Then Came Branson

IT IS FOUR O'CLOCK ON A JULY MORN-ing in Carrabassett Valley, Maine, and the moose are getting an eyeful. The sky is velvet black, the air is apple crisp. A black hot-air balloon, the largest ever built, towers over a ring of vacation condos. The balloon is so big you could park a Boeing 747 inside; it could lift a double-decker London bus. Propane burners on the roof of the passenger capsule blast heat into the balloon. Quartz lamps cause giant white letters on the balloon's skin to fluoresce: "FLY VIRGIN."

Soon, the craft begins to rise. There are two men inside the capsule: Per Lind-strand, the balloon's designer, and Richard Branson, a 37-year-old British entrepreneur. Richard the Lionhearted. He's a multimillionaire turned folk hero, rated in a poll of Britain's youth as the third most popular individual after Prince Charles and the Pope. (Hold on, dear boy: are we talking about Britain? You know, where self-made men rank about as high on the social scale as chimney sweeps?) Branson, chairman of a newly public company, Virgin Group PLC, is about to risk his neck on a transatlantic crossing long considered impossible for hot-air balloons.

There is reason behind this flight -- the bravado and daring mask levels of calculation and precaution lost on the international film crews and the television crew from "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," now shivering in the cold below. Because there's another way to look at this flight. That balloon may be the largest and most successful billboard ever made.

For Richard Branson, this flight is business as usual.

By American standards, Richard Branson achieved success the hard way -- starting from scratch when he was 15 years old, and with only a high-school education, he built himself an international business empire and a $320-million (about ?200-million) personal fortune.

By British standards, he's done the next to impossible.

For one thing, he built his empire during one of Britain's darkest economic hours. Venture capital was scarce. Tax rates were crippling -- the top rate on unearned personal income was a staggering 98%. Strikes routinely hobbled companies large and small. Indeed, a postal strike forced him to abort one of his earliest ventures.

More important, perhaps, Branson did it without the cultural supports that American entrepreneurs take for granted. Here, it's OK to get rich, much more than OK if you do it by starting your own company. We've turned businesspeople into super-heroes -- Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, for example. Our business schools assign students class projects that later turn into multimillion-dollar enterprises. In Britain, however, the best money has been old money, or money earned in the practice of the professions. A survey commissioned by the British Venture Capital Association last year found that only 13% of executives in the United Kingdom believed people who ran their own businesses held the highest status in the country; 29% said such people had the lowest status.

So how did Richard Branson get to be such a hero?

At times his antics have shocked Britain, but overall, he's charmed the country. His continuing rebellion against the stodgy ways of the corporate establishment won him the admiration and the business of Britain's young, but also piqued the interest of the upper crust, known for its own seam of eccentricity. He's had an uncanny instinct for understanding what young people want -- he's sold cut-rate records, cut-rate air flights, and now, in one of his latest ventures, cut-rate condoms. And throughout he's let that instinct be his guide. When he sees an opportunity, he pursues it with an Andy Hardy-like ingenuousness: hey, everybody, let's put on a company!

It helps, too, that Britain's business culture is undergoing dramatic change. It's becoming all right to get rich in Britain. Maggie Thatcher says so. "He's a symptom of the ear," says Mick Brown, a London Sunday Times writer on leave to do Branson's biography. "At the same time, people can recognize in him a very English sort of sense of fair play and decency and modesty and good manners. He's that unusual combination, really, of all the things that people expect success and money to corrupt out of people."

Until lately, Branson says, entrepreneur has been a "dirty word" in Britain. "I'd perhaps like to think it's because some entrepreneurs are apt to flaunt their wealth in an ostentatious manner, which I've avoided doing." Some entrepreneurs, it turns out, means American entrepreneurs. "The stereotype of an American entrepreneur, to a lot of British people, is somebody who makes an awful lot of money, the 'Dallas' type, who rather misuses that money with big cars any yachts, basically on some massive presonal indulgence."

He is sitting now on the sun deck of a hotel at Maine's Sugarloaf Mountain, picking at a sandwich. Bad weather has postponed his flight, but he's rakishly dressed in a shiny green jumpsuit anyway. (In fact, he wears the same jumpsuit three days in a row.) He's speaking softly, periodically cupping his thumb and forefinger around his mustache and running his hand downward through his beard.

"It's important if you're successful that you set an example for the people who work for you in the way you conduct your life," he says. "You know, jumping on a train rather than jumping into a limousine, or going second class rather than first class. Little things are quite important."

Does Branson play the game as well as he talks it?

He drives a 1959 Bristol that cost him $5,000. He wears corduroys and sweaters, and claims he owns only one suit. Nonetheless, he was voted best-dressed man in Britain last year. On the day of the announcement, his mother spotted him wearing mismatched socks. No one can accuse him of selling out to the City, London's financial district -- he runs his empire from a barge on a canal in London's Little Venice, opposite old men and little boys busy fishing. And he's struggled to stay politically neutral, about as difficult to do in Britain as keeping out of the rain.