What Makes a Man a Success? As They Ponder That Issue, Many Men Are Re-Examining Their Ties to Work and Home. Some Men Find the Ties Constraining, but Others See Themselves as. . . : Bound for Glory

Blaise Mercadante likes to wear his lucky cap for his boys.

It’s a beaut of a cap, a symphony in blue-and-white flannel stitched in honor of the Dodgers so long ago it has a “B” on it. For their old haunt, Brooklyn. Or for Blaise, depending on how you look at it. Even more serendipitous, once the cap fell into Mercadante’s hands, it took on a strange and wonderful dimension:

It started bringing luck to Blaise’s boys.

Mercadante noticed the cap’s unusual powers soon after he bought it at Baseball City in May. He would wear it to his son Kegan’s Westlake Village all-star games, and the team would win. When he didn’t wear it, they would lose.

Then came a game Mercadante was forced to miss because he had a meeting at the ad agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn Inc., where he’s a senior vice president. But when Mercadante woke up Kegan the day of the game, the 8-year-old looked him full in the face and said: “You’re going to wear the cap, aren’t you?”

What’s a father to do?

“The game started at 5 o’clock,” says Mercadante, 37. “So, at 5 o’clock, I put the cap on. The game usually lasts two hours, so I wore it until 7, and when I got home, sure enough, they’d won.”

Mercadante, the father of four, is rather proud that he’s considered the “designated breeder” of his agency, a player in a high-powered field known for its preponderance of single people. He certainly isn’t the only successful man who’s trying to juggle home and work hats in the ‘90s, but he may be one of the more resourceful ones.

These days, men who streak to the top at work don’t fit the old stereotype of the absentee dad whose biggest rewards were on the job. At the same time, they’re probably not the forward-looking Daddy trackers who put more time into their families, even if it bruises their careers.

These men are a cross between the two. Like dads of yore, they’re heading full force toward stardom in their fields. But they’re also taking on more responsibility at home--picking up the groceries and the kids (even if couples may still clash on whether he’s doing enough). Sometimes virtuosity at balancing the home-work scales is a must, because often the successful man has thrown in his lot with the successful woman. And she’s working, too.

So don’t be fooled by men who set their career sights high--which often means worshiping at the altar of their job, a particularly jealous mistress. Studies show they are still, typically, extremely concerned with their families.

In fact, when Men’s Life magazine surveyed 815 men for its debut issue this fall, five of every eight picked marriage as their top priority--above money, sex, fame and career. A survey conducted for the Los Angeles Times in July found that 80% of the Southern California men who responded considered their families to be very important; slightly fewer, 76%, said they valued their careers as highly.

What all this means is that women aren’t the only gender to suffer from the double trouble that comes from juggling a job and family, even though they have been getting much of the ink lately. Men are singing the work-versus-home blues, too.

“Men have a tendency to imagine that they’re the only ones who have this work-family conflict,” says Robert Weiss, research professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “They kind of feel torn and feel that they’re not doing right by their kids, and they want to do right by their kids, yet how can they if they’re going to hold down a job and hold down their end of things at home?”

In his new book, “Staying the Course: The Emotional and Social Lives of Men Who Do Well at Work,” Weiss talks about the different--and much misunderstood--way men resolve the conflict.

“I think men resolve it by saying, ‘I’m working for my family, so in a way, I’m contributing to my family by knocking myself out at work, by running to get the plane and stuff like that.’ ” Weiss said. “But at the same time, I think about a third of our sample expressed some remorse over not having been more available while their kids were growing up.”

Weiss’ conclusions put a different spin on family surveys that paint men as career-aholics; in The Times’ poll, slightly more than half the men who responded said their parenting had suffered because of their demanding jobs.

“They give a lot of energy to work,” says Weiss, an avuncular academic who also lectures in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School’s Massachusetts Mental Health Center. “You might even say they give more energy to work than they do directly to family. But that’s because work is so fundamental to everything else. It isn’t because they care more for work than family. It’s that work makes it possible for them to be the kind of person for their family they feel they ought to be.”

Weiss’ conclusions stem from a five-year study in the 1980s of 80 successful men ages 35 to 55, two-thirds of whom have wives who work at least part time. What he found was that even as gender roles inch toward the future, the family lives of men established in their careers are still largely traditional.

Dad still spends long hours at the office and Mom is still in charge of the home, whether or not she also works outside it. That arrangement has gotten women’s dander up, a source of domestic heat that has scorched recent polls by the Roper Organization. Women, the polls show, have been getting angrier and angrier over the past 20 years.

But men, it seems, see lopsided home duties as an even trade because working wives earn only 40% of the family income, according to 1989 figures supplied by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Men have some intuitive sense of what statistics bear out,” says Warren Farrell, the San Diego-based author of “Why Men Are the Way They Are.”

“The man senses that when there are children, the woman retains three options: Option one is to be full-time involved with the kids. Option two is to be full-time involved with work. And option three is to do some combination of both.

“The man sees his life as having three slightly different options: Option one is to work full time. Option two is to work full time. And option three is to work two jobs or to intensify his commitment to work.

“So what he sees is an obligation to prepare himself to take jobs he likes less, that produce (more) of the income. What happens is that he fears that if he spends time with the children or spends time doing housework, he’s taking away from his ability to keep ahead enough at work to get the kind of promotions to be able to produce income at that level.”

John Lorelli, 44, finds his job as the manager of the bookstore at Santa Barbara City College to be extremely demanding--and stressful. And that’s precisely what he likes about it.

“From the morning of the fourth of September through the afternoon of the seventh of September, we had 7,500 customers go through our store,” he says. “It’s a tremendous challenge. You’re responsible for moving tons of books from one end of the country and getting them into your store and having it all ready and having enough of them, and you have to deal with all the faculty and all the students. It’s very challenging.”

Lorelli figures he probably worked 60 hours that week. In a typical week, he’ll clock in a hefty 50 hours. He and his wife, Amy Madsen, also are parents of a 6-month-old boy.

Under the circumstances, Lorelli misses him. “He’s the most beautiful baby in the entire world,” Lorelli swoons. “He has the most gorgeous smile.” There are times, though, when Lorelli doesn’t see that smile very often. On Thursdays, tiny Andrew stays with his grandmother while his mother works toward her master’s degree in English and his father teaches a course on the Vietnam War at Ventura College.

“The only time he sees his parents is briefly in the morning,” Lorelli says. “He sees me briefly in the late afternoon and that’s it.”

And forget the first week of school. “I saw him in the morning. I hated it. Because he’s just so much fun. He’s a happy, bouncy kid. I don’t like it, but the demands of the job have to be met. And the way it gets done is you have to devote attention to it. It doesn’t run on automatic pilot.”

Lorelli’s love for his son--despite the long hours he logs away from home--is not unusual. “I think women have a very faulty understanding of the intensity of men’s investment in their children,” says Weiss.

“That shows up especially when a marriage ends and the guy fights the woman for custody or demands liberal visitation, and the woman says something like, ‘When you were at home, you weren’t that involved with the kids. You’d come home late and you’d hide behind the television set and you’d tell the kids to go play, and weekends you’d spend playing tennis, yourself, or watching television. And now the marriage is over, and you’re suddenly a devoted father. I don’t believe it.’

“And the thing that they (women) miss is that by working hard, the guys felt themselves contributing to their kids. Now you can’t be a father simply by being a presence in the house, because you’re not in the house at all,” Weiss adds.

Tim Pulido, a happily married marketing vice president for Pizza Hut’s western division, makes sure his three children have scheduled chunks of his busy week.

On Monday evenings, which are always reserved for family, the Pulidos go bowling en masse or make ice cream runs. On Sunday evenings, the Pulidos hold “family councils,” where everyone talks about what’s coming up that week. After the group talk, Tim Pulido will have individual heart-to-hearts with his boys in their rooms; he calls the chats “one on ones.”

“Those three things form a lot of the family glue that helps us go through the pressures of everyday life,” says Pulido, 35. “I really feel that the family is the most important thing. And I have an enormous impact on my children. If I’m not there, I don’t have the opportunity to really build and shape their value system, I’m not there to build a sense of responsibility for them when they’re growing up and helping them find their interests and talents. That’s the major role of a parent.”

And having a family makes all that hard work on the job worthwhile, lending meaning to those grueling 60-hour weeks. Weiss found that of the 80 successful men he studied, only five were personally adrift, suggesting that a family life goes hand-in-hand with a dynamic work life.

“That, in a way, is what it’s all for,” says Weiss. “They have their wives’ pictures on their desks sometimes, or their kids’ pictures on their desks. You say, ‘Yeah, they’ve got their family’s pictures on the desk. They see more of the pictures than they do of their families, they spend so much time at work.’

“Well, they’re working partly because that’s what they do for their families. Their work helps them be the kind of people they want to be for their families, namely capable people who have self-respect and the respect of others.”

Robert Cauer, father of newborn Alexandra, works a merciless six-day week at his violin-making business in Hollywood, sometimes until the early morning. “If you would give me a choice, and say for 30% less money, you now have free from 5 o’clock on, I’d grab it immediately,” says Cauer, 43. “But there’s something else which forces me to sit here. One is responsibility to my customers.

“I feel a little bit like a heroin addict. If you ask a heroin addict, ‘Would you like to stop?’ they would say, ‘Yes.’ And half an hour later, they take some again. Yes, I would love to work 40 hours a week. But, in a business, there’s always something to do, and in the evening, there’s a choice. Do I go home or do I do one more job, which I need to get done? And very often work wins out.”

Perhaps, ironically, men may be more hard-driving at work because of their need for love, experts say.

“The man looks at the world, and he says, ‘If I decide to become a secretary, there’s no way, shape or form that any woman will marry me that I’m attracted to,’ ” Farrell says. “ ‘She’s going to feel awkward about bringing me home at Thanksgiving and saying, “Guess what? I’m marrying Johnny. He’s sensitive and he’s a secretary, but he’s going to take care of the kids and I’m going to support him.’ Suddenly, her parents are giving her heart-to-heart advice.

“So the distinction between the male and female choices of jobs is that men are trained from an early age to make their primary framework the jobs that earn the most, so that we still have, going to college, 85% or 90% of engineering students are males and over 90% of art history majors are females. And everyone knows art history majors with a BA will make a lot less than engineers with a BA.

“For men, a business book is his relationship book because he knows that until he’s reasonably successful, there will be no relationship,” Farrell continued. “Fewer than 1% of women marry men who earn less, unless they believe they have potential. There will be no love for him unless he has a source of income. And if he puts time into child care and housework, he will undermine his ability to do what he must do, which is provide income for the family.”

The result, even among forward-looking couples, is that the man usually remains the primary breadwinner. That becomes even clearer when children enter the picture.

“When children enter the house,” says Weiss, “then everybody loses freedom. Women lose freedom to work to the same extent they would have liked to or would have been able to before. Men lose freedom not to work.

“The advent of children makes men’s work critical to the family. You can say it doesn’t have to be that way. Men can stay home and take care of the kids, and to an extent that’s so,” he adds. “But it goes a little against the grain, that when the children are born mother produces them and Dad watches it happen. And that’s a very different role. You can say, ‘OK, why doesn’t Dad then pick it up, and from now on it’s shared.’ And you can do that. It’s just that you have to put some energy into that. If you do what comes naturally, the kid stays with Mom, for a while, anyway.”

Viktor Budnik, a Venice-based food photographer, gets to see plenty of his family, thanks to a flexible arrangement that sends him out the door to work only two or three days a week. The rest of the week, he works at home. His wife, Janie Hewson, also works at home, where she’s starting a business designing children’s furniture while she rears 9-month-old Kimberly.

“I don’t think I could lead a total traditional life,” says Budnik.

Still, their marriage has its traditional side: Budnik brings home most of the bacon, at least for now. Having their own family has been very important to them, partly because both were adopted. Still, a decision to have another child will be determined by Budnik’s income.

“I’m the main breadwinner,” says Budnik, 41.

And when small children come into the picture, housework usually becomes part of Mom’s bailiwick.

John Lorelli and his wife, Amy, split the housework evenly until Andrew arrived. “We had a really serious division, but honestly, she’s doing most of it now,” he says. “She’s home more and she has really taken over control of running the household.”

“When they’re very small, she’s in charge of the kids,” Weiss says of such marriages. “And she’s in charge of the kids’ milieu, and the milieu is the home. She’s there. The household remains the woman’s domain. She remains the person in charge. And if a guy doesn’t vacuum as well as she thinks he ought to, she says, ‘Gee, you missed a place.’ ”

And if he’s missing too many places, or if he’s not home to brandish that vacuum in the first place, then that can mean trouble on the home front. Couples are most likely to clash if the wife also works outside the home, but there are skirmishes over housework when the wife stays home with the kids--and finds herself in her work milieu every waking hour.

There are other pitfalls. Couples dealing with home-work conflicts tend to become “adversaries” or accommodators”--two of the “four A’s” that Los Angeles organizational psychologist Jerome Adams has identified as roles people take on. Less popular are “allies,” couples who split the responsibilities, and “acrobats,” people who try to do everything full force.

Adversaries compete for career opportunities. And with high-achieving accommodators, “one partner’s career takes dominance and the other takes on an accommodating role to support the home life,” he says. “Unfortunately, far too often the accommodating role has fallen on the female spouse. There’s envy that begins to build in a relationship because the one that is really supporting the home life is watching the other spouse grow professionally over time.”

Healthiest, says Adams, are allies. When his children were small, ally Adams, 45, carried his share of the parenting weight. “We didn’t have a live-in, but we were able to make sure they were supervised. Actually, I made the commitment to take time off whenever the kids were sick. You make those trade-offs.”

If that isn’t possible--or desirable, from either spouse’s perspective--experts have another suggestion: Hire a housekeeper, if you can afford it.

“Almost every woman I’ve had this discussion with, I say, ‘Do you earn more than it costs to hire someone to work around the house?” says Farrell. “The answer is usually, ‘Yes.’ ”

Household help has been a godsend for John Phillips, 47, chairman of California Common Cause and a partner in a thriving public-interest law practice, and his wife, Linda Douglass, 42, the political reporter for KNBC-TV. Because they have a part-time nanny and a live-in housekeeper, they can spend all the time they are at home with Katie, their 7-year-old daughter.

“It makes all the difference in the world, no question,” says Phillips. “To come home and do the shopping and cook the food, it would take all my discretionary time at home. That’s one of the advantages of having children later in life. You may have less energy because when you’re older you slow down, but you have that support base that gives you quality time when you’re home.”

Successful men who do make a point of putting scarce time or money into their families say it is a worthwhile investment.

Says Blaise Mercadante: “There is a depth of understanding or a stability or a centeredness that I feel that I have and people with strong families tend to have. I’m not just defined by my job but by my relationship with (my wife) Jan and by my family. In Westlake, a lot of our relationships with friends are through the church or people we know through the kids, through soccer and Boy Scouts. I walk around Westlake and I know everybody. It’s an amazing richness.”