A Gala Salute to Milken and Junk Bonds : Publishing: Five hundred people attend a reception to celebrate a 400-page, 20-pound book dedicated to a man who couldn’t be present.

It was billed as a gala dedication of a book on American entrepreneurship. But the Thursday night celebration was also a defiant salute to those who created and benefited from some of the most controversial corporate financing methods of the go-go ‘80s.

To start with, “Portraits of the American Dream” was dedicated to Michael Milken, the former Beverly Hills junk bond king who is serving a 10-year term for securities violations at the Federal Correctional Facility in Pleasanton, Calif.

More than any other figure in American finance, Milken is the emblem of the so-called Decade of Greed.

Then there was the fact that the dedication’s sponsor, Knowledge Exchange Inc. of Beverly Hills, promotes itself as a “financial research and communications firm specializing in high-yield companies.” The kind of companies that high-yield, high-risk bonds financed before Milken’s fall from grace.

And, finally, there were the guests.

Many of the 500 at the cocktail-and-hors-d’oeuvre dedication were chief executives whose corporate expansions were financed by deals put together by Milken and others at the country’s once-leading deal maker, Drexel Burnham Lambert.

Peter Magowan, chairman of Safeway Inc., played host to the crowd. Safeway was taken private in 1986 with Milken’s assistance.

But “this is not a party dedicated to Michael,” emphasized Lorraine Spurge, the former Drexel vice president and Milken confidante who heads Knowledge Exchange. “The book has been in the making for two years now”--well before Milken entered prison last March.

The 20-pound, 400-page book is a picture and word testimonial from 146 companies that Milken helped with financing projects.

Even though those on its pages singing the praises of entrepreneurship include the likes of former Olympics Chairman Peter V. Ueberroth and actor Jimmy Stewart, Milken may be giving little thought to the book these days, Spurge suggested.

“Obviously he has to worry about his problems. . . . The book is my project, and he’s satisfied that I’m satisfied” with it, she said.

Although Milken couldn’t attend, his 93-year-old grandfather, Louis P. Zax, showed up, said Lloyd Kaplan of Harold J. Rubenstein Associates, which handled public relations for the dedication.

And there was no question that Milken’s spirit hovered above the open-air quadrangle of the Junior Achievement of Southern California complex where the multimedia event was held.

A nearby auditorium in the complex was a gift of a Milken family charity.

Kaplan said he was sure that the onetime financier’s name “was on many lips.”

And if anyone wondered whether the crowd missed Milken, the language of the picture-filled book’s dedication message was a dead giveaway.

The former financier “had the vision, energy and courage to open a closed system so entrepreneurs--regardless of race, creed or color--with ability and a dream to go into business could test themselves for the marketplace,” it said.

“He understood that the most important form of capital is human capital--and possessed a deep-rooted conviction that a strong and free society is dependent on a strong free enterprise system.”

The rest of the publication is pretty heavy reading, Spurge joked. At a foot by a foot and a half, the book can “either be put on a coffee table or have legs added to it and become a coffee table.”