In that order, the titles would loosely mirror the fate of the Forbes family's renowned collection of Victorian paintings, from which each of the above titles come. Next month, the bulk of that collection, which rivals the Tate's and the Victoria and Albert's collections-not to mention composer Andrew Lloyd Webber's-will become the latest chunk of the Forbes' art and antiquities holdings to be sold off as the publishers of Forbes magazine struggle against a brutal economic downturn. The paintings-which required three volumes to catalog-will be auctioned off, not on the Mersey, but at Christie's auction house in St. James, London, on Feb. 19 and 20.

But Christopher (Kip) Forbes, who said he devoted "30 years of hard work and dedication" to amassing the collection, won't be saying "'Good bye'-On the Thames." Mr. Forbes is none too happy about the auction. "I won't go," he told The Transom. "It will be too sad to see it departing."

Indeed, Mr. Forbes seemed upset enough about the sell-off of the Victorian collection to break with the official explanation for the auction offered by both Forbes spokeswoman Monie Begley and Christie's flack, Margaret Doyle: The quote from the late Forbes patriarch Malcolm Forbes' memoirs, More Than I Dreamed , in which he noted, "I've often told my children I hope that, if they decide to be done with one of the collections, that they will put it back on the auction block so that other people can have the same vast fun and excitement that we did in amassing it."

According to Kip Forbes, however, he was not yet "done" with the art collection that he began in 1969 when, according to Christie's press material, he persuaded his father that he could "assemble the best collection of Victorian pictures for the price of a lovely, but relatively unimportant, Monet Waterlilies which hung in his office."

"This was a familial decision," Mr. Forbes said of the Victorian painting auction. "I'm not allowed to make these decisions one way or another."

That decision was made last summer, he said, when he and his three other brothers-Steve Forbes, president of the company and editor in chief of the magazine; Timothy Forbes, chief operating officer; and Robert Forbes, president of Forbes Global-sat down and decided what parts of the family estate they would auction off. In late 2001, the family auctioned off part of its collection of American paintings, drawings and sculpture for $4.6 million. Then they sold 434 documents from their American Historical Documents collection, including the handwritten manuscript of Lincoln's last public address, in two sales, one in the fall of 2002 and another in the spring. Combined, the two auctions brought in $30 million, and last April they sold 61 Fabergé pieces for $6 million. "My two older brothers were more sorry about the autographs, though-not as much about this," said Kip Forbes, who is in charge of the advertising and promotion departments at the company.

Mr. Forbes acknowledged that the auction was to raise money, but not necessarily for the business-media company's survival in a grisly bear market. Mr. Forbes said profits from the sale would be divided among the five Forbes children. (The brothers' sister, Moira Mumma, does not work in the family business.) Although he did not elaborate, Mr. Forbes did say: "If I could have the money and not have to sell the paintings, I wouldn't sell them."

Martin Beisly, head of Victorian Painting for Christie's, sketched out a similar scenario. "I think the proceeds are going to the family," he told The Transom. "We'll make out one check divided among the family by Christopher. The check did not say Forbes Inc. It was to the family, not the business itself. The receipt says, 'Care of C. Forbes.'"

Ms. Begley said the decision to sell the collection was made by "the entire family. They have had it for 30 years," she said matter-of-factly. She also declined to discuss whether the sale had anything to do with the company's financial state, saying, "They never disclose financials."

That said, Forbes has been cost-cutting since 2001, and last October closed its quarterly Forbes supplement ASAP . Meanwhile, the magazine's January 2002 ad pages were off by 40.8 percent from the previous year, and advertising dollars were off by 39.38 percent. The company also suspended matching contributions to its 401(k) plan and cut senior managers' salaries.

If the money from the Christie's sale does go toward bolstering the Forbes organization, it could be a boon. The auction house's press materials indicate that Christie's expects the paintings to fetch in the neighborhood of $35 million.

Mr. Beisly said that the Forbes' collection was one of the four largest collections of Victorian art in the world. "First would be the Tate," he said, "then the Victoria and Albert. Then competing for the top private collection would be composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Forbes collection."

The collection includes 361 works by Holman Hunt, Millais and Rossetti, as well as G.F. Watts, Albert Moore and Tissot, some of which belonged to Queen Victoria. "I like pictures where I don't need a psychoanalyst to tell me about what's in it," said Mr. Forbes, who wrote a college thesis on Victorian art when he attended Princeton and, after beginning his family's collection, created a Victorian Society to encourage the appreciation of the period. But, he added, "other than me, nobody else [in my family] was all that interested, and the market has been … pretty good for Victorian painting right now."

The Forbes family will retain some of their most valuable Victorian-era works-including, Mr. Beisly said, "an old pair of knickers that once belonged to Queen Victoria"-but they will sell two very important works by Millais, titled Trust Me and For the Squire . "I'm sure Andrew [Lloyd Webber] would have loved to have bought some of [Kip's] paintings," said Mr. Beisly.

And maybe he will-though as Mr. Forbes said before, he won't be around to watch the bidding. "We don't want to inhibit anyone buying the paintings with our crying over it," he said with an unconvincing laugh.

-Alexandra Wolfe

Sporting a Woody

It's nothing that remarkable for a young woman to move to Manhattan and, a few years later, find herself on the arm of a billionaire-but one has to be impressed with Holly Newman, a 30-year-old investment banker. For the past year, Ms. Newman has been the discreet main squeeze of one of the richest men around, fiftysomething philanthropist and New York Jets owner Woody Johnson.

Although the couple are said to dislike publicity, that rare breed of gossip lovers who follow both sports and society said the two can be seen at Jean Georges restaurant-Mr. Johnson lives above the restaurant at that swinging bachelor building, 1 Central Park West-or on the sidelines of Jets games.

Though Ms. Newman declined to comment and Mr. Johnson didn't return a call seeking comment, friends said that Ms. Newman grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., where her father is a successful lawyer and her mother is a retired librarian. She attended the University of Michigan, where she majored in international relations, and also studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

After moving to New York in 1996, Ms. Newman got a job at Oppenheimer & Co., then worked at Daniels & Associates and Gleacher & Co. before moving on to Communications Equity Associates, where she's now vice president.

"She was great; clients loved her," said a source who knows Ms. Newman. "She's attractive, fun, she's spunky, she's all those things. Buxom, attractive, Jewish-very attractive girl. And she's broken hearts. Holly is who she is. I mean, she comes from a very solid Jewish background with very solid family values. Her parents call her every day."

Friends said that Ms. Newman has also excelled at the relationship game. Before she met Mr. Johnson in Florida, she dated a wealthy hedge-fund manager named Michael Charles, whom she met at Mayor Bloomberg's Upper East Side townhouse.

As one friend put it: "Holly gets what Holly wants."

Of course, because Ms. Newman has bagged a desirable bachelor, there are certain women in town who are suspicious of her motives.

"She's a girl with a mission, but there's lots of them in New York City," said one acquaintance of the petite, dark-haired and athletic Ms. Newman. "She's not a movie star; she's sort of an Energizer Bunny. She's persistent, she has a way of endearing herself …. She mesmerizes [men]."

But talk to some men who know Ms. Newman and another story emerges. "She is mesmerizing," said an investment banker in his 50's who said he dated her for two years, got hurt, but is still friends with her.

"She's perfect for Woody," said the jilted guy, "because she's energetic, she's enthusiastic, she plays sports, she knows about football, she can throw a perfect spiral across the room even though she weighs about 100 pounds. She's perfect. She's a guy's girl. Guys go out with her and then they want to marry her. But by the time you want to marry her, she's gone."

He stressed that Ms. Newman was no gold digger, but rather "a free woman." "You know what? She does what guys do. They go out with people serially, and she's entitled to do that. She's young, she's single, she's beautiful, she can go out with who she wants. But I will tell you this: I believe that if she marries Woody, she will be completely faithful to him and a great wife."

-George Gurley

Barry Air

If things don't sit well with USA Networks president Barry Diller, there's going to be trouble. Just ask the repair company charged with refurbishing his private Gulfstream IV jet.

Mr. Diller's name appears in a $3.7 million lawsuit that his company, USA Interactive, recently filed against the Savannah Air Center, an airplane repair company. The suit accuses the Savannah, Ga.–based company of "breach of contract and negligent repair" in the refurbishment of his plane.

But though the case was originally filed in U.S. District Court here in Manhattan-Mr. Diller's jet is registered with New York State-it was transferred to Federal District Court in Georgia in August because, as District Judge Louis L. Stanton concluded, almost all of the contested repairs to Mr. Diller's Gulfstream took place in Georgia and all of the defendant's witnesses-including "an engineer, a lead avionics/electronics employee, a lead upholsterer, a lead installer, a lead cabinet maker, and two sheet metal workers"-reside there as well.

"The only physical work in New York," according to the judge, "was the test-sitting in a seat by USA's president [Mr. Diller] to see that it was comfortable for him."

The seat must have suited Mr. Diller's derrière since, according to court papers, that particular improvement "is not a part of plaintiff's claim that the completed work was substandard."

The lawsuit, filed on May 14, alleged that USA hired Savannah Air Center to refurbish the new aircraft with new circuitry, plumbing, cabinetry, seating, interior design and audio systems within an agreed-upon 18 weeks for $2,529,000.

In a response to the lawsuit filed by S.A.C. on Aug. 17 in Georgia, lawyers for the company-which bills itself on its Web site as "The Industry's Premier Interior/Exterior Corporate Aircraft Refurbishment Center"-admitted that "the refurbishment [to Mr. Diller's plane] took more than eighteen weeks and cost more than the contract price," but that these problems were due to "design changes and additions to the scope of the work requested by" Mr. Diller.

According to USA's complaint, which was obtained by The Transom, the repair work on Mr. Diller's jet was due to be finished in June 2000, but was not completed until August of that year. When it was finished, the suit claims that "USA discovered the existence of serious electrical problems," including broken wires in the temperature-control system, a faulty circuit breaker in the lavatory water system, and a severed wire in the cabin-to-cockpit communication system. There were also "latches, doors and drawers that stuck," "severe fit and finish problems" with the cabinetry, and plumbing fixtures which "could not function" because they had been "installed backwards."

The defendant's response also includes the admission that during the prolonged repairs, USA Interactive requested that S.A.C. "pay for Barry Diller's transportation costs while the work was being completed." USA claims that this cost, "a short term lease of a comparable Gulfstream IV," would be the $3.7 million asked for in their suit.

USA returned the plane for further repairs on Sept. 5, 2001. Based on the work done in 2001, S.A.C. has filed a counterclaim against USA which alleges that "Plaintiff is indebted to Savannah Air Center in the amount of $50,907.59" for the labor and materials he had not yet paid for.

In addition to the 50 grand, the countersuit asked that USA pay all legal fees and "such other and further relief as this Court deems just and proper."

Patrick O'Connor, the lawyer for Savannah Air Center, said that because the case is currently pending in the U.S. District Court in Savannah, he was unable to comment on it, except to say that "we are vigorously defending the case."

Douglas Kuber, who is representing USA Networks, also said that District Court rules bar him from commenting on the case.

-Rebecca Traister, with additional reporting by Zoë Slutzky

Lew Who?

Has the ghost of Time Warner chairman Steve Ross gotten it up for one final beyond-the-grave cockfight with fellow late movie mogul, MCA chairman Lew Wasserman?

Eagle-eyed media junkies noted that Wasserman, who died on June 3 at the age of 89, was-strangely-not mentioned in either Time or People magazines' annual year-end roundups of the media heavies who have gone to the great commissary in the sky.

Time magazine, keystone of the Time Warner empire built by Ross in the 1980's, didn't include Mr. Wasserman in "The People Who Left Us in 2002" layout in the Dec. 30–Jan. 6 "Persons of the Year" issue. The section did include brief passages on deaths of Eppie (Ann Landers) Lederer, rapper Jam Master Jay, comedian Milton Berle, and beloved Hollywood director and Wasserman contemporary Billy Wilder.

The omission seemed especially odd in light of Time rival Newsweek 's year-end spread on the dead, which included a photograph of Wasserman in his famous thick-rimmed black glasses, and a short piece that noted that director (and Steve Ross pal) Steven Spielberg had once called Wasserman the "chief justice" of Hollywood.

Though Ross and Wasserman weren't known to have any great personal animosity toward each other when they roamed the earth, they are often mentioned in the same breath as two of Hollywood's most powerful titans, each of whom changed the nature of the entertainment industry.

Early in his career, Wasserman encouraged Hollywood to accept television, invented the summer blockbusters with a deft publicity campaign for Jaws and, with his wife Edie, became a generous Democratic Party supporter. In 1990, in the face of an industry dominated by multimedia conglomerates like Time Warner, Wasserman sold MCA to Matsushita Electric Industrial Company of Japan. Wasserman famously regretted the decision, especially when, in 1995, the Japanese corporation sold 80 percent of the company to the beverage company Seagram, which turned MCA into Universal and left Wasserman a mere figurehead.

Steve Ross, once America's highest-paid corporate executive, took over the shambles of Warner Brothers-then called Warner-Seven Arts-in 1969. He later proposed and engineered the merger with Time, creating one of the conglomerates, along with Columbia Sony, Walt Disney, and 20th Century Fox, that forced Wasserman to sell to Matsushita. Ross died in 1992 of prostate cancer.

A spokeswoman for Time pointed the Transom to the magazine's June 17 obituary for Wasserman, which ran at 129 words and called Wasserman "the last of Hollywood's legendary movie moguls."

According to Time managing editor Jim Kelly, however, "Lew Wasserman is just a small part of this story." Mr. Kelly said that not only did Ross keep Wasserman out of the magazine "from beyond the grave," he "picked 'Whistleblowers'", Time 's controversial "Persons of the Year" cover.

An insider at Time Warner's People magazine also told The Transom: "We wish Steve Ross were here, God bless him-but sadly, he's long gone."

Time Warner entertainment magazine Entertainment Weekly was alone in running a piece on Wasserman, written by legendary lady-killer, producer, cocaine addict and stroke victim Robert Evans. In the brief piece, Mr. Evans wrote that Wasserman, his first agent, "had the most brilliant career in Hollywood history," and that he spent the last 10 years of his career eating alone in the Universal cafeteria, because "they didn't know who he was."

-R.T.

Two weeks later, an almost 5,000-word piece on the March 3 Times was marveling at "the speed with which [the Saudi peace initiative] has swelled from a little-noted idea in a newspaper column into a serious force in the Middle East."

In The Times ' coverage, the subplot to this sequence of events has been the influence of a New York Times columnist who, from the perch of the Op-Ed page, can best the abilities of a diplomat in tackling a dispute as intractable as the Middle East.

But other news organizations have been, not surprisingly, less willing to give Mr. Friedman credit as a roving peace-maker. Competing papers have consistently criticized the proposal in his column as vague and unoriginal. Critics have also suggested that Mr. Friedman was little more than a high-profile pawn for the Saudis' latest diplomatic gambit.

On Feb. 28, the Los Angeles Times described the Saudi land-for-peace plan as a "formula, which emerged as nothing more than a trial balloon in The New York Times. " Even The Boston Globe , which is owned by The New York Times , wrote in a Feb. 27 editorial, titled "A Scoop for Peace," that Mr. Friedman had only "printed the Mideast peace plan divulged to him by the Saudi ruler."

Mr. Friedman, however, was not up to discuss his involvement in the Saudi plan, or the reaction to it.

"I'm not interested in doing an investigation of what really happened," Mr. Friedman told Off the Record on March 4. Of his column, he said, "Everyone has their own reaction. My position is, let a hundred flowers bloom." He added: "The column speaks for itself. I'm just sitting back and watching it play out."

But Mr. Friedman is no ordinary columnist. Even before Sept. 11, the mustachioed two-time Pulitzer winner, Middle East expert and best-selling author had evolved into a Times heavyweight, one who showed little compunction about expressing himself in forums outside the paper. Since Sept. 11, Mr. Friedman's profile has only grown, as he has appeared on programs like Today, Good Morning America, Meet the Press, Face the Nation and even the Late Show with David Letterman.

Some of Mr. Friedman's colleagues at The Times were eager to pat him on the back. "It looks good for the paper if he played a role in bringing peace," one said.

Others, however, thought The Times may be overstating its case. "There's a certain amount of hubris to these people that they think they can negotiate Mideast peace," a Times source said. "The self-importance is hard to take."

A reporter covering the story for another news organization said he suspects that Mr. Friedman was simply being used by the Saudis to plant a story. "Hats off to Friedman for getting the access," the reporter said. "I suspect that Crown Prince Abdullah knew what he was doing. He knows The New York Times is the most influential paper in the U.S., and Tom Friedman is the most influential foreign-affairs columnist at The Times. "

-Gabriel Snyder

Page Six, meet The Wall Street Journal . The Wall Street Journal , meet Page Six.

While The Journal has broken a lot of important stories over the past several months-including the Red Cross giving away thousands of dollars in relief aid to undeserving Tribeca residents-none had the sexy oomph of its scoop on Monday, March 4. In a formidable yet delicately handled gossip coup, the WSJ outran the tabloids by disclosing a "romantic relationship" between Jack Welch, the married former chairman of General Electric, and Suzy Wetlaufer, editor of the Harvard Business Review .

The Journal appeared to go out of its way to downplay real dirt in the piece. Entitled "Harvard Editor Faces Revolt Over Welch Story," the story ran in the B section of the paper. Written by reporter James Bandler, its opening paragraphs described a "staff mutiny afoot" at the Review . It talked about the Review 's editors seeking the resignation of Ms. Wetlaufer after she pushed to abort a profile she'd written about Mr. Welch.

It was not until deep in the fourth paragraph that Mr. Bandler delivered the payoff: "Several weeks before the story was pulled, Ms. Wetlaufer told at least three Review staffers that she and Mr. Welch were having a relationship."

It was akin to breaking a story about Gary Condit's relationship with Chandra Levy in the fourth paragraph of a story about agricultural reform. But by mid-afternoon on Monday, the piece had become the talk of Boston writers, who had seen a delectable local story swiped by a national outlet.

Not that the local wags were averse to challenging the way The Journal handled it. "Why wasn't the story on page 1?" said Howie Carr, a columnist at the Boston Herald . "I'm surprised they didn't have it above the fold. If it were my story, here's my lead: 'A $276,000-a-year Harvard Review editor's under fire after telling co-workers of her relationship with Jack Welch.' It seemed like The Wall Street Journal was embarrassed to report the story. And I don't know why. It's the best story in the paper."

But Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam put it this way: "It's one of the great advantages of the bigger papers like The Times and The Journal . They can have a story placed further back in the paper and have it become the biggest story of the day. I thought the story was a masterpiece of understatement."

Mr. Bandler, himself a former Globe reporter, declined to comment. Likewise, Mike Miller, the paper's page 1 editor, declined to go into the matter but said: "We always want to be sure not to overplay a story or underplay a story."

Mr. Miller said that the decision on where to put the story rested in the hands of managing editor Paul Steiger. Mr. Steiger declined comment, and Steve Goldstein, a vice president with Dow Jones, the paper's parent company, said: "We don't comment on issues of placement."

However, another executive at the paper said: "It's a fascinating story, but it didn't have the richness of detail that warranted placement on page 1."

When reached by Off the Record, Ms. Wetlaufer declined to comment. A spokesperson for Mr. Welch meanwhile said: "His only comment is that it's a personal matter."

However, Mr. Carr offered a possible venue where Mr. Welch could address the topic.

"Maybe he could talk about it on CNBC," Mr. Carr said, referring to Mr. Welch's job with the financial-news network. "Welch can interview Jim Cramer about his troubles, then Cramer could interview Welch about his."

-Sridhar Pappu

Every year, the reporters and editors at Business Week go through a laborious performance-review process, in which editors have to fill out a 20-question form on their employees on matters such as how many stories each person gets in the magazine, quality of writing and editing, etc. It all gets boiled down to a grade of 1 through 5, with 5 being the highest. For the Business Week staff, this matters because the higher your grade, the bigger your annual raise.

This year, Business Week decided to make the process a bit more laborious. In recent years, you see, there's been some staff griping about grade inflation, in which some supervisors were giving out more 4's and 5's than they really should.

Editor in chief Stephen Shepard said that when he asked his staff about the process, "one of the things they said is there should be more differentiation between outstanding performers and average performers." He added, "One senior editor or bureau chief may be more generous than others."

To that end, in mid-February, the top editors huddled together for most of an afternoon, going over every editorial employee's review, changing grades up and down to "even out the difference between graders, Mr. Shepard said."

The system may have been more fair, but it won't change the raise people will get. At the weekly front-of-the-book meeting on March 1, Mr. Shepard announced that there wouldn't be any raises at all this year.

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Business Week 's corporate parent, had set approved raises of 2.5 percent this year, but the magazine turned it down in order to, as Mr. Shepard said, prevent further layoffs. "We decided this was the least disruptive way to cut costs," the editor said.

- G.S.

Over a lifetime, the late Malcolm Forbes and his sons not only built a magazine, but a collection of antiquities that is hard to rival. The collection of Fabergé eggs on display at the Forbes headquarters off Fifth Avenue and is said to be the largest in the world.

But hey, what's history? On March 27, Christie's will auction over 200 items from the Forbes collection of American historical documents. The lot amounts to a history buff's dream and includes the handwritten manuscript of Lincoln's last public address and the August 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to Franklin Roosevelt that led to the development of the atomic bomb. A Forbes spokesperson added that further items would be auctioned in October. In addition, 61 non-egg Fabergé pieces will be auctioned off on April 19.

And, boy, will the money come in handy! Forbes ' January ad pages were off by 40.8 percent in January from its 2001 number, with advertising dollars off by 39.38 percent. In February, the company suspended matching contributions to its 401(k) plan and cut the pay of its senior managers.

In explaining the move, a Forbes spokesperson said the move had nothing to do with the financial state of the magazine or Forbes Inc. "They had determined to do this awhile ago. There's an awful lot still left. This is only a small part of the collection.

"That's what collectors do," the spokesperson continued. "They buy and sell things."

-S.P.

What's the difference between the average guy and a typical man? In the eyes of Men's Health , very little. Over the past year and a half, Men's Health has been running a monthly one-page feature on its back page called "The Average Guy." Each issue, the magazine compiles statistics about average guys, such as "Age at which the average married man is most likely to have an affair: 34" and "Number of men who've thrown out a piece of clothing because it was missing a button: 1 in 4."

The page has become something of a franchise for Men's Health (which means, one supposes, that a line of "Average Guy" calendars, day planners and barbecue mitts emblazoned with nifty stats are in the works). So when the magazine's editor, David Zincenko, opened the March issue of Esquire and saw their feature "The Typical Man," which listed factoids about the typical man ("About 1 in 6 men admit to having paid for sex" and the like), he was pretty upset.

"I'd imagine Esquire is under a lot of pressure to match our numbers, but I don't think that this is what [Hearst Magazines C.E.O.] Cathie Black had in mind," Mr. Zincenko said.

Over at Esquire , editor David Granger claimed ignorance of the Men's Health feature. "I admire the success [ Men's Health ] had in the 90's," he said, "but it's not the kind of magazine that forces one to read it on a regular basis, unless one is into, you know, health." His "Typical Man" feature started as an idea to find the typical man and profile him. He had some staffers do some statistical research. "The profile fell by the wayside, but when I wanted an amusing little two-pager to break up the feature well, we had the stats lying around," Mr. Granger said. He said Esquire wasn't planning to make "Typical Man" a regular feature "unless we get a lot of mail from Men's Health readers demanding it."

Mr. Zincenko retorted: "I admire Esquire- and their success throughout the 1960's."

One question we had for both editors: Don't you owe Harper's Magazine an apology for ripping off their "Index" franchise?

Mr. Zincenko: "No more than Harper's owes to the Guinness Brothers."

Mr. Granger: "Believe it or not, both statistics and lists of statistics in printed matter predate even Lewis Lapham. In fact, I believe it was Chemical Market Reporter from which Harper's borrowed the idea."

-G.S.

Toward the end, a reporter asked him, "What are you going to do now, immediately?"

"Well," said Mr. Forbes, "in terms of what I do now, yes, I will be going back to Forbes magazine. In fact, tomorrow I've got to write some editorials. Deadlines are deadlines. They spare no one."

Not so fast, Mr. Forbes. The staff in the Fifth Avenue headquarters of the business magazine has been getting along just fine without you.

"I would have laughed if he said he had deadlines to meet," one unbelieving former Forbes staff member said.

Before his two runs, Mr. Forbes was never much of a hands-on editor in chief at the magazine he more or less inherited from his father, Malcolm Forbes. His column in every issue of the twice-monthly magazine consists of five or so 250-word items on foreign and economic policy; a two-person team helps him put it together. Mr. Forbes stopped in at the Forbes office on Feb. 14 and formally ended his 11-month leave of absence on Feb. 15.

By running for President practically nonstop since he first declared his candidacy in 1995, Mr. Forbes has spent years away from his post at the helm of the Forbes publishing empire. And while he was frittering away his millions on the campaign trail, his brother Tim, the youngest of the Forbes clan, has been handling the company's affairs. His title is chief operating officer. And the staff loves him. They liked the way he carried weights in a backpack and ran up the office stairs to get in shape until that skiing accident last year. (Now he works out in the office gym.)

"He's a really nice guy," said one staff member. "He's super-friendly."

Contrast that with Steve. Reporters at the magazine have been sick of the fact that, too often when they're making a call on a story, they have to put up with chitchat from sources and story subjects about their boss' quixotic attempts to win the White House. It was cramping their style.

"It's a little embarrassing," said one Forbes writer, "because I think the magazine is really respected in business circles, and he's such a joke. The American populace isn't taking him seriously, either."

There may be people on earth who thought Mr. Forbes did a good thing when he spent $66 million on his own apparently unrealistic ambitions, but there don't seem to be many of them working at Forbes .

"We're just like, 'Pffft!'" said one Forbes staff member. "It's as much a joke to the people inside as it is to the people outside."

With Mr. Forbes due back from the political wars any day now, people at the magazine are pondering a deepening mystery: Just who owns the majority stake in Forbes ? Last October, Mr. Forbes confirmed that he raised some of the campaign cash by selling off part of his stake to the existing shareholders of Forbes Inc.-that is to say, to his siblings. Since Mr. Forbes inherited 51 percent of the family business from his father, that likely means that Steve no longer owns the majority of the shares. Citing the fact that it is a private enterprise, a spokesman for the Forbes business would not reveal the identity of the majority owner.

Three recent newspaper clippings on Mr. Forbes have been tacked onto the cubicle walls of the fourth floor. One, a Washington Post profile from Nov. 12, is headlined, "Forbes Reveals Little but His Ideas; Rich Enigma Is Most at Ease With Policy." The other two articles are a bit more telling: a Dec. 31 Wall Street Journal article reporting that Mr. Forbes' gross annual income increased 67 percent in two years, to $2.5 million in 1998, and an Oct. 28 New York Times story looking into how Mr. Forbes was financing his campaign.

In that article, The Times reported that, despite his estimated net worth of $440 million as of 1996, "Mr. Forbes does not have the cash on hand to foot his enormous bills." In order to come up with the money, the report said, Mr. Forbes sold some of his Forbes company shares and had slipped from being a 51 percent owner to being simply a major shareholder.

A Forbes Inc. spokesman told Off the Record recently: "He said, he has always said he has sold personal resources to finance his campaign," but refused to discuss other details of the report.

While Mr. Forbes has been exploring Iowa and New Hampshire, Tim Forbes has taken control of the family business. He was a semiotics major at Brown University and attended U.C.L.A.'s film school before he joined the Forbes stable in 1986, at age 32, to run the six times yearly, advertising-free journal American Heritage . Shortly before his father Malcolm died in 1990, Tim was involved in the ultimately unsuccessful negotiations to buy Interview from the Andy Warhol estate. Tim headed up the 1990 launch of Egg , a vapid but beautiful life-style magazine for upscale urban hipsters that folded a year later.

In September 1995, when Steve took his first leave of absence, Forbes Inc. announced that Tim would "assume leadership responsibilities as acting chief executive." After Steve dropped out of the race in 1996, Tim got a promotion to chief operating officer and kept his role as the overseer of day-to-day operations.

Forbes insiders said Tim's role hasn't changed much since then, as he continues to court advertisers and attend corporate functions as the representative of Forbes Inc. While Steve is rarely seen around the office, Tim is there almost daily.

Several Forbes staff members assumed that Tim was the sibling who bought big brother Steve's shares, but Tim wasn't talking and neither was the spokesman. As to what Mr. Forbes' role would be now that he is back, it's murky. The spokesman said: "Steve Forbes has his column which he writes and other responsibilities, which he did not detail to me."

Other members of the clan include Christopher Forbes, the vice chairman of Forbes Inc., and Robert Forbes, who is president of Forbes Global and Forbes FYI .

EVERY SO OFTEN, a literary media star is born. In the early 90's, it happened to novelist Donna Tartt, and later in the decade it happened to memoirist Elizabeth Wurtzel. Now it is happening to Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius .

The campaign began in earnest with The New Yorker in October of last year. The news: McSweeney's "is a deeply intelligent publication that offers a mixture of playful postmodern fiction and quirky reported pieces." A big color photo, splashed across two pages like a centerfold, showed Mr. Eggers and the McSweeney's gang living the bohemian good life on a rooftop. Self-effacing quote: "I try to make the magazine as untimely and irrelevant as possible." Six pages later, there was an excerpt of his book.

Then came the Hartford Courant on Dec. 28, 1999, page 2 of the Life section. The news: Staggering Genius picked as the best book of the year 2000.

Then there was a big profile in Shift magazine's January 2000 issue. The news: "Eggers's star is rising almost in spite of him. He does everything at the last possible minute, publishes only what amuses him, and never, ever compromises his beliefs for money or status." Self-effacing quote: "It will never have a point," says Mr. Eggers about his own Web site, "it will never make a dime, and that's what makes it fun."

Along came the February issue of Spin . The news: Mr. Eggers reviews his own book. Self-effacing quote: "Good lord it gets ugly and strange. And thus, while I feel comfortable recommending this book to anyone who is precisely like me, I hesitate to thrust it upon anyone else. Is any of this interesting to anyone outside his family and small, ill-bred coterie of friends?"

The Jan. 31 issue of New York was next, with a four-page profile, including full-page photo. The news: "He has a handsome Irish face … and when it crinkles up into a devilish smile, you know he's pulling your leg, but you're not sure why." Self-effacing quote from Mr. Eggers: "You get tired of using the word 'I.' At least I do."

The big one: The New York Times , Feb. 1, 2000. " A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius may start off sounding like one of those coy, solipsistic exercises that put everything in little ironic quote marks, but it quickly becomes a virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of a book that noisily announces the debut of a talented-yes, staggeringly talented new writer," writes the paper's chief book critic, the hard-to-please Michiko Kakutani.

Then it was Time , Feb. 7, 2000, page 72. The news: "Eggers, 29, is not the first person you'd expect to produce a touching memoir, perhaps the least cool thing a young editor could do." Self-effacing quote: When offered a chance to see a copy of his book for the first time, Mr. Eggers said, "'No! I asked them not to send it to me.' But then: 'Does it look good?'"

Then, the Daily News , Feb. 8, 2000, page 58. The news: Though film companies are bidding as much as $2 million for the movie rights to Staggering Genius , Mr. Eggers has rebuffed both Miramax Films and New Line Cinema. Self-effacing quote from Mr. Eggers' book agent Elise Chaney: "There is no movie deal. The book is not on the market."

The March issue of Vanity Fair hit the newsstands. Snuggled into the Vanities section was a photo of his by-now-familiar unkempt writing room in Brooklyn. The news: He made his publisher strike the word "memoir" from the title of his book. Self-effacing quote: "I'm a pain in the ass."

The New York Times , Feb. 10. The news: The paper's London correspondent Sarah Lyall flies to New York to tell the world, "In the throes of some early media stardom that seems guaranteed only to escalate, Mr. Eggers comes across as quizzical, friendly and very slow-spoken." Self-effacing quote from an unidentified friend of Mr. Eggers, addressing the topic of his rising fame: "Oh, no, make it stop."

The next day's Style section of The Washington Post marked the beginning of what might be called the Eggers media backlash. The news: "There has been so much buzz about his book … that Eggers is almost passé, washed up at 29."

CAREFUL READERS OF A.M. ROSENTHAL'S first column for the Daily News on Feb. 11 may have noticed that he had a little more space than the other columnists. Mr. Rosenthal's column was 750 words versus the 600 allotted to the others.

"My column at The Times was 755, and theirs was less, and so they very nicely redid the page," Mr. Rosenthal said. "I couldn't write less."

Is this a sign of special treatment for the News ' latest hire? "Absolutely true," said editorial page editor Michael Goodwin. "We think he has something to say, and it is worth accommodating him."

Mr. Rosenthal, who was the executive editor of The New York Times from 1977 to 1986 and an Op-Ed page columnist there from 1986 to 1999, said he's very happy at the tabloid. "I'm not asked to do anything differently, and the understanding I have with them is the same as the one I had at The Times ," he said. "I write about the subjects that interest me, and nobody interferes. Of course, I'm only on my second one, but that's the understanding."

He hasn't taken an office at the Daily News yet. "I've been writing at home," Mr. Rosenthal said, "which is a difficulty because my machinery, my fax, keeps breaking down. Can you fix a fax?"

Mr. Rosenthal's column will appear in the News every Friday. He is also writing two columns per month for Generationa.com, a Web site targeted to people over 50. (The Internet column is even longer, at 1,400 to 1,500 words.) Mr. Rosenthal kept his syndication rights when he signed up with the News , so he is also currently looking for a syndicator to distribute his weekly column.

Pretty soon, Mr. Rosenthal plans to take an office at the Daily News. "Maybe they've got faxes that work," he said.

He's actually been in the building only a couple of times. Were people impressed to have the legendary Times man around?

"I'd like to think so. I didn't detect it, but I'd like to think that," Mr. Rosenthal said. "They treated me in a very warm way."

Off the Record can be reached by e-mail at gsnyder@observer.com.