Changing of the Guard : New Mayor Takes Office in Beverly Hills as Council Strives to ‘Pull Together as a Team’

Alone in the spotlight, Max Salter made the most of the moment. “Bob,” he told Robert K. Tanenbaum, the man he was about to replace as mayor of Beverly Hills, “speaking for myself, I want you to know that you’re one of the finest political leaders that this community has ever known. And that’s my opinion.” He paused.

“Of course, what do I know?” he went on. Giggles and applause swept the black-tie crowd in the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Everybody knew the punch line: “I’m a moral and intellectual cretin!”

Switched Jobs

That memorable insult, aimed at Salter by Tanenbaum in their early days on the City Council two years ago, brought the house down at last week’s staging of the Beverly Hills Follies, a musical revue produced to benefit charity groups and city schools.

Despite their rancor--they made it clear in private that there is little love lost between them--the two former New Yorkers have learned to tolerate each other.

When Tanenbaum was mayor and Salter vice mayor, they served on a two-man committee that supervised the construction of new parking lots and launched an urban design program for the city’s downtown. They traveled to Maryland last summer with 70 city staff members for a federally sponsored course on disaster planning.

Now Salter has taken over the high-profile, if largely ceremonial, post of mayor of one of the world’s best-known cities freeing Tanenbaum from 30 hours a week of municipal chores.

The five City Council members rotate the chairmanship among themselves on a yearly basis. But he who wields the gavel speaks for city government and can play a key role by setting its agenda.

The job, in short, is what the mayor makes of it, and performance often reflects personality.

Warmer Image

Tanenbaum, 46, is an aggressive former prosecutor, author, senior partner in a downtown Los Angeles law firm and possible candidate for district attorney. Salter, 69, is a UCLA dropout who built a statewide clothing store empire from one little shop in San Luis Obispo.

Of the two men, the goateed Salter has a warmer image, although he sometimes shows a self-made man’s irritation at the slow pace of local government. “If occasionally I’m impatient to get things done, I apologize,” he told the audience at his inauguration.

Tanenbaum is a 6-foot-4, one-time college basketball player who still shoots hoops once a week in a pickup game in which he recently broke his nose. He is not ashamed of his hard-charging tactics, which irritated some city residents and other council members.

“As a prosecutor I did everything legally possible to see murderers are convicted,” Tanenbaum said in an interview. “As an attorney, I did all I could to see my clients prevail. When playing basketball, it’s true I do everything within the realm of good sportsmanship to prevail.”

Regular Squabbles

Despite their differences, said City Councilwoman Vicki Reynolds, the five current members have managed to change their image as a panel torn by regular squabbles.

“Everyone took office with the spoken and unspoken commitment to make things work smoothly and pull together as a team,” she said.

It wasn’t always easy. When Tanenbaum and Salter first joined the City Council in 1986, the normally staid inaugural ceremony was disrupted by an argument between Salter and then-Mayor Charlotte Spadaro over whether Beverly Hills should enter into an agreement to become a sister city to Cannes, France.

Salter urged that Beverly Hills boycott France because its government refused to allow American jets to fly over on their way to bomb targets in Libya.

A year later Tanenbaum raised a row at the inauguration ceremony for then-mayor Benjamin H. Stansbury, seeking to block the selection of Donna Ellman, a three-term member, as vice mayor.

He was overruled 3 to 2, with Salter casting the deciding ballot. Several months later Tanenbaum and Salter tangled over the lease negotiations for the city-owned Greystone Mansion, and it was then that Tanenbaum expressed his opinion of Salter’s moral and intellectual capabilities.

Stansbury and Ellman, both of whom Tanenbaum wanted ousted, and Spadaro, an ally who left for reasons of her own, all declined to run again in 1988, opening the way for Reynolds, Allen Alexander and Bernard J. Hecht to joint Salter and Tanenbaum in a more peaceful era.

Indeed, at his inaugural last week Salter credited his predecessor for helping bring a kinder, gentler spirit to city government, “long before George Bush.”

Salter’s Goals

He said he hopes to use his business experience to keep city government focused on a small number of clearly defined goals.

“What can we look forward to this coming year? More of the same. I expect your applause for this,” he told the audience, saying that he hopes to concentrate on a balanced budget, safer streets, completing the Civic Center, supporting the schools, developing the downtown business section and putting an emergency preparedness plan in place.

Although they both come from New York, different paths led the two men to Beverly Hills.

Salter remembers growing up in a poor family during the Depression. How poor were they? “We were starving to death and freezing to death in New York, so my mother figured we’d come to California, and we’d only starve to death,” he said.

Riding the bus to UCLA, “you’d see all these beautiful homes, and the other kids driving in cars,” he recalls. “UCLA cost $27 (a semester). I didn’t have 27 cents. I had to borrow $27 from my uncle. It took six months to pay it back.”

Fortunes Changed

It was after his Navy service in World War II that Salter’s fortunes changed.

Newly married to the daughter of a man who liquidated failing businesses, he moved to San Luis Obispo to take over Beno’s, a tiny Army-Navy surplus store that came into his father-in-law’s hands when the original owner died in a car crash.

He owed money on the store, but when an entire division of soldiers were demobilized there, they bought uniforms, ribbons and souvenirs faster than Salter could keep them in stock.

“All that garbage turned to gold,” he said. “I earned in eight months $35,000 and that was the break I had.”

Working seven-day weeks of 14-hour days for the first three years, “I almost lost my wife,” Salter said. “She went crying to her dad. He said, ‘You’re lucky. You’ve got an ambitious husband.’ ”

Business Expansion

By 1950, he owned four outlets, expanded into clothing for the general public and moved to Los Angeles to be better placed to buy his stock at wholesale. Although the firm was making its own clothes at one point, Beno’s is now strictly a merchandising operation, buying clothes and footwear in large quantities, much of it manufactured abroad, and retailing it in small towns across the state.

“If you can buy at L.A. prices in these little towns, you’re doing good,” he said.

The company’s 55 stores stretch from Crescent City to Coalinga, with supplies trucked in from a sprawling warehouse tucked under the Santa Monica Freeway in downtown Los Angeles. Salter’s son, Michael, a former physics graduate student at UC Berkeley has taken over day-to-day operations.

Salter believes that people should spend at least a year in the retail trade--especially city staffers and elected officials.

“People dwell too much on mistakes,” Salter said. In the rag trade, “you learn how to take a markdown. Get rid of it and go on to the next thing.”

Although he still stops in at work every day, Salter’s success has allowed him to devote time and money to a range of good works, including a matchmaking service for Jewish singles and the Ronald McDonald Camp for Good Times, a summer camp for children who have cancer.

His $100,000 election campaign was his first run for office, motivated by a goal of making city government “as efficient and productive as (he) can,” said Jacob Pressman, rabbi emeritus at Temple Beth Am, where Salter was president for three years in the 1960s.

“He wasn’t looking for higher office, he wasn’t looking for upward mobility of any kind,” Pressman said.

Kennedy Fan

Tanenbaum is of a different generation. He spent many Saturday afternoons as a child attending Broadway musicals with his mother. A fan of the slain Kennedy brothers, he frequently refers to Beverly Hills as Camelot and makes no secret of his ambitions for higher office, most likely a run for district attorney.

Tanenbaum is a graduate of Boalt Hall, the law school at UC Berkeley. He worked as a prosecutor in New York under Frank Hogan, a legendary Manhattan district attorney who left a lasting mark on his young disciple.

“If he was still alive, we’d still be living in New York,” he said. It was only after Hogan’s death that he moved his family to Beverly Hills in 1978 to be near his wife’s parents.

But operating out of a one-man office near Santa Monica Boulevard, he found it hard to forget the seamy streets and bizarre characters of New York and tried his hand at writing in his spare time.

Crime Writer

His first book, “Badge of the Assassin,” an account of a cop killing, was published in 1979. “The Pious Teacher,” another nonfiction work, and “No Lesser Plea,” a novel featuring a 6-foot-4 ex-college basketball player-turned-prosecutor, established him as a crime writer of the hard-boiled school. Both were published in 1987.

“Actual D.A.’s have been very complimentary,” he said.

His latest novel, “Depraved Indifference,” which features many of the characters from “No Lesser Plea,” is set for publication in the fall, and Tanenbaum hopes to write more books and screenplays, despite his new job at Riordan & McKinzie, a politically connected downtown law firm.

His secret? “Just don’t sleep,” he joked in an interview before stepping down as mayor, relieved that he would be able to devote more time to his practice.

“The author part is . . . a foundation on which to talk about the incredibly dramatic events I’ve lived through, to discuss issues of criminal justice--capital punishment, the insanity defense, plea-bargaining, proportionate punishment to crime. I do it on weekends and at night,” he said.

White-Collar Crimes

Now he defends business executives against accusations of fraud and other white-collar crimes, a far cry from the blood-soaked cases of his formative years in the district attorney’s office.

“There are cases where people are unjustly accused,” he said. “That is not to suggest that everybody I defend is unjustly accused, but I always urge that everybody accused should have the best defense possible.”

Carl W. McKinzie, managing partner of Riordan & McKinzie, said the firm was drawn to Tanenbaum because of his experience in city government, as well as his extensive background as a courtroom lawyer.

“From what I know of him, Bob can excel at whatever he wants to undertake,” he said.

“We assume he’ll continue his civic duties and continue to be a functioning lawyer. We think he can do it all,” McKinzie said. “We see him as someone who is involved with the community and obviously very well organized to be able to do all that, practice law and write his books.”

Having established himself as a political figure in Beverly Hills--he preceded Salter as mayor because he won more votes in the 1986 election--Tanenbaum said he joined Riordan & McKinzie because he wanted to get involved with the real movers and shakers of Los Angeles.

“No question,” he said. “I didn’t want to live here and be unfamiliar with the major hub of activity.”

As part of that effort, he scored political points by sponsoring a fund-raising party for Tom Bradley a few weeks before Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky dropped out of the Los Angeles mayor’s race in January.

Widely expected to run for Los Angeles district attorney if the job is open in 1992, Tanenbaum said he has not yet decided whether to run again for the Beverly Hills City Council.

‘Not an Easy Decision’

“Do I want to be D.A.? Yes, I want to be D.A.,” he said. As for the City Council, he said in January that he was likely to try for reelection.

Now, however, he said, “it’s not an easy decision, because of the tremendous time commitment, and I’m very committed to my law firm. So we’ll see.”

But he pointed with pride to the accomplishments of his year as mayor, saying that all who wanted to address the City Council on controversial issues got a fair hearing and that the goals outlined when he took up the gavel last year were accomplished.

Those goals included the foot patrols for the business districts on South Beverly Drive and Robertson Boulevards, and a proposed change in the city rent control ordinance to require just cause for eviction, which will come up before the City Council next month.

YMCA President

Other goals are not yet accomplished, chiefly the establishment of a human resources center in the city-owned industrial zone that would house the Beverly Hills YMCA, the institution through which he became involved in city politics.

Tanenbaum, who also serves as president of the Y, excused himself from voting on the proposal, which is being considered by a city committee.

But he pitches the idea at every opportunity, saying that it could save the city $1 million to $2 million a year while providing unrivaled facilities for recreation, child care and other social services, such as Meals on Wheels, cardiopulmonary resuscitation classes and the Maple Center, a psychological counseling agency.

“It’s really a question of initiative,” Tanenbaum said. “Each person (on the City Council) brings his own values, and all you can do is make suggestions.”

His dual role as mayor and president of the Y led to a heated exchange earlier this year after Corey Wellman, a resident who voted for Tanenbaum in 1986, said she had trouble getting him and his children’s basketball team to leave the gym there after she rented it for her son’s birthday party.

Each accused the other of using foul language in front of children, but Tanenbaum withdrew after a half-hour argument.

“Our public officials should bring honor to their offices, not derive privilege from them,” Wellman wrote.

In his response, written on city stationery, Tanenbaum said that Wellman was trying to transfer her “crude and nasty behavior” to him and called her “an unmitigated liar.”

Echo of Complaints

The unpleasant incident echoed complaints from previous City Council members that Tanenbaum does not hesitate to throw his weight around.

“Maybe Bob’s biggest contribution was to bring peace to the council, and only he could do it, because he was the one who prevented the council from working peacefully before,” said Donna Ellman, his former colleague.

“People used to say that Bobby Kennedy was ruthless, but I’d say he’s not ruthless, he’s compassionate,” Tanenbaum responded. “Everyone has an equal opportunity to put forward one’s point of view. I have too much respect for people to suggest that they would inartfully argue their positions.”