Hollywood Bill Will Get His Shot at LAPD Stardom

I woke up Monday in no mood to take a shine to our shiny-new police chief, Bill Bratton, who was being “pinned” that day with the LAPD badge bearing no number, just four stars.

He’d already been chief for three days. He was sworn in privately last week in time to helicopter off on a retreat of city officials in Lake Arrowhead, which meant this Monday ceremony at the L.A. Police Academy was a retake, for public consumption. Swell, I think. Here one weekend, and already he’s doing retakes. Hollywood Bill has come to town -- and where does he come from? Boston and New York, whose residents believe they understand L.A. because they watch the Oscars and “Dragnet” reruns, and think this is either an Eden populated by morons with silicone for brains, or a hellhole filled with felons wearing sun block. They didn’t even watch our World Series.

On top of that, I’d just seen the estimate for a retaining wall for my hillside, which is slowly trying to flee the premises and maybe take my house along with it, a Southern California nightmare outside the ken of New Yorkers and Bostonians.

So I was not in a frame of mind to cotton to someone who rides into town like the Lone Ranger, saying, “Stand aside, folks, and let a professional take care of this,” who says fighting graffiti is Job One, when just because getting rid of turnstile-jumpers and squeegee men did the trick on bottom-up crime-fighting in New York doesn’t mean it’ll work here in L.A.

But Hollywood Bill worked his wiles on me at the “badge-pinning” at the Police Academy on Monday, and had me eating the popcorn out of his hand, at least for the duration of the show, because:

He’s married to a journalist -- well, an anchor for Court TV, and she earns maybe four times what he does.

He gave a pretty fair speech, adroitly, without notes (drawn in part from his own book so it’s all in his head).

His hat looked too big and kept sliding forward on his head as he spoke (say it, somebody -- maybe his head will soon grow to fit it).

He spent part of his speech telling cops about their obligations, among them to cut out the “waving and smiling” and get out of their cars.

He even used that slangy word “cop,” which I don’t think I ever heard Bernard Parks utter. (The name “Parks” was not so much as whispered on Monday, but when 10-years’-gone chief Daryl F. Gates was introduced, it broke the applause-o-meter. That man still looks about 50; I swear he’s sold his soul to Jack LaLanne.)

He made a little jest about calling the paramedics when the badge got pinned on him, and then joked again that the Police Commission could “stick me any time, so long as it’s not in the back.”

And that R thing, that missing-consonant JFK-Bostonian absent R. To some mirth, Bratton did “solemnly sweah” to uphold the city “chah-tah.” Rocky Delgadillo, the L.A. city attorney, plundered his kid’s refrigerator-magnet alphabet that morning and gave Bratton the letter R to replace his missing one. (Also missing: Councilman Nate Holden, the only one of 15 to vote against Bratton and the only one not to show up on Monday; too busy, he said, with his regular Monday constituent meetings to spend three hours at a swearing-in for a man who already was sworn in.)

But even if Bratton hadn’t been a nimble performer, I’d decided to honeymoon with him. L.A. is one big bully pulpit and our public figures have not been filling it. Anyone monitoring L.A. from another planet must think Rob Reiner is the mayor and Arnold Schwarzenegger the police chief, for all that the real ones seem to have abdicated air time.

So what if Bratton campaigned for the chief’s job, sending out his autobiography and press packets with him on the cover of Time magazine? So what if he’s been called showboater and grandstander? To get to the dais on Monday, Bratton had to walk past the Jack Webb/William H. Parker Education Center -- doesn’t that suggest something about this place? Beneath every LAPD badge beats the heart of a star manque -- why not the chief’s, too? (I don’t mind if he goes Hollywood, just so long as he doesn’t move to Brentwood. Can some real estate agent from Los Feliz please send him a flier and point out that Madonna once lived there?)

And there on the greensward at the Police Academy, I realized I’ve grown pretty weary of the mystical brotherhood of LAPD stuff.

Yes, L.A. is a different sort of city, but that’s a starting block, not a roadblock. Joe Wambaugh is absolutely correct when he says that a lot of the bragging rights Easterners have claimed, from SWAT to community policing, came out of L.A., and right, too, that any LAPD brass who’d have the brass to apply for the chief’s job in New York would get slow-roasted in the press for daring to think he or she could lead the 212-PD.

But I’m weary of the Parker Center pathology, where the sixth floor has behaved less like part of city government and more like the Kremlin with side arms. So I’ll give the Bratton Show a chance, and see how his numbers go, before I think of changing the channel. Just so long as he’s not opposite “The West Wing.”

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt. morrison@latimes.com.