‘Mickey’ Ziffren, 86; Author, Activist in Politics, Charities

Muriel “Mickey” Ziffren, the consummate political wife and hostess who was a force in Southern California political, charitable and cultural affairs for more than half a century, has died. She was 86.

Ziffren, a former member of the California Fair Political Practices Commission who earned her own following as a novelist, died Monday night at her home in Malibu of natural causes, said her son, John Ziffren.

“We women start our lives all over again and again and again,” she told The Times in 1979, just after publication of her novel, “A Political Affair.” She certainly had done just that.

Mickey Ziffren was married for 43 years to Paul Ziffren, attorney to such entertainers as Charlton Heston and Danny Thomas, and an influential member of the Democratic National Committee and respected chairman of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. He died in 1991.

She helped create LA’s BEST -- Better Educated Students for Tomorrow -- the Neighbors of Watts program and the charitable Phoenix House.

“Mickey Ziffren believed,” said Carla Sanger, current LA’s BEST president and chief executive, “that all children should be privileged to have a safe place to be, with fun activities and adult supervision, during the critical hours after school.... Her continuing support of LA’s BEST ensured that L.A.’s children with the greatest needs and fewest resources have opportunities for homework help, sports, and visual and performing arts activities, under the guidance of adults who care about them, every day after school.”

Ziffren also worked with her husband to elect politicians including Gov. Pat Brown and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley.

It was Bradley who named her to LA’s BEST board when the organization was created in 1988.

In 1981, recognizing Mickey Ziffren’s contributions to politics and government, then-California Secretary of State March Fong Eu appointed her to a four-year term on the five-member California Fair Political Practices Commission.

Ziffren was thoroughly steeped in material for her novel, which a Times reviewer pronounced “a breeze to read.”

The book featured Norah Jones Ashley, an Academy Award-winning actress who is asked by the president, best friend of her millionaire industrialist husband, to run against a California senator with presidential ambitions who is named Richard Hardwick.

Ziffren, who met her husband at a dinner party in Washington, D.C., married him six weeks later -- in time to help him launch the campaign of former movie star Helen Gahagan Douglas against fellow Rep. Richard M. Nixon for the U.S. Senate.

Douglas lost that 1950 contest. Ziffren’s heroine Ashley won hers. But the novel, written three decades after the Douglas-Nixon Senate campaign, was no nonfiction political diary.

“The story is not a rehash of the past,” a Washington Post reviewer spelled out, “and to belabor the point would be to underrate Ziffren’s considerable skill as a writer of fiction.... [She] mixes elements that make readers turn pages -- Hollywood glamour, political corruption, murder, illicit sex -- with a good dose of practical idealism, for a winning combination.

Her story is well put together and develops logically to a suspenseful conclusion.”

In the Times interview in 1979, Ziffren said she wrote the novel after musing to her husband -- as they pored over stacks of books in bed -- that anybody could write, only to hear him snap: “No. A storyteller is a special talent.”

She duly dedicated the book to him -- “my beloved sleep-in editor without whose discouragement this book would never have been written.”

Ziffren, who identified herself as a member of “the marrying generation,” was born to a surgeon father and socialite mother in Philadelphia, attended Rollins College.

At 20 she married a native Washingtonian, with whom she had a daughter, Toni.

That marriage ended in divorce.

At 60, Ziffren said, after putting husband and children first for several decades, she enjoyed becoming a novelist, spending afternoons scribbling her manuscript on a yellow pad.

“I’m faced with the happy thought that I can do anything I want,” she said.

“This is my time, and I intend to ... write.... Writing is the most serious discipline of anything I’ve done in my 60 years.”

In addition to her son, John, an award-winning television producer, and her daughter, she is survived by two grandchildren.

Services will be private. The family has asked that any memorial donations be made to LA’s BEST.