At 79, Lawyer Is Still at Home on a Soapbox : Adventures of Eve and George Slaff Include Liberal Causes and Fierce Independence

The heroine followed her desires and her passionately independent spirit into an area where--tradition had it -- she was not expected to go.

The hero followed his conscience to do battle with injustice wherever -- by his lights -- injustice dwelled.

A summary of a romance novel? No, merely an outline of the adventures of Eve and George Slaff.

Eve, now 73, is a full-time executive, a petite, dark-eyed dynamo who became the boss of a business in an era, 30 years ago, when not many women found opportunities to do so. She went into business not because she needed money but because of a clear-eyed rationale.

‘Enough Was Enough’

When her husband’s work required one too many household moves, Eve said, “I decided enough was enough. My feeling was, I’m going to find something to do where my time is as important as George’s. Instead of having to pick up stakes and move to one place or another, I would have my own life that would keep me set where I wanted to be.”

George Slaff gave solid support to her independent inclinations, Eve said recently, because: “It was something he understood very well. In his family background and in mine there were independent women who established their own credentials.”

George Slaff, at 79, is an alert, peppy champion of liberal causes. His serious intent is usually softened by a cheerful smile and an agreeably noncommital manner, but beneath the genial exterior he is a persistent fighter for his beliefs. An attorney, he was president of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Southern California branch for six years and he is currently a member of ACLU’s national advisory council.

Target of Complaints

He has been the target of complaints not only from political conservatives but ironically from fellow liberals within the ACLU. He is generally inclined to ignore his critics. But when dealing with an issue in court, Slaff is a skilled debater who does his homework carefully and presents his case in rolling, basso profundo tones, a manner of speaking that carries over to everyday life.

Whenever possible he has kept his political views separate from his professional practice; a specialist in the entertainment industry, Slaff for two decades was chief counsel and personal attorney to film producer Samuel Goldwyn, and in recent years he has represented clients from Raquel Welch to the Smothers Brothers.

But Slaff has made many courtroom appearances without fee on behalf of liberal causes. He regards citizen participation in politics as a duty: He served 12 years as a member of the Beverly Hills City Council, including two terms as mayor (the office is rotated annually among council members).

Slaff has also received plenty of brickbats. He has been criticized sharply at times, especially on radio talk shows, as a consequence of taking ACLU cases to court and defending unpopular clients. But he rarely bothers to reply to those attacks. “A courtroom lawyer,” he said, “learns not to be diverted by irrelevancies.”

Freewheeling Politics

Slaff takes pride in a tradition of freewheeling independent politics. “I grew up in a liberal atmosphere,” he said. His parents, Russian Jews who fled czarist tyranny in the late 19th Century, settled in Passaic, N.J., an industrial town a dozen miles from Manhattan.

“They came to America to find opportunity, and they found it,” Slaff said. “My father started out with a pack on his back, selling needles and buttons and bows, and eventually worked his way up to become a successful businessman.”

Partly in rebellious reaction to the cruel ways of czarist Russia, partly out of an instinctive sympathy for the less fortunate, the Slaff household became a center of liberal attitudes and a stopping place for new arrivals from the old country. “My mother’s opinions,” Slaff said recently, “might have been called socialistic.”

The women in the family were active, enlightened and progressive, Slaff said; his mother worked alongside his father in business, while George’s older sister became a physician in 1920, “when women doctors were practically unknown.”

The third of four children, George Slaff at the age of 10 became “a kind of an honorary member of the Young People’s Socialist League. I carried around a soapbox for Socialist speakers to stand on.”

As a high school sophomore George wrote an essay critical of President Woodrow Wilson. “I began reading the essay to the class and the teacher stopped me right in the middle of it.”

Fire Undimmed

But the youth’s outspoken fire was not dimmed. At 15 he became captain of the high school debating team. Quick in studies, he entered Harvard at 16 and later he followed an older brother to Stanford University Law School.

From the moment Slaff began practicing law, his sympathies were never in doubt: His earliest clients were tenants against landlords.

He also made time for plenty of pro bono work. He said: “In 1932 the Erie Railroad apparently decided that one way to meet the Depression was to raise commuter fares. My brother and I were living in Passaic and commuting to New York. We formed the Metropolitan League of Erie Commuters”--despite its imposing name the outfit consisted entirely of the two brothers--”and we brought suit to stop the proposed fare increase.” Eventually the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled in favor of the railroad, but one week after the ruling the Erie reduced its fares.

The Slaff brothers and a few friends next formed the Utility Users League and sued the Public Service Electric & Gas Co. of New Jersey. The case lasted two years and resulted in a major reduction of utility rates. Victory brought a measure of fame: The mayor of Louisville, Ky., hired Slaff as special counsel to press a rate-reduction suit against Southern Bell Telephone & Telegraph Co. Slaff moved to Louisville for two years and won “a large rate reduction.”

After that, George Slaff returned to New York, where he went into private law practice with his brother and, on the side, the two kept up a steady pattern of pro bono cases.

In one, representing a group of labor unions, George Slaff carried successfully through the New Jersey Supreme Court a case claiming the right of union organizers to distribute handbills.

Landmark Decision

Another time, when Jersey City Mayor Frank (“I Am The Law”) Hague ordered local police to physically “deport” union organizers outside the city limits, George Slaff joined other lawyers in a suit to block Mayor Hague’s action. The case against Hague, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, became a landmark “free speech” decision.

That success brought another request to George Slaff and his brother, this time from Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose members had been banned by lower courts from distributing leaflets. When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the Slaff brothers wrote an amicus brief; and once again the result was a landmark victory for free speech.

George Slaff’s keen interest in public utilities, and his impressive track record at winning rate reductions, led to an invitation to join the reform-minded New Deal, and at the age of 38 he was appointed chief counsel of the Federal Power Commission.

There he headed up the first nationwide investigation of the natural gas industry. During his government service he won a series of lawsuits establishing the federal government’s right to regulate the natural gas and electrical power industries, and he won additional cases resulting in rate reductions by utility companies.

Slaff also joined the FPC employees’ union. “Then I found out,” he said, “the union had created a separate union for black members, so of course I worked hard to get that kind of nonsense knocked off.”

In Washington, he also renewed his friendship with a distant relative, Eve Budd. When they first met, some years earlier at a Passaic gathering of the Slaff clan (a group numbering more than 300 family members), George Slaff sensed immediately that they might be meant for each other.

The telltale clue: Eve had organized a meeting to help the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, and she invited George not only to attend the meeting but to deliver a speech, which he did.

Youngest of Four Children

The youngest of four children, Eve also grew up in Passaic, where her father owned a department store. “My world was not enclosed,” she said recently. “I never thought in terms of not being involved in something, of not working for one cause or another. During the Spanish Civil War I collected clothes--my brothers claimed I took everything, including their tuxedoes--and sent all of it over to help the Loyalists.”

Eve entered New York University in 1929, but dropped out after two years when the Depression took its toll of the family’s finances. Eve went to work in her father’s store.

“It was a very troubling time for him,” she said. “He was in process of not only losing the store, but he had debts on other properties. I stayed with him, as sort of a morale backup. It was hard for him to talk to bankers, hard for him to relinquish anything.

“Somehow, I was able to deal with creditors and do whatever had to be done. I’d worked in the store while I was growing up. The conversation of business was always going on around me. I’d assimilated knowledge about mortgages and banking. My two brothers were away, my sister was not much interested in business, so when the Depression struck, I was the one who stayed on and kept involved.”

Later, Eve went to secretarial school, to learn shorthand and typing, and in time she went to Washington to become a lobbyist for a nursery industry trade association. In Washington, she renewed her friendship with George Slaff, and the friendship gradually bloomed into romance.

Married in 1944, amid a housing shortage in overcrowded Washington, Eve took time off from politics to search for a place to live. “We’d find an apartment to sublet, and just about the time we got settled into it, the owners wanted it back, and then we’d have to find another. My main occupation seemed to be establishing households and then moving again.”

Reputation Grows

George Slaff’s reputation grew as a skilled and independent-minded lawyer, and in 1946 he was introduced to Samuel Goldwyn, a film producer widely known for his own maverick ways. Slaff said: “We struck immediate rapport.”

Goldwyn hired him to be the film company’s chief counsel, and the Slaffs moved to Los Angeles. Housing was scarce and, Eve recalled, “We kept moving from one hotel to another.” They bought a house in the Hollywood Hills, adopted two children and later moved to Beverly Hills.

Aware of Eve’s business experience, a Los Angeles-based relative asked her to join him as a partner in a garment factory. At first she declined; the children needed her attention and, moreover, she was busily establishing household roots.

Soon, however, there was another temporary move. George was needed for a six-month tour of duty in Goldwyn’s New York office; Eve and the children took up temporary lodging in suburban Connecticut.

“It was a lovely setting, a beautiful home with a pond, but I didn’t like the idea of all that moving around,” Eve said. “It occurred to me I needed something that would be as important to me as George’s career was to him, something that would allow me to stay in one place.”

When the Slaffs returned to Beverly Hills, she was ready to accept her relative’s offer of a business partnership. “I figured it was something I could do during the hours the children were in school, something on a limited schedule. It stayed ‘limited’ for about two weeks.”

Firm Expanded

Eve Slaff brought in a third partner and the firm expanded its production line to include chaise lounge covers made of terry cloth. Later Eve developed the terry-cloth section of the business into a separate company. She said: “One day the buyers at J. C. Penney called up and asked for terry-cloth robes. Gradually the robes became the major line and the chaise cover became a minor item. Today, under the label Robes of California, we sell to practically all the major department stores.”

Not many women were executives in the garment industry when Eve made her entry 30 years ago. “Customers would come in and ask to see the boss. I’d say: ‘I am the boss,’ and they were surprised. Then, after a while, they’d say: ‘You know, you think like a man!’ This was supposed to be a great accolade,” she explained.

“But I never thought of business in terms of man versus woman. I never thought I was doing anything unusual. My mother was an independent person who worked in the store with my father, not as an accessory but as a full partner.

“I had the same experience, especially when my help was needed during the Depression years, and what I’ve done since then has been a natural progression of life.”

Eve’s outspoken independence has occasionally startled her peers. One revealing incident occurred when George Slaff, active in civic affairs and championing liberal causes, was first elected to the Beverly Hills City Council in 1966.

Following inauguration ceremonies, Eve recalled, “The wife of another councilman said to me, ‘See you next Tuesday.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘It’s a meeting of the council.’ I said, ‘But that’s George’s meeting, not mine.’ She said, ‘But all the wives always go to the council meetings.’ I said, ‘Well, now you’ve met one wife who’s not going to be there.’

Her Own Job to Do

“I wasn’t trying to be different. I’m happy to be George’s wife, I was happy about his election to city council, but I didn’t see it as my responsibility to hang in there and applaud every time he made a speech.

“Maybe if I had nothing else to do, and if I needed that kind of social or ego satisfaction, I’d have become a typical council wife. But I had my own life going, I had my own job to do.

“That’s the way George and I have always functioned. He certainly doesn’t come to my office and tell me how to run the business, nor would I ever tell him how to do his work.”

The Slaffs have suffered personal tragedy and serious illness. One child was killed in an auto accident in the 1960s. Eve underwent a 10-hour operation for a brain tumor three years ago and, after a period of recuperation, returned to her full-time work schedule at the factory. Late last year George had a colostomy, and afterward he also returned to a busy professional routine.

Beyond her 9-to-5 life in business, Eve makes time for another activity: She is a board member of the Constitutional Rights Foundation, a nonprofit group devoted to law-related, business and education programs for youth. The CRF has collaborated with the Los Angeles Unified School District on a new program called Youth Community Service. Through YCS, 12 junior high school students from each of 12 schools are this year developing their leadership skills by involving their peers in community projects.

George Slaff has kept up a close involvement with political causes. While he worked professionally as counsel to Goldwyn, private citizen Slaff wrote an amicus brief on behalf of the Hollywood Ten, a group of movie writers and directors who had been sentenced to jail for contempt of Congress following refusal to answer a House committee’s questions about their political beliefs and associations.

Slaff also wrote an amicus brief on behalf of a lawyer who passed the California Bar examination but was refused admission to the State Bar because he refused to answer questions dealing with his political beliefs.

Unease in Some Quarters

When Slaff became mayor of Beverly Hills in 1968, there was unease in some quarters of City Hall, particularly in the Beverly Hills Police Department, about his ACLU connection. But any worry that he would be unduly influenced by the ACLU proved unwarranted; even his more conservative critics conceded that he conducted the mayor’s office with fairness and balance.

Slaff’s social conscience has always been plain to see. He has personally taken many ACLU cases to court. He set up ACLU legal aid for defendants following the 1965 Watts riot. Recently, when the Boy Scouts of America denied an Eagle Scout permission to become a scoutmaster because of the person’s admitted homosexuality, Slaff acted as the Eagle Scout’s ACLU attorney. Preliminary proceedings have been under way for several years; the case is expected to go to trial in the near future.

Slaff’s involvement in unpopular causes has occasionally drawn broadsides not only from conservatives but also from liberals, including some within the ACLU. One example: Following an incident among Marines based at Camp Pendleton, in which blacks were physically beaten by whites, the latter group was about to be summarily punished by the Marine Corps.

Slaff said: “I took the position that--no matter what I thought of them--the white Marines were entitled to due process under the military code. Our (ACLU) board got into a great debate about the propriety of the ACLU representing the white Marines. Ultimately, a majority of the board agreed with me.” But during the debate, one ACLU member was overheard to say: “We’ve just got to get rid of old-fashioned liberals like George Slaff.”

“So I get it from both sides,” George said recently, reporting the anti-Slaff comment with a burst of laughter. “And I recognize that many people in the Democratic Party don’t want to be known as liberals. There seems to be some intellectual stigma, in today’s climate, about being ‘too liberal.’ But I don’t think liberalism can be considered excessive. To me, it’s simply a matter of recognizing equal rights for all.”