Three Who Watch, Wait and Strike

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During the oil-induced recession of 1974-75, the computer-leasing business went bad, but insurance shielded Steinberg from severe troubles. He changed the name of his company to Reliance Group and in 1982 took it private, in part so that he could make all the decisions on his own and not have to worry about pleasing stockholders. Says he: "If I have a general manager who does extraordinarily well for us and I want to give him a seven-figure bonus, I do it and don't worry about how it's going to look."

A messy second divorce in 1983 put Steinberg all over New York City's tabloids. As part of the action, his wife filed a stockholder's complaint that accused him of taking drugs, diverting corporate funds to personal use and making payoffs to New York City officials to get business for his company. None of the charges, though, were ever proved.

After the divorce, Steinberg slowed down and changed many of his working habits. A few years ago, say friends, he regularly worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week when a deal was being made. But last summer, late on a < Friday and deep into a negotiation, Steinberg announced, "I'm going to the beach."

While he still makes all the final decisions, Steinberg now delegates more. Says a former employee: "As a boss, he is mostly carrot and very little stick. He is very demanding. His goal is to get more out of people than they realize they have to give." Steinberg lives with his third wife, Gayfryd, and two of his six children in a 34-room Park Avenue triplex once owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Irv the Liquidator. Irwin Jacobs, 43, has trained his takeover artillery on such corporate giants as ITT, Pabst Brewing, Kaiser Steel and Disney Productions. He was in an earlier phase of the Phillips battle but sold his 4.6 million shares for a sizable profit shortly before last week's voting.

A University of Minnesota dropout, Jacobs started working full time in 1959 for his father, a Russian immigrant, who ran a gunnysack business. In the mid-'60s the company flourished, selling sandbags used to dam floods along the Mississippi. Jacobs early showed a trader's instinct, buying merchandise at business liquidation sales and reselling it. At 18, he got 300 pairs of skis at a U.S. Customs auction for $13 a pair, then sold them right outside the auction hall for three times as much.

After a decade of steady growth in the family business, everything started to go wrong. In 1975, at age 33, Jacobs was depressed and ready to quit. "I said to myself, 'What do I need any more money for? I've had enough of Big Business.' " At the root of his malaise was the failure of Grain Belt Breweries, which he had bought with a $4 million loan. In his attempts to make it more profitable, he filmed a TV commercial with the line: "It may be my brewery, but it's your beer." Nothing worked. Says he: "I got murdered. I never worked so hard in my life."