Davis: Private Man in the Public Glare

On a fine spring day, Gray Davis is peddling Gray Davis, a job he undertakes with the joyless precision of an assembly line worker on a double shift.

Teachers. Cops. Ministers. Between campaign stops, Davis clamps a cell phone to his ear and hustles contributions. “Things are terrific. . . . These new ads will knock your socks off. We focus grouped them last night and the results were stunning, stunning.”

He’s like the Fuller brush man, polite but insistent, traveling from richly paneled law office to sleek industrial park, begging 15 minutes to give his spiel and perhaps walk away a step closer to his decades-old goal of being California governor.

He hates it.

“I enjoy governing,” Davis says over the drone of the small plane carrying him from Los Angeles to San Diego. But as for the constant campaigning, “I’d rather take a couple days off weekends. I’d rather not pick up the phone all the time and ask for money. . . . You just accept that’s your lot.”

It is one of many ironies that Davis has proved so adept at something he claims to so detest. Indeed, after 24 years in public life, California’s 55-year-old lieutenant governor is better known for his serial pursuit of higher office than for anything he accomplished once elected.

An extremely private person--few know he had a benign brain tumor removed 14 years ago while in the Legislature--Davis has chosen the most public of professions. The son of an alcoholic father and disapproving mother who forbade the use of the “I” pronoun, he has a homing pigeon’s instinct for a TV camera and an unshakable reputation as one of Sacramento’s biggest publicity hounds.

Cautious to a fault, he carefully picks the issues he champions and caveats the most innocuous statements. “I have nothing against white males,” he says, extolling the virtues of diversity. “They’re fine people.” At the same time, a certain recklessness in his campaign conduct has landed Davis in trouble more than once.

Perhaps the greatest irony, though, is the way Davis’ relentless self-promotion and ceaseless striving have created a caricature of a man who, by most accounts, is in fact intelligent, capable, politically principled and genuinely interested in using government as a tool for the betterment of others.

“It’s way too easy to stereotype and view individuals as one-dimensional,” said Steve Merksamer, a Sacramento attorney and close advisor to Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, the presumptive GOP gubernatorial nominee. Republican Merksamer is no fan of Democrat Davis, an acquaintance for more than 20 years. But he respects the lieutenant governor on a professional level. “At the end of the day,” Merksamer said, “he’s someone who makes a sincere effort to make government work.”

The two are members of a rare fraternity. Both served as chiefs of staff to California governors--Merksamer under the monochromatic George Deukmejian, Davis in the Technicolor administration of Jerry Brown.

In Davis’ case, it was truly an instance of polar opposites attracting. Much of his life, by Davis’ admission, has been a search for order and structure, from his collegiate decision to practice law--”there was a discipline I found attractive”--to his steadfast refusal to try new restaurants or dishes. “I like consistency,” Davis said, to the consternation of his more venturesome wife, Sharon. “If I order something, I want to know I’m going to like it.”

Father’s Alcoholism Caused Early Turmoil

Joseph Graham Davis Jr. grew up in a Republican household, to the extent his parents bothered with politics. The oldest of five children, Davis was born in the Bronx and raised in Connecticut (there is still a hint of upper-crust New England in his nasal tone.) His mother, Doris, didn’t like the names Joey, Graham or Joe Jr. Hence the nickname Gray.

Davis came to California at age 11 when his father, an ad executive for Time magazine, moved west to help start Sports Illustrated.

The senior Davis was an alcoholic who squandered the family’s wealth and was estranged from his son for years, facts the candidate rarely discusses.

“He saw a model of the person he did not want to become,” Sharon Davis said of her husband’s difficult relationship with his late father, with whom he eventually reconciled. “His father was very gregarious and outgoing and I think maybe [Gray] might have strived to be somewhat opposite.”

Davis’ mother, a retired interior designer, appears in a campaign video lauding her son and heartily endorsing his gubernatorial bid. But their relationship is more brittle than that superficial glimpse suggests.

Growing up, Davis attended a series of private schools that were alternately monastic and militaristic. “I knew my mother loved me, and the way she demonstrated it was by holding me to very high standards,” Davis said. “Whatever I was doing was wrong. If I was studying, I should be playing. If I was playing, I should be studying.”

Davis’ parents divorced during his second year at Stanford University, a bitter split that drastically altered the family’s fortunes. His mother and siblings moved back East. To stay in school, Davis began waiting tables at his frat house and enrolled in ROTC--a move that would prove fateful.

Although Zeta Psi had a reputation as one of the heartier partying frats on campus, Davis was not a notable participant (he still drinks sparingly). He golfed, steered clear of politics--Stanford was an important recruiting ground for civil rights activists--and even then kept up a fastidious personal appearance.

“You had a lot of people in the house walking around in T-shirts and Bermuda shorts that hadn’t been washed in a week,” recalled former state Sen. Gary K. Hart, a Zeta Psi frat mate. “But that certainly wasn’t Gray Davis.”

Frank Dubofsky, another frat mate now practicing law in Colorado, was surprised to see Davis enter the public arena. He recalls a thoroughly apolitical Davis--”very neat, never a hair out of place”--who was “pretty private . . . quiet, serious” in a fraternity “not exactly known for a lot of serious students.”

From Law School to Service in Vietnam

What changed Davis, inalterably recasting his life course, was Vietnam.

He joined ROTC for the money, he confesses, at a time “when there were no hostilities in the world and none seemed likely.” But by 1967, when he graduated from Columbia Law School and lost his student deferment, the U.S. buildup in Southeast Asia was well under way.

Davis spent eight months of his two-year Army stint in Vietnam. A member of the Signal Corps, his duty was maintaining tactical radar equipment, a job that periodically placed him in the line of fire. He left with the rank of captain and a Bronze Star.

More crucially, the experience politicized Davis. Traveling between division base camps, “I could see the people in combat were disproportionately minority. The fighting was being done by people of color and whites who didn’t have college degrees, and that struck me as totally unfair.”

After his discharge, Davis settled in Los Angeles, where he practiced civil law and took up politics on the side. He signed on as finance director for the 1973 mayoral campaign of City Councilman Tom Bradley, who built a multiracial coalition to become the city’s first black mayor.

Admittedly puffed up after that first endeavor, Davis launched a long-shot run the following year for state treasurer, finishing a distant third in the June primary. Soon, Davis signed on with Brown’s gubernatorial campaign and after the November election became his chief of staff.

It was Davis who woke up each day pondering what handful of issues the governor should focus on, then debated Brown at length--not on the substance of issues, but rather on the makeup of his schedule.

The six years Davis spent as Brown’s staff chief have indelibly cast him as a creature of those turbulent times, and though the two are not close--Davis apparently has no close friends other than his wife--the candidate nonetheless defends the Brown years. “Jerry’s remembered for the Plymouth, space satellites and Linda Ronstadt,” Davis says of, respectively, the governor’s austerity, flightiness and African safari mate. “But there were a lot of very substantive accomplishments under his watch.”

Despite his liberal label, Davis has always been more conservative than his old boss. Davis, for one thing, is a longtime proponent of the death penalty, which Brown famously opposed. And Davis sounds positively Republican when he talks about a constitutional ban on flag burning, ending the culture of welfare dependency or slashing red tape to boost business.

“I was making the kind of decisions I thought Jerry Brown would make, not necessarily the kind of decisions I would make,” said Davis, who effectively ran the state during Brown’s frequent absence in the course of two failed presidential campaigns.

Davis was 32 when he became chief of staff. Before leaving Brown’s administration six years later, he was determined someday to be governor himself. A succession of elected positions followed: assemblyman from the Westside, state controller and, since 1995, lieutenant governor.

Those who have watched Davis up close say it seems that every waking moment of the past 20-odd years has been devoted to the service of political ambition. A relentless fund-raiser, Davis is infamous for crashing other candidates’ events, trolling the crowd for his own benefit.

Even his social life--golfing with major donors, for instance--has functioned as an extension of his political life. Said David Mixner, a longtime Democratic activist, “On weekends, where you and I might rest, he fills it up with political functions: bar mitzvahs, parades, American Legion 100th anniversaries.”

Nothing, not even the hint of mortality, has slowed him down.

In 1984, Davis, then in the Assembly, went to see a doctor for vision problems. The diagnosis: a tumor behind his right eye. Three weeks after surgery to remove the benign growth, Davis was back at work in the Legislature, wearing a wig to hide his shaved head.

Despite his apparently complete recovery, Davis remains loath to discuss the matter, perhaps fearing some political liability. “It hasn’t slowed me down,” he said, midway through a typical 15-hour schedule. “I still put in a pretty good workday.”

As if to reinforce his abundant caution, Davis has been badly burned the few times he exercised less than studied judgment. A poorly conceived 1992 campaign for U.S. Senate turned into a disaster when his vicious personal attack on rival Democrat Dianne Feinstein backfired.

More seriously, Davis reimbursed the state $28,000 to settle charges that he improperly used state office workers and equipment in his 1986 controller’s race. In 1993 Davis, then controller, was further embarrassed by reports that he named cronies to lucrative part-time jobs as probate referees.

Davis denies any wrongdoing. “There was nothing illegal or inappropriate in what I did,” he said, noting that he voluntarily implemented reforms to overhaul the appointment process.

A Life of Paying Political Dues

Up-close scrutiny, which Davis abhors, is just one price he has paid for spending his entire adult life in public office.

Much else has been sacrificed. After a career on the government payroll--as opposed to some swank law firm--he has few assets and little net worth. He lives in a 1,000-square-foot condominium in West Hollywood, which he now touts--like Gov. Brown’s old blue Plymouth--as a symbol of self-denial. He is childless, though Davis said he and wife would still like to have a family.

Thus, it is particularly galling to be pitted at this, the zenith of his political climb, against a pair of monied interlopers, Al Checchi and Jane Harman, who care nothing of his years spent tilling, watering, nurturing.

On a spring day in the political vineyards, speaking to black ministers in the basement of San Diego’s Calvary Baptist Church, Davis hopes to gather his perceived due. “My entire life I have worked to help people,” he says. “I haven’t gotten rich. I’ve lived on a paycheck.”

“In the end,” he sums up, seemingly praying as much as politicking, “I think people want a governor who’s paid his dues.”

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Profile: Gray Davis

Political Party: Democratic

Born: Dec. 26, 1942, Bronx, N.Y.

Residence: West Hollywood

Education: Bachelor’s degree, Stanford University, 1964; law degree, Columbia University, 1967

Family: Married to Sharon Ryer Davis.

Background: Captain, U.S. Army, earning Bronze Star for service in Vietnam, 1969; attorney, private practice, 1970-74; chief of staff to Gov. Jerry Brown Jr. 1975-81; member of state Assembly, 1982-86; state controller, 1987-94; lieutenant governor, 1995-present.

Career highlights: As chief of staff, Davis was credited with bringing some order to Gov. Jerry Brown’s chaotic administration. In the Legislature, he worked to rid public schools of asbestos and led campaign to find missing children by placing their photographs on milk cartons, grocery bags and billboards. As controller, he fought offshore oil drilling and worked out tax deals in which large corporations turned over environmentally sensitive lands for state preservation. As lieutenant governor, Davis used his seats on the UC Board of Regents and Cal State University board to fight for lower student fees and promote racial and ethnic diversity.

Strategy: Present himself as a Sacramento veteran who would ensure a steady course in this time of relative prosperity and voter contentment. Capitalize on ties to labor unions, Hollywood and other Democratic constituencies to overcome enormous financial disadvantage.

Quote: “I think what distinguishes me more than the other two [Democratic candidates for governor] is that I’ve had a life of public service. The other two have spent a good portion of their lives getting wealthy.”