Top Power Players Come Calling on Hollywood Women

In the stately reception room of a Hollywood power couple, Gov. Gray Davis and a phalanx of advisors and experts stood before a crowd of prominent Los Angeles women at the height of the anthrax crisis and gave a command briefing.

The meeting in this improvised war room--equipped with maps, pointers and charts--was hosted by a charity board member whose husband is a respected film producer. In light of the anthrax deaths, she told the gathering, we must learn to protect ourselves, not rely on the government.

Standing before a wall of windows that back-lighted him with luminous midday sun, Davis assured the 20 women that he was moving quickly to toughen airport security, protect bridges, test the water--and he was eager to hear their concerns.

“As you all know, Sept. 11 changed everyone’s world,” Davis said, as guests sipped white wine, and his wife, Sharon Davis, took a seat. “Education is still my passion, but now my highest priority has to be keeping you safe.”

While Bush administration spin master Karl Rove was summoning Hollywood to talk patriotism in a post-9/11 world, a cadre of well-connected Hollywood women have been doing some summoning of their own.

Many Americans are reading books on Islamic fundamentalism and germ warfare. These women are bringing officials and bioterrorism experts into their living rooms and peppering them with the questions, large and small, that have haunted Americans since the terrorist attacks.

They call themselves the Industry Task Force for Emergency Response and Preparedness. In a Hollywood-driven city, does anyone need to ask which industry?

Their milieu is accustomed to access: Mexican President Vicente Fox laid out the challenges of the drug war last year. Israeli President Moshe Katsav was the guest of honor at an at-home dinner for 100 people last June held to--as one host put it--”introduce him to the community.” Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton were regulars during their political campaigns.

The women invited by the task force have clout. Philanthropist Cheryl Saban and her husband, television deal-maker and top Democratic Party contributor Haim Saban, knew their way around the Clinton White House. An actress who hosted a meeting with Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) is married to one of Hollywood’s highest-paid male stars. Nancy Daly Riordan is a children’s advocate whose husband, Richard Riordan, is a Republican contender for governor. Sharon Davis’ husband is running for reelection as governor. Barbra Streisand is a power broker on multiple fronts.

“We want to join together to educate people and see if there’s anything we can do to prevent more terrorism. This is not a group of dilettantes,” said a task force leader, Wendy Goldberg, who was a contributing editor to the book “Hollywood Moms.”

“Our goal,” said Irena Medavoy, the driving force behind the group, “is to facilitate the implementation of a unified state and national program for emergency preparedness and response.”

The task force has even drawn up a family emergency plan, with evacuation strategies, first aid tips and passwords so kids can vet a strange driver who might pick them up at school after a disaster.

Sharon Davis said the plan is already in the hands of California state security expert George Vinson, who will determine if it can complement existing disaster preparedness drills, such as Earthquake Week, or be posted on Web sites or sent to schools.

Celebrities have offered to make public service announcements.

“The president called people to action. This is what this community felt they could do,” said Davis, who has been in touch with the group--”a lot of these women are personal friends of mine”--since its genesis.

She attended the most recent briefing, held Jan. 30, by Bill Patrick, whose bioterrorism street cred is rooted in his unique past as a manager of the now-defunct U.S. biological weapons program. That’s the unit that dreamed up ways to kill America’s enemies with disease.

“I think I’m going to frighten you,” said Patrick, 76, a stolid, balding gentleman who delights in gallows humor. The group was bivouacked that day at the Beverly Hills mansion of an influential task force leader who declined to be named.

Patrick launched into a treatise on world germ stockpiles and how something as banal as a leaf blower could scatter deadly microbes.

Patrick--who has briefed secretaries of defense, consulted for the CIA and FBI, and was the oldest U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq--waived his usual speaking fee.

“These are dedicated, patriotic ladies who have power, prestige and money,” he said. “I was surprised at the depth of their information.”

Indeed. By that time, the women had been briefed on security by former Secret Service agent Chuck Vance. They had talked Osama bin Laden with Mideast expert Herb Cohen. They had discussed health issues with Susan Blumenthal, a Bush administration assistant surgeon general. They had hosted a dozen power briefings.

“Here we had this access to all these smart people. It was really our responsibility to pass this along to people,” said Cynthia Sikes Yorkin, an actress and charity activist.

The movable think tank began in uncertain times last fall, when the threat of anthrax had become a reality and authorities feared terrorists could target California bridges or shopping malls.

“We started out wanting to educate our own families,” said Shawn King, who runs a foundation with her husband, CNN television host Larry King, that arranges for heart surgery for people without health insurance.

The wife of a studio executive invited UCLA infectious diseases professor Peter Katona. Katona made his way up to Medavoy’s mountaintop mansion in a gated Westside community, armed with photocopied fact sheets and a seven-page resume listing his publications--”Are Preparations for Bioterrorism Futile?”--and his home phone number and address.

On an enormous screen usually used to preview Hollywood films, Katona fast-forwarded a Power Point presentation through a grim Cliffs Notes of germ war history, from the medieval warriors who catapulted the corpses of smallpox victims into enemy castles to the more sophisticated capabilities of Iraqi bete noir Saddam Hussein.

Then Katona departed from the intelligence briefing format and zeroed in on local fears.

“How many of you have Cipro in your medicine cabinet?” Katona asked the women.

Beverly Hills, he told them, was the first city in America to run out of Cipro, the antibiotic prescribed against anthrax. No one seemed surprised.

“My husband is a prominent figure in the entertainment industry, and he’s received a direct threat,” said a woman in an elegant black suit and Santa Fe-style silver jewelry.

The room grew silent. Hollywood is considered a potential target. And Hollywood is their life.

“I’ve told my staff not to open any mail,” the woman continued. “Is there anything I can do to make it safe?”

Heads nodded. People murmured suggestions. Maybe microwave it? Katona shook his head.

“You could iron it,” he offered.

People exploded in laughter. Of course! Our staff can iron the mail!

Another practical issue: “Is it safe to go to the Lakers game Thursday night?”

Everyone nodded. Some had courtside seats. They know Shaquille O’Neal socially. They do lunch with Laker wives.

In an America that’s still afraid to fly on airplanes, a lot of fears about international terrorism boil down to whether it’s safe to go to malls and movie theaters.

“Knowledge is power,” said Goldberg, as she left. “It makes you feel better.”

Next Katona brought in another UCLA professor, Scott Layne, a onetime staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico who teaches a class on terrorism and mass destruction.

“I think any time people have a forum to educate themselves on things that are valuable to society, it’s important,” Katona said.

Layne wants to create an infectious disease testing laboratory that could deter the spread of diseases like anthrax. He like to approach the Gates Foundation for support.

“Somebody we know will get him to Bill Gates,” Medavoy said.

“These people are in a position to do something constructive,” Katona said. “They have access to people of power.”

That may be one reason--aside from a web of social ties between Washington and Hollywood--that experts visiting Los Angeles add task force briefings, free, to their schedules.

When Gov. Davis filed in to the Medavoys’ with his entourage late last year, he gazed out at a roomful of Democratic fund-raising muscle that most Republican candidates can only dream of in Hollywood.

The Valentino and Armani crowd was a different tribe than the bleary-eyed pinstriped pilgrims who sip coffee at 8 a.m. briefings at Washington think tanks.

James Carville once described Washington as “Hollywood for ugly people.”

But this is L.A. The well-groomed sea of faces staring back at Davis included people like actress Kelly Lynch and Ms. America Susan Jeske--who was invited not by the task force, but by a soberly attired expert who talked about bringing her to a Rome summit with the Afghan king.

The women peppered the experts with questions: “Is California ready for a terrorist attack?” “What role will women have in the new Afghan government?”

Peter Thompson, a former U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, spieled details on the coalescing Kabul government--some so up-to-date they had not been publicly announced.

Everything has snowballed since then. Nowadays, a Cambridge-educated assistant to columnist Arianna Huffington, Peter Abbott, takes the minutes of each briefing.

Drafts of the emergency plan are clogging faxes all over town.

“Fear is not the focus now,” Medavoy said. “I’ve given away my gas mask. I don’t have a supply of Cipro. The concern now is: to have California be the No. 1 state in showcasing the new century’s response to bioterrorism preparedness.”