(FORTUNE Magazine) – REUBEN MARK had been chief executive of Colgate-Palmolive just a few months when his secretary buzzed him on the intercom. ''Sir James Goldsmith is on the phone,'' she said. Uh-oh. Goldsmith, the Anglo-French financier, has made a nice living buying poorly run companies and putting them back in order. He already held nearly a 5% stake in Colgate, and now he was thinking of increasing it. ''Naturally the adrenaline started flowing,'' Mark recalls. He had outlined publicly his plans for reviving Colgate. He reviewed them with Goldsmith and added pointedly, ''I think we can do it better ourselves.'' They talked several more times before the man who had shortened the career of many a C.E.O. backed off. ''Mark was going to do to Colgate exactly what I would have done,'' Goldsmith says. ''So instead of fighting him, I got behind him.'' After Mark emerged from the lion's den and carried out his plans, people at Colgate wondered whether the upheaval would have been any less complete had ( Goldsmith persevered. Mark laid off employees and closed plants. He removed a cumbersome layer of management, pushed decision-making down through the ranks, and fostered an entrepreneurial spirit that had been as heretical at Colgate as brushing with Crest. Like a faith healer, he got Colgate to throw down its crutches and walk without a limp. In fact, under Mark's leadership the company is strutting. Net income has climbed from $71 million to $177.5 million in two years, Colgate's stock price has more than doubled, and operating profits as a percentage of sales have nearly tripled since Mark took over in 1984. The boss doesn't strut himself; secure and confident, he doesn't have to. Colgate director Vernon Alden, former head of the Boston Co., a financial services firm, remembers touring company facilities in the Far East in 1985 with Mark and Keith Crane, the man Mark had succeeded as chief executive. ''Keith was born in New Zealand,'' says Alden. ''Even though Reuben was C.E.O., the Far East was still Keith's territory. Reuben understood. He stood in the wings a lot and let Keith take the bows.'' Shortish (5 feet 8 inches) and trim, Mark, 48, dresses sharply in pin- striped suits. He often wears a company tie and cuff links. He is bald on top, and since his ascent to chief executive he has grown his hair longer in back. It curls at the collar, with a sort of European flair. A limousine shuttles Mark between his Manhattan office and his house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and he clearly likes to fly on the company plane. But he also pays for all his personal phone calls from the office. Most top managers fit comfortably into the role of sleek executive, but they are less adept at playing the humble role of Everyman. Mark mingles as easily with shampoo bottlers in a Colgate plant as he does with fellow C.E.O.s. On a recent trip to the company's facilities in Mexico City, he disarmed nervous employees by joking in fluent Spanish. ''I remember as a young boy walking with my father, who was treasurer of a food company, through one of their plants,'' Mark says. ''A worker who was stirring something in a huge vat yelled down with a big grin, 'Hi, Mr. Mark,' and my father called back, 'How you doing, George?' It meant a lot to me that my father, a management guy, had a good relationship with people in the plant.'' Those smooth transitions between executive suite and assembly line aren't for show; Mark is just unpretentious. He recalls hurrying home one Saturday afternoon from a business trip via company jet, helicopter, and limousine so he could work with one of his sons on an old Jeep they had bought for $400. ''I had to drive to Stamford to get some parts,'' he recalls. ''But then the Jeep broke down and I had to hitchhike to a truck stop for help.'' Experiences like that keep things in perspective. So does another weekend project Mark has taken on now that his daughter and two sons are in college. When his schedule permits, he and his wife, Arlene, a psychologist who counsels delinquent children, drive to lower Manhattan to work with a seventh-grade class of students who have learning disabilities. Mark was born in Jersey City, the industrial town that then housed Colgate's headquarters and its biggest U.S. plant. The family moved to Great Neck on Long Island before his first birthday. Mark left home for the first time at 17 to study economics at Middlebury College in Vermont. After graduating in 1960, he spent six months as an Army officer before heading to Harvard Business School, where he earned his MBA in 1963. He had heady company. Classmates included Frank Lorenzo (now head of Texas Air), Vernon Loucks (chief executive of Baxter Travenol Laboratories), Frederick Joseph (chief executive of Drexel Burnham Lambert), and William Agee (former chairman of Bendix). Mark ran the business school snack bar during his second year. Says William Crozier, another classmate who is now chairman of BayBanks Inc., a Boston holding company: ''I'll never forget him standing there in his apron, flipping burgers.'' Standing behind the grill built cash as well as character. ''The snack bar was the closest place to go for food and drink, so the guys who ran it really raked in the money,'' says one business school graduate. Mark ran up still more profits during dormitory poker games. Says Agee: ''I never played with him, but I heard he was very talented.'' AFTER HARVARD Mark mulled offers from Colgate, which had moved its headquarters to New York, and its archrival, Procter & Gamble. Why did he choose Colgate? ''I didn't want to move to Cincinnati,'' he says. A friend proposes another reason: ''I think he felt he could probably move faster and higher at Colgate. It just wasn't as competitive internally as P&G.'' Mark did rise rapidly. By 1972 he was running the company's Venezuelan subsidiary. Colgate's international operations have always been important proving grounds for executives because the company traditionally earns more than half of its profits overseas. After Venezuela, Mark took over the Canadian company and then the Far Eastern division. When he returned to New York in 1979, it was as group vice president of Colgate's domestic operations. Just as Mark settled into his job, Colgate was shaken by the ouster of chief executive David Foster, a fiery man who had run the company since 1971. Foster was undone by a rocky relationship with the board of directors and a series of misguided diversifications into sports, food, and other industries. ''Profits from the core businesses propped up Foster's acquisitions,'' says William Shanahan, now a senior executive vice president. ''That squeezed us financially and stifled important things such as new product development and plant modernization.'' Colgate earnings sank. In came Keith Crane, who had joined Colgate New Zealand in 1937 as a mail clerk. He began to refocus the company on its three main businesses -- household and personal care products, health care, and specialty marketing. (Besides Colgate toothpaste and Palmolive soap, the company makes such familiar items as Ajax cleanser and Fab detergent.) Crane created a three-person management team to advise him. Mark was a key member. CRANE'S RESTRUCTURING caused little excitement. ''Keith was an introvert,'' says Jack Salzman, a security analyst with Goldman Sachs. ''And he was not inclined to make a lot of rapid decisions.'' He was also the prototypical Colgate boss, ruling with a stifling, autocratic hand. ''The culture had always been closed,'' says a former company executive. ''People had a very narrow vision of the future. After all his years at Colgate, Keith was not about to change the way they did business.'' So even though Crane moved in the right direction, shedding unwanted subsidiaries and slowly improving the health of Colgate's main product lines, investors hardly noticed. ''Colgate was Dullsville,'' says Hercules Segalas, a security analyst for Drexel Burnham Lambert. ''Crane never talked to the investment community, and as a result it just wasn't the kind of company investors felt comfortable with.'' It's unlikely that Mark, even with his newfound power, felt comfortable himself. ''Reuben had a perennial itch,'' says Philip Beekman, a former executive at Colgate who is now head of Hook-SupeRx, a Cincinnati drug company. ''He always wanted to change, to do things better. He must have found + it frustrating biding his time under Crane.'' Mark still keeps whatever reservations he had to himself. Says another former Colgate executive: ''I think he remained quiet because he seemed to know, as all of us at the company did, that it was only a matter of time before he got the chairmanship. There was no sense in rocking the boat.'' When Crane stepped down in 1984, Mark took over. ''I was delighted,'' Segalas says, ''but I was not surprised.'' Even Mark's rivals lauded his promotion. ''I was deeply disappointed that I didn't get the job,'' says Roderick Turner, a senior executive vice president at Colgate and a member of Crane's advisory triumvirate. ''But it was pretty clear that Reuben was a damn good choice. He was always very humane, very courteous. When he battled, he did it in front of you, not behind your back.'' Mark transformed Colgate, using his energy and salesmanship to inculcate a set of business principles so basic they could have come from any introductory management course. But they were desperately needed. As Mark says, ''We had to take the handcuffs off.'' He announced 11 corporate initiatives designed to do everything from lower Colgate's production costs to speed up the development of new products. (''We originally had ten initiatives,'' he recalls, ''but that sounded too biblical.'') And he set out to make profits as important as market share. It all sounds remarkably simple, but, Segalas says, ''Profit had not been in the Colgate lexicon for years.'' Mark toured Colgate's overseas facilities and sent out quarterly videotapes to keep the outposts abreast of progress and to reinforce his goals. ''I wanted to foment independent action and encourage people to take risks,'' he says. Recently Mark met in Mexico City with several of his managers. They proposed that the Mexican subsidiary import some idle equipment from a Colgate plant in the U.S. ''It was a complicated proposal that usually would have required reams of paperwork and approval from a lot of people,'' says Michael Tangney, head of Colgate Mexico. ''After we explained it to Reuben, he said, in effect, 'Do what you think is best, and I'll back you.' That doesn't mean we are not accountable. But Reuben listens to what we have to say, and he can make a decision very quickly.'' Mark admits that it is sometimes hard to back off. ''I'm a line guy, and I like the action,'' he says. ''But we had good people around the world. We had to let them operate, and we had to reward them.'' Nothing rewards like money, naturally. Mark began giving stock to Colgate workers for innovative suggestions and cost-cutting ideas. Executives cashed in too; for the first time, they began getting incentive bonuses. Always the motivator, Mark relied on other techniques as well. ''Reuben gave his work a very personal touch,'' says Beekman. ''He spent hours on airplanes writing postcards to people, remembering their birthdays or anniversaries.'' Unlike his predecessors, Mark meets often with analysts and institutional investors to talk up Colgate. The results have been bullish. ''He spoke at a seminar I arranged, and by the time he got done talking, everybody wanted to run right out and buy Colgate stock,'' says Emma Hill, an analyst with Wertheim Schroder & Co. ''I've never seen anything like it.'' That support helped when Goldsmith made his run at the company. Institutional investors held on to their Colgate stock because they were convinced Mark had the right stuff. Says Segalas: ''More than any other chairman I have seen, Reuben has Wall Street eating out of his hands.'' BUT MARK will have to do more at Colgate to satisfy Wall Street's voracious appetite for profits. His biggest challenges lie ahead. Last year Procter & Gamble and Unilever, Colgate's chief competitors, each had sales at least three times the $5 billion Colgate registered. Although the falling dollar has helped Colgate's profits overseas, the U.S. division, which Mark ran for two years, earned only $189 million before taxes on sales of $2.3 billion last year. Because Colgate competes in a mature market with sluggish growth, it can thrive only by acquiring companies with proven products that fit nicely with its own businesses or by introducing successful new products. All the while, Mark must keep his workers pumped up and find new ways to operate his company more efficiently. Some old Colgate hands worry that Mark is still shackled by remnants of the culture he has tried to exorcise. Says one: ''Colgate doesn't have that killer instinct. Reuben has a few good people around him, but he is going to need better horses pulling the cart before he can take Colgate further.'' Most security analysts concur with Salzman of Goldman Sachs, who says, ''Mark has revived a company that was scared of its own shadow. But how will he do now that earnings are back where they should have been all along? The greatness of Reuben Mark has yet to be determined.'' True enough. Even Mark admits that much remains to be done. But in persuading a bunch of soap and toothpaste makers to believe in themselves again, Mark has put a shine back on Colgate.

CHART: INVESTOR'S SNAPSHOT COLGATE-PALMOLIVE

SALES (LATEST FOUR QUARTERS) $5.0 BILLION CHANGE FROM YEAR EARLIER UP 10% NET PROFIT $177.5 MILLION CHANGE UP 6% RETURN ON COMMON STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY 18% FIVE-YEAR AVERAGE 14% RECENT SHARE PRICE $45.50 PRICE/EARNINGS MULTIPLE 18 TOTAL RETURN TO INVESTORS (12 MONTHS TO 4/10) 23% PRINCIPAL MARKET NYSE