Brown can turn on the charm -- in person

Basic Brown

My Life and Our Times

Willie Brown

Simon & Schuster: 352 pp., $26

*

Oscar WILDE observed the absurdity of dividing people into good and bad. As he saw it, people were either charming or tedious. By that measure, Willie Lewis Brown Jr. has few contemporary equals. He goes down as one of the most charming, least tedious politicians in modern California history.

This great-grandson of Southern slaves lost but one election, his first. After that, his remarkable life has been a celebration of guile, wit, grace, theatrics and -- yes -- the grandeur of public service. Winning was important. But how the winner conducted himself counted for plenty too. Too bad that Brown’s loose-jointed memoir, “Basic Brown,” lands on the wrong side of Wilde’s maxim. Charming it is not.

Brown was a Democrat on his way up in the state Assembly when I arrived in Sacramento as a cub wire service reporter. He was my kind of politician: bold when others were meek, brash when his colleagues were measured. He was a pugilist, a dandy, a raconteur -- traits that frightened other politicians, but which never seemed to hold Brown back.

Face it, he was interesting in a business that perpetually suffers from aching dullness. He had a grin as big as a hundred-dollar bill and he spent from it freely. His renowned eloquence bestowed consequence on the subjects that mattered to him.

No wonder that his tenure as speaker of the Assembly became a standard for others. No wonder that after he was elected mayor of San Francisco, Newsweek put him on the cover to illustrate an article on the most dynamic mayors in the nation.

I admire Brown because he earned it. He made it look easy, when in fact his life has been in service of his ferocious drive. Once, as a statehouse reporter for the Los Angeles Times, I went home to Texas with him for a reunion of his classmates at Mineola Colored High School.

I saw the railroad tracks that cut his hometown in half according to race, and I tried to imagine the beginning for this diminutive black kid from a broken home.

How far he’d traveled. He came of age in the angry era of the 1960s, but anger never got in the way of his determination to live large and for a purpose. If anyone deserved to wear a $6,000 suit, he did. He was the only one at his reunion successful enough to have a white reporter in tow.

The pages of “Basic Brown” convey much of Brown’s improbable life story, and no small measure of his contrarian political wisdom. But Brown, I’m afraid, presents himself in this book as a man measurably different and less likable than the one I know in the flesh: a blowhard.

This book is said to be the result of an extended series of reflective breakfast meetings between Brown and former San Francisco Examiner columnist P.J. Corkery. It is written in first-person Brown as conveyed through Corkery’s keyboard. Trouble is, this keyboard doesn’t convey the twinkle of an eye, the spread of a grin, the confessional shrug of shoulders -- those, and other, conveyances of body language that Brown has mastered to make people feel they are in on the joke.

These attributes are the source of Brown’s magnetism. He is a politician of the parlor more than of the arena, and as a consequence he translates unevenly onto TV news. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that Brown’s electoral success ultimately was limited to San Francisco. Surely, it accounts for the flatness on these pages. His cat-like poise is seldom witnessed. This Brown shows too much fang and not enough purr.

We are introduced to a Willie Brown who says: “I grew up to become one of America’s most adept politicians.” He has, he explains, “exhaustive and unerring command of subject matter” and also is “a very bright student of the whole world.” He achieved power “obviously by becoming a master politician.” When he walks “into a party or public dinners or other social gathering, instantly all the attention is focused on me.” And so on.

True, Brown has never been one to consider modesty a virtue. Equally true, he would walk the long way around the block to goad a foe. But rank arrogance is a far different thing than a well-appointed ego, which the Willie Brown of San Francisco’s power restaurants knows and the strident man depicted in hardcover does not. Let’s remember that during four decades in public life, he has acquired a great many friends, and friends don’t swarm around coarse braggarts.

“Basic Brown” is not without its moments. Brown is delighted to recount his unconventional personal life -- married with girlfriends. He is loyal to his mentors just as he demands loyalty to those he mentors -- a close-in facet of politics rarely discussed in the presence of mere voters. His footwork dazzles as he navigates cultural boundaries. And, of course, he is a clotheshorse with few peers.

“I’ve spent more time in the closet than any other straight man in San Francisco, but that’s just to choose my wardrobe,” says he.

Brown is also cuttingly frank about political fundraising (reform has gotten us nowhere), dangerously provocative about women in politics (“The very reason why black women appeal to black voters makes them less attractive to Caucasian voters”) and taunting about investigations of corruption in the state Legislature under his leadership (the FBI fumbled and bumbled and never laid a glove on him).

To a considerable extent, “Basic Brown” is a highlights reel of California and San Francisco politics from the 1970s through the early years of this century. If only the reader could see the devilish expression on Speaker Brown’s face when he thwarts the famous 1988 coup attempt by the “Gang of Five.” Or watch his eyebrows arch when he’s told the FBI is raiding colleagues’ offices in the statehouse.

Regrettably, Brown is too eager to be part of a history where he doesn’t really belong -- in the orbit of the Clintons or beside Arnold Schwarzenegger. For that, we should forgive him, I suppose. He coveted the bigger stage. He would have done well on it. That would have been a smashing story.

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John Balzar was a Times staff writer for 25 years. He is now senior vice president for communications at the Humane Society of the United States.