THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Can-Do Attitude : Julie Newcomb Hill of Newport Beach makes it her business to do lots of things well. She’s a CEO who puts family first, is an advocate for women’s issues and invests her time in the community.

Let’s be blunt: Julie Newcomb Hill has it made.

She’s president and CEO of a publicly owned land development company, Costain Homes, a unique position for a woman in the United States.

She’s able to arrange her schedule so she leaves the office at 2:30 each day and spends the rest of the afternoon with her 10-year-old son, Matthew.

She’s bright--a graduate with honors from UCLA, where she was also homecoming queen in 1967.

She’s athletic--a skier, swimmer, onetime sky diver and hang glider.

Her bosses think she’s great. One took it further and proposed.

The people at UC Irvine think she’s great. She has been serving on their CEO Roundtable of advisers.

Superior Court Judge Donald Smallwood thinks she’s great. As a member of his Orange County Family Violence Council, she is generous with her time and money.

And UCI professor Judy B. Rosener, who makes a specialty of studying women in business, thinks she’s great. “Julie to me is the perfect example of the woman who has been able to have a professional career and never lose sight of the fact that she’s a woman--a mother, a wife, someone giving back to the community.”

Hill, 48, says that recounting the facts of her career advancement makes it “sound real easy, a 20-year overnight sensation.”

But it wasn’t.

Growing up in small-town Colton, neglected by her father, taking charge of her dying mother though still in high school, feeling out of place at UCLA and later taking one dissatisfying job after another, Hill says her life began to blossom only when she jettisoned the bad advice and went to her first love, the world of business.

What bad advice? The answer comes instantly; it’s tattooed onto her memory. Her high school counselor during her senior year told her: “Pretty little girls shouldn’t go into business. They become witches on wheels.”

In 1964, “that was the conventional wisdom,” Hill says. It took years for her to deduce it was wrong.

Now she spends much of her time working to correct other wrongs in a woman’s world. She has championed a shelter for abused women in Laguna Beach and is helping build another in Irvine. She works with a UCI center to create career opportunities for women and speaks publicly and emphatically on the topic.

Yet when people ask whether she selected a land development career to challenge so male-dominated an industry, she says no. It just happened. Opportunities emerged, and she grasped them.

“When you stand at the top of a ski slope, you don’t plan which way you’re going to go. You move the way the mountain shows you. And when you can stand at the bottom and look back up, it looks like your whole trail is linked and there was forethought. But there wasn’t.”

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Her father, Spencer Kincaid, was a member of a wealthy, socialite family in St. Louis but was thrown into the working world when the family’s fortune collapsed.

In Los Angeles he met a secretary, Ebba Lind, daughter of working-class Swedish immigrants, and they married and moved to Colton. There they had a daughter, Julie, in 1946 and four years later a son, Jeffrey.

Hill says her father, an insurance broker, seemed to be absent nearly all the time, and her mother single-handedly held the family together.

When the mother developed cancer, the daughter had to take over.

“Let me give you an anecdote that would characterize my childhood:

“My senior year in high school, on the outside you could say that everything was classic. My boyfriend was the captain of the football team. I was a song leader. Homecoming court, straight A’s--all of that.

“At home, because my mother was dying of cancer, I was giving her shots in the night of Demerol and morphine to keep her from experiencing pain. I was dealing with my father, who was absent. I was worried about our finances. And I’m 16, 17 years old.”

Hill says she and her brother have worked very hard at their careers and attributes that to the climate at home when they were children.

“My brother, who is not like me in many ways, is like me in the fact that his career has been very important to him. He’s been lead engineer for the space shuttle engine for 20 years. He’s dedicated his life to it.

“I think a lot of my and my brother’s strong work ethic came from seeing what can happen if you don’t take charge, if you’re not responsible. We saw the unhappiness my father created in his own life and other people’s lives.”

When Hill’s mother died, Hill’s aunt, Lilian Stern, became surrogate mother, went to work and sent Hill through UCLA.

Hill followed her high school counselor’s advice and aimed at teaching with a major in English literature. She dived into the college mainstream, joining the Delta Delta Delta sorority, becoming homecoming queen and graduating with honors, despite feeling “like a hick” among “these girls who seemed so much more sophisticated than I was.”

She began job-hunting immediately, for her aunt’s support ended upon graduation. After an unsatisfying nine months as a receptionist at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in Los Angeles, she wound up where her counselor had aimed her--teaching junior high school English literature in Schaumburg outside Chicago.

“Now I think of it as my two years in the Peace Corps, frankly. The Third World. Basically, I had to teach some of these seventh-graders how to read. They had just been passed along. In order to do it right, my life was dominated by teaching, and I think I was being paid about $600 a month at that time.”

She went back to Los Angeles and tried a job promoting prescription drugs to physicians, but the first physician she approached challenged her. “He asked me why I should come in there and tell him about drugs when I was an English lit major. The point was, I really shouldn’t be doing that job, and dammit, he was right.”

It was during this time she married Thomas D. Barnett, an Air Force fighter pilot. The couple moved to Atlanta, where Barnett hoped to become an airline pilot and where Hill decided at last to trust her instincts and follow a business career.

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Hill obtained a master’s degree at the University of Georgia in 1975 and began “looking around for a business area to get into.”

“The real estate market there was in the tank, and I’d see these full-page distress-sale ads in the real estate sections. They literally had black borders, like a telegram announcing a death. It was so negative. I figured that with this newly minted degree in marketing, I should contact one of these banks.

“What I found out was banks didn’t at that time have any sophisticated in-house marketing. So I set up a business of my own.”

It was Julie Barnett & Associates, except there were no associates.

“I was a one-man band. I did everything. There were many all-nighters. You could say it was instantly successful, I suppose. I never worried about getting clients. That part was easy, because I’d just intuitively defined a niche where there was a need. There were so many [foreclosed] properties at that time. The hard part was just getting the work product out.” When her husband, then working for a large insurance company, was transferred to California in 1978, she took her business with her. They selected Orange County, mainly, she recalls, because “for me, the Irvine Ranch was where I needed to be. It was where land design solutions were being formulated on a much broader scale than anywhere else.”

A query to the Irvine Co. brought her to Ken Agid, who at that time was doing the Irvine Co.’s real estate marketing.

“Julie was a very interesting package of talents,” Agid says. “Very ambitious, very capable, very bright, articulate. She worked on a number of assignments for me.

“No-- with me,” Agid adds. “She is a very independent individual. Subordinate is not a term she would use referring to herself. A healthy ego, but an ego.”

Hill had at last found a mentor. Through Agid’s recommendation, she soon became vice president of marketing at the Akins Co., a developer in Tustin.

Changes came quickly, however. Her husband, wanting to become an entrepreneur, took on the first of his chain of fast-food franchises in Phoenix. Their separation of interests and locales eventually led to “kind of a divorce by attrition. It was a very amicable split.

“I look back and realize that with the changes that have gone on for me, the growth in my life, it would have been very difficult for any one person to have gone through every one of those phases with me. It was Margaret Mead who said she had three husbands, and every one of them was right at the right time in her life.”

Divorced, laid off by the Akins Co., in 1982 Hill was pondering her future when she was approached by the Mobil Land (Georgia) Corp., an owner of huge tracts of land in the Atlanta area. Agid was one of the people queried about Hill.

“I wound up talking with the senior vice president back there,” Agid says. “He asked me, ‘Will she be able to stand up to the pressures and interface with some good-ol’-boy builders back here? Can she succeed in this job?’

“I told him, ‘The thing you don’t have to worry about is whether she’ll succeed in her job. Worry that she doesn’t want to succeed in your job.’ And he hired her.”

According to Agid, Hill “turned Mobil into a master planning operation that was considered to be one of the leading operations in the U.S.” During her tenure, she was declared national marketing director of the year by the National Assn. of Homebuilders.

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In Atlanta, she married Scott Newcomb, a real estate broker whom she had met in Orange County and who had joined her in Georgia. Their only child, a son, was born in 1985, and suddenly there was new competition on Hill’s priority list.

“Prior to his birth, I thought I would have a nanny; life would continue, things would be easy. I would just work this child into my life. But my personal experience was very different. I wanted to be the mom. I didn’t want to miss those years. I didn’t want him to be raised by somebody else. It was a tremendous conflict for me.”

She went to her bosses at Mobil to explain why she had to resign. They reacted by asking her what concessions she needed. A three-day workweek with no reduction in responsibility or compensation, she said. And they accepted.

“I breast-fed this child until he was 6 months old because I could literally take off from the office and on the way home take off my jewelry, be with him for an hour and then get back to the office.

“I discovered that regardless of the demands at work, when you get home it’s baby time. That was probably the most peaceful time of my life, because I allowed things just to stop, and my time became the time with my son.”

Hill is quick to concede that few women even now can command the concessions she received.

“I give speeches about this. I was an anomaly. It happened probably because I knew to ask for it, probably because I worked myself into a favorable position. I was 38 when my son was born; I wasn’t 28. I had worked myself to where I had value to a company, so they were going to make an exception for me.”

It was this concern for family that brought Hill and her family back to Orange County, she says. Both she and her husband had ailing elders in their families, and both wanted their son to be near their extended families. *

Back in Orange County, Hill became Newport Beach developer J.M. Peters’ first female vice president. “This was a prestigious job, a profile kind of job,” but the minimum 10-hour workdays made it “very uncomfortable for me with my son. Things were out of balance.”

When a less time-demanding opportunity arose she jumped at it.

It was an offer from Costain’s president to become the firm’s marketing vice president, working the same schedule as she had at Mobil.

But turmoil lay ahead. Costain Homes’ parent company, the Costain Group, a huge, London-based company with more than $2 billion a year in revenues, specialized in mining and engineering and wasn’t sure it wanted to continue in the California land development business.

In 1990, the Costain Group board put Costain Homes up for sale, throwing the local office into near chaos. Then they changed their minds.

“I don’t want to be falsely modest about this,” Hill says. “I think what happened was I picked up the pieces” after the former president was shown the door.

Hill was one of four vice presidents interviewed at length by a home-office task force sent from London. It was plain, she says, that they were looking for a new CEO.

“Talk about stress. For one week they questioned us about every detail. But when they had general questions, they wound up asking me, because I could answer them. Because of that, I think, I was asked to be CEO.”

The tip-off came when Peter Costain, chief executive of Costain Group, flew in from London and sat in on one of her interviews. He began telling her how he thought the company should be managed.

Speaking recently from London, Costain conceded that considering a woman for such a high-level position was unprecedented in his firm. “In the U.K., I’m not aware of even a medium-size company run by a woman.

“I must say I might have had a difficulty in having a female boss in a construction company. One comes across sometimes--very rarely--women in senior positions in business where there is sometimes--how do you put it?--the use of feminine charm in dealing with things.”

Going into his first meeting with Hill, “I remember saying to a colleague, ‘If she, in discussing the future, actually flutters her eyelashes or uses her sexual difference, there’s no way she’ll get the job.’ ”

But it was all business, he says.

“She was straightforward, matter-of-fact, a clear thinker. It was clear she was the best choice, and we haven’t been disappointed.”

In January, 1991, she was appointed president. A year later, news came down that a new chairman for Costain Homes was arriving. Fearful that she would be swept aside, she asked her old boss whether “there is another open-minded, non-chauvinist Brit in this company, and he said, ‘I think you’ll like this guy.’ ”

It turned out to be a classic understatement. The new boss, Peter Hill from London, is still her boss and now is also her husband.

Yes, she concedes, it’s a corporate taboo. “It’s fraught with peril. It’s just absolutely what you would never do. I had many friends who said to me, ‘What the heck are you doing?’ ”

But she said that, while the friendship developed quickly, the romance developed gradually.

It happened during Costain Group’s second attempt to sell Costain Homes Peter Hill and the recently divorced Julie Newcomb joined as bidders to buy the firm they were managing. But the couple’s purchase proposal painted such a promising future for Costain Homes that London again retracted its offer to sell.

As compensation, Costain promoted Peter Hill to chief of all American operations and promoted the future Julie Hill to CEO and president of Costain Homes.

By that time, Julie Hill says, she had accepted the marriage proposal, but it was only after a long and spectacular courtship. “He apparently knew very soon. He was very sure. For me, I had just come out of a heartbreaking divorce. I needed to be certain,” she says.

“He’s a very romantic and lovely man. He proposed to me in lovely places--in Venice, in Paris, in Tokyo, in London.”

More specifically, in a gondola under a canal bridge in Venice, in a water taxi before the Sydney Opera House, in a carriage on the Orient Express.

He radioed a proposal as she was about to take her first (and only) jump from an airplane. “I told him I’d think about it on the way down.

“The whole thing became a sort of lovely inside joke,” she says. “I suppose that went on for about a year. A friend told me, ‘If you hold out a little longer, you’ll go around the world.’ ”

The couple were married before nearly 200 people on Jan. 29, 1994, in the chapel at Concordia University in Irvine.

Those who know the mature Julie Hill should not be surprised she would take such a daring step, says her husband. “She sets her priorities, and she’s been very clear in her own mind what’s important to her.”

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What’s important to her is still evolving, she says.

“I’ve done my climbing. I’ve climbed my corporate ladder, and I’ve gotten to where I wanted to get. I think cause-related issues will take up the second half of my life.”

And the causes are well defined. She does not want women victimized--not by people telling them what they cannot do, not by physically or emotionally cruel husbands, not by a corporate culture that does not accommodate the needs of the working mother.

A day in the life of working mother Julie Hill is the way it ought to be, she says.

She drives her son to school at 8, then appears at the office for a heavily scheduled morning and noontime. At 2:30 she’s off to pick up her son and spends from then until bedtime with him, running school errands, doing homework, swimming, playing paddle tennis, cycling, playing Monopoly. After bedtime, she does her own homework, sometimes while exercising.

Nowadays, her causes have edged closer to the top of her priority list. She says an award she received last month for helping women advance in business--one of the Clara Barton Spectrum Awards given by the American Red Cross in Orange County--makes her particularly proud.

“My perception is, you help one person at a time, and it has a ripple effect. If there’s anything in my life that I’m impassioned about, it is that ability to use whatever currency or power I have in the world to give that back.

“I think there’s something in me in the very beginning that said, ‘I have a right to be heard, and I have a right to evolve and be the best person I can be.’

“If my life has any message in what I’ve done, it’s ‘Don’t tell me I can’t.’ ”

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Julie Newcomb Hill

Background: Age 48, lives in Newport Beach. Born in Loma Linda, raised in Colton and Covina.

Family: Husband Peter Hill, 43; son Matthew, 10.

Passions: “Son, husband, friends, independence, involvement in making a difference, interesting travel and good jokes.”

On accommodating working mothers: “We haven’t evolved very far. We still don’t understand that women will continue to work and women and families will continue to have this stress until employers and our society in general recognize we have to shift. . . . This won’t be addressed until we figure out that we’re all parents in one way or another, that we all have a responsibility to parent the next generation.”

On helping other women advance: “One of the things that disturbs me the most is the queen bee syndrome. And there are queen bees in our industry, women who have made it and pull up the drawbridge and say, ‘No one can come after me. I’m special. I’m exceptional.’ I think that’s very wrong.”

On the prospect for change: “There will be changes. And it could be a hundred different changes. It doesn’t have to be a national policy that develops all of a sudden. I think it happens on an individual basis. It’s almost a spiritual or evolutionary recognition of who we are as human beings and what our values are.”