August 22, 1985

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.