What was going on when I was born?

After several years of lackluster earnings, Revlon Inc., a company famous for making women look more glamorous, is beginning to look more alluring itself. So much so that it is having to fight off a hostile suitor that has recognized something other investors had not: The cosmetics and health care giant is worth far more than the stock market was reflecting. As recently as a month ago, Revlon's shares were trading at $42.50, giving them a total market value of $1.6 billion. Now, in offering $47.50 a share, or $1.8 billion, for Revlon, Pantry Pride Inc. appears to be hoping it can make a quick killing. Sources close to Pantry Pride say it believes that Revlon's disparate health-care operations -which last year generated 66 percent of Revlon's operating profits of $298.3 million and 54 percent of its sales of $2.4 billion - could be sold piecemeal for $1.5 billion. That would leave Pantry Pride with Revlon's cosmetics and toiletries operations, believed by some analysts to be worth at least $700 million.

The investigation that led to the resignation of John J. McLaughlin as president of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation last week was prompted by a criminal complaint filed by one of his investment partners, associates of Mr. McLaughlin said yesterday. They said a complaint against Mr. McLaughlin had been filed with Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, by Ann Maytag, a partner of Mr. McLaughlin in the May-Mac Investment Partnership, a private investment fund incorporated in Sante Fe, N.M., where Miss Maytag lives. They said Miss Maytag, a member of the family that founded the Maytag washing machine company, had accused Mr. McLaughlin of stealing profits from real-estate investments that they shared, primarily in New York City.

A TODDLER pokes her hands into a sandbox, oblivious to the noisy enthusiasm of two small boys engrossed in an air hockey game. Another child crawls around an indoor slide, while a young mother sings Spanish lullabies to her sleeping baby. Surrounded by a spill of toys and books, puzzles and drawings, the children might be playing in a lively day-care center. That is, until the visitor notices the plastic hospital identification bracelets, intravenous poles and monitors. For this cheerful blue playroom, with its gaily painted murals and Walt Disney marionettes set up in the windows, is situated on the pediatric floor of St. Luke's Hospital, and its young patients suffer from asthma and broken bones, cancer and sickle-cell anemia.

Business backers of President Reagan's tax revision plan are warning that their support will collapse if Congressional tax writers bargain away the reductions in corporate and individual tax rates contained in the plan. While support from the business community is not viewed as critical to move a bill out of the House tax-writing committee, whose members are now generally committed to turning out a comprehensive tax overhaul bill, their lobbying organizations are being counted on to help win passage on the House and Senate floors, where support is uncertain. The business groups backing the Reagan plan represent a relatively small segment of the business community and their influence has been weakened by division within their ranks. Nonetheless, they have emerged as the strongest base of support thus far amid a sea of dissent from most segments of the business community and lackluster support from the general public.

Phibro-Salomon, the financial conglomerate that trades everything from bonds to gold, said yesterday that it would end its operations in South Africa and close its Johannesburg office. Phibro is the biggest American company so far to announce that it would pull out of South Africa. It could not be determined yesterday whether Phibro had consulted with Harry F. Oppenheimer, the leading South African businessman, who controls more of Phibro-Salomon than anyone else. Mr. Oppenheimer, who has visited the United States to urge American companies to remain in South Africa, indirectly controls 14 percent of Phibro. Phibro's South African operations consist mostly of buying precious metals and minerals and exporting them elsewhere.

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company said yesterday that it would eliminate 24,000 jobs in a sweeping cutback at its big information systems division. The company said it was cutting the jobs at the division, which makes business communication equipment, computers and home telephones, in order to increase its profitability in those highly competitive industries. The division, which employs 117,000 people, is based in Morristown, N.J. A.T.&T. said 12,000 of the unit's workers are employed in New Jersey and 7,000 in New York. Effect Is Nationwide Robert E. Allen, chairman of the information systems unit, said that employees in Morristown and at other locations across the country would be affected by the layoffs, but that he did not know how many jobs would be lost at specific sites. About 30 percent of the jobs are in management, with the rest spread out among other positions.

Twenty-six people were accused today of running the New Jersey branch of an organized-crime group, officials said. Acting on a sealed indictment returned in Newark, law-enforcement authorities in Florida and New Jersey conducted dawn raids today, arresting 20 of the 26. The prosecutor, United States Attorney Thomas W. Greelish, said the indictment ''brings to a dramatic halt the operation'' of the New Jersey branch of the Luchese crime organization. These 26 defendants constitute ''the vast bulk'' of the Luchese group operating in New Jersey, he said.

South African officials told high-ranking Reagan aides at a meeting in Vienna that the Government was prepared to make political changes that were more significant than steps ultimately announced by Pretoria, a senior Administration official says. The official said in an interview this week that the Administration was led to believe that the South African Government was prepared to make internal changes involving ''power sharing'' with the country's black majority. The sharing was to come through some form of political participation for blacks and in how the Pretoria Government would relate to other internal Government entities, said the official, who was involved in the meeting. #6 U.S. Aides in Vienna Though a participant in the Vienna meeting, the senior Administration official who discussed the session refused to be identified because of his sensitive foreign policy position.

The financially troubled EPIC Holdings Ltd. - parent of the Community Savings and Loan Association of Bethesda, Md., which temporarily halted operations this week after a run by depositors - has notified most of its investors that it will cease making payments on all of its $1.4 billion in mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, Federal officials said today. If such action leads to a default, it would be one of the largest on record. Meanwhile, a team of investment bankers from several of Wall Street's largest firms are joining in an effort to prevent a default. They are concerned that the troubles at Equity Programs Investment Corporation, a real estate subsidiary of Community Savings, could mushroom into a broader mortgage crisis, investment banking sources said today. The Federal officials, who are close to the negotiations between EPIC and the financial institutions that have bought the mortgages and mortgage-backed securities issued by Equity Programs, said the company already is delinquent on some of the mortgage payments and other payments are expected to come due next week.

Carl C. Icahn said yesterday that he intended to raise his stake in Trans World Airlines to more than 50 percent, giving him control of the nation's fourth-largest carrier and the biggest international airline serving the North Atlantic. The step would sound the final note in a protracted and bitter battle between Mr. Icahn and the Texas Air Corporation, whose president, Frank Lorenzo, had hoped to create the nation's second-largest airline by taking over the carrier. The battle took its decisive turn on Tuesday when the T.W.A. board turned down proposals that could have kept Mr. Icahn from blocking approval of the Texas Air bid of $26 a share. In a wrenching meeting, the board turned its back on Texas Air, which it had openly favored throughout the takeover battle, and decided to hand Mr. Icahn the victory. ''The outside directors felt that Icahn was a bad guy,'' one source who attended the meeting said. ''But at the same time they did not want a labor war, which would not happen if Icahn got the company.''

The United States accused the Soviet Union today of using a mysterious powdery substance as an aid in tracking the movements of Americans and possibly other foreigners in Moscow. ''We have protested the practice in strongest terms and demanded that it be terminated immediately,'' a State Department spokesman said. Officials said the United States was more concerned about a possible health risk from the substance than about espionage questions. Information in U.S. Is Classified A State Department spokesman, Charles Redman, raised the possibility that the chemical might have the potential to cause cancer. He said one agent, apparently developed by the Russians for tracking purposes, was a mutagen known as nitrophenylpentadienal. A mutagen is a substance that is known to cause genetic change.

Political and civic leaders called for fundamental changes in New York State's electoral system yesterday, a day after a state judge ordered one candidate for mayor and four for City Council president offthe Democratic primary ballot because of mistakes in labeling and numbering petitions. The Citizens Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union proposed changes, and Democrats and Republicans in Albany said they were willing to consider some change - particularly if the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, did not overturn the rulings. The City Comptroller, Harrison J. Goldin, who is unopposed in the primary, asked Governor Cuomo and the legislative leaders to set up a bipartisan commission to study the election law and report back in time for the 1986 elections. 'Frivolous and Undemocratic' In a letter to Mr. Cuomo, he said the system was ''frivolous and undemocratic'' and a ''tacky obstacle course for the unwary,'' and he called for a ''fundamental rerationalization of the election law.''