Business: The Midas of Mutual Funds

At Geneva's new air terminal, the scene is a recurrent attraction: a bald and stubby executive clad in a redlined cape and a Pierre Cardin jacket buttoned to the chin clambers from a custom-built black Lincoln Continental. With him comes an eyebrow-raising entourage: one male aide and four mini-skirted lasses of Playboy pulchritude. The normally expressionless Swiss faces at the ticket counter light up with half-amused, half-respectful recognition. "It's Bernie," whispers a Swissair hostess to a new colleague. Taking at least two of his curvaceous companions with him, Bernie quickly boards his private Mystère jet. His destination: a London (or sometimes Paris) business appointment for which he is, characteristically, two hours late.

A ONETIME poor boy from Brooklyn, 5-ft. 5-in. Bernard Cornfeld causes quite a stir in almost everything he does. Despite the persistent antagonism of conservative European moneymen, some foreign governments and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he has built his Investors Overseas Services into one of the 20th century's great financial empires. Geneva-based I.O.S. has prospered primarily by selling mutual funds outside the U.S., and Cornfeld has proved himself to be a master salesman. Today he manages some $2.2 billion of other people's money, and his personal fortune amounts to about $140 million. Still a bachelor at 42, Cornfeld is a bizarre figure, part Peter Pan and part Midas. His days and nights are packed with people, planes, horses, telephone calls, travel and parties. Everywhere he goes, even to address staid bankers, some of his girls accompany him. Cornfeld is ordinarily as mild-mannered and soft-spoken as a shoe clerk, but he can break abruptly into profane rages. His informality prompts all of his employees to call him Bernie. But Cornfeld's financial trailblazing has altered the investment climate of Europe and helped hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens (and perhaps a few crooks as well) to acquire a larger stake in the capitalist economies of the free world.

High-Voltage Sales. Cornfeld started I.O.S. 14 years ago as a one-man firm in a Paris flat. Today it has grown into the world's largest financial sales organization, with 16,000 salesmen and 800,000 clients in 110 countries. Despite the natural resistance created by falling stock and mutual-fund prices, the high-voltage organization last year almost doubled its sales, to $3.1 billion. Just under $1 billion in cash flowed into the company's coffers. I.O.S. not only manages eleven mutual funds of its own but has spread into almost every major field of finance. It owns or controls six insurance companies, a dozen banks and finance firms scattered from Italy to the Netherlands Antilles, real estate subsidiaries selling condominium apartments in Spain and Florida, even a small computer outfit and a financial publishing company.