Sidney Frank, who died Tuesday at 86, was the marketing genius behind Jagermeister and Grey Goose, the premium vodka he dreamed up and then sold just six years later, in 2004, to Bacardi for more than $2 billion.

Frank was as flamboyant and eccentric as he was rich, and he was capable of acts of generosity that were both spontaneous and sustained, he cut a colorful figure in an industry not usually noted for its star players. Aiming at the luxury market, Frank revolutionized the “superpremium” liquor classification by charging twice the price of other premium vodkas. Grey Goose came in a pretty frosted bottle decorated with geese in flight, taken from a painting by by Cezanne.

“Ask a lot of rich people what’s a Cezanne, they know,” the cigar-chomping Frank told the Wall Street Journal. “That’s rich people.”

The market for Jagermeister, an herbal concoction some likened to cough syrup, was different: binge drinking college students. Frank’s sexy “Jagerettes” prowled bars across the nation, dispensing free shots of liqueur. Several dozen eventually sued him for sexual harassment, charging that Frank and tried to “tongue kiss and fondle the Jagerettes’ breasts and buttocks,” but the promotion continues.

Frank became a billionaire only recently, with the sale of Grey Goose in 2003, and he quickly established himself as a major philanthropist. He was the biggest charitable giver in New York in 2004, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, thanks to a $100 million gift to Brown University, a school Frank attended for but a single year. Frank also created a foundation to honor R.J. Mitchell, the British designer of the Spitfire fighter, which Frank contended was responsible for turning the tide in World War II.

Frank amassed an extensive art collection that he kept at his large homes in New Rochelle, San Diego, and the Bahamas, where he was building his own golf course. Too old to play himself, he hired a half dozen golf pros whom he trailed around the links, barking out club selections. He called these near daily excursions, “my own Ryder Cup.”

Equating retirement with death, Frank was working on introducing a “superpremium” tequila, and a high-end hip-hop themed sports drink called Crunk. Active until the end, he told Britain’s Daily Mail last year, “I’m going to have a special cart built to take me into the sea so I can go snorkeling.”

Frank was raised in Montville, Conn., where his parents raised chickens and vegetables. Starting at age 12, he built a 50-foot ladder so tourists could climb nearby Mohegan Rock, said to be the largest boulder in all of New England. He charged them a dime each, he said in a recent interview in INC magazine. By the time Frank was 17 he had saved $1,000, enough to cover a year’s tuition at Brown.

Once the year was up, he dropped out of college and went to work for Pratt and Whitney, working on airplane engines in East Hartford, Conn. During World War II, Frank worked as a civilian troubleshooter for the company in East Asia.

After the war, Frank went to work for Lewis Rosenstiel, founder of Schenley Industries, one of the nation’s largest distillers, to investigate using distilled alcohol as airplane fuel. When that idea failed, Frank went to the Philippines and Scotland, where he revived the flagging Schenley businesses. He returned to America, and eventually became president of the company. One of his successes was Dewar’s White Label Scotch. Inspired by long-aged Scotch, Frank in 1954 pioneered the marketing of premium, 12-year-old bourbons, anticipating the “super premium” campaigns of future decades. He also introduced innovative packaging that served as a display in liquor stores, and as a game board for chess, checkers, and quoits in bars.

When asked for advice, Frank invariably said that young men should keep in touch with important people they meet, “And marry a rich girl. It’s easier to marry a million than to make a million.” It certainly worked for him, as he married Rosenstiel’s daughter. But friction with the imperious Rosenstiel led to Frank being fired from Schenley in the early 1960s. He spent much of the next decade as an art dealer in partnership with Israeli artist Yaacov Agam.

After Frank’s wife died in 1972, he sold much of his art collection and a Park Avenue townhouse to bankroll a return to the liquor business. Having been blackballed by Rosenstiel (who had also been involved in lawsuits with his now-deceased daughter), Frank started out by importing niche products, including Gekkeikan Saki and Jagermeister – then a virtually unknown liqueur. Sales toddled along until 1985, when a student drinking fad at Louisiana State University made local news – a shot of Jagermeister dropped, boilermaker-style, directly into a beer. An article in a Baton Rouge newspaper said the drink had the effect of “liquid Valium.” Frank made millions of copies of the article, hired some Jagerettes, and the marketing blitz was on. Jager shots became a symbol of exuberant consumption, especially at universities. By 2000, demand topped 500,000 cases.

Having become wealthy importing Jagermeister, Frank set out to invent his biggest score from scratch. Frank’s new liquor would compete with Absolut, a “designer” vodka that had blazed the “superpremium” trail. The name “Grey Goose” was already his; he had registered it as the name for a Liebfraumilch wine he had tried to market in the mid-1970s as a competitor for the popular Blue Nun brand. The new brand’s “story” was impressive – coming from “exotic” (for vodka) France, filtered through Champagne limestone, quintuple distilled, etc. But the clincher was that Frank charged $30 for the bottle, twice the price of the competition. Coming during the stock market run-up of the late 1990s, just as the microbrew craze was dying down and the cocktail and lounge craze was heating up, the high price only made Grey Goose more alluring. Like Jagermeister, it was marketed with exclusive parties, distinctive wood-crate packaging, and more sex: “Goose Girls.” Grey Goose sold 100,000 cases in its first year, 1999. By 2004, when he sold out for a reported $2.3 billion, it sold over 2 million cases.

Asked why he sold Grey Goose, Frank said, “I’m 85 years old. I wanted to count the money while I was still on this side of the ground. “But far from retiring, Frank threw himself into new projects. He planned to market a premium rum to be named White Pelican, that would come in a battery-powered musical bottle. He purchased two small travel magazines, and also began laying plans for a foundation that would dis tribute the bulk of his billions after his death. People who visited him at one of his homes were sometimes startled to find him impulsively giving away thousands of dollars to descendents of survivors of World War II prison camps and the like.

Like one of his heroes, Churchill, Frank liked to conduct business from the bedroom, in pajamas, usually while smoking a giant cigar, (when he remarried, it is rumored that a clause in his prenup let him smoke them whenever he wanted.) He owned dozens of cars, including a pair of customized Mercedes Maybachs with beds in the back, employed four personal chefs, and when he took his golf cart out to follow his golf pros, he would dress in a bight pink or green blazer and a red bowtie with polkadots. His art collection was as excessive as everything else in his life – he liked Henry Moore’s sculptures so much that he owned 29 of them.

Sidney Frank

Born in 1919 in Norwich, Conn.; died January 10; survived by his wife, Marian, children Cathy Halstead and Matthew Frank, five grandchildren, and a sister, Edna Nowitz.