New Chapter for Old-School Politician

The Office of the Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco is two offices really, one for work and one for show. For a month now, a small, dapper man has spent weekends bustling from one to the other, alone but for his security detail.

Great heaps of official flotsam surround him -- wooden plaques, grip-and-grin photos, hard hats from ribbon cuttings, gag gifts from famous people, commemorative snow globes. They cover the big ceremonial desk and the long conference table, fill the deep leather chairs and the polished tops of credenzas. The man spent seven hours on Thanksgiving weekend and only got through three cupboards.

“Years of accumulation,” Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr. chuckled, gesturing one recent evening toward a landslide of half-filled packing boxes. His eyes were guarded, his tone carefully unsentimental.

“But,” he said, “it is time to go.”

After nearly four decades, the Texan who shined shoes as a child and rose to become one of the most powerful political figures in California is quietly doing what his adversaries have craved for a generation: moving on.

Having represented San Francisco more than half his life -- first for 16 years as a rank-and-file assemblyman, then for a record 14 1/2 years as speaker of the Assembly, then for the maximum two four-year terms as mayor -- Brown let it be known last month that he was done with elective office.

This is a city whose politics are entwined with youth and rebellion, and the last election revealed what he had suspected for some time -- that a generational shift is underway.

“A Jurassic Park resident,” Brown has taken to calling himself as he approaches his 70th birthday. The mayor-elect, Brown’s protege Gavin Newsom, is younger than Brown’s own son.

After Jan. 8, when Newsom is sworn in, Brown is not sure what his next chapter will be, he says. Making some serious money maybe. Maybe founding a public policy institute. He definitely intends to continue working, he says.

The City Charter prohibits the mayor from earning any income beyond the job’s $161,000 annual salary, and the eight years since Brown sold his law practice have cost him, he estimates, about $1 million.

He has spent, he says philosophically, “about $10,000 a month more than I make” maintaining his exuberant lifestyle in this priciest of cities. He still drives a luxury car -- a Mercedes 600SL -- eats virtually every meal out and wears elegant Brioni suits and Borsalino fedoras.

He still is a regular, with some lovely young date, on the social circuit. (Event planners say they’ve long since given up trying to keep the names straight, and have taken to just writing “Guest of Willie Brown” on the place cards.)

Less famously, he has continued to discreetly support numerous dependants and loved ones, from extended family to the baby he fathered with his 41-year-old fundraiser, Carolyn Carpeneti, two years ago. His wife, Blanche, a teacher of ethnic dance from whom he has been separated since 1980, says that he routinely steps in as needed to help his three grown children and that when she suffered serious health problems recently, Brown covered the expense entirely.

“I have never permitted any member of my family to suffer, not in my entire life,” the mayor said, sitting for an interview recently in his ceremonial office. He wore a dark blue suit and a crisp white pocket handkerchief, and, though it was late in the day, neither had even a hint of a wrinkle. “So I treated my bank account just as if my law practice still existed.”

Consequently, he said (and Blanche Brown confirmed), his retirement savings are substantially depleted, and except for the big family home overlooking Haight Ashbury where she lives, most of his holdings -- his stock, his Cathedral Hill condo, property in Sacramento -- have been sold. His son says the Mercedes is at least 5 years old, maybe older; his friends say Brown has made do for a while now with mixed-and-matched pieces from his existing wardrobe. He rents a two-bedroom apartment on Nob Hill.

Few expect him to want for job offers. Law firms and investment banks, TV and radio stations, the rubber chicken circuit -- all, he says, have been making inquiries. He has hired a lawyer to field the offers, and Carpeneti -- whom he says he no longer sees romantically, but with whom he has remained friends -- organized a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser last week for the public policy institute he hopes to create, either on his own or with an academic institution.

But friends and family members say it isn’t clear what, if any of it, tempts him. Politics -- the give and take, the cutting of deals, the delicate coaxing out of policy and consensus -- has been his gift and his passion. And now, for a host of reasons, it is the one option that appears to be closed to him. Or, perhaps more accurately, the one that Brown can’t bring himself to act on.

In February, he lost a bid for the presidency of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the pension fund on whose board he serves. And as recently as last year, he was raising money to run for the soon-to-be-vacant seat of his old friend state Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco), who is himself 71 and will be forced out next year by term limits.

But Bay Area politics have been swayed increasingly by young, unapologetically radical leftists who are not only leery of Brown, but also of his generation and even the Democratic Party.

Polls showed that the state Senate race, though winnable, would be humbling -- “like a three-time Oscar winner having to take a screen test,” Burton sourly described it. Last month, Brown let the filing deadline come and go without submitting the requisite papers.

“I didn’t want to go back and ask everybody to vote for me again,” he said, his voice hardening. “I really am sick of reinventing the wheel.”

About 35% of the voting landscape in San Francisco changes every three or four years, he said, and over the last cycle, the electorate has not only turned over, but -- for now -- also turned against incumbents.

“The public is groping among themselves to find an answer to their own frustrations, their own disappointments, their own trials and tribulations,” he said. “And if they can find somebody to grab and choke and squeeze, they’re doin’ it.”

The recent gubernatorial recall was part of the trend, he said, but he added that he’d also seen it in endorsements he lost because his accomplishments -- important gay rights laws he got passed as a legislator, for example -- were now taken for granted.

“Multiply that with all the other things that you’ve done that ought to eliminate the need for you to have to crawl and compete with some candidate who doesn’t know their ... from a hole in the ground, who’s misrepresenting, who’s misstating, and when you have the history I have.... “

His voice trailed off.

“Every public job I’ve had, I’ve rushed to work,” he said. “Public service is my life. It’s what keeps me living. I’d still be a member of the California State Assembly except for term limits. I’d still be mayor of San Francisco except for term limits. But it’s a whole different world now. It’s a world in which I am absolutely certain old-timers such as I am would absolutely not belong.”

A Legendary Ascent

Brown’s life is by now the stuff of biography and legend: the enterprising child from Mineola, Texas, born out of wedlock to a waiter and a maid. The shoeshine boy whose white customers would, for laughs, flip quarters into a spittoon next to the shine stand just to see if he’d scrape for the money. The bright Mineola Colored High School kid who, upon graduation, was sent west to live with his Uncle Itsie, a big, sharply dressed man who had gone to San Francisco during World War II to work in a shipyard and had ended up running a gambling establishment.

It was Aug. 4, 1951, when Brown stepped off the train from Dallas, he often tells people, reeling off month, day and year like a glorious milestone in history. In fact, the most complicated relationship of Brown’s life would be with San Francisco, which would both bless and abuse him.

It would give him his education at San Francisco State and UC’s Hastings College of the Law. It would give him political allies such as Burton, a gangly white basketball player whom Brown befriended in school. It would give him his wife, a half-black, half-Filipina sorority girl whom he met at S.F. State when she was a freshman.

But the city’s bounty, in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, would only extend so far for a young black man with state-school credentials. Brown was turned away when he tried to get a job with the big, white-dominated law firms, and ended up making his reputation representing pimps and hookers. When his wife and a black girlfriend went house hunting in a swank new development in the city, Blanche said, the real estate agents “ran out the back door” rather than show the property to nonwhites.

Furious, Brown told them to sit and wait, which they did until a janitor came to lock up. Brown then called the local black newspaper and, with the publicity, incited one of the city’s first sit-ins. The ensuing attention catapulted him into citywide prominence, and the next year Burton and his brother, Phil, who were organizing what would become that generation’s ascent to power among Democrats in San Francisco, tapped him to run for the Assembly.

Brown, then 28, lost, but won on his second try two years later.

At that point, San Francisco began to experience Brown from afar, and thus for a long time failed to fully understand his character. For example, although his friends in the Burton faction came from a staunch leftist background, Brown was a self-made centrist whose easy nature tended away from ideology and agenda. Had he not been African American, he has long said, it isn’t clear how much he and the liberal wing of his party might have had in common.

“I have always been mainstream, but blackness positioned you on the left in the white world of that time,” he told Los Angeles Times writer Robert Scheer in 1991. “I was never really a member of the labor mentality. I wanted to own this country.”

Still, his constituents repeatedly reelected him. It was enough for his liberal base that he backed civil rights and farmworkers’ rights and affirmative action and the decriminalization of all private sex acts between consenting adults, a milestone in the gay rights movement. They liked his cunning and joie de vivre, the fast cars and the young, ambitious girlfriends that he went with to the Academy Awards and the Kentucky Derby.

If Brown was several degrees comfier than they were with oil and tobacco money, if his law firm accommodated big developers and the occasional business with ties to apartheid, if he cut deals with Republicans, if the FBI kept asking about him, if the rest of the state was coming to view the self-described ayatollah of the Assembly as the biggest insider in Sacramento, San Franciscans didn’t seem to see it.

“A fresh wind is blowin’ down the musty old corridors of power,” the San Francisco Chronicle’s famed Herb Caen rejoiced in 1996, when Brown -- a fixture in power corridors -- became mayor. By then California, with Brown cited as a prime reason why, had enacted legislative term limits and Brown, in a final flourish, had orchestrated the election of the next Assembly speaker on his way out. On the night of his inauguration, tens of thousands of people danced on the waterfront.

In-His-Face Activism

“I have to run up to the redevelopment agency and make a pitch,” he said 15 minutes into the interview. “Wanna come?”

Brown’s footsteps were rapid and quiet as he crossed the carpeted room and threw open the door to the great marble hallway. A wave of noise hit. Crowds of bureaucrats and tourists jammed and clattered under the arches. A bespectacled man rushed up to ask Brown’s advice on a labor dispute involving the city’s homeless shelters. A cop blocked his path with a teenager who wanted to meet him. Supplicants greeted him. Bystanders gawked.

Then: “WE WANT IN! WE WANT IN!”

Brown had arrived at the redevelopment meeting, where his new, post-electoral relationship with San Francisco was on display. A protest was in full swing as a clutch of activists -- there to oppose a development agreement for the defunct and long-blighted Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard that would both cap Brown’s term and end decades of wrangling -- learned that the room was filled and that no one else could be admitted.

As had become routine with the city’s leftists, they blamed Brown.

“THE COMMUNITY WANTS IN. YOU’RE BULLDOGGING THIS MEETING!”

A gray-haired woman shoved herself up against a security guard and thrust her face, bellowing, into Brown’s. He looked past her.

“YOU’RE BULLDOGGING THIS MEETING. WE WANT A BIGGER ROOM!”

“Shhhhh!” Brown finally erupted as if to an incorrigible child, putting an index finger to his lips.

The woman glared back. “Mayor Brown doesn’t want the community to be in this room!”

“Shhhhh!” Brown repeated. “Why are you bein’ so stupid? Why do you have to be so stupid?”

But there could be no negotiation. After eight years in which Brown and San Francisco had thoroughly gotten to know each other, the city’s far left had come to view him as -- surprise -- an establishment insider, and Brown had come to see them as ideologues, rigid and self-defeating.

Later, the protesters would charge that Brown wanted the deal so his developer pals could get rich gentrifying that long-suffering end of the city.

“What it is, is, they don’t want the process to end,” he responded, laughing, almost in resigned admiration, as he took a fistful of phone messages from his secretary. “Seriously. People are obsessed with process here. They are firmly of the opinion that if what is being done isn’t, in their wisdom, perfect, then nothing should be done and we should just start all over. Lunatics!”

He had not started out wanting to be mayor. If he had been able to remain speaker, he would never have taken this job, he has repeatedly said.

“I absolutely abhorred the idea that I would have to fix a pothole or that I would have to settle a dispute between dog owners, dog walkers and soccer moms,” he recalled in a recent address.

But aside from the job’s minutiae, there were huge differences between the rule-bound chessboard of Sacramento and this thin-skinned, fractious, dogmatic gem of a city that had chewed up and spit out the two previous mayors after one term.

“I really was not part of the political perspective of San Francisco,” Brown said, still laughing after the hallway encounter. “Not until I became mayor did I realize that nonsense like this takes place every day here.

“Participatory democracy is like the hallmark of this city,” he said. “People here have an opinion, and they express it, and it changes hourly and they are absolutely certain about every assertion.”

In fact, one of the stress points of Brown’s tenure has been the disconnect between the absolutism of so many San Francisco factions and Brown’s preference for the more flexible, deal-making parts of public service.

“Structured situations, where people could get together in a room and knock heads and everyone would walk out with their half a loaf and things were done -- he could do that,” said Richard DeLeon, a San Francisco State political science professor who is writing a book on Brown’s years as mayor. “But then he came into this chaotic, molten political environment.”

DeLeon remembered that when one of the city’s signature sociopolitical phenomena, the radical bicyclists’ movement Critical Mass, began commandeering downtown streets with mass rush-hour rides early in Brown’s first term, the mayor’s negotiating skills were useless, because the anarchist Critical Mass has no leader.

“When it came to populist, dispersed, grass-roots groups such as you find in San Francisco,” DeLeon said, “those weren’t suited to his special skills.”

Brown’s skills did work, spectacularly, on providing clout and attention for the city, and on big-ticket endeavors.

Even Supervisor Aaron Peskin, one of his most consistent critics, acknowledged: “The guy’s cut more ribbons than any mayor in the last half-century.”

Brown pushed through construction of the city’s urbane new ballpark and a new international terminal at San Francisco International Airport; kick-started a second UC San Francisco campus at Mission Bay with new housing, shops and offices around it; and oversaw the renaissance of the Embarcadero, the expansion of the convention and visitors center, and the renovation of City Hall.

He even fixed (though far later than promised) the inept Municipal Railway, the city’s bus, streetcar and cable car system known as the “Muni.”

And Brown was fun. He listed his home phone number and schmoozed at church and in nightclubs. He held Saturday office hours, when everyone -- on or off psychotropic medication -- could talk to him.

But as the dot-com boom convulsed the city in the late 1990s, pricing out artists and schoolteachers and families, the honeymoon ended.

San Franciscans took offense at his breezy behavior. He took limousine motorcades and international junkets. At a benefit, he merrily sashayed across the stage of “Beach Blanket Babylon,” the long-running musical revue, in emperor’s robes after editorial cartoons depicted him as “King Willie” with a crown and scepter.

He had to apologize to the Board of Supervisors after the New Yorker quoted him calling its members “pantywaist politicians” and “mistresses you have to service.”

He infuriated sports fans when he joked that Golden State Warriors Coach P.J. Carlesimo “may have needed choking” after Latrell Sprewell grabbed the man by the neck, and again when he quipped, after a bad game by the San Francisco 49ers, that the team’s then-quarterback Elvis Grbac was “an embarrassment to humankind.”

And that was just his first term, before the papers began criticizing the scores of Brown’s friends and supporters -- some judged competent, some far less so -- who were being added to the city payroll and before the local economy was slammed by the tech bust and the post-9/11 tourism crash.

Brown won reelection in 1999 in a campaign fueled by record spending and support from the city’s older and more conservative precincts, but the Board of Supervisors was taken over by his opponents.

They tried to thwart his pro-growth decisions on land use, blocked an ambitious plan he had championed to expand the airport’s runways, cut into his appointment powers and accused him of improperly steering city business to supporters. Brown countered that those supporters were qualified and that he often had pals on both sides of the bidding.

But the implications -- that he was too entrenched, too connected, that anyone with that much juice had to be dirty -- were like a replay of his last years in Sacramento. Indeed, one of his old Sacramento pals, Paul Horcher, the former assemblyman from Diamond Bar who turned on his fellow Republicans to help Brown control the speakership at the end of his tenure, has had an executive job at City Hall since Brown’s mayoral election.

“Brown left this legacy that cutting deals and feeding your army is the way government should be, to the point that a whole lot of folks here have forgotten what good public policy is about,” Peskin said.

When the president of the new board, Matt Gonzalez, campaigned for mayor, it was on an openly anti-Brown platform.

But as he prepares to exit, Brown’s positive ratings have climbed above the 50% mark, local pollster David Binder said, and San Francisco seems already to be missing “Da Mayor.”

Dozens of goodbye parties have been held for him in recent weeks, hosted by everyone from the Residents Assn. of the Public Housing Authority to Ed Moose, proprietor of Moose’s Restaurant in North Beach.

Though such critics as San Francisco Common Cause’s Fred Ridel maintain that “corruption and incompetence” will be Brown’s legacy (“Willie Brown’s first priority is, was and always will be Willie Brown,” Ridel says), others believe just as vehemently that the city should be deeply grateful for him.

“I’m a fourth-generation San Franciscan, and I voted for him twice. And I think the city was lucky to have him,” said State Librarian Kevin Starr.

Policy Institute Perhaps

Some months ago, after several UC Berkeley professors approached Brown about helping with the school’s political internship program, he became excited at the notion of an institute through which he could share his political knowledge.

Talks with UC Berkeley failed, in part because Brown’s vision was grand and, some speculated, because he remains controversial from a university fundraising standpoint. But he is still considering either an independent enterprise or an alliance with a different school, maybe another UC campus or San Francisco State.

His health is good, though friends say he suffers from macular degeneration and sees so poorly now that he recognizes most people by voice even when he wears glasses.

Brown remains, by all accounts, close to his family.

Three of his children are nearby -- his son, Michael, 40, owns a clothing store in the Haight and lives with his wife and new baby in Oakland; his daughter Susan, 45, recently moved back to the Bay Area to become a filmmaker; and his toddler, Sydney, lives across town from him with her mother. Daughter Robin, 43, lives in New York with her husband and two children and works for Newsweek.

“I was never one of those daily fathers,” he said, and now, with the prospect of more leisure time, he still isn’t: “Noooo!” he joked. “Sleep deprivation’s not part of my pain level.” (His staff disputes this, saying his “pain level” has more to do with diaper changing than staying up late.) His two-seater car has no room for a baby’s car seat.

Still, on the day of the interview, he said he had been out buying dresses for his youngest daughter. “Know what she calls City Hall?” he asked. “Daddy’s house! ‘That’s my daddy’s house,’ she says!”

Not long ago, Blanche Brown said, he cooked breakfast at his apartment for the toddler and his two visiting granddaughters. Sitting in her own airy kitchen on a rainy day, the room smelling like muffins, she laughed merrily at the mental image of Brown flipping pancakes and warming plates. When his sisters visited recently, she said, the owner’s manual to the stove was still inside his oven.

“Carolyn [Carpeneti] said it was the funniest thing she ever saw -- he was, like bustling around in the kitchen!” Blanche recalled, adding that she is “very friendly” with Carpeneti and thinks her husband’s new baby “is a little cutie.”

“My relationship with all his women friends has been friendly,” she said, noting that she and Brown have lived apart, after all, since their 40s, when she found out about his dalliances.

Asked how she reacted when she learned he was to become a father again so late in life, Blanche Brown -- a short, still-graceful woman with almond eyes and cropped gray hair -- grinned and then mimed letting her jaw drop. Friends said “she laughed for about five minutes,” to Brown’s intense discomfort.

When the question of why the couple hadn’t divorced was raised, she smiled fondly and said, “I honestly don’t know.”

Had Brown ever considered marrying Carpeneti? “I have a wife,” he replied.

Blanche said she hoped her husband’s next step would focus on his institute. “I think he just has so much to offer that way,” she said.

His son said he thought Brown would make the perfect state Democratic Party chairman if the position came open.

The mayor’s friends Wilkes Bashford, a clothier, and Stanlee Gatti, an event planner, think he should be in show business.

Brown himself says only that he is glad he has so many friends and contacts, and that, from the looks of things, he may not need to ask them for favors: “I had an uncle who always used to say, ‘A friend in need is a pest!’ ”

“He’ll probably make more money than God, and he’ll need to,” said old friend Burton. “But I do think he is worried. You’re in this job for so many years, and then you wake up one day and it’s all changed and what ... are you going to do now?”

Brown’s former law partner, San Francisco Superior Court Judge John Dearman, said he called the mayor not long ago.

“I said, ‘You depressed, dude?’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Well it’s not going to be long before you’re no longer a public figure.’ He said, ‘Sure, it’ll be a letdown, but I will adjust.’

“But I don’t know if I believe it, not really,” the judge said. He remembered that at Brown’s final State of the City address, as Dearman watched from the dais, the mayor’s voice shook with emotion as his speech concluded.

“He turned around at the podium and looked at me, and his eyes were tearful,” said Dearman, whose friendship with Brown dates to the days when theirs were the only two black faces at the city’s grass-roots Democratic club meetings. “I gave him the ol’ high five, and I said, ‘Man, that was a great speech.’

“And he didn’t answer, because he couldn’t talk.”