The price of immortality
By STAFF Kate Ballen, Darienne L. Dennis, Alan Farnham, Stuart Gannes, Carrie Gottlieb, Julianne Slovak

(FORTUNE Magazine) – ^ As never before, immortality is for sale. What kind? The kind that comes when a donor cements his name to an institution: Stanford University, Carnegie Hall, Rhodes Scholarships, the Pulitzer Prize. Modern plutocrats are maintaining the tradition. Just look at the $10 million Kravis Women's and Children's Center, given by investment banker Henry Kravis to New York's Mount Sinai Medical Center. Many of today's most attractive naming opportunities are going fast, and prices soon may rise. Among the best bets for prospective eponyms: -- Buildings. Prime opportunities include classrooms at MIT ($50,000 each) and an athletic training facility at Yale ($500,000). When the Yale Bowl is renovated, it's conceivable you could get your name on it or, for a lesser sum, on the men's room. But buildings have a drawback when the donor's goal is eternal fame. As Yale fund raiser Terry Holcombe explains, ''Someone who endowed a professorship here in 1720 -- that's still around. If they endowed a building, it has probably been replaced.'' -- Chairs. Endowments that pay for a university professorship offer high- prestige permanence at prices from $375,000 (University of Nevada) to $2 million (for the most expensive chairs at Harvard). Here and there, buyer incentive plans can bring prices down considerably. At Florida State University, matching funds allow a $1 million chair, such as the Burt Reynolds Eminent Scholar Chair (currently occupied by eminent scholar and former loony actor Charles Nelson Reilly), to be had for as little as $600,000. -- Prizes and scholarships. Endowed funds are the most nearly permanent gifts, lasting as long as the institution they benefit. At Harvard they have been established for band players, newsboys, Confederate veterans' descendants, sons of widows from west of the Appalachians, and people named Murphy. -- Churches. At Washington's gothic National Cathedral, all the buttresses have been named but eight gargoyles (at $15,000 each) are still available. While regulations preclude a donor's giving in his own name, he could circumvent the rule by having his spouse donate in his name. Three of the cathedral's eight ''great pinnacles'' are still available, in whole ($400,000) or in constituent parts, which include 36 angels ($6,000 for big ones, $5,000 for small) and the heads of 32 animals: rhinos, praying mantises, pigs, bats, squirrels, wart hogs, cows, giraffes, and flies. So for $5,000 you can buy immortality for someone by putting atop the National Cathedral a fly's head, carved in stone, the size of a basketball. Maybe it's just as well you can't put your own name on it.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: BOB GALE CAPTION: YOUR NAME HERE (FOR A PRICE) DESCRIPTION: Amount needed for AIDS research center at Harvard, Yale Bowl, gorilla forest at Bronx Zoo, Harvard professorship, Yale Bowl men's room, National Cathedral gargoyle and MIT book fund. Color illustration: Stone gargoyle.