January 24, 1992

In an apparent solution to R. H. Macy & Company's overwhelming financial troubles, Laurence A. Tisch, chairman and chief executive of Loews and CBS, has offered to buy the tottering retail company. Already a major investor in Macy, Mr. Tisch would spend roughly $1 billion more to increase his stake substantially, people involved in talks to solve Macy's immense debt problems said last night. They added that negotiations were continuing and that details of the proposal could change.

Corporate America is going to bat for Detroit. Companies like Monsanto Chemical in St. Louis and the Tosco Corporation in Stamford, Conn., and the Brown Paper Company of Greenwich, Conn., are all offering their employees $1,000 each toward buying an American car. Just what is an American car -- with American workers making foreign brands at U.S. plants -- is up to each program. But even though other countries send cars to the United States, only the Japanese imports seemed to be viewed as a threat. Business Day, page D1.

NO one need go to the theater to learn that people will do anything for money. So why does "The Visit," Friedrich Durrenmatt's drama about a town that sells its soul for a fortune, still exert a chilling grip nearly 35 years after it shook up genteel Eisenhower-era audiences who had been drawn to it by the star power of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne? The answers are there to be found in the Roundabout Theater Company's revival at the Criterion Center. As directed by Edwin Sherin without benefit of star power but with lots of intelligence and a fiercely conceived lead performance by Jane Alexander, "The Visit" stands revealed as a small masterpiece of misanthropy, a play whose cynicism is so thickly layered that the greed driving the plot at its surface seems almost the least of its characters' sins. For Durrenmatt, people, not money, are the root of all evil.

The Centel Corporation, one of the country's largest non-Bell telephone companies and one of the few large cellular telephone properties not owned by a giant phone company, said yesterday that because of increasing industry consolidation, it might put itself on the auction block. As recently as Wednesday, the stock market valued Centel at just over $3 billion. But yesterday, reacting to the news, the market bid up the company's share price by $9, to $46, raising Centel's value to nearly $4 billion.

Companies Laurence A. Tisch plans to buy Macy's. The move by the Loews chairman, already a big investor in Macy's, is an apparent solution to the company's financial troubles. He will reportedly spend about $1 billion to greatly increase his stake. [ Page A1. ] A.T.& T. and three Baby Bells reported depressed fourth-quarter and full-year earnings, a reflection of furious competitive pressures to cut costs and employees. [ D1. ]