ONE afternoon, President Spyros Skouras of Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., who lives in the New York suburb of Rye, offered a lift home to his neighbor, Jed Harris, the New York theatrical producer. Harris accepted. This is what happened afterward, as he recalls it.

"First we drove to Philadelphia to attend the wedding of one of Spyros' Greek friends. Then we drove to Newark for the funeral of a second one. Between times we stopped off at half a dozen Greek restaurants, in each of which Spyros gave a banquet for a swarm of other friends, assembled on the spur of the moment. We got to Rye all right, but not until late the next afternoon."

In making a convivial odyssey out of what, for other Westchester commuters, is a monotonous 45-minute train or car ride, Spyros (rhymes with "hero") was behaving in characteristic fashion.What made the incident exceptional was that the strong-willed Harris eventually reached his original destination.

Skouras' hospitality is formidable fun. Business associates, invited to his country place for a "quiet lunchtime conference," are not surprised to find a dense crowd milling around on the lawn. When the group eventually thins out enough to cram itself into the dining room for dinner, it sometimes includes a hapless guest who came to the wrong house and found himself swept into the genial Greek maelstrom. Such lost souls generally look to Skouras like old friends. "Haven't seen r you for a long time," he will shout. "How's / everything in St. Louis?"

THE quality of impulsiveness discernible in Skouras' entertaining is still more marked in his major activities. Some years ago in Atlanta, Ga., Skouras was inspecting a million-dollar theater, a weak link in one of his chains. Arriving at the theater at 11 a.m., he found no one there except a youthful usher.

"Where's the manager?" he asked, without identifying himself except by his strong Greek accent, which the usher failed to recognize.

"He's not in yet," said the usher.

"Where's the assistant manager?"

"He's not in yet, either."

"Who runs the theater when the manager and the assistant manager aren't here?"

"I do," said the usher.

"From now on, you're the manager," said Skouras.

Skouras' impulsiveness pays off. His earnings, combined with those of the two brothers he calls Charlie (pronounced tsolly) and George (pronounced zuds), are reputed to top the takes of even such mighty families as the Shuberts and the Schencks. As president of Twentieth Century-Fox, Spyros heads the second biggest producing company in the world,* whose Hollywood studio, run by Vice President Darryl Zanuck, turns out some 40 feature pictures a year. As head of National Theaters, comprising some 550 houses scattered around the West, Charlie runs the nation's second largest theater chain. With younger brother George, who is president of a 70-house chain in the East, the Skouras family controls a sizable part of U.S. movie production.

Some five years ago, the antitrust division of the Department of Justice finally completed its Herculean task of dividing the producing end of the movie business from the theater-managing end, in which the Skourases had grown up. Spyros' producing company thereupon sold its stock in Charlie's theater company. The division was a legal and fiscal one, but it would take an agency far greater than the U.S. Government to sever the blood ties which bind the Skourases together. Those ties began in the Peloponnesian town of Skourahorion (Skourasville), founded by their grandfather in 1830, during the Greek War of Independence from the Turks.

"FOUNDING Grandfather Skouras was given Skourahorion and its environs as a place in which to settle his deserving soldiers, many of them relatives. His eldest son and heir dotted the community with churches and children. The departure of the third generation was led by Charles, the seventh in the family of ten, in 1907. Accustomed to towns fitted out with Skouras churches, filled with Skouras congregations, Charles Skouras found St. Louis, where he settled more or less by accident, sadly deficient on that count, but did his best to remedy its lacks. First he sent for Spyros and George, got all three of them jobs as bus boys at the Jefferson Hotel, and banked their wages with his. Then he invested their savings in a nickelodeon being built by some other St. Louis Greeks and patriotically called the Olympia. In due course the Skourases, acting as a financial unit, bought the Olympia from their compatriots, who were acting as individuals. The Olympia started the first Skouras theater chain, which within ten years numbered three dozen, including the biggest theater in town. Meanwhile, all three had married and started the U.S. Skouras line, which, with grandchildren, now totals 26.

Before the Depression, the hallmarks of Skouras theaters were lavish stage shows and ornate interiors which, if not Orthodox, specialized in the blazing Eastern splendor which helped establish the term "movie cathedral." After the Depression, they acquired even greater prestige by paying off their own debts and hiring out to rescue other chains--most notably those owned by Twentieth Century-Fox.

Meanwhile, with typical Skouras ebullience, George acquired culture, reading books by the libraryful. Charles is considered senior partner of the fraternity, while Spyros is the family's public figure.

For Skourases, television had no terrors. Charlie developed a superior breed of popcorn, popped on his own assembly line. Spyros undertook to out-TV TV by acquiring U.S. rights to a Swiss device called Eidophor, for large-screen televising of games, shows and political events (TIME, May 29, 1950).

NOWADAYS, Spyros is less interested in making money than in giving it away. When Greeks were starving during the war with Italy, Spyros was persuaded to take over a lackluster relief campaign. He not only raised $3,000,000 in three months, but also badgered the British and German governments into breaking their blockade to allow food ships to his native land. This gave him a taste for charity-organizing; since then he has raised money for the Red Cross, the Cancer Drives, the Greater New York Fund and United Jewish Appeal.

There is a legend that, back in their St. Louis days, the bull-necked Skourases sometimes wrestled film exhibitors for rentals. Today, their principal form of exercise is golf, but all three are still health fanatics and diet cranks. Skourases gobble quantities of fruit, cheese, olive oil and yogurt--the latter brewed from a culture developed by Mrs. Charles Skouras. Both Spyros and Charles have massage tables, heat cabinets and showers built into their offices, where, stripped to their fine coats of curly fur, they hold conferences, issue commands, and shout dictation to stenographers from whom they are concealed by screens. Not long ago, Spyros Skouras was cornered by a reporter who asked why he did not want to become Ambassador to Greece, a post for which his name has often been mentioned.

Said Skouras: "I think I can do more for my country in my private life"--a paradox which, true or false, lost nothing from its delivery in a steam bath.

-The biggest: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

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