April 7, 1996

THE PRODUCER ROBERT WHITEHEAD, at 80 one of the grand old men of Broadway, was approached recently by his 23-year-old son, Charlie, with a proposal that both flattered and confounded him. "Charlie said to me, 'Dad, I feel I want to get into what you've done,' " recalled Mr. Whitehead, whose work over the last 50 years has ranged from the original productions of "A Member of the Wedding" and "A Man for All Seasons" to the current hit "Master Class."

HOLLY GOLIGHTLY looked wistfully on the face of Manhattan as she prepared to depart for Rio. "Years from now, years and years, I'll be back," she declared. "Me and my nine Brazilian brats. I'll bring them back, all right. Because they must see this." "This" in the 1961 movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's" was not Central Park or the Brooklyn Bridge or Rockfeller Center. It was the steel-and-glass corporate canyon of postwar Park Avenue.

THE Culbro Corporation has long been a quiet company. Its premium cigars, led by the popular Garcia y Vega and Macanudo brands, are puffed at Wall Street gatherings, and it is a big landowner in popular Wall Street getaways like rural Connecticut and Florida. But with a stock market value of less than $300 million, and with half of its shares in insiders' hands, it has never attracted much attention, despite ties to a fabled tobacco dynasty and a board studded with business celebrities.

IN a field of mud, in the rain, three men were digging last week. It was a forlorn scene. One man was pulling up chunks of clay out of the short trench they were making. The other two were clearing the dripping clay by hand from their shovels after each bite into the ground. In a small meadow of a remote valley, these workers could easily have been three Bosnian peasants stuck with the task of digging a well. But, about four feet down, they pulled a man's jacket out of the ground, examined it and put it in a plastic bag. And on a trail just above them were some investigators, wearing tight, white waterproof gloves, gingerly poking their fingers into a pile of rubbish. They were examining layer upon layer of the remains of human life. They had found pieces of clothing, identity documents, a tin can, a pack of cigarettes, a small mattress. They were placing numbered yellow markers near some of the items. And the team leader was narrating the findings into a tape recorder.

Urged on by a coalition of big industries, one state after another is adopting legislation to protect companies from disclosure or punishment when they discover environmental offenses at their own plants. The idea, advocates of the legislation say, is to encourage companies to monitor their own activities rigorously without fear that what they discover will be used against them. But opponents, including prosecutors, environmentalists, labor unions and lawyers for victims of pollution, say that polluters will exploit the laws to avoid adverse publicity and responsibility for illegal acts.