IMPACT OF THE BELL ATLANTIC / TCI DEAL : Now Comes the Hard Part : Is ‘Smiling Bulldog’ Smith Ready for His Greatest Role?

Raymond W. Smith--an amateur actor, director and playwright--suddenly commands the biggeststage in the media world. Now the question is whether the chairman and chief executive of Bell Atlantic Corp. is up to the role.

In running the Philadelphia-based phone company that plans to swallow cable television giant Tele-Communications Inc., Smith, 56, has won a reputation as the savviest leader among the seven Baby Bells.

Described by one colleague as “extremely tenacious, a smiling bulldog,” Smith engineered a relentless, painful culture change at Bell Atlantic--not without considerable management bloodletting.

He has spearheaded Bell Atlantic’s drive to expand beyond the traditional businesses of a phone company--coming up with new products, aggressively acquiring cellular phone interests and branching out internationally.

And he is a leading proselytizer of just what the $21-billion-plus TCI buyout will allow--the merging of telephone technology and cable television to put phone companies at the center of bringing entertainment and information into American homes and offices.

His record, though, may not be enough.

After a lifetime of working at a telephone company, Smith faces running a company involved in radically different businesses--including entertainment programming--at a time of fierce competition.

Although investors have reacted favorably, boosting Bell Atlantic’s stock 12.7% since the TCI deal was announced Wednesday, there is great uncertainty whether Smith will be able to make the new mega-company produce the vast profits that will be needed to justify the merger.

And there are questions about whether he really will run the show--or whether TCI Chief Executive John Malone, who is to be vice chairman of the new company, may try to pull the strings from backstage.

Said Larry Gerbrandt, an analyst with Paul Kagan Associates, a media consulting firm in Carmel, Calif.: “John Malone has joked about going fishing, but I doubt very much that John Malone will disappear out of this.”

Malone has been accused of being ruthless and monopolistic in his acquisition of cable companies. Smith, by contrast, has gotten along well with regulators; though his firm is based in Philadelphia, he lives in the Washington suburb of Potomac, Md.

Since the Bell Atlantic-TCI merger is heavily dependent on regulatory approval, some analysts wonder if making Smith chairman was as much a political as a business move.

Samuel K. Skinner, White House chief of staff and transportation secretary in the George Bush Administration, lauds Smith as “one of the most innovative CEOs in the country.” Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the powerful House subcommittee on telecommunications and finance, is on record with praise.

Yet Smith’s ascendancy may be far more than political window dressing.

Aaron Posner, artistic director of the Arden Theater Co., a small professional theater company in Pennsylvania on whose board Smith sits, says Smith’s intense interest in the theater may serve him richly as he builds an interactive media network.

“Live theater is the genesis of wanting communication to be interactive between an audience and a performer,” Posner said. “It makes perfect sense that someone with a theatrical perspective is moving to the forefront of making that possible.”

Smith’s educational background is in engineering. Besides his theatrical interests--he has written some 26 plays, including “The Fetal Pig,” about middle-aged men coming to terms with their ambition--he lately has taken up oil painting.

As an employee of the old Bell System, he worked his way up through the ranks. But in the post-AT&T; breakup era, he won kudos for frog-marching Bell Atlantic out of its monopolistic torpor.

While other Baby Bells debated what to do, for example, Smith mounted a successful court challenge to restrictions left over from the AT&T; breakup that banned telephone companies from getting involved with cable television.

He also re-engineered Bell Atlantic’s corporate culture.

“The old Bell System was like a great football team with the best athletes and the best equipment,” Smith said in an interview with the Harvard Business Review. “Every Saturday morning, we’d run up and down the football field and win 100 to 0 because there was no one on the other side of the line of scrimmage; we were a monopoly.”

So Smith devised a new mindset.

“It became very obvious to Ray Smith when he became the chairman that the old culture was not going to carry them into the future,” said John R. Childress, president and chief executive of the Senn-Delaney Leadership Consulting Group in Long Beach, who worked closely with Smith in developing what came to be known as “the Bell Atlantic Way.”

Bell Atlantic executives carry blue poker chips in their pockets--to remind them to focus on “blue chip” issues. Some wear “Coach Me” buttons to encourage co-workers to give them advice. Smith and many others wear lapel pins bearing one word--”Quality.”

Even Childress acknowledges that the techniques that have worked in what predominantly is an engineering company may not work for a firm that now will include cable entrepreneurs and entertainment executives.

“There is definitely an industry difference between Hollywood, media promotion and the traditional engineering-based industry of basic phone service,” he said. “There can’t be a vanilla culture that fits everything.”