(FORTUNE Magazine) – Next month, the curtain will rise at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on a satirical theatrical production based on the life of Michael Milken. Choreographed by punk ballerina Karole Armitage and set to a hip-hop/industrial score, The Predators' Ball takes its audience through Milken's childhood, his ascent at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the opening of DBL's posh Beverly Hills offices, and Milken's dealings with Ivan Boesky. It culminates with his investigation and subsequent indictment at the hands of tough-guy prosecutor Rudy Giuliani (now the mayor of New York). At one point, Milken's famous X-shaped desk levitates above the stage to look like a puppeteer's control.

A moralizing punk satire recapitulating the life of the most prominent investment banker of his generation? A satire that ends with Milken's disgrace? Ouch!

Milkenologists may forever disagree on whether he is a hero or a scoundrel--even now, opinions of him seem to be strikingly without nuance--but Milken himself is working harder than anyone since Nixon to make sure, with what time he has left, that history will rehabilitate him. His prostate cancer in remission, he is underwriting a huge effort--called CaP CURE--to assault the disease for mankind. He pursues his philanthropies with a zeal that is rare for tycoons of his vintage. His two public-relations people are former political consultants.

He is also these days, to a surprising and remarkable degree, a player. He taps CEOs like MCI's Bert Roberts and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch to be a part of his annual education conference. The Milken Institute for Job and Capital Formation is gaining visibility as a think tank. All this leaves Milken very connected, enabling him to speak regularly with academics, scientists, politicians, and corporate executives. Rare indeed is the person who doesn't return a phone call from Milken. Even President Clinton called to wish him well at a CaP CURE dinner two years ago.

If Michael Milken was at the white-hot center of American business in the 1980s, he's not as far removed from the center of action in the 1990s as many might think. For instance, he and Oracle's Larry Ellison put up a combined $300 million to start a company called Education Technology, which hopes to mix, well, education and technology. His Milken Family Trust has made a handful of multimillion-dollar investments in such ventures as a London-based real estate company called Heron, and ICS Communications, which provides cable and phone service to apartment buildings. (Business Week recently reported that ICS has so far been a losing proposition.)

Milken, however, has also been playing a far more interesting--and controversial--role than passive investor, one that seems to require his conspicuous presence at the side of the small handful of moguls now engaged in nothing less than the wholesale reshaping of the global media business. Indeed, when the curtain falls on this year's big merger performances and the principals take their bows, there will stand Milken, looking a lot like the old Milken: the poster boy for preposterous compensation. In the $7.5 billion purchase of Turner Broadcasting by Time Warner (parent of FORTUNE's publisher), Milken stands to gain a $50 million "consulting" fee, this despite severe limits on the kind of advice he was legally allowed to give. That sum was so large--and so widely reported--that it apparently caused the SEC to open a fresh investigation of him, to see if he was violating the terms of his agreement with the agency.

Why would Milken, hell-bent on redemption, concerned with his own mortality--or immortality--do such a thing? For $50 million, stupid, you're saying. But wait a minute: he already has a net worth that's said to be roughly $500 million. And anyway, after taking a beating in the press, he says he will give most of the $50 million fee to cancer research ("after expenses"). If you were barred from the securities business, were less than three years out of jail, were racing to find a cure for your fatal illness, and were trying to avoid being remembered as the emblem of an entire decade's greed, is this how you would be drawing attention to yourself?

"I have never been motivated by money in my entire life," Michael Milken says, sitting at an inlaid walnut dining table in his spacious office in Santa Monica, California. He is wearing a casual black-on-black outfit, and a straight face. "It has never motivated me."

This will be news to the people who were on hand when Milken moved his junk-bond operation from New York in 1978, escaping the fusty atmosphere of Drexel's home office. In those days Milken's traders raced to work at 4:30 in the morning--Milken was known for always being the first one in the office--to explore and exploit the new world of leverage he had discovered. Money was their medium and their reward.

For a combination of reasons--the enormous sums Milken has made, his arrogance, his influence, his incarceration, the cynicism induced by his galumphing PR campaigns--the story of Milken is one that the culture still feels obliged to make mythic. It's not unlike the case of Jay Gould, remembered either as the financier who expanded America's railroads or as one of the great stock manipulators of his time. Milken, who probably made more money on Wall Street than anyone before him--$550 million in 1986 alone, for God's sake--has been understood, more symbolically than not, either as the martyr of free-market capitalism or as the guy who won because he played with marked cards. And he knows it.

For those who believe Milken is, if not evil incarnate, then close to it, the most persuasive spokesman is James B. Stewart, the former Wall Street Journal reporter whose account of Milken's reign as the junk-bond king is contained in his best-selling book, Den of Thieves. Milken, Stewart wrote, was at the center of "the greatest criminal conspiracy the financial world has ever known." In Stewart's portrayal, virtually every Milken transaction is in some way corrupt. Even in his personal dealings, Milken is described as a heartless monster. According to a close friend, one of the anecdotes in the book that infuriated Milken--and which he heatedly disputes--concerned his supposed callousness when one of his top lieutenants had to leave the office to attend to his mother, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. According to Stewart, Milken expressed no sympathy, asking only, "When are you going to be back?"

Milken's supporters argue, on the other hand, that he ranks among the great men of the second half of the 20th century. In this view, junk bonds were one of the singular innovations of the postwar age. The combination of this powerful new financial tool and Milken's shrewd understanding of what it could do for upstart companies starving for capital did as much to transform the modern business world as any single thing. Men like Craig McCaw and Ted Turner used junk bonds to build their companies, and in the process they changed the face of American business. If Milken himself became a billionaire in the process, who deserved it more? Oh, yes, and he also found time to tutor inner-city kids, establish a foundation that gave grants to teachers, and coach his kids' soccer team.

His crimes? Well, his supporters say, he may have committed some trivial securities violations, but in the main they claim that the government basically hounded Milken into pleading guilty for infractions that no one had ever gone to jail for before, using such repugnant stratagems as indicting his brother Lowell as a way to force him to fold. They point in particular to that moment, just before Milken's sentencing, when Judge Kimba Wood gave the government an unusual opportunity, in a so-called Fatico hearing, to make its strongest case against Milken. In their view, the prosecution fell short.

The loyalty of Milken's allies isn't just a matter of spin, nor is it explained by sympathy for his fight with cancer. The moguls he supported in the 1980s have remained intensely loyal to him in the 1990s. The multimillionaires who built their fortunes on Milken's bonds still value his counsel--and the fact that they do helps validate Milken's view of himself as a financial visionary.

One of the surprising things about meeting Milken is realizing how much he wants to win you over. The problem is that he wants you to view him as he views himself, a giant who was brought low by Lilliputians. He is obviously bitter about the press, but he tries not to let it show. He will talk forever about his prostate-cancer project or about how to fix the nation's schools. When he talks about his prosecution and imprisonment, it tends to be in wry shorthand ("I was taking a few arrows at that time"). At times he seems more like a hammy politician than someone who was once the most feared man on Wall Street. He name-drops shamelessly--and mentions "Oprah" and "Whoopi" as well as "Rupert" and "Ted"--and repeats the same anecdotes. The only sign of stress can be seen on the little finger of his right hand: Its nail and fingertip have been chewed mercilessly. "He's the most unreflective smart person I've ever met," says someone who has spent a good deal of time with him since he emerged from prison--as Truman Capote once said of Andy Warhol, "he's a sphinx without a riddle."

When the conversation turns to an area where he doesn't want to go, he instinctively becomes opaque and distant. Once, during an exchange about his Time Warner-Turner fee, he was told, "There are people in the investment banking world grumbling about this. They go back to the old greedy thing." He replied, "I'm not sure what the old greedy thing is."

Milken has been involved in three big deals since getting out of jail--not just any deals, but major realignments in the hot crucible of the media business. Besides the Time Warner-Turner acquisition, Milken played a role in MCI's agreement to invest up to $2 billion in Murdoch's News Corp., and in Murdoch's deal with Ron Perelman, in which Perelman's New World television stations became Fox-TV affiliates while Fox invested $500 million in New World.

A striking aspect of these deals is how much they resemble what most of us think of as investment banking, which may well be why the SEC is looking at them to determine whether Milken has violated the agency's order. (His probation, due to have ended March 1, has been extended several times by Wood while the investigation continues.) In effect, Milken is bringing together businessmen who have a commonality of interest, and suggesting that they join forces.

Milken and his lawyer, Richard Sandler, both insist, however, that everything he did was well within the parameters of the order, which bars Milken indefinitely from "association with any broker, dealer, investment adviser, investment company or municipal securities dealer." Beyond that, though, the standard for what he can and cannot do is murky. The closest thing to a specific legal standard in matters like this is a collection of letters that the SEC staff has written to others who have entered into similar agreements. Some letters say a consultant would be considered an investment adviser if he became an "integral" part of a negotiation. Other letters say a consultant wouldn't be considered an investment adviser if his role in a negotiation was a "limited" one. What constitutes "integral" and "limited," of course, is ultimately up to the SEC.

Before he began his post-prison consulting career, Milken sought the advice of Richard Phillips, a partner at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart and a former assistant general counsel at the SEC, who is regarded as a dean of securities law. "What we told him," Phillips says, "is that nothing precludes you from being a business consultant. If consulting results in a securities transaction, stay away from negotiating the terms of securities. Stay away from valuing securities and from structuring securities. And stay far away from rendering investment advice or assistance."

Other former SEC enforcers agree that Milken has every right to be a consultant--but say they still might have advised him not to do it. Lawrence Iason, at the New York law firm Morvillo Abramowitz Grand Iason & Silberberg, who headed the New York office of the SEC, says, "I would have told him I don't think it's a violation, but you are going to come under intense scrutiny, so you might not want to do it. But I also might have done a cost-benefit analysis and said, 'If you're going to get $50 million, it might be worth it.'"

The way Milken tells the Time Warner-Turner story, Ted Turner came to him in early-summer 1995, after he realized that Murdoch had Milken on retainer, and said that he wanted to put Milken on retainer too. (How flattering to be hired by two such direct and ornery competitors; how fraught with potential conflicts of interest too.) At the time Turner was angling to make a bid for CBS. Though it's been reported that Milken was helping Turner in this effort, Milken insists that the opposite is true: "I told Ted that I did not believe CBS was in the best interest of Turner." He continues: "I was quite concerned about Ted's energy and focus level...I felt that CBS would be a divergence."

When Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin approached Turner about combining their two companies, Milken says he was as surprised as anyone--and immediately enthusiastic. ("I felt that it was a phenomenal opportunity for Ted.") As meetings progressed between the parties--which included former Drexel client John Malone, who as CEO of the cable company TeleCommunications Inc. controlled 22% of Turner Broadcasting, and stood to become the largest shareholder of the newly merged company if the deal went through--Milken quickly assumed an advisory role. He remembers an early meeting, in Denver, which Turner didn't even attend. "It was a meeting between Time Warner and TCI, and I represented Ted."

One theory is that Turner, in particular, was perfectly happy to pay Milken $50 million for his work on the Time Warner deal as a kind of payback for services rendered in the old days, when Milken's financing was so important to Turner Broadcasting's success. Not surprisingly, Milken disputes this theory. (Reportedly, Time Warner is paying $40 million of Milken's fee, and Turner is paying the rest.) A second theory holds that Levin and Turner were paying him, in effect, to rope in the notoriously stubborn and prickly Malone. On this point Milken demurs. "I wouldn't go that far," he says. "John only does what he's interested in doing." (Malone, Levin, and Turner declined to be interviewed.)

There is another theory, though, that the money was paid to neutralize Milken himself. Partly because Milken has so many important friends in the media business, and partly because of his consultant's role with Ted Turner, it was critical to have his approval of the deal. With Milken's blessing, all the parties would feel that much more secure about what they were trying to accomplish--after all, the one and only Michael Milken was saying it made sense. But if he decided he didn't like the deal, that could have serious implications too. He could whisper to Turner that he should turn away from Time Warner, for instance. Or he could even cook up another deal involving Time Warner by, say, bringing Perelman into the picture, or by stirring up MCA's Edgar Bronfman, who still holds 15% of Time Warner stock. By that calculation, $50 million could be viewed as a small price to pay.

And how was this remarkable fee arrived at? "The compensation was a function of value created for clients," Milken says blandly. "I think we provided a great deal of value to the transaction." Granted, but $50 million worth? "The fee was decided by Turner and Time Warner, and they told us what it would be and we accepted it," he says. Was it true that he had originally suggested a fee as large as $200 million? "I think the issues were that, if it was a $10 billion transaction [Milken took the $7.5 billion purchase and added the $2.5 billion of Turner debt that Time Warner will assume], 2% would be $200 million," he replied. "If it was 1% it would be $100 million, if it was one-half of a percent it would be $50 million." In other words, this was the low end. (Note: Because the deal involves a stock swap, it was originally valued at $7.5 billion, based on the price of Time Warner stock, which then stood at $41 per share. With the subsequent decline of the stock, it is now valued at $6 billion.)

So let's get this straight: Milken is saying--nay, insisting--that he did not serve as a bona fide investment banker. He is also claiming that his fee isn't payback from Turner. He also didn't dream up the deal, and was limited by the government in the advice he could give. So how can he possibly justify $50 million?

Maybe it's simply because he really believes that his presence at a negotiation--"sprinkling holy water," as they used to say in the 1980s--is worth that much. What's perhaps more amazing--and what speaks volumes about the way Milken is still perceived in many an executive suite--is that the dealmakers who have that kind of money to hand out also believe he's worth it.

And then there's cancer. Michael Milken had been home from prison only six hours when he got the phone call. "There's an error in the PSA test," his internist said. It was February 1993. Milken had gone for a complete physical after leaving prison for a halfway house and had told his internist he wanted a test for prostate-specific antigen, which can indicate the presence of prostate cancer. The doctor told him it wasn't necessary, since he was only 46. "I had just had a very close friend, Steve Ross, pass away from prostate cancer," Milken explains. "I said I wanted it. He persisted. I told him, 'Could you humor me, please?'"

It turned out that Milken did have prostate cancer; further tests showed that it had metastasized to the lymph glands in the pelvis, which meant he wasn't a candidate for surgery. Milken underwent hormone therapy, and a course of radiation to kill off any residual cancer cells. In three months his PSA hit zero. "Of the patients whose PSA drops quickly," Milken said, "about 10% live less than another six months and about 10% live more than ten years. The vast majority survive three to five years. So by the summer of 1993 I knew I was in the three- to five-year expectation range. And I had to figure out what I was going to do to extend that."

For most people the idea of fighting cancer is intensely personal, and no doubt it is to Michael Milken too. Still, with Milken everything, it seems, has to involve a Big Idea. Within weeks of his diagnosis he had founded CaP CURE, described as a kind of "Manhattan Project" for prostate cancer by his doctor, Stuart Holden, who also serves as CaP CURE's medical director. So far Milken has contributed $17.5 million and has raised another $23 million. A rich patient's folly? Hardly. Milken is able to muster serious firepower, including scientists at the cutting edge of cancer research and a board of directors who can make things happen--including, among others, Intel's Andy Grove and MCI's Bert Roberts. (A separate CaP CURE "presidential board" includes all four living ex-presidents.)

The effort, now nearly three years old, is as central to Milken's life as junk bonds and Drexel Burnham Lambert used to be. In Milken's own mind, the link is terribly close: "I rightly or wrongly believe that all the aggravation I had contributed to my cancer."

CaP CURE is trying to speed up the search for a prostate cancer cure by applying some hardheaded organizational principles to it. For instance, one of its major undertakings is to look for 1,000 American families in which two or more living family members have prostate cancer, collect tissue samples from them, and see what genetic links they have in common. Then Milken wants to put the data on the Internet, so that every researcher and medical entrepreneur in the world will be able to use them. Some believe that CaP CURE's work has the potential to revolutionize the way medical research is conducted.

Team Six, Team Six, are we ready to go? Ten seconds! 49 x 41. That's right, 2,009! Fan-tas-tic. Give me five!" It is late afternoon at Mount Vernon Middle School on the edge of South Central Los Angeles. Milken is conducting a session of Mike's Math Club. This is the Mike Milken that he most wants the world to see. In brown corduroys, scuffed brown loafers, and a Mike's Math Club T-shirt, Milken paces happily back and forth in front of a chalkboard, teaching mathematics to inner-city kids.

One of the raps on Milken has been that he got involved in education solely as part of his "redemption campaign." There's no question that his most high-profile educational efforts--the National Educator awards and Milken Scholars awards--were first handed out in the mid-1980s when Milken was under investigation. There's also no question he likes to use these scenes to polish his image. But they aren't fake. Milken has been tutoring troubled kids since 1978.

Glenn Levant, a beefy Los Angeles former narcotics cop who ran the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program where Milken served his 5,400 hours of community service, says, "In 1983, I was down in Watts in an elementary school. I saw this guy in a suit. He had this entourage of kids following him around. It was clear he was very popular." After discovering that the man's name was Mike Milken--not that the name meant much to him at the time--Levant introduced himself and complimented him on the work he was doing. He adds, "I also wanted to give him some safety tips, because he was driving a Mercedes alone in that part of town."

Milken doesn't drive himself much anymore, but he has a self-deprecating explanation for why that's the case: He says he used to do so many things while driving that he kept having collisions. "I've run into walls. I've hit parked cars. I used to read the newspaper when I drove in to work, and I would have the all-news station on...I think when cellular telephones came in, it was the straw that broke the camel's back."

Michael Milken turned 50 on the Fourth of July. He celebrated the occasion with a gala four-day party at his new, $42 million, 30,000-square-foot vacation home on Lake Tahoe (see photo on the Contents page). The 150 guests included Steve Wynn, Murdoch, Ellison, and the governor of Nevada, Bob Miller. Even that celebration was colored by his fight with cancer. In between the birthday dinner and the square dancing and the golf and tennis and fireworks, guests attended seminars on nutrition and health Milken had organized.

Focused as he is on his immortality (or at least how he will be remembered), Milken is also of course absorbed with his own mortality. He has a special chef to prepare totally fat-free meals. He used to get by on four hours of sleep a night; now it's closer to six. He has also made a conscious effort to slow down a bit. After his diagnosis, he went to see Deepak Chopra, the Indian doctor and spiritual healer, at the Maharishi Ayur-Veda Health Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts. Milken spent a week there with a group that included his wife, Lori, and Michael Jackson. "Chopra presents the concept that there is a common collective thought that if positively used can affect the course of history and events and even one's health," he says. "I decided I would engage in those theories and put my mind to it."

Milken continues on hormone therapy. He also has a PSA test run every month. Today all tests show no evidence of cancer in his prostate or his lymph nodes. Still, he knows the clock is ticking. For several months he and his doctor, Stuart Holden, have been discussing whether he should try chemotherapy in what Holden calls "a kind of preemptive strike to stave off a recurrence." Milken has decided to hold a discussion of the issue at CaP CURE's annual scientific retreat this month before deciding.

History's judgment of Milken will never be what he wants it to be, of course. Just as Nixon will be remembered as the President who resigned because of Watergate--as well as the President who reopened relations with China--Milken will be recalled as the moneyman who went to jail when the financial fever of the 1980s broke, as well as a genius who almost single-handedly reshaped capital markets. So why must he work so assiduously on his myth? Why can't he let it go?

Clearly he is involved in things that are good and sincere. Just as clearly, it would never occur to him to do all these good works anonymously, and he can make them easy to ridicule, as he did when he took 1,600 kids to a Mets game during the height of the SEC investigation. Milken's war on cancer is a noble undertaking indeed, but there is no question that he must be its general, its quarterback--its beacon. This is just part of Milken's deal.

Once, when Milken was asked whether it had been hard for him to slow down, he leaned over his elegantly inlaid table and stared out at some distant spot across the room. His answer was uncharacteristically blunt. "Death," he said, "and a high probability of death, is a great motivator."

REPORTER ASSOCIATES Anne Faircloth and Erin M. Davies