This week's cover story on multimillionaire Reginald Lewi came about in a roundabout way. Features writer Mary Corey hadn't planned to do a profile on him, but she had heard that The Sun had been trying to get an interview for three or four years without success. Writers had been told he just wasn't talking.

Mary, meanwhile, was working on a feature story about actors Tim Reid and Daphne Maxwell Reid. During the interview, Tim Reid told her that Reginald Lewis was a role model for black people and a personal hero of his. She wanted to use the quote in her story, so she called Lewis' international company, TLC Beatrice, to confirm a couple of things. She ended up speaking to an amiable vice president and director of communications, Butch Meily.

"By the way," she asked, "why won't Lewis talk to his hometown paper?" Meily told her Lewis would be glad to do an interview now -- he had just been tied up with business whenever The Sun called before.

It still took three or four months before a time could be set up for the interview, when Lewis wasn't in Barcelona or Paris or Ireland. And that's why magazine photographer Patrick Sandor didn't take the photos for this week's cover story: To his regret, we decided not to send him to the Canary Islands.