(FORTUNE Magazine) – B.I. and A.I. may not be traditional historical markers. But they capture the two distinct periods in the history of CEO celebrity. Before Iacocca--as in Lee Iacocca, anointed as Chrysler's "savior" a quarter century ago--the vast majority of corporate managers were virtually invisible to the outside world. Sure, entrepreneurs like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Thomas Watson had always loomed large in American mythology. They were creators, builders, the personification of everything that is good about America. But corporate executives were different. Bureaucrats and company men, they connoted conformity and compromise, the suppression of individuality. Even when corporate executives were legends in their fields--think Alfred Sloan or Pierre du Pont II--they weren't likely to penetrate the consciousness of the average person.

That all changed After Iacocca. As it happens, the fulcrum for that transformation is located in the middle of the 50-year history of the FORTUNE 500. Around 1980, Iacocca started appearing in advertisements that sought to move K-Cars based on his own credibility as Chrysler's chief executive. His new prominence, says Harvard professor Rakesh Khurana, author of Searching for a Corporate Savior, "set off a chain of events that gave rise to the celebrity CEO." An ever-growing group of corporate commanders was elevated, if that is the right word, from managers to personas. The next two decades represented a historical departure--a moment when managers were front and center and companies were, like, cool. From Jack Welch and Lou Gerstner (oops, Sir Lou--he was knighted three years ago) to the last word in celebrity CEOs, Al Dunlap, corporate leaders could suddenly generate a crowd, get a table at a hot Manhattan restaurant, or sell a million copies of their autobiographies. They were heroes. Until, of course, they weren't.

OVER THE DECADES, THE IMAGE OF COMMERCE has risen and fallen along with economic cycles and the currents of history. In the 1950s the business of America may have been business, but that hardly conferred glamour on big corporations. "In the postwar years, when we were still imbued with the afterglow of the war," says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, an associate dean at the Yale School of Management, "warriors were a lot more the focus of celebration and attention than the man in the gray flannel suit. Death of a Salesman, The Organization Man--it's no accident that you had such a clustering in the literature that also reflects where society's fascination is." A job at a big corporation was something to be endured, not celebrated. The antiestablishment mood of the '60s only made that image worse. Then came the economic doldrums of the '70s. Oil shocks, recessions, and the decline of manufacturing had humbled American industry.

It was a perfect time for a man on a white horse. Enter Lee Iacocca, a man who had been unceremoniously fired as Ford's president. He rode to Chrysler's rescue by orchestrating a massive federal bailout and union concessions. The automaker rebounded--and somehow the world forgot that anyone other than Iacocca had been involved in the turnaround (he didn't seem that inclined to remind them). Charismatic and straight-talking, Iacocca was a star, plain and simple. His autobiography became a giant hit. He even became popular enough to be discussed as a potential U.S. presidential candidate.

All of a sudden, you couldn't turn on your television without seeing a CEO. Dark-suited chieftains of such corporate giants as AT&T, MasterCard, McDonald's, and Consolidated Foods became ubiquitous in a forum that had previously been reserved for eccentric car dealers and homespun entrepreneurs. "Show business is awful," Iacocca complained to FORTUNE in 1980. But for the, um, good of the company, he soldiered on, palling around with Frank Sinatra in ads and eventually appearing in some 80 different Chrysler promotions.

Not everyone loved the CEO-on-camera trend. Advertising people saw it as an ego-driven "nightmare," as veteran adwoman Linda Kaplan Thaler puts it. "You always wanted to flatter the CEO by at least approaching it as a possibility," she recalls. "Very often you'd have people say, 'The CEO doesn't want to be in the ad.' Then you'd find out that, lo and behold, he really wanted to be in it." A generation of TV viewers would suffer the consequences: an endless parade of wooden, "sincere" corporate executives.

Still, in the early '80s some managers remained hesitant to be too visible. After all, they were more likely to be disparaged than celebrated in the popular press. For example, GE's Jack Welch rose to prominence in the early '80s--but only as "Neutron Jack," the man who laid off thousands of workers. Back then the media identified more with the jobless worker than with the highly paid executive.

As the '80s wore on, however, the tone would begin to change. New species of businessmen were emerging. So-called corporate raiders, men like Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens, and Saul Steinberg, generated oodles of press as swashbuckling figures taking on America's corporations. Ditto for arbitrageurs and junk bond salesmen. You might not have the first notion of what such people did, but there was a good chance you knew who Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken were. Indeed, it was a decade of epic stories: the RJR Nabisco drama; Boesky, Milken, and others going down in flames for violating securities laws. Bestsellers such as Barbarians at the Gate and movies such as Wall Street only cemented the image of businessmen as alpha males in high-stakes contests for supremacy.

Meanwhile the rise of high-tech companies was focusing attention on another group of leaders. Tech products were new, and the average person could barely understand what they did, much less how they operated. It was easier for the companies to sell the image of their CEO, says Lou Hoffman, who heads a Silicon Valley public relations agency of the same name. And so a whole new generation of founder-CEOs, men like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison, came to personify their aggressive young companies. Moreover, they showed themselves to be almost as adept at image management as they were at inventing products and building companies. Gates spent countless hours shrewdly cultivating reporters and built a press apparatus that raised his profile--Gates showed up as one of People's 25 Most Intriguing People as early as 1983 and made the cover of Time a year later.

The publicity affected certain CEOs like a drug. They began to yearn for ever more press attention, says Howard Rubenstein, who has handled publicity at various points for figures ranging from Rupert Murdoch and Ron Perelman to Donald Trump and George Steinbrenner. Sometime in the mid-1980s, he recalls, corporate titans moved from being content to have their own publicist to hiring extra ones for their trophy wives so that they could snag mentions in Town & Country and People.

Meanwhile, droves of Americans had become investors for the first time, and they grew entranced with the financial markets. That fueled huge growth in the business media, most notably with the founding of CNBC in 1989. The cable channel not only made on-camera appearances a regular part of the CEO lifestyle but also paved the way for even newer breeds of celebrity. Heretofore obscure titles, such as mutual fund manager and stock analyst, could now find the word "star" attached to them. An investor (and a CEO himself), Warren Buffett, had arguably replaced Walter Cronkite as the most trusted figure in America. So vaunted would his reputation become that an investor would later bid $250,000 in a charity auction for the right to have lunch with him.

By the mid-1990s, business was downright sexy. Revlon's Ron Perelman was hobnobbing with actresses and supermodels, and nobody saw that as strange. Every company's stock, it seemed, was soaring--ergo, the CEO must have been doing a great job, right? What had been reviled was now glorified: CEOs were praised for their clear-eyed decisiveness when they instituted layoffs. Where once stocks had fallen after such announcements, now they climbed. Pretty soon just hiring a celebrity CEO made a stock spike. Sunbeam's shares rose 49% in one day in 1996 on news that the company had hired "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, who had gained hero status at Scott Paper, his previous employer. More than 10,000 people had lost their jobs at Scott Paper--but the stock tripled and Dunlap scored a cool $100 million. "I have zero problems with your calling me an egomaniac," he told FORTUNE during this period. In his bestselling autobiography, Mean Business, Dunlap bragged of reaming out investment bankers because their men's room wasn't stocked with his company's toilet paper. He boasted of treating one of his closest advisors so harshly that the man didn't speak to him for a year and a half.

WITHIN TWO YEARS DUNLAP WAS FIRED FROM Sunbeam, and not so very much later, a whole generation of highflying leaders--Ms. Stewart, Messrs. Lay, Skilling, Ebbers, Scrushy, Kozlowski--came crashing to earth. More than one discovered that when the prosecutors come calling, having a high profile can turn out to be a disadvantage. After all, when you've cooperated with endless media coverage that portrays you as omniscient, it becomes harder to argue that you didn't know what was going on at your own company.

Buffeted by such scandals and the hype-quelling restrictions of the Sarbanes-Oxley law, corporations now assert that their CEOs have been on a 12-step program for recovering publicity addicts. Big cheeses no longer crave being on magazine covers, they claim (a statement somewhat at odds with their continued presence there). Citigroup, once led by the high-wattage Sandy Weill, now turns to the relatively invisible Charles Prince. Business Week sings the praises of United Technologies' chief executive George David on its cover under the headline THE UNSUNG CEO. A half-dozen experts interviewed for this article call Colgate-Palmolive's Reuben Mark the leader for our age because he delivers outstanding results without seeking fame. He represents a distinctly new creature: the CEO who is celebrated for being uncelebrated.

Today boards of directors can sound like puritans searching for leaders of appropriate moral fiber. Charisma is almost a liability. One reason: Evidence suggests that hiring a high-profile CEO from outside the company doesn't usually yield good long-term results. Says consultant and author Jim Collins, whose bestseller Good to Great exhaustively analyzes a group of companies with 15-year-plus records of outperformance: "Over 90% of good-to-great CEOs came from inside their companies. And over two-thirds of companies [that didn't produce such results] tried going for an outside CEO--often a savior--and they failed to make that leap."

And yet the new restraint may not last long. To the outside world a CEO still embodies his company. Surveys conducted by PR giant Burson-Marsteller suggest that 50% of a corporation's reputation is attributable to that of its CEO. Stock prices still routinely rise and fall with the news of a CEO hiring or firing. And let's not forget those entrepreneurial zillionaires--Donald Trump, Richard Branson, Mark Cuban--who have launched self-promoting reality-television series. (Fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger will be joining the bunch soon with a show on CBS.) Ad veteran Kaplan Thaler predicts we'll be seeing FORTUNE 500 CEOs in such venues before too long, saying, "It's a great way to get your image out there" in an age when many viewers TiVo their way past commercials.

Before you dismiss the notion as preposterous, recall that marketing executives from staid Procter & Gamble were featured in a recent episode of Trump's The Apprentice (and P&G's website scored more than 800,000 hits in the two hours after the show aired). So if someday you see the CEO of an automaker, say, hosting a televised round-the-world auto race using the company's cars, you can be sure he'll be doing it just to help his company. Right?