Committee of one: Eli Broad built two Fortune 500 companies, has given away millions, and is determined to shape a cultural mecca out of L.A.'s void. So why does he get so little love?(Interview)(Biography)

On a gloomy winter afternoon, Los Angeles's most powerful civic leader and richest man sprints his way through the Museo Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, just as the day before he sped through the Museo del Prado in Madrid, hurtling past centuries of Spanish art. Here, deep inside the Guggenheim, the Jasper Johnses, the Andy Warhols, and the Roy Lichtensteins he rushes by don't claim his attention for more than 40 seconds. Why should they? He's seen them all, and he'll have plenty of time to spend with them come September, when they'll be shipped back to his house in Brentwood and his retreat in Malibu. On the other hand, almost anyone else would savor this moment--the chance of seeing, for the first time, one's personal art collection filling to half its capacity what has become the world's most celebrated museum. But not Eli Broad. He's Racing through the galleries, and he can only see what's wrong.

Broad has traveled to Spain with his wife, Edythe, and his close friends Richard Riordan and Nancy Daly Riordan. The trip began a week earlier in Havana and will end in a few days on the slopes of Saint Moritz, but its high point is this evening's gala opening of Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections at the Guggenheim. Riordan has skipped the afternoon preview for a jog ("Gotta stay fit!" the former mayor says). Edye Broad has decided to remain in her hotel room for an hour free of her husband's hyperactivity. So Broad's entourage has been pared down to Joanne Heyler, the curator of his collection; Rockwell Schnabel, Broad's former Westside neighbor and the American ambassador to the European Union; and Nancy Riordan.

Even when Broad sits still he thrusts forward. A full head of silver hair reigns over a robust face bronzed by decades of reading corporate documents in the California sun. The ears are prominent like conches, the eyes sharp behind stylish silver-rimmed glasses. Broad rarely breaks into a smile, but when he does it is one of controlled satisfaction, the top teeth visible in an even row. A slight paunch, which is easily concealed beneath the cut of a Zegna or Brioni suit, has taken up residence on the otherwise lean body. Although he is about to turn 70, Broad looks 15 years younger but sounds 15 years older. His voice is the importunate, high-pitched yawp of a prospector who never learned the value of patience and isn't about to start now.

Broad's taste in art tends to the massive and the assertive--for instance, the 60-ton Richard Serra sculpture called No Problem that sits on his lawn in Brentwood. In the Guggenheim's cavernous spaces, the pieces breathe in a way they didn't at their previous stop, Washingtons Corcoran Crallery. Yet Broad has some problems with the exhibition. Why are Cindy Sherman's photographs spaced apart so widely? he asks Joanne Heyler. They look lost, Broad insists, his mouth a tight frown. Why is every panel in the Eric Fischl piece identified by a separate card, as if they're all individual paintings? "Well," his curator gently tells him, "the viewers here will have some trouble with the translation."

Eli Broad has always had a temperamental inability to accept what he calls "the status quo." His drive to prove wrong the "fat, dumb, and happy" businessmen of his era led to his creation of two Fortune 500 companies--Kaufman & Broad, the mammoth international home builder, and SunAmerica, the insurance conglomerate that was the fastest-growing stock on the New York Stock Exchange for much of the 1990S. At 23, with his partner Donald Kaufman, Broad revolutionized the home-building industry turning the single-family residence into a mass commodity like any other; his company, now called KB Home, has built 500,000 of them. Broad went on to give the life insurance industry just as heavy a beating. Why were insurers still selling policies against an early death, when Broad's scrutiny of demographics showed that the true catastrophic threat facing baby boomers was a prolonged life that outlasted one's savings? Out of a century-old insurance company he built an annuities empire, selling policies that paid out as long as the bearer's heart kept beating. When he sold SunAmerica in 1998 to insurance giant AIG, Broad had amassed the largest fortune in L.A., estimated today at $4.8 billion.

In the past 20 years, no private citizen has exerted more influence on Los Angeles. Broad helped pay for the television commercials and mass mailers that crushed the San Fernando Valley secession movement. During the campaign last year, he became a more articulate spokesman for keeping the city united than Mayor James Hahn.

The city may have proved to be a less than ideal laboratory for Broad's bid to reform public education, but he and Riordan did for a time manage to secure a majority on the Los Angeles Unified School District's board that was amenable to their credo of top-down managerial reform. While cohosting the 2000 Democratic Convention, Broad suggested to former Colorado governor Roy Romer that he apply for the job of LAUSD superintendent; later he sat on the search committee that selected Romer. Before the new superintendent and his reform board were installed, the district hadn't built a new high school in 30 years. Today, 20 schools have broken ground, funded by a $3.3 billion construction bond measure. Broad gave $200,000 toward its passage.

Recently, he contributed $20 million to UCLA to rebuild its fine arts complex, which will be renamed the Edythe and Eli Broad Art Center, and he was the leading donor to Caltech's $100 million Broad Center for the Biological Sciences, which opened last fall. The two buildings are companion pieces to the Edythe and Eli Broad Studios at California Institute for the Arts and the Edythe and Eli Broad Center at Pitzer College.

Broad's greatest impact has been felt by Los Angeles's long-neglected downtown. In 1979, he presided over the creation of the Museum of Contemporary Art on Grand Avenue. Although Grand may be one of the city's most pedestrian-averse thoroughfares, Broad has enlisted the city count and state to reimagine it as a direct competitor to New York's Broadway-with expanded sidewalks, shops, theaters, and restaurants, and maybe a central park stretching from the Department of Water and Power headquarters to City Hall. To replace the California Transportation Agency's 1940s concrete bunker, Broad organized the first design competition in the agency's history; the winner was the Richard Neutra-inspired scheme of architect Thom Mayne. Broad cemented his reputation as the city's cultural rainmaker when in 1996 he led the rescue of Frank Gehry's Disney Hall with a $135 million fund-raising campaign. It is now an article of faith that when Gehry's sculptural stainless-steel concert hall opens in the fall, it will give this shapeless city its unifying symbol, that it will have the same transformative effect on Los Angeles that Gehry's Guggenheim had on Bilbao.

At the Guggenheim, Broad charges ahead and takes a sharp right. Heyler tries to call him back, but Broad, oblivious, sweeps through the next four galleries in the wrong direction. Entering a room full of Charles Ray pieces, he winces at the first thing he sees--a nude department store dummy He is not upset by its faithful reproduction of the artist's genitalia but by the awkward placement of what should have been the room's centerpiece--an eight-foot mannequin in a hot pink power suit. It's the same situation when he reaches the Jeff Koons room. Had Broad approached from the front entrance, he would have seen its most significant work, Koons's enormous blue steel Balloon Dog, from a long way off. Instead, another Koons piece, a small stainless-steel rabbit, is bothering him. "Why is the bunny over here?" Broad demands. "Why isn't it over there?"

Nancy Riordan, cheerful and overwhelmed by all the art around her, has not kept pace with Broad and so is not privy to his displeasure. She can hardly imagine how Broad must feel. How large the sense of accomplishment must be, how rewarding his triumph as a collector, how inconceivable the trajectory that led him from a working-class childhood in Detroit to world-class stature in Bilbao. "Isn't it fabulous?" she asks. "Who would have thunk it?"

Eli Broad did not come to Los

Angeles to reinvent himself. Arriving in 1963, he was a lot more like those Prewar Iowans who poured in by the thousands, determined not to cut their roots away but transplant them in L.A. soft, where, after all, anything can be made to grow. Broad likes to tell why he settled in Brentwood and why he's remained there ever since. "At the time," he says, "Bel-Air was out of our league, and for raising a family, we thought that Beverly Hills was a little too glitzy."

Barry Munitz, president of the Getty Trust, who considers Broad a good friend, speculates that if you asked a dozen of people to write down what they thought a quintessential Angeleno was and put their responses in an envelope, "I don't think Eli would fit one out often of the criteria. I mean, his pace is different. His values are different. His upbringing is different. His commitments are different. He doesn't do the movies. …