Sternlicht fumed as Heyer pushed him to the sidelines. Sternlicht reels off a list of what he sees as his successor’s failings: Heyer’s refusal to tap into Sternlicht’s institutional knowledge at budget reviews, his lack of focus on the Heavenly Bed, the fact that Heyer seemed particularly interested in altering anything Sternlicht had touched. “I’m not disparaging him—it’s factual,” Sternlicht says. “He was pathologically obsessed with me. Obsessed.” (Heyer refused to comment for this article.)

From the beginning, the company employed a consultant to act as a marriage counselor for Heyer and Sternlicht. It didn’t help. Sternlicht went to the board in late 2005 with an ultimatum: Either he goes or I go. Sternlicht offered to pay Heyer’s severance with his own $11.8 million package. Before the directors would consider getting rid of Heyer, they wanted to know if Sternlicht would take his job back. But Sternlicht wouldn’t commit. He was already thinking about what he could do at Starwood Capital, and he told Interior Design magazine that he envisioned returning to painting and sculpting, once his passion, at a studio he’d set up at his Nantucket beach house.

Today, that hideaway has hardly been touched: An easel overlooking Nantucket Sound sits empty, and a carousel big enough for a portfolio’s worth of supplies holds just eight nearly new brushes. There’s no time for art when there’s another real estate empire to build.

“You kick me, and I get challenged,” Sternlicht says. “It’s probably why I’m still working here. You know, I just wanted to do it again. The more you kick me, the more determined I get. I must get that from my dad.”

Only after I’ve spent a year sitting through meetings and traveling with Sternlicht is he finally ready to talk about his childhood. We’re having lunch at a nondescript restaurant just off the campus of Brown University, where he’s attending his 25th reunion. I’ve asked everyone who’s worked with Sternlicht what makes him so driven, and no one has been able to answer the question. Now, Sternlicht tells me, it all goes back to the story of his father.

Maurycy Sternlicht was a nine-year-old boy in Kraków, Poland, when the Nazis invaded in 1939. His father, away on a business trip, was captured by the Russians. Maurycy fled, along with his sister, mother, and grandmother, into the mountains of Czechoslovakia, where they scrounged an existence until the end of the war. Maurycy became an engineer, changed his name to Mark, and emigrated to America. There he married Harriet, a native New Yorker.

The couple had three sons. Barry, the middle child, says his father was a distant figure who worked long hours and spent weekends on his hobby: tinkering with car engines. “All he lived for was cars,” Sternlicht says. “I guess he never really felt that comfortable here. But nobody can imagine what he went through.” Sternlicht’s mother was a gregarious painter and biology teacher who eventually put her networking skills to use as a stockbroker. Sternlicht didn’t stand out much while he was growing up, choosing activities in high school like the drama club, where, instead of acting, he oversaw props and publicity. “A nice kid, a good kid, but he never really sparkled,” says Wes Hobby, his high-school drama teacher.

While attending Brown in the early 1980s, Sternlicht experienced two things that would kindle his ambition. The first, again, involved his father. The elder Sternlicht had opened a plant in the 1970s that produced batteries and disposable flashlights for a French company. As his firm grew, he was asked to speak about small-business issues and sit on government panels. But, says his son, the operation began to suffer from lack of attention. When the parent company ran into trouble, it liquidated the factory. His father didn’t have an ownership stake and was forced to start over. “I think it really hurt my dad,” Sternlicht says. It also sparked a sense of paranoia in the son. Sternlicht began reading incessantly, a habit he still practices: “I read out of fear. I read because I think I’m going to read something that tells me the reason I’m holding that asset is no longer valid, or that I’ve got to sell that today because I don’t want to wind up like my dad’s business.”

Just as his dad’s enterprise was failing, Sternlicht glimpsed the other side of the business universe. While visiting his college roommate’s family in the Hamptons, he watched a peacock strolling on the grounds of one of the mansions. He was stunned. How wealthy, how successful do you have to be in order to have your own peacock? Whatever it took, that’s what he wanted, and he wore his desire on his sleeve. In his last speech as C.E.O. of Starwood Hotels, Sternlicht told 2,200 managers, workers, and executives that although Starwood was succeeding, it couldn’t afford to give an inch: “The peacock is headed to our lawn, but our worthy adversaries are, even as we speak, and at their own snail’s pace, getting new peacock food!”

Sternlicht eventually earned an M.B.A. from Harvard and joined Chicago-based JMB Realty, then one of the hottest property investors in the country. He became a nonstop dealmaker, helping to steer billions of dollars’ worth of purchases for the firm before he turned 30. Soon after a London buyout he was working on proved disastrous, his firm began downsizing and Sternlicht was fired. “I went from the wunderkind to being out the door,” he says. “I never wanted to get fired again. It was not a pleasant experience.”

Sternlicht decided the answer was to work even harder. A friend who handled money for the ultrawealthy Burden and Ziff families offered to back Sternlicht with $20 million if he started his own investment firm. Others joined in, and in 1992, Sternlicht launched Starwood Capital with $52 million. His goal was to buy up properties that were being auctioned off in the government’s bailout of the savings and loan industry. In 1993, Sternlicht sold the portfolio to real estate magnate Sam Zell for more than 20 percent of Zell’s Equity Residential Properties Trust. When Zell took the company public that year, Starwood saw a 100 percent return.

Anyone peeking into the Starwood offices then would have sworn he was looking at a boiler room. Sternlicht expected his handful of employees to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week, first from Chicago and then from a run-down hotel in Stamford, in a room furnished with a fax machine and a pile of yet-to-be-unpacked boxes. “Everything was about the deal and getting the deal done,” recalls Jerry Silvey, Starwood Capital’s chief financial officer.