His Hipness the Mayor

Never mind that Willie Brown was out roaming the town until God knows when last night, capping off a crowded evening of official events and decidedly unofficial carousing with a stop for barbecue at a Fillmore District rib joint in the small hours. And never mind that it's barely seven o'clock on a Saturday morning and most of San Francisco is still asleep. Mayor Brown likes to get an early start, and here in his opulent city-hall offices the business day is already in full swing. One of the chief complaints of the mayor's critics is that his standard operating style is that of "management by crisis," and right now there is a waiting room teeming with citizens in varying stages of urgency giving vivid testimony to that charge.

Once each month the mayor throws open his office door for these one-on-one meetings with his constituents. But, this being progressive San Francisco, Willie Brown won't be handing out bags of coal to destitute widows or fixing traffic tickets. He will be, as they say, "problem solving."

Some of these people have camped out for hours to secure their precious ten minutes with the mayor. What do they want? Some are angling for jobs, some are angry about perceived injustices at the hands of the city bureaucracy, and some just want to vent to somebody important. And, of course, San Francisco being one of America's more unusual cities, a few are here to relay urgent messages from their alien masters on distant planets. Brown, who walks the streets of the city often, is well aware of the weirdness quotient that awaits him in his outer office. "Sixty-five to 70 percent of the people who stroll in here," he has said, "are clearly in need of therapy."

But, hey, that's why they call it San Fran schizo, and if you can't handle a little insanity, as the mayor often says, you don't belong in the job. "I wake up every morning with only one thought in mind, and that is to be entertained," says Brown. "I am hardly ever disappointed."

No way the mayor is going to be disappointed today. Included in the mixed bag of earnestness and eccentricity that will pass through his office this morning are a wayward city bus driver who is on suspension for his incorrigible habit of taking off-route joyrides, a rap musician who wants his hip-hop group to be the mayor's "official" band, a lottery winner so incensed at Brown that he plans to spend all his winnings to get him removed from office, and a sad, elderly Egyptian gentleman carrying a tattered portfolio of badly drawn cartoons who breaks down into tears during a disjointed monolog in which he proposes that Arabic be adopted as San Francisco's official language and reveals a secret plan to prevent the city's parking meters from being ripped off.

To each supplicant, legit and loopy alike, Brown will accord his undivided attention and sincere concern. Brown says his biggest surprise upon taking the reins at city hall was discovering how "dedicated to dysfunction" local government is, and he makes no bones about the fact that he roundly distrusts career civil servants ("little clerks who push pens and pencils" is how he refers to them). Hence, he revels in these opportunities to circumvent the process and personally intervene on behalf of his constituents.

When a general contractor accuses the city attorney's office of conducting a vendetta against his company, Brown advises the man not to get into a court battle with a public agency ("These guys have no profit motive," he warns the contractor. "They'll litigate you forever.") and then offers to mediate the dispute himself. When the head of a do-gooding nonprofit outfit asks for help finding a location for a start-up company that employs ex-cons, the mayor suggests an abandoned factory on the far edges of the city.

And finally comes the aforementioned lottery winner, a 60ish man so livid about the "incredibly rude" treatment he received from city hall after his car was hit by a municipal bus that he refuses to shake the mayor's hand.

"What I want is a written apology, signed by you," says the man. "And I'll never get it."

"You got it," says the mayor. "Handwritten, on my letterhead." Brown leans forward and taps the man on the knee. "Now, you know what I want? I want to put you to work! Instead of just criticizing, why don't you come to work and help me?"

The man looks aghast. "No, no, never!" he sputters. "You are looking at the last conservative Republican in San Francisco. I get $800,000 a year after taxes from the lottery, and I'm going to spend it all to get you defeated."

"Absolutely your prerogative," Brown says with a shrug. The man gathers his papers and stomps out. "All that money sure didn't make him happy, did it?" Brown chuckles. "But shit, give me a million of it and I'll resign."

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If ever a man and a municipality were meant for each other, they are Willie Brown and San Francisco. The thing about the City (as true San Franciscans, smug and solipsistic to the core, refer to their hometown) is that although it has the approximate population of, say, Kansas City, it has never chosen to shake the hubristic notion that it belongs among the world's great metropolises. And the thing about Willie Brown is that although he was born dirt-poor and illegitimate in a segregated backwater community in East Texas, he has never had the slightest doubt in his destiny to lead a life of power, pleasure and high privilege.

Could there be a more natural fit? The consummate style-driven over-achiever in charge of the world's most obsessively self-conscious city. That being said, it is also true, if Brown is to believed, that he never had the slightest interest in running for mayor of his adopted hometown until he ran out of other options.

For the majority of his public life Willie Brown has wielded power on such a grand scale that the idea of being a mere mayor, even of his beloved San Francisco, has always struck him as small potatoes. "Why would I ever want a job," he once asked contemptuously, "where your main concerns are streetlights, parking meters and dog doo?"

Why indeed? In his tempestuous 30-year career in the California legislature, during the last 15 of which he reigned as the nearly omnipotent Speaker of the Assembly, Brown built up such an unprecedented power base that he came to be viewed by many as the de facto boss of the most populous state in the nation. Governors came and went, but in Sacramento there was always Speaker Brown, the slickest political operator anybody could remember. Ruthless, outspoken and controversial, Brown had a Machiavellian instinct for the delicate maneuvering and horse swapping of the legislative process. And, equally important, as one of the most prolific fund-raisers in California history, the Speaker had virtually every Democratic officeholder in the state beholden to him. With the legislature snugly in his pocket and near veto power over an annual $50 billion state budget, it is not too much to say that for nearly two decades Willie Brown was the most powerful elected black official in America.

Brown says he would have been happy to stay in the assembly forever, pushing his liberal agenda and waging battle against California's forceful right wing. But it all came to a sudden end with the passage of California's term limits act in 1990, a law that many believe was enacted as a direct result of voter revulsion over Brown's stranglehold on state government. Termed-out and barred from reelection in 1996, Willie Brown was out of public office for the first time since 1964.

What to do? It was suggested that he might run for governor or senator, but Brown quickly rejected both possibilities. One thing he prides himself on is his uncanny ability to count votes, and he knew it was next to impossible for a black man—especially one burdened with his political baggage—to win statewide office in California.

Another option was to devote himself to the high-powered law practice he'd built up in San Francisco during his years of political influence. But how could being a private-sector lawyer ever satisfy him after his years in the spotlight as the 800-pound gorilla of California politics?

That's when Brown's good friend Herb Caen stepped in. Caen, the legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist who died in 1997, had for years harbored a not-so-secret dream that his longtime buddy would someday become mayor. San Francisco was in the midst of a demoralizing downswing, Caen felt, and only someone with the brilliance and indomitable panache of Willie Brown could restore it to its rightful glory as a world-class city.

For nearly 60 years Herb Caen was the supreme arbiter of all things trivial and significant in the Bay Area. No true San Franciscan would have dreamed of starting the day without first turning to Caen's column to find out what had transpired overnight in the place he called Baghdad by the Bay. So when Caen devoted an entire column to what was essentially a hagiographic manifesto urging Willie Brown to take on the task of reviving the city's sagging fortunes, the die was pretty much cast.

"Even before Herb's column I had been flattered by the number of people who had come to me and said they thought the city could only be saved if I came aboard," says Brown. "But when Herb did the column urging me to renew the world's interest in San Francisco by making it the most glamorous city I could possibly make it, that was a compelling factor in my deciding to accept the challenge and run. That, and the fact that it was only the opportunity for me to stay in public life, of course."

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Despite Caen's endorsement, Brown entered the mayoral race as an underdog. The incumbent, an amiable if lusterless ex–career cop named Frank Jordan (who was known as Empty Holster Frank for the succession of desk jobs he'd held on the force) not only seemed to have the big downtown money locked up but also held a commanding lead among white middle-class voters. A second candidate, Roberta Achtenberg, a popular former city supervisor and lesbian who as assistant secretary of HUD had been the highest-ranking avowed homosexual in the Clinton administration, was ceded the sizable gay vote that would have normally gone to Brown. All that was left for Willie was some union support and the minorities.

Just before the election, the always lucky Brown got luckier when, for reasons unknown, the normally starch-stiff Jordan agreed to a stunt in which he posed nude in a shower with a couple of drive time radio jocks. Brown topped the voting in a close race. And then, in a runoff against Jordan—with (continued on page 162)Willie Brown(continued from page 88) Achtenberg's gay constituency now behind him—Brown racked up an impressive win. Sworn in on January 8, 1996, Brown promptly showed the citizenry what was in store for the next four years by throwing himself an inauguration party so wildly extravagant that his detractors compared it to the excesses of Versailles. With local restaurants and wineries supplying the food and drink, and fat-cat sponsors picking up the exorbitant tab, Brown entertained some 75,000 ecstatic revelers at a wharfside street bash that raged till nearly dawn.

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Brown rode into office on a crest of public goodwill and media adoration, and from the beginning he seemed determined to grab the entire chaotic city by the heels and shake it until everything fell into its ordered place. He was everywhere at once, reeling off plans for ambitious new development projects, announcing sweeping changes in city government, blithely commenting on every subject from world affairs to the price of the Borsalino hats that had become his rakish trademark, and performing his ceremonial duties with a swank joie de vivre that hadn't been seen around city hall in years. "I'm into happiness!" the mayor giddily announced, and all of San Francisco seemed to share the sentiment.

Mayor brings city together! raved one newspaper headline early in his tenure, S.F. Thriving under brown proclaimed another. And indeed, in a city fatally splintered by narrow-focus interest groups and ancient political rivalries, the mayor appeared to possess a preternatural ability for bringing warring factions to the table.

And things were getting done. After years of political timidity and bureaucratic logjams, civic enterprises that had been stuck on the drawing board suddenly sprang to life. The sprawling Mission Bay project, the largest urban renewal scheme in the city's history, got a green light after decades of dormancy. Plans for a new waterfront stadium for the San Francisco Giants finally won approval. Construction cranes appeared everywhere, and it seemed as if the foundation were being dug for a whole new city. San Francisco was humming, and Willie Brown was incontestably the power source.

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When he was born in 1934, at the rock bottom of the Depression in Mineola, Texas, Brown's unmarried parents were so poor that instead of going to a hospital, his father, an itinerant waiter and sometimes pimp named Lewis Brown, paid a midwife $7 to deliver the baby. It was one of the few contributions he ever made to the welfare of his son.

With his mother gone off to Dallas to work as a domestic, Brown was raised by his maternal grandmother, a formidable woman named Anna Lee Collins. The family business was a local watering hole called the Shack, where you could not only get a pretty good hamburger but also avail yourself of a taste of the moonshine Brown's uncles distilled in the nearby woods. His grandmother, says Willie Brown fondly, was a born outlaw.

"She was an incredible woman, a beautiful woman, tall, thin and angular, with great high cheekbones, probably a combination of white, African American and Native American," says the mayor. "She was totally and completely fearless, and, without any education, she was instinctively the smartest person I ever met. She raised us five grandchildren with a great degree of love, but no real tenderness, so to speak. You had to meet the standards."

Brown was a bookish, voluble boy who excelled in math. He got into a little trouble here and there, but his grandmother kept him in line. "She knew what you were going to do before you did it," he says with a laugh. "For instance, she never let me handle the collection plate in church because she knew I'd be making funny change."

But it was his uncle, Rembert "Itsie" Collins, who provided Brown with both a role model and entree to a larger world. Itsie was a dandy and a gambling man who had left Texas during World War II to join the great migration of blacks to the West Coast. In San Francisco, he started up a little floating gambling operation. It was so successful that within a few years he had opened a backroom casino in the black ghetto of the Fillmore District. On his frequent trips back home, Itsie cut quite the figure with his big cars and flashy clothes. With local racial tensions making his family uncomfortable, it seemed logical to send Willie to San Francisco after his high school graduation so he could join his prosperous uncle.

Willie worked his way through college selling shoes—and as an occasional lookout for Uncle Itsie's San Francisco casino. He then attended a local law school. His first job was as a "street lawyer" in the Fillmore, which was known for its after-hours clubs and illicit gaming dens, and his practice consisted primarily of defending prostitutes, drug dealers and petty thieves. This wasn't exactly what he had envisioned when he decided on a career, but upon graduating from law school, he discovered that none of the white-shoe firms downtown were interested in hiring a young black lawyer, even one as bright as he was.

At the same time he was also making a name for himself in the city's burgeoning civil rights movement. In 1961 Brown became the focus of one of the city's first big antidiscrimination protests when he and his wife were refused in their attempt to buy a home in an all-white housing development. Local activists threw up a picket line that became a cause célèbre among San Francisco liberals, and even though the Browns never bought the house, their defiance spurred the local progressive community into action. It also led to his first, unsuccessful run for the State Assembly on a civil rights platform in 1962.

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It was around this time that a Pacific Heights public relations woman named Marion Conrad, who regularly fed items to Herb Caen, decided that Caen needed to know this razor-sharp young attorney with a preacher's eloquence and a sartorial flair. "I guess she felt that I would make good copy for Herb, so she arranged a luncheon for the three of us at Trader Vic's," Brown recalls. "Herb and I immediately realized that we enjoyed the same kind of put-down humor, and we started zinging each other unmercifully, which of course left poor Marion mystified. From that day on Herb and I had lunch once a week. We hung out a lot, barhopping everywhere, and he started dragging me to these parties he always went to."

Soon a regular among the exotic cast of characters that inhabited Caen's column, Brown achieved a sexy cachet among San Franciscans for his pungent wisecracks, his elegant ways and his eclectic nocturnal peregrinations, which ranged from the penthouse parties of Nob Hill to the low dives of the Barbary Coast. Brown always topped the best-dressed lists, always drove hot cars and, despite being married with three kids, always was seen in the company of the most gorgeous women. (It surprised no one when he and his wife, Blanche, separated in the early Seventies, but the couple never divorced, and they remain warm friends. According to Michael, Brown's personable 35-year-old son, the mayor is on good terms with all three of his grown children.)

When he made his second run for the assembly in 1964, Brown focused his campaign on his opposition to a proposed crosstown freeway, thus situating him squarely in the camp of environmentalists. Brown won going away, becoming San Francisco's first black state legislator.

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Although he seemed untouchable as an assemblyman, there were growing indications when he became mayor that his vaunted mojo wasn't entirely bulletproof. Brown still had a disturbing tendency to mouth off at the slightest provocation, and he was suffering serious consequences. "I am my own worst enemy," he was heard to say on more than one occasion, and even his most devoted followers agreed.

One of the most damaging outbursts came after a tough 49ers loss in 1996, when Brown offhandedly described the team's backup quarterback, Elvis Grbac, as "an embarrassment to humankind." The mayor was on an official visit to Paris at the time and had no way of knowing that Grbac's infant son had recently undergone a serious operation. But his apparent callousness generated a media barrage of anti-Brown vituperation.

During the campaign for the football stadium, Brown suffered yet another public relations disaster when friends of the campaign manager for the pro-stadium forces, a loose-cannon political consultant named Jack Davis, threw him a bacchanalian birthday party so licentious in nature that it shocked even easygoing San Francisco. The main act of the evening involved a dominatrix who first urinated on a naked man and then sodomized him with a bottle of Jack Daniels. Brown, as well as every other celebrity in attendance, claimed to have left the premises before the infamous penetration occurred, but the media had a field day with the incident and it nearly cost the mayor the stadium vote.

By this time, too, the mayor's extended love affair with the San Francisco media had gradually degenerated into an ugly trade of attack and insult. Brown began castigating reporters at his media "availabilities" and throwing virulent antipress tantrums on a regular basis. "I'm not like these other politicians," Brown fumed. "When I am insulted, I insult back."

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By midterm, Brown's poll numbers were beginning to reflect serious voter dissatisfaction. It was felt that his constant outbursts made the city look bad, and, despite the frenetic pace the mayor maintained, people were starting to question if anything of substance was getting done. Brown was finding that some of the more entrenched civic problems were resistant to even his outsize skills as a fixer. The city's large homeless contingent, attracted by San Francisco's liberal welfare policies, continued to clog the sidewalks and inhabit the parks, causing the mayor no end of headaches. When he tried to ignore the problem, he took heat from neighborhood groups and the business community, and when he cracked down with sweeps and arrests, homeless advocates and civil libertarians jumped him.

Brown had also promised to fix Muni, the city's creaky public transportation system, but he hadn't taken into account the years of neglect that the system had suffered, nor the stubborn intransigence of the unions whose members drove and repaired the buses. The mayor put his chief of staff in charge and instituted a controversial program to use former gang members to provide security on the buses. But service continued to deteriorate.

"The truth about Willie Brown is that he's all glamour and no substance," says former California state senator Quentin Kopp, a longtime Brown foe. "He simply doesn't have the discipline to attack the gritty issues such as Muni and the homeless."

What Brown direly needed at this point was for Herb Caen to step in and take the heat off. But Caen had died more than a year earlier, and the mayor was without his main champion. "Herb helped me so much by allowing me to be myself without having to compromise any facet of my personality," Brown lamented. "He interpreted my conduct as something other than arrogance and made me into a lovable figure so that people got vicarious joy out of my antics. I miss him a hell of a lot."

But the one area where the mayor was surprisingly successful in dodging criticism was in the matter of his splashy sex life. While Bill Clinton was impeached for failing to curb his lust, Willie Brown, whose name was constantly linked with scores of attractive young women, managed to escape the slightest hint of sexual scandal.

To Brown it's beside the point. "Why should there be a scandal? I've never done anything bad," he says. "I have a good time, I'm a gentleman, I'm up-front, I treat women with the same respect I wish to get myself, and I'm harmless. I'm not a phony. I don't make it appear as if I'm sanctified. Plus, I don't think anyone I have ever dated would consider herself to be an ex-girlfriend. They are all still good friends of Willie Brown's—no longer dating companions, no longer lovers, but still good friends. And the reason is that my relationships have always started out as friendship, never as a hustle. No one ever leaves with a bad taste because there has never been a promise of permanence or exclusivity."

All of this is no doubt true, but there is also Willie Brown's well-known largesse to his former flames. He found plush public jobs for two of his inamoratas, and he's famous for his lavish parting gifts. "He big-times the women when he leaves, so they tend to keep quiet," says a journalist who covers San Francisco's social scene and is a longtime Willie watcher. "He bought one girlfriend one of those hot Darth Vader–rigged black Jeeps, and another a geranium pink Armani gown to wear at an opera opening. And the word is that he gives out Cartier Panthere watches, at $9000 a crack, to the lucky ones."

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The big question that hovers over Willie Brown is his future. True, his poll numbers have sagged. In February, poll results published in the San Francisco Chronicle said that only 32 percent of San Francisco voters would be inclined to vote for him in his bid for reelection. The New York Times reported, "San Franciscans are obviously upset. They are upset with Mr. Brown's seeming inability to make the buses and trains run on time or to get the homeless off the streets. And they are upset at downtown traffic jams, at a lack of public parking, at litter, mediocre schools and the mayor's 'arrogance.' In short, they are upset at a lot of things."

In San Francisco, however, it's always best to expect the unexpected. Many of Brown's potential opponents in the November election have even lower poll numbers. Nor does Brown have many options—he watched the late Tom Bradley try unsuccessfully to move from mayor of Los Angeles to governor of California twice, which led Brown and others to believe that an African American candidate has an uphill battle at best.

At the moment, Willie is all but an announced candidate—having secured early endorsements from several powerful unions. He has also announced his plans to conduct gay weddings on the city hall steps, for instance, and makes daily proclamations on new ways to improve the transportation system. "I don't think democracy is well served with me having an opponent," says a typically brazen Brown.

"As I always tell my staff, 'I am a bundle of contradictions, so don't ever try to explain me or predict what I'll do,'" says Brown. "I have a theory that if you focus on going for something too distant from where you are, you'll never achieve it. So just perform at your zenith and all roads will be open to you. Whatever I do, I always believe I am going to succeed, and if I don't, well, it wasn't meant to happen. My feeling is that you cannot unwrite history, so don't even bother to try."

With fat-cat sponsors picking up the tab, Brown entertained some 75,000 ecstatic revelers at a wharfside street bash that raged until dawn.