He’s Giving Himself Quite a Name

In some rarefied circles, Haim Saban was already well-known as one of Southern California’s political scene-stealers. A parade of senators--and even a couple of presidents--have made their way to the door of Saban’s neo-French chateau in gated Beverly Park.

Saban is a member of a small but potent coterie of Hollywood rainmakers the Democratic Party counts on to raise millions for candidates and campaigns. But on Thursday, it was revealed that Saban gave the Democratic National Committee $7 million--among the largest gifts ever received by a major national party.

When Saban informed Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe of the sum he would donate, McAuliffe told him: “You’re the man!” Saban recalled Friday.

And in a way, he is. Saban’s political gifts--and his ability to get others to give too--have built a high-profile platform for a cartoon baron whose fortune rests on “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”

Saban still likes to call himself a “cartoon schlepper.”

But late last year, Saban was made capital campaign chairman of a DNC effort to raise $32 million to build a new party headquarters in Washington. Last month, he was named to the University of California Board of Regents by Gov. Gray Davis, whom Saban and Saban Entertainment have given more than $600,000 since 1987.

Saban links his political activism to his concern for such issues as education, Middle East peace, social justice and abortion rights.

“I have a passion about what’s going on in the world,” said Saban, an unpretentious man with thick black hair and a gym-toned physique who looks much younger than his 57 years.

“I’m a concerned person,” he said, with a light Israeli accent. “Whatever I can be helpful with, I’d like to be helpful with.”

“I never want to see a woman’s right to choose go away,” he said. “I want to see a universal health care system.”

Campaign finance reform, of course, could soon drastically change the rules of the game that have allowed Saban and his enterprises to donate $2 million to Democratic causes since 1999, according to records.

“I am all for campaign reform,” Saban said. But for now, “The law today is the law today.”

And the law today has turned Saban’s 90210 ZIP Code into a fund-raising hot spot where political contributions rose from $2 million in the 1994 election cycle to $6.2 million in the 2000 cycle. It’s a hefty take, considering the average ZIP Code yielded just under $9,000, according to the Center for Political Responsiveness.

In the nouveau reaches of high-end Hollywood, hosts like Saban seem to regard fund-raising parties as a status symbol, not a chore.

At a recent event for Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, (D-R.I.), Saban’s wife, Cheryl, greeted guests in chic leather pants. Waiters offered trays of tempting gourmet canapes--duck on Belgian endive with raspberry sauce, wild mushrooms on toast--as co-hosts such as actress Elizabeth Shue mingled.

The Sabans are a study in contrast as they move through a Hollywood party populated with such actors as Kevin Costner and Anjelica Huston -- Cheryl schmoozing with writers, Haim idly toying with buying a newspaper like, maybe, the New York Post.

Contrasting Couple Make Formidable Pair

He is dark and muscular, she willowy and blond. He lacks the aloofness common to people of his milieu: Socially, he is as warm and effusive as she is poised and reserved. But together they have become a formidable couple.

In January, the Sabans sat at a table with former President Clinton at a $25,000-a-couple banquet for Davis in the home of supermarket magnate Ron Burkle.

“I doubt if Ron Burkle is looking for anything other than enjoying the flavor of all those Hollywood parties,” said longtime Brentwood fund-raiser Stanley Sheinbaum.

“Burkle doesn’t need anything. But Saban does,” Sheinbaum said. “He’s still a new name around town. He’s still on an upward climb. He’s got his name on a building in Westwood, but he wants it around.”

Al Gore may have reproached Saban in the past for the violent content of his children’s programming, but he dropped in to dine at Chez Saban recently. The Sabans hosted a series of casual dinners, at another Saban home in Malibu, for visiting senators during the congressional break. On March 4, Saban and Burkle co-hosted a fund-raiser honoring Tom Strickland, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Colorado. The contribution was $2,000 a person.

In Hollywood, such fund-raising is facilitated by full-time political staffers, some of them Clinton veterans. Saban’s political advisor, Laura Hartigan, was finance director of the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign. Ari Swiller, who works for Burkle, used to work in the White House.

When a politician plans a swing through Los Angeles, “the DNC will try to get heavy hitters on the hook” and Hollywood political staffers “will make that happen,” said a Democratic fund-raising strategist.

Saban and fund-raising honchos like Burkle have written outsize checks for California races as well. Burkle and his Yucaipa Cos. have given Gov. Davis nearly $533,000 since 1987, records show. Westwood One radio Chairman Norm Pattiz, a friend of Saban’s, has given $356,000.

And Pattiz, like Saban, also was just named to the UC Board of Regents. Both give to education philanthropies, but neither is a college graduate.

“I don’t think that the fact that I am a supporter of the governor had much to do with it, to be honest,” Saban said. “The governor and I spend a lot of time together and we exchange views. He saw my concern for education, and it is his job to put in place people who have passion for the issues he’s responsible for.”

Pattiz has a slightly different spin.

“Did it help me to be a longtime friend and supporter of the governor to be appointed to the Board of Regents? Absolutely,” Pattiz said. “As a friend, [Davis] knows of my interest in education.”

Sheinbaum shakes his head.

“Can you believe Haim Saban was just made a regent?” said Sheinbaum, who was on the UC board from 1977 to 1989. “What are we talking about here?”

He shrugged.

“I’m a good case with Gray Davis,” he confessed. “When I was a supporter of Jerry Brown, Gray Davis was his chief of staff. Gray got my appointment cleared with the Board of Regents. I was very appreciative.”

Funding a New Party Foundation

In the past eight years, Saban has developed a close friendship with DNC Chairman McAuliffe and with Democratic congressional leaders--House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt and House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi--who have played a role in guiding more fund-raisers to cash-rich Los Angeles.

His $7 million forms the foundation of the $32-million effort to build a party headquarters. Its centerpiece is a technology overhaul project that will purchase voter files, redo Web sites and e-mail lists to broaden the base of potential donors.

Such contributions may soon be more important than ever, now that Congress has passed a bill to overhaul campaign finance laws. President Bush says he will sign the law, which, after the fall elections, would prohibit national political parties from raising huge sums from a single source--donations like Saban’s $7 million.

In an interview before the Senate cleared the bill Wednesday, Saban endorsed such an overhaul of campaign finance law.

“I think they should take campaign finance reform even further by limiting private individuals,” Saban said. “Otherwise I think we’re creating a whole new category of rich people who may or may not be qualified to be public servants who would have a better opportunity to serve than others. That’s a very dangerous path.”

Saban’s journey from Israeli rock guitarist to Los Angeles political impresario has been long and improbable.

Saban was working as a music promoter in Israel in 1973 at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. Profitability evaporated.

He moved to Paris, where he unwittingly turned a 9-year-old club singer into the “Israeli-French Donny Osmond” when he invited the child to perform a French theme song for a Japanese cartoon. The song sold 3.5 million copies.

More music revenues followed. Saban and his partner moved to Los Angeles in 1983 and began buying obscure Japanese cartoons and repackaging them for U.S. markets.

Late last year, Saban banked about $1.5 billion as his share of the sale of Fox Family Worldwide Inc., an empire built on television shows, like the “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,” that were criticized by adults as violent and lowbrow but embraced by children.

Saban’s rise has been so swift that books on Hollywood politics published a decade ago don’t even mention him.

One friend who recommended the Sabans to an exclusive Westside private school recently found herself explaining that, aside from having nice kids, the Sabans could be assets. Literally.

“I told the director of the school, ‘Do you want a new swimming pool? Do you want a new building? Do I need to be more blunt?’ ” said the friend, who asked not to be named.

But in some circles, he needs no introductions. Along with billionaire Eli Broad and Nancy Daly Riordan, wife of former Mayor Richard Riordan, Saban successfully lobbied for permission to build mega-mansions that block the public views of the ocean in violation of state regulations. The group purchased an oceanfront lot which they offered to turn over to the state for a public beach in return for the right to build the houses.

The Sabans met when she answered an ad in the Hollywood Reporter and went to work for him. She was 36, a divorced single mother with two daughters who used such philanthropic services as the Los Angeles Free Clinic to make ends meet. Now the Sabans are such big clinic supporters, “I think we even have a wing there,” he joked.

“It’s unfathomable to me that in a country like ours, kids go around with no health insurance, and minorities get inferior health care than white people,” he said.

Saban adopted Cheryl’s girls, and the couple had two more children. And Cheryl, now 50, is a leading philanthropist and sometime author with a dry wit, who seems to play straight woman to her more extroverted husband.

Once he woke her up at 5:30 a.m. to tell her a new cartoon name: Samurai Pizza Cats. “I feel for you,” she told him--and went back to sleep.

Now Saban is weighing his next business move.

He’s got a high-powered New York publicist, Stephanie Pillersdorf, who openly debates whether to grant the New York Times Magazine access for a Saban profile or to hold out--in classic Hollywood style--for a magazine that promises to put him on the cover.

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Times staff writers Robin Mayper, Maloy Moore and Jeffrey L. Rabin contributed to this report.