Counsel to the cop: She fits the profile

Rikki Klieman beams at her husband, the next chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. He is speaking to a group of Latino officers picnicking at the Police Academy. She gives him the same adoring look Nancy Reagan gave her Ronnie when he was in the White House, the same sweet gaze Hillary Clinton leveled on post-Gennifer, pre-Monica Bill.

“I have never, in my life, been in this role,” Klieman says as she watches Bill Bratton address the Latin American Law Enforcement Assn., also known as La Ley. She works the tented area like a candidate’s wife, enthusiastically introducing herself to officers and their families, including some who wanted one of their own, Oxnard Police Chief and LAPD veteran Art Lopez, to move into Parker Center. When the news cameras and reporters swarm the chief-designate, she stands off to the side.

In Los Angeles, she’s Mrs. Bratton, making the public rounds with her husband, house-hunting near the beach, in West L.A., the Hollywood Hills and Los Feliz. In New York, she’s Rikki Klieman, a self-described “type A to the fourth power” and as accustomed to the national spotlight as he is. A lawyer, she anchors the daily legal affairs show “Both Sides” on Court TV, a job she’s thrived in since her on-air trial by fire, the O.J. Simpson case.

And now she’ll be a weekend wife. She’ll stay in New York and in front of the camera until her contract ends this time next year. Until then, she’ll rack up frequent flier miles on last-minute nonstops and redeyes that land at dawn.

“I really made a major shift when I fell in love with Bill,” she says. “For the first time in my life, I decided that he was my priority, and not my work. Anybody who knew me would not believe that kind of change is possible.”

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‘Top Cop’s’ fourth wife

So what’s it like being the fourth wife of a man who calls himself “America’s Top Cop”?

“For Bill, his job, his success, his career had always come first. With us, there’s an equality. I am every bit as important to Bill as his job is,” she says. “I don’t think he’s had that before.”

What do the lawyer and cop do together?

“We are both joggers,” she says. “We are very bad tennis players. We love the movies. We’re total movie buffs. We saw ‘The Four Feathers’ because Bill needed a break from pacing while waiting for Mayor Hahn to make a decision.”

Who cooks?

“Mostly, we eat out,” she says.

Does he blow a fuse?

“I’ve never seen him lose his temper. What you get is the look, with a capital T and a capital L.”

Do you dance together?

“I am transformed when I dance. Dance is my favorite thing.... Bill has really grown. When we were in Buenos Aires, we took tango lessons, and I have the pictures.”

But mostly, they work.

A pit-bull litigator in Boston before her television career, Klieman first started making headlines as a prosecutor, then as a criminal defense lawyer with the large silk-stocking law firm Choate, Hall & Stewart, and ultimately in her own firm, Klieman, Lyons, Schindler & Gross. No longer a partner, she remains “of counsel,” practicing solely in an advisory capacity.

In 1983, Time magazine named her one of the nation’s five best women attorneys, all of them talented trial lawyers: “As a group, they are less like the stereotype of their sex than the stereotype of their job: they are fiercely intelligent, tough-minded, intensely competitive, self-assured individualists who relish the fray.”

U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, who began practicing law in Boston a couple of years before Klieman, explains in a telephone interview, “First, you have to recognize the profession was overwhelmingly male. And however overwhelmingly male it was, criminal law was even more overwhelmingly male.”

Harvey Silverglate, the dean of defense attorneys in Boston, remembers Klieman’s early days in court. “She’s tough, very tough,” he says by phone. “This is a very tough job. You’ve got a prosecutor threatening you. You’ve got cops lying and other witnesses lying, and you have to manage to tear them apart and convince the jury they are lying. And, sometimes your clients are very tough.”

“She’s a terrific actress,” he adds. “I don’t mean that in any derogatory manner. She is able to communicate with jurors in a way that makes them want to listen to her ....She’s able to connect, which is why she ended up in television.”

Warm, friendly, down-to-earth, Klieman nevertheless brings a formidable intellect and terrific recall to her show, which dissects both sides of big trials, the prosecution and the defense. She’s also ended up in film. “In my work at Court TV, my greatest fun, besides what I do, has been acting,” she says. “I played myself in ‘Cable Guy’ with Jim Carrey. I played a reporter in ‘A Civil Action’ with John Travolta. I most recently played a lawyer in ’15 Minutes’ with Robert De Niro.”

Klieman dreamed early on of an acting career. Born in Chicago 17 years after her parents, a garment worker from the Ukraine and a homemaker, were married, she started acting, dance and voice lessons before she started school. She majored in theater at Northwestern University, and then headed to New York. “I did a bus-and-truck of ‘Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.’ That was probably one of the real learning experiences about the glamour of the theater,” she says. “Get on a bus. Go to some town. Get on another bus.” After a year, she gave up.

Trying to figure out what to do next, she revisited a professor who had taught a class on the 1st Amendment. “He said to me, ‘Why don’t you think about going to law school?’ I said, ‘Well, girls don’t go to law school.’ And he said, ‘No, but women do.’ It was a pivotal moment in my life,” she says, a moment that propelled her to Boston University Law School and a career dominated by the law.

Nearly 25 years ago, Norfolk County, Mass. Dist. Atty. William Delahunt--now a member of the U.S. House of Representatives--hired Klieman, an “extraordinary lawyer.” In a phone call from Capitol Hill, he remembers one case in particular that she prosecuted. In 1980, at the height of the American hostage crisis in Iran, she won the convictions of three teenagers who beat and fatally stabbed an Iranian engineering student near Boston University.

While a trial lawyer, she says, she worked “10 1/2 days out of every week,” at a high cost. “Many women in my generation, who were in college during the ‘60s, of course, during the feminist revolution, were driven to put success above our personal lives. There are many women who have sacrificed solid, loving relationships, marriages, children, and their physical and psychological health,” Klieman says. “My life was geared as a successful lawyer.”

Success required sacrifices: two failed marriages. No children. Health problems.

Petite, not quite 5 foot 3, Klieman weighs the same as she did in high school--120 pounds, she says. Few women her age, at 54, can say the same. For her, it’s an accomplishment to weigh that much.

“I used to say, ‘Is this a five-pound trial or a 10-pound trial?’ It was pretty scary.” In 1990 she lost 15 pounds while defending David and Ginger Twitchel, a Christian Scientist couple convicted on manslaughter charges for denying their dying son medical care because of their religious beliefs. Her health took another hit during the appeal, which she won. “I looked like a refugee,” she says.

She’s now writing a cautionary autobiography, “The Price of the Prize,” with Peter Knobler, who also worked on Bratton’s book “Turnaround: “How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic.” It’s due out in the spring.

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Met Bratton 10 years ago

The couple first met 10 years ago at a luncheon held by the Anti-Defamation League of New England. A member of the league’s civil rights committee, Klieman sat next to Bratton, the guest speaker. “The first time we met he doesn’t remember,” she says. “Where was my feminine mystique?”

They got to know each other professionally a year later, when she negotiated the surrender of fugitive Katherine Ann Power, a Vietnam-era radical who drove the getaway car after a 1970 bank robbery that left a cop dead. A week after the officer’s funeral, Bratton joined the Boston Police Department.

He became police commissioner while Klieman was arranging to bring Power in, and joined the discussions along with state and federal prosecutors. “We had no social interaction,” she says. “This was purely business.” On a personal level, Klieman says, cops are her weakness. Her second husband was a federal agent, and before that a cop. Her first husband, a law school classmate, gave her away to Bratton at their civil ceremony. (By coincidence, Bratton’s third wife was also a Boston lawyer who rode O.J. to a TV news career. He has one child, a son by his first wife.)

She got together with the current cop in her life four years ago. Klieman, then on Court TV, and Bratton, then a security consultant, were at the Regency Hotel in New York for a power breakfast, only not with each other. She stopped by his table. “Remember me?” she asked. He flirted back. They exchanged business cards. He called before she got back to her office.

On a chilly night in February 1999, he drove her down a dirt road lightly dusted with snow. The former NYPD commissioner still had some pretty important friends in the city. He asked them to open the Central Park carousel.

“He knew what horse would be my favorite, this big white horse. He put me on it, and said, ‘I want to go round and round in life with you.’ It was truly the most romantic moment of my life,” says Klieman, who collects carousel memorabilia, including miniature carved horses in rainbow colors. Two months later, they married.

“We were just on that carousel two weeks ago,” Bratton says. “We returned to the scene of the crime. We’re never in the city on weekends. We had a wedding to go to. We were walking and found ourselves in Central Park.”

On Oct. 6, his 55th birthday, Bratton took his wife to the Griffith Park merry-go-round. She immediately recognized an ornate horse carved by the master Charles Looff, who, in 1876, installed the first merry-go-round in New York’s Coney Island. “She knows her horses,” the chief-designate said. He took the horse next to hers. While the carousel twirled, they held hands, kissed and laughed.

It’s not an act, according to friends. Indeed, there is a palpable heat between them.

“She’s like a teenager with Bratton. She just bubbles when she talks about him,” Dr. Bonnie Typlin says from Tucson. “I’ve known Rikki forever. We went to grade school and high school together. We were at Northwestern together.” Still close, they talk often. “She makes sacrifices for them,” Typlin says. “They have a practice of going up to their home in Quogue [in the Hamptons on Long Island] on weekends, and they don’t return phone calls. They spend quality time together.”

Regarding the move from New York, she says Klieman “cried for three days, then she said OK, she has to do this. She’s looking at the broader picture. She wants her husband to be happy and successful.”

Bratton’s new job will force Klieman to give up her “perfect life” in New York--a job she loves, dinner out at the restaurants of the rich and famous (Elaine’s, Nobu, Daniel, 11 Madison Park), and their apartment in Murray Hill, a charming and historic area of Manhattan.

She’ll miss most of all her “dream house,” her favorite place in the world, their Long Island sanctuary surrounded by woods, nestled against a nature preserve, and five lovely minutes from the Atlantic Ocean.

“It’s for sale,” she says with a catch in her throat.

When asked if Klieman is the kind of woman who would give up everything for her man, Rep. Delahunt laughs. “We all mellow with time,” he says.

As far as relocations go, she could have done worse.

“It’s not like she’s moving to Ames, Iowa,” says Silverglate, the Boston attorney. “I wouldn’t expect her to move if her husband became police chief of Ames, Iowa. It’s not like she’s relegated to the boondocks. People like Rikki make their own scene.”

Court TV doesn’t broadcast out of L.A., so Klieman will be looking for something to do. “There’s my old world, the entertainment world, and bet your bottom dollar I’ll be looking there. There is my present world, which is the TV world, which I would also look at, obviously. There is my world, [in which] I teach. I’m still an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School.”

One thing is certain, Klieman says. “You can rest assured, I’m not going to be sitting home or doing yoga on the beach. It’s not in my character to simply be Mrs. Bratton.”