Mayor Brown: A Honeymoon Intercepted

Football no doubt has ended more than a few honeymoons. It must be an unsettling experience, that first Sunday when the bride discovers her dashing, tuxedoed groom transformed into a T-shirted slob, sunk into the sofa, shouting commands at helmeted figures at play on the television screen: Get rid of the ball! Watch out for the linebacker! Don’t throw it there!

And so it has come to pass for San Francisco and its new mayor, Willie Lewis Brown Jr., former speaker of the state Assembly and a politician known to most Californians simply as “Willie.”

Since his election a year ago, Brown had been enjoying the most blissful of political honeymoons. He could do no wrong. He rearranged City Hall staff with ease. He threw great parties. He delivered fine quips. He presented himself, with uncanny success, as a sort of regal populist, rolling about the city in a limo to make sure The People’s buses ran on time.

The press was uncommonly enamored. On the topic of Brown, some of the most hardened of journalistic cynics would go mushy, writing Hallmark poems to the mayor’s latest success. Brown’s affection for fancy suits and fedoras was celebrated in fashion layouts. Newsweek put him on the cover. A local television station went so far as to air a promo depicting Brown’s future nomination for the presidency of the United States. In the spot, Brown played himself.

Ah, such sweetness. Such light.

Then came football.

*

It happened in Paris. Brown was leading an entourage on a “mission” to drum up trade and consult with a company that makes kiosks and pay toilets. The newspapers were giving it Normandy Invasion-strength coverage. “Brown’s Dizzying Paris Pace,” went the headline over the lead story in the San Francisco Chronicle--next to the three-column color photo of Brown posing before the Eiffel Tower.

That was Tuesday of last week. The Wednesday paper told a different tale: “Mayor Brown’s Grbac Gaffe.” This time the picture was the size of a thumbnail, an unflattering shot of the mayor wearing a flipped-up hat and a dumb grin. Grbac was a reference to Elvis Grbac, the back-up quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers. The 49ers had lost to the hated Dallas Cowboys--in large measure because Grbac threw a crucial interception, a football mistake that no doubt had 49er fans shouting at television screens across Northern California.

When the reporters in Paris asked Brown about the game, his response was hardly diplomatic. He called Grbac an “embarrassment to humankind.” He declared that if he helped the 49ers build a new stadium, Grbac should not be allowed to play quarterback in it. Presumably, Brown thought he sounded downright folksy: Every so often, a politician who wears only Brioni suits must show he’s still one of the fellas, talk a little football, and all that.

There was, however, one thing Brown did not know. After the game, Grbac had explained why he had been a bit distracted. His 9-month-old son had been in the hospital, undergoing surgery for spina bifida, a serious birth defect. Open mayoral mouth, insert Italian loafer. Or, as Grbac himself would put it: “One slip of the tongue, and everything changes.”

*

What followed was more a study in physics than politics. Gravity would now have its way with the high-flying mayor. The descent was as swift as it was inevitable. Brown sent flowers to the 49er practice facility; the players stomped on them. Newspapers ran unscientific polls showing that San Franciscans by several zillion to 1 disapproved of Brown’s Paris “mission,” which now was being termed a junket. There were calls for investigations into the trip. The Spina Bifida Assn. demanded Brown declare a Spina Bifida Awareness Day. City Hall telephone lines were jammed with irate callers.

“Take your damn hat off, sit down and run the city,” was one San Franciscan’s advice for Brown. It was advice Brown seems set to follow. While it’s doubtful the Grbac episode will prove politically fatal, Brown at least can understand now how his predecessor felt when he so infamously allowed himself to be photographed in the shower with two L.A. deejays before the last election. In two words, pretty dumb.

Brown returned from Paris on Sunday--the 49ers won; Elvis, of course, was a star--and headed straight back to work. At his first press conference, Brown dutifully, almost humbly, fielded questions about Paris, but what he seemed most interested in discussing were mundane municipal chores. Oh yes, he was full of plans and notions--for traffic light improvements, and freeway repairs, and better bus schedules, and public restroom restorations . . .

The honeymoon over, the work of the marriage begins.