State Senate’s ‘Bad Boy’ Grows Up : Politics: Once noted for controversies, Bill Lockyer is now seen as a consensus-builder. He is virtually assured of succeeding fellow Democrat David A. Roberti as president pro tem.

Sen. Bill Lockyer, onetime bad boy of the California Legislature, has all but sewn up the support he needs to succeed fellow Democrat David A. Roberti next year as leader of the state Senate.

Now, at 52, Lockyer says he has matured since his self-inflicted wounds of the 1980s, when his fiery temper and offensive behavior propelled him from one controversy to another.

Gone is the era, he says, when he drew public notice for insulting another senator, inviting a police summons for failure to pay restaurant debts, and propositioning a female reporter over lunch.

“My ambitions made me grow up,” Lockyer said recently in an assessment of his efforts to shed the image of an unguided missile and prove he is the lawmaker best suited to become the Senate’s next president pro tem.

The president pro tem is among the most powerful figures in state government, wielding enormous influence over legislation affecting the lives of millions of Californians. He also is his party’s chief fund-raiser for campaign contributions for Senate races.

Roberti, who has held the post for a record 13 years, must leave the Senate next year because of term limits.

By all accounts, Lockyer has locked up the necessary votes of Senate Democrats to replace Roberti, probably early in 1994. The two men have begun an unofficial transition process.

For the past 18 months, Lockyer, a moderate-to-liberal Democrat from the east San Francisco Bay area city of Hayward, has been rounding up support. He has made it a point to guide campaign contributions to needy Democrats. He has been hosting private lunches and dinners for colleagues, including right-wing Republicans who are philosophically opposed to him but whose goodwill he may need someday.

But in lining up Senate support, this legislative workaholic has stirred ghosts of controversies past.

In the summer of 1985, he accused Sen. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles) of engaging in “mindless blather” during a hearing on the death penalty. He apologized, but was reprimanded by the Legislature’s women’s caucus.

A few weeks earlier, police were called to an Oakland restaurant by the owner, who complained that Lockyer had twice refused to pay his bill. Lockyer said the service was bad. The matter was dropped.

During the same summer, a woman reporter wrote--and Lockyer admitted--that he had propositioned her during a business lunch some years earlier.

“Certainly, there were a couple of fairly bad years of conflict and confrontation,” Lockyer said during a recent interview. He said the business of making laws is a high-stress occupation and recalled that he was going through a rough divorce at the time.

But he said he came to understand that his ambitions to advance politically would be sunk unless he developed some self-control, particularly of his explosive temper.

“David Roberti and other members said: ‘Lockyer, if you want to lead the (Senate), you need to take care of yourself, handle the temper or whatever.’ I have. So for some number of years, there haven’t been the incidents.”

Others say he has brought his temper under control.

“He does not suffer fools lightly,” said Sen. Frank Hill (R-Whittier). “I think that’s when he tends to blow up. He is trying to temper that emotion.”

“His prior, what you’d call, erratic behavior, was pretty well known,” said Sen. Robert B. Presley (D-Riverside), who early on was talked of as a potential successor to Roberti. “I think he has worked hard to get it under control. It is a moot concern, if you get it under control.”

A career legislator, Lockyer was elected to the Assembly in 1973 and to the Senate in 1982. He is considered a master at legislative tactics and--despite the past controversies--a solid supporter of women’s rights, labor and civil liberties.

Lockyer is also a bookworm; a junk food devotee who has joked that he will make history as the only 125-year-old human who never ate vegetables, and a technician who makes it his business to know the political nuances of virtually all 120 legislative districts.

Known for doing his homework, Lockyer is one of a vanishing breed of legislator who actually reads bills instead of predigested analyses prepared by staffers.

He says he needs only three or four hours of sleep a night and--often on the Senate floor or at committee meetings--has the peculiar habit of pacing on his tiptoes when concentrating deeply. For relaxation, he often spends weekends doing battle with computer games.

As a law student at night school in 1984, Lockyer became the first non-lawyer to chair the prestigious Senate Judiciary Committee. He wrote California’s first comparable-worth pay law for female state employees.

Once considered an unbending Democrat, he has moderated his partisan instincts in favor of finding compromise on polarizing issues, colleagues say, which is a role he assumed during the recent overhaul of workers’ compensation insurance in California.

“He has made consensus-building an art form,” said Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), who has been both an ally and opponent of Lockyer on issues. “He develops a playing field where people can at least talk. They may end up in disagreement, but without the blowups that characterized previous experiences he might have had.”

Hill, a conservative Republican, often is at odds with Lockyer. Even so, he said, “I am attracted to his brainpower. He thinks through the big picture.”

Hill credited Lockyer with almost single-handedly rerouting a recent major tax break bill for manufacturers to soften its fiscal blow. Originally, it proposed an immediate sales tax cut that critics said would cost cash-starved government coffers up to $1 billion a year.

Lockyer led the successful effort to give manufacturers a credit on their income taxes instead, an action that will cushion the loss of revenue and spread it over several years.

Lockyer now redefines himself as a middle-of-the-road Democrat who supports the death penalty and a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. On gun control, he has favored certain restrictions on ownership of firearms and opposed others.

“I haven’t called myself a liberal for a long time,” he said. “I’m more conscious of what I would conserve in the American tradition than what I would change.”

For years, Lockyer, whose Judiciary Committee has been a dead-end for no-fault car insurance bills, has drawn criticism for being too close to personal injury and other tort action lawyers. They are among his biggest campaign contributors.

Lockyer counters that his alliances with these attorneys stem from his concern for their clients, whom he described as generally ordinary citizens who are damaged by big corporations and institutions.