Sen. Bradley Fund-Raiser Pulls In $600,000

They called him “Dollar Bill” when he played basketball, so tight was Bill Bradley with the buck.

But the tag took on new meaning Thursday night when Bradley, now a Democratic U.S. senator from New Jersey, hauled in more than $600,000 in campaign contributions at an event in Century City.

It was a watershed in California’s role as the nation’s chief exporter of campaign dollars. No one could recall a Democratic senator, not even California’s own Alan Cranston, taking in that much at one dinner in the state.

And although the money is headed for Bradley’s 1990 Senate reelection, many in the audience were there because Bradley is often mentioned as a possible candidate for President in 1992.

(Well, some might have been there because their $1,000 contributions also got them 20 minutes of gut-busting jokes by Robin Williams.)

“Any senator who comes into a state that’s not his own and raises that kind of money is going to cause people throughout the country to open their eyes and wonder what his future plans are,” said California political consultant Kam Kuwata.

The event was organized by several people with the clout to shake loose a lot more money for Bradley down the road.

They include Walt Disney Studios chief Michael Eisner, Hollywood super-agent Michael Ovitz and Los Angeles lawyer and political strategist William Wardlaw.

In the audience were former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. and Oscar winners Goldie Hawn and Sydney Pollack. The list of dinner sponsors included industrialist Armand Hammer, director Steven Spielberg, producer Norman Lear and actors Bill Cosby and Sally Field.

Bradley avoided the kind of gloomy assessments of America that often got Democrats in trouble in the Ronald Reagan Era.

But he did admonish the crowd to demand excellence in their institutions and in their government.

“America needs big ambition,” said Bradley, who grew up in a Missouri town of 3,000 and went on to become a Rhodes scholar and a basketball star with Princeton and the New York Knicks.

This was not the kind of passion-inciting speech so often delivered by such Democratic luminaires as New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. Not once, for example, was Bradley interrupted by applause or cheers.

His address was more a tapestry of thoughts on the theme of excellence and on what Bradley sees as the need for America to raise its sights and its standards as it enters the ‘90s.

“What’s the goal now? In a word, it’s ‘excellence,’ ” said Bradley. “America needs to reach out for greatness--something we don’t always see.”