A ‘Thank You’ Is Her Highest Pay

Orange County Deputy Public Defender Marla Moller says she honestly doesn’t understand why she was one of 25 women nationwide honored for overcoming obstacles and taking charge of their own lives after the age of 30.

“It shouldn’t be newsworthy when somebody on welfare gets off and does well,” she says.

She genuinely believes that, too, even though she has been happy to accept the perks that have gone along with the award--$1,000 and a fair amount of publicity that has included several television interviews and an appearance with the Rev. Robert H. Schuller on his television show. She accepts all this philosophically. “Andy Warhol once said that some time or other, everyone has their 15 minutes (of fame). I guess I’m having mine.”

Moller is an original, a Jewish mother to the Orange County public defender’s office (“the best law firm in town”) and all the downtrodden people within her reach. She is a slight, slim woman of 39 with enormous hazel eyes that could not possibly be as innocent as they look, and long, dark hair. Her posture is slightly hunched as if she were perpetually walking into the wind in a desperate hurry. Which she is. There simply isn’t enough time for her to right all the social wrongs that need to be fixed and take care of two young sons at the same time. But she is giving it a hell of a shot--which, whether she agrees or not, is probably why she won the Clairol award.

Eight years ago, Moller was, indeed, on welfare. She was coming off a recent divorce. She had two small children and skills that were not marketable. Trained as a teacher, she lacked a California credential and wasn’t making it as a free-lance writer. So she decided to do what she had wanted to do since she got out of college: go to law school.

She had enrolled in law school once before, 10 years earlier, but marriage and a family got in the way. Moller is a native of the South Side of Chicago. “Our neighborhood,” she recalls, “was like a womb. It was made up of lower-income, working-class people, mostly Jewish, and everybody fit in. Holidays were wonderful. We never worried about being on the streets at Halloween. Our doors were never locked. I had the Museum of Science and Industry as a playground. I thought all of Chicago--and I guess all of the world--was like that.”

Her family moved to San Bernardino when she was 16, and she graduated from high school there and enrolled at UCLA--”with Lew Alcindor,” she points out. “I never went to a football game because I was working weekends and couldn’t afford transportation, anyway. But I followed basketball because it was on campus. I still do, even though Lew Alcindor is now Kareem Abdul-Jabaar.”

She transferred to John Carroll University in Cleveland, got a teaching credential, taught briefly in Ohio, then went to Chicago to work on the staff of a magazine called Gallery. That is when she thought about law school for the first time. Instead, she married a boy from the old neighborhood and they set up housekeeping in Orange County. Sons Joe and Nick arrived soon after, a year apart, and Marla stayed home to care for them while she tried--not very successfully--to pick up extra money by writing. Her marriage lasted seven years. A year after her divorce, Nick went to kindergarten and Marla went to law school, financed by scholarships and borrowed money. It took her 2 1/2 years of juggling schedules and creative financing to get her law degree. “My single greatest nightmare was always: What would I do if the child-care provider turned up sick?”

When she passed the bar on her first try, she knew exactly what she wanted to do. “From the beginning,” she says, “I wanted to be a public defender. I believe we’re here to help each other. It’s your bottom line, basic Golden Rule. I know what it’s like to have to depend on someone else, how terribly vulnerable these people feel, especially if they get in trouble. When they look up at me now and say ‘thank you,’ it’s the highest pay I can imagine. No one has ever fought for most of them before.”

A lot of other attorneys wanted to be public defenders, too. When the first openings were posted after Moller passed the bar, there were 153 applicants for three jobs. Moller got one of them. “I told the man who interviewed me,” she says, “that if you don’t hire me, I’ll be back in six months and six months after that and six months after that.”

She started in Juvenile Court in August, 1985, and hasn’t slowed down since. The day we talked, her desk was piled with telephone messages from a mix of people that she has helped in the past and have called to report progress or backsliding; people she is presently involved in defending, and people who have heard her on television or read about her and are calling for help.

Two of the callers were success stories reporting. One came from the well-to-do parents of a high school boy she had defended almost three years ago. He had turned around, and the parents gave Moller a lot of credit--and told her so. “I didn’t get him off, but he changed,” she said. “It’s how you go forward that counts.”

Another was a young man in his mid-20s who lost his job, got into drugs, and then into trouble. He convinced Moller that he really wanted to change his life “so the judge worked with me. This young man completed a drug-treatment program and came back to the courtroom with the head of the program, who stood up for him. It was like graduating from high school, starting a new life. He’s stayed with it--and every success like this helps others.”

She admits that there have been a distressing number of failures to go along with the successes, “but isn’t it satisfying to try and help?” She remembers especially “a beautiful young girl who was on drugs. I got her out and into a program, and she didn’t make it. But I still believed in her, and I got her out a second time by pleading with the judge. She didn’t make it again. Now she’s in custody, and a life is being wasted.”

Moller estimates that about half, “maybe more,” of her cases are related to drugs. She professes no easy answers--or even hard ones--but she argues passionately that “punishment clearly isn’t doing the job. And if one thing doesn’t work, you’ve got try something else. I’d like to see us take the money dealers are getting out of drugs and turn it into education and rehabilitation. We could do that by legitimizing drugs, then taxing the hell out of them. This is one place I’d like to see government interfere.”

Besides the snapshots of her two sons, Moller’s office is a gallery of quotations and aphorisms--from Vince Lombardi to the Earl of Chatham--from which she draws inspiration and sustenance. “I use a lot of sports analogies,” she says, “like John Wooden saying, ‘Whether you win or lose, the important thing is to come off the court with your heads up,’ or Vince Lombardi saying, ‘Sooner or later the man who wins is the man who thinks he can.’

“It’s the possibility that matters. I can understand why many of these people turn to drugs. Their lives are so desperate. But if you have a garden, you don’t just throw the seeds out and say, ‘Now grow.’ You nurture them. That’s why somewhere, sometime, somehow these people must be offered rehabilitation--backed by the economic force our government can provide. Then if they mess up, I can’t say a thing because you ultimately have to depend on yourself for help. But they should be offered that first shot.”

In her personal life, Moller has more winners than losers these days. Her two sons, now 12 and 13, are into Pop Warner football, and she is struggling mightily to learn about the game and be supportive. (Their father lives nearby and, Moller says, “calls every day and sees them every Sunday. He’s a wonderful father, and my sons adore him.”) She is involved with an administrative official at Juvenile Hall whom she first met almost 20 years ago, then met again last year when she subpoenaed him without knowing who he was. “We have the subpoena framed,” she says, “but no plans to get married.”

Moller’s biggest problem at the moment is her approaching 40th birthday. “I’ll have to admit,” she said, “that I’m agitated about it. I’m trying to learn what a 40-year-old woman should be.”

As the interview was winding down, one of Moller’s associates, clearly agitated, burst into her office waving a sheaf of papers.

“You set me up,” he said. “You want this busted to a misdemeanor when this guy shot off a gun and hit a car. Did you know he hit a car?”

Moller smiled sweetly. “I really love these people,” she said. “They need help.”

More fuming while Moller listened calmly and quietly. Then she said: “Do you want me to take it back?” Her associate said, “No, no,” looked at her with a mixture of irritation and admiration, and stalked out. Moller sighed.

I asked if she is seen as a bleeding heart, and she said she didn’t know how she was seen, but “on a given case, I’d go to the wall. If that’s the worst they can say about me. . . .”

Her only hobby at the moment is tap-dancing lessons. “I enjoy it, but I’m not very good. Mostly I just take work home at night and take care of my kids. My reward is my sons and the work I do.”

So what are her aspirations for the future.

She didn’t think about that very long.

“I aspire,” she said firmly, “to be a better public defender and a better mother.”