She’s rich, she’s thin, she doesn’t...

Jenny Craig in person is a better ad for her weight loss program than the image that comes across in commercials, where she appears to have a heavy face and matronly figure.

Actually, at 57 she’s slender enough to be a model: 5-foot-5, 122 pounds, youthful and vivacious, with lively brown eyes and tousled raven hair. Full of energy, she says it is a quality she requires in all who work for her.

But Craig does not come on strong. She is a warm, friendly woman with a relaxed, informal manner, a quiet efficiency and an upbeat cheerfulness that can seem relentless. She would never have received so much as one casting call for those hard-boiled executive roles that Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford landed. But she is no mythical Betty Crocker or public relations figurehead. Craig is a hands-on executive and a workaholic, as is her husband Sid, chief executive officer and chairman of the board. The Craigs have built their empire together. “It’s our life,” she said.

Whether she’s in her sumptuous, art-filled corporate headquarters in Del Mar or taking her brisk four-mile morning walk along the beach, heart rate monitor attached, the co-founder, president and chief operating officer of Jenny Craig International is thinking and breathing business. And business has been serving her very, very well.

Jenny Craig is America’s sixth-fastest-growing private company, according to Inc. magazine. Founded in Australia in 1983 and launched in the United States two years later with 14 centers, the company will do about $400 million in sales this fiscal year, doubling last year’s $200 million. Pre-tax profits in 1988 were $30 million. There are more than 444 centers worldwide now, and the goal is 1,000 centers in the United States by 1995. The company is negotiating to open centers in Japan and Mexico and is looking at Europe and Malaysia.

Jenny Craig was not born to wealth, power and fame. She grew up in a big New Orleans family hit hard by the Depression, and her early adult life reads like a 1950s stereotype: marriage and two kids. So how did she become a worldwide diet queen?

She grew up, she said, “in an atmosphere where the message was, ‘You’re so smart, you can do anything you want.’ ” And Jenny and Sid Craig were smart enough to understand that the American obsession with good health and good looks--weight loss--would grow from a national pastime into a national obsession.

Things have been going so right that Craig was recently invited to address the Harvard Business School during a seminar on entrepreneurship. She decided to combine the trip with a dinner meeting for her management team in the greater Boston area. With the company growing at the rate of four new centers a week, there are many employees she has yet to meet. The company moved into the Boston market six months ago; now there are 11 centers, with eight more on the way, and this was her first visit.

“For every month for the past two years, (Sid and I) have said, ‘We’ve never run a company this big before,’ ” Craig said. “It’s mind-boggling.”

Both Sid and Jenny said it dawned on them just how much success they were about to experience when they moved into their corporate headquarters. They had rented the top floor of an airy building on a hilltop overlooking the ocean and wondered how they would ever fill the 15,000 square feet. They outgrew it before they moved in, had to rent additional space downstairs and, with a corporate staff of 100, are feeling snug.

Jenny Craig frequently calls the rapid rise to success “this runaway horse we’re on.”

The horse got out of control on its way to Boston and nearly ruined her trip.

Things started out right, with the Mercedes limousine with the “BeThin2” plates calling for her at the beachfront home in Del Mar. The company’s new Jet Star was waiting for the 9 a.m. takeoff from Palomar airport--a pearl gray leather-and-suede cabin with 12 luxurious seats and a pretty little galley stocked with Danish for the crew and oat bran for the woman who is fast becoming a household word for fitness.

Three and a half hours and two grounded planes later, Craig and her four companions took off in a noisy six-seat jet, baggage piled in the bathroom, a platter of sandwich triangles placed on the only available space, the floor. Immediate destination: Fort Wayne, Ind., for refueling.

The delays in the cross-country journey provided a test of her relentlessly cheerful manner. No tantrums or tirades. When the pilot first broke the news that the engine wouldn’t start, she fixed a level gaze on him and, still as nice as could be but with just a trace of warning, asked: “Do you have a Plan B if you can’t get it to start?”

It seemed that Plan B, trying to get a rented plane from Los Angeles, was being hastily devised. “I think that’s a very good idea,” she said evenly.

After the second plane failed to arrive, she seemed to accept that the day was a bust.

The next evening, after a successful day at Harvard, she relaxed in her hotel room and talked about what the travel experience showed about her management style.

“My feeling is, in a business, as a professional, you should be able to react, to have Steps 1, 2, 3, 4 that you do in a case like that. Any professional person should be prepared for disaster. History shows there are glitches that come up.”

She said, however, she rarely chews people out.

“It’s not the way I handle a situation. I don’t push my weight around or play boss/employee. I talk like we’re a team and I’m a player on the team. . . . I believe leadership is in a relationship, not a position.

“On my first date, I was going to the Blue Room at the Roosevelt Hotel,” Craig said, describing her none-too-privileged childhood in New Orleans. The Blue Room was a big deal.

“My mother said to me, ‘You walk in there like you’ve been there 100 times before and you own the place.’ I did. I have always had that confidence, that feeling of self-esteem.”

A considerable number of years later she found herself in a gloomy auditorium facing 400 Harvard graduate students at the seminar on entrepreneurs. But it could have been the Blue Room.

“I can’t wait to go home and tell all my friends I went to Harvard!” she said by way of a greeting, smiling conspiratorially. The students loved it, laughing with her and applauding.

Of course, Craig did not go to Harvard. She did not go to college at all.

She was born Jenny Guidroz and grew up the youngest of six children in a Cajun family that was hurt by the Depression. But she never felt poor, she said, because she was surrounded by love, support and hard work.

Her father often worked three jobs and had the “hard work never hurt anyone” ethic that his daughter took to heart. Her mother raised her own chickens and grew vegetables. There was plenty of healthy food on the table, but no money for candy or sweets.

“I teethed on (Cajun) food,” she said, adding with amusement, “now all of a sudden it’s in vogue. The good thing about Cajun food is you don’t need a lot of fats. If people would learn to use seasonings and herbs like the Cajuns, it would be good.”

Craig does not cook every day, explaining that she and Sid work until 8 p.m. more often than not and usually eat out. They do keep a supply of “Jenny’s Cuisine” frozen dinners on hand. But she said she loves to cook for family and friends and sometimes whips up “a whole bunch of things and put them up in the freezer.” Gumbo is a specialty, and she lists her other Cajun favorites: black bean soup, red beans and rice, chicken fricassee.

“Not nouvelle.”

As a teen-ager, she wanted to be a dental hygienist, but her mother was dying and she did not want to go away to school. Craig instead went to work in a dental clinic.

“I don’t think there is a correlation between education and success. Other factors play a role,” Craig said, and repeated that philosophy to the Harvard students, who didn’t argue. The two primary precursors to success, she said, are self-discipline and commitment. She acquired both qualities by watching her parents and believes students have to acquire them to graduate.

Marriage to a boat racer and the birth of two daughters, Denise and Michelle, did nothing to sidetrack her ambition to succeed. She worked part time, her eye on her own business or franchise.

“All of my life, I’ve never been afraid to accept any challenge. I read ‘The Cinderella Complex,’ ” she said, shrugging off the book that describes women’s fear of success and desire to have men take care of them. “There’s nothing in that book I can relate to.”

Craig got into the weight loss business by accident. Slim all her life, she gained 45 pounds when she was pregnant with her second daughter, and the weight did not come off after the baby was born. Knowing nothing about dieting, Craig, then named Jenny Bourcq, joined a gym in New Orleans, Silhouette/American Health.

She took the weight off and attracted the eye of management as she began to befriend other members.

“I became interested in talking to people who were losing weight. At first they’d be so introverted, heads down--but as their weight came down, they’d come bouncing in. It was a metamorphosis. A person would change right before my eyes.”

She has managed to maintain her weight and said it has not fluctuated more than three pounds in the last 30 years. Fruit is her idea of a snack or treat. The only craving for a “no-no” she admits to is ice cream (she still has her grandmother’s ice cream churn) but, she said, these days frozen yogurt will suffice.

“Thank God I practice what I preach,” she said, confiding that people take it upon themselves to look over her grocery cart in the checkout line and comment. She has to point out at times that she is not on a reducing diet.

She went to work for Silhouette in the early 1960s, she said, managing five clubs. Then she mortgaged her house and bought her own club, “Healthletic,” but soon sold it to her former employers and started looking for a franchise.

Enter Sid Craig from Los Angeles, who, in 1970, ran an ad in New Orleans papers for employees to staff his Body Contour Inc. Figure Salons, a company owned by Gloria Marshall Figure Control Salons.

They were a team from the start, although both said that any romance between them came years later, after both were divorced. Jenny went to work for Sid, also 57, opening and supervising three centers, then going to the South, then to Chicago to manage the Midwest. She said they realized that their business friendship, maintained primarily by telephone, had turned into love, after she moved to Chicago, alone.

They were married in Las Vegas in 1979.

In 1982 Body Contour Inc., as part of Gloria Marshall, was sold to Nutri/System. The Craigs were briefly part of the transition, then withdrew.

“We got the bug for starting our own company,” Sid Craig said. They had signed a two-year non-compete clause with Nutri/System for the United States and so began looking to Australia.

They started their comprehensive weight loss program there in 1982. They offer weekly one-on-one counseling sessions; a diet of “Jenny’s Cuisine,” prepackaged and frozen foods that are supplemented with fresh fruits, vegetables and dairy products; weekly life style classes; behavior modification cassettes, and suggestions for low-key activity or exercise.

The program costs $185 (although they are now advertising a half-price deal, in part a response to a campaign of a similar program and, Craig said, their major competitor, Nutri/System). The weekly food and vitamin supplies range from about $50 to $70. Midway to their desired weight, clients are urged to sign up, for $99, for a year’s maintenance program.

By the end of the first year they had 50 centers in Australia. Today there are 96 centers there, plus another 11 in New Zealand and 30 in England.

Jenny Craig attributes their success to “our collective efforts. I provide the discipline and stick-to-it-iveness, the elbow grease. Sid is an absolute genius in marketing.”

She did not realize she was on a runaway horse until recently, but from the first day in Australia, “I knew it was going to be a tremendous success. Sid will worry about something, but if I feel in my heart it’s going to work, I won’t worry.”

The runaway horse sometimes makes stops as it did for the dinner for her Boston managers on a Saturday night. Ellen Destray, vice president for operations, had told Craig that members of the Boston crew were “beside themselves,” and she had not exaggerated.

Nobody tried to keep their cool or look indifferent. The young women, heady with ambition and success, let themselves gush and bask in a corporate climate that tells them the sky is the limit for people who show promise. Although Craig said it is not intentional, her management staff is about 95% female; her clientele, about 85% female.

Here they were with Jenny, and that is what they called her, admiringly, lovingly, several of them telling her what a wonderful role model she is. She encouraged that familiarity, telling stories on herself, talking about her grandchildren, imparting nuggets of her philosophy and business sense, having them tell her about themselves.

They were former primary school teachers, sales people, some with backgrounds and degrees in fitness, nutrition, psychology, cosmetology. One revealed, to shrieks of laughter, that she had driven heavy equipment for a trucking company.

It is company policy to promote from within, and Jenny Craig is hiring and promoting at a rapid pace. It is one area in which the runaway horse the Craigs are riding could be heading for trouble. Not everyone who has worked for the organization speaks with the enthusiasm of the Boston managers. Nor for that matter do all clients.

Accounting for her success, Craig told the Harvard students, “good service is the key. We have a training program second to none. We promote from within. You can move up quickly . . . and people will work harder for recognition than money,” although, she said, they make a point of paying well. Counselors start at about $2,000 per month; managers vary according to areas, with bonuses built into the system.

Nonetheless, a few former employees complain of impossible working conditions and of being summarily dismissed.

One former supervisor of five centers, who briefly contemplated a lawsuit, was let go, she said, without notice. She called her job an impossible task, trying to service and stock food for 1,000 people a week in a cramped area, counseling people in hallways, seeing staff transferred constantly.

Most current or former clients approached for this article praised the program or called it at least as good as its competitors in the billion-dollar-plus industry.

There are, however, client complaints about “hard sell” of certain products at Jenny Craig, such as motivational tapes; of failure--or refusal--to disclose unit prices of food items; of unknowledgeable, uncommitted, or too many counselors.

Much of the criticism sounds as if it stems more from rapid growth than policy. Quality of service seems to vary among centers, as do instances of overenrollment, overcrowding and scheduling.

In the old days, Craig said, she would make surprise visits. She now finds that impossible, she said, but supervisors are trained to do that.

“I think our turnover rate (among managers) says a lot. I don’t think it’s 5%. People who are with us tend to stay. At the counselor level, sometimes they’re not committed to a lifelong career. There tends to be more turnover there.”

Maintaining quality in such a fast-growing enterprise could be a problem, she acknowledged, if everything continued as before, and she mentioned one new direction the company needs to take.

“We’re at a point where we’re a large corporation, and some corporate disciplines need to come into play,” she said, explaining that the company needs to recruit several MBAs for several mid- and upper-level management positions. “In the past people were promoted from the lower ranks. But you don’t get many MBAs who start as counselors.”

Growing pains or not, they have been going nowhere but up. Jenny and Sid Craig seem to have it made: race horses, art, a new getaway house in Aspen where they flew their families for a three-week ski vacation over the holidays. (Sid has three children.) The lineup in the garage at their Del Mar house includes the Mercedes limo, her Bentley, Sid’s Porsche and a 1934 Bentley drophead coupe.

Craig acknowledged she has all the creature comforts she could want, most visible of which is the seven-carat diamond “rock” on her finger and diamond butterfly on her lapel. And there is the birthday present she gave Sid, a 14-seat executive bus, with which they sometimes take friends on “destination unknown” parties.

The Craigs have reached that level where they are talking of “giving something back,” specifically of starting a foundation.

“If you could see the letters we keep getting every week. I can’t say no,” Craig said, but added it is time to champion a particular cause and make an impact, not write checks for $5,000 or $10,000 here and there, which she called “just firing buckshot.”

A start-up commitment of $25 million is not buckshot. It is likely to go for the homeless, although, she said, they would not stop giving to various local projects.

The Craigs are clearly a close family. The walls and table-tops of their home are covered with pictures of their children. They see them whenever they can. And they have involved them in the business, but in franchises and not management, for two reasons, Craig said. They want to avoid sibling rivalry, and they do not want their upwardly mobile executives to feel they’ll be aced out by a favored son or daughter on the way to the top. So, for example, a son and daughter of Sid’s control the franchises in Florida; Craig’s daughter Michelle and her husband have 37 franchises in northern California.

“We feel we’ve given our kids the opportunity” to make their own fortunes, Craig said. “We aren’t interested in building a dynasty, leaving a lot to the kids. We’d rather leave it for something we believe in.”

Her marriage, her family, her business, her work, her money and what it can do. It must feel good.

“It’s nice to know if you made mistakes the first half of your life,” she said, “you can spend the second half doing the things that make you happy.”