A Spunky Tycoon Turned Superstar

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In Bloomfield Hills one night recently, the main course was pasta in a tomato-and-duck sauce. The cook, Peggy Johnson, is Iacocca's fiancee; they became engaged in December. "Lido," explained Johnson, 34, "shot the ducks in Canada last fall." Across the table, he smiled. "Yeah, she called me up today to ask a little advice on the meal." Her comeback is quick, Iacocca- style. "I called you up to find out what the hell to do with these birds." The couple met in 1982 in the offices of the Statue of Liberty Commission where Johnson, a flight attendant on leave from Pan Am, worked as a volunteer. "He is a very caring person," she says of her husband-to-be, who is 26 years older than she. "He gets hurt very easily."

Iacocca's life is not loaded with leisure. At Sinatra's house in Palm Springs he did see A Passage to India ("Too long"), and he is reading two books by fellow best-selling Italian Americans--Mario Puzo's The Sicilian and Leo Buscaglia's Loving Each Other. But in addition to doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, his main hobby seems to be hypochondria. After learning of an acquaintance's death not long ago, he shook his head and said gravely, "I've got to start guarding my health." In fact his health is under pretty tight security already. Among other medicinal regimens, he doses himself every night with Metamucil, a fiber laxative. He is a confessed fiber zealot. "I've probably saved 500 lives by spreading the gospel," he says. For Lent he has given up smoking his daily two or three Monte Cristo Havanas. At home on weekends, he crews a rowing machine for half-hour stretches. Every weekday at 11:15 a.m., he begins 45 minutes of sweating in the gym he had built on the fifth floor of the K.T. Keller Building at Chrysler headquarters.

Down the hall, he puts in 9 1/2-hour days running the company. "Some guys in this business slow down, retire and take it easy," he says. "A couple of months later, they're dead." Not Iacocca. He has spent almost 39 years in America's pivotal industry, and he still glories in the hurly-burly of his factory floors, in the sheer quantities of capital ($2.8 billion) and steel (1.3 million tons) and humans (110,000 employees) that he must commit to producing 2 million vehicles a year. Iacocca likes it best when he can make managing a car company seem like a martial task, urgent and vast and possibly heroic.