A Kinder, Gentler ‘Loose Cannon’ of the Legislature? : Government: Assemblyman Steve Peace, now enjoying a political ‘rehabilitation,’ says he is a changed man.

For Steve Peace, it came as a hot flash as he sat in his car.

Until that moment in mid-January, as he was leaving memorial services for Chula Vista Mayor Gayle McCandliss, the likelihood of death had only been a vague possibility. But, with his high school friend dead from cancer, a sense of mortality rolled over him as a sweat-drenching anxiety attack.

“I knew she had died before, but I didn’t know she died, that she ain’t coming back,” Peace said about the middle-age epiphany. “That experience . . . overwhelmingly changed my view of life, just from the standpoint of how incredibly fragile, minute and short-lived it is.”

James Stephen Peace is a changed man. Or so he says.

And the 38-year-old Democratic Assemblyman from Rancho San Diego, still widely viewed as the loose cannon of the Legislature, appears to be putting those changes to use as he enjoys a political “rehabilitation.”

Over the past two years, Peace has seen himself transformed from Democratic outcast, stemming from his role in the ill-fated “Gang of Five” rebellion against Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), to chairman of a new legislative committee dealing with banking and bonds.

And, earlier this month, Peace emerged as a key player in the state budget war when, with Brown’s blessing, he maneuvered a workers’ compensation measure through a hostile Legislature to help break the deadlock over the $57.6-billion spending plan.

Meanwhile, the man who once vowed he would quit public office in disgust is now showing interest in how reapportionment plans could be redrawn to send him to Washington from a new South Bay congressional district, sources say.

For most people, the reincarnated Peace is not much different from the old cantankerous model, perhaps best known for giving the world the low-budget cult movie classic, “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.”

Peace is still able to ramble during his speeches and deliver a blistering retort. Running his new committee meetings with impatient abandon, he thinks nothing of abruptly cutting off unprepared witnesses or publicly branding a proposal he dislikes an “institutional scam.”

“Steve can be very belligerent. He pings off the walls sometimes,” said an Assembly Democrat who asked not to be identified.

Added a skeptical lobbyist: “A diplomat, he is not. A bull in a china shop, he is.”

Yet there are also some signs that the hard-charging Peace may be changing with the lessons of time, just as he says. The most obvious is a willingness to put aside the bomb-throwing tactics of youth so he can work within the power structure of the Legislature.

As an example, he worked closely with Brown’s office to take the political flak and maneuver the workers’ compensation bill, which would cut stress-related claims against employers, through a prickly Legislature during the budget fight.

Other signs are more personal: the hot flash of realization he had after McCandliss’ death. Or the way he nearly broke down last month when he rose on the Assembly floor to talk about the future of his three sons, ages 11, 9, and 7.

The subject at the time was the 1991-92 educational budget, and an emotional Peace stood up to thank Gov. Pete Wilson for changing his mind about cutting $2 billion from the public schools.

“I want to say thank you, because it meant a lot to me personally,” the one-time rebel choked. “I’m concerned about my kids, and I mean it.

“I’m worried. I’m scared. . . .”

Born in 1953 in San Diego, Peace was part of a generation whose dreams took hold in the futility of Vietnam and the cynicism of Watergate, a time when authority figures were suspect but the power to change the world was not.

The wiry, impish Peace brought to those dreams the kind of familial commitment to rightness that once prompted his maternal grandfather to brave a beating rather than keep his mouth shut about some union elections in Iowa.

The idea was reinforced by spirited political debates around the dinner table with his Republican mother and a Kentucky Democrat step-father, Chula Vista dentist G. Gordon Browning. As an adolescent, Peace was an avid Ronald Reagan fan, though he registered as a Democrat in college.

“I had grown up in an environment where confronting someone verbally was encouraged, not discouraged,” said Peace. “. . . There was never a thing that you don’t talk to your elders, you don’t question your dad.”

The same held true for anything approaching parental authority. As Bonita Vista High School student body president in 1971, he successfully fought administrator opposition to a rock concert by organizing student leaders.

Peace’s seemingly inexhaustible self-confidence came equipped with extras: a quick tongue, a sarcastic wit, a hair-trigger temper and a powerful mind with little use for details. Friends and relatives say he was a high-school debater who couldn’t match his clothes, a wisecracking class clown who overpowered teachers with ideas but never bothered with such niceties as spelling.

“I thought for a while that he was brain-damaged at birth in his spelling centers,” said his mother, Patricia Browning, a retired speech teacher. “Finally, in his senior year, he had a teacher who gave him ‘D’s for his spelling, and he learned to spell in one quarter.”

Out of high school, Peace married his sweetheart, Cheryl Matzenauer; worked as a legislative aide; graduated from UC San Diego in political science and made a half-hearted attempt at the University of San Diego law school before plowing his considerable energy into an entrepreneurial dream of his own, a fledgling film company, founded in 1973 with former debate partner John DeBello.

For seven years, they worked around the clock on football weekends to produce highlight and analytical films for high schools and college teams.

The pair’s biggest gambit, however, came in 1978, when they produced the low-budget “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.” A spoof of politicians and bad movies, the climax featured Peace, in aviator garb and with a drawn sword, leading a charge out of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium to stomp on an advancing army of the fruits.

Hollywood--or anything remotely resembling it--was unimpressed. Peace recalled one would-be distributor turning off the projector after only a minute of viewing the film. “Why didn’t you just take all your money, kid, and put it on a number in Las Vegas?” another smirked.

Undaunted, the pair simply decided to buck the odds and distribute the film on their own. It became a cult classic.

But, before “Tomatoes” ever caught on, Peace gambled again--this time in politics. Never an officeholder, he decided to take the plunge in 1982 when Wadie P. Deddeh (D-Bonita) vacated his Assembly seat to run for the Senate.

The decision was quintessential Peace. The race was being conducted during reapportionment, and Peace said he discovered the Democrats, a.k.a. Willie Brown, had reapportioned the district so that his house was excluded.

“It just pissed me off,” he recalled.

He was angry enough to walk in the rain for signatures on his nominating petition, and driven enough to walk in the searing Imperial Valley desert heat for votes to win the election and beat the party’s favorite, Imperial Valley farmer Fernando Sanga, by 4,000 votes in the primary.

In Sacramento, Peace became part of a new Democratic brat pack, wannabe power brokers from rural and suburban areas who would chafe under Brown’s liberal philosophy and autocratic leadership.

“Most of us were clear representatives of the Baby Boom,” said Sen. Charles M. Calderon (D-Whittier), who was elected to the Assembly in the same year and eventually joined Peace in the Gang of Five rebellion. “There was a whole new generation of leaders out there. The only problem was that the older leaders were living longer.”

Then 29, Peace came from a district with great demands but no overwhelming political allegiance. The 80th Assembly seat includes all of Imperial County, Otay Mesa, and the booming southern San Diego county communities of National City and Chula Vista. Its problems are decidedly Third World--drug smuggling, illegal aliens, border sewage spills, the industrial toxics.

Peace tackled those and other controversial problems with the philosophy of a “radical moderate,” a phrase he coined in a college paper for someone with an extreme adherence to Everyman views. The result sometimes looks so conservative that he’s accused of being a closet Republican.

Such pragmatism has led to some lawmaking success. He fashioned a model interstate compact that helped to keep low-level radioactive-material dumps out of his district. He wrote the first law in the country allowing consumers to block the dial-a-porn numbers on their home phones. And, last year, he convinced Gov. George Deukmejian to include $10 million for a border sewage plant in a bond package voters eventually rejected.

But the thing Peace became best known for is an unpredictability, sometimes boorish behavior and vesuvian temper. As soon as he hit town, he amused then dismayed insiders with a stupefying gift to deliver impassioned--some say ranting--speeches on anything that strikes his fancy.

In 1985, he jarred legislative sensibilities by calling a powerful, 77-year-old senator a “senile old pedophile” for killing a bill as political revenge. Peace swears he yelled something else. Last year, he punched a Republican assemblyman during a hallway scuffle for daring to imply that Peace favored the distribution of pornography to minors.

“He gets very emotional when it is something he feels strongly about, he cares about,” said Cheryl, his wife.

Despite such outbursts, Speaker Brown took a shine to Peace, perhaps seeing a bit of his younger self in the hot-headed, sometimes brilliant young man from San Diego. He appointed Peace to the powerful Ways and Means Committee and made him caucus “whip,” a position that gave him access to Brown’s inner sanctum.

Still, he was restless. And, as always, impatient.

“To run up against a system that said, ‘You can have as many staff as you want, you can have a nice office . . . but don’t expect to have an impact in policy,’ that wasn’t enough for us,” said Calderon.

So began the Gang of Five rebellion of 1987, an insurrection that has become Capitol lore and nearly cost Brown the speakership. His challengers were all fellow Democrats: Peace, Calderon, Jerry Eaves of Rialto, Rusty Areias of Los Banos and Gary Condit of Ceres.

The quintet had been absorbed into Brown’s leadership structure with committee assignments and caucus posts, but they felt inhibited. “The fundamental issue for us was whether to act independently, act for our constituents and not be dictated by the majority of our party,” said Peace, who before the rebellion was telling reporters he was so disillusioned he wanted to quit.

Peace was among those who first broke rank, joining two others to help kill a major insurance reform bill in the Ways and Means Committee in August, 1987. To the shock of loyal Democrats, they substituted their own “no-fault” measure strongly opposed by California trial lawyers, who are closely aligned with the speaker.

That act helped coalesce a rebellion that, by mid-1988, had profound ramifications. The Gang of Five became the balance of power in the 80-member Assembly. With glee, they combined with the 36 Republicans to pass out conservative measures bottled up in Brown’s committees--measures such as death penalties for child killers and AIDS testing for prostitutes.

The real threat, however, was what the cabal could do to the Speaker himself. Forty-one votes could boot him out and install a new Speaker.

Peace now says the Gang of Five goofed by not telling Brown directly that they never intended to bump him off, at least not in the beginning. That failure, he said, came from the mistaken belief that “we were going to just do the right thing and let our conduct define itself.”

Instead, the uncertainty prompted a fierce backlash from Brown loyalists, who branded the Gang as ingrates, turncoats and opportunists. Eventually, Brown stripped Peace of his committee posts, slashed his staff budget, switched him to a small office and even changed his front-row parking space in the Capitol’s underground garage.

Yet the cruelest blow, said Peace, was when Brown’s forces conducted the “dirtiest campaign in California history” to oust Eaves from his San Bernardino seat in the June, 1988, primary. Mailings and a whispering campaign included false charges of child molestation and drunk driving, he said.

“I’ll never forgive those people for what they did to Jerry as a human being,” he said several months ago, at that point suggesting therapy for himself for a “catharsis.”

Eaves survived the primary assault. But fate doomed the rebellion. On June 8, a Republican Assemblyman from Orange County died suddenly. Five months later, the Republicans lost three seats in the general election, giving Brown loyalists a solid majority and rendering Peace and the Gang irrelevant--a truth painfully evident when their only attempt to unseat Brown in January, 1989, fell five votes short.

Peace was now politically isolated and mistrusted. His fall from grace was complete. He had to find a way back. Concluded Peace: “Sometimes you’ve got to lob grenades. Sometimes you have to go to war. But there’s no satisfaction or prosperity in going to war forever.”

The gestures seeking forgiveness began.

According to a Brown aide, a much quieter Peace began hanging around the Speaker’s office door again in 1989. He began voting regularly with the Democratic majority. A year later, during the 1990 budget debates, Peace demonstrated his born-again loyalty when he stood up and rebuked the Republicans.

“It was a wonderful moment where he was signaling to the world that he had been on the other side, and now he was on this side, and this is where he belonged,” said the Brown aide.

By then, Brown had reappointed Peace to the Ways and Means Committee. And, in December, the Speaker put Peace in charge of a new Assembly Committee on Banking, Finance and Bonded Indebtedness, a panel created specifically for Peace. He moved into a bigger office and was given $250,000 extra for staff.

Meanwhile, Peace’s personal fortunes were multiplying as well.

“Killer Tomatoes,” the quirky cult film, had grown into a hot property. Peace negotiated deals for a Saturday morning “Killer Tomato” cartoon series, which premiered on the Fox network last fall, and is finishing production with 20th Century Fox on two yet-released video cassette sequels.

In addition, he was negotiating plans for merchandising spinoffs from “Killer Tomatoes”--action toys, lunch boxes, key chains, books, Nintendo games. Even Killer Tomato boxer shorts.

But, in the midst of such bounty, life would deliver a blow that Peace described as a “cataclysmic” turning point in how he views the world. Chula Vista Mayor Gayle McCandliss died Jan. 17 after a yearlong bout with colon cancer.

McCandliss, 36 and unmarried, was part of the high school crowd that moved on with Peace to tackle the real world, a crowd that expanded through marriage to include Chula Vista Councilman David Malcolm. A year younger, McCandliss succeeded Peace as high school student body president.

Peace says he still remembers the haunting telephone call last Halloween when McCandliss asked to stop by his district office for a chat. “I could sense the hesitation in her voice,” he said. She eventually canceled the meeting so Peace could go home and pass out candy to the neighborhood kids.

It wasn’t until after McCandliss was elected mayor in November that she finally told Peace her awful secret, confiding the guilt she felt for covering it up during the campaign. He stood by her at a hastily called press conference, and went into denial.

“It never, ever entered my mind for one second that Gayle would die,” said Peace. Three weeks later, he attended her memorial service.

“I walked out and got into the car with Cheryl and my body . . . it was sort of like a hot flash. Literally, sweat just broke out. It was then that I realized she had died.”

The realization galvanized what Peace said had been a slow, internal shift of values, an appreciation for balance, that has come with the changes he’s undergone since he first entered the Assembly eight years ago. Changes like raising three young sons, a receding hairline, learning how to dress better.

“He might have mellowed out in the last few years, but I think we all have,” said Cheryl Peace. “I don’t know if that’s because we’re getting close to 40, but you do change. You’re not that rebellious youngster anymore.”

The signs of Peace’s youthful rebellion still line his walls--prints of newspaper editorial cartoons depicting the Gang of Five rebellion. The onetime political hellion says he’s still proud of a failed coup that presaged reforms such as Proposition 140, the voter-approved initiative that slapped a term limit on legislators.

But his mind these days is on other things. He skipped, for example, the speaker’s annual golf outing May 2 so he could fly home and coach a Little League game.

“I had a dream, and I realized that I was dreaming of my kids playing Big League baseball,” he said. “I thought, ‘Gee, that’s weird. It’s been 15 years since I’ve dreamed about being a Big League player.’

“That’s the transition you make. You start living vicariously through your kids,” he said, adding with a chuckle: “You probably screw them up a lot.”