LAPD Overseer--Latest of Sheinbaum’s Many Lives : Police: The commissioner brings ties to liberal causes and a willingness to confront Chief Daryl F. Gates.

On the day he became a Los Angeles police commissioner, Stanley K. Sheinbaum--economist, philanthropist and vanguard of the American liberal intelligentsia--zipped off to London to mingle with world leaders at an international economics conference chaired by former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

The following morning, Sheinbaum heard a knock on his hotel room door. It was James Callaghan, the former prime minister of Britain and now a member of the House of Lords.

“Aren’t you the guy,” Callaghan asked, obviously having seen Sheinbaum on TV, “they just put on that commission in Los Angeles?”

The incident is testimony to the two lives of Stanley Sheinbaum--his remarkably eventful private life and his newly acquired public life as a police commissioner. In recent months, Los Angeles residents have come to know Sheinbaum not for his work in politics, economics and civil liberties, but as the most outspoken member of the citizens panel that oversees the Los Angeles Police Department.

This week, with the expected departure of Commissioners Melanie Lomax and Sam Williams, Sheinbaum--with less than four months on the job--will become the board’s most senior member. He is also considered a candidate to become its next president.

During his brief tenure, Sheinbaum has emerged as a pointed adversary of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, engaging in more than one tense verbal sparring match with the chief.

He has challenged Gates at almost every turn--on the department’s policy toward recruiting gays and lesbians, on the chief’s decision to transfer a top aide who had criticized Police Department management before the Christopher Commission, and on controversial public statements Gates has made.

His aggressive posture has angered Gates’ supporters. City Councilman Hal Bernson has called for Sheinbaum to resign from the five-member panel, and Council President John Ferraro said in a recent interview that he wishes the commissioner would ease up on the chief.

“It wouldn’t upset me if he stepped down,” Ferraro said. “But you’ve got to have some senior member. He’s the senior member now with three months. I would just hope he would understand what the Police Department is all about before he goes off shouting like an expert.”

To Gates’ critics, however, Sheinbaum has been a godsend.

“I have to thank the mayor for appointing Stanley,” said Lomax, who has generated considerable controversy in her own dealings with the chief. “I’ve suffered from this radical image and Stanley makes me look like a moderate.

“There have been very few people who have had the appetite to take the chief on and Stanley is always calling on Gates. In that sense, I can only say that Stanley is fearless. But he is also 70 years old and a multimillionaire and has nothing to lose.”

That is true, and Sheinbaum makes no bones about it.

At 71 (he had a birthday in June), Sheinbaum is something of an anachronism. A native New Yorker and child of the Depression, he became independently wealthy 27 years ago when he married the daughter of movie mogul Harry Warner. He is quick to note, however, that he nearly doubled the family fortune in one quick investment in the early 1970s by betting that U.S. currency would go off the gold standard.

He has not held a job for years. But he is nonetheless always working, relentlessly pursuing what his wife, artist Betty Warner Sheinbaum, calls “his favorite things”--most notably the advancement of his own political ideas.

“I can spend my life in public and political activities with the luxury that so few people have--that is, of being able to make decisions without worrying about how those decisions would affect my financial well-being,” he said.

His relationship with Gates, he said, is a prime example:

“Somebody had to stand up to him. . . . It goes back to that luxury. Some people call it arrogance, but I just don’t feel I have to keep looking over my shoulder to see who might get back at me in some business dealing.”

Locally, Sheinbaum is perhaps best known as the former chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California--a job that has not endeared him to Gates’ supporters--and as a former member of the University of California Board of Regents.

But he has been involved in a host of other behind-the-scenes endeavors on national and international fronts. “He’s a pot-boiler,” said producer Norman Lear, a longtime friend. “Something is always brewing in Stanley.”

He has a Rolodex as packed as a can of sardines with names that belong in a volume of “Who’s Who:” Ed Asner, Warren Beatty, Joseph Biden, Jerry Brown, Mario Cuomo, John Kenneth Galbraith, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, Christie Hefner, Teddy Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, George McGovern, Paul Newman, Andreas Papandreou, Sidney Poitier, Colin Powell, Helmut Schmidt, Jacobo Timmerman, Bishop Tutu. And so on.

Three years ago, Sheinbaum made headlines when he joined a delegation of Swedish diplomats who met with Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. At the conclusion of their negotiations, Sheinbaum--who is Jewish--was photographed with his arm around Arafat.

Jewish leaders were outraged. Not long afterward, a skinned pig was deposited in Sheinbaum’s driveway. Police questioned members of the militant Jewish Defense League, but no one was charged.

A consummate networker--the Yiddish word schmoozer might be a more apt description--Sheinbaum has also spent countless hours raising money for his pet political candidates and causes, among them the environment, Israel and human rights in Central America. His Brentwood home has been described as a veritable salon for such activity.

Over the years, he and his wife have donated millions. While Sheinbaum once estimated their contributions at $750,000 annually, that figure has since dropped considerably, he said, in part because he no longer believes the donations influence public policy.

Among his beneficiaries has been Mayor Tom Bradley, who appointed him to the Police Commission. City records show that the Sheinbaums donated nearly $38,000 to Bradley campaigns between 1983 and 1990.

Some Gates supporters have complained about the contributions. “In that game,” Sheinbaum replies, “that’s not that much money.”

If there is a criticism of Sheinbaum, it is that he is a limousine liberal, motivated by his own ego. But those who know him well say that he simply has an abiding need to leave his mark on the world.

“He wants to be where the action is,” said Nathan Gardels, editor of New Perspectives Quarterly, a liberal so-called “think” magazine that Sheinbaum publishes. “He has the means to make a difference, and at this stage of his life he has the contacts to make a difference.”

Lear said: “Stanley needs to believe he matters, and he will probably never be convinced of it. That’s part of the wonder of what motivates him. . . . Stanley is big and he’s blustery and he’s terribly vulnerable. He’s very tender inside.”

With his stately gray beard, rounded glasses and conservative bow ties, Sheinbaum looks like the tweedy economics professor he once was. He is plain-spoken, sometimes to the point of being blunt, and has a quick and irreverent sense of humor. When told he was to be the subject of a newspaper profile, he served up a morsel of Hollywood-style gossip on himself.

“Annette Bening and I are going to have a baby,” he said drolly. “No, Warren Beatty and I are going to have a baby.”

For this interview, he selects the clubby, wood-paneled lounge of the elegant Bel-Air Hotel--at 9:30 a.m. on a Wednesday. He has an early breakfast meeting in the hotel restaurant, and he figures that the bar will be quiet at that hour, a place where he can talk without the constant interruptions that are a fact of his life.

He emerges from the restaurant wearing a pale cream summer suit and a black and white plaid shirt, open at the neck. As he walks, he leans gently on a sleek wooden cane that he adopted several months ago, when he developed a problem with his spine. He says he is in physical therapy to correct the ailment.

It is hardly slowing him down.

“When I think of Stanley, I see him at the Brentwood mart, having three breakfasts in a row,” said Betsy Kenny, an aide to Lear who was Sheinbaum’s breakfast partner that day. “That’s how I see Stanley--always moving, always hustling, always some cause, always a burning issue.”

These days, Sheinbaum’s burning issue is reforming the Los Angeles Police Department.

His interest in police reaches back at least to the late 1950s, when he was teaching at Michigan State University. That also marked his first contact with the Los Angeles Police Department. As the director of a technical assistance project for the South Vietnamese government, he came to Los Angeles to recruit officers to participate. Later, during a stint at a think tank in Santa Barbara, he examined the relationship of police to society.

He says that he wanted to serve on the Police Commission long before the March 3 police beating of Rodney G. King. When, coincidentally, two commissioners resigned that week, before the tape was made public, Sheinbaum let the mayor know he was interested. He was nominated two weeks later.

His appointment was controversial from the start. Gates supporters hammered away at his connection with the ACLU; as a result, Sheinbaum resigned his seat on the group’s board of directors. More recently, his critics have tried to use the Christopher Commission report to push him off the panel.

The report, released July 9, recommended the removal of commissioners who had participated in a controversial vote to place Gates on 60-day leave. The recommendation was clearly directed at Lomax and Williams, who offered their resignations that day.

Sheinbaum, however, was spared. The commission’s took its vote on Gates on April 4, which would have marked Sheinbaum’s first board meeting had he not gone to the conference in London.

In an attempt to tie him to the Gates flap, Sheinbaum’s critics note that he has twice voted to appeal court rulings that upheld the City Council’s decision to reinstate the chief. Sheinbaum, for his part, says his decision had nothing to do with Gates; rather, he said, he is pursuing the appeals in an attempt to preserve the Police Commission’s authority.

Did he ever consider leaving? With characteristic resoluteness, he replies: “No. Never.”

Stanley K. Sheinbaum

In recent months, Los Angeles residents have come to know Stanley K. Sheinbaum not for his work in politics, economics and civil liberties, but as the most outspoken member of the citizens panel that oversees the Los Angeles Police Department.

Age: 71, born in New York City.

Background: Taught economics at Michigan State University; later became affiliated with the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, an elite think tank in Santa Barbara. Became independently wealthy when he married the daughter of movie mogul Harry Warner.

Public Involvement: Former chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California; former member of the University of California Board of Regents; fund-raiser and political activist in liberal causes; publisher of New Perspectives Quarterly, a magazine geared to liberal intellectuals.

Police Commissioner: He now is the senior member of the Police Commission and a candidate to become its next president. He emerged as an adversary of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.

Quote: “I can spend my life in public and political activities with the luxury that so few people have--that is, of being able to make decisions without worrying about how those decisions would affect my financial well-being.”