Villain and Genius of Time : MASTER OF THE GAME: Steve Ross and the Creation of Time Warner, <i> By Connie Bruck (Simon & Schuster: $25; 400 pp.)</i>

Even Steve Ross’ final act was full of playful fantasy and elements of delusion.

Dying of prostate cancer, the legendary chairman of Time Warner Co. checked into the hospital the last time under the name George Bailey.

Bailey, of course, is the character Jimmy Stewart played in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the Frank Capra film about a man who finds his life had meaning because of how he helped other people.

For Ross, it must have seemed a natural choice. The movie was his favorite, and this ingratiating dreamer, deal maker and emotionally disconnected manipulator imagined himself to be like Bailey: a selfless giver, a builder of things, a nurturer who cared more about people than anything else.

At least one friend also thought it was Ross’ attempt at one last incredible deal--this time with the Almighty--for in the movie Bailey is saved from suicide by an angel for his good deeds. “He figured he was probably going to die, and he wanted to try to convince God he was George Bailey,” the friend recalled.

Finally, as Connie Bruck reveals in her graceful and wisely balanced biography of Ross, “Master of the Game,” assuming Bailey’s identity was not without its ironies. For in real life Ross was also the greed-soaked, unfeeling villain of the film, Mr. Potter, who used people to enrich himself.

It was a life improbable enough for the movies. Ross grew up poor in Flatbush and married into a chain of New York area funeral parlors. To take the family company public, implausibly, he merged it with a parking lot company that apparently was a Mafia front. From there, he moved into the movie business, shedding companies and friends like a reptile shedding old skin. Eventually he achieved the most probable of all, acquiring Time Inc., all the while making Time executives think they were acquiring Ross’ Warner Communications.

Along the way, Bruck explains, Ross built an atmosphere of entrepreneurial creativity and almost “feudal” loyalty all but vanished from corporate America. And he escaped prosecution for a series of scandals and improprieties that could have ended several careers.

In the telling, Bruck, the New Yorker writer and author of “The Predators’ Ball,” has avoided the trap that befalls so much nonfiction today--confusing biography with expose.

Instead, “Master of the Game” thoughtfully, and often eloquently, weighs Ross’ good qualities--those of an American original and nurturer of creativity--with his bad ones--those of a man capable of unmentionable dishonesty, disloyalty and greed. Though not a long book, this is a serious study by a careful, probing and reflective writer.

“Believing nothing was impossible (and being, in this sense, a throwback to an earlier, more adventurous time), he was daring and bold, and he saw with fresh eyes. But, feeling exempt from legal, ethical and moral standards, he abrogated them at will.”

For all its admirable qualities, however, Bruck’s book also falls just short of being a definitive work about Ross or an essential tract on American corporate life.

What Bruck reveals rather is how Ross made business a kind of excellent adventure. He lavished his executives with freedom and wealth--until the last decade he paid them more than he did himself. And he exhorted them to each day “dream,” and then go out and do something about your dreams. “His salesmanship (was) so consummate,” Bruck writes, “that it seemed more about the art of romance than about selling.”

Bruck obviously admires the creative culture Ross engendered. When a record company executive once told Ross he was worried about expanding into a new music area that might lose about $10 million, Ross told him simply: “It’s your company. If you don’t think you can handle being 10 million in a hole, don’t do it--but it’s your company.”

Ross was an amazing manipulator. Once when trying to buy a company, Ross discovered that his adversary had been reading a book on psychology. He had one of his aides read it, and they used the techniques in the book to outmaneuver the man.

“What had so tantalized Ross about business, from the start, was certainly not day-to-day operations, with its myriad details, or even the lofty overview of management that monitored the whole; it was, rather, what hovered, indistinct, about the edges of the thing--Chimera which promised to shower gold if one could only give them substance.”

And Bruck notes Ross’ awesome insecurity. At the height of his career, he once tried to impress his wife by claiming that, using a pseudonym, he had actually written a hit song of the day for her.

Along the way there were four major episodes that betray Ross’ image as a romantic “builder,” most of which Bruck details well, though staunch critics may argue she is not hard enough.

Ross’ early partners are apparently gangsters, Bruck accepts though never conclusively establishes, and he never fully lost his connection with them.

In the 1970s, at the height of Ross’ success, Warner executives took bribes to invest in a Mafia-associated business near New York City, the Westchester Premier Theatre. Although she renders no final verdict herself, Bruck describes how Ross escaped conviction only by letting his best friend, Jay Emmett, take the rap. The two men apparently never spoke again.

A few years later, again in an apparent crime for which he was never charged, Ross sold off more than $20 million off his own company’s stock when he knew that his subsidiary, Atari, was about to collapse.

And his ultimate triumph, the merger of his Warner Communications with Time Inc., was an ultimate failure, Bruck suggests, both because of Ross’ extraordinary greed and the fact that the two companies’ parts were not all that complementary.

For all its sensibleness, however, the book leaves one with a feeling of missing pieces.

The first is a sense of hollowness about Ross. He remains a distant figure. We are in the minds of some characters--Ross’ wives, for instance--but never that of Ross himself. He “seemed never to look back” at his life, she writes. “Whether this persona--caring, constant, generous beyond his beneficiaries dreams, an idealized father figure--was one Ross deliberately fashioned . . . is not altogether clear.”

The fault may not entirely be Bruck’s. She is trying to be fair, and Ross is an extraordinarily complex subject.

Bruck also seems to have devoted herself to understanding events, not simply digging for amazing anecdotes, but as a result this is not a book so filled with remarkably telling details that characters simply come to life.

Apparently, too, some key figures would not talk, among them, it seems, the sacrificial friend, Emmett. As Bruck writes in her source notes, moreover, Ross had agreed to cooperate but died before Bruck had a chance to cover the key events in his life.

The other absence is the deeper question of why we celebrate and write books about people like Ross.

For all his celebrity and wealth, what, if anything, did he contribute? Bruck makes little attempt to broach the topic. She does not even give us much about the movies or books or anything else that Ross had a hand in. Finishing “Master of the Game” left me feeling that our values were skewed. This is a book about corporate life and mergers, not, as some business biographies have been, shaping the culture, building a great institution or affecting the country.

Perhaps such social criticism is too much to ask from this fine book. But in the end Ross seems little more than a magnetic, fascinating guy, a deeply flawed and strangely appealing character.

Yet that is much less of a testament than we might expect from our corporate titans. Ultimately, it seems, Ross was the master of nothing more than a game.