Lone Justice : She’s Been Described as Compassionate and Vindictive, Warm and Intimidating, Highly Respected and Unqualified for the Job. In Search of the Real Rose Bird.

Rose Bird is a character: sipping carrot juice, talking to the animals at a city zoo, discussing meditation and her search for an “inner sea of calm,” asking the bewigged chief of Sydney, Australia’s highest court if his scalp itched, lecturing a cabdriver on the dangers of cocaine, denouncing the political system as “bankrupt,” insisting after the 59th consecutive time she overturned a death penalty that her personal views on capital punishment don’t affect her opinions.

There has always been something about Bird--whether it is her unyielding sense of right and wrong, her indifference to worldly goods or her evangelism on behalf of secular causes from vegetarianism to feminism--that has set her apart from other people in public life.

Perhaps the most enduring image of Rose Elizabeth Bird is that of a woman alone--the plucky schoolgirl pedaling long miles to school in the rain; the teen-age idealist working for Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 presidential campaign long before it was fashionable for young people to work in politics; the legal ingenue defending accused rapists and murderers as the first female member of the Santa Clara County public defender’s office; the recluse of the Brown Administration who worked late, skipped the Sacramento parties and went home to her mother; the determined survivor who struggled against repeated onslaughts of cancer without resigning from either the Cabinet or the Supreme Court; the spoilsport who sold the Supreme Court’s limousine and put an end to the justices’ annual meetings at fancy resorts; the stubborn jurist whose unbroken string of death penalty reversals defies the public’s appetite for capital punishment; the embattled candidate who has spurned the help of supporters and has drawn away from friends.

Now, as Bird prepares for an election that could end her nine-year career as chief justice of California, she is working hard to explode the image of an eccentric liberal and to show that she is a reasonable person whose thinking is in line with mainstream values. In her speeches and television ads Bird stresses that her controversial record on the court is based on nothing more than her adherence to old-fashioned constitutional principles.

Bird’s friends hope she will project the same salt-of-the-earth qualities--wit, charm and generosity--they value in the chief justice, qualities they say have been hidden from view. “She has been unfairly criticized. That’s not to say she might have done some things more tactfully. History, though, I think will show that she has been one of the most courageous and visionary members of the Supreme Court,” says Appeals Court Justice John T. Racanelli, who used to drive to work with Bird and whose wife, Betty Medsger, is the author of a ringing defense of Bird’s first years on the court.

Racanelli’s mixture of regret and respect is typical of many people who see Bird as a remarkable person who sometimes manages to be her own worst enemy.

From her earliest days on the court, Bird has been criticized for being aloof and imperious. Lately, even people such as Racanelli who have been close to her in the past say that Bird has begun to distance herself from them. “There has been almost an estrangement that has set in between the chief justice--I used to call her Rose--and people as close to her as I was, even closer. It’s been a disappointment,” he says.

Racanelli says he thinks Bird’s conduct has hurt her. “If one withdraws from public contact, from face-to-face discussions, it can create confusion, even disillusionment, and I think that has happened.” Yet, he says it has not dampened his respect for her.

One of Bird’s former law clerks puts it this way: “She is an extraordinary person, and it approaches Greek tragedy what has happened, where certain of her personal qualities have gotten in the way of what she could have accomplished.”

BIRD WAS AN UNKNOWN QUANTITY WHEN she joined the cabinet of Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. in 1975. Aside from campaign work, she had no political experience when Brown appointed her secretary of agriculture and services.

Bird immediately impressed people.

“At cabinet meetings she would throw her head back like a clipper ship in full sail and state the moral boundaries of an issue with the clearest, cleanest view of anyone I ever heard,” says one of Bird’s colleagues in the Brown Administration, where Bird served as secretary of agriculture and services from 1975 to 1977. “She had a directness about her, a sort of Yankee panache, that could shut down a debate with just a few well-chosen words.”

The colleague recalled Bird’s contribution to a long debate between Brown and several assistants over the question of providing portable toilets to a crowd of demonstrators who were staging a protest on the Capitol grounds. “The issue was whether the toilets would make the demonstration so comfortable that it would go on longer and cause more people to take part. The discussion had been going on for an hour when Rose walked in.

“ ‘People have to go to the bathroom. Give them toilets,’ she said. That was it, end of discussion.”

If speaking her mind meant taking issue with the boss, colleagues recall, Bird was willing to do so. “She was willing to tell someone with quite a lot of power that he didn’t have any clothes on. You might disagree with that or with her. But you had to respect her candor,” says Appeals Court Justice Marc B. Poche, who was Brown’s legislative secretary during the time Bird was a member of the administration.

Marty Morgenstern, who headed Brown’s office of employee relations, recalled one of Bird’s early skirmishes with Brown: “It had to do with the first budget. It had to be trimmed back, and Brown wanted to postpone raises for state employees. Rose single-handedly threw a fit. She went in there and made a speech that it was unethical, that state employees weren’t a bunch of fat-cat bureaucrats, but little people, secretaries, the kind of people the Administration was pledged to look after.”

Bird believes that it was her habit of speaking out that drew her to the attention of Brown in the first place, when he was a struggling candidate for governor and she was acting as his chauffeur. She was driving him and his campaign manager, Tom Quinn, to a debate during the final weeks of the campaign when Brown suddenly asked her how she thought he was doing.

“Apparently, his campaign staff had kept from him the fact that he wasn’t doing real well. I said, ‘I think you’d be lucky if you win.’ . . . I thought Tom Quinn was going to explode at that moment because it was not something that was useful to have him be told right before a debate. I understand that much better now, but I think it was the candidness of telling him exactly what I thought the truth was that caused him to ask me to come up (to Sacramento).”

If her candor endeared her to the governor, it did not always win friends elsewhere in the Administration. One clash had lasting repercussions. It involved one of the Brown Administration’s most publicized accomplishments, the passage of the Agriculture Labor Relations Act, which gave farm workers the right to collective bargaining.

Bird was an architect of the ALRA. But once the act was passed, people close to Bird say she was slow to hand over authority to the five-member board Brown appointed to administer the act. Sources say Bird felt that the board was spending money recklessly and that, despite her sympathy for the farm workers’ movement, she thought the board was too partisan for its own good.

Bird’s discomfort with the board soured her relationship with its chairman, Catholic Bishop Roger M. Mahony, who has since become archbishop of Los Angeles.

“Rose was very upset with the selection of a board that was so apparently one-sided. She especially made enemies with Mahony over that,” says Morgenstern.

Says a former member of Bird’s staff, who asks not to be named: “Here were these guys (ALRB staff members) running around with UFW buttons on, checking in with Cesar Chavez at every opportunity, searching for ways to help the cause, and Rose Bird, who really didn’t have any authority over them, was worried that an agency with such an obvious bias would never survive.”

Bird’s tiff with Mahony did not die quietly. When she was nominated to the Supreme Court, Mahony wrote a letter opposing Bird’s nomination. The bishop questioned Bird’s “emotional stability” and called her “vindictive.” Mahony declines to discuss the letter or the dispute that led to it.

But he was not the first person to find Bird hard to please and quick to judge.

“Bird has the most highly developed, almost eccentric sense of ethics,” says a former employee who worked under Bird in the Brown Administration. “Often, she would be the only person seeing an issue as an ethical question. Inevitably, this led to disagreements in which she would accuse or imply that the person who disagreed was unethical. There were a series of incidents like that, which marred her relationships with people.”

Fellow Cabinet member Donald F. Burns, the secretary of business and transportation, was one of those people. “Whenever she disagreed about something, she would personalize the disagreement,” says Burns, who is now a lawyer in San Francisco. “There would be the suggestion, and sometimes it was pretty explicit, that if you disagreed with her you were selling out.”

Burns recounted an incident in which he tangled with Bird over a letter written by a member of her department to a member of his. “The issue was so trivial I can’t even remember what it was, but the upshot of it was that Bird sent a memo to the governor

with the implication that I was not living up to the ideals of the Administration.”

Burns says he was one of several people whom Brown consulted before appointing Bird to the Supreme Court, and Burns says he recommended her for the job. “I thought she had great abilities and would be a good appointment,” he says. But he admits he did so with an ulterior motive, to get her out of his hair. “Jerry (Brown) thought I was trying to get rid of her. There was a little bit of that. Jerry and I laughed about it.”

It has been less than a decade since Brown appointed Rose Bird to the Supreme Court, but it already seems like a bygone era. The tide of Democratic populism that swept Brown into office has receded, leaving Bird one of few remaining advocates for yesterday’s favored special-interest groups--the poor, the elderly, minorities, employees and consumers.

In several of her most recent speeches, she recited a litany of violent acts committed against homeless people around the country, and she berated politicians for not paying enough attention to issues such as poverty and illiteracy. She has spoken of a “bankrupt” political system that has sold out to special interests, of a nation whose “ethics are based on expediency and convenience rather than on enduring human values.”

Bird conveyed a similar message to audiences in Australia, where she visited earlier this year, and many people who heard her said they were surprised by the chief justice’s bleak vision of her native country.

“Why are you so disillusioned with America?” asked an Australian lawyer who attended one of Bird’s speeches.

“She totally questions the premise on which American society is built,” an Australian journalist commented.

In her personal life, Bird is known for avoiding the trappings of success--preferring small cars and modest houses and choosing anonymous motels with kitchenettes over hotels with three-star dining rooms.

There has been a change in her appearance--highlighted by a new hair style that makes her look, at 49, more youthful and more fashionable than many her age. In most respects, however, the woman who came to work in the governor’s office wearing pantsuits with a prim bow in her hair is as down-to-earth as ever.

When her feet hurt after a day of high-heeled functions in Australia this year, Bird thought nothing of donning black, ankle-high running shoes under a tailored dress before heading off to receptions hosted by the American ambassador and the chief justice of the Australian Supreme Court.

After a private tour of Australia’s sumptuously appointed new Supreme Court building, Bird made clear her distaste for ostentation in clothes and buildings. Stopping in front of a women’s department store window on her way back from the court, she compared the court building to a sequined gown that glittered in the window. “It’s beautiful, but it’s cold and uncomfortable,” she said. “When you dress something up, whether it’s a person or a building, it can have a chilling effect, creating distance between people.”

The most commonplace detail can move Bird to social commentary. Eating lunch in a cafe one day, she drew attention to a troop of uniformed schoolgirls passing the window. Children should not dress alike because it prevents them from appreciating their own diversity, she said, launching into a lecture on the dangers of conformity.

BIRD’S TROUBLES AS CHIEF JUSTICE BEGAN well before the death penalty became an issue. From the moment of her nomination she faced a struggle winning the respect of the judiciary and of the public. There were four strikes against her. She was a woman. She had never been a judge. She was the appointee of a governor who saw the judiciary as a bastion of the overpaid and underworked. And she was Rose Bird, who after less than two years in the Brown Administration had become known as one of the prickliest characters in government.

“There were an awful lot of closed minds among the judges,” says Appeals Court Justice Poche. “The idea that the governor could take someone with no experience--a woman no less--and thrust her on top of the heap, so that she would be setting rules for judges who had put in long years on the bench growing barnacles on their butts--that caused deep-seated resentment.”

Bird says she was made to feel unwelcome on the Supreme Court as soon as she took office. “Wiley Manuel, who was appointed to the court when I was, called to ask me if he could go with me to the lunch the other justices were having for us that day. I had to tell him I didn’t know anything about the lunch. Obviously, I wasn’t invited.”

But Bird may have laid the groundwork for some of the hostility she encountered. Before she took office, she made it clear that she represented a threat to many of the traditional ways of doing things. Appointed by a governor who regarded the court system as a clubby patriarchy, Bird shared his views, according to people who knew Brown and Bird at the time. (Brown was unavailable to be interviewed for this article.)

“Rose Bird went over there with the idea that the courts needed reform. Brown believed that the people who ran those institutions were a small political clique. The reason Bird was sent there was to democratize the courts,” according to Marty Morgenstern, who says he was present for conversations between Brown and Bird shortly before her appointment.

Bird insists now that she had no marching orders to reform the court system, but in her investiture speech in 1977, she said that the courts had lost touch with the people and, as a result, were no longer thought of as fair.

To democratize the system, she began inviting judges from lower courts, those that have most frequent contact with the public, to fill temporary vacancies on the Supreme Court. Traditionally, such assignments were reserved for appeals court judges.

Bird took her penchant for reform to the Judicial Council--the main lobbying, policy-making and budget-setting authority for the court system. She stopped the council’s habit of meeting in remote splendor at resorts in Yosemite and Monterey and ordered the council to convene, where the public could watch, in the State Building in San Francisco.

Much of the criticism of Bird’s reforms--which are often praised by judges today--tends to focus more on how she did things than what she did. Bird surrounded herself with a coterie of handpicked newcomers and distanced herself from longtime court employees.

“From a collegial kind of organization it turned into a stern, hierarchal structure. There was a mood of isolation and suspicion,” says one former employee who worked for the court for 13 years.

Ray Lee, a 30-year employee of the Supreme Court who retired in 1984, mentions the locks that appeared overnight with Bird’s arrival at the Supreme Court in 1977. Lee, who served four chief justices as secretary to the court, says that suddenly the trust and camaraderie disappeared.

“I came into my office one day,” says Lee, “and not only were the doors to the adjoining office locked, the door knobs were gone and, in their place, were steel plates. This had all happened without any explanation.”

The issue of loyalty comes up frequently in comments by former employees.

“One ethical imperative with Bird was loyalty--absolute, blind loyalty. Those who failed that test faced the silent treatment or, worse, the total casting out,” says one.

Another says of Bird: “Disagreeing with her meant lack of loyalty. And that meant you were dead meat, burnt toast.”

One of Bird’s former law clerks, a person who admires the chief justice and plans to vote for her in November, says that even people close to Bird can find it hard to work for her: “Fundamentally, she doesn’t know how to make people feel appreciated. She doesn’t know how to grease the wheels of human motivation. Perhaps, because she expected so much of herself, she simply didn’t realize that other people needed praise or positive feedback. From time to time, she would make an effort. For example, we would have these little birthday parties. But they seemed so artificial. We would all sit there feeling uncomfortable because there had been no real contact preceding it.”

Bird knows that some people regard her as a fearsome presence, and she is both puzzled and saddened by the reaction to her. “I’ll be going to work at the court, driving into the garage, thinking about a case or a legal problem, and there’ll be a judge there that I don’t say hello to, and he’ll think I’m mad at him. One of the appeals court judges said to me the other day: ‘Do you have any idea how intimidating you are?’ I guess I have an intensity about me that maybe, somehow, I don’t quite understand, is misread by people.”

At the same time, Bird concedes that she has not done enough to change the negative image that is held of her in some quarters. “I tend to be somewhat reserved around people who do not know me well. And so a kind of image of a stiff, little-bit-remote person was created,” she says. “And I never did anything to try to dispel it because I always thought it was wasted energy. Who cares what the image is out there? I know who I am and what I am doing. But unfortunately it does make a difference.”

And Bird says she does care what people think of her. “I would perhaps like people to say two things about me. That she cared and that she tried to be a good person.”

Bird says she moved quickly to make changes at the Supreme Court because she was afraid that she didn’t have much time to accomplish her goals. Less than a year after she became chief justice, she endured her second bout of cancer. (The first, in 1976, resulted in a mastectomy.) At the same time, she was facing her first election and a determined campaign to undo her appointment.

“I was not sure how long I would be on Earth, let alone in office,” Bird says.

She survived the election by a margin of 51.7%, the slimmest ever for a California Supreme Court justice. She also survived a third bout with cancer.

The election precipitated the worst crisis of her judicial career up to that time. A 1978 Election Day story in The Times aroused suspicion that Bird or her allies on the court had delayed the release of a decision in a politically sensitive criminal case. Bird asked the California Commission on Judicial Performance to investigate.

The effect of the investigation was like damning with faint praise. The commission concluded its inquiry by saying simply that no formal charges would be filed against any of the justices. It did not say that allegations of case tampering were without merit. Worse, the commission’s hearings exposed the bitter infighting that had beset the court since Bird’s arrival there.

To Bird’s supporters, the episode offered compelling evidence that people on the court were out to get her. To her critics, the hearings made it clear that Bird’s abrasive leadership had thrown a once great institution into an appalling tizzy.

Eight years later, as Bird prepares to face the voters for the second time in her career on the bench, her style of leadership remains an issue. Appeals Court Justice Harry W. Low, who is a former president of the California Judges Assn., says Bird failed a tough test--building a bridge to a judiciary that was not eager to accept her. “It required a person of great interpersonal skills to build that bridge,” Low says. “If she had managed to convey the sense that the California judiciary was a great institution that could be made greater, she would have had an easier time winning people to her side.”

But other judges say Bird has won widespread respect for her efforts to find more money for the judiciary, to computerize the court system and to make judges’ workload more manageable. “She has done a really magnificent job in professionalizing the place and in developing an unprecedented rapport with us,” says a conservative Appeals Court justice who asks not to be named because he says he is uncomfortable praising a chief justice whose opinions he often disagrees with. “She now really fights for us in the Legislature to get funding for more staff assistance or administrative help. She is also much, much more friendly.”

In a way, it is ironic that conservatives are leading the attack against Bird’s reelection in November. Her life has the makings of a classic American success story. Born during the Depression in Arizona, where she lived until she was 14, Bird has risen from an impoverished, fatherless household to the highest court in the state. (Her father, a hat supply salesman who went bankrupt during the Depression, left home when Bird was 5 and died soon afterward.)

After moving to Long Island, where her mother found work in a plastics factory, Bird won a full scholarship to Long Island University, where she earned high honors and became the kind of student that teachers vividly remember 30 years later.

They talk about her two-hour commute, part of it by bicycle, to the inner-city Brooklyn campus where she was virtually the only white Anglo-Saxon female.

Moreover, the words they use to describe her paint a profile very different from the image of the cold, combative administrator that many colleagues say she has become.

“She was a very lovely, sweet, caring person,” says Len Karlin, a former journalism professor at Long Island University. “I would have been very proud if she had been my daughter. I have three daughters, and I would have been thrilled if one of them had been like Rose.”

There are others who attest to the sweeter side of Bird’s nature.

Shirley Shapiro was lying in a hospital bed in Los Angeles after cancer surgery when she got a phone call from the chief justice. Shapiro had never met Bird, never spoken to her before that day. The chief justice simply decided to call after learning from a mutual friend that Shapiro was having a hard time recovering emotionally from an operation similar to one Bird had had for a malignant tumor.

“She just called and said, ‘I’m Rose Bird, a friend of a friend of yours.’ She said she’d had cancer, that it had come back, and that she had made a lot of changes in the way she lived. Her diet, for example. She said if I needed someone who had been through it before to talk to, she was there. I’ll never forget that she did that.”

In other, smaller ways, Bird, who has no children, can show a motherly solicitude to friends and strangers--pressing a bottle of skin cream on a sunburned reporter or putting her arm around a Jewish friend who had just been subjected to an anti-Semitic remark.

She enjoys talking to cabdrivers. With one young driver, who confessed a desire to try cocaine, Bird launched into a friendly but stern lecture on the perils of drug addiction, staying in the cab for several minutes after reaching her stop.

Len Karlin and others who knew Bird at Long Island University say they were surprised to learn that she had become a criminal defense lawyer. “She called me from California, telling me she had taken a job as a public defender and describing the rapists and murderers she was defending. It was a shock to me that she would be handling people like that,” Karlin says.

Bird joined the Santa Clara public defender’s office in 1966. It was the only time she worked as a practicing lawyer before joining the Supreme Court 11 years later. It was also the first time the Santa Clara office had hired a woman public defender.

With her soft voice and old-fashioned good manners, Bird, at the start of her career, was a little mystifying to some of the lawyers she worked around.

Ulysses C. Beasley, a prosecutor with the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office, laughs when he recalls the first time he argued a case against her. “The way she spoke, it was so soft I thought she was crying,” Beasley says. “I guess it had an effect on the way I was handling the case, because the judge took the clerk aside and told him I was acting as though I wanted to give the case to Rose.”

But Beasley says he soon learned that the soft voice belied a quick tongue. “I was always aware she had a hair trigger, and I didn’t want to set it off,” he says. Nevertheless, Beasley says he liked her--liked her and didn’t like her--expressing an ambivalence typical of many people who have known Bird over the years.

“When I first met her she made me feel good inside,” Beasley recalls. “She was a very decent, warm person, and she was a very high, moral person, but there was something about Rose. I can’t put my hand on it. She was just wrongheaded when it came to understanding people. I always felt she thought I should be a very liberal person because I was black.”

Beasley also believes that Bird took her views to the court, where they were enshrined in her death-penalty opinions. “I know she is opposed to the death penalty. She never told me that outright, but I sure got that impression,” Beasley says.

Bird has avoided stating her personal views on the death penalty, insisting that they have no bearing on any one of the 59 cases in which she has voted to overturn the death penalty. “I don’t think it is something that you viscerally decide. I wouldn’t decide whether a sentence is cruel and unusual because some mechanism within my head tells me that it is cruel or unusual. I would do it based on what the Constitution intends, what the history of a particular amendment is and what the case law has been over the years.”

Bird maintains that she has voted to reverse death sentences because defendants were denied essential constitutional protections during the course of trials or criminal investigations. She attributes the number of reversals to the state’s death-penalty law, which she says does a poor job of spelling out the constitutional requirements that police, prosecutors and judges must follow.

The people who question Bird’s claim of impartiality in death-penalty cases point to the language of some of her opinions as evidence that she has more sympathy for the people accused of the crimes than she does for the victims of the crimes.

Indeed, some friends say that Bird’s reputation for fairness is not well served by the wording of some of her opinions. For example, Appeals Court Justice William A. Newsom, who works down the hall from Bird and knows her socially, cites the language of Bird’s opinion in the case of Earl Lloyd Jackson, who was sentenced to death for murdering two elderly Long Beach women in 1981. One of the women had been raped with a wine bottle. Jackson was quoted as saying that “the two old bags were a nuisance and . . . got what they deserved.”

The Supreme Court upheld Jackson’s death sentence, but Bird dissented, arguing that Jackson, a man of limited intelligence, was not competently represented.

Bird’s dissent, which caused people to wonder about her sympathies, began:

“Today, this court sends to his death an impoverished, illiterate and possibly retarded 19-year-old black youth. . . . “

To Newsom, that language is a good example of the chief justice’s flair for being unnecessarily provocative. “Why not start out by saying, ‘This has been a heinous crime, and it is with extreme reluctance that I dissent,’ ” he says. “Why not let people know that you share their repugnance for what was done? But when she says what she says, you can’t blame the people for reacting the way they do.

“Time and time again,” Newsom continues, “the court does what it thinks is right but doesn’t care a whit how it is perceived by the public. I have tried to make that point with the chief justice. It’s not what you say, but how you say it. I’ve told her that her unpopularity wasn’t confined to right-wingers but that it has filtered down to the man on the street, to the barber and the bricklayer. I also told her I thought it could be cured if she was willing to reach out to people a little more.”

Bird tends to be impatient with armchair analysis, whether it is of her tumultuous tenure as chief justice or of a more personal nature. In her view, most of it adds up to grist for gossip columns and is hardly the stuff of serious political commentary.

She is well-known for her reluctance to talk about herself. Nothing is more likely to draw rebuke from her than a personal question. To have someone poking around her private life, taking pictures of her at home, playing with her nieces or her dogs, would be debasing, she believes.

“What happens in that process is that you use people, and even something like your dogs, as objects to create an image or an aura around yourself. And in the process of doing that, you debase who you are. You dehumanize yourself.”

On the infrequent occasions when Bird does talk about herself, she concedes there are things she would do differently if given the chance to relive her life. She says she regrets never having started a family. “I’ve missed out on that part of life. I’m sorry about it, though I think now I would be a much better wife and mother than I would have 20 years ago. I think I am a much more tolerant person now,” she says.

When the subject of her future is raised, however, Bird is less forthcoming. She jokes about opening a brownie store, then says she hasn’t thought about what she will do if she is out of office. “I have a feeling--that may in part come from having faced cancer--that the future tends to take care of itself and you shouldn’t worry so much about it. You should concentrate on what you are doing now, and if you do it well, things that you want will happen in the future.”

Bird has repeated that comment, as if it were a key refrain, in a number of speeches she has given. She said it in Australia, where it went over well.

“She gives off an incredible, palpable sense of serenity,” said one woman who came to hear Bird speak in Sydney. “I am very impressed by people who are prepared to throw fate to the winds.”

Later on that day, Bird and a few friends ate dinner at a popular local nightclub. The featured performer, a gravel-voiced white man who sang blues in the style of black American musicians, treated Bird to a bit of down-home fatalism. It was a rough-hewn, pitiless tune that Billie Holiday used to sing called “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do.”

The song goes: “There ain’t nothing I can do, nothing I can say folks don’t criticize. I’m gonna do what I want to do anyway, and I don’t care if they despise me. . . . Ain’t nobody’s business what I do.”

Bird smiled and nodded in time to the song’s rolling piano accompaniment. It sounded like her kind of tune.