MAUREEN KINDEL

Maureen Kindel, sitting in her cool blue City Hall office full of overstuffed furniture that she herself had bought, was at that moment a perfect blend of 1950s traditionalism and 1980s raw ambition.

She repeatedly spoke of the Bradley Administration as “we.” She described herself as a feminist, talked at great length about the need for progress for women, and told of the time and money she gives to organizations that help poor women.

During the same conversation, she often fretted about her appearance (“This is the picture I prefer you use--or why don’t you just sub me out and use what you’ve got on Jackie Bisset”), complained good-naturedly that her children are being too slow to settle down and have grandchildren, and peppered her conversations with Eisenhower-era phrases like “really nifty.”

That is how Kindel described her $52,000-a-year-job on the city Board of Public Works. She was appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley in 1979 and was elected president of the board the next year.

But the big way she exerts her influence, she admitted unabashedly, is in her ability to get the mayor’s ear.

“The only way I can quantify the power I have is to measure the influence I have over the mayor. Most suggestions that I make to him, he follows. Most things that I ask him to do, he does,” Kindel said, before adding quickly: “That doesn’t mean I have a perfect record.”

Not quite. She was one of a group of the mayor’s confidantes who argued against Bradley’s controversial approval of oil drilling in Pacific Palisades. That decision was evidence, Kindel said, “that none of the people close to the mayor can push him to do something he doesn’t want, doesn’t believe in doing.”

But Bradley took her advice on how to deal with the Soviet boycott of the 1984 Summer Olympics.

Kindel, a member of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, was one of a handful of advisers who met with the mayor, urging him to fly to Moscow if it would help to persuade the Soviets to participate. Bradley announced that he would go to Moscow but later decided that the trip would be futile.

Bradley turned to Kindel for help on another Olympic-related problem.

Robert J. Fitzpatrick, president of California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, recalls what happened after he turned down Bradley’s request to head up the Olympics Arts Festival. Kindel and the mayor flew to Valencia by helicopter to persuade Fitzpatrick to take the Olympics job. Fitzpatrick politely declined.

Another meeting was arranged at the home of Olympic committee chairman Paul Ziffren. Fitzpatrick said Kindel used her 5-foot, 4-inch frame to block a doorway, refusing to budge until he agreed to take the job. He agreed.

“I came to understand that if I wanted to continue to live in Southern California, I’d better reconsider,” Fitzpatrick said with a chuckle. “It was all done with smiles and great grace but the message was very clear.”

Dubbed ‘Miss Modesty’

Bradley himself said as much during an Olympics reception later: “No one can say no to Maureen . . . not forever, “ the mayor said of the friend he once playfully dubbed ‘Miss Modesty.’ “She will get you in the end.”

Some of her early education in political persuasion came when she was a housewife in Maryland during the late 1950s. She took part in the civil rights movement, she said, starting with a Maryland fair housing group that was fighting discrimination against black home buyers.

“People would come in and march and I would make sandwiches and things like that,” she said. “I must say I was mad at (Los Angeles Assemblywoman) Maxine Waters, who did that thing at the South African embassy and didn’t call me. I said to her (later), ‘I haven’t been on a picket line in a long time. I would have loved that.’ ”

Her first marriage, which lasted 10 years, was to a New York patent attorney. The couple had two sons, now aged 23 and 26.

Became Well-Connected

She married attorney James Kindel in 1971. They moved from New York to Los Angeles, where he became well-connected in Los Angeles business, legal and social life.

In Los Angeles, she quickly became a fund raiser for the Music Center. All of this, and more, is chronicled in an eight-page biography that she keeps on hand. (“Henry Kissinger doesn’t have a resume that long,” she joked.)

Her entree into the Bradley circle was basic--she knew how to raise money, lots of it. After her Music Center efforts, she was appointed fund-raising director for Bradley’s first reelection campaign. Kindel attributes some of her fund-raising success to the fact that she “married well.”

During his first successful mayor’s race in 1973, Bradley relied heavily on money from Westside Jewish liberals. But Kindel “gave them the entree to the big WASP, old money that had not been flowing before,” one Bradley aide said.

Marriage Broke Up

Kindel said that the strains of the 1977 campaign led to the breakup with her husband, although they are still friendly. “Tom Bradley cost me my marriage,” she said. “I was married to a very conservative Republican lawyer who didn’t like me staying out until all hours of the night working on the campaign.”

Kindel now is married to U.S. Appeals Court Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt, a one-time Democratic National Committee member and longtime Bradley confidante whom Kindel often refers to as “the judge.” Bradley appointed him to the city Police Commission in 1975. He was commission president when he resigned in 1980 to become an appellate judge.

Since her appointment to the city Board of Public Works in 1979, Kindel has worked to keep the film industry in Los Angeles, has encouraged stiff penalties for toxic dumpers and advocated affirmative-action provisions to open the city contracting process to more women and minorities.

As board president, Kindel has been “an exceptionally good administrator” but “ruthless,” according to Jim Hall, a former public works commissioner and one of 120 city commissioners fired by Bradley last year in a shake-up of all city commissions.

Does ‘Political Things’

Hall said that Kindel cherishes the “prestige” of the board job and spends as much time doing “political things” for the mayor as she does on her board duties.

She was confronted with controversy following a 1980 series of Times articles detailing questions about use of public funds. The stories related how Kindel called city workers to pump water out of her basement and raised allegations that she had contract standards rewritten to benefit a friend.

Bradley asked three commissioners named in the stories to resign, but Kindel was not one of them. Bradley stood by her and said that the allegations, denied by Kindel, were not serious enough to warrant her removal.

Since then, her job has been “to make public works a matter of pride for the mayor, and she did,” said James Wood, chairman of the Community Redevelopment Agency. “She has made herself a force, a positive one I think, to be reckoned with.”