She’s been threatened, smeared, called a “Marxist in a miniskirt,” but journalist Connie Bruck keeps turning out her devastating portraits of the rich and shady

Many years ago, long before she unmasked junk-bond baron Michael Milken and savaged arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, Connie Bruck convinced a convent of Carmelite nuns to break their vows of silence and talk to her for a story. Today Bruck’s beat is the similarly cloistered world of finance, a place where secrecy reigns and the SEC is the omnipotent deity. In this world, Bruck has become infamous for her ability to get people in high places to tell her things they should not as she translates complex financial transactions into elegant, piercing prose; her dogged reporting and unsparing analysis have left many a CEO cursing the day he agreed to talk to her.

Next month Bruck advances her killer reputation with the publication of Master of the Game: Steve Ross and the Creation of Time Warner (Simon & Schuster). In it, she dissects the enigmatic Steve Ross, a man of enormous charm and ambition who spent his life cobbling together a communications empire, merging an odd assortment of funeral homes, parking lots, entertainment businesses, and, most spectacularly, Time Inc., to create Time Warner, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. Now, just as Time Warner is emerging from years of corporate restructuring, massive debt, and internal turmoil, comes Bruck’s book exposing the seamy side of Ross’s glittering “strategic alliance.”

The first thing you notice about Connie Bruck’s office at The New Yorker is that she has no Rolodex. It is a telling absence; while most accomplished writers pride themselves on their close ties with the influential figures they chronicle, they do so at a price-with access often comes timidity. One former colleague explains the missing Rolodex: “Connie’s pieces are usually so mean she just assumes no one will talk to her a second time.”

Along the walls of her office are hundreds of reporter’s spiral notebooks and thick legal depositions stacked from floor to ceiling. Over the years I’ve been told that Bruck is one of the best writers around—fiercely intelligent, hardworking, often intimidating. As we go through the awkward ritual of exchanging basic information that precedes all interviews, I see ample evidence of all three qualities. But I am also surprised by how much she hesitates, her voice trailing off to a girlish whisper when she confesses to small failings, such as frequently losing her purse or having a terrible memory. Beneath her formidable presentation, I sense another side that reminds me of someone else: the smartest girl in the class who isn’t quite sure yet whether it’s all right to be so.

Wearing a beige sweater, short brown skirt, and high heels, Bruck, forty-seven, is strikingly pretty and looks anything but vicious as she recalls the day she told the usually unflappable Ross she was going to write his biography. “He practically fell out of his chair, he jumped back so fast. It was the only time I saw him completely unguarded.”

Yet what makes Master of the Game so compelling is the skill with which Bruck captures the tension between Ross’s seductive magnetism (“Steve could talk a blind man into see-ing,” said one friend) and his enormous moral flaws, without reducing him to either. Ross, like Michael Milken, the subject of Bruck’s best-selling The Predators’ Ball, is a gargantuan figure of limitless ambition who felt exempt from the ethical and legal standards of everyday life. But Bruck’s natural sympathy for the underdog–which, although it initially drew her to the iconoclastic Milken, didn’t keep her from eviscerating him—gives her portrait of Ross a rich, measured quality usually found only in fine literary biographies; Ross lives so fully in these pages that the reader is drawn to him even when his actions are deplorable.

As a lone visionary in an army of small-minded bureaucrats, Ross was by far the most attractive figure in Bruck’s New Yorker pieces on the Time Warner merger. Still, he had reason to be nervous. His good friend Michael Milken’s reputation virtually destroyed by The Predators’ Ball, and other financial bigwigs have been similarly ground down by Bruck’s understated but damning prose. Ross’s meteoric rise, during which he made up his own rules and mixed with a diverse cast of Hollywood stars and shady characters, was sure to be grist for Bruck’s mill.

Summing up much-feared superagent Mike Ovitz, Bruck writes in the New Yorker, “Many who know him consider him an uncommonly cold manipulator— extreme even by Hollywood standards. For years, Ovitz appeared to be gratified by the fear he aroused.” Billionaire pet-supplies and publishing magnate Leonard Stern can still recite the first paragraph of Bruck’s unflattering 1984 profile, titled “The Hartz Mountain Corporate Officers’ Guide to Committing Perjury, Suborning Perjury, Obstructing Justice, Locking Up the Market, and Paying a $25,000 Fine,” which describes him as looking like a reptile. “Connie Bruck wrote with an emotional and intellectual bias that was really unforgiving,” Stern says. “She wrote fiction by taking half-truths and casting them as whole ones. She shames her whole profession.” A number of her other subjects are still so bitter they refuse to talk about her on the record.

Born in 1946, in North Arlington, New Jersey, Bruck spent her college years as an English major at Wellesley and Barnard, then went on to get an M.A. in journalism from Columbia. After a stint as a reporter in Red Bank, New Jersey, she was married in a ceremony that would have made a marvelous “Talk of the Town” piece. The couple exchanged vows in a hot-air balloon on a snowy December day, officiated by a rabbi who afterward called himself “the flying rabbi.” Originally planned for summer, the ceremony was delayed because the groom had trouble getting a balloonist’s license. “The worst part was we couldn’t invite guests until the night before because we had to consult the wind reports. It nearly killed my mother,” says Bruck.

The couple then moved to California, where Bruck wrote about sex communes, poverty, nuns, and female criminals for a San Diego weekly. Caught up in the idealism of the decade, she explored the possibility that the proliferation of female crime might represent a form of social liberation, albeit a dark one. “These women were thought of as total outcasts, and I wanted to somehow humanize them and combat our society’s tendency to objectify them,” she recalls.

A voracious reader, Bruck’s literary tastes were markedly romantic; she consumed a steady diet of Ayn Rand, e. e. Cummings, and Anais Nin, whom she was once asked to profile. The problem was that when she arrived at Nin’s house, Bruck was struck mute with awe. “So she started asking me questions, and I ended up telling her the story of my life. I had done some pretty wild things, which seemed to please her. As I left, she looked at me in this mystical way and whispered in my ear, ‘Follow the dream…'” The piece was never published.

While Bruck was in California tracking the counterculture, the largest financial boom in history was about to take place on Wall Street, a revolution Bruck aptly described in The Predators’ Ball: “Overnight, all the rules of survival in the corporate jungle had been rewritten. The weak could become the strong, and the strong the weak.”

In 1978, her marriage having ended, Bruck moved back to New York with her seven-year-old son, Ari, and got a job with The American Lawyer, a new magazine created by Steven Brill (who subsequently founded Court TV), to investigate the previously mysterious legal community. Working closely with Brill, Bruck wrote a series of hard-edged profiles of the “players” who were becoming the stars of the 1980s. Her two pieces on Rudolph Giuliani–“He was ruthless and consumed with political ambition”—are still required reading for any journalist who covers him. A profile of Ivan Boesky for The Atlantic virtually introduced his name to the general public and won her the coveted John Hancock journalism award.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Bruck is how little she knew of finance before covering it. She arrived at The American Lawyer not even knowing what the SEC was, but quickly became a gifted interpreter of a financial world that was-much to the consternation of befuddled regulators-in the midst of transforming itself. “My dirty little secret is that I’m not really interested in business,” she explains. “Before I wrote about Boesky, I knew nothing about finance— zero. I never even read the business section. But I learned, although I didn’t learn beyond what I had to know, nor do I keep this knowledge very long.” Bruck is still famous among her colleagues for forgetting even the most basic facts of a story once she turns to her next topic.

In fact, her very lack of knowledge has been an important asset. Given her ignorance of finance, Bruck, already an avowed workaholic, worked even harder, poring through endless documents, conducting hundreds of interviews, leaving no source unexamined. On top of these research techniques, she developed a talent for putting her subjects at ease, combining an insatiable curiosity and good looks to lull them into unguarded moments and, inevitably, incautious remarks.

With few exceptions, the upper echelon of the financial world is still a men’s club, as is the cadre of journalists who cover it. “Some men don’t think women understand what they are doing, and if that is the way they feel, I’ll take advantage of it,” says New York Times business reporter Susan Antilla. “I can’t believe I’m saying this in 1994, but men are sometimes surprised by how much I know. Also, it’s sometimes easier for women to ask the ‘stu-pid question because we have less ego involved, and you get some extraordinary answers when you ask the ‘easy’ question.”

“Connie disarms her subjects by pretending to know less than she does. She opens them up by approaching them as an eager student,” says Wall Street Journal deputy Washington bureau chief Jill Abramson, who worked with Bruck at The American Lawyer. “I would often hear her ask a source to ‘just walk me through this’ —that’s when I knew he was in big trouble.”

But you don’t have to talk with Bruck to be caught in her sights; in fact, she has done some of her best work when the boardroom door was slammed in her face. She received only limited access to Drexel Burnham Lambert for The Predators’ Ball and virtually none to Milken. Milken hated the press and wanted to be left alone to do his junk-bond deals. which were revolutionizing finance and bringing him as much as $714 million a year. He cultivated extraordinary loyalty by making his employees multimillionaires. Everyone, he thought, had a price. Bruck, whom he referred to as “a Marxist in a miniskirt,” was just another deal.

The journalist and the junk-bond king met in 1986 at a closed investors’ meeting Bruck had sneaked into. First, Milken tried to convince her that he wasn’t an important story. “Then, without missing a beat, he said, ‘I do not want it done’ — not as a threat, but in a way that made me realize he thought that would be the end of it,” Bruck recalls. “I told him the book was already in progress, and then he made his bid.” Milken offered to pay her an amount equal to her advance not to write the book, and then, when she balked, he also offered to pay her for the copies she would have sold. “He was acting like a trader,” Bruck explains. “The first offer was too low, so he simply upped it a little. He was so naive. He had no idea how to relate to a world outside of his own.”

Once published, The Predators’ Ball had a crushing effect on Milken’s efforts to turn public opinion in his favor. The book is a brilliant reconstruction of Milken’s rise and the complicated deals that earned him and his associates more money in less time than any other individuals had made in the history of the U.S. In addition to being an exhaustive account of the jury-rigged world of ’80s finance, the book provides a devastating glimpse of the manipulative man at the center of the empire-Milken, the brilliant megalomaniac. Jesse Kornbluth, author of Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken, a recent biography written with his cooperation, confirms Bruck’s interpretation. “Despite her limited access, she had a dead-on reading of Milken’s character—a reading that eluded me for the first 400 hours I interviewed him.”

Predators’ sales were aided by the aggressive smear campaign orchestrated by Milken’s lawyers and public-relations peo-ple. Attempting to destroy Bruck’s credibility, they compiled more than 100 pages of “errata” and sent it to book reviewers across the country. These were tense times for Milken; although not yet indicted, he was squirming under the scrutiny of federal investigators who were aided by the testimony of his old friend Ivan Boesky. Even as he was about to be indicted, Milken was obsessed with Bruck. “The case scarcely mattered to him,” says Kornbluth. “Bruck filled his thoughts like no other woman before her.”

In the midst of the smear effort, Milken’s lawyers even accused Bruck of anti-Semitism, which, being Jewish herself, she found especially painful. “Milken believed he was persecuted because he was Jewish, and there was a grain of truth to this because the establishment hated Milken and was anti-Semitic,” says Bruck. “That was the very reason I was so sympathetic to what he was doing, in the first place. He was taking them on, and I liked that. But he wasn’t prosecuted by the government because he was a Jew. He broke the law.”

The anti-Semitism charge was particularly misconceived, since it is something Bruck writes about with great sensitivity. Even as she damned the man who, for many, represented all that was wrong with the decade, she warned against drawing bigoted conclusions: “One danger at this moment, as in any period of reaction, is calcification,” she wrote in The New Yorker, “a hardening of attitude toward outsiders, a stiffening toward any risk, an enshrining of the status quo.”

With Predators’ Ball, Bruck was a certified star, and she was soon hired by The New Yorker. One of her first assignments was to cover the tempestuous Time Warner deal, the largest media merger in history. Looming behind it was Steve Ross, Warner’s founder.

“I was enthralled by his history, but it didn’t take me fifteen minutes to figure out that he had a shady underside,” she recalls. “Personally, I didn’t find him that magnetic, because he was so nervous with me. He was at his worst with journalists because he had a lot to hide.”

By the end of Master of the Game, Bruck convinces the reader that among Ross’s many accomplishments, the most miraculous was that he never went to jail. With her typical thoroughness, she charges Ross with an array of legal and ethical misdeeds-everything from having Mafia ties and being disloyal to friends to stock manipulation. Although often praising Ross, Bruck nevertheless ends up burying him. She concludes that Ross’s genius was in making people believe the larger-than-life image he created of himself. But, she insists, the image was a lie. “The truth was that his extraordinary generosity was funded to a great degree by the company,” she writes, completely undercutting the very virtues that inspired such devotion from his admirers. “His loyalty in many cases, endured as long as people were useful to him; and–driven by a compulsion to win–he tended to put his own interest ahead of others’, in situations large and small.”

That Ross died of cancer just three years after the Time Warner merger and was only briefly able to preside over the empire he had brought to fruition was widely judged a tragedy. This was, however, before Bruck’s unsparing portrait appeared; one now wonders whether Ross’s premature death was actually an example of his impeccable timing. But Bruck wishes he were still alive. “Part of the allure for me was to write about a figure at the height of his powers and discover things about him nobody else knew. I had hoped the book would jar hims. It was very difficult for me when he died.”

Difficult for her? A sadness creeps into Bruck’s voice as she discusses Ross’s death–something deeper than the sound of a writer who is disappointed that her story has taken an unfortunate turn. After she had worked for years to uncover the very things Ross had spent an entire lifetime hiding, the only person who would really get it was now dead. Others might admire or loathe her portrait, but only Ross would know how accurate it was, only he could be truly shaken by it. For Bruck, the smartest student in the class, this would have been the ultimate affirmation.

The most damaging of Bruck’s discoveries was that Ross was far more involved than had previously been thought in a 1982 scandal surrounding a Mob-controlled theater in which Warner Communications owned an interest. Protected by the sacrifice of two colleagues (his best friend was one), Ross just barely escaped being prosecuted, and the scandal, which also involved Frank Sinatra and a host of unsavory characters, was a question that lingered over him for years. “The theater scandal was the part of the book I cared about most because nobody else had ever gotten to the bottom of it before,” Bruck says. It also required some truly intrepid report-ing, during which Bruck received two or three hang-up phone calls each day at her home and office. She was told that one Mob figure “would just as soon kill you as look at you if he knew you were asking these questions.” Despite such dangers, Bruck knew she couldn’t fathom Ross’s character until she got to the core of the affair.

In the scandal’s aftermath, Bruck’s longtime mentor, Steven Brill, wrote a piece in The American Lawyer titled “Trading Up-How to Hang a Tycoon,” in which he defended Ross as having been unjustly harassed by prosecutors who didn’t have a case. Thereafter, Ross used Brill’s article as a public certification of his innocence. In a dazzling act of journalistic patricide, Bruck devotes a sizable chunk of Master of the Game to deconstructing Brill’s article point by point, arguing that he was misled by Arthur Liman, Ross’s lawyer, and that he failed to look behind Ross’s flimsy defense. When Bruck is finished, the dark clouds have turned stormy, and both Ross and Brill are soaking wet.

In fact, few people in Master of the Game are portrayed in a flattering light, which may say as much about Ross as about Bruck’s savage style. Liman comes off as a duplicitous lackey whose personal loyalty to Ross outweighs his professional integrity; Ross’s third wife, Courtney Sale, is seen as an imperious brat who fancies herself the Jackie O. of the media world; and Ross’s successor, Time Warner chairman and CEO Gerald Levin, is depicted as an unscrupulous, Machiavellian schemer who lies, stabs a colleague in the merger. “The deal that Time’s managers were able to strike was not power before Ross’s body is even cold.

Although Bruck doesn’t think of herself as a moralist, her often unrelenting judgments are what give her writing its bite. Some people, however, wonder whether since moving to The New Yorker she has gone too far. “Connie is a brilliant writer, but these days she is less concerned to restrain her impulse to pile on,” says Brill, who had read only a published excerpt from the Ross book. “Journalists, unlike juries, don’t always have to vote yes or no. They can sometimes vote gray.”

More than Bruck’s edge, it is her self-described “pathological honesty” that causes her to come down so heavily on her subjects. But while her opinion about someone’s innocence or guilt is uncompromising, her literary rendering of it is anything but heavy-handed. “That most people have mixed emotions but believe, often passionately, that their intentions are good ought not to cloud the picture,” she writes of the ambiguous conclusion to the Time Warner merger. “The deal that Time’s managers were able to strike was not solely seigneurial, but it was seigneurial; it was not solely self-interested, but it was self-interested; it was not solely venal, but it was venal.”

Currently at work on a piece about Hillary Clinton, Bruck has been dividing her time between Little Rock, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C. “She is such an inspiration to so many women, but it is not clear to me exactly who Hillary is,” says Bruck., in between flights. Nothing I have read about her even begins to satisfy my curiosity.”

In her voice I hear all the ingredients of a classic Connie Bruck profile: high hopes and praise for the underdog, extreme inquisitiveness, a certainty that the real story has not been told. I find myself thinking: Whatever you do, Hillary, be careful when she asks you to “just walk her through” the comprehensive health plan.