The Man and the Myth

As someone who used to travel with “Travelin’ Sam,” my memories of the former mayor are more personal than those of most who eulogized him Friday.

Some of the tributes that came across the city desk at The Times elevated Sam Yorty to a sort of municipal sainthood.

Mayor Sam would have had a good laugh at that, as he sipped a vodka on the rocks and cast an appreciative eye at the best-looking women in the room.

I traveled with him after he took it in his mind to run for president in 1972. A Winnebago van, the Yortymobile, carried us through New Hampshire. Rented cars and airplanes brought us to Florida, and hotels in Miami and Jacksonville.

I ridiculed Yorty and his quixotic presidential campaign in my stories. He got mad, but got back at me. As we sat around hotels or flew across the country, drinking and talking, I heard his tirades against the institution he hated most, the Los Angeles Times.

*

When I arrived at The Times in 1970, Yorty was still exulting over his defeat the year before of the Times-backed candidate, Tom Bradley, who came back and beat the mayor four years later.

Relations between Yorty and the paper were grim. The wounds at the paper were slow to heal. Editors and reporters remained angry and frustrated over their candidate’s defeat by a man they considered a skunk. Knowing that, Yorty ripped the scab from the wounds at his weekly press conference at City Hall, just across the street from The Times.

As a new reporter in town, looking desperately for stories, I wandered over to City Hall to check out the mayor. Where my Times colleagues were appalled, I was fascinated. What they considered vulgar, I thought amusing.

The mayor was one of the greatest characters I had ever encountered and for the next few years, I made my living reporting on his life.

People recollect his Nebraska twang, but what I noticed were his eyes. They were, I once wrote, “like the eyes of a good detective or poker player, unrevealing, the eyes of a man who knows all about sin and virtue, who has had every experience and heard every story.”

He’d heard every promise, too, and listened to them with the cynicism of a man who had betrayed, and been betrayed. At a Cinco de Mayo reception during the 1973 campaign, an overweight city commissioner, Al Ortega, told Yorty that he had made a bet: He’d lose 50 pounds if the mayor wasn’t elected.

“About that bet, Al,” the mayor replied. “If I don’t win the election, you’ll be out of a job and you’ll lose a lot more than 50 pounds.”

Often, as I walk today’s mayoral suite, past uptight, hard-working budget experts, sipping their bottled water, I long for an earlier time where the talk in the mayor’s office was about girls (as they were called then), deals and double-crosses.

We were talking one night about a man who was one of the era’s hot prospects, then-Councilman Arthur K. Snyder. A Yorty pal and I spoke of Snyder’s brains.

“Very smart,” Yorty agreed. “Very ambitious. A very ambitious young man.”

In other words, too ambitious. That was long before Art Snyder fell, his career wrecked by campaign contribution scandals. Those Yorty eyes could see inside a person, unerringly focusing on every strength and weakness.

Life to him was combat. He’d give me lip. Sometimes, I would give it back.

Once I wrote a story laying out the political connections of the big contributors sponsoring a Yorty fund-raising dinner. We used to have an early edition, and I rushed to get the story into print so Yorty would read it before the dinner began.

He had. At the dinner, he told me “Bayarsky [that’s how he pronounced my name] I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”

My mind raced backward and I thought of a city commissioner who had died under mysterious circumstances in the port during an investigation of Yorty’s Harbor Commission.

“Oh no, mayor,” I said. “Not the harbor.”

He gave me a look with those cold, cold eyes and I knew I had gone too far.

*

The last time I saw the mayor was a few years ago in Councilman John Ferraro’s office. Sen. John Tower had just lost his chance to be secretary of Defense because of a scandal.

“Terrible thing, Bill, booze and women,” Yorty said, a twinkle in his eyes.

I caught the twinkle and smiled at the old cynic. “A terrible thing, mayor,” I agreed. “A terrible thing.”