Offstage Line

Jack Lyons, president of Bloomingdale Properties, a company that administers the depaitment-store family's fortune, was recently watching a TV movie about a bank robbery. Suddenly his wife pointed at one of the robbers and asked, "Isn't that the man you're in business with in California?" By Dun & Bradstreet! The 6-ft.-plus, curly-haired crook on the screen was in fact the same fellow with whom Lyons had just concluded a six-figure real estate deal. "It was the first I knew he was an actor," says Lyons stoutly. "He had a proposition, and when we met to make the transaction, he was a totally professional businessman."

Salvage Cases. The actor in question was Wayne Rogers, 41, star of TV's M*A*S*H*. When he is not playing the show's martini-mixing Army surgeon, Trapper John, Doc Rogers carries on with a different operation. As head of W.M. Rogers, Inc.--Managed Investments, he takes care of the financial affairs of half a dozen clients (among them Actors Peter Falk and James Caan) and deals with such financiers as Lyons and Los Angeles Industrialist Lawrence Weinberg. Insiders estimate that Rogers' company is worth several million dollars. His holdings--with Falk and others--include apartment buildings, office blocks and a 500-acre California vineyard--the largest planting of merlot grapes in the world.

Rogers got into the investment business ten years ago, he explains, partly to protect himself against show-business management sharks and partly to keep out of Hollywood's unemployment office. His first venture was the purchase of an office building in foreclosure, and he still follows the pattern of seeking out money-losing buildings and putting them back in the black. A few of his clients have also been salvage cases. Says Caan: "Wayne stepped in and pulled me up by the bootstraps."

As a business manager, Rogers pays his clients' bills, invests their money and handles their taxes. He is a specialist in tax shelters and, although self-taught in that field, now lectures on the subject at California C.P.A. seminars. Says Rogers: "I always tell my clients up front nothing is perfect. I'm human; I make mistakes." One recent slip-up was the loss of "less than $100,000" in an Oklahoma oil well that wasn't.

There is none of M*A*S*Hs can-the-caduceus flippancy about Rogers-as-businessman. His investment philosophy, say his clients, is strictly "traditionalist." So is Rogers. Born William Wayne McMillan Rogers III, the son of a wealthy lawyer in Birmingham, Ala., Rogers in his youth was suitably Southern-comfortable: "I drank beer, chased girls and drove fast cars." Sent to a boarding school for "Southern incorrigibles" in Bell Buckle, Tenn., Rogers finally buckled down and eventually graduated from Princeton with honors.

At the end of a hitch on a Navy cargo ship, Rogers dropped in on a college friend who was directing a workshop production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. "I thought, 'Here's a profession in which a) you must use your mind, b) you use yourself physically, and c) you're alive emotionally. How do I get into this?' "

He enrolled in New York's Neighborhood Playhouse and acquired a Brooklyn accent while sharing an apartment with Falk. The two also shared a single borrowed raincoat, a Colombo precursor that hung to Falk's ankles and above Rogers' knees. Sixteen years of TV and small film roles later, he was cast in M*A*S*H.

Soul-Selling. After the show's three years of top ratings, Rogers can split figures dispassionately. In films, he figures, "I'm probably now worth about $1.2 million to a producer--$600,000 for TV sales, $500,000 for foreign rights and maybe $200,000 in U.S. distribution." He will stay on M*A*S*H--that is, unless Ingmar Bergman should decide to use him. "If Bergman were to phone, forget it. That's soul-selling time." As for Rogers, Inc., the forecast is for development of a parcel of land near Huntington Beach, Calif., and backing an inventor in the photocopying field. One investment conspicuously missing from the firm's projections is film making. "An actor who knows about money," says Rogers firmly, "does not put it into movies."

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