Should it surprise anyone that a man who called his boyhood bedroom his "office" would grow up to be a titan of corporate America? With Steve Case, 42, the chairman and CEO of America Online, the only surprise is this: A career that reached its pinnacle with the January announcement of AOL's planned acquisition of Time Warner (PEOPLE's parent company) had, until recently, included its share of missteps and outright failures. Shortly after graduating from Williams College in 1980, Case landed at Procter & Gamble, where he coined the deathless slogan "Towelette? You bet!" for an ill-conceived conditioner-embedded hankie you were supposed to rub across your hair. In his next job he concocted new ideas for Pizza Hut. (Pineapple topping? It made sense to Case, a fifth-generation Hawaiian.) Even after he began to change a little company called Quantum Computer Services into the behemoth that would become AOL, he kept stumbling. He was removed as CEO of an about-to-go-public AOL in 1992 because the board felt his youth (he was 33) would frighten investors. (He reassumed the job the next year.) In 1996, when AOL's servers maxed-out and subscribers couldn't connect, he was battered by critics who dubbed the Internet provider "America On Hold." As Case told FORTUNE in 1998, "There are a bunch of people who believe it's their manifest destiny to put AOL out of business, and it's my job to make sure that doesn't happen."
According to Wall Street, he has done his job well, having taken AOL from the "throes of death," as Prudential Securities analyst Paul Merenbloom describes it, to a membership of nearly half of all American Internet users. Despite a personal fortune estimated at $1.5 billion, Case still dresses in khakis and lives relatively modestly in a three-story house on a cul-de-sac in McLean, Va., with his second wife, Jean Villanueva, 41. (She herself was an AOL exec when Case told his board in 1996 that they had become involved; after their respective divorces, they were married in '98 by the Rev. Billy Graham. Case's three children live nearby with his ex-wife.) And while he'll have a second office in Manhattan after the merger, for now he often eats lunch in AOL's Dulles, Va., cafeteria, just another Net-head scarfing a sandwich—and preparing to take charge of a $41 billion company.
