TARTIKOFF : In Her Own Right : When it’s cash for cancer research she’s after, Lilly is every bit as focused as her husband, NBC mogul Brandon.

When Lilly Tartikoff wants something, she comes across like a pit bull with charm.

And she wants something now. She wants money, a lot of money, for UCLA’s cancer research programs in the School of Medicine, which include the clinical study of breast and ovarian cancer.

On her first outing into Los Angeles’ big-time charity scene, she’s obtained a donation of $2.4 million from Ronald O. Perelman, chairman and CEO of New York-based Revlon to set up the Revlon/UCLA Women’s Cancer Research Program. She’s also grossed $400,000 toward funding for the UCLA program through ticket and ad-book sales for her Fire and Ice Ball, a $500-per-person, black-tie gala on Tuesday at the Beverly Hilton.

Of course, it helps that she’s married to Brandon Tartikoff, the 41-year-old president of NBC Entertainment, who has a Rolodex most people would kill for. Lilly lifted it off his desk and called everyone from A to Z, back to A, and back to Z again.

“If you live in Los Angeles and you haven’t heard from me,” she says with a laugh, “it’s because I dialed the wrong number. I’d just get on the phone and say, ‘This is Lilly Tartikoff, and this is not a tea party. I’ve raised $2.4 million for breast and ovarian cancer, and the doctor who heads this lab is someone real special to Brandon and myself.’ ”

Her relentless pursuit of Perelman and her ruthless determination in getting the city’s power brokers to support her gala are evidence of Tartikoff’s tenacity. “Basically, I’ve been obsessed,” she says. “I admit it. I’ve spent every hour of the day on it. It’s hard to be that intense. It’s a brand-new project.”

“This is sort of Lilly’s coming-out party,” said her husband in a telephone interview while he was on a recent business trip to Florida. “It’s her first big-budget feature. She’s done small-budget features, like helping with other people’s charity events, but this is her first big-scale production.”

How much of her successful arm-twisting can be chalked up to the fact that she’s Mrs. Brandon Tartikoff?

“I think it’s been 90% Lilly and 10% Mrs. Brandon Tartikoff,” he says. “Of course, if she was Lilly Jones, she never would have started off with my Rolodex. Everybody knows that there’s a great abundance in this town of black-tie events. Everybody gets hit from all sides. But Lilly learned from her father (a fashion accessories manufacturer) that the sale begins when people say no. To say she’s been persistent is, I think, a kind word.”

Cancer has directly affected the 36-year-old Tartikoff. Her husband contracted Hodgkin’s disease 15 years ago. According to Lilly, Brandon did his “maintenance work” at UCLA with Dr. Dennis Slamon, director for clinical research at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“I just feel like Brandon was one of the lucky ones,” she says one afternoon while sitting on the balcony of their walled Beverly Hills home. It is spacious but not gaudily oversized, just about right for the Tartikoffs; their 7-year-old daughter, Calla, and two dogs, a husky and a golden retriever.

She wears little makeup, jeans, white Keds and a white sweater that flatter her petite figure, maintained since her career as a dancer in the corps of the New York City Ballet.

“There have been a lot of people over the years that we’ve known who haven’t been as lucky,” she says. “Brandon’s cured, and that’s as much as I’ll ever talk about Brandon and his Hodgkin’s. I’ve never talked about it. It’s just so personal and sacred, and everyone seems to know everything else, that this is the only issue I’ve kept secret.”

But now her father, whom she adores, has cancer, and he is being treated primarily at UCLA. This time the hospital was ready for her interest. According to Slamon, after Brandon Tartikoff was successfully treated, the research program wasn’t ready for the kind of funds someone such as Lilly Tartikoff could raise. “So I’ve been sitting here at my house waiting to raise money for cancer,” she says.

Revlon’s $2.4 million is to be spread out over three years and augmented by money Tartikoff hopes to raise from annual Fire and Ice balls. (The name comes from the famous 1952 Revlon ad campaign.) While Revlon gives routinely to charities, Tartikoff had to do some persuading to get Perelman to part with his money for the UCLA program.

“When I proposed the idea to him,” she recalls, “he loved it instantly. But he made me work at it, because I had to prove that UCLA and these doctors were worthy of all this money and this kind of attention. That was the work that was cut out for me.”

Back up about two years, to when L.A. social scenester Wendy Goldberg, a marketing adviser for new product promotion and development for Max Factor (a Revlon subsidiary), asked Tartikoff to be on the Max Factor advisory board to offer advice on product development.

About a year later, Tartikoff was perusing women’s magazines with her teen-age nieces, “and I realized that the cosmetic companies weren’t addressing teen-agers. So I wrote (Perelman) a letter out of the blue. . . . And he responded to it instantly. He thanked me for caring about the company, and (wrote) he would address this problem.

“So I thought,” she says, “that now that I have his attention, there are a few other things I wanted to bring up.”

They continued the correspondence until one day, according to Tartikoff, Perelman called her and offered her a job with Revlon.

She was flattered, she says, but realized a full-time job was out of the question. He countered with a part-time position, and she took it.

But before she even had an opportunity to arrange for a job title, Tartikoff had a brainstorm: to put Revlon together with the UCLA cancer research group. Slamon and his colleagues had just been offered positions at another hospital but decided to stay at UCLA, and the time to raise money was at hand.

Tartikoff phoned Perelman’s office and arranged a meeting. She had already researched how much money Revlon gave to charity.

“It took me a long time to convince him that UCLA was the right medical center,” she says. “He was very careful: He sent groups of people to check it out.”

Finally, after six weeks, Perelman gave the go-ahead for the donation. “It seemed like such a logical thing to do, to put his money into something that was going to directly affect women,” Tartikoff recalls. “I really made him feel that it was his responsibility to take care of women, and to give back to them, since we’ve been buying his products since we were 12.”

“Lilly is a passionate advocate for the things she feels strongly about,” said Perelman in a telephone interview from his New York office. “She convinced us that this was something that had to be done. She was very good at making her point. She’s very energetic, very focused, and she stayed on top of it the entire process.”

Tartikoff sits in the spare office of Dr. Dennis Slamon, whom she calls Denny. She is asking Slamon what would be the best way to earmark a $50,000 donation to the research program.

“It’s been a real tour de force working with her,” says Slamon, “and that’s not to say that there aren’t other people who have been very instrumental in helping. . . . I think she’s made a lot of people in this town stand up and take notice.

“I have no fantasy,” he continues, “that there is a whole huge community out there that’s doing this because they think it’s really great that we’re doing research into breast cancer. She’s bludgeoned a lot of people into being involved with this. She said, ‘You’re not going to tell me no, and that’s all’. . . . This is the first time I’ve worked with a person who really wants to know basically what it is we’re doing, so that when she goes out to talk to people, she has a sense of it. I think that’s a very positive thing when it happens.”

Michael Eicher, deputy director of development for the Health Sciences at UCLA, agrees that Tartikoff has made things happen rather quickly. “Gifts of this nature sometimes move along very, very quickly, and sometimes they take a long time, depending on the nature of the donor and the research project. But sometimes I’ll get in my office at 7:30 in the morning to get things going early, and by 7:45 Lilly would be calling, and she’d have already made a call or two to New York.”

What possessed her to ask Ronald Perelman point-blank for $2.4 million?

“I’ve always said that until I meet anyone as brilliant as (the late New York City Ballet founder George) Balanchine,” she says, “there’s not a whole lot to be intimidated by. I mean, I’ve been at a table with (G.E. Chairman) Jack Welch, and he’s a brilliant businessman. . . . Before I went into Ronald Perelman’s office, I thought, I’m not going to act scared. And I was nervous. It was no different from being in the wings of the New York State Theatre. I don’t drink, and I think after I talked to him I had a vodka. I might have had two. I was a wreck. But I sure wasn’t going to show that side of me to him.”

Tartikoff doesn’t mind speaking up to the powerful, such as Welch, whose company owns her husband’s employer, NBC. “Business is fun, and when people start talking about it, I always have my opinions. Like (Creative Artists Agency president) Michael Ovitz I adore, and he’s sometimes outraged by what I say, but he laughs. I’ll sit down with Jack Welch and say, ‘How’s our stock doing? What’re we buying now?’ I tried to talk him into buying Universal Studios, but he just finally said he wasn’t interested, and for me to stop bugging him about it.

“Brandon lets me get into trouble, he doesn’t help me get out of it. . . . He just takes it all in and says, ‘I wonder how she’s going to get out of this mess.’ And that’s what our relationship is all about.”

“I don’t think you can reign Lilly in,” Brandon Tartikoff says. “I think she knows she goes out of bounds several times each week, but I think of the overall good she does, and you come to accept it. She’s Lilly. I think a good part of our relationship is that I’m still constantly amused watching her in action. Somehow she gets away with a lot more than a lot of us get away with.”

Adds Jack Welch: “We’re silly a lot, to be perfectly honest. Does she give me advice? A lot. Often. She has an opinion about a lot of things, but they’re usually well-founded.”

Don’t bet on a radical personality change now that Tartikoff has entered the world of big-time charity fund raising.

“I’ve never been into lunch at the Bistro,” she says. “Maybe I’m missing out on something. Maybe I should try it.”

Two years ago, Tartikoff admits, she would have been more critical of that Hollywood lunch scene.

In 1988, she was a slightly different Lilly Tartikoff, a little more defensive, feeling more like she had something to prove.

“If I’m going to try to act like I’m not a Hollywood wife, I’m going to seem ridiculous,” she says, gazing out across the back-yard pool. “Because I guess I am a Hollywood wife, but I guess there are all sorts of Hollywood wives. . . . What’s different between me now and back in 1988 is that I don’t really care now if they think I’m some dumb, stupid, Hollywood wife. I spent those years trying to prove that I wasn’t. I’m not trying anymore. Maybe I’m more secure now. This (event) has helped.”

Tartikoff prides herself on not abandoning old friends like Bonita (Bonny) Borne, now the ballet mistress and assistant to the artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet. Borne and the then Lilly Samuels, who grew up in Cheviot Hills, were in ballet classes when they were 8, made it to the New York City ballet within a couple of years of each other, and traveled the world with the company. While Tartikoff never rose out of the ranks of the corps (injuries played a part), Borne says the dedication was there.

“Lilly had a career. As a dancer you start very young, and that’s your whole life. When it abruptly stops for one reason or another, you’re lost, and it takes time to figure out what direction you want to go in. Some choose to get married, some choose another career; it’s an individual thing. And it’s very scary. . . . I think she missed having her own life. She’s not somebody who didn’t ever do anything. She doesn’t want to be known as just Brandon’s wife. I admire that about her.

“Lilly had to find her own way,” Borne adds. “I thought her life was really exciting, I always wanted to hear what was going on. It was a whole different world she was thrown into, and I think she had to get burned a little, and then you see the light finally. I think she felt she was being used sometimes by people trying to get to Brandon. And that goes with the territory. You have to stand back and take a look, and I think she did that, and saw people for what they were.”

Two years ago, Tartikoff recalled what life was like early on with Brandon. When they married, he was head of West Coast programming for NBC: “When I married Brandon, I realized I didn’t have a wardrobe. There was so much expected of me. I wasn’t even aware of what was expected of me. . . . I just sort of put my shoulders up, held my head up and used my good ballet posture and got by. And had attitude. If you have attitude I think it helps. . . . I did become obsessed to the point that it was probably obnoxious, and it probably still is, not letting this change my life, keeping all the good values.

“I have to say I leaned on my ballet identity for many years. That’s a part of you forever. . . . I had a friend who quit the ballet before I did, and I said, ‘How did you know when it was time to leave?’ And she said, ‘You’ll know when it’s time.’ I was 26, and I felt old and that I was suffocating and I had to get out. It was very intense. All you do is dance. . . . I didn’t even plan it. I just followed the ballet mistress into the dressing room and said, ‘I have to go home now.’ ”

After she left the ballet in 1980 and before she married Brandon two years later (they had met at a party and were friends for years before becoming involved), she worked for her father and learned something of the business world.

When the Fire and Ice Ball is over, Tartikoff may or may not take that part-time job with Revlon. She’s also a contributing editor of Mirabella, and the advisory position with Max Factor still stands.

“I’d love to make my mark, but I’m just intensely obsessed with this right now,” she says. “I’ve had a taste of trying to do it all now. I don’t mean this to sound arrogant or anything, but right at this time in my life I don’t need to go out and earn a living. I’ve just been so busy with this, and even Brandon’s felt it. He’s so used to having 100% of me. It’s impossible,” she adds with a note of exasperation in her voice. “You can’t have it all. It’s a fable.”

And while she thinks of the invitations that still need to go out and the people who need to be called, she pauses a minute. “Actually, the biggest problem at this point is that I don’t have a dress.”