Santa Ana Lawyer Has Writing on Her Personal Docket

Pamela Trescott just can’t seem to kick her Orange County roots.

Since growing up in Anaheim, she has taken off to help Ronald Reagan move into the White House, learned Mandarin so she could deal directly with the Chinese for the U.S. Department of Commerce and written two books on such disparate subjects as diplomatic immunity and Cary Grant--among a lot of other things.

But when she got tired of the writing regimen and decided a few months ago to pick up her law practice for the third or fourth time, she chose Santa Ana “because I have lots of associations, lots of friendships there.”

When Trescott talks, the listener gets breathless. An enormously energetic woman in her early 40s, Trescott has dipped into so many activities, rocked so many boats, tossed off so many achievements that they begin to sound almost mundane. (Doesn’t everyone write a book if the spirit moves the person?) Especially when rendered between bites of salad at a local restaurant where she has rushed after a long morning in a Santa Ana courtroom.

Her conversation is like quicksilver, running through the fingers. But her accomplishments are solid, the result of a kind of bulldog tenacity and determination. Especially in the area of diplomatic immunity.

The small cadre of diplomats’ relatives and staff members of diplomatic missions in the United States who have chosen to flaunt their diplomatic immunity should have planted a sign in front of Trescott’s Washington townhouse saying, “Don’t burgle.” But one of them did--and got her dander up.

“They trashed my apartment,” she recalls, “and when the police got there and checked it out, they told me they knew who did it--and they couldn’t do anything about it. That’s when I really began to understand the nature of diplomatic immunity.”

The townhouse next door was a chancery of the Dominican Republic. One of the staff members, says Trescott, had simply placed a ladder on Dominican soil, leaned it against Trescott’s apartment, climbed in a window and helped himself.

This was during Trescott’s Commerce Department period, and she went to work the next day full of outrage. What she discovered--to her surprise and consternation--was that virtually everyone who heard her story promptly topped it with tales of being run into, burgled, beaten up and even raped by people with diplomatic immunity.

“So,” she said, “I started to collect stories and do some research. I found that immunity worked OK when the diplomatic service was narrowly construed. But now it covers huge retinues of staff and family and it doesn’t work very well at all. And we get a double dose in this country because we not only have all the diplomatic postings but the U.N. ambassadors and their staffs as well.”

About the same time, Trescott’s husband, Chuck Ashman--an internationally known and respected investigative journalist and biographer--interviewed a New York City woman who had been beaten, robbed and raped by the son of a low-ranking U.N. delegate. The police caught him, tied him to several other rapes, then had to release him when he claimed diplomatic immunity. He departed the United States, grinning cheerfully from the steps of the airliner. Ashman remembers that grin.

Because, said Trescott, “we thought it would be easier to get things changed in England,” she and her husband directed their early research to diplomatic crimes committed in England. The result was a book called “Outrage” that was well enough received that Trescott and Ashman decided to redo it for an American audience, using only crimes committed by diplomats, their families and staff in the United States. Called “Diplomatic Crimes” (Acropolis Books Ltd.), the book was published last fall. Said Trescott (who is presently working on a TV treatment) wryly: “We wouldn’t have to make anything up to keep it on the air for years.”

She hasn’t received a sales report yet, but the book--along with her untiring efforts in public speeches and congressional hearings--sparked the first attempt by lawmakers to assess diplomatic immunity since it was defined by the Vienna Conventions on Consular and Diplomatic Relations in 1961 and 1963. Last summer, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-S.C.) introduced a bill that would restrict diplomatic immunity to diplomatic agents and consular officers, removing the blanket of protection now thrown around staff members and families. The State Department resisted, and the bill died in committee. “But,” said Trescott, “it will be reintroduced.”

That kind of determination has been a prime catalyst for Pamela Trescott since she was a child. It just took awhile for the muscle to catch up with the determination. She was born in Rhode Island and grew up in Anaheim, where she was a member of the first graduating class of Western High School.

“I was a little skinny kid nobody ever looked at,” she said. “I’d been jumped a grade a couple of times, so I had just turned 16 when I graduated.” She didn’t have a shot at valedictorian “because I never made it in gym class.”

She was halfway through Cal State Long Beach when she got married and pregnant in 1963. She will say only that the marriage was to “a fellow student and very brief. I had to drop out of school to earn enough to raise my baby.” She waited tables, sold used cars, even laid bricks until 1971 when she married Chuck Ashman.

The following year, Trescott went back to school--but this time it was law school. Lacking a BA, she tested into Pacific Coast University in Long Beach, then the University of West Los Angeles, both private law schools. She got her law degree and passed the California State Bar exam on her first try in 1976.

She entered an overcrowded profession in one of the toughest arenas in the world--Beverly Hills--and made it, specializing almost by accident in foreign theatrical work. How did she break through so quickly? She shrugged. “I met the right people.” Pause, then more firmly. “Anybody can make it who wants to be out there and take a few risks on things they believe in--and aren’t too concerned about money.”

In 1980, she was invited to go back to Washington as part of the transition team that ushered in the Reagan presidency. She said she has no idea why she was chosen or who chose her--although as an afterthought she added, “Jerry Ford might have been my entree because I did some legal work for his family.”

She liked Washington, attended the Foreign Service Institute and was invited to work in the Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration, which led to postings in Beijing and Taiwan. These were frenetic years, with Trescott spending every third or fourth weekend on the redeye flight between Washington and Los Angeles. (“I’d arrive at the Commerce Department in sweats on Monday morning and change to working clothes in my office.”)

Trescott left Commerce in 1984 to join a vast Los Angeles law firm (“basically because I found it interesting and I’d never done that before”). She stayed a year. “They were fine attorneys and I enjoyed it, but I had to discover that I greatly prefer the freedom of a small practice.”

In 1985, Trescott turned virtually full time to researching and writing “Diplomatic Crimes.” She and her husband--who writes regularly for the Chicago Sun-Times and a string of European newspapers including the Sunday Express of London--had never attempted to collaborate before. Trescott said that on balance it worked quite well, “although we have very different ways of going about a book. He thinks I’m too picky, and I know my writing is more structured than his. So he makes me move faster, and I make him structure his work.”

During the collaboration, Trescott took a writing detour of her own. In the social circles she frequents, she has become a good friend of actress Dyan Cannon, once married to Cary Grant. She also met and admired Grant--so much that she decided to write a biography of him. If that seems an odd project for a lawyer specializing in international trade and diplomatic excesses, Trescott doesn’t think so. “You can write on anything you’re interested in. Just go for it.”

She went for it. Grant approved and met with Trescott several times “and talked about the things he liked to talk about--industry stuff. He’s a very private man, so I had to do a lot of research.”

The books were written concurrently. The Cary Grant biography is scheduled to show up in Southern California bookstores next month--and Trescott is already into two new books. She won’t say what they are (“I never like to talk about them while they’re in evolution”), only that she is doing them alone.

Meanwhile, she has been basking in praise generated by “Diplomatic Crimes.” The Senate Foreign Relations Committee publicly credited her with triggering the debate on diplomatic immunity, the American Federation of Police has presented her with its highest civilian honor, and she is in demand as a speaker. She is also watching the progression of a case through the courts that will have a considerable impact on the bill she wants to see passed.

It involves the child of a U.N. diplomat from Zaire whom school officials noticed was badly bruised and battered. When representatives of New York’s Department of Social Services called on the parents, they were denied admittance. So the next time the boy appeared in school, battered anew, he was turned over to the custody of a foster home. The diplomat was recalled, went home without his son, and is suing New York City for his return. Lower courts have ruled in favor of the child, and the case is now pending--although not on calendar--at the Supreme Court.

“This,” said Trescott, “wasn’t any run-of-the-mill spanking. The child was hung by the ankles and beaten, then cut down so he fell on his head. The problem I have with this personally is that the State Department--our State Department--intervened on behalf of the father. What a price to have to pay to keep diplomatic lines open. But I believe firmly that if we word this law right, it can work and still not make it hard on State (Department).”

So with all these balls in the air, Trescott has gone back to the practice of law. “I was writing full time until I opened my law office in Santa Ana a few months ago. I missed the law. I missed human contact. I’d like to try to have it both ways.”

Knowing her even briefly makes it hard to imagine that she won’t figure out a way to do it. One piece of her balance is already firmly in place: her home in Brentwood. There she tends her roses, her cats and her family. Her daughter, Shireen, now 23, recently married the lead singer of a new rock group called Gentlemen After Dark. Both Shireen and her husband are songwriters and are living in the family home, “until,” explains Trescott, “one or the other gets the record deal of the century.”