Troubling Portrait of Lindsay Emerges : Councilman: Aides and former colleagues tell of a confused, forgetful man who depended on his staff during his last two years in office.

If there has been a recurring theme about the late Los Angeles City Councilman Gilbert W. Lindsay during the Superior Court trial over the proceeds of his estate, it is the veteran politician’s insistence on living life his way.

“He’d do what he wanted to do,” Bob Gay, a former deputy, testified in a familiar refrain among those who knew the councilman best.

Lindsay loved politics and pretty women, but only attended meetings if he felt like it during the last two years of his 27-year tenure as a councilman. Though nearly deaf, he refused to wear a hearing aid for fear he would look “old.”

During the last two weeks, the trial stemming from the lawsuit brought by Lindsay’s stepson and estate against Juanda Chauncie, accused of manipulating the councilman out of money and property, has addressed many such facets of Lindsay’s personal life.

But details of Lindsay’s public life have emerged as well. The central issue of the trial echoes some of the same questions that privately troubled many at City Hall during the last two years of the councilman’s tenure: Was Lindsay in control, or was he controlled?

Lindsay, Los Angeles’ first black city councilman, died in December, 1990, at age 90.

At the trial, the picture painted by staff and Council President John Ferraro, who knew the councilman for more than 40 years, showed a once-gregarious man who increasingly seemed to lose interest in his job. Witnesses often described Lindsay’s willfulness and independence in terms of his personal habits. He was portrayed as forgetful, confused and dependent.

“For the most part, staff ran the office for the last five years,” said Lindsay’s former aide and driver, Marion Scates.

“He in fact shifted most of the responsibility away so he didn’t have the burden as he had before,” Gay testified, recalling the final two years. “Clearly, he had entered into some diminished capacity state (in) which he found difficulty to recall key things, key individuals, dates, times.”

On Monday, a jury begins deliberating whether Chauncie, a 40-year-old wardrobe consultant, used undue influence over a man Herbert Howard, Lindsay’s stepson, says was no longer in control of his body or mind.

Chauncie claimed that Lindsay was a vibrant man she called “Poppy,” who voluntarily showered her with gifts, including diamonds, furs and land, who became her fiance but never her lover. Howard claimed that Lindsay was a doddering man who could neither control his bladder nor remember things from one minute to the next.

In the trial, each side has most often used testimony from staffers and others most familiar with the public side of Lindsay to open a window on the private man.

Two deputies said that after a 1988 stroke, Lindsay was guided by staffers from the moment he got up each morning, when they had to dress him.

Gay, who unsuccessfully sought Lindsay’s 9th District seat after the councilman’s death, testified that he signed Lindsay’s signature on official city documents because the stroke had incapacitated the councilman’s right hand.

Gay would wake him up during council meetings, particularly when it was time to vote, he said. “I would suggest to him which way he ought to vote.”

In part, Gay said he performed this function because of Lindsay’s constant memory loss and also because “he never read anything over a paragraph, period, no matter whether it was the city budget or ‘War and Peace.’ So he would depend on staff to be able to advise him . . . which way he might vote on a particular item.”

While Lindsay was alive, many considered Gay, in effect, the councilman, an assertion he denied. Asked on the stand if he, not Lindsay, was responsible for facilitating much of downtown Los Angeles development, Gay responded: “At no point does a deputy ever claim to be totally responsible for any work that an elected official does. It is a death knell.”

Ferraro described Lindsay before his health deteriorated as a man who had “a great style. When he’d walk into a room everybody knew. He had an overwhelming personality.”

But Salvador Altamarano, who became Lindsay’s deputy in 1983, said: “After the first stroke, if he didn’t have assistance, he could not function.”

Lindsay’s condition was an increasing concern to council members and others at City Hall during those final two years, although many were hesitant to publicly discuss his behavior then. Instead, when a council vote seemed close on controversial issues, Lindsay became the focus of intense lobbying efforts by other council members and aides hovering by his chair to coach him.

His health became a public issue during one council debate on the 1990 ethics reform package, when some advocates attempted to have Lindsay write the opposition ballot argument. But that failed when Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky complained publicly that Lindsay was not capable of composing a coherent argument.

Such criticisms were rare, and no action was ever taken to remove him from the council. Three months before Lindsay’s death, as he lay speechless and nearly motionless from his final stroke, Ferraro put the councilman’s office into trusteeship. By that point the council president had been told of rumors that some Lindsay employees were missing work and checking out city cars for long periods.

At the trial, attorneys asked Gay, who now works for Councilman Nate Holden, if he thought there had been a deliberate attempt to deceive voters about Lindsay’s condition during his final reelection campaign in 1989.

“Would you define deceive?” Gay asked.

“Give voters the impression he was able mentally and physically to carry out his function, knowing he was not,” said Chauncie’s attorney, Geraldine Green.

“By that definition, probably most politicians would be qualified as deceiving the public,” Gay responded.

“Would you say Councilman Lindsay was deceiving the public to any greater extent than other politicians,” Green asked, and Gay said:.

“Not by what I’ve seen lately, no.”

Scates and Gay testified that Lindsay had been greatly affected by the 1984 death of Theresa Lindsay, the councilman’s wife of 48 years and Herbert Howard’s mother. Though not as well-known as her husband, she played a role in introducing Lindsay, once a City Hall janitor, to politics and was an important adviser. One Lindsay associate said she had introduced him to county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, who launched Lindsay’s political career.

“Would it be fair to say she was the mind behind the man,” one of Howard’s attorney’s, Dion-Cherie Raymond, asked Scates, who replied: “Yes.”

After her death, Gay testified, “he became more dependent on staff.”

One aspect of Lindsay that remained unchanged after his stroke was an affinity for “attractive women,” Gay testified. “That may be the one consistent aspect of his behavior that continued.

“On a number of occasions I would come in Monday morning (and learn) . . . he had promised some young, good-looking woman a job over the weekend at some particular event,” Gay said. “And I’d have to phone the young woman that it was my job and it was not available.”

Consequently, when Lindsay began to date Chauncie, a slim, exotic-looking woman with a fine-boned face and large, almond-shaped eyes, staffers were not surprised. But Gay said he spoke of his concerns about her to the councilman when he learned she had had seven names, mostly because of three marriages and various spellings of her name at birth, which was Wanda Chancy.

But the councilman, Gay said, made it clear how he felt about Chauncie. “The councilman said to me: ‘You can talk to me about anything, except about this woman.’ ”