THE FIXER UPPER.

• Author: Edwards, Lynda
• Position: Dick Jenrette

Looking back on his career, Dick Jenrette explains how rebuilding companies is a lot like restoring old houses.

Richard Jenrette first heard about the zodiac at age 42 while chatting at an institutional investing conference in California. He rushed off to Esalen Institute, the New Age epicenter at Big Sur, to get his chart drawn by an astrologer. "But I was so distracted by the naked joggers," he confides, "I had to get it redone." He now gives colleagues "personality color tests," preferring to do business with chartreuse men and emerald women.

At 71, the Raleigh native who co-founded Wall Street powerhouse Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc. and saved the giant Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States feels he's earned the right to be eccentric. For example, he considers his legacy not to be the businesses he built and turned around but the six historic mansions he has rehabilitated. He lives in one, a New York estate named Edgewater for its wide lake encircled by willow trees. "It feels like home because one of its early owners was a transplanted Southerner," he says. He still shows up in the DLJ office as chairman emeritus.

Dick Jenrette was an outsider who became the ultimate insider. And, by all accounts, he did it differently from most of his peers during the Me and Greed decades. When The Bonfire of the Vanities was published in 1987, author Tom Wolfe said the novel's one moral character -- the aristocratic father of Sherman McCoy, the backstabbing Master of the Universe -- was based on Jenrette. That sense of decency drew criticism from the Machiavellian element in DLJ: They blasted him as too soft to handle the havoc caused by soaring oil prices and skidding stocks in 1974. "I learned that you can turn the soft image to your advantage," he says. "Your opponents never suspect you can make tough decisions that affect them. It's safe to say the companies and I prospered."

He's now on the safe ground of Ayr Mount, his 19th century mansion in Hillsborough. He bought it in 1985 as his retirement home when he sold DLJ to Equitable. But in 1987, the insurance company asked him to stay in New York as chairman. When he visits North Carolina, usually three or four times a year. he stays here. A researcher duplicated Ayr Mount's original wall paints. Jenrette sleeps in the red room with a copy of Gone With the Wind bedside. "It's special for me. New Yorkers' stereotype of Carolinians as hard-luck aristocrats made my early years there a little easier," he says, smiling.

Starting DLJ in 1959, the first new securities firm on Wall Street since the Depression, was a brash...