CORPORATIONS: Blues for Mr. Charlie

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At the peak of his rambunctious form, Chairman Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western Industries, one of the world's biggest conglomerates (1976 sales: $3.4 billion), is a curiously compulsive monologuist. Whether lolling with a weekend visitor by a sleepy lagoon outside his luxurious beach house, La Favorita, in the Dominican Republic or lecturing to an awed audience in his company's baronial headquarters suite overlooking Manhattan's Central Park, Bluhdorn fearlessly offers his forthright and often funny opinions on such disparate topics as acquisition strategy ("I want to buy things no one else wants"), American businessmen ("They have surrounded themselves in a citadel where everyone else was below them"), ideology ("I am a capitalist and I don't intend to change"), even China ("I think there was maybe something good about Mao when he sent the ministers out to do something in the fields").

Lately, Bluhdorn has been uncustomarily silent. Three separate investigations are being made into the affairs of Gulf & Western, its subsidiaries and some of its officers and directors. The SEC is looking into, among other things, the adequacy of the company's public disclosure in connection with transactions of G & W's securities, the company's pension funds and its dealings in the shares of an auto-parts subsidiary that had some stock traded on the over-the-counter exchange. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is supervising another probe. Finally, the New York State senate committee on crime and correction is examining the possibility that organized crime may be linked to the operations of Madison Square Garden Corp., another G&W affiliate. Jeremiah B. McKenna, general counsel to the committee, dismisses inquiring reporters with a cryptic comment: "We're coming at the organized-crime aspect of it from a different angle that I can't mention to you."

With his citadel under siege, Bluhdorn is silent as a mime on all these matters, and no other officer will offer as much as a syllable of explanation. One middle-level employee describes the current atmosphere at G & W as "paranoid." It was rather startling that a routine registration statement filed lately by Associates First Capital Corp., a financial-services subsidiary of G & W, was rejected by the SEC because of incomplete disclosure. Even more anguish has been caused to shareholders by the drop in the company's stock: it has sagged by more than 20% this year, leaving Bluhdorn's conglomerate in the humiliating posture of selling for less than $14 a share, or $8 a share below book value.