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36 Hours in the Life
"I think we surely work too hard," Gianni Agnelli complains. "One should really be able to get home before 8:30 at night and stay away on Sundays and holidays." Agnelli rarely does, but he compensates for all the hard work by finding time for hard play. On one recent Sunday, for example, he started at 8 a.m. at the Turin headquarters, conferred on production schedules until 1 p.m. Then he had a light lunch with his wife and children, Edoardo, 14, and Margherita, 13, before boarding his Grumman Gulfstream jet for a business trip to Rome. That night he joined some princes, publishers and movie stars at a party, then moved on to a nightclub, and finally got to bed at 5 a.m.
He was up and dressed at 1 a.m. on Monday "to meet the government." In the next six hours, he had lengthy meetings—to discuss Italy's economic situation—with Central Banker Guido Carli, Treasury Minister Guido Colombo, President Giuseppe Petrilli, of the state-owned I.R.I, industrial complex, and President Giorgio Valerio, of the Montecatini-Edison company. Then came a brief nap, a fixture in his life that Agnelli will not give up "for anything or anybody." After that, back to Turin. He arrived at 5 p.m., in plenty of time to stop at the office and later to dress for an 8 p.m. dinner date at the palazzo with some Rumanians who had come to talk about buying tractors from Italy's leading capitalist.
What Makes Gianni Go
Great wealth furnishes Gianni Agnelli with no end of devices to cope with one restless compulsion. As he puts it: "I'm afraid of losing time. I want to get everything done and have everything in its place." In the time it takes for a fairly long lunch, he often speeds by private helicopter from his Turin office to the Alps for a few midday ski runs. On skis he performs almost like an Alpine Nureyev, despite a stiff brace that he must wear on his right leg. His $50,000 Ferrari can go 180 m.p.h., and Agnelli likes to push it hard. His lame leg propped up on the seat or the dashboard, he flicks his left foot among clutch, brake and accelerator.
This acute sense of hurry is really what makes Gianni go. The Citroën takeover reflects his conviction that time is running out for many of Europe's 20 auto manufacturers, who among them produce just about as many cars as the U.S.'s Big Three. He figures that, before long, mergers and corporate failures will leave only half a dozen huge, concentrated companies to share the European market—the U.S. three, one British company and one or two others. Fiat, of course, will survive.
Time is also running out, Agnelli believes, for Italy's old ways of doing things. He agrees with many other political observers that the center-left government coalition must prove within the next four years, before the elections of 1973, that it can meet the demands for expansion of schools, housing and hospitals, and for reforms in the bureaucracy, the courts and