Ming the Merciless Is on the Prowl : When Sanford C. Sigoloff Took Charge of Wickes in 1982, the Company Was Nearly $2 Billion in Debt. Today, It Has $1.4 Billion in Ready Cash, and Sigoloff Is Shopping.

A passengers quickly de plane, clear customs and head to two taxis that depart for a hotel on the other end of the tiny Atlantic island.

s dusk begins to fall, a sleek white Canadair Challenger jet descends from gray clouds, touching down on an airstrip on the east tip of Bermuda. Its four passengers quickly deplane, clear customs and head to two taxis that depart for a hotel on the other end of the tiny Atlantic island.

In one cab is the self-described “toughest man in retailing,” a businessman who until recently was known--almost exclusively in financial circles--as a rescuer of bankrupt companies, but who is now familiar to millions of television viewers as the stern executive who commands his workers to cut prices and boost service on behalf of Builders Emporium and Wickes Furniture.

For Sanford C. (Sandy) Sigoloff, the trip to the mammoth pink Southampton Princess Hotel and Resort is something of a novelty. In the process of building a tough-guy image in the board room--an image strikingly close to his television pose--Sigoloff has shied from mixing his professional and personal lives. Instead, he has devoted himself to the challenge of resuscitating troubled companies, building a reputation as a perfectionist, an endless and calculating planner who deftly holds creditors at bay, an intense and demanding boss.

It is an approach that has made him the man at the top of the $2.8-billion Wickes Cos. empire, umbrella for Builders Emporium, Wickes Furniture and other firms he brought back from the brink of financial ruin in just three years. So successful have been his rescues that Sigoloff is now in the enviable position of having more than $1.4 billion in shopping-around cash at his disposal. He has already acquired a number of small companies, and earlier this year he went after his biggest target yet, National Gypsum, which he tried to buy for more than $1 billion. He was outbid but is still on the prowl for new acquisitions.

Sigoloff has scheduled just a one-day stay in Bermuda--to attend a fling he promised to Wickes managers and their wives if the Wickes lumber division in Vernon Hills, Ill., made at least a $31-million profit for the year. (They exceeded it by $1 million.) But this time, his wife, Betty, who has never been to a business meeting and has just flown on the plush corporate jet for the first time, has come along. And the one day will uncharacteristically stretch into four as they ride mopeds, tour the islands, play in a tennis tournament and shop.

But this evening, as the taxi pulls up to the Princess Hotel’s low-slung lobby, even the weather seems to sense that, Bermuda fling or not, Sanford C. Sigoloff ultimately is a man who means business. The clouds darken and winds whip through the shivering palms and hibiscus that line the hotel driveway. As Sigoloff steps out of the taxi, a peal of thunder erupts in an eerie echo of his television commercials. Had the Wickes managers inside been assembled to greet him, they no doubt would have reflexively shouted in unison: “We got the message, Mr. Sigoloff!”

igoloff has a nickname for himself: Ming the Merci less. It comes from the villainous ruler of the planet Mongo in the Flash Gordon comic book series he so enjoyed as a child. During his reorganization of the ravaged Wickes companies in 1982, he had all of his management team adopt names from the series, for comic relief. Mongo was a planet bent on destroying Earth, and Sigoloff equated it with the reorganization. “It was ugly, alien; everybody hated it,” he says. “The idea being that we were the people from this ugly planet trying to gain respectability. The only way to get respectability was our plan of reorganization, which we called Princess Aura, who lived on Earth. Our goal was to steal it (respectability).”

Both Ming the Merciless and Sigoloff’s persona on television as a stiff, somewhat threatening chief executive are not all that far from the mark. But those who know and work for Sigoloff say both caricatures miss his softer side, the underlying nice guy.

“When we recruit senior people, sometimes they are a little timid in that he (Sigoloff) has an image of a very tough, demanding, hard-nosed businessman, and that is really kind of far from the truth,” says Larry Friedman, Wickes senior vice president for human resources. “In a sense, he is certainly demanding, but he is really a very, very easy guy to work for. After you have developed a relationship, he becomes really supportive. He is still intense, still demanding, still hard-driving and all those things . . . but he gives a lot of trust.”

Despite Sigoloff’s reputation a decade ago as a hatchet man, his style at Wickes instead involves cultivating a small, loyal group of managers who don’t mind the pace and are not afraid to speak up when they disagree with him. “Authority and responsibility to the lowest level is essentially what the game is all about,” he says. “When it’s all over, the great score card in the sky for me is how many managers did I influence. It’s not whether Wickes is No. 1 in the hit parade.”

During the early dark period of the Wickes reorganization in 1982, Sigoloff often put in 22-hour days. Though the hours are shorter now, he ignores 9-to-5 routine and expects the same from his staff. He can be on the phone to subordinates as early as 6:30 a.m. and as late as 10:30 at night. He and his senior staff regularly work through lunch and dinner, on planes, sometimes until 3 in the morning and usually on Saturdays. He has an uncanny habit of remembering all their schedules. “Sandy,” Friedman says, “would be intense even if he were running a nursery school.”

Sigoloff’s manner is “friendly until problems arise,” says Les Hagen, head of the lumber division. “Then he gets right to the bottom of the problem, goes right after it in a very aggressive manner. His voice and the connotation of the voice is firm enough to make you understand what he means without yelling and shouting.”

A key to his management style, Sigoloff himself says, is never to let on that he is entirely happy. “My dissatisfaction (is designed) to continue to cause people to grow,” he says, using his remarks to the lumber division managers in Bermuda as an example. “Privately, I’m as proud of those guys as anybody in the world, because I know how they have grown. But I don’t take the pressure off them.”

No detail is too small to escape his notice--from dusty or dented cans on a store shelf to unguarded merchandise in a store parking lot.

“I was on the car phone this morning with Les (Hagen) and said, ‘Hey, the stores we talked about two weeks ago? I don’t see any changes in those. I’m going to talk to you next Monday, and I want answers.’ Did he turn a good month? A fabulous month! But I wouldn’t take the pressure off of him for a minute.

“You’ve got to understand that part of the game is never giving anybody the feeling that I’m totally satisfied. Does it drive them crazy? No. They know that there is a lot of expectation. I think that is important. The expectation is not of me, but of themselves.”

On a working Saturday, the Wickes senior staff--all dressed casually--gathers at 8:30 in the company’s board room on the second floor of a modest office building in Santa Monica. They breakfast on lox and bagels and fresh fruit. Sigoloff conducts business with his peculiar blend of soft-spoken aggressiveness, thoughtful intensity and humorous asides.

Dressed in a light-blue shirt, blue slacks and loafers and carrying a load of papers, Sigoloff saunters in at 8:36. “It smells like a deli in here,” he says as he helps himself to the food. “Is anyone toasting bagels this morning?”

There’s a lot on the agenda: updates on the upcoming Drexel Burnham Lambert investment conference in Los Angeles; a status report on the company’s acquisition program; the annual meeting and preparations for the Wickes economic conference in New York. It is the staff’s last formal gathering before they meet again in New York the following week.

Sigoloff also pointedly notes: “On Saturday, everybody but legal is walking (in the March of Dimes Walkathon), I am told.” The whole staff breaks into laughter as Al Segal, senior vice president and general counsel, grins sheepishly. Wickes has about 160 teams participating in the walkathon. Sigoloff himself is planning to walk in Venice.

The meeting is a relaxed affair with open discussion, but Sigoloff forcefully makes his points. He frequently lapses into pensive poses, intently listening to a speaker with his chin resting in the palm of his left hand. After a review of a recent Builders Emporium awards dinner, Sigoloff tells the executives that he wants to see a more cohesive Builders Emporium group.

“I think what you see (at such dinners)--and we’ve been to every one of them--is that where you have a family environment, in other words where the husband and wife and top management are interactive, you have a totally different concept of the business and their relationship to Wickes. I know most of the store managers because I think I spend, with an exception with some of you, more time with that group than any other. I was amazed that they did not know each other.

“There has been turnover. We’ve constantly upgraded to the more professional store manager. But even the people who have been there 25 years and the Employee of the Year and the Cashier Register Queen of the Year didn’t know anybody. We talk about store service, we talk about employee contribution, (but) the people who make it happen have absolutely limited relationships with the structure except with the regionals. It really is a very fractionated group,” he says.

Sigoloff is rolling. “Let me beat up on something,” he continues. “I sat next to Ron (Builders Emporium Vice President and Controller Ron Maccarone), and Ron, you know, is very laconic, a very sweet man, but he doesn’t volunteer anything. We finally got into my favorite subject. We are really lousy at managing shrink (losses due to theft and damage).

“Everything I’ve wanted results on has not been discussed. I really do think you have to get Ron up here, and we’ve got to get into this issue of shrink one more time. There are stores that know how to manage their shrink, (but) I think that we’re still doing an average job.”

As an example, he says, he recently visited the Builders Emporium store on Sepulveda Boulevard, where he saw 40 pallets of plants unattended outside the nursery area. “While I was sitting in the car, four of those plants disappeared. People came out with their shopping carts--plunk, plunk. So I went to the store manager and said, ‘Are they on sale or are we giving them away? Because four of them just disappeared.’

“So he went back in (the store) and nothing happened, at which time I called Dick (Vallone, vice president for operations) and said, ‘I’m going to sit here, and if two more disappear, I’m taking them out of your paycheck.’ Five minutes later, someone came along very hastily and took them inside.”

The staff makes the notation, and Sigoloff quickly moves on to TTB--”ticking time bombs.” He praises a recent memo on office security, including concerns about pictures being stolen off the walls.

“These are true stories,” he says to quell the chuckling. “These are no jokes. New pictures have been stolen off the walls. I tried to go to more floral (decorating) in the office. We have floral arrangements all over. People steal the orchids out of the floral arrangements. Last week the orchid arrangement was there on Friday but gone on Monday.”

The discussion then turns to the sensitive issue of mergers and acquisitions, and finally, four hours after it began, the meeting breaks for lunch.

The other side of the Sigoloff toughness is loyalty, a word that suffuses almost every description of his style.

“He is most unique in the sense of the loyalty he creates,” says Henry Sweetbaum, chairman of Wickes PLC, a European subsidiary based in London. “It really is the personal involvement that he develops with the people around him. He demands enormous loyalty and gives enormous loyalty. Unlike some companies, we don’t have political maneuvering. Sandy doesn’t tolerate it. You know you have his loyalty and he has yours.”

This is perhaps the reason Sigoloff, for all his admitted ambition and endless business calculation, is seldom perceived as ruthless. He never criticizes employees in front of others, and he hardly ever shows anger (“You’ve got to work at it a long time,” he says). He takes a personal interest in the families of his subordinates. Linda Friedman, wife of the Wickes senior vice president for human resources, remembers a time when both she and her daughter Karen were ill. “Sandy called me at home, and I said Larry wasn’t home yet. He said: ‘No, I was just calling to see how you were. I heard you were sick and Karen was sick.’ ” And when Sigoloff’s business decisions mean that jobs will be lost, he has been known to personally take a role in developing compensation packages. “One of the things I’ve never lost sight of is that when you take someone’s earning capacity away--even if it’s short- term--you have a responsibility for that person’s status in the family,” he says.

When Wickes had to close Aldens, a mail-order house in Chicago, during the bankruptcy reorganization, Sigoloff went to court so that Alden employees would receive compensation more in line with company policy and their length of service, which was greater than the minimum allowed under federal bankruptcy laws. And he didn’t send a messenger to break the news to Alden employees; he went himself.

“There isn’t one of us that couldn’t pick up and leave and duplicate the money and working conditions and maybe improve our career paths,” says Sweetbaum. “But no one is interested in leaving, and no one would leave as long as Sandy was here.”

The exceptions to the close-knit, affectionate image Sigoloff would like to portray were the recent departures of two of his high-level executives. Jeffrey Chanin, who had worked with Sigoloff for more than a decade, left in a dispute in 1984 to work in investment banking for Drexel Burnham Lambert in Beverly Hills. And Sigoloff tried to talk Hal Smith, the former president of Builders Emporium, out of his unexpected decision last March to move to Ernst Home & Nursery in Seattle as president and chief executive officer. Smith decided, on the basis of “better financial opportunities for my family,” to go with Ernst.

Smith says his “was a very difficult decision. Sandy was a mentor to me in many ways. I didn’t sense he felt betrayal. I sense that he felt that I wasn’t making the right decision. He seriously questioned whether my opportunities were better at Ernst. But he wished me all the best.”

Neither Chanin nor Sigoloff will comment on Chanin’s departure, and the two have not spoken since. When he loses trust in someone, Sigoloff says, “it’s goodby. I’m forgiving, but I’m a rememberer. It’s not a grudge, it’s just a learning process. I tend to remember not in the vindictive sense, but I’m more on guard the next time. More cautious.”

In person, Sigoloff appears to have just leaped from one of his commercials. His is tall, lean, impeccably groomed and usually dressed in a dark suit. He is friendly but guarded. Sometimes he appears stiff and distant because, as he says, “I tend to watch before I get involved.”

He wears his own everyday business clothes in the commercials. For a Los Angeles filming of a Builders Emporium ad with a new theme--”I challenge them all”--Sigoloff brought a huge wardrobe in his maroon two-seater Mercedes with the license plate MING. The film crew helped him unload half a dozen dark suits; a hanger draped with at least 20 ties; a pair of black, immaculately polished shoes and a brown tweed Hartman suitcase full of starched and pressed dress shirts, each neatly wrapped with blue tape. “I thought I’d get a little exotic,” he joked. “I brought a striped shirt.”

Sigoloff helped select what he would wear: a dark-gray, pin-striped suit, an ivory shirt and red tie. The crew had his favorite tea (Lipton) and Mrs. Fields cookies on hand during makeup, which included a little bit of eyeliner.

He says he doesn’t much like doing the commercials and was dead-set against the idea when Michael Sitrick, a senior vice president for communications, first suggested it to him. But market surveys showed that Builders needed a strong spokesman, so Sigoloff gave in. His early “We got the message, Mr. Sigoloff!” spots provided a rallying point when Wickes was in bankruptcy reorganization. More important, they have helped boost sales 25% annually since the ads began.

Still, Sigoloff doesn’t seem to enjoy the taping sessions. Director Stuart Berg asks him to be more relaxed. “It’s almost impossible with that light. It burns,” Sigoloff complains. The lights are adjusted. Berg reminds him, “Keep your eyes more relaxed.”

Sigoloff’s eyes, which flash clear blue, tell a good deal about his mood. They are, in fact, one of the few ways to sense it, since his face almost always remains expressionless.

Perched on a wooden stool, with his right foot resting on a lower rung, Sigoloff pulls out his script--a single 8 1/2-by-11-inch page folded into quarters--from his inner jacket pocket. He rechecks his lines frequently. Sitrick believes that cue cards and a monitor make Sigoloff too wooden; he banished them before the executive arrived.

Sigoloff makes a mistake during Take 14. He hates having people watch him make mistakes. He closes his eyes, composes himself and goes on. A member of the film crew approaches. “Every time I hear footsteps, I hear trouble,” Sigoloff moans. “What do you want?”

He is asked to use his hands while he talks. “Use the middle finger,” a voice calls out.

“One more take and I will,” he replies. By Take 19, Sigoloff says, “I want to put in how abused I am. Everybody wants something different.”

By noon, the commercial is completed. “This is the easiest commercial we’ve ever done,” says a relieved Sigoloff. “Usually it’s 3 o’clock and he (Sitrick) wants one more and I’m ready to walk off the set.”

The roots of the Sigoloff style, the intense loner who wraps himself in his work and in the privacy of his family, appear to lie--as Sigoloff himself some times alludes--in the isolation he felt growing up Jewish in the solidly Baptist South during World War II. Born in St. Louis, Sigoloff was an only child until he was 10 and his sister, Bobbie, was born. Theirs was a kosher household until the war erupted. Sigoloff’s father, a doctor, volunteered for the Navy but instead was assigned to the Army.

Sigoloff was 11 when the family moved south, first to Jacksonville, Fla., then to Fayetteville, N.C.; Jackson, Miss., and Montgomery, La. He remembers it as a very lonely, painful and unhappy time outside of his family. “The family unit was the only thing that existed,” he recalls.

“My sister is 10 years younger than I am, so I was really her baby-sitter. She and I are really unusually close and have always been. I used to take very good care of her, take her everywhere, and really treated her as sort of a special person. For her it was great because she got a lot of attention, and for me it was something to do--I mean emotionally to do.”

His memories are mostly negative. “I really saw, smelled and tasted bigotry. That probably has made a lasting impression on me in how I deal with people,” he says. “I know what it feels like.”

Sigoloff says he never went to any after-school activities “because I was Jewish. The South was very Baptist, and it was a very unaccepting period, coupled with the fact we were white Army trash--white Army trash Jewish was not very high. So I was active in school, but when the day was over, that was it. There was never anybody in the clubs that I would see afterward. I just went to school.”

Even after the family moved to California and he graduated from Beverly Hills High School and UCLA, the loneliness did not abate. “Beverly Hills High in the period right at the end of the war was a very closed school and very snobbish,” he recalls. “There was a lot of accumulated wealth, and my parents were very modest. I can remember vividly not having the money to buy Levi’s in those days. I used to buy jeans from Sears because I couldn’t afford Levi’s.”

Sigoloff packed ice cream at Chapman’s on Santa Monica Boulevard after school and on weekends. He lived at home while going to UCLA and had jobs as a truck driver and a cement unloader. Even in college, where he majored in chemistry and physics, he still felt the outsider.

“By that time, I had a lot of friends, but you never really sort of fit in exactly. I was always too young for this, or a foreigner in a promised land. I was a good student because there wasn’t much else to do,” he says. “I was the great test-tube maven.”

In his senior year at UCLA he began working part time for the Atomic Energy Commission; he worked full time after graduation. When the Korean War broke out, he was reassigned to the Air Force, where he continued his atomic energy work, studying the effects of nuclear weapons testing on the military and civilians, until 1957.

It was then, while attending the Air University Command, an Air Force advanced-studies program, that Sigoloff, already a practicing scientist, felt the attraction of the business world. He realized, he says, that “the guys who put up the money and manage the projects--they’re having as much fun as us poor test-tube people. That was when it changed.” (His love of science remains, however. His favorite magazine, according to his wife, is the professional journal Science. “There isn’t one picture in it; just graphs,” she notes. “It’s boring.”)

He went on to Electrical Optical Systems, a private Pasadena company that was later purchased by Xerox. He became a group vice president before moving on to become senior vice president and, in 1971, president at Republic Corp., a mini-conglomerate that at the time was in serious financial straits. In 1973, he quit Republic to go briefly into consulting. In 1974, he joined Daylin Inc., a Los Angeles-based retailer, where he conducted the first of his bankruptcy reorganization operations. When Daylin was bought out in 1979, Sigoloff became vice chairman and chief operating officer of Kaufman & Broad, the Los Angeles home builder.

In 1982, Sigoloff, whose reputation for rescuing troubled companies was by then well established, was approached by a search committee from Wickes, which was on the verge of financial disaster. Sigoloff became chairman, president and chief executive officer.

The Wickes company had been founded more than a century before as a family-owned machine shop in Saginaw, Mich. After World War II, it grew into an agricultural elevator company (moving its headquarters to San Diego in 1972). In the 1950s, it developed one of the nation’s first cash-and-carry lumberyard “supermarkets” and continued to grow by developing thousands of retail stores worldwide, including Wickes Furniture, Wickes Lumber and Builders Emporium.

But it ran into problems when it bought Gamble-Skogmo in 1980 and attempted to diversify into general retailing. Wickes more than doubled its debt to make the acquisition at a time when housing sales had begun a steep decline and interest rates were rising sharply. By 1982, Wickes was reporting heavy losses despite sales of nearly $4 billion. Four of its top executives abruptly resigned when Sigoloff came aboard and demanded full authority.

Less than a month later, Wickes--nearly $2 billion in debt--sought court protection from its 250,000 creditors under the federal bankruptcy laws. Sigoloff reorganized the company by regenerating key businesses such as Builders Emporium and Wickes Furniture; closing or selling 17 companies; slashing the number of employees from 38,000 to 28,000 and paying off all creditors in full with a combination of cash and securities. Wickes emerged from court protection in January, 1985.

Just six months later, the company paid $1 billion in cash to buy a number of companies, including swimwear makers Catalina and Cole of California, and Kayser-Roth Hosiery, whose products are sold under the names of No Nonsense, Calvin Klein, Liz Claiborne, Burlington and Levi. Since then, Sigoloff has sold other Wickes companies (Woman’s World, Mode O’Day) and snapped up small companies (Ole’s Home Improvement, Orchard Supply Hardware). For his efforts, he earned a 1985 salary of $750,985 and $722,600 in bonuses.

“The ability to give leadership, give direction--to be able to seek resolution and move the business forward under crisis conditions--is a rare quality,” says Ron Gordon, an attorney for a group of Wickes creditors during the bankruptcy. “It’s like being a general in the war. There are peripheral skirmishes, but you also have to have the big picture in mind.”

Today Sigoloff has big plans for Wickes. With the $1.4 billion he raised by selling a new debt issue, he is a force to be reckoned with in the takeover market. Even a recent lost battle proved productive: Though he was outbid for National Gypsum, Wickes made a $3-million profit during the takeover battle on stock it owned in the company.

etty Sigoloff is a bright, attractive woman with a winsome smile. At home in West Los Angeles, she is clearly in charge. She is perhaps the best conserva tor of her husband, making sure he has a life away from the office. They have three grown children.

Spontaneous and fun-loving, she provides a congenial contrast to her husband of 34 years, who is organized, methodical and exacting, much like his hobbies--photography, and collecting Porsches and antique clocks. “It’s like he’s always in school and I’m in recess,” she says. “We’re really just the opposite. I have to remind him that we can’t all do things like he does. I also tell him I don’t like to be perfect. It takes too much time to be perfect. I like going out and doing things. He is still working on arranging and perfecting, while I’m on the way out.”

Sigoloff acknowledges the contrast. “I do certain things a certain way,” he admits. “Unless you happen to want someone who is totally spontaneous and unpredictable, I’m an easy person to get along with. If you want someone to fly in at 20 minutes after 5 and say, ‘Gee, we’re going to the opera in San Francisco in three minutes, grab your handbag’--that’s not quite me.”

On a plane ride back from New York, Sigoloff discussed travel with the wife of a business associate. The woman was explaining that one of the best ways to pack clothes was straight from the cleaners, plastic and all. But Sigoloff disputed her for a “scientific” reason. Moisture condenses in plastic packages, he argued, causing clothes to wrinkle, especially in humid climates. Instead, he personally packs each garment with tissue paper in between and unpacks immediately when he arrives at a destination. “I have to look like I just came out of the cleaners,” he says. “I can’t wear the same suit twice.”

“I never unpack a suitcase,” Betty says nonchalantly. Sigoloff adds: “You roust around in a suitcase like a little mouse.”

Even when he relaxes, the perfectionist in him emerges. “He loves to repair things,” Betty says. “He’ll even do mending. I have never had a repairman in the house. I don’t even tell him something is broken unless I want him to fix it then. He’ll do it right then, and dinner will have to wait. He is a perfectionist to an extreme. Everything has to be in working order.”

He will cook occasionally. His specialty is breakfast. “When he makes waffles, he has a wonderful time cleaning the waffle iron,” Betty says. “It was the one we got when we were married. We’re still using it, because he keeps fixing it.”

Sigoloff occasionally makes an expedition to his local supermarket. “I love to go up and down the aisles. I love it. It’s great fun,” he says. “She’ll give me my little list. I’m supposed to go off and come back with eggs and the usual things. I don’t know my way around the store, and signs don’t tell you anything, so you tend to go up and down aisles. And, oh, you see the greatest things. She’ll always admonish me by saying, ‘Do not get anything else (but the items on the list).’ So I have to hope she’s not around when I come in.”

Three times a week, a mobile fitness gym arrives early for Sigoloff’s morning workouts. He jogs with Sheba, their German shepherd, two days a week. On Sundays, he and Betty take long walks.

The Sigoloffs enjoy quiet dinners with their close friends, most of them from his college days. “I don’t like to go to what I call you-have-to-go affairs,” he says. “I love not to have anything to do, because I’m free to do whatever I want. I always find something to do, whether it’s being at the computer or fixing something or taking pictures. I water and take care of the plants. I love it. I like to see beautiful things grow.”

On the first night of the Bermuda trip, the Sigoloffs unobtrusively make their way into the Atlantis ballroom for a buffet dinner, Sigoloff now dressed in a herringbone jacket and dark slacks. Heads turn as Sigoloff passes by, but he proceeds without fanfare or introduction to his seat at a table near the Bermuda All Stars band. Though most of the couples have never met him, they recognize him from photos and television.

“To people at this level, he is a hero, because things looked pretty grim to me at one point,” says Alan Butler of Endicott, N.Y., who sat with the chairman on another night. “I know how hard-nosed he is, but he doesn’t act it in person.” Butler’s wife, Paulette, says Sigoloff was funny and entertaining, telling them how annoyed he was over a wrinkled curtain on the set of one of his commercials. He told them how he demanded an iron so he could press the curtain himself.

By 11 on the first night in Bermuda, the Sigoloffs are saying good night. Before he leaves to join Les Hagen of the lumber division for a late-night conference, Sigoloff stops to chat briefly with an acquaintance who is sitting with three couples. He leaves without introducing himself, which startles the husbands--all Wickes managers who had never met him.

“I can understand it, because he’s here to relax,” one wife shrugs. Her husband isn’t so sure.

he next morning, the Sigoloffs have a leisurely breakfast and sit in on an educational session on memory training. The highlight of the day is a moped race. Sigoloff is especially looking forward to it because Betty banned motorcycles some time ago when he and their son Steve arrived home four hours late after getting scraped up in a motorcycle accident and visiting the hospital.

Within minutes after beginning the route along the winding coastline, the leader of Sigoloff’s five-member team makes a wrong turn, and the team is disqualified. “So much for time trials,” Sigoloff says, trying to hide his irritation. “I’m competitive all day long. I don’t need to be competitive now.”

“Ah,” he gasps at the shoreline scenery. “This is fabulous.”

Sigoloff says he can detect changes in himself over the years. “I’ve become a little more tolerant in not meeting my goals as I get older,” he says, and “I’ve learned to be a better loser” in some things.

Two years ago, he noted, when he didn’t come in No. 1 at a car show, he took three or four days off and spent 20 hours a day preparing for the next show. “The car was obviously gorgeous, but it wasn’t gorgeous enough to win.” So he took it apart and put it back together. “That’s what I mean by being a perfectionist,” he says. “It’s not just winning, but it’s doing what you said you are going to do.”

He won first place at the next show.

In contrast, he says, he and Betty recently managed a weekend trip to the wine country of Northern California. But they only got as far as Monterey before Betty came down with the flu and was confined to her bed in a hotel. Sigoloff says he sat on the balcony for two days and, having read everything in sight, just “watched the trees grow. Can you imagine me doing that?”

His future, he says, is “a constant debate around the house. It starts out like, ‘When are you going to slow down? Haven’t you climbed enough mountains? Life isn’t a dress rehearsal’--that’s what Betty likes to say. The literal translation is: ‘Don’t you know you’re not going to live forever?’ ”

“I do know there are things I won’t do anymore,” he said one Sunday in his home. “For instance, I’ll probably never do another Chapter 11. Never, never. The level of total commitment you do a couple of times in your life, and after you’ve done it there is no reason to do it again. I proved that you go from a small one to the largest (non-railroad bankruptcy reorganization) ever done successfully. Why do I have to do it again? So if you have the Guinness Book of World Records, as Betty says, why do you need any more records?”

So he has begun seeking a balance between work and his activities outside the office. He is starting to schedule more time for short weekend trips to such places as La Jolla, Palm Springs and Santa Fe--less organized travel than his usual two-week vacations.

Heading back to the Bermuda hotel on their mopeds, the Sigoloffs stop at Tio Pepe, a Spanish and Italian restaurant, for a snack on the terrace. Sigoloff tells a story about his 1955 Chevy--”for the 250th time,” he grins as Betty throws up her hands in mock surprise.

Sigoloff--then a first lieutenant in the Air Force--his wife and another couple were driving to Houston and New Orleans in Sigoloff’s brand-new, V-8 four-door Chevy. They stopped to eat and buy gas. His stern rule was “absolutely no eating in the car,” he says.

When they got back on the road, Sigoloff heard the women giggling in the back. Betty had sneaked a chocolate malt into the car and had spilled some on the back seat. Sigoloff was furious. Did she clean it up? “Immediately,” Betty laughs.

After 30 years, Sigoloff can laugh at the story, too. He’s not so tightly wound now, not quite so driven. “We’ve told that funny story so many times, it was worth the chocolate shake,” he says, smiling at the memory.

Even so, as he finishes the story, he hears a radio playing in the background. It’s tuned to the news. He pauses to listen, raises an eyebrow and asks, “Is the market down?”