Intense (in tens’) adj. 1. very strong 2. zealous 3. having or showing firm purpose 4. ELI BROAD

The Richard Serra sculpture is big: four curved panels of Cor-Ten steel--151/2 feet high, 22 feet wide, 2 inches thick--and each weighing 15 tons. It was forged at a Pennsylvania foundry and shaped at a New England submarine works, then hauled on flatbed trucks across 30 states, requiring special permits in each to allow this extra-wide load to waddle along the interstate between two escort vehicles. Once in Brentwood, trees had to be ripped out and concrete poured to protect retaining walls, just to maneuver the sculpture down a driveway.

Finally in place, the panels--rust-colored and textured on one side, smooth and gray on the other--seem thrust by some seismic force out of a peaceful, manicured lawn. And while they are identical conically shaped curves, each looks different, depending whether it’s placed right-side up, or upside down. It all depends on your perspective.

Such is the case with the man who casually commissioned the Serra sculpture: Eli Broad.

Co-founder of home-building behemoth Kaufman and Broad. CEO of SunAmerica, a $48-billion financial empire and, since 1990, the fastest-growing company on the New York Stock Exchange. Personal fortune of $1.8 billion. Founding chairman of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and a leading collector. Donor of $20 million to establish the Eli Broad College of Business and the Eli Broad Graduate School of Management at his alma mater, Michigan State University--the largest single donation ever made to the school. Former chairman and life trustee of Pitzer College, trustee of Caltech, major donor to CalArts. Co-owner of the Sacramento Kings and Arco Arena. Former chairman of the World Affairs Council of Los Angeles.

Ask Broad (rhymes with road) to refer you to potential interview subjects for this story and he says brashly: “Start with the president. Start with Hillary Clinton, if you want.” At first, the statement seems wildly egotistical, but the White House confirms that Broad is often tapped by advisors to the president and vice president. (Neither Clinton, however, was available for comment.) Phone calls from members of Congress seeking counsel are a routine part of his day, and Broad and his wife, Edythe, have hosted political fund-raisers for Clinton and Gore at their Brentwood home.

Explains Henry G. Cisneros, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development and current chief of the Spanish-language television network Univision: “Every city has a handful of people who are thought of as the keys, the gateway to the city. If you want to find out what’s going on, if you want to relate to the machinery behind the engine of that city, you go to a handful of people. For L.A., Eli Broad is one of those people.”

Mayor Richard Riordan, fund-raising co-chair with Broad for the Walt Disney Concert Hall, calls his friend and skiing buddy simply “the brightest guy I know. He’s a maniac for getting things done.”

Still, the same hard-driving, my-way-or-the-highway style that has led to such breathtaking success in business has also earned him detractors, particularly in the nonprofit arts world, where volunteer boards often need him a lot more than they want him. Inviting Broad to your party can be a lot like expecting a puppy for Christmas and finding out that your parents got you a full-grown pit bull instead. Some of the same people Broad identifies as friends often describe him with less flattering terms behind his back.

“The amazing thing about the guy,” says one critic, “is that either he is utterly impervious and he does not register the kind of impact he is having on people, or he does, and he has ice water in his veins.”

Eli Broad’s own vital signs share an intravenous link with the rise and fall of the global economy. Observes one SunAmerica employee of his 64-year-old boss: When the market is up, so is Eli.

But the man who has enough money to buy anything he wants usually doesn’t. While his life’s work led him to achieve millionaire status before age 30, Broad seems to find the game far more compelling than the prize. In 1995, he charged a $2.5-million Roy Lichtenstein painting, titled “I . . . I’m Sorry,” on his American Express card, thus racking up a frequent-flyer mile for each dollar. He then turned around and donated 2.5 million miles to CalArts for student travel.

And with his wife of 43 years, Broad has amassed one of the largest collections of contemporary art in the country. But, worried that museums were losing out as the wealthy collectors of

the 1980s hoarded the best contemporary artworks, he established the Eli Broad Family Foundation to share that collection with the world’s museums.

For Broad, leisure is a concept that does not compute. He never takes a vacation that does not involve nearly as many faxes and telephone calls as a day at the gleaming Century City office tower that houses, and is named for, SunAmerica. Financier Michael E. Tennenbaum, whose offices are in the same complex and whose parking space is in front of Broad’s, says that even with his own long hours, he never manages to arrive earlier, or leave later, than Broad.

While business has dominated Broad’s life, his quest for financial success was satisfied early, and his restless need to have something to do led him to expand his interests into the diverse worlds of politics, art, education and sports.

Broad often eliminates the personal pronoun, perhaps because it takes up too much time. “Golf? Don’t play it,” he offers. (Broad also tends to interview himself--another timesaver.) “Traditional retirement, go to the country club, have lunch, play cards after lunch, not interested in that.” Relaxation for the trim, silver-haired Broad is holding weekend business meetings at home, outdoors in the sun; that, not sports, accounts for his ruddy tan.

Born in New York City and raised in Detroit, this only child of Lithuanian immigrants--his father was a house painter, then owner of several dime stores--became the youngest-ever certified public accountant in Michigan at age 20. At 21, he married then 18-year-old Edythe. In 1957, Broad co-founded Kaufman and Broad Home Corp., now the largest builder of moderately priced housing in the West. In 1971, Kaufman and Broad acquired Sun Life Insurance Co. of America, which by 1989 had transformed into SunAmerica Inc., providing retirement investment and savings options for the baby-boom generation.

“I like to work,” he says, crisply. “I like to accomplish things. I do not like presiding over the status quo. I work all the time. The only question is, what do I work on?”

His most recent undertaking is to raise the funds to build downtown’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, new home for the L.A. Philharmonic, designed by renowned architect Frank O. Gehry, who also designed Broad’s home.

Or not.

That depends whether you ask Gehry or Broad. Broad hired Gehry to design the home--all glass and steel, perched at the edge of a precipice--but in the end hired another architect to complete it, motivated, Broad says, by Gehry’s slowness and his own impatience. Broad says he loves the home, and proudly refers to it as “a Frank Gehry house.” Gehry has disowned the house and refuses to visit it. He also refused comment for this story, as the two men have wrangled again over architectural issues surrounding Disney Hall. More on that, later.

Broad has been active in Democratic circles for more than 30 years, recently supporting individual candidates including Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt. Recent donations to organizations including the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have ranged from $2,000 to $50,000. (He also contributed $1,000 to Steve Forbes’ failed try for the 1996 Republican nomination.)

And Broad was a presence during President Clinton’s late-July visit to Los Angeles, at a private dinner for the chief executive at the home of former MCA chairman Lew Wasserman and a $600,000 fund-raising dinner for California’s Democratic delegation to the House of Representatives.

Andrea Rich, president of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, of which Broad is a trustee, sums up his political clout this way: “How many Democrat billionaires are there? . . . The political support he gives is not always in his financial best interest. He has a little Populist in him. People don’t believe that, but it’s true.”

One of the things people admire most about Broad is his steadfast refusal to bear grudges or name names. Of course, such magnanimity may be easier for the bulldozer than the bulldozee. He uses no names as he discusses the marked difference between the art and business worlds: “I make people uncomfortable. Not in business, not at universities and colleges; the great educational leaders are very comfortable with me. But some people in the art world have to be dragged into accountability.”

Former U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor says he finds Broad’s approach refreshing. “He is all over an issue; he surrounds it, pounds it into the ground, makes sure it’s done. Because he’s focused and concentrates on what he’s doing. If you don’t have that same kind of commitment, I think it can be somewhat difficult. That’s the kind of intensity some people can find off-putting. I don’t.”

*

The Broads have been avid art collectors since the early 1970s, inspired in part by the late Taft Schreiber, then a top MCA official, who donated some of his most significant acquisitions to MOCA. Their first major purchase was an 1888 Van Gogh drawing, soon followed by works of Matisse, Miro and Henry Moore. By the early ‘80s, however, Eli had turned his energies to contemporary art. Among the first were works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, the heroin-ravaged ingenue who died in 1988 at 27 of an overdose.

“Jean-Michel would go out and buy $2,500 Armani suits and then paint in them--he was wild, but a great talent,” recalls Broad, who says he loves contemporary art because the artists are still alive to meet and talk to.

He recalls buying a Basquiat painting the artist insisted on redoing, to make it “very special” for Broad. “He painted over it!” Broad says. Eventually, Broad gave up waiting for Basquiat to restore the painting, and the art dealer let him pick another instead.

Broad would soon become a major player, buying significant works for his family foundation and sitting on the boards of numerous art institutions. His collection includes artists who established themselves during the heady days of the ‘80s art boom.

“I had no background in art history,” Broad says. “I got interested out of intellectual curiosity. It was interesting in the same way I’m interested in talking to people at academies and universities and colleges. Artists reflect on our society in a different way than business people, with whom I spend most of my time. It’s a voyage, and an adventure.”

The Eli Broad Family Foundation is essentially a nonprofit lending library. Hidden in a nondescript brick building near Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, the foundation has a third of its more than 400 works on loan to museums at any given time. Among the 100 contemporary artists included are Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari, Lari Pittman, Julian Schnabel and Susan Rothenberg.

Broad also maintains in his home an extensive private collection that includes the work of Picasso, Miro, Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns. And the SunAmerica Corporate Collection, mostly paintings and limited to Southern California artists, fills the walls of the company’s offices.

The courtyard of Broad’s home is made of the same delicate Indian red sandstone as the Arata Isozaki-designed MOCA building. To Broad, founding the museum is among his most important achievements. And the project on which he lavished the most effort is the one that stirred the greatest conflict, due to Broad’s self-styled definition of the role of arts patron.

Some MOCA survivors charge that Broad failed to play the deferential role expected of a volunteer chairman, who traditionally raises money and leaves policy decisions to the paid president. Instead, Broad, who, along with fellow mogul and art collector Max Palevsky, donated $1 million each to found the $10-million museum, operated like the CEO of his own corporation, they say.

Broad stepped down as chairman--some say he was pushed--in 1984 and no longer sits on the MOCA board. In 1995, however, he did donate another $1 million to the museum, which houses the Eli and Edythe Broad Reception Hall.

“Everyone assumes that their way is the right way, but I think that Eli suffers that with a vengeance,” says a MOCA insider. “So even people who had enormous respect for him, who had enormous appreciation for the kind of gift that he made, would get incredibly angry at him . . . he would always come in like a bull in a china closet and overturn things. I wouldn’t wish him on anybody. On the other hand, you can deal with him, and he is reasonable.”

Ninth Circuit Judge William A. Norris, MOCA’s founding president, admires Broad but also recognizes that Broad’s CEO personality often disturbs nonprofit sensibilities.

“Eli was a true visionary,” Norris says. “Was Eli always easy to work with? No. The fact that he was so hard-driving and so determined to make MOCA a success ruffled feathers along the way. Max Palevsky is not the easiest guy to deal with either. There were times when I thought I couldn’t possibly get the job done without them and times when I thought I couldn’t get the job done with them.

“But I doubt that anyone could believe that Eli wasn’t always acting in what he thought was in the best interest of MOCA, even if he made some people uncomfortable at times.”

Don’t look for Broad to change his ways to ensure that the nonprofit arts world remembers him with fondness. “I’m not one, if I have certain beliefs, to forget about them,” he asserts. “When I go to meetings, I want to participate and make things better, rather than being a potted plant. There are others on that board who think it’s a big social event, they spend two or three hours, they nod their heads and clap and don’t question anything. That’s not my thing.”

LACMA president Rich compares her own management style to Broad’s: “CEOs, executives, don’t have the luxury of not worrying about the costs of things. [We] have to be the bearers of bad news.”

*

Broad could be bucking for the same kind of conflict with Disney Hall, as tension over Gehry vs. Broad, Art vs. the Bottom Line, shows little sign of abating. Launched 10 years ago with a $50-million donation from Walt’s widow, Lillian, the troubled project foundered in 1994 when new estimates suggested that it might cost $265 million to build--more than double original estimates. That left a funding gap of $150 million, and Disney Hall officials scrambled to persuade the county Board of Supervisors not to default on the project while a new fund-raising plan was devised.

In recent months, largely due to the efforts of Broad and Riordan, the gap is closing, with more than $72 million in new donations since last December, including $5 million each from Broad and Riordan.

But the project hit a snag in late May, when architect Gehry threatened to withdraw, following a disagreement over Broad’s plan to have incomplete working drawings turned over to contractors to complete in a so-called “design-build” plan. Gehry feared that the plan would compromise the integrity of his startling, all-curves design. Observers feared a reprise of the house conflict.

In late July, Walt Disney’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, took that dispute into her own hands by authorizing that already-donated Disney family money be spent to have the drawings completed by Gehry’s firm. Still, Gehry has expressed lingering doubts about retaining control as Broad pushes for tight construction deadlines and, some believe, an unrealistically low budget.

Talk to Gehry, and the Disney Hall controversy represents a major quake; to Broad, the dispute is a tiny aftershock barely rattling the china. Then again, Broad is the same man who named the 60-ton Serra sculpture “No Problem.”

LACMA’s Rich, for one, wonders why Broad has come under attack for wresting control of the Disney Hall effort, even if egos get bruised in the process. “For Eli to take that on was a very major thing. He didn’t have to do that to become an important cultural leader; he already was.”

Norris thinks that personal style may be one reason for the criticism of Broad in art circles over Disney Hall: “Eli’s not warm and fuzzy. Frank is.”

Broad himself is mystified when others suggest that his Disney Hall work is part of some master plan to become the city’s next great cultural czar. “People [who have said that] didn’t care about what I was doing or how I was going about it,” he protests. “The real answer is, I think Disney Hall has to be built.”

*

Broad usually spends the hour between 8 and 9 a.m. isolated at his desk at SunAmerica. He is often interrupted by phone calls, and on this day, he gives some quiet but firm advice to someone on the other end of the line: “People like your work, but you jibber-jabber about personal lives; you are considered a bit of a rumormonger. People wish you didn’t have those qualities. OK?” Broad doesn’t say goodbye--just hangs up and goes back to work.

The interchange is typical of Broad, whom friends and detractors agree has little patience for personal pleasantries--or their ugly sibling, gossip. To Broad, such chatter is not only a waste of time but inappropriate, unseemly even. (Says pal Riordan, with a wicked grin: “Off the record . . . oh, what the hell, it can be on the record--Eli is somebody who doesn’t know anything about mental foreplay.”)

What might seem to be coldness may be Broad’s own self-imposed rules of decorum--more in sync with his Midwestern roots than his adopted city, schmooze capital of the world. One colleague observes that he has never seen Broad remove his suit coat.

Edythe Broad declined to be interviewed. Their son Gary, 38, a commodities trader in Indian Wells, says the family is adamant about separating business from the personal, which may keep acquaintances from ever knowing the real Eli. (Another son, Jeffrey, 41, is a private investor in Santa Barbara.)

“People look at him as a driven and ambitious man,” he says. “People don’t see the softer side of my father. He is a very loving man and very caring. He was a very good father; unfortunately, he did not have time, as much as he would like to have had, to go to games and that kind of thing. But if you ever need him, he’s there.”

Gary Broad describes his own lifestyle as the opposite of his father’s driven one, but he has no problem with the elder Broad’s hoices: “His life, for him, is balanced, because he loves the work.”

Eli Broad describes SunAmerica as “a multicultural meritocracy” and acknowledges that his work ethic is an acquired taste. “Our company is not for everyone. If someone wants a calm, balanced life--go to a lot of conventions, play a lot of golf--they’re in the wrong place.”

SunAmerica vice chairman Jay Wintrob, for one, likes the challenge. “Eli is a very generous person. When people accomplish things here, they are very richly rewarded,” he says. “His criteria are fair. I find Eli a delightful person to work with--very professional, very dignified, very straightforward. I don’t spend a lot of time chitchatting with him about how the Sacramento Kings did last night, but that doesn’t bother me . . . that’s not what I’m here to do.”

Former Deputy Mayor Linda Griego served with Broad on a Riordan administration task force studying L.A. city finances in 1993-94. She calls him “kind of a Renaissance man. He is in the arts, but in the housing world, he was involved in the most innovative and cost-conscious kind of building.” But while she trusts in their honorable intentions, Griego says styles tend to clash when Broad and other super-rich volunteers arrive in their limousines at the modest offices of less-moneyed civic activists. Such was the case when Broad offered to pay the cost of compiling the individual reports from the seven-member task force.

“He pulls out his checkbook and is ready to write a check for $5,000, or $10,000,” Griego recalls. “I don’t think he does it to embarrass anybody. I think he is magnanimous; I think he has the wherewithal, and that’s how he operates. That’s Eli . . . but for people who are not of his ilk, I can tell you, you don’t feel good about it. It’s like, is my one-seventh of the report not as valid because I didn’t put up the 10 grand?”

Not surprisingly, the people seemingly most comfortable with Broad are those who inhabit similarly lofty executive suites, such as developer James A. Thomas, president of Thomas Development Part- ners and co-owner of the Sacramento Kings with 25%-partner Broad.

“He’s a very good source to call on with respect to financial and business decisions,” Thomas says. “Now that he’s gotten involved, he’s following the players, and likes to give us his opinion of the players. . . . I think this is a fun investment for him. Watching games and players and talking about strategies may be as light as it gets for Eli.”

*

Eli Broad is talking about the stark, beloved Serra sculpture that adorns his Brentwood lawn. “It is powerful; it is hard to put other things near it.” In conversations with people who know Broad, the image of that sculpture looms large again: For some, a work of art; to others, cold, hard steel.

On this summer day, Broad is attending a surprise party for Kaufman and Broad chairman Bruce Karatz to celebrate Karatz’s 25th anniversary with the company. Focusing his efforts on building SunAmerica, Broad has been absent from active participation in Kaufman and Broad since he left the firm’s board in 1993.

Karatz headed the company during a spate of lawsuits that dogged it during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, alleging misconduct ranging from bribery to substandard construction practices. Karatz and Broad dismiss the lawsuits as typical for the affordable-housing business, particularly in a state with “too many lawyers.”

For Broad, Karatz’s party is sandwiched between an in-office lunch with retired UCLA Chancellor Charles Young and a LACMA trustees meeting. Broad’s longtime driver and personal assistant, Chuck Walker, will get him there. Depart SunAmerica: 2 p.m. Arrive at Kaufman and Broad in Westwood: 2:25 p.m. Need to be at LACMA by 3:30. That leaves 35 minutes for fun.

Despite the time constraints, Broad genuinely seems to enjoy the party, where he gives a brief speech describing Karatz’s early days with the company during the 1970s, when Kaufman and Broad was busily expanding into France. He then presents Karatz with a Breitling dual-zone travel watch, tasteful and appropriate in this goofy atmosphere of silly stunts, gag gifts and hugs. Broad does not remove his suit coat.

“Bruce and I are very different people. We’re both very driven and so on, but I wish I had his . . . he’s a real charmer,” Broad observes a few hours later, sounding ever-so-slightly wistful. “Great with people, as you’ve probably noticed.

“Obviously, people respect me, but that’s different, you know, from being your best friend.”