Pioneer in a New Breed of Community Leader

Jane Nathanson has sized up the situation. Do-gooding was fine for her mother’s generation, those energetic women of usually affluent households who about 40 years ago were spotting needs--unwed mothers, deprived children, bright youngsters who need scholarships--and starting organizations to handle these problems.

But not today. Today, if you’ve got the energy and you want to make an impact, it’s do-gooding plus politics plus activism.

“It’s what the world demands,” says David Mixner, chairman of the Great Peace March, which began March 1 in Los Angeles with about 1,000 people walking across the country to Washington to advocate global nuclear disarmament. And Jane Nathanson, he says, is a pioneer of this new breed of community leader.

Nathanson--one week shy of her 40th birthday, wife-mother-professional woman-volunteer--is the stereotypical superwoman of the ‘80s. Her projects lately: chairing both the departure ceremonies for the PROPeace March and the May 16 party accompanying the Museum of Contemporary Art’s giant art auction.

A child of the ‘60s who wanted to change the world, but not herself, Jane Fallek was appreciative, rather than rebellious, of her parents’ wealth and had no problem with joining a protest march after a daylong shopping spree.

She still sees it that way, glad to have the money to enjoy life, to give to projects she believes in, an involvement in the art world she loves, a happy, healthy, well-adjusted family. But she also talks of the importance of power--maybe not to change the world, but at least to have an impact on one’s immediate environment. And power, she says, means politics, making commitments to candidates and elected officials, pressure groups and people who, like Mixner, fight for issues and press for change.

“I think if you have a chance to do something, to make a difference--well, you’ve got to do it,” Nathanson said recently, sitting in the futuristic party room of her 40-year-old Beverly Hills home, leaning back amid the cushions, which had been piled on a concrete block sofa. “My involvement with PROPeace, I think it gives it creditability when people see that your community ladies are involved too, that it’s more than a college hippie thing.”

Nathanson with her home full of Warhols, Segals, Ruschas and Motherwells, her love of great clothes and knock-out jewelry, her passion for travel and the luxury life--David Mixner says she’s a woman who can fit in anywhere.

“I’m number one in Jane’s fan club,” he adds. “She’s one of the few people I know, who when she makes a commitment, she does three things. She works her head off. She’s with you through thick and thin. And she’s extraordinarily well-connected.”

The connections extend from artists to community leaders to politicians to movie producers to the everyday-type folk one meets at PTA meetings or in movie lines. Nathanson likes people. She likes them in a down-home, we’re-all-in-this-together, have-some-cake sort of way.

And she likes to talk, to converse, laughing at herself even as she is being candidly introspective.

Stories--like how she grew up a princess, summers studying art in Europe, a father who denied her nothing. Her late father, Fred Fallek, was a German Jew who immigrated here during World War II, started a chemical import firm with $500 and sold it several years ago to Diamond Shamrock for $90 million.

This was conversation squeezed between meetings a few weeks ago. It had started at 10 a.m. with the by-laws committee of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s new support group, still unnamed. At 11:30 a.m., the invitations committee for the MOCA fund-raiser arrived. Shortly after noon, the first of the PROPeacers, straggling in early for a meeting at 1. Then that night, Nathanson and her husband, Marc, president of Falcon Communications, the state’s largest independent Cable TV operator, would meet friends for dinner at Morton’s.

But not until late. That’s a Nathanson house rule: no social engagements before 8 p.m. That’s so parents can sit with children--Nicole, 17, Adam, 15, and David, 9--while they eat and maintain, as Jane Nathanson says, “a semblance of a family life.”

Jane and Marc Nathanson moved to Los Angeles 10 years ago and almost immediately were invited into the crowd that makes things happen.

“As I think about it, I was lucky,” she said. “I like people. And people were receptive to us. This is really a big small town.”

Jane Nathanson also said yes: to Cedars-Sinai Women’s Group (she still pays dues); to the Amazing Blue Ribbon (which she subsequently quit--”I was 28, too young, and I’m bothered by exclusiveness. I like inclusiveness”); to MECLA (Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles, one of the largest gay activist groups in the U.S.); to the Dance Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

And it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if her family had not been affluent, she decided. She still would have been involved. “Either you have a talent for that or not.”