A Spunky Tycoon Turned Superstar

In his book and in his conversation, he goes hardly a page or a half-minute without mentioning "guys"--specific guys or guys in the abstract, guys who build automobiles ("car guys") or sell automobiles or buy them. He is a big guy (6 ft. 1 in., 194 lbs.), a driven guy, an earthy, passionate, volatile, funny and profane guy, a talkative guy who tells it like it is, who grabs for gusto, who damns the torpedoes and plunges full speed ahead. He is a high- strung, stand-up guy, the consummate can-do guy, a guy who enjoys spending time in the company of other guys: duck hunting in Canada, drinking Scotch with Frank Sinatra at Manhattan's "21" Club, hanging around the Yankee dugout during spring training.

Lee Iacocca is also an increasingly rich and celebrated guy. Over this past winter, his popularity has assumed extraordinary proportions. His memoir, Iacocca, has stayed at the top of best-seller lists for almost five months, moving out of bookstores for a while at a rate of 15,000 copies a day. "The book's popularity reaches across all social strata, in all regions of the country," says Bernard Rath, president of the American Booksellers Association. Indeed, its publisher says that Iacocca has just become the best- selling nonfiction hardcover in history: more than 1.5 million copies are in print.* Hundreds of new devotees write to Iacocca each week, more than 25,000 during the past five months, often beseeching him to run for President of the U.S. In Washington, House Speaker Tip O'Neill says that Iacocca, with Senator Gary Hart and New York Governor Mario Cuomo, is among the most plausible contenders for the 1988 Democratic nomination. During January and February alone, Iacocca was asked by 1,270 different groups to give speeches. Out on the street in any city, strangers approach to stare, to chat, to touch, as if he were a star or something.

Obviously, he is a star or something. After saving and then rebuilding Chrysler Corp. against all odds, Lido Anthony Iacocca, 60, is now achieving another, more ephemeral sort of American miracle: he has become an industrial folk hero in a supposedly postindustrial age and, more improbably still, a corporate capitalist with populist appeal, an eminence terrible admired by working class and ruling class alike. Not since William Randolph Hearst has there been a tycoon who has occupied the national imagination as vividly as Iacocca.

Much of the rest of the world is at least very, very curious. In Japan, 200,000 copies of Iacocca have been sold in one month. It is first on the London Daily Mail's best-seller list, a bootleg edition is available in Bangkok, and the book is considered a must-read among the Saudi technocratic elite. Says Michigan Governor James Blanchard of his state's favorite son: "Iacocca is the most revered businessman in the world."