The Tycoon.(Mortimer B. Zuckerman)(Interview)(Biography)

Shortly before turning seventy, last month, Mortimer B. Zuckerman decided that it was time for him finally to take up the task of writing a memoir. He already had in mind a title ("Backstory") and a first line, "I have never worked a day in my life," by which he meant that all the work he has done--as a graduate-degree accumulator, a real-estate developer, a publisher, a philanthropist, a back-channel envoy--has felt to him more like play. The one pursuit that may have felt like a job (lawyering) he abandoned before he'd billed a minute or taken the bar. He often says that the law is the opposite of sex: "Even when it's good, it's lousy." The one thing that law school taught him, he says, is not to be intimidated by lawyers.

Zuckerman speaks softly, except when he shouts, which he does occasionally, at people who work for him or to make himself heard as a commentator on "The McLaughlin Group," the Sunday-morning talk show. Quiet-talking is a power tactic, and Zuckerman has mastered it. At a benefit dinner or embassy reception, to be within earshot of this voice, as it playfully disparages everyone beyond its limited range, is to bask in the back-of-the-bus insouciance of a front-of-the-bus man. He has a slight lisp, and there are traces of his native Canada in his vowels. (He was born in Montreal.) He is lean, not very tall, deliberate in his movements, a study in self-possession. He dresses impeccably--in sharp suits with silk ties and matching pocket handkerchiefs--and keeps his hair neat and dark. Age has weathered him; his nose, up close, seems to have borne the brunt of it, and his eyes, glinting things, at times succumb to a look of all-encompassing fatigue--the weight of the world. This drawn, anxious manifestation hardly resembles the fleshier, grinning version of him in the society pages, or in the head shot accompanying his column in his magazine, U.S. News & World Report. Worry hounds him. There is in his manner a trace of Montgomery Burns, the sibilant and miserly industrialist in "The Simpsons." But a certain allure evinces itself. As his many friends attest, he is fun to be around. They talk about his loyalty and generosity, making references to family tragedies or health scares that he has helped see them through. Barbara Walters describes him as one of the best dinner-party companions she has ever known.

Eminence, too ardently grasped, can be as slippery as a trout; to get hold of it, you may occasionally squeeze too hard, and away it goes. Still, Zuckerman has spent a lifetime assembling the core components--money, influence, allies, properties, positions, women--and it has accrued to him, in a provisional kind of way. Few of his contemporaries have done as much as he. He attended great universities, became a billionaire (he's worth $2.8 billion, according to Forbes), purchased prominent publications, and befriended heads of state. He has been on the boards of hospitals, schools, and major Jewish organizations. He counts as friends men and women of high degree, who praise him for his keenness and the reach of his mind. He has a jet, a helicopter, a yacht, houses in East Hampton and Aspen, and a three-story apartment on Fifth Avenue that is filled with paintings by Picasso, Rothko, and Matisse. He is a man whose collection of accomplishments, possessions, and associations both obscures and begs the question of what life is for. If this has nagged him, he does not readily admit to it, although his restlessness, his chronic dissatisfaction, suggests that it might, in some form or another, tug at the levers of his soul.

Zuckerman is a relentless and pro ficient teller of stories--both of real anecdotes and of those known to non-practitioners as jokes. Along with policy talk and opinion pronouncement, these are his chief mode of discourse, his conversational carapace. (He tends not to ask a lot of questions, at least not of those whose answers may not be of interest to him.) "I'm going to tell you a story," he says, his eyelids fluttering a bit, as he reaches into the storehouse. He is of a genus and a generation for whom most occasions--speeches, dinner parties, deal closings--call for a well-told joke. He assembles the jokes in a notebook. He can perform in paragraphs; like a figure skater completing a series of spins, he returns from tangents to the point at hand. A poet could collect two months of his punch lines, lay them out in verse, and call the result "Mort." In the anecdotal category, the stories tend to involve his dealings with famous or powerful people, and the funny things he has said to them. It is not uncommon to hear the same stories more than once.

This spring, I visited him a number of times at his office at 599 Lexington Avenue, the New York headquarters of his real-estate company, Boston Properties, of which he is the chairman. The building, next to the Citigroup tower--another Boston Properties property--was his first development in New York. His office, spacious enough, is stocked with books and artifacts of a semi-public life--a photograph of him on Air Force One with President Bill Clinton, a page from the Congressional Record of his eulogy for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and a plaque on his desk that reads "The Mishegoss Stops Here." The view is unspectacular. We'd sit at a glass table, and Zuckerman would quietly tell stories, interrupting himself now and then to call out directives to his assistant Clare Probert, without whom he'd be lost. One day, he greeted me with an account of a recent three-day trip to Israel, where he had met with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. On the way, his jet had hit a bird, which knocked out the radar. "So we get out over the Atlantic, and we don't know whether we're going to have to turn around. And I said to the pilots, 'The only thing that worried me is that before the bird hit I heard it say, "Allahu Akbar." ' "

Then he began to speak, in his elliptical way, about Israel: "I met all the major players, and we basically talked. We reviewed both their strategic position and their tactical position, let's put it that way." He said that he'd gone as "an analyst," on authority he finds it difficult or indiscreet to specify. "I have been involved with these people for years and years and years," he said. "And so you have a certain history, where either they trust your judgment and confidentiality or they don't." He explains the nuances of American politics and policy to the Israelis and then comes home and explains the nuances of Israeli politics and policy to the Americans. "It always amazes me, but very few people know what's happening in Israel in detail," he said. "And the same is true on the other side. If you think the Israelis can learn what's happening here on the basis of reading the Washington Post or the Times--believe me, you know how wrong that is." He was not impressed, for example, by the former Israeli Defense Minister and Labor leader Amir Peretz. Zuckerman had once asked him how he proposed to negotiate with the Palestinians. "He said, 'Well, it would be like a labor negotiation. I put myself in their shoes. Figure out what they need.' And I said, 'There's a different way of describing that particular process, which is that when you're in a negotiation that is as difficult as this will be you do want to walk a mile in the other man's shoes. That way, when the deal blows up, you're a mile away---and you have his shoes.' And he said, 'Can you explain that to me again?' "

Zuckerman's anecdotes often feature an incongruity, which leavens or adorns the greater gist, the grander scheme. Later that same afternoon, he told me about the Nicholas Daniloff incident. Daniloff, a Moscow correspondent for U.S. News, was arrested in 1986 by the Soviets and accused of espionage. Zuckerman went to Moscow to facilitate his release and then met with William Casey, the director of the C.I.A. "Casey came to my office," Zuckerman started in. "It was the end of the day, and he was wearing black tie. In fact, all four times I met him he was wearing black tie. And I said to him, 'Is black tie the costume du jour for spooks?' Now, Casey shared with me some of the most extraordinary things. I couldn't believe what he was willing to share with me. I don't know how else to put this, but it was very hard for me to concentrate on it, because he had his fly open. I didn't know what to expect. Would a microphone come out of the zipper?" (Zuckerman also has a habit of prefacing many of his best stories with some variation of "This is off the record, and you'll see why in a moment." This was the case in his ensuing discussion of the extraordinary things that Casey told him.)