Lemon or Limelight? It’s Not Easy to Get Behring Straight

For all those used-car salesmen on Ventura Blvd., this one’s for you.

The consummate pitchman, disguised as an NFL owner, is on the verge of bringing his spiel to Southern California.

What a perfect panorama for a connoisseur of exotic cars, exquisite wines and extravagant real estate.

Yet, despite his display of prodigious wealth, Ken Behring is a frumpy, blue-collar, down-to-earth guy, friends said last week.

“He’s a very friendly, outgoing millionaire,” said Dick Messer, director of L.A.’s Petersen Automotive Museum. “If you met him on the street you would think he was your average next-door neighbor.”

As behind-the-scene negotiations continue to keep the Seahawks in Seattle, Los Angeles is bracing for the latest entrepreneur to court its fickle fans.

What is it getting? Take a drive down Ventura in the Valley. If nothing else, Behring and Southern California can talk cars. Lots and lots of cars.

Behring, 67, launched his self-made Forbes 400 career in an old lot in Monroe, Wis., during the Depression. He started selling used cars as a teenager and soon owned a dealership. He made his first million by 24 and by 29 was developing private communities in Florida.

“When I was growing up in Wisconsin, a car was the most important possession in a person’s life and in our town you could tell who was somebody by the car they drove,” Behring said in a 1988 interview with The Times.

Today, that somebody is Behring, who often drives around his planned community of Blackhawk in Contra Costa County, 30 miles east of San Francisco, in a vintage Duesenberg, one of his prized collections among 250 classic cars.

Behring came to California in 1977 with his eyes on the wide-open rolling hills east of Oakland. He envisioned a gated golf community for the nouveau riche like himself. After battles with environmentalists, Behring won the right to develop 5,000 acres at the foot of Mount Diablo in Danville.

He made Blackhawk his private preserve with a 30,000-square-foot home and the $10-million Behring Museum of automobiles.

During the museum’s opening in 1988, friends said Behring stayed in the background as if it were not his crown jewels on display.

“I’m not much of a city boy,” he once said. “I don’t want people to think I’m a rich, spoiled kid.”

Yet, visitors to his home at the base of Mount Diablo cannot help but marvel at the opulence. Some of his favorite antique cars not on display at the museum are parked in a 7,000-square-foot ballroom at the house that includes a cellar with 10,000 bottles of wine and a two-ton jade sculpture in the garden.

Collectors say Behring’s museum is the world’s nicest facility of its kind. His collection is worth about $100 million. Among his historical pieces are a 1935 Duesenberg once owned by Clark Gable, a ’31 Bentley owned by William Vanderbilt Jr., and a ’26 Isotta Fraschini owned by Rudolph Valentino.

Looking for new horizons in 1988, the former high school fullback took his multi-millions to the NFL.

“I figured I tried everything else,” he told the Seattle Times shortly buying the Seahawks. “Why not football?”

Behring was a die-hard Raider fan and friend of neighbor John Madden, the popular football broadcaster and former coach. But he was introduced to the Nordstorm family that owned the Seahawks by sports agent and developer Mike Blatt of Stockton.

Blatt hoped to become a minority owner of the team, putting $8 million in escrow, but eventually served as interim general manager for three weeks.

The association with Blatt led to the first crack in Seattle’s relationship with Behring.

Blatt was charged in the murder-for-hire death of a one-time business associate of his who was shot with a crossbow in February 1989, then strangled and dumped down a hillside. Two former University of the Pacific football players admitted to killing the man, saying they were hired by Blatt when he found out the general manager’s job was going to Tom Flores.

Prosecutors said Blatt arranged the murder because he was upset that the former associate, Laurence Carnegie, ruined Blatt’s chances of remaining in Seattle by writing an unflattering letter to the team. Blatt was cleared by two hung juries.

Still, the episode was an embarrassment for Behring and the Seahawks. The owner and some Seattle associates were subpoenaed to testify in the case.

It also was considered to be a fiasco by the NFL. Behring and then-partner Ken Hoffman remained outsiders in the cliquish world of league owners, who called the duo, “Bartles and James.”

In some ways, Behring could not escape the negative characterizations. Always a candidate for Mr. Blackwell’s “Worst Dressed List,” Behring is a balding man who stands 5 feet 9 and weighs more than 200 pounds. He prefers Ashworth golf shirts to Armani suits.

To complete the contradiction, Behring flies in a private DC-9 with the Seahawk logo painted on the side and owned a 97-foot yacht.

It’s little wonder Seattle’s elite--much less the lumberjack crowd--never embraced him either. The Pacific Northwest values sincerity and it never felt comfortable with Behring’s swashbuckling style.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Art Thiel began one of his columns, “In his first six months on the Seattle sports scene, Seahawk owner Ken Behring has supplied the most bewildering smorgasbord of misinformation since the Nixon White House.”

Seattleites were told, “I do what I say I’m going to do,” only to discover that Behring did what served his best interest, including the attempt to move the franchise to Southern California.

Some suggested he was self-serving when he donated the classic car collection at his museum to UC Berkeley in 1989.

The state wanted Behring to pay a 7% sales tax on the showpieces after the transfer, but he got state Sen. William Campbell (R-Hacienda Heights) to sponsor a bill that exempted him from the tax. Some legislators questioned it as a special interest ploy designed to help a millionaire avoid taxes.

It might have been, but friends said most car collectors do not share their treasures as graciously as Behring.

“He’s a good man,” said Don Williams, who buys cars for Behring’s collection. “His word is his bond. He plays fair.”