The Bear of Baltimore

William Donald Schaefer mulled for a moment as he took up the silly hat.

He had worn so many over the years, donning more theatrical props than a vaudeville ham during his stint as Baltimore’s mayor-for-near-life and then two terms of trench warfare as Maryland’s governor. After all the Viking helmets and popeyed spectacles, feathered war bonnets and stiff straw boaters, here, in front of 400 cronies, business titans and state government bigwigs on the heady morning of his political rebirth, was Schaefer’s chance to finally play it straight. Balding. Dignified. Hatless.

The hat went on. It was a blue baseball cap adorned with a cranky love note to a lifelong crank: “I am a William Donald Schaefer supporter and damn proud of it.” Without his silly hat, he explained in his Chesapeake drawl, “it wouldn’t be me.”

After three years spent complaining about his retirement from public life, Maryland’s most famous crab has returned to his state’s rough-and-tumble political world. He is angling to become comptroller--the state’s tax collector and financial gatekeeper--a job that was a sinecure for 81-year-old Louis Goldstein, whose death last month opened the door for Schaefer’s reemergence.

Having frightened off most of a field of 19 Democratic Party challengers within a week of declaring his candidacy, Schaefer, 76, is now poised to take his own lifetime perch this fall, a prospect sure to raise blood pressure readings from the Chesapeake Bay to western Maryland’s mine country.

Schaefer’s return is one last go-round for the politics of a character, a vintage replay of a quirky, petulant and often-imperious style of governance that cowed bureaucrats and sometimes left voters sputtering. Kicking and screaming himself much of the way, Schaefer accomplished miracles. He transformed Baltimore from a dingy sailor’s haunt into a harbor-side tourist attraction, then pumped up sleepy Maryland communities with million-dollar public works projects.

His lasting popularity is bound up in his manic drive for success--and in his identification with his beloved seaport city, a town where eccentrics once bloomed like wildflowers. Baltimore has been lionized in Anne Tyler novels and John Waters films, and its oddballs are a fading breed these days, but Schaefer’s return comes as evidence that the town and its cockeyed political culture have not gone blandly normal quite yet.

“People miss the characters, the good feelings,” a briefly contemplative Schaefer said in the Baltimore law office he itches to leave. “There’s a stiffness in the people running the show now. So here I am. The good old days are back.”

Putting the Fun Back in Maryland Politics

There is still an election to win and a Republican rival, Michael Steele, to fend off. But to hear a wily old head like Marvin Mandel, who was governor when Schaefer was mere mayor and who weathered two federal corruption trials before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his convictions, the hardest part--persuading Schaefer to run--is already done.

“He’ll bring a lot of fun back to Annapolis [the state capital], and he’ll expand the role of comptroller,” Mandel said amid a throng of gleeful Schaeferites at the coming-out party.

Some politicos wonder whether Schaefer’s return will give Maryland two governors--not an appetizing prospect for Democratic incumbent Parris Glendening, who faces a tough challenge this fall from Republican Ellen Sauerbrey. After floating his own candidate for comptroller in the days after Goldstein’s death, Glendening had to yield to the popular Schaefer to stifle the threat of a ruptured party. The two men are not allies. Glendening dryly referred to Schaefer as a “character” just before his triumphant party. Schaefer rolls his pale blue eyes at the mention of the governor’s name.

Schaefer’s antics are the stuff of legend here. In public, his sternest oath is “Oh, my land.” In private, he wields invective like an air hammer. As mayor, he dressed down aides and college students alike in epic screaming fits, then dressed up in an admiral’s whites to celebrate the rebirth of his harbor. This is a governor who showed up on a constituent’s lawn on a Sunday to berate him for an angry letter, mooned a roomful of stunned legislators and is revered in the Eastern Shore--a place he once likened to an outhouse--for building a convention center and buttressing its sandy beaches.

For all of Schaefer’s quirks, says film director Waters, he hardly qualifies as a full-blown Baltimore oddity. Waters, who lives here and has filmed his slyly ribald satires of American life here for nearly three decades, populates his movies with the city’s bizarre archetypes. But Schaefer “wouldn’t fit” in one of his films.

“Sure, he’s a little eccentric,” Waters says. “But he’s not famous just for being a fool. This man made Baltimore a great city. He turned it around. I wish he was running for president. He’d have my vote.”

While saddled with the same poverty and crime that pull down all old American cities, Baltimore benefited from Schaefer’s reign. Houses that sold for $1 at city auctions became architectural wonders with federal largess and city aid. The seedy harbor was outfitted with teeming malls, an aquarium and vintage clipper ships.

Some say stranger-than-life figures like Schaefer have flourished here because of Maryland’s status as the southernmost Northern state. A disguised Abraham Lincoln had to rush through Baltimore to his inauguration to evade secessionist mobs. Others blame the state’s archaic political culture and its late-blooming reliance on TV to reach voters.

“There’s just something in the water here that produces these people,” says Matthew A. Crenson, a political science professor at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University. “But Baltimore’s influence has been waning politically, and its characters are being replaced by grayer types.”

A Cast of Characters in Supporting Roles

That movement must be glacial, judging by the assortment of classic types who flocked to a highway toll-plaza hotel in the early morning to welcome Schaefer back into the limelight.

There was Mandel, the diminutive, sage Annapolis political player whose former wife, Bootsy, booted him out of the governor’s mansion when he took up with another woman. There was Wally Orlinsky, a Baltimore City Council president toppled by a federal corruption probe who now peddles programs to Orioles fans at Camden Yards.

“Look at all these dinosaurs,” Orlinsky said, surveying old faces around him. “Jurassic Park East. And there’s the head tyrannosaurus.”

Schaefer hardly looked like a raptor, surrounded by old aides and cronies. With his Promethean head, penguin’s frame and sad-eyed countenance, he has been underrated and snickered at by political rivals throughout his long public life. Most of them have been left well-devoured.

“Oh, my land, life takes strange turns, doesn’t it?” Schaefer said as Billy Murphy, a ponytailed lawyer who once vied with Schaefer for mayor and now represents boxing promoter Don King, reached out to shake hands.

“Whatever I can do,” Murphy offered.

“Endorsements are what I’m looking for,” Schaefer said, adding: “Money, too, would be nice.”

A few feet away, Glendening, who had come to be seen with his new campaign mate, was insisting Schaefer would fit in easily in his state cabinet. Not likely. Schaefer talks of redefining a job that is primarily that of financial guardian. He imagines himself a deal-maker without portfolio, overseeing the state’s AAA bond rating and packaging projects that would aid Baltimore and other business centers.

“I can see no one’s in state government trying to bring all the businessmen together,” he said, a thinly veiled slap at Glendening’s cold-shouldering of business interests. There will not be two governors, Schaefer insists. Glendening, too, says Schaefer has room to “redefine the job.”

Those are patchwork assurances, observers say, designed for papering over enmities before the election. Schaefer’s former lieutenant governor, Melvin A. “Mickey” Steinberg, who had a bruising falling-out with Schaefer in office, cautions that his old boss “can’t change the function of comptroller without changing the state constitution. But he can create a lot of, well, excitement.”

But as he sat with a steady parade of cronies, Don Schaefer, for once, had nothing to scream about. To keep in shape, he bellowed for ex-aides. They scurried, as in the old days. “Raynor!” he barked to his close friend, Baltimore hotel owner Gene Raynor, “Raynor, where are the signs?”

“We got 200 billboards,” Raynor wheezed, making up a number out of thin air. “Oh, how he exaggerates,” Schaefer said, mock-pouting.

He wrinkled his jowls into a prune face when someone asked whether he wanted an endorsement from President Clinton. Despite his lifelong Democratic heritage, Schaefer tacked to his own wake in the 1992 presidential campaign, stumping for George Bush.

His visage grew even darker when someone mentioned Glendening. Schaefer, ever the score settler, could not let bygones be bygones. He pursed his lips and rolled his eyes like a street mime.

William Donald Schaefer was back. For good.