THE FLASH : WILLIE BROWN’S STORY

WHY ARE WE IN A FERRARI showroom?” I keep asking Willie Brown.

“You got a problem with that?” he shoots back.

The Speaker of the California Assembly is waiting to take delivery on a new Ferrari, and no matter what critics of his occasionally ostentatious lifestyle may think, he regards it as a sound investment.

“Buy any Ferrari you can get under sticker,” he advises. “Don’t screw around with the Japanese cars; you’ll lose money. Mercedeses and Porsches are no longer good buys. I got a Porsche that I’m going to sell that I bought in December of ’89. I bought it for $82,000, I’ve driven it three times. There were only 400 made. I really thought by now it would be worth over $100,000. I’m unloading it for $78,000. Guy from Germany is flying in and has already sent me a $10,000 non-refundable deposit. Because I advertise in the exotic magazines, he saw it, had me send him pictures of it with both the top up and the top down. I don’t drive my cars a whole lot. But I really love automobiles. And so far I’ve not lost money. The most I’ve ever made on any car is on the Ferrari.”

Home from Sacramento for the weekend and resplendent in very expensive leather designer jeans and jacket topped off with a cashmere cowboy hat, he pops off with whatever irreverent thought comes to mind. The 57-year-old San Franciscan just isn’t like other top elected officials.

“I don’t make any concessions to the reality of electoral politics,” Brown observes. “I think that one’s personal enjoyment of life doesn’t have to be altered or affected--as long as you play the political game as well as, if not better than, anyone else. As long as you administer to the (Assembly) membership, as long as you build consensus, you are going to be successful. The day I stop enjoying the process, I’m faxing in my resignation.”

But appearances do matter, and, under the circumstances, might a beleaguered politician not prefer being associated with a more plebeian vehicle like the Mercury Sable station wagon, which, believe it or not, Willie Brown also owns? “No, too wholesome. It wouldn’t be good for my image,” he quips.

These days, however, the Speaker is getting testy. Sometimes the charm, the quick wit and disarming candor are replaced with defensiveness. He clearly feels cheated of his just measure of public approval. A quarter of a century in the Assembly, including a record 10 years as the state’s second-most-powerful elected official, and still the dogs of controversy nip at his heels. Newspaper reports based on information from unnamed sources have for years hinted of possible conflicts of interest relating to his lucrative private law business. Some leftists in the Assembly and public-interest lobbyists charge he gives away too much of the liberal agenda to keep peace with the Republicans. And those same Republicans who first elected him Speaker in a fight with another Democrat and still count on him to pass their favorite bills use the specter of a radical Brown to scare conservative white Californians at election time.

While he remains popular in his own San Francisco district, his negative poll ratings elsewhere in the state were exploited in last year’s election to help pass Proposition 140, which places term and expenditure limitations on the Legislature. There were many other factors, and similar measures were passed in other states, but even close associates concede that Brown’s breezy lifestyle didn’t help. He took it hard when, as a result of Proposition 140-imposed cutbacks, 144 Assembly staffers, some of them old friends, were laid off. In a rare public display of vulnerability, Brown cried while presiding over the farewell ceremony.

On top of that, five white reporters--count them--from The Times alone were preparing stories on him, and he is convinced that they will never get it right, that they’re just looking for dirt on a black who’s made it. “I’m black, I’m successful, so I must be a crook in their minds, and that’s . . . racist.” He also knows the precise words he used can’t be printed.

The Times and other papers in the state have carried reports on Brown’s extensive private legal practice, in which they suggest that his private clients benefited from his contacts and influence in state government. The Speaker replies that many legislators engage in private business, quite a few are lawyers and that his activities are perfectly lawful. He insists that the recurring charges are politically motivated. The only case that hints at a legal violation centers on an ongoing FBI investigation of the Norcal Company, a waste-disposal outfit that Brown represented.

“I am the subject but never the target,” he says. “Of course Willie Brown’s name appears. Brown represented them (Norcal) in order to get garbage landfill capacity in Solano County at a low cost for San Francisco and a major (expense) for them.”

Sources close to the case have told The Times that indictments are due soon, but that Brown is not expected to be named. The typical capital-insider response is that Brown has been investigated for years, and if the FBI had anything, it would have come out by now. He is judged, though, by friend and foe alike, to be just too smart to ignore the limits of the law. Brown can be manipulative, and this is not the first time that he has charged that racism is behind the scrutiny he has received from the press and investigators, but the anger this time appears genuine. He thinks he’s a fine piece of work,a brilliant master of legislative procedure and consensus, and there’s no shortage of Republicans as well as fellow Democrats who credit him with having unjammed more than one state-budget impasse. And anyway, Willie will be Willie. He could hire a team of professional image makers to redo his speeches and his wardrobe, as some of his advisers persistently urge, but the makeover would not take. Brown cannot change. He is a period piece, an indelibly defined product of his own journey from the segregated outback of Texas to the center of power in the Golden State.

Which plays just fine in San Francisco, where the voters in his increasingly white district have returned Brown to the Assembly for 14 consecutive terms by ever-more-comfortable margins. On a recent weekend home, he was met with friendly catcalls of “Hey, Willie Brown!” from a rainbow of constituents who encountered his slow cruising of the district from the heights of Cathedral Hill to the remnants of the black ghetto in the otherwise gentrified Fillmore. He loves the errands--dropping off laundry, shopping for clothes or just checking things out--and many commented approvingly and knowledgeably about the Acura NSX, one of several cars that he owns. How many cars? “None of your business,” Brown says.

THE WEEKEND WITH Brown had begun with the every-Friday lunch, a 15-year-old tradition, with legendary columnist Herb Caen; clothier Wilkes Bashford, who sells Brown his $2,500 suits, and socialite Harry De Wild’t (“That’s social-ite, not socialist,” Brown reminds), dubbed Sir Lunchabout by Caen, and the rest of the gang at Le Central, the always “in” downtown bistro. And it ended late Sunday night with the long drive back to Sacramento following a huge celebration marking the 20th anniversary of the Delancy Street Foundation’s drug-rehabilitation program.

In between, there had been an art opening at Fisherman’s Wharf; a friendly visit with Brown’s son, Michael, at the home of the Speaker’s estranged wife, Blanche; a planning session on the megabuck fund-raiser dinner Willie planned for May (“No, you can’t use the picture where I appear to be kissing the top of Joan Collins’ breast,” he jokes with the art director of the dinner program); a biscuits-and-grits breakfast in the black section of the Fillmore; a tour of the impoverished housing project where Brown lived while studying at San Francisco State; a stop at the ridiculously expensive Gianni Versace boutique, where he bought a pair of $225 red jeans to go with his red cowboy boots; an impromptu sidewalk meeting with constituents demanding that Brown hold the line against cuts in education, and nightcap cappuccino at San Francisco’s Tosca Cafe, the century-old North Beach landmark where director Francis Ford Coppola and other movie types hang out. No one ever accused Willie Brown of being slow.

His antics are well-known in a town that turns first to Herb Caen’s column for its hard news. Caen and Brown became close buddies after sharing a laugh in a trendy cafe some 15 years ago. As Brown recalled the incident, “Caen was with some other people, and he sees me and my law partner, John Deerman, and he sees this very attractive woman. He sends a note over: ‘Willie Brown, is John Deerman your beard (your cover)?’ So I flipped the napkin over, I wrote: ‘Don’t be so conventional, she is the beard.’ He reads that and he starts to laugh.”

But even Caen, in his column, has frequently chided Brown for his profligate lifestyle. In San Francisco, this is nothing short of being condemned by the Holy See. “Caen gets pissed about my excesses, as he calls them--cars, clothing,” Brown recalls. “Caen’s harder on me than anybody you know. The other night they had a cocktail party for him. I had on a turtleneck and a Versace long-cut jacket with wide shoulders and narrow lapels, and Caen was all over me all night: ‘What goddamn uniform is that you’re wearing? You let Wilkes sell you that shit?’ He just thinks that creates a handicap for me.”

Caen judges the flashy image financed by his estimated $200,000 annual income to be a mask: “He is shy. He is lonely. He spends weekends going to movies all by himself. He is like a kid; he loves the power, glory, and the toys, except it’s the toys that drive people bananas. They think he has to be a crook to do all this. He’s riddled with honesty. It all goes into what he’s wearing and what he is driving and dames. But he is very nice with women. They love him.”

Brown is in what some would call the enviable position of being on good terms with Blanche, his wife of 34 years and mother of his three grown children (Susan, Robin and Michael), and with Julian Guthrie, his girlfriend of nine months. In fact, both his wife and his girlfriend, an ambitious 26-year-old editor at Frisko magazine, attended a recent Brown fund-raiser.

“I don’t know why neither of us has made the move to get a divorce,” says Blanche, who teaches dance at Cal State Hayward. “We’re friends like we’ve never been friends when we were married. We talk to each other, not a whole lot, but we remember each other’s birthday. We get together at Christmas, and I have Thanksgiving dinner for everybody. We never discuss each other’s personal life. We have a very good relationship. I don’t live by society’s rules, and Willie doesn’t either. So we’re fairly comfortable with the way our lives have gone.”

Willie seems close to his children, more so now than in their early years. He can be protective, even puritanical. But for an occasional glass of wine, he shuns alcohol; and he won’t stand for drugs. But he is in all other ways a Bay Area bohemian.

Brown revels in being yet another San Francisco character and has been carrying on a love affair with his adopted hometown precisely because it is culturally as far as he could get from rural Texas, where he was born, and which, after 17 years, he fled. As the sign over Vesuvio cafe in North Beach has proclaimed for decades, “We are itching to get away from Portland, Oregon.” In this case, it’s Mineola, Tex.

The Speaker, as he prefers to be called, is of a generation younger than those blacks such as Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley who first broke the color code by proving they would not inconvenience the white world if it let them in.

“I was clearly conscious of the fact that they had never stuck their fingers in anybody’s eye,” says Brown of Bradley’s world. For him, though, “there was some joy in sticking your finger in people’s eyes, because you got a reaction other than tolerance. That was pretty much what I found among the returning (black World War II) veterans, who had an attitude that if they played by the rules and met the standards, then they had a right to be different if they were different. They didn’t have to bow and scrape.”

But if Brown was not like Bradley, neither was he an activist in the civil-rights movement of the ‘60s, committed to lifting his people and then himself. He recalls his ‘50s generation of ambitious blacks as being preoccupied instead with individual material success as the main way to help oneself and the race. He would later get caught up in some civil-rights struggles and do pro bono legal work on the side--but never at the risk of arrest or anything that might damage his career.

Sometimes Brown is disarmingly candid about his motives. Asked why he didn’t go back down South on freedom rides and other civil-rights activities, he replies: “No, I just couldn’t do it. I’ve always been a marginal liver. If I miss a paycheck, the creature-comfort level that I have become accustomed to and want to be accustomed to and my family is accustomed to would be jeopardized, and I’ve always made my family first cut. I was never able to get far enough ahead to take a vacation and to make that sacrifice to go down, which clearly requires some reduction of your resources and, in some cases, total abstinence. I figure my contribution will be made where I am without having to make that sacrifice.” He leaves no doubt that his personal success as one of the nation’s top black officials is also his major social achievement, a stance at least consistent with flashy--no, correct that, Brown would insist-- exquisite clothes, cars and women.

Does he enjoy flaunting his success? “Not flaunting it. I don’t deny it: I enjoy my successes. Is that something not exactly kosher for a politician to be doing? More importantly, a black politician? That’s crazy.”

STANDING IN THE FERrari showroom on the auto-row strip of Van Ness Avenue, Brown can draw the map of his San Francisco odyssey in a tight circle around him. Eight blocks west are the ever-run-down Westside housing project, where he lived while attending San Francisco State, and Westminster Presbyterian Church, where he was the janitor for two years while working his way through college. Five blocks east sits prestigious Hastings Law School, where he graduated at age 24, high in his class, and soon after passed the Bar exam. All around Van Ness, one can still find the genre of hookers and pimps he represented early in his legal career. And right here on auto row he launched his rise to political prominence when he was the NAACP lawyer for hundreds of protesters arrested in 1963 for “sitting-in” at the auto showrooms while demanding that the first blacks be hired to sell cars.

Yes, racism here in liberal San Francisco, not fiercely segregated Mineola, Tex., which he’d left six years after World War II, a short, skinny teen-ager good at math and surviving, part of that great migration north in pursuit of the dream deferred. Only to discover that being what was then called Negro in San Francisco meant encountering major barriers because of union and employer discrimination. To be black meant you would not be hired to drive a municipal bus, to be a bank teller, to register guests at the fancy hotels or even to collect tolls on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Back then “Brookie,” a slight but super-sharp graduate of tiny Mineola Colored High, caught a train north with his prize possessions in a shoe box, knowing only that he had a couple of gambler uncles in ‘Frisco. But “by the time I finished the first semester at San Francisco State, I had mastered life, in my opinion,” he says now. That was 1951, four years after Truman desegregated the Armed Forces, and the country seemed full of opportunity. “I knew that if I got properly credentialed and what have you, that I could ensure a better life for me and anyone else whom I knew. So I was on my job by then. Mineola was a bad memory.”

Just how bad? He was reminded in February on a return trip from his mother Minnie Boyd’s 82nd birthday in Dallas. He was driven down to Mineola in a rented limo with his daughter, Robin, a magazine designer, her white husband, Bobby Friedel, a New York photographer, and Brown’s girlfriend, Guthrie, also white. Parking in front of Broadway barbershop and looking at Collins department store, he remembered why he had left in the first place. “The streets were still just as narrow as they always were. The white people living there were still just as evil looking. . . .”

In Mineola in the ‘30s and ‘40s, he says, “you knew you were going to be hassled. You were constantly the object of sport. For example, if you were walking, most of the streets did not have sidewalks, you had to worry about the automobile approaching, because many times it was being driven by a white person, particularly a young white person. They would see how close they could come to you without hitting you, supposedly. But if they hit ya, it was pretty much OK. Nighttimes were even worse in Mineola.”

One sport Brown recalls was the odd habit of some of his shoeshine customers--tossing quarter tips into a spittoon.

No need to minimize the distance from the segregated “crow’s nest” alcove at the Mineola cinema to the upfront seat that Brown occupied at the recent Academy Awards, but he is also insistent that life on the “colored” side of town was warm and nurturing. It is a source of some chagrin for Brown that, despite the gains in civil rights of the intervening four decades, the black family in Mineola provided a supportive environment that is far less available in ghetto communities today.

“The family was designed kind of as a mutual-assistance operation. The five children of my mother’s were raised by my grandmother, and my mother went off to Dallas to work in somebody’s kitchen to help support the family, and the grandmother had the responsibility to raise the kids. All of her children sent money home to help in that regard.” This hard-working matriarchy carried on without the benefit of Brown’s father, who abandoned the family when he was quite young. (Brown avoids any introspective conversation about his father, who reappeared at one of his speaking engagements in Los Angeles a decade ago. Brown has invited his father to some public events, but the two are not close.)

“My grandmother raised us, and she fished full time. She fished every day of her life practically. And one of the things you had to do was take our grandmother fishing if you had a bicycle, or anything like that; we had no other means of transportation, so you’d put on the carriage rack of your bike and pedal her to the fishing hole, and you had to dig baits for our grandmother, too. You cut the wood, you slopped the hogs, you helped raise the corn, tomatoes and chickens.”

As he weaves his reminiscences, there is obvious pride in the do-for-yourself work ethic and finely honed survival skills that marked his Texas world and that he notes is missing today in the unkempt projects in his own San Francisco district. Much of how the man lives seems to reflect a personal witness against the disorder of modern black poverty. Brown is extremely fastidious; his two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is meticulously ordered; there’s never a wrinkle in his clothes, and there are no crumbs in his cars. His body is trim, and his basic living habits are healthful, and he attributes all that to the example of his mother, who set the tone on her weekend visits from Dallas to Mineola.

“She would dress you, make you get a haircut, take you to the barbershop. No matter what your circumstances were, you should not look like a bum, nor should you act like a bum. So I never indulged in any of the business of letting it all hang out. That was unacceptable. She went to the white woman’s kitchen and looked like she was on her way to shop at Neiman’s. She got there and put on her uniform, and it was equally as spiffy. When she left there, she took it off and you didn’t know she was working as somebody’s maid. The wearing of overalls is not part of our image.”

That was the foundation, and Uncle Itsie, the gambler whom Brown was sent to live with after high school graduation, provided the accessories: “The shoes, cars, suits, hats, diamond stick pins, watches, rings were in part what he lived for. So (I’m) a combination of her discipline of social order and appearance and his self-indulgence and finery.”

Brown also attributes his own easy tolerance of whites to his mother’s example: “I don’t think my mother would permit us to have that hostility. She always spoke positively about her employers. She never spoke about any mistreatment by them. They always developed a relationship beyond the employment relationship. She lived up over the garage; she lived in service. I met the family, and, as a matter of fact, members of the families whom she worked for have visited me in the Capitol. She’ll call me and tell me whoever’s children are coming, and they’re going to stop by and visit.”

Brown doesn’t need to dwell on the social significance of having those people look him up. He tells these stories of his recurring encounters with the limitations of his old culture with a quizzical and bemused grin meant more as a mark of unlikely progress in the human condition than as individual boasting.

Brookie (he got the nickname from his mother, who had to miss a performance by the Larson Brooks Band the night her son was born) got out of Mineola by the grace of Uncle Itsie, an apostle of the free market who operated as a kind of generous patriarch and inspiration on his swings through town. “He had been a bootlegger in Texas. They had a basement under my house where they hid the booze. The other two brothers and my grandmother had a joint up the street where they sold home brew called chock and other forms of alcohol, plus they had a jukebox. My family, my mother’s brothers, were always persons who operated, were hustlers.

“Itsie was never in Mineola for long, and he always demonstrated great wealth by our standards. He always had a very fancy car. He always wore very fancy clothing, and he’d come down to leave money for his relatives and then he would leave. He did it because that’s the way his mother raised him. That was standard, and that’s been that way in the family all the years I’ve known; I know no other way.”

Itsie introduced young Willie to Jimbo’s Bop City and the Long Branch Bar and the other great sights and sounds of the sepia-toned, Langston Hughes world that was the throbbing Fillmore ghetto of the day. San Francisco was cosmopolitan and liberating, quite a break from the straight-laced maternalism of Mineola.

Willie Brown was one of those “coloreds” marked by local teachers and family as college material. Although everything was done to get him out of town and upward bound, his education at Mineola Colored High hadn’t prepared him for the San Francisco State entrance exams. “But I got in. Duncan Gillies, a counselor who was at San Francisco State at that time, interviewed me as part of the process, and he looked at the papers, he looked at my high school records, and he had the sensitivity to say, ‘Listen, there is no question in my mind you can do college work. If you’re willing, you could be admitted on probation, and we will evaluate you after 10 weeks, and if you’ve made it, you’ll stay.’ ” The Gillies helping-hand example comes up frequently in Brown’s definition of his liberalism, which centers on evening the odds with a helping hand.

At San Francisco State, Brown met his wife Blanche and became active in a national Negro fraternity and the campus chapter of the NAACP. Brown’s driving personal ambition found a social echo in the black organizations. “I had no dream, intent or agenda when I headed to California. The campus was active. There were political activists on campus, lots of them. They were real, and they were about trying to elect blacks to student governments. And they did. There were probably less than a hundred Negroes. There were two tables where you sat in the cafeteria. Had a place out in front of the hut, and you associated in your own social organizations, your fraternities and sororities.”

San Francisco Assemblyman John Burton, who was also a student there at the time, recalls that racial separation was the order of the day. But, fortunately for Brown’s future political life, it was a line crossed by Burton, a gangling varsity basketball player a year ahead of Brown, who befriended the shrimpy kid from Texas. Brown and Burton were both natural orators and organizers, and this odd couple, who also served in the campus Air Force ROTC together, then proceeded to take over student government and the Bay Area Young Democrats. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Following State, where Brown got a bachelor’s degree in political science, there was a quick passage through Hastings Law School. Burton, who went on with Brown to Hastings, recalls the spectacle of seeing Brown chairing meetings as president of the student body during the day and sweeping up the meeting rooms at night as a school janitor. After graduation, Brown followed the life of a number of young black lawyers of the time. His civic duty was to take on civil-rights cases. But, to make a living, because they were being excluded from the prestigious downtown law firms, they found their cases in more ordinary circumstances.

Brown was offered a job by black attorney Terry Francois, later a county supervisor, whom Brown remembers as a swashbuckler independent of the black Establishment, unafraid of the white power structure. He was associated with Francois but ran his own end of the business: “I went to every bartender in the Fillmore. I went to every cabdriver. I went to every barbershop. I went to every church. I did a marketing job, and I had the distinction of being the first of my generation of black lawyers. I was the first 24-year-old down the pike to be a lawyer. I was the kid, and, of course, I held membership in the NAACP, Urban League--anywhere there was a meeting, I attended and spoke.”

His legend in the Fillmore began with his first case defending a prostitute: “I went in one day defending my first hooker. It was small, maybe a $25 fine, but it dawned on me that it was discriminatory prosecution. Before Superior Court Judge Clayton Horn, I said, ‘You can’t engage in an act of prostitution by yourself. . . . They have decided that the guy who’s paid her is a more reliable witness than she is.’ I said, ‘This is a poor woman who has no other way to make money. She didn’t go looking for him; he came looking for her, and she should have the same opportunity to testify against him.’ So the judge says, ‘You’re right’ and dismissed it.

“Of course, when she goes back out on the streets that night, she passes the word to everybody in the world. Within a week, every pimp in town is in my office for me to represent him and his ladies, and I ended up going to court every day, and I never had less than a half a dozen cases on the calendar. I made cash money every day representing whores. I became the whores’ lawyer . . . until I got elected.”

Critics today charge that Brown is a captive of the California Trial Lawyers Assn., which has consistently made large contributions to his campaigns, but he responds that his years of being a defense lawyer left him with a sympathetic mind set, particularly in matters of civil liberties and victims’ rights--including the current Sacramento debate over the right to sue insurance companies.

Four years into his law practice, in 1962, Willie Brown was tapped by the emerging Burton machine to run for the Assembly against an incumbent Democrat. John and his older brother, the late Phil Burton, were from a liberal-left Irish family. They had figured out that World War II had transformed San Francisco into a more heterogeneous community, and that new alliances involving blacks, Latinos and the Chinese were possible. A key element in this new coalition was San Francisco’s large leftist culture, which was strongly based in the dynamic International Longshoremen and Warehouseman’s Union (ILWU), headed by militant organizer Harry Bridges.

Most important for the career of Willie Brown, the ILWU was one of the rare unions that aggressively organized on a multiracial basis and had developed strong ties with the black community. Bridges was close to Carlton Goodlett, who, in addition to being a prominent medical doctor in the black community, was the publisher of its leading newspaper, first the Sun and currently the Sun Reporter.

Phil Burton was putting all of these pieces together when young Willie Brown suddenly popped into citywide prominence. One day Brown’s wife Blanche attempted to look at an open house that was for sale in a new upper-middle-class development called Forest Knolls. She’d chanced to drop by with a woman friend, and she was “just amazed when the salespeople all ran out the back to avoid waiting on us.” The two women waited for about a half-hour or so, and when it became clear that they were being ignored because they were black, they called Brown’s office for legal advice and were told to just “sit in.” They did. Brown showed up later with a photographer from Goodlett’s paper, and over the next days the sit-in grew. That was in 1961, two years before San Francisco would be rocked by the auto-row sit-ins.

The ensuing publicity was extensive, and Brown was on his way to being a household word in San Francisco. He ran for the Assembly and lost the first time out, but made it in 1964 along with his friend John Burton, who represented the other half of San Francisco.

Those were heady times, and the political defeat of San Francisco’s old guard was near total. Not the least of the new forces represented in the winning coalition was the gay community, then beginning to come out of the closet and become a major force in San Francisco. Brown remembers the baptismal event as a late-’60s meeting of the Society for Individual Rights when it “was very nervy to appear at one of their candidates’ nights.”

At the meeting, there had been much talk about endorsing something called the Model Penal Code. Brown got up and said he didn’t know what that was, but he had heard it had a provision to decriminalize sexual acts between consenting adults and he would introduce that in the next session of the Legislature. Burton, who, like Brown, had been elected in 1964 and ’66 without tapping the then-largely invisible gay community, said he would also sign on. And then-state Sen. George Moscone stood up and said he would introduce the code in the state Senate. They pushed the bill every year for six years until 1975, when the landmark law was passed in Sacramento and set a pattern for the nation. No question that Brown was committed to the civil-liberties side of the issue, but he also anticipated the growth of gay power in San Francisco, making it exactly the sort of marriage of principle and pragmatism that he loves. The measure remained controversial in the state and was allowed to become law without Gov. Jerry Brown signing it.

Burton and Brown agree that Willie was never an ideological leftist even when he accepted the company of the same. “I have always been mainstream,” Brown recalls, “but blackness positioned you on the left in the white world of that time. There was no room for a black and no acceptance of a black in the mainstream. Certainly no recruitment of blacks; that only happened on the left-wing side of the aisle. All of the left organizations embraced me, but I was never really a member of the (radical left) labor mentality. I wanted to own this country.”

There it is: the key to Brown’s politics. Had the downtown law firms and the Democratic Party mainstream been open to ambitious young black lawyers, he likely would have come up as a centrist in the Lyndon Johnson mold, rather than joining the McGovern, anti-Vietnam War left that he would represent as co-chairman of the California delegation to the 1972 Democratic National Convention and as chairman of the national Jesse Jackson campaign in 1988. The Speaker still considers himself to be following Phil Burton’s brand of pragmatic politics rather than the more consistent leftist views of John Burton or Jesse Jackson.

Sure enough, at the onset of the recent Gulf War, John Burton, peace button and all, was leading the opposition to U.S. intervention in the Gulf, while Willie Brown was chairing the Assembly session, never stepping down to speak in the hot debate, just calmly seeing to it that all sides were heard and respectful of his Speakership. Despite a flamboyant style, he remains primarily a man seeking the center, while John Burton, still a very close friend, is always more comfortable in the loyal opposition.

So there Brown sits today, orchestrating the majority, as he puts it. Does that mean he is without social values or political commitment? Brown, and most of the liberals in the Assembly, would deny that.

Brown’s liberal defenders argue that he has appointed strong people to key Assembly committees, people like Tom Bates, who presides over Human Services, John Vasconcellos, who heads the all-important Ways and Means Committee, and Tom Hayden, who chairs Higher Education.

Brown, however, is not a good-government reformer or an Earth First! environmentalist. Instead, his liberalism is old-fashioned and activist. His goals lie in maintaining a Democratic majority along those lines through reapportionment machinations and fund-raising. “Every problem in existence has a solution,” is the way he puts it. Ending legislative gridlock to permit governing, through as much compromise as necessary, is his commitment.

This spirit was captured by Assemblyman Hayden (D-Santa Monica) in recounting a strange visit he received from the FBI in January, 1983. Two FBI agents inexplicably approached Hayden--who had been on trial in the early ‘70s as an anti-Vietnam War militant--asking questions about Brown’s loyalty to the country. As a regent of the University of California, Brown has access to classified information about nuclear weapons being developed by the university. “This is a guy that is the Speaker, and he is the Speaker because he believes in the institution and the system,” Hayden recalls telling the FBI. “He believes in the system more than the FBI does. His ultimate commitment is to make things work, rather than to break down, even if he has to set aside what he believes.”

Brown’s trick is in his mastery of legislative detail. “Willie is brilliant,” says Steve Merksamer, who, as former Gov. George Deukmejian’s chief of staff, had years of direct contact with the Speaker. Merksamer, now a practicing attorney whose conservative law firm represents the Republican Party, says that Brown has a better grasp of program and policy than perhaps any other legislator and that, “if he gives you his word, you can take it to the bank.”

Willie Brown’s reign as Speaker has been marked more by consensus than crusade, and his style would not likely detract from his considerable achievements were he a white legislator. But there is no getting away from his blackness. His ebony balding head juts out in the primarily white crowd that powerful people, even the rare black, must move among. In the final analysis, Brown’s politics are marked by a notion that blacks, no matter how hard they try, will never be fully accepted.

“In 1983, I had become really successful by American standards; I had really made it,” he recalled recently in a speech to the Beverly Hills chapter of the NAACP. “You might say I was at the upper-echelon level. I had been a member of the Legislature for almost 20 years, been Speaker for three, and by a constitutional choice of the state, the Speaker is the second-most-important or -powerful elected official, and sometimes the first. And on occasion I demonstrate it.

“No longer did I have to worry about going into my law office on any given day, because I had retainer clients. I had clients who I could deal with just by telephone, and I somehow managed to get into their computer-payment schedule. And they didn’t even expect a bill; it just came every month based on previous relationships. I had it made. I had a driver and a gardener at this stage of my development. I was purely what you might call White American. But still black.”

He was confronted with that irreducible fact, Brown noted in his speech, when he went apartment-hunting in an exclusive San Francisco high-rise. “I had my idea of what I wanted to have. I wanted beautiful hardwood floors. I wanted restored Victorian. . . . I wanted to be able get those beautiful Oriental rugs. I wanted to be able to have that sound system where you walk in, put your hand on the wall, and the sounds start coming out from everywhere. . . . This particular apartment unit had it--including a spectacular view . . . and I had arrived at the level where you no longer carry a checkbook, where you no longer carry any ID or any cash, you tell these people, ‘Just call my bank.’ ”

Brown had arrived; only the white rental agent at the complex didn’t know that. He leased the unit to someone else while claiming to be checking the Speaker’s credit. Brown sued the company for discrimination and settled out of court after producing an Asian man who’d had the same experience. Liberal San Francisco had yet another civil-rights flap. And Willie Brown was once again reminded that, despite all the Ferraris, he wasn’t all that far from Mineola.