Key Figures in the Dispute : JOAN IRVINE SMITH : Heiress: Admired by some, despised by others, she represents the last familial link to a piece of California history.

Some people who know her suspect that Joan Irvine Smith enjoys tweaking the Irvine Co.’s nose almost as much as the prospect of getting more money for her share in the company.

The price for both, of course, was giving up her birthright--the last ties to land that had been in her family for more than a hundred years.

A Michigan court referee decided Monday that she will get $149 million plus interest for the stock, less than the $330 million plus interest that she wanted. But it’s more than the $114 million offered by Irvine Co. Chairman Donald L. Bren in 1983, and she was pleased Monday.

“I consider it a definite victory for us,” Smith said.

The decision came after a seven-year dispute over the value of the Irvine Co., which owns 64,000 acres of land in the path of the growth rolling southward from Los Angeles. The real estate is some of the most lucrative in the nation.

The case pitted two of Orange County’s wealthiest and most private individuals against each other in a public battle. It was an encounter that fascinated observers and prompted comparisons to the TV series “Dallas.”

To friends, Smith is a determined and intelligent woman who was besting better-educated and more experienced men at a time when women were expected to defer meekly to male business judgment. To her enemies, she’s a virulent, litigious gadfly.

Smith grew up rich in the 1930s, an only child spending summers on the sprawling ranch of a family that had been rich for two generations when she was born. Forbes magazine estimated her share of the family fortune two years ago at $200 million.

Smith’s great-grandfather, a Scottish immigrant named James Irvine, bought 108,000 acres for a song during a drought in the 1860s. At first the land produced sheep, then cattle, and later lima beans and oranges. The land made the family rich and--in a rural farming community like Orange County--powerful.

Smith, an indifferent student, left school to get married at 19. She has since been married three times. She was a dashing bride: On one of her honeymoons, she flew a plane across South America. Now, at 57, she has three grown sons and two grandchildren and is unmarried again.

While Smith was doing what was expected of rich young heiresses in the 1950s, the county was becoming a bustling suburb of Los Angeles. The land, it was evident, could produce even more profits in the form of houses, offices and factories.

But the company was no longer controlled by the family. Smith’s grandfather had put more than half the company’s stock in a foundation to hold the tax man at bay and prevent his heirs from having to sell the ranch. In 1957, Smith, at 24, took her mother’s seat on the board. She came with no business experience and little formal economics education.

Nevertheless, she elbowed her way into company affairs to the amusement--and then the anger--of the men her grandfather left to run the company. To her credit, she not only wanted more dividends but also thought the company should begin carefully planning for the inevitable development.

Sometimes she won. She embarrassed the company into donating 1,000 acres for construction of the University of California at Irvine, a shrewd move that would pay off later from the growth the school would bring.

In the 1960s, officials began planning to develop the company’s land on a dazzlingly large scale. They thought not in terms of subdivisions or neighborhoods but of whole new towns; they created from scratch the city of Irvine, which now has 100,000 residents and forms the center of an office neighborhood almost as large as downtown Los Angeles’.

Still fighting, Smith in 1969 helped persuade Congress to pass a tax bill requiring the foundation to relinquish control of the company. It was sold to Smith, Bren and others.

But being just another board member never agreed with Smith. She was soon arguing with the new owners, some of the richest men in the nation, men like Henry Ford II and shopping center magnate A. Alfred Taubman.

By 1983, Smith wasn’t speaking to any of them. Bren and Taubman were squabbling. The other stockholders were getting nervous. They’d just had a close look at what a recession does to the real estate business and were thinking it might be nice to get out with a tidy profit. That suited Bren, who--Smith charged in the lawsuit--purposely fomented many of the squabbles in order to buy out his partners cheap. Smith said she was tired of fighting and she’d sell too. But she wanted three times what the other shareholders got. Hence the suit.

Smith clearly has left a mark on Southern California history. She helped transform the old family company into a sleek corporate entity, and the land now brings forth office towers instead of oranges and beans. When she agreed to sell, she ended the family’s close involvement with the company--only a few members still own a tiny piece--and she cut a link to California’s short but colorful past.

“I feel I’ve done the best I could do,” Smith, with her customary sense of drama, once told a reporter. “I felt I have done what is right.”

Times staff writer Leslie Berkman contributed to this story.