WHO IS ROXANI GILLESPIE? : And Why Is She Saying All Those Terrible Things About Ralph Nader, the Insurance Revolt and Prop. 103?

IN HER AIRY OFFICE, high above San Francisco, California Insurance Commissioner Roxani Gillespie, petite and perky in her round, bouncy, black Dutch-boy bob with bangs, is hopping about the floor, flapping her arms and swishing her skirts as she demonstrates, amid gales of merry laughter, the virtues of her dress. The commissioner is tired of all the flak she’s been getting--from her daughter, her press secretary, even perfect strangers--about the dresses that have become her trademark: prim, pristine little-girl numbers, Laura Ashleys by label, with gathered skirts, puffy sleeves, teensy patterns. This one is blue. With what looks like rosebuds.

Little Miss Muffet comes to mind. An English nanny. The parson’s wife. Roxani Gillespie, 48, looks more like any of these than the queen of California’s $55-billion insurance industry and the state’s most politically controversial woman since former Chief Justice Rose Bird.

“I like these dresses!” Gillespie protests, giggling, exasperated, as her press secretary, a pretty, stylish blonde in a smart black suit, named Carey Fletcher, covers her eyes and groans at the indignity of the unfolding sight.

“Suits are not comfortable. These dresses are comfortable,” Gillespie cries, slapping at her unfettered waist, her hidden hips. “Look!” Jerk goes the skirt. Walking space. “See!” Yank, a handful of bodice. Roomy. Gillespie likes these dresses so much, in fact, she next announces, that she buys them by the half-dozen, each style in all available colors. “Let’s see.” She pauses, frowning, ticking them off briskly on her fingers. “I have this one in red, blue, green, black and, uh . . . yes! Dark blue! Why not? I don’t like to shop. Besides, men wear the same clothes all the time.”

Fletcher moans. “God, you oughta see her black one,” she mutters. “It’s got little pink flowers on it.”

Gillespie thinks that’s hilarious, too. She flounces into her chair, triumphant--having demonstrated, all within a space of five minutes, a good many of the qualities that have reduced her critics to howls of impotent fury for months now: Unpretentious, down to earth, spontaneous, funny, she’s a born charmer. Also stubborn, opinionated, a streak explosive and possessed of enough apparent self-confidence for 15 people. You don’t like the way she runs her kingdom? Ralph Nader calls her a lackey of the insurance industry? No refund check from your insurance company yet? You think she wants to trash Proposition 103? You might as well criticize her dress.

EVER SINCE November, when California voters, in their most dramatic uprising since the property-tax rebellion of 1978, passed Proposition 103, consumer activists and assorted politicians have been protesting that Roxani Gillespie--Greek immigrant, attorney, wife and mother, one-time claims adjuster and former insurance company executive--is unfit to preside over such a pioneering piece of populist history.

What Proposition 103 represents is something out of any good conservative’s worst nightmare: a public lunge into the affairs of one of capitalism’s most enduring monoliths. Among other reforms mandated by 103, insurance companies--unless they can persuade Gillespie otherwise--must roll back their rates to their Nov. 8, 1987, levels, then reduce them by an additional 20%. Banks have been granted permission to enter the insurance market. The office of the insurance commissioner, traditionally one of the governor’s appointive plums, has been turned over to the electoral process, starting in 1990, and transformed from an essentially passive administrative post into an aggressive consumer watchdog position, with full authority to set all future rates for California’s 788 insurance companies.

All of which, critics say, is utterly beyond Gillespie’s demonstrated capacities or inclinations.

So far, Gillespie, appointed commissioner by Gov. George Deukmejian in 1986, has been accused of grandstanding, evading, deceiving and dragging her feet on 103; of making decisions stacked in favor of insurance companies or, more often, of making no decisions at all. She has been called everything from criminally negligent to a docile puppet of Deukmejian. She has been likened to various small animals--”an attack pit bull” (Harry Snyder, West Coast director of Consumers Union); a “bulldog” (Will Glennon, legal analyst for the California Trial Lawyers Assn.), and “a timid mouse” (Robert Fellmeth, director of the Center for Public Interest Law).

“That woman isn’t fit to be dogcatcher,” screams Proposition 103 author Harvey Rosenfield. His mentor, Ralph Nader, national icon of consumer rights, also has pitched in, demanding Gillespie’s resignation. “She has no interest in consumers; she’s just biding her time, waiting for some big fat offer from the insurance industry,” Nader warns from his Washington headquarters.

And, if pressure on Gillespie was heavy before, the California Supreme Court only turned up the heat in its May 4 ruling upholding most of Proposition 103. The court’s decision vested Gillespie with even more authority than she had before, essentially the power (subject to court appeal) to decide, right here alone in this stark little office with the picture of Athena on the wall, which insurance companies must grant the 20% rollbacks and which get off the hook. The court further dramatically relaxed the standard that companies must meet to qualify for exemptions: Under Proposition 103’s original language, only companies that could show a “substantial threat of insolvency” would have been spared from the rollback; now Gillespie need only find that they are being denied “a fair and reasonable” profit, as she determines it. Gillespie says the fair rate of return will vary from company to company and that past profits will not be a factor in deciding whether a rollback is merited.

And we’re not just talking auto insurance here--an $11-billion industry all by itself--but every form of property and liability insurance in California, too.

Even now, they are pounding on her door in droves, insurance companies begging exemptions based on need. Nearly all of California’s insurance companies are expected to file. And, now it isn’t going to be just the Rosenfields and Naders on her case: Every policyholder in California who doesn’t get a refund check in the mail is going to be mad at Roxani (pronounced Rox-annie) Gillespie, too. And that’s probably going to be a whole lot of people.

BUT DON’T BLAME Gillespie--she always told you Proposition 103 was a lousy law. From the start of the insurance initiative wars last year, Gillespie has been quite explicit in her view of 103 as “unfair and one-sided” in its all-out assault on insurance companies, while doing nothing about what she sees as the central villains in escalating auto-insurance rates: ambulance-chasing lawyers and their sue-happy clients. To Gillespie, 103 was never more than a “pie-in-the-sky” fraud perpetrated upon consumers by Nader and Rosenfield.

Now the chickens have come home to roost, and there’s no overstating Gillespie’s frustration as she sits at her desk, eyes flashing, intent, trying to explain once again, in her clipped European accent, the reasons 103 will never work--and why “a lot of people are going to be frosted” when they don’t receive a rebate or a rollback.

“Because you have a very significant California auto industry that simply doesn’t have the money that Rosenfield says they have,” she exclaims for the umpteenth time since Proposition 103 exploded in her lap, “it’s going to depend on whether your company is a rich one or not. If you’re with one of the big guys that comes from the East that has a significant surplus, like our friend State Farm, you’re going to get your rebate. But a great number of policyholders with California companies simply are not.”

Gillespie has always complained about the inherent unfairness of this situation. Why should some customers get rollbacks and not others? Thus, she sees the Supreme Court decision, which basically enables her to grant exemptions to more insurance companies, as “fairer across the board to consumers.” Meaning, if you don’t get a refund, you are now less likely to be jealous of your neighbor, because he’s probably not going to get one either. Gillespie searches for a way to make the situation clear:

“What Harvey has gotten passed is something that says, ‘This VW just as it is, you got it for $5,000 last year, well, you’re going to be getting it for $4,000 this year.’ Now, the VW is exactly the same--so how is that going to happen? Harvey didn’t say, ‘OK, how are we going to get the VW to cost less? Let’s take out the radio, let’s take out the tape deck, let’s take out the air conditioner.’ No. It was the exact same VW, but costing less.”

Good for Harvey.

“Yes, you see,” she cries, exasperated, unamused, “and that’s exactly what everybody likes! But how the heck is the VW manufacturer going to be able to provide you with this VW? It’s very seductive. But where I’m coming from is the bottom line. We must find a way to bring down costs for everybody.”

To Gillespie, whose opinion is shared by many insurance experts, the only solution to the auto-insurance crisis is some type of no-fault plan, which would eliminate costly court battles between insurance companies over which driver was at fault. Instead, each driver would be obliged to collect damages from his own company, most lawsuits over auto accidents would be eliminated and recovery for hard-to-prove losses such as pain and suffering would be drastically limited.

Eliminating lawsuits and attorneys’ fees is all-important to Gillespie, which is the central reason she so dislikes the consumerists nipping at her heels. In her view, they are not only half-baked ideologues and flunkies of the trial lawyers but a social menace, too, thanks to their obvious populist appeal.

Most days, she simply swats them away like gnats-- all of them, from the large, established Consumers Union (which Gillespie once dismissed as “a handful of people who test vacuum cleaners”) to Rosenfield’s Voter Revolt, the organization behind 103.

“Pussycats, all pussycats,” she sighs, laughing, dismissing the whole lot of them with an airy hand, her tone one of near fondness, the tolerant teacher beset by naughty and somewhat slow-witted pupils. “And they’re always so unprepared, they don’t do their homework, they don’t show much understanding at all of the financial situation,” she clucks. “Frankly, I think they are mostly interested in the (TV) cameras.”

Other days, Gillespie tries to accord them some minimal respect. It isn’t easy. “I don’t like them because these people don’t represent the consumers, they represent themselves. What the Rosenfields of the world”--she pronounces it Rosenfeld, apparently in innocence--”really want is to be the consumers’ daddy. They’re paternalistic; they want to make the consumers’ decisions for them. And their agenda--at least the Rosenfield agenda, and the Ralph Nader agenda--is to stop tort reform. They represent only the victims.

“And I do think that they truly believe in it. They feel .in their hearts there is no need to do anything about legal excesses, that these awards are never too big, that we simply cannot have enough of a good thing,” she says. “And, of course the rights of victims are important--or there would be no need to have insurance. But there is the other side, too. What about the poor stiffs that pay the bills? We must bring this to a common-sense compromise. There are excesses on both sides, but Harvey has persuaded people otherwise.”

By the time she finishes, she is practically wagging her finger. That’s the most consumerists will ever get from Gillespie by way of serious consideration. Otherwise, her plan is clear: She intends to kill them with condescension, if she doesn’t mock them to death first.

Ralph Nader, the man who has gone so far as to demand her job, takes the mightiest chop. “Why does he do these things? He has never even met me,” Gillespie wonders. “Normally, you wait for a person to at least act, but this man sits out on the East Coast and uses the same libretto for everyone, be it General Motors or me. Actions are irrelevant to him.”

She warms. “The last time he was in California, for example, was the very day when we had just gotten State Farm to refund what we alleged to be improper premiums to its policyholders. It was on Page One of The Times!” she remembers, simmering. “But, there was Nader anyway, in the state Legislature, saying I was lackadaisical, dragging my feet, that I wasn’t doing anything.” Gillespie throws up her hands, then, mockingly, this to Nader himself: “Now, come on. Everybody can read, Ralph. Maybe you can’t, but everyone else can.

“I would just hope the man would eventually go back to wherever he comes from,” she finishes, neat as a cat wiping its paws.

SO JUST WHO is this lively, razor-tongued, uncowed woman, so seemingly fit for high-pressure public combat, who suddenly emerges from the obscurity of what was once one of California’s most boring, ignored agencies to Page One prominence, Woman of the Hour?

Roxani Manou Gillespie is, for starters, the daughter of a prosperous and influential family of Greek politicians, intellectuals and attorneys. She speaks six languages, including Russian, fluently. She immigrated to the United States when she was 22, having married a Canadian based in Boston who is now a consulting engineer in suburban San Carlos. She is the mother of two college-aged children: Costa, 20, an engineering student at the University of the Pacific, and Margaret, 22, a UCLA law student.

Gillespie is also an attorney. She attended Boston College Law School and, after graduation, worked for a couple of years as an attorney for the Boston Legal Aid Society. It was there, she says, that she decided she would rather be a corporate attorney than work with poor people. They were too frustrating, she recalls--and, in some cases, frightening. She still grimly remembers one client she represented in a divorce case:

“This woman had three children who all drowned--at three different times, one in a bathtub, another in a pool. The police marked them all up to accidents, but, you just knew. . . .” Gillespie, subdued, shakes the image away. “But these were the kinds of people who were our clients. We had to represent them.”

Even those who weren’t probable murderers exasperated her, she says. “I could not get them out of my mind, because what you saw in a lot of (clients) is that they were in a vicious circle, some of it of their own making, and it was very hard for them to pull out,” she says. “You could say, ‘Now, Mrs. Smith, I really never want to defend you against such a charge ever again.’ But you knew darn well, lo and behold, she would be coming right back the next week.”

And so, “I decided then that I was not good at being a public defender, that it was far easier to deal with issues than with poverty,” she finishes. “It is much easier dealing with the big guys than with the Mrs. Smiths whose children keep drowning.”

Gillespie began small with the big guys, however. Her first job, after her husband transferred to San Francisco in 1970, was as a claims adjuster for Industrial Indemnity, the large San Francisco-based insurance firm where she would spend the next 13 years. “It was the only job I could find. There wasn’t much demand for female attorneys in those days.” Her rise within the company was rapid, however. In fact, she says, her first promotion, to corporate attorney in 1971, came too fast. “I was their token woman, totally unprepared.”

Five years later, Gillespie became a vice president, making her the highest-ranking woman in California insurance circles at that time. Heady years--by 1980, even Gov. Jerry Brown briefly considered her for insurance commissioner, she says.

Meantime, Gillespie’s halcyon days at Industrial Indemnity were fast coming to an end, she says, still visibly soured about it. “I realized I had hit that invisible glass ceiling, you know? When you know you’re never going to advance any further.” She was just about to quit and go into private practice or hunt for a judgeship, she says, when along came Deukmejian in 1983 to appoint her deputy insurance commissioner.

Gillespie is also a self-described feminist, particularly when it comes to abortion rights, which she supports with almost white-lipped intensity. In fact, she says, although she is a registered Republican and a “fiscal conservative,” she is a liberal on most civil-rights issues. She even supported her fellow Greek-American, Michael S. Dukakis, for President. But, she quickly amends, “only until he won the nomination. Then I stopped working for him.”

Why?

“Because I felt it would have been inappropriate,” she says, confused at the question. “It would have embarrassed the governor if I were out working for Dukakis. He really wanted Bush--and I’m his appointee, after all. You have to be a team player.” She won’t say whether, in the privacy of the polling booth, she voted for her Greek or for George Deukmejian’s Texan.

But that doesn’t mean she’s a puppet of Deukmejian, who dislikes Proposition 103 every bit as much as she does. “I’ve never personally discussed 103 with the governor,” she says vaguely. “And he doesn’t tell me what to do on a day-to-day basis. But he does set the standard, definitely. By his own actions, he sets the tone. He took a position against 103. He opposed all the propositions. That sends a definite message.”

But Gillespie never stays vague for long. What about all these charges that she’s an insurance company lackey?

“I’m not in the pockets of anybody,” she explodes. “I don’t know why they keep saying it. There’s absolutely no evidence. What these people (consumerists) want is a commissioner who’s in their pockets. In their own way, they are no different from the insurance companies--both sides want absolutely unfettered authority. But I’m no part of any of it. I am trying to be a very independent commissioner, to do what I think is right for my customers, California policyholders. I also think that if I were a gray-haired gentleman, there would not be this much attention.”

And now she is marching through the lobby of a fancy San Francisco hotel, en route to a speaking engagement, such a conspicuous figure in her blue corduroy dress, her sturdy, no-nonsense black shoes with their big, odd Pilgrim buckles, a little old lady’s black plastic purse over her arm, chin jutted forward, girlish bangs hanging almost to her eyes, the body language--stand back.

Suddenly, passing a group of men, she snatches at her visitor’s arm. “Did you hear that?” she whispers, excited, eyes sparkling. “One of those men back there said, ‘There goes Gillespie and her entourage.’ ” Gillespie notices these small episodes in her new life--and, have no doubt, she’s thriving in the limelight. It’s a kick, being recognized; all the media attention fascinates her. She’s gradually mastering the art of the 30-second TV sound bite, she confides. “Insurance issues are so complicated, it’s difficult, but we’re trying to learn.” (“She’s learning too well,” Rosenfield gripes.)

Nor is Gillespie coy about the thrill of it all.

“There I was, in the sleepy old days--I had my green eyeshade, I did my work, I did my numbers--we were basically a nickel-and-dime collection agency. And then wham, all this,” she says, in delighted mockery of her own former, musty state-agency status. Now, thanks to Proposition 103, Gillespie’s budget has nearly doubled, to about $60 million, and her staff also has almost doubled; she will soon have 788 employees at her command. “We’re having the time of our lives.” Gillespie also relishes seeing her once-unglamorous $85,000-per-year job suddenly become the focus of so many covetous eyes. At last count, there were at least half a dozen prospective candidates.

She may, of course, run herself. So far she’s not saying. Only that “I haven’t made up my mind. I’m too busy right now just getting the show on the road.”

And then she is swallowed up in a sea of beaming, pink-cheeked, flannel-suited insurance executives, members of the Workers Compensation Institute. By way of introduction, the host calls Gillespie “a capable and diligent administrator” who has “shown tremendous grace under fire” despite many “potshots and cheap shots.”

Gillespie’s speech--quick, clear, relaxed and off-the-cuff--contained this basic message: The insurance companies had better get moving now, on their own, to remedy the inequities in the workers comp system, to do more for “the folks who pay the bills . . . not just the workers” before “what happened to your brethren in the automobile industry happens to you too. California, as you know, has the initiative process.” Everybody laughed.

GILLESPIE became insurance commissioner three years ago, after her predecessor, Bruce Bunner, was unceremoniously bumped by Deukmejian in a dispute over Bunner’s attempt to take a harder line in regulating insurance companies. Critics called Bunner’s departure a blatant display of the Administration’s cozy relationship with the insurance industry--and Gillespie was promptly portrayed as a commissioner the governor could control.

Gillespie has always said that she only wants what’s best for California policyholders--all of them. Cheaper rates for everybody, not just some. But, she complains, it’s not her role to make insurance law, only to implement what she’s given. Then she explodes in a fit of real temper at the state Legislature. It burns Gillespie up that she’s in the middle of this controversy all because, she fumes, the “do-nothing” Legislature failed to head off the insurance revolt by properly performing its duty to provide decent insurance laws--an opinion that is widely shared.

In Gillespie’s opinion, the Legislature has passed only one significant insurance bill during her tenure--the so-called Joint Underwriting Assn. bill, directing companies to provide affordable coverage to day-care centers and others. And, she declares, “I proposed that bill myself , or rather the governor did. It was one of the first things I did when I took office, and they dragged their feet on even that for a year.”

State Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Van Nuys), chairman of the Senate insurance claims committee, only shakes his head at Gillespie’s assault on the Legislature. “Her department has opposed 75% of all reform legislation we’ve proposed in past years,” he says. And what the insurance industry hasn’t resisted, he adds, the trial lawyers have.

But, as far as Gillespie is concerned, she’s the only one getting any work done on behalf of the consumer. She cites everything from rate review to information hot lines. But, her real pride and joy--”my little tortilla,” as she sometimes calls it--is a proposed bill she has been working on, in concert with such minority groups as the Urban League and the Latino Issues Forum. The bill, aimed at people who go without insurance because they can’t afford it, would provide a stripped-down, no-fault insurance package for only $160 a year, the trade-off being that the policyholder forfeits all rights to sue for damages unless they exceed $15,000 per person.

This type of “no-frills” plan is the “real long-term solution” to escalating insurance prices, “the way to provide everyone with affordable prices,” Gillespie says. To her delight, both Consumers Union and Assemblyman Patrick Johnston (D-Stockton) have incorporated her “no-frills” plan into a broader no-fault package they are sponsoring. Its backers say this package would provide a far-reaching no-fault system modeled on New York’s--widely considered the best in the nation--that would both stabilize rates and make insurance accessible to the poor.

Gillespie’s $160-a-year plan is guaranteed to bring about a counterattack from trial lawyers and others who op pose no-fault’s limitation on damages. “It’s the most outrageous thing she’s pulled yet. It’s racist,” Rosenfield declares.

“Ah!” Gillespie sighs. “Why don’t they let the poor make their own choices? The bottom line is, how the heck can we tell people they must buy insurance if it’s not affordable? If it comes down to a choice between buying groceries or paying $2,000 for insurance, what do you think the choice is going to be?”

Gillespie also has always insisted that, even if she doesn’t like Proposition 103, she has been doing her best to enforce it, given the limitations imposed by the six-month legal delay. (When the insurance companies brought suit immediately after the November election, challenging the constitutionality of 103, the Supreme Court imposed a freeze on both the rollback and rate-increase provisions pending its decision.)

She cites her much-publicized intervention when Travelers attempted to pull its auto-insurance business out of California last fall to escape 103, and her settlement of a State Farm rate discrimination case earlier this year. “We really cracked down, and it was strictly implementation of Proposition 103.”

Despite Gillespie’s tough talk, however, State Farm officials had no specific gripes about her treatment of them--or her public statements chastising the company. “Some of her (State Farm) statements were clearly geared to the political climate, and we understood that,” says State Farm vice president-counsel Laura Sullivan, who has known Gillespie for years and likes her. “She’s getting tarred with political statements, so she’s responding with some too.

“Roxani’s independent, smart, gutsy,” Sullivan adds, “and she’s not going to be pushed around by anybody, whether it’s the insurance industry or the consumer groups.”

To be sure, Gillespie seems well-liked within the insurance industry. Such is her lonely lot these days, however, that, while her critics are having a field day at her expense, few insurance company officials will launch an all-out defense. Reaction is universally warm but muted. Some go out of their way, in fact, to find nit-picking points of criticism.

“She’s in a tough position, and I think she’s doing a good job,” says Tom Conneely, president of the Assn. of California Insurance Companies. “And, unlike these consumer activists, she understands some basic business principles--one being that what a business charges for its product must reflect the cost of it.” Gillespie also recognizes that all parties have a right to due process--”one of the things that escapes the Harvey Rosenfields of this world-- and who are they anyhow?” Conneely declares.

What’s more, Gillespie doesn’t always act to please the insurance industry. For example, Conneely says, insurance companies “wondered for months what the process for rate filings is going to be, how long it will take, how they get it approved. If she were in the pocket of insurance companies, she’d have been issuing all kinds of cozy letters saying here’s what you have to do to get your rates approved.”

For her part, Gillespie will frowningly concede that, yes, “insurance companies have alienated everybody.” But her most enthusiastic complaint about them is confined to the “mumbo jumbo of insurance jargon, which really must go. Nobody understands what they are paying for.”

When it comes to profits, gouging, greed--that which occurs to the average consumer when he thinks about insurance companies--Gillespie reiterates, as she always does, that “of course, there are excesses on both sides.” And, in the next breath, she intently recites her version of what actually happens to your insurance dollar. Most of it goes to legal claims, she asserts, “and so what you have is only 5 cents (of every dollar) going to administrative expenses.” (The California Trial Lawyers Assn., by comparison, says it’s 20 cents on the dollar.)

THERE ARE SO many competing agendas in the chorus of controversy surrounding Gillespie, so many politicians with eyes on higher offices and consumerists with a sweet tooth for national publicity, that, at times during the past months, Gillespie has been all but lost amid the in-house sniping over who is the Truest Populist of Them All.

Democratic politicians tend to describe Gillespie’s various sins more as a generic Republican disease. “Roxani is smart, personable, but she’s no politician, obviously. If she were, she could become a California folk hero. She’s just a very cautious individual, and I just think she wants to do a good job for Deukmejian. She once said that, you know, that ‘I belong to Deukmejian,’ ” says Alan Robbins, who is considering running for insurance commissioner in 1990. Likewise, another leading Gillespie critic, Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, wants to be governor.

“Political hay, all of it!” Gillespie snaps.

For once, she and Rosenfield agree on something. “There’s so much posturing in all this, we’re the only purists,” says Rosenfield, who does not take lightly to those attempting to horn in on the issue that is making him, at 36, famous--and he’s got copies of Esquire and Newsweek, among others, on his desk to prove it. Big, full-sized pictures. (“Aw, I hate that picture,” Rosenfield says, grinning bashfully at himself, in shades, looking super cool, in Esquire.)

It has usually been Gillespie’s inaction that has most antagonized herconsumerist watchdogs. They are particularly bitter that she did nothing to stop dozens of insurance companies from using the loophole provided by the long court delay to raise their rates. They also complain that, through her failure to impose penalties on companies, even when she did act, Gillespie has set a permissive tone for future industry misdeeds, given a green light for anything from arbitrary cancellation of policies to purposeful undercharging of customers in fly-by-night schemes to make a fast buck.

Nor do they see much to cheer about in the much-touted Travelers or State Farm cases--neither company was inconvenienced nearly so much as their customers, and “she was excruciatingly slow to act in both cases,” says Steven Miller, head of the small Insurance Consumer Action Network.

Not least, Gillespie’s critics saw her utter contempt for Proposition 103 writ large in her refusal to begin early hiring, writing regulations and taking other steps to swing into action if the court upheld the measure. Gillespie, who did predict that “the court can never uphold that thing in its entirety--it’s unconstitutional,” insists that she had been preparing all along and will be ready to begin rate hearings by July.

BUT IN ALL these long months, nothing has better captured the full flavor of the case of Gillespie vs. the Consumerists than the public hearing she held in March to investigate a 9.6% rate increase by State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer. The State Farm rate hike, announced in January, only three months after passage of Proposition 103, ignited consumerists as little else could. To them, it was the insurance industry at its most arrogant, and an added economic burden to thousands of policyholders who were shelling out an extra $14 million a month in premiums.

Gillespie said her hearing would demonstrate her full intent to implement the people’s will “in the spirit of 103--to spread sunshine.” Assorted consumer organizations, as well as observers from Van de Kamp’s office and the California Trial Lawyers Assn., saw it differently.

To them, Gillespie’s handling of the State Farm hearing reflected her at her cunning, deceitful worst, posturing as a heroic watchdog of consumer interest, while, in fact, doing everything in the book to sabotage the intent of Proposition 103, starting with her delays in holding the hearings. The rate hike had been in effect for almost two months before Gillespie convened her public court. Then, when Gillespie did schedule the hearing, her department’s attorneys first held a private meeting with State Farm attorneys. Consumer attorneys were not invited. “And if that’s not collusion, what is?” howled Harry Snyder of Consumers Union. Gillespie dismisses the meeting as “unimportant.”

The day of the hearing, several consumer-group representatives showed up in full force, and the sideshow began.

In a technical dispute over which provisions of 103 were in effect and which were under Supreme Court stay, consumerists, backed by Van de Kamp’s office, argued that the hearing should resemble a courtroom proceeding, with themselves entitled to sufficient information and privileges to determine whether the rate increase was legitimate. That is not what they got. Roxani Gillespie evidently knows how to maintain order in the courtroom, her way.

“It was incredible! A kangaroo court! Like being in Moscow!” sputtered Snyder afterward.

“Harry behaved very badly,” Gillespie sighs. “He was really out of order. He just kept popping up, and he hadn’t done his homework, as usual.”

“Gillespie denied us every single right of participation, of discovery mandated by 103,” Snyder screamed. “She totally ignored legal process.”

“Ah, process. Always the process,” exclaims Gillespie, touching her forehead in mock despair. “They are so hung up with process. But the process is not for them. It is for the policyholders. They don’t like that I used Section X as opposed to Section Y? What is the difference? My goal is the bottom line--not Section X versus Section Y!”

Meantime, Gillespie was viewing State Farm’s rate increase with the same amused tolerance she applies to her critics: “State Farm is pleading misery, but, it is in a way sort of like Donald Trump raising his rents. He doesn’t really need it, but he will tell you that all of his buildings have to pay for themselves because he’s in business. And that’s what State Farm is saying. ‘Yeah, I don’t need it. I can put food on the table. But I’m not a charity. I’m in business.’ ”

But it’s all moot now. Gillespie still hadn’t made up her mind about the State Farm increase when the Supreme Court ruled on 103. Now, she says, the company will go through the same rate relief hearings, starting in July, as everyone else. But the public hearing wasn’t wasted, Gillespie says cheerfully. “It was a good dress rehearsal for the types of hearings we’re going to have. It was good training for all of us.”

IT’S THE END of the day, some of the fire has died down, Nader and Rosenfield are mostly forgotten. Now Gillespie, softer, quieter, wearing baggy blue jeans, is showing a visitor around her home, a picture-post-card, three-story townhouse on a San Francisco hillside overlooking the Presidio. Inside is a page from House Beautiful--Persian carpets, burnished wood, antiques, bay windows, hand-carved ceiling friezes. In fact, Gillespie says, looking shyly pleased, “the blind pianist, what was his name? George Shearing used to live here.” Gillespie and her husband, Chris, 56, bought the house when they first came to San Francisco. Today it must be worth a small fortune.

But it’s the oil paintings of Gillespie’s ancestors that are her real treasure. They are all over the house, elegant portraits of dark-eyed people, period pieces many years old, each lovingly lighted. Now Gillespie is darting about like a butterfly, radiant, alighting briefly before each one to tell that relative’s special story.

Nothing seems to take the insurance commissioner’s mind off her Proposition 103 wars faster than the chance to discuss her rich family history. Liberators of Crete, field nurses, poets, both grandfathers members of the Greek Parliament, one of them--chairman of the National Bank of Greece--jailed for defying the Nazis during World War II. Gillespie’s memories of both World War II and the civil war that crippled Greece into the ‘50s include “corpses lying in the streets . . . starving children.” In the next breath, she’s sunny again, describing the glories of the 15th-Century family home that she still maintains on the island of Corfu.

“We weren’t rich, at least not by American standards,” she says with quiet pride, lingering before a portrait of her father, a businessman, “but my family had certainly been comfortable for many generations. But they were also the kind of people who did things.”

Gillespie is also the classic doting mother. She is particularly proud of daughter Margaret’s impending career takeoff, so much more glamorous than her own. “She just interviewed with eight major (international law) firms--and had her pick,” Gillespie happily brags, leading the way down a corridor.

Discussing her husband’s attitudes toward her career, she is typically direct: He’s supportive, he’s proud--otherwise, he doesn’t like it. “He complains that it’s been a lot of pressure on him. And it’s true. He doesn’t have a woman whose only concern is his welfare and what he is going to eat and those kinds of things. It’s just not the kind of environment his father had. But,” she finishes with a laugh, “I think he’s getting used to cooking his own dinner.”

And now we are in Gillespie’s bedroom, admiring what is apparently her most prized family portrait, a pretty, dark-eyed woman who looks a little like Gillespie herself. This is her grandmother, she says, and, for a second, Roxani Gillespie is silent, reverent, a woman visiting some private shrine.

But in the next second, she has flung open her closet door, yelping with frisky, defiant glee. You don’t believe that she actually buys her Laura Ashleys by the half-dozen? Well, see for yourself. It is stupefying, this act--who else but Roxani Gillespie would invite a perfect stranger to gawk into her closet? And what do we find? Crumpled clothes, dirty underwear, coat hangers on the floor?

No. What we have here, lined up in a neat row, is a sea of dark-colored Laura Ashleys, maybe 50 of them, all looking just alike--not a single deviant dress in the lineup. On the floor are four pairs of shoes, exactly alike--squat pumps with little bows, in different colors.

Gillespie stands there laughing. “I was more conscious of my image when I worked at Industrial Indemnity, of course. Back then, it was very important to look, um, prohibitive. So I wore suits. But now,” she chortles, “my idea of looking prohibitive is to wear black.”

Then Gillespie is excitedly discussing a trip she would make to London the following week to attend a big international insurers conference. She would be a guest speaker and also meet with the head of Lloyd’s of London, she says, eyes dancing, plainly impressed. “The international market is becoming quite important in California, you know,” she remarks with all the dignity befitting the California insurance commissioner. “And it’s going to be exciting, too. These trips are fun.”

Give the Laura Ashleys a year. Roxani Gillespie is outgrowing them fast.

Porsche convertible courtesy of Bob Vernali.