Uncurbed enthusiasm

When Laurie David, environmental activist extraordinaire, sees people wending down the streets in Hummers, she just can’t help herself. “I have to send them negative vibes and sometimes I get busted,” she admits. “I’m like scowling at a woman driving a Hummer and she sees me, and her window goes down, and I’m forced to say, ‘Do you know what you’re driving? How many miles a gallon do you get in that?’ Then we get into an altercation and my husband’s horrified and begs me to change my last name back to my maiden name.”

David’s husband is Larry David, the co-creator of “Seinfeld” and now star and creator of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” On the show, he’s married to a Mrs. David, who’s the model of wifely forbearance, lithe, blond, a Pacific Palisades semi-saint. That’s not this wife.

“That’s his dream wife!” says David, using her favorite line about the character played by Cheryl Hines. “Trust me. I’m not nearly as patient or as nice to Larry as she is.” The real Mrs. David is a lithe, dark, glossy-haired former New Yorker.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, in the new, environmentally sound West Coast headquarters of the Natural Resources Defense Council, she was wearing a lemon drop sweater, a kicky black skirt and black stiletto boots. With an upfront manner, she’s more of the pushy broad genus, a former show biz executive who for the last eight years has devoted herself to such passions as stopping global warming and promoting fuel-efficient vehicles.

The TV show might be raising her fictional profile, but the real Mrs. David does just fine on her own, magnetizing not only supporters but rabid detractors who bemoan celebrities with money and mouths -- and all-access passes to the media.

David is a board member of the NRDC, which employs a platoon of lawyers and scientists to battle on behalf of the environment through the courts and in Washington, D.C. On Thursday, the organization is opening the Leonardo DiCaprio e-Activism Zone and the David Family Environmental Action Center, a Santa Monica mini-museum with a gift shop selling hiking books and Patagonia sweatshirts emblazoned with the NRDC logo.

David, whose husband has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from the syndication of “Seinfeld,” admits, “I’m not someone who funds buildings. That doesn’t interest me. I’m more interested in programs.” But when she finally saw the environmentally sound center, which boasts exhibits on topics such as global warming, as well as computers on which attendees can write their congressional representatives, she was “blown away.”

“I got it -- why having a green building is so important. Everyone who walks into this building is going to leave this building thinking about it. The chairs are made out of old seat belts. The rugs have blue jeans in them. Everything is sustainable here. If everybody leaves with one thing [that they think] I could do this way or that way -- that’s going to change the world. You create these tiny ripples.”

The Davids aren’t the only Hollywood names dotting the gray clapboard (which is actually Hardiplank wood-fiber/cement siding) building. The office is named for longtime trustee Robert Redford, and includes the Horn Family (Warner Bros. President Alan Horn) terrace, and the Peter Morton (CEO of the Hard Rock Hotel) conference room.

Hollywood inroads

While the NRDC has been in California for the last 15 years, it’s only in the last several years that it’s made serious inroads into the Hollywood community, attracting the support of everyone from Cameron Diaz to Tom Hanks. That’s in no small part due to David, who, among many things, produces its biannual fundraiser, which raises millions.

“She’s someone whose dedication to these issues is like you wouldn’t believe,” says NRDC founder John Adams. “It’s unbelievable the doors that have been opened.”

“One of my main jobs is to cultivate advocates and activists,” explains David, who has held “dozens and dozens” of dinners at her house, as well as “eco-salons” to introduce leading environmental thinkers to the community. She’s not done yet. “I want to meet every single person in this town who cares about environmental issues and I want to get them active. I want to train them and I want them working with me on these issues.

“Somebody said to me Elizabeth Wiatt [wife of William Morris President Jim Wiatt] cares about environmental issues,” says David, recounting the informal networking that goes on. “I’m like, ‘She does? Can you introduce me to her?’ She’s now like my best friend and partner.”

In fact, David and Wiatt co-chair the NRDC’s Action Forum, a posse, primarily of Hollywood wives, dedicated to the environment. The group, which includes Kelly Chapman Meyer (wife of Universal Studios President Ron Meyer) and Gigi Levangerie Grazer (writer and wife of producer Brian Grazer), made a whirlwind trip to Washington last year to lobby Congress to vote against the energy bill. Adams credits David with being instrumental in getting a recent bill passed in California that requires the state government to buy the most fuel-efficient cars for their fleets.

Closer to home, they’ve lobbied all the studios about putting hybrid cars in their movies or at least hiring them for their production crews, and written to TV producers about featuring them. David, who drives a 2004 Prius, reels off the shows that now have characters driving hybrids, including “24,” “Miss Match” and “Alias.”

Both the screen Larry David and the real Larry David drive hybrids, and this week’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” featured a positively romantic close-up of the pale blue Prius. “Wasn’t it fantastic?” says Laurie David. “I was so excited. To me, that’s the greatest gift he could give me. Any time he mentions the organization on the show, I am very nice to him that day.”

Indeed, David is long accustomed to having their lives plundered for art, although she says that in real life, she’s much more confrontational than her husband. That incident with the Hummer, she says, “if it wasn’t in last season, it will be in this season.”

David, who’s in her mid-40s, says her passion for the environment dates to her childhood obsession with littering. “Back then people would smoke cigarettes all the time and they would have ashtrays full of cigarette butts in the car, and they used to take the ashtrays and dump them out onto the sidewalk. When I saw people throwing things out of windows of cars, I’d be screaming in the back seat and trying to confront the other drivers. My mother would get mad at me.”

In the intervening years, she booked guests for the David Letterman show, managed comedians and supervised sitcoms for the Fox network, ultimately quitting when “Seinfeld” became such a hit, to have two children, now 7 and 9.

“I wasn’t going to develop a better show than ‘Seinfeld.’ OK, that’s out now,” she figured. Ultimately, Horn introduced her to Adams, and the NRDC. “Once you start having kids, you have to engage in these issues.”

On most mornings, David wakes up, reads the paper and starts getting mad. Today’s gut-puncher was a front-page article in the New York Times about how Subaru was reconfiguring its sedans as light trucks to get around fuel-economy and pollution standards. She called Robert Kennedy Jr. about it, because the leading environmentalist has been doing a lot of interviews recently, and then got on the phone with her walking partner, political gadfly Arianna Huffington “at 8:20 in the morning and got her riled up.” They have been talking throughout the day to figure out how to respond. “I’m sure I’ll be calling Barbara Boxer at some point today,” David says.

Fuel-efficiency has been one of David’s biggest bugaboos, and along with Huffington, producer Lawrence Bender, and agent Ari Emmanuel, David started the Detroit Project, which last year launched a series of provocative ads which equated driving SUVs with supporting terrorism.

If you agree with her, David’s weirdly upbeat sense of outrage can be infectious. Not everyone agrees however. Although the ads appeared on cable outlets, many stations refused to run them.

More recently, David has been wading into even more contentious waters -- presidential politics -- and her Palisades home (and ergo, her wallet and connections) has been one of Hollywood’s destination points for Democratic politicians looking for dollars. Although she and her husband have declined to endorse any one candidate, they’ve held several events for Sen. John Edwards at their home, sponsored several Wesley K. Clark events, and given money to everyone from Sen. John F. Kerry to former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

“Right now I’m really focused on after the primaries, on the strategy and organization to get out the vote.”

Media firestorm

More recently, David almost single-handedly started a talk radio firestorm, when she sent out an e-mail to hundreds of interested parties, inviting them to “the most important meeting you can attend to prevent the advancement of the current extremist right-wing agenda.” It was an opportunity to hear about America Coming Together, an effort to mobilize Democratic voters in 17 states, as well as the Media Fund, a group that hopes to raise $80 million dollars to fund an independent advertising campaign in support of the eventual Democratic presidential nominee.

Later, an enthusiast in the Midwest apparently added the words “hate Bush” into the log line of the e-mail, which caught the attention of conservative Internet macher Matt Drudge, who was soon decrying the “Hate Bush” meeting. Rush Limbaugh was calling it a convocation of “Left Coast Hollywood kooks.” A hundred attendees were expected, and almost 300 showed up, along with a bevy of TV cameras.

David is now planning a March event in New York to introduce the group to high-end New York. Her co-chairs include Jann Wenner, Nora Ephron, MTV’s Tom Freston, Meryl Streep and George Soros.

If anything, the firebrand conservationist seems energized by the fracas.

“Ultimately, it was a blessing in disguise. I’m so appreciative to Matt Drudge for everything he’s done for me,” she cracks, “and I never met the guy.

“He turned a very small evening into a very large evening.”