(FORTUNE Magazine) – MARRY a savvy strategist and a meticulous tactician and what do you get? Maxicare Health Plans Inc., the health maintenance organization that doubled its size to $1.6 billion in annual revenues in 1986 with the acquisitions of HealthAmerica Corp. and HealthCare USA. Now far and away the biggest publicly held HMO, Maxicare operates in 25 states, working with 20,000 physicians and more than 1,600 hospitals and pharmacies to serve some two million members. The strategist behind this empire is Fred Wasserman, chairman and chief executive; the tactician is Pamela Anderson, president and chief operating officer. Wasserman, 47, and Anderson, 40, are also man and wife. The business partnership began even before Maxicare, when Wasserman hired Anderson in 1973 to help him run his management consulting practice aimed at Southern California doctors and dentists. The two had met at UCLA, where they were studying for master's degrees in public health. Says Anderson: ''Fred was getting everybody in our class jobs, so I said, 'How about me?' '' Later that year they started Maxicare with $27,000 from their savings and a $10,000 bank loan; at year's end they got married. By 1982 they had built Maxicare's membership to 140,000, and they burst out of California with an aggressive program of acquisitions and joint ventures. Wasserman would find promising HMOs in new markets and negotiate the deals. Anderson would wade in to integrate the operations and make the acquisitions work. Wasserman has a doctorate in public health as well as an MBA and teaches a course on health-care management at UCLA. More important, he is an exuberant and extroverted marketer who takes an unusual approach to growth. Many HMOs expand mainly into markets where hospitals and doctors, in overabundant supply, are willing to provide HMO services at a deep discount because they need the business. Wasserman, who is determined to build a national network, can't single out glutted markets -- and doesn't want to. He seeks prestigious health care providers and typically offers them a generous cut of premiums or a joint venture partnership. Says security analyst Margo Vignola of L.F. Rothschild Unterberg Towbin: ''Wasserman's profit margins may be lower than those of other HMOs because he doesn't walk in with a stick, but he will get more members in the end.'' Absorbing HealthAmerica will be the biggest test yet of Anderson's skills; the company is in disarray after an acquisition orgy. But she has already hooked about half of its operations into Maxicare's elaborate computer network. Says she: ''The HealthAmerica people are actually dismayed at how much we've been able to do in a short time.'' When husband and wife discuss operations together, the conversation has the air of a tennis match in which the object is to keep the ball airborne. For example, Wasserman positively revels in Maxicare's electronic mail system. ''When you're on the network, you're part of the company,'' he says, as Anderson points to the terminal in their New York City corporate apartment. Wasserman: ''As each of HealthAmerica's HMOs is added to our network, it begins to feel like it's part of the family.'' Anderson: ''Now we ask executives if they can type. I send 15 to 20 messages a day.'' Wasserman: ''There's very little pencil pushing here.'' The couple work in offices deliberately set far apart in the company's Los Angeles headquarters -- generally he's there ten hours a day, she 14. When they find free time, they spend it at their 1928 art deco home in Beverly Hills, once occupied by Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan, where Wasserman tends a formal garden that includes 90 rosebushes. Both love to travel, and, says Anderson, ''with this new acquisition I'm seeing parts of the U.S. I didn't think I'd ever see.'' Though their joint travels may worry shareholders, Dr. Charles Lewis, the professor in whose course they met and who is now a Maxicare board member, says: ''It's not a case where you would insist on separate planes. Neither would function worth a damn without the other.''