At L.A. stop on book tour, Clinton foresees ‘more adventures’ ahead

Her day in Los Angeles had all the trappings of a prelude to a 2016 run for president, and Hillary Rodham Clinton saw no need to pretend otherwise.

“I think we have a few more adventures still ahead,” she told a packed hotel ballroom in Century City on Thursday night.

The occasion was Clinton’s acceptance of the William O. Douglas Award from Public Counsel, a nonprofit law firm holding its annual gala fundraiser.

Earlier in the day, the former secretary of State and first lady signed hundreds of copies of her book, “Hard Choices,” at the Barnes & Noble store in the Grove shopping mall.

Clinton’s Los Angeles stops came amid a flurry of TV and radio interviews to plug the book, a memoir of her time in President Obama’s Cabinet.

The Century City dinner, highlighting legal services for the poor, offered Clinton a forum to reminisce about her days as a young lawyer defending the indigent. She also joked about moving to Arkansas in the 1970s to be with her former Yale Law School classmate and future husband, Bill Clinton.

“I had no job, so I thought maybe I should go see whether this relationship would lead anywhere,” she said.

A longtime friend, actress Mary Steenburgen, presented the award to Clinton. Steenburgen also posed a series of questions on, among other things, the capture of Osama bin Laden and the stress of living with a security detail.

Clinton said that when she had suggested giving up her security staff to regain some privacy, the Secret Service told her “what the latest threats are and what people are planning to do to you” – so she keeps it. “You just kind of get used to it and don’t worry about it too much,” she said.

Steenburgen also asked Clinton about becoming a grandmother. Her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, is pregnant.

While waiting for word that a grandchild was on the way, Clinton said, she’d been “getting to feel a little sorry for myself.” She offered advice to would-be grandparents who feel that way.

“Stop thinking about it, stop talking about it, quit sending articles about decreasing fertility when you get older,” she suggested. “Just don’t do any of that, and somehow it may happen.”

As for her decision on running for president, Clinton said she wanted to focus, for now, on her grandchild.

“I want to really be in the moment, in as present a state of mind as possible, because I’ll only have this experience once,” she said. “I’ve already run for president once. And so, I mean, becoming a grandmother is totally new and different.”

Twitter: @finneganLAT