Tom Bradley’s City Hall : He Is as Inscrutable to His Office Staff as He Is in Public but It’s Clear He Calls the Shots

Mayor Tom Bradley chooses to define his life by his work, the way other people define their lives by personal relationships, cars, clothes, religion, recreational activities or hair style.

He has few outside interests. At nights, and on weekends, when he has no political or government events to attend, he usually reads ordinances, answers letters and makes telephone calls in his office. “I occasionally will go to a movie, a play or a sporting event,” he said. Or, he will watch a tape on his new video cassette recorder at home. “I just finished ‘Scarface,’ and it took me three sittings to finish that,” he said.

Yet, he dislikes publicizing the work that dominates his life. The schedule given to the press tells only a small part of what he does. His stubborn refusal to publicize his activities verges on secretiveness and is a constant source of frustration to aides.

“I’m not here to make a headline,” he once said when asked about his reticence to publicize himself, his usual voice, almost a monotone, actually taking on expression as he reacted sharply to what he thought was a stupid question. “I’m not here to create a story for the news media. I’m here to get that job done, and if we were in confrontation, just for the purpose of headlines we could have made all kinds of noise and would not have accomplished a damn thing. My career has been built upon creating an atmosphere in which you could get consensus and not worry about who is getting credit.”

That reticence is why the best way to understand Bradley is to watch him at work and to interview the men and women--many unknown to the public--who sift his correspondence, route his telephone calls, plan his schedule, lobby for his measures in the City Council, write his speeches, devise his political strategy and sort and analyze the big piles of ordinances that come to him from the council a couple of times a week.

The work is a mixture of politics and city business these days as Bradley runs for a fourth term against Councilman John Ferraro.

The Day Begins

Bradley’s workday starts early. After rising at 6 a.m., reading the newspaper while he rides his exercise bike and breakfasting on cereal, fruit, milk and orange juice, he looks for the small failures of city government while he is driven by a Police Department bodyguard to City Hall.

“Every day, I look for dirty streets and sidewalks,” he said. “Or some problem with buildings. Or trees that need to be trimmed or strengthened. I’ll never forget, I drove by a Presbyterian Church at 3rd and Western one day and saw this tree. . . . It had been blown over by the wind and the stake that was controlling it had broken off and it was leaning over. I didn’t think it would last through the day. So I looked up the phone number and called and the secretary of the minister was there and I told her. . . .”

And every day, when Bradley’s executive assistant, Wanda Moore, gets to work, small handwritten notes from Bradley await her, telling of a pothole to be filled and its location.

Moore is the gatekeeper. Her hard climb from Police Department clerk-typist to her present prestigious job mirrors Bradley’s long, difficult rise from the South-Central Los Angeles ghetto.

By the time Moore arrives at her desk at 8:30 in a room outside the mayoral office, Bradley is already at work, his desk overflowing with documents and correspondence.

“It usually starts with signing whatever documents are left over from the previous day,” Bradley said. “Then I take care of phone calls that have come in. I make inquiries of different department people if there is a problem I need to discuss. Then I review whatever my schedule is for the day to see if there is anything I have to secure or prepare.”

This is his real desk, located in a small room behind the large ceremonial offices where he greets guests and holds meetings.

The Paper Pile

The paper pile on the desk is legendary, although the mayor seems to know how to find things. “He can be in New York City and call and say, ‘Go into my office and pick up the telephone, the stack to the left, two-thirds near the bottom; it’s yellow and you’ve got some information on it,’ ” Moore said. “Or he’ll come in and say, ‘Who has been messing with my desk? You have moved papers.’ ”

The paper work tells much about Bradley. Unwilling to delegate authority, he reads every ordinance that comes across his desk, every report and most of the letters, even those sent by constituents unhappy with city services. “I would say 99.9% of the time, he sees everything,” Moore said.

“A lot of people would consider that old-fashioned,” said Deputy Mayor Tom Houston. “He places his own phone calls. He still signs the proclamations. He could have a machine do it. He will review every letter.”

Among the most important papers on his desk are the files of ordinances and other business that comes from the City Council which, under the City Charter, shares governmental power with the mayor. All this ends up on another desk famous for its clutter, the one belonging to Bradley’s chief administrative assistant, Anton Calleia.

Calleia is an amusing, sometimes sarcastic, occasionally bad-tempered man who was a reporter for the old Examiner and then The Times before joining then-Councilman Bradley’s staff. In the opinion of staff members and others in City Hall, Calleia knows more than anyone about the politics, feuds, bureaucracy and sources of power in the building.

“If you want to find out what’s happening in a department, ask Anton,” Houston said. “He can get the answers quicker than anyone else. The mayor relies on him enormously. He’s the trouble-shooter. He moves an enormous amount of paper.”

Looking at the pile of paper on his desk one day before sending it to Bradley, Calleia said: “This is what I’m going through right now. A department proposes an ordinance to ensure humane treatment of dogs locked up on chains. Everything from that to auction of circus property, to proposed amendments to leases at the airport. They all come here.”

Calleia writes a summary of the ordinance, which is attached to the file, and it is then piled on Bradley’s desk.

“If there’s nothing complicated in the matter--in 30 to 60 seconds I know it’s something that can be approved--I sign it routinely,” Bradley said. “If it is a complicated or controversial matter, there will be a special note on there so I won’t quickly rush it through. I sit and read and may go as far back as committee reports, the city administrative officer’s report, and very often I will have to call somebody and raise questions so that I’m satisfied.

“Sometimes I will actually go out and look at the area. As an example, out in Westwood there was a zone change requested in order to build a hotel. There was opposition from the community and the council had turned down the recommendation and I wanted to be sure the rejection was fair, so I actually went out and walked the neighborhood and talked with neighbors in the area and then I made my decision (against the hotel). I never call and give any advance warning. I just show up and knock on doors.”

The Man Behind the Desk

Bradley is, by all accounts, as inscrutable in the privacy of his office as he is in public. In a sense, Bradley works in isolation, although he is surrounded by people. His associates have no stories of him sharing his innermost thoughts, or even volunteering an opinion on public policy.

Always impeccably dressed, tie never loosened, coat usually on, Bradley sits on an overstuffed chair in his big office, or behind the desk or in the middle of a conference table and just listens.

Sometimes he interrupts with a question, often showing his interest in the minutiae of government. He might ask a department head how a newly promoted official has worked out or complain, “You’re just carrying that guy.”

“One of the most difficult things to learn in dealing with Tom Bradley is that you go in and he listens with a Sphinx-like expression and you don’t know whether anything you have said has registered, and you certainly don’t know whether he agrees with your assessment of the situation,” Calleia said.

“He is not really very open in his personality and demeanor,” said Maureen Kindel, president of the Board of Public Works. Kindel and her husband, federal appeals court Judge Stephen Reinhardt, are close to the mayor. She is constantly talking to Bradley about the public works projects she supervises and about his political life. But even Kindel often leaves meetings without a clue as to what Bradley is thinking.

“He’s friendly and nice,” she said. “And he’s very accommodating with people. But in a private meeting, he is very slow to come up with his opinions. That’s not to say he doesn’t have them. I have never asked him a question directly when he has not said, ‘This is what I think.’

“But on the other hand . . . he never volunteers it. In a meeting, there will be people going around the room and saying, ‘This is the position I think you should be in.’ He’ll listen to every person and . . . you can walk out of the room and he won’t even tell you what he’s decided or his thinking. In other words, he plays it very close.”

Often, he is doing other things while his visitor talks. “I say I want to do this or do that, he listens, participates--and answers phone calls and signs proclamations at the same time,” Houston said.

Only the experienced can understand some of his orders. “He comes out and just hands you something and he leaves. He doesn’t tell you what he wants you to do,” Moore said. His instructions are written on the paper, and he expects his order to be obeyed immediately. “You do it, “ Moore said. “You don’t think about it and set it aside. You stop what you’re doing and you do that and you get back to him. If you haven’t gotten back in time, you will get buzzed. He’ll say, ‘Have you been able to get to that yet? I need it right away.’ ”

When Bradley is angry, only students of the man can tell. “He raises his eyebrows, he sets his chin, his jaw, he writes you notes in large letters,” Moore said.

The Big Decisions

Because Bradley plays it so close, the staff is never quite clear just how the mayor makes some of his big decisions. The fact that Bradley places his own phone calls, often without telling anyone he has made the call, means that none of his aides can say just whom Bradley consulted.

That is why Houston and the others were surprised at one of the most important decisions of his career, when he reversed his years of opposition and signed the ordinance permitting the Occidental Petroleum Corp. to drill for oil in the Pacific Palisades. The decision damaged the mayor’s strong support on the Westside and crippled the pro-environmental attack he had been waging against Gov. George Deukmejian, whom the mayor may challenge in 1986.

Out in the San Fernando Valley, valley coordinator Doris (Dodo) Meyer had a hint weeks before the decision was made:

“He said to me: ‘You know, it’s different this time, the whole plan is different. . . . I’m starting to go through material, I’m not going to make any decision till the council deals with it. But . . . their proposal has resolved a lot of the problems that I had with it from the very beginning.’ ”

As Bradley tells it, he reached his decision as he does in a zoning case, including making visits to urban and beach drilling sites. That was to check out the contention of Occidental and one of its leading City Council backers, President Pat Russell, that since other neighborhoods had oil drilling, the affluent, politically influential Palisades should not be spared.

He went to Huntington Beach, Venice, West Adams and the Westside. “At Venice, I talked to people who were walking by or, in one case, skating by,” he said. “And the funny thing was they didn’t know the well was there. They had no problems and no complaints about it.”

Bradley made these visits over a period of months and then for weeks read the thick council file and reports of the long dispute. “I would do a little bit at a time, “ he said. “It was a chore to do it, so I never had enough time to read it all at once, just whenever I could. I read some of it at my desk, some at home. Most of it was prime time at the office. I was having trouble finishing, and just to keep out any interference with my concentrating, I honestly locked my doors so as to have time to get up to date.”

At the end, he took a yellow legal pad and wrote down the present proposal and how it compared to the one he had vetoed in 1978. He made up his mind on a Friday afternoon and began writing his message. He said he enjoys writing. “I’m a pretty good writer on complex issues like that,” he said.

There are times when Bradley does not give decisions so much thought. An aide approached him in the hall and asked him to appear at a Latino event. Bradley agreed, and the sponsors announced his appearance. It turned out the event was sponsored by Coors, target of a boycott by labor, one of Bradley’s staunchest allies. Bradley canceled the appearance, giving Ferraro an opportunity to attack him for being in labor’s pocket.

Often he relies on the staff for technical information. In January, Houston suggested to Bradley that he make a statement on what Houston considered the state Air Resources Board’s slowness in stopping diesel engine-caused smog.

The approach followed Houston’s general plan of attacking the Deukmejian Administration on environmental issues. The mayor said he was interested and the matter was turned over to Houston’s assistant, Mark Fabiano, a 1982 Harvard Law School graduate, former clerk to Judge Reinhardt and, before he went to work for the mayor, a downtown Los Angeles lawyer.

He wrote a 20-page memo, including a proposal for a city tax on diesel refineries that did not meet state standards, and at 11:30 a.m., went in to see the mayor. “I basically outlined the memo,” Fabiano said. “He asked me a lot of questions. He went to the heart of the problem. He asked me if state and federal gas taxes preempted the city’s power to levy such a tax. I told him it was a close question and outlined ways that may get around it.”

Bradley approved the idea and Houston’s idea of holding a press conference at a site that would draw television coverage, an Arco diesel fuel station at 5th and Alameda streets in the industrial area east of downtown. The mayor edited and approved a press release, rejected longer remarks that had been prepared for him to deliver and spoke from the press release, which he had underlined with a black felt-tip pen on the short drive from City Hall.

The Visitors

“Dear Brother Bradley,” wrote James S. Wade, a Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity brother of Bradley at UCLA about 45 years ago and now president of the Piney Woods Country Life School in Mississippi. “It may be possible for me to drop in and say hello and to let you know how well things are moving along here at the school. I know Brother Laurence Jones is looking down on us and hoping that we would have an opportunity to see each other after several years. I am looking forward to renewing our friendship.”

Bradley saw Wade earlier this year and also stopped at the retirement dinner of another Kappa brother, Raoul Reynolds, a criminal courts investigator. Pat Todd, a court secretary, had written to the mayor’s office that “he (Reynolds) had suffered a stroke six months ago and it would be terrific for Raoul if Mayor Bradley would be able to come or acknowledge his retirement in some way.”

All these requests go to the desk of Linda Miller, the scheduling secretary, a job that in a politician’s office requires good political sense. In shaping the schedule, she must investigate each event, to know those that could help the mayor--or hurt him.

Miller was an actress between roles on television commercials when she became a political volunteer. Later, Miller did political work for the county labor federation and was scheduling secretary for Assemblyman Richard Alatorre (D-Los Angeles) before going to work for the mayor.

About three times a week Miller will deliver two folders--yellow for events far in the future, red for more pressing ones--each containing roughly 50 requests. “I’ve got work for you,” she says.

When he is finished deciding on his schedule, the mayor will take the pile out to Miller, leaving it on her chair if she is not there. “They say, ‘Schedule this one, don’t schedule this one, why was this done?’ or ‘Why wasn’t anybody at the event when I showed up?’ ” The schedule of Tuesday, Feb. 12, gives an idea of a Bradley day. At 5:30 a.m. he campaigned by touring the Produce Market, near downtown. He worked in his office, and at 9:30 a.m. had his picture taken with Melanie Taylor Kent, an artist who did an Olympics painting.

At 10:30 a.m. William Robertson, secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, introduced Bradley to Andy Kuljis, the new president of the city firefighters union. At 11:15 a.m. he posed for a film crew from China Television. At 1:30 p.m. he spoke at a fund-raiser for City Councilman Gilbert Lindsay, a political ally.

That ceremonial event, showing his close ties with Lindsay, had implications for a 2:30 p.m. meeting with city Planning Director Calvin Hamilton, Transportation Department General Manager Donald Howery and Edward Helfeld, who heads the Community Redevelopment Agency.

Helfeld and Hamilton have been feuding. Hamilton objects to giving the downtown redevelopment area an exemption from a state law requiring the entire city to conform to a plan voted by the council years ago. In that proposal, less density than downtown business interests want would be required if the downtown followed the plan. Huge high-rises on the drawing boards might be stalled. Helfeld sided with the downtown leaders, who have benefited from a redevelopment plan that cleared the way for today’s high-rises.

“The mayor favored the exemption, “ Houston said. He said Bradley told that to Hamilton and Helfeld and said, “Work it out.”

Hamilton has continued to tell his side of the story, but Houston said the mayor will not try to stop him. Bradley knows, Houston said, that he has the votes for the exemption on the City Council and Hamilton cannot change them.

Bradley is, after all, the boss--a fact that he emphasizes dozens of times every day, from something as mundane as opening the mail to making billion-dollar downtown development decisions.

The boss-employee relationship to even the most powerful staff members seemed clear one night in the San Fernando Valley when Bradley’s valley backers threw a country and Western fund-raiser. Everyone dressed in what they hoped would be Western style--even the mayor, who wore a blue work shirt and jeans, looking as though they had just come from the store rack. While the band played, Houston did a wild cowboy two-step. The mayor stood at the microphone, as if he were calling a square dance.

The symbolism was probably accidental but very clear: The mayor--not Tom Houston or anyone else on the staff--calls the tune.