THE SUNDAY PROFILE : A Quiet Force : Dorothy E. Leavey loves sharing her millions with the needy and the deserving--especially children. But much of it is done anonymously. She doesn’t like the fuss.

Dorothy E. Leavey sits, her posture quite fine, on a green floral couch under a painting of horses, patiently awaiting her guest. From the entry hall of her corner home in Beverly Hills, she appears almost regal, with a crown of thick snow-white hair and a three-strand pearl necklace--a leaner, granite-jawed Barbara Bush.

Is she really 98?

If neither her name nor that of the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Foundation is familiar, it’s quite deliberate. For years, this benefactor and matriarch--nine grandchildren; seven, going on eight, great-grandchildren--has declined to make her contributions to Los Angeles widely known.

But now that her name is carved into two prominent and distinctly different new buildings, in Hollywood and on the USC campus, there is no escaping recognition.

“It’s embarrassing, it’s very embarrassing” seeing your name on buildings, Leavey says. “I just don’t like to have it bannered about. I don’t care for a lot of hoo-rah. But I get kind of a little twinge when I see Dorothy up there.”

She smiles broadly.

In the last 15 years, the 42-year-old Leavey Foundation has donated $100 million to educational, medical and Catholic institutions, primarily in Southern California. Leavey’s late husband made the family fortune as co-founder of Farmers Insurance, started in a small office on Spring Street a year before the 1929 stock market crash, and saw it become a multibillion-dollar enterprise.

Thomas Leavey died in 1980, leaving his wife of 50 years to help fulfill his legacy.

What has made the Leaveys so generous?

“Well, very simply, if you have some available help (to give),” she saysslowly, her voice hoarsened by age, “there’s no use in you not giving to someone who needs it. But it’s been easy for me to help somebody else. I come from a very generous family in the first place. Whenever they have an opportunity to help someone, they have done that.”

Later, she adds: “I love to be charitable about things. But not overly so.”

“You mean you hold back ?” quips Leavey’s daughter, 1954 USC homecoming queen and college trustee Kathleen Leavey McCarthy, who helped persuade her mother to finally talk about her life.

Leavey laughs.

She speaks with an economy of words, as if to conserve energy, and there is a certain reserve with someone new. Her humor is still razor-sharp.

Asked how she spends her days, Leavey’s brown eyes sparkle: “Getting the best of my daughter.”

Asked to cite the most important thing about Dorothy Leavey, she fairly shouts: “Survival!”

*

Heartache came with a bang.

On March 29, 1979, Dorothy Leavey’s younger daughter, Dorothy Therese (Terry) Lemons, was killed when a California Highway Patrol employee, driving 82 m.p.h. on the Golden State Freeway near Magic Mountain, crashed his car into the van she was riding in. She was 40, and the mother of five. The driver of the state-owned car pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter.

On the same day a year later, Thomas Leavey died at 82 after an extended illness. “Grandma told me,” says Karen Lemons, “that Grandpa--we called him Poppa--died the day Mom died, and it took him a year to just physically die.”

In the spring of 1981, Dorothy Leavey reached out to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Candy Lightner, who had founded MADD in Sacramento in 1980, four days after her 13-year-old daughter Cari was killed, recalls verbatim the telegram Leavey sent: “ ‘I have heard of your work. I would like to know how I can help.’ ”

Lightner phoned, and Leavey invited her to lunch at the Los Angeles Country Club, where Lightner was asked to shed her slacks in favor of a club-issued skirt. Barbara Bloomberg, a founder of the L.A. MADD chapter, joined them.

After hearing about MADD’s mission, Leavey asked what she could do to help.

“ ‘We need money, we are desperate for money,’ ” Lightner told her.

Leavey wrote a personal check, handing it to Lightner under the table.

“I looked at it and I started crying. I thought it was for a $1,000,” Lightner recalls. “I had never seen so many zeros in my life. (I thought), ‘Oh God, this is wonderful--$1,000,’ and tried to hand it to Barbara under the table to be cool and classy, and Barbara is looking at it, and her eyes are bulging, and (then) I realized what it was.”

It was $100,000.

The foundation would ultimately give MADD almost $2 million. And for years, the plate on Leavey’s Cadillac sedan read “4 MADD.”

“Without them,” says Lightner, now president of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, “there would be no MADD.”

For years, Leavey insisted on anonymity. “She would not allow us to publicize her gifts or her in any way,” Lightner says. “She was very adamant. . . . It was always, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘How can I help?’ She would write letters to newspapers and legislators. She put her money where her heart is.”

Thomas Leavey had also observed a code of near silence. In a 1963 letter to one of his grandsons, he wrote: “Humbleness wins and keeps loyal friends, and assists you in building a successful career . . . undue self-promotion and so-called ‘strutting’ in an attempt to impress (others) causes them to eventually turn their back upon you. . . . Do not hesitate to render a helping hand to others.”

The tradition lives on. J. Thomas McCarthy, a lawyer who succeeded his father-in-law as chairman of the Leavey Foundation, will not say how much money has been given to whom: “It would embarrass them and embarrass us.”

But the people at Aunt Bee’s Laundry Service for People with AIDS and Thrift Shop in Hollywood are not shy. The group received $5,000 in 1992 and another $10,000 this year.

“The Leavey people were the very first foundation to give us money--$5,000 was very big money to us,” says founder Miki Jackson. “They gave it to help get us opened. It helped legitimize us.

“Their bet paid off,” Jackson adds. “We’ve got 182 clients, and we do a lot of wash. . . . Seventy percent of our clients are people of color who were having a hard time making ends meet, even before they got ill.”

Dorothy Leavey has long played a role in finding people to help, including the more than 400 disabled clients at the Lincoln Training Center in South El Monte and the kids who benefit from Childhelp.

Nearly $300,000 has gone to the agency’s national child abuse hot line; to buy new bedding and make renovations for Childhelp West, a foster care facility in Beaumont, Calif., and to other projects.

“More than just the money, what I love about Dorothy is her true caring,” says Childhelp co-founder and chairman Sara O’Meara. “She came to the headquarters of our child abuse hot line to see the work we were doing firsthand. . . . And she never failed to thank us for the work we were doing.”

Helping children has long been a special interest.

“ Childhelp-- it spoke for itself,” Leavey says. “To see a child not having the opportunities I have had, my children have had. . . . I was always a loved child,” she adds, “more or less pampered.”

*

For Dorothy Risley Leavey, family always came first; charity essentially began at home.

When she was 25, single and working as a legal secretary in San Francisco, her mother in Missoula, Mont., died suddenly of pneumonia. Although her father was alive, Dorothy’s 12-year-old sister soon joined her in California. The pair settled in Los Angeles.

“She’s got a heart of gold,” Yvonne Edwards, now living in Sherman Oaks, says of her sister. “She has been very good to me through the years.”

Dorothy, the middle child of Dalton and Irene Burbridge Risley, was born in Omaha, Neb. Her brother would find success as the inventor of Rislone, an automobile oil. The family moved a lot, to Cleveland, to Chicago--where Dorothy graduated from the Convent of the Sacred Heart school in neighboring Lake Forest--and to Montana.

Their father had a ranch near Butte, then a flour mill in Missoula. Dorothy rode horses--”Indian style without a saddle,” she recalls, looking on as her daughter flips through a family photo album. Spotting a shot of a sleek dark brown horse, she cries out: “That’s my Spider. “

She attended the University of Montana while also working as a secretary in the district attorney’s office.

Finally, hard winters and perhaps a failed romance drove her out of Montana.

She met Tom Leavey through a mutual friend as he and John C. Tyler were starting up Farmers, in 1928. They married two years later when she was almost 34.

“I had a couple of romances that didn’t pan out, or that I didn’t really want to pan out,” Leavey recalls. “But when I met him he was everything I admired, we got along beautifully, and that was it.” Also, she says, he was “nice and tall.”

Tom Leavey’s beginnings had been truly hardscrabble. The youngest of three brothers, he was born in Ferndale, Calif., to Irish immigrants. His father, who had been a stableboy in Ireland, worked as a butter-maker on dairy farms. His mother died of milk fever a few days after his birth.

Leavey graduated from Santa Clara University in 1920 and from Georgetown University Law School in 1923, both Jesuit schools, after a brief stint as a World War I lieutenant.

“Tom was the only one (of the brothers) who got a college education,” says nephew Joseph James Leavey, who once was Farmers’ general counsel for claims litigation and now serves as a foundation trustee. “The other boys didn’t have the money, and they saved up and put (Tom) through.”

He would pay them back with jobs in his company.

By all accounts, Tom and Dorothy had a traditional marriage. Although she had her children late--at almost 39 and 42--the pregnancies went smoothly. “When Kathleen was born, I was dancing,” she says.

Before the children came along, she traveled with her husband. “If he went to Visalia, I went to Visalia. If he went to Portland, I went to Portland,” she recalls. “When I married, that was it. I didn’t care about anything else but that tall, 6-foot-3 1/2 man.”

Still, finding herself at loose ends, she sought ways to fill her free time, landing at the Assistance League on St. Andrews Place in Hollywood.

“Sometimes it was office work, and sometimes it was assisting in the development of the young children,” she says. She also loved going to the Assistance League because movie stars from 20th Century Fox, which was then nearby, would dine in its lunchroom.

Last month, the Dorothy E. Leavey Family Resource Center--home to such projects as Operation School Bell, which provides new children’s clothing, books and toys--was dedicated at the league complex. The first $1 million for the $8 million pastel stucco building came from her personal funds. It is the only Leavey building, among at least seven stretching from Georgetown University to Santa Clara University, to bear her name alone.

Although she never completed college, Leavey has always been eager to learn.

“She has a curiosity about the world generally,” says former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, a family friend whose teaching position at Georgetown is endowed by the Leavey Foundation. “She asked me about my classes, how they differ through the generations. About what Reagan was like to work for, and what it was like to represent the United States.”

With her own alma mater so far away, Leavey has doted on her daughters’.

Earlier this month, dressed in a cream-colored suit and gold Ferragamos, she attended the dedication of the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Library at USC. The foundation gave $9 million toward its construction.

Leavey Library, as the elegant concrete and brickwork building is known, is a four-story, $28-million electronic gateway to the world’s library systems: Basement study rooms surround a soothing mauve-carpeted area with 100 computers.

On the ride home after a gourmet dedication lunch, Leavey announced to her companions that she was still hungry.

“Mrs. Leavey, we’ll drive closer to home,” said her caregiver.

“No, I want something right now ,” Leavey insisted.

So she ate a burger and fries from Jack in the Box in the chauffeured gray Cadillac sedan.

*

These days Dorothy Leavey likes to sit at the top of her front steps and watch the world go by.

“I see people and I try to imagine how happy they are and so forth, and if they’re doing anything right,” Leavey says. “I just muse along with my own life in the background.”

She regularly goes out to lunch at the Peninsula or the Four Seasons or Jimmy’s, and in the summer to the Bel-Air Bay Club in Malibu. And at night she occasionally attends fund-raising events, or watches TV.

On a recent Saturday while watching “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” Leavey saw Dr. Quinn, played by Jane Seymour, get a kiss on the neck from the character Sully, a hunk who sleeps in the woods with his pet wolf.

“More, more,” Leavey called out, as one of her home companions remembers it.

She has lived since 1950 in the house she and her husband painstakingly planned, down to the little cubbyhole built to muffle the phone off the dining room.

Several times a year she goes to Pala Rey, in north San Diego County, a 600-acre ranch and family retreat surrounded by orange and avocado trees that Tom Leavey bought about 1940.

Leavey thinks about turning 100 but doesn’t dwell on it.

Shortly after arriving at USC on dedication day, she expertly maneuvered her wheelchair from her designated place at a table in the shade, seeking sunlight, warmth, the inevitable parade of family and friends. At ceremony’s end, Marilyn Zumberge, widow of a university president, bent over Leavey’s wheelchair. “I’m glad you could be here,” she said with obvious emotion.

“So am I , “ came the reply.

Dorothy E. Leavey

Age: 98.

Native?: No; born in Omaha, Neb.; raised in Cleveland, Chicago and Montana; lives in Beverly Hills.

Family: Widowed. Two daughters, Kathleen and Terry, who died in 1979; nine grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren.

Passions: Helping the needy, particularly children; her Catholic faith; horses; bright colors; hamburgers.

On why she gave $1 million to the Assistance League: “I don’t know, other than the fact that it was needed. There have been some marvelous people in the Assistance League, and I was just one of the many that joined. . . . I think I’m one of the oldest members.”

On her late husband, Thomas, and their work together: “He had such high ideals, and anything that I did in any charitable way or any athletic way, or any of that, he was right there.”

On how it feels to be 98: “The funny part is, I don’t feel any different at all. If I was bedridden a lot, and not being able to enjoy things, maybe it would be different, but I feel just like I did when I was 20 years old. I am just as interested in everything. . . . I still have my hair, my own hair, and I have my teeth too.”