COLUMN ONE : L.A.’s First Lady Gets a Life at Last : Left in deep shadows by the political spotlight cast on her husband, Ethel Mae Bradley is no stranger to compromise and looks forward to moving into her dream house as a private citizen.

The Queen Anne chair in the living room of the mayor’s mansion is stately but uncomfortable. Ethel Bradley sits in it, fidgeting. Even the nylon in her pink and purple jogging suit seems to be complaining.

There is not much in this cold and cavernous room that bears the mark of the city’s longest-reigning First Lady, not the sea-foam green drapes, not the gloomy portraits on loan from the county art museum, not the mismatched antique tables picked out by a decorator she never really liked.

For 16 years, Ethel Mae Bradley has lived a life of compromise in this place they call Getty House, official quarters of Mayor Tom Bradley and family, the place that neither of his two would-be successors intends to inhabit.

She has stood curbside with roses to greet dignitaries who spoke mostly to the mayor. She has remained faithfully at the side of a man who works seven days a week, 17 hours a day. She has made presentable a neglected, 19-room, donated mansion, then rattled around in it alone, watching sitcoms on her big-screen TV and cooking lamb chops for one.

Now a 20-year chapter in the epic life of the nation’s second-largest city is closing; the Tom Bradley dynasty is coming to an end. And with it goes this city’s quirky but gracious First Lady. At age 74, Ethel Bradley is packing up, and she is not looking back.

“Everything looked gorgeous at Getty House but now the party’s over,” she said, rising from the chair that holds her prisoner no more. “It’s been 30 years of my life I’ve given up. . . . It’s time for me to have a life of my own.”

*

The door opens behind a gated entryway through which has passed a worldly parade of somebodies from Prince Charles to the prime minister of Japan. But on this sunny March morning, the formal dining room with its long banquet table is stacked with cardboard boxes. Ethel Bradley has her black loafers on. Her signature auburn pageboy, temporarily two colors of red while she grows in a lighter shade, is slightly mussed.

She has been packing all morning. The city will not swear in a new mayor for months, the mansion need not be vacated until June, but Ethel Bradley is a driven woman. She cannot wait to get out of there.

“This house is very boring. I don’t want to be a complainer, but it’s never been told what I really do,” she said, moving from room to disheveled room, putting into boxes 30 years of political life--10 as the wife of a councilman, 20 as wife of a mayor--that has had its ups and downs.

This sprawling estate on an acre lot in ritzy Hancock Park, a home once owned by actor John Barrymore and positioned right behind comedian Shecky Greene’s place, was a mess when the Getty Oil Co. donated it 16 years ago and the city put it in her hands.

The back yard was a jungle and she turned it, mostly at her own expense, into a breathtaking garden showcase. She ordered the driveway to be paved, the block wall to be built and the patio enclosed for parties. When it came to her attention that the neighbors were using the tennis court, she had it lighted and resurfaced, then kicked everybody off. “If you want to use the tennis court, run for mayor,” she told them. “I won’t have people running around wild at Getty House.”

Keeping a 72-year-old mansion in working order with no budget and virtually no staff is no picnic. The water coming out of the faucets is brown. Soot shoots out of the floor heating vents and stains the mint green rug. It is drafty. City contractors took three months to paint the outside and, only four years later, the paint is peeling. When the city-appointed decorator decided to do the whole ground floor in Early American, Ethel Bradley put her Louis XIV gold-leafed dining room set in storage and learned to live with it.

“I never thought I’d be here this long,” she said. “I’m not a free bird. I got stuck.”

But it is almost all behind her now. She has the keys to her dream house, a 1940s two-story spread with a remodeled kitchen, four fireplaces and a walk-in cedar closet with a place for all her shoes. All of it in a private corner of Los Angeles called View Park, the exact location of which she does not care to disclose, exercising her first privilege as a soon-to-be private figure.

She is taking her eight-track Johnny Mathis tapes (“Nobody has a voice like him. Nobody.”), her glass-encased Joe Montana football jersey, her Sugar Ray Leonard boxing gloves and her autographed Pele soccer ball.

The Getty House garden is stripped nearly bare. Everything in pots is lined up in the driveway and ready for the movers--162 varieties of fuchsias, plumerias, bromeliads, several strains of roses, orchids and two mango trees. Everything in the ground stays, and at her direction, the beds will be blooming with begonias and salvia in three colors when, and if, the new mayor moves in.

“Nobody could be a caretaker for this house like I’ve been, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. I could run around in the street and visit all day long. I don’t do that. I think I did a beautiful job and left things better than when I first came. And that’s what I have to say.”

This is vintage Ethel--plain-spoken, honest, what you see is what you get, no phony smiles, no political facades.

For the last 20 years the public spotlight has trained tightly on Tom Bradley. The woman behind him has been largely ignored, unless someone needed her garden for an awards ceremony or her presence for protocol.

She is no Hillary Clinton; “I let the mayor make up his own mind.” She is no Pat Nixon either, standing loyally by her powerful husband, demurely silent. If you ask Ethel Bradley a question, she is going to give you an answer.

Of her tenure as Los Angeles’ First Lady: “Everybody wants something from me, but what do I get? Not a dime to keep this garden up right.”

Of the elusive limelight: “Everybody makes such a big deal over Tom. And the wife? You just stand there and they ignore you.”

Of Getty House: “If you want to serve a cup of coffee, where you going to sit? This house is too formal. I feel like a bird in a cage.”

Such candor from anyone in politics is rare. How many political spouses will give you a tour of the master bedroom with the bed half-made? When was the last time you heard Nancy Reagan admit that chitchatting with foreign heads of state gets boring? Would Pat Nixon disclose that her husband is “not a party man”?

No, there is only one Ethel Bradley, model-turned-singer-turned-beautician-turned-mayor’s wife, a First Lady as unique as the city of Los Angeles itself.

She has more than 100 hats and rarely goes out without one. She collects heirloom crystal and elegant evening gowns, four racks of them, to be precise. She can always be counted on to nurse a sick friend. Her garden is where she feels close to God.

She is an incurable baseball fan, particularly when it comes to the Dodgers, who have assigned her a permanent front-row seat behind home plate. The wall in the downstairs reception room at Getty House, used for black-tie, VIP receptions, is filled with photographs such as these: Ethel with Don Drysdale. Ethel with Ernie Banks. Ethel with Al Downing, Roy Campanella and Pee Wee Reese.

She has never influenced city politics, never advertised herself as a black woman’s role model. The mayor makes it no secret that political ambition left him little time for the woman he courted so furiously in 1935, when he asked her to watch him run in a track meet and the only reason she consented was because Jesse Owens was running too.

“Her birthday, my birthday and the Academy Awards. Those are absolutely inviolate dates,” Bradley once blankly told a reporter, describing the times of the year when his wife can count on his company.

She married “a plain old policeman,” and wound up with a mayor who is never home. She misses him.

“Because I love him, I would like to be with him more,” she once said.

Quietly, though, Mrs. Bradley has carved a private existence out of the public life she never asked for and kept her bargain with the city of Los Angeles.

As daughter Lorraine puts it: “How can a mayor do that much work and not have to worry about anything else unless he has someone like her behind him?”

Public appearances have become less frequent over the years. She rarely travels with her globe-trotting husband anymore. “I’ve been to Europe, New Zealand, the Pacific Rim. . . . You don’t want to do it a second time.”

But throughout her tenure as No. 1 political wife, there has been one controlling purpose to Ethel Bradley’s life: a First Lady’s duty to keep the mansion in order and throw a soiree they can talk about the next morning.

At the ready the day she moved in were six chafing dishes, a 30-cup coffee maker and several brass punch bowls. “When you entertain foreign dignitaries, you have to have the best,” she said proudly. “I would always go out there properly dressed with my hat on and the roses to present to the guests.”

The only thing that is not stuffy about the French Colonial mansion with its library full of books that nobody ever reads is the woman who spends all day inside it, waiting for the mayor to come home and knowing that when he does, it will be too late for dinner.

Friendships can be difficult to keep when you move up in the world. It is awkward to socialize with old friends in a house so formal, and there is always reason to be suspicious of the new acquaintances.

“You have to be very careful about friends,” Ethel Bradley said. “Most people aren’t really your friend, they just want to say they know the mayor. I’m no dummy.”

So she spends a great deal of time in the garden. She talks to her two daughters almost every day on the telephone. Occasionally they bring Chinese food. But at 5 feet, 2 1/2 inches, she seems lost in the three-story manor. Her 1973 gold Oldsmobile Cutlass looks out of place in the garage of a carriage house built for a chauffeur.

A First Lady whose prized possession is a glass case filled with autographed baseballs has never felt right in a mansion so fancy you cannot get from the coffeepot to the television set without climbing a flight of stairs.

“I’m ready now and I could move tomorrow,” she snapped. “The sooner the better.”

*

Ethel Bradley auditioned three chairs in the upstairs sitting room before settling on a brown leather swivel with a scrunchy back pillow. She suffers from sciatica. The cortisone treatments have caused her to put on 50 pounds, she confides. She is now “too fat” for her Sydney Knit suits.

The swivel chair is positioned in front of a big-screen TV. It is here that she eats most of her meals alone, except for Sunday evenings when she and the mayor watch “60 Minutes” together.

He gets up at the crack of dawn, rides his exercise bike, eats his granola, goes to work and does not come home again until late at night. When the Dodgers are not in town, she watches her favorite sitcoms--”Blossom,” “Prince of Bel-Air” and “Golden Girls”--then she goes to bed.

She is not sure her husband appreciates the full extent of her TV-watching.

“I guess sometime the mayor might walk in and say: ‘By God, what the hell is she doing?’ ” she laughed.

She suffers at once from fame and obscurity. Considering it unseemly for a mayor’s wife to go flitting about the city all day, she stays home. When she does go out, no one seems to know who she is anyway. People are forever running up to say hello to the mayor, as she stands beside him, ignored. “Mrs. Bush is so much like I am. She got off the plane and stepped aside and let him have the show.”

Still, public life has not been all bad. Ethel Mae Arnold, the girl who married the first boy she ever kissed, has traveled the world, entertained Winnie Mandela and the king of Spain and flown on the Dodgers team jet. The queen of England entertained her three times and she has walked down more red carpets than she can count.

The best part was all the beautiful parties. The worst was the public airing of painful matters: The Far East National Bank investigation that rocked Bradley’s career in 1989 with conflict-of-interest charges. The times that daughter Phyllis’ drug and shoplifting arrests hit the papers.

Scandals pass with time. What endures are three decades of political souvenirs--an engraved clock in the shape of a ship’s wheel, several proclamations, declarations and what seems like a million plaques.

“Thirty years of public service is too much,” she said, standing disgustedly over a box of trinkets that have no sentimental value to her. “Too many plaques. I don’t want that stuff in my house. Give it to a museum.”

*

One month later. 4 o’clock on a Monday afternoon. Ethel Bradley has a lemon cake in the oven. She is bubbling like a high school girl who has just been invited to the prom. She has spent the morning at the new house where the garden is nearly planted and the new sofas, a blue-green Indian design selected by the mayor, are delivered. Her limited edition Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth collector plates are in their frames.

“I haven’t had so much energy since I don’t know when,” she giggles.

Las Angelenas, the mayor’s volunteer corps she has supported for 20 years, has spent weeks planning a Thursday party at City Hall to honor a woman they consider a veritable hero. President Clinton is sending her a letter of recognition. Tommy Hawkins of the Dodgers is bringing her a collection of commemorative pins. The First Lady who for so long felt like a second-class citizen is about to feel appreciated at last.

When the parties are over and the new mayor is sworn in, Bradley will take his job with a high-powered law firm in Los Angeles. His wife will take her place as a private citizen, no more worrying about the people who befriend her just to get close to the mayor, the news media poking into her private life, the big old house she did not like with the furniture she did not pick out.

Maybe she and the mayor will spend a little more time together. Maybe not.

“The mayor would like to travel but I’m not too interested in that,” Ethel Bradley said, musing about the long and lazy days of retirement just ahead.

“I’m just glad it’s all over. I’m going to entertain my friends any day of the week. I’m going to make myself a pot of coffee, go in and sit down in my new family room, watch TV and be happy.”

A free bird.