The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  I’m not one of the pampered rich.16 My father didn’t give me any endowment. He didn’t even give me a car when I was in the university, and that made me pretty sore at the time. I didn’t move in select social circles. I had to toe the line. When I was a kid, if you walked on Mrs. So-and-so’s lawn going home from school, she called the school and you heard about it the next day … We were taught to be responsible for our own actions. That’s what I want to get across.

  He splayed his hands on the table, approximating a map of the country. “They have this map of the United States and every census time they figure out the place in the middle west that is the exact center, and they run stories about that town, that point which represents the middle of population distribution, you know? Well I want to be that place, in my person. I want to express what Middle America thinks, by finding what they can agree on.”

  Two weeks before the election, Jerry was on the cover of Time magazine, a symbol of the upcoming post-Watergate generation. On the last Monday, Jerry flew around the state to rallies in San Diego, Burbank, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Fresno, culminating two months of more than two hundred appearances in sixty-six communities. “If ambition could crack steel,17 this plane would crash,” wrote Tom Hayden, who followed the candidate in the final weeks for Rolling Stone. “For almost five years an unlikely little circle of ex-nuns, media men, spiritual freaks, young lawyers and academics has been slaving to land a new force in the center of American politics. This is the turning point.”

  Republican Flournoy had saved the bulk of his media budget for television buys the last three weeks. Polls showed him steadily gaining, every day. Quinn and Maullin looked at the numbers and worried. Quinn wanted to borrow money to do last-minute television; Jerry refused.

  “Strikes by public employees, opposing capital punishment, decriminalizing marijuana, people aren’t ready for it,”18 Jerry said the day before the election, ticking off positions that had cost him support. He predicted a narrow win. “It’s going to be a six-point margin and that isn’t much for a ‘new spirit.’ ” He headed to an election eve party for staff and press at Lucy’s El Adobe, which had become almost an extension of the campaign office. Jerry had eaten arroz con pollo in the kitchen so often that they named the dish after him on the menu.

  On Tuesday, November 5, Jerry waited for results at his home in the Hollywood Hills.

  With help from his parents, he had bought a house in Laurel Canyon, a place made famous in song by the musicians who called the canyon home. The community was a series of serpentine streets off Laurel Canyon Boulevard, which ran north from Sunset Strip up into the Hollywood Hills. The canyon once carried water to irrigate fields at the base while sheep grazed on the steep hillsides. The sheep gave way to small cabins and large estates built by early celebrities including Clara Bow, Harry Houdini, and Errol Flynn. As Los Angeles spread out, modest homes were built along squiggly dead-end streets, and by the 1920s the canyon had a one-room school, a newspaper, and a grocery store. In 1947, the Army Air Corps took advantage of the canyon’s seclusion to build a top-secret movie studio that produced defense department documentaries including a series about nuclear tests in Nevada.

  The postwar boom that brought thousands of tract homes to suburban Los Angeles brought a different sort of development to Laurel Canyon. Garrett Eckbo had gained international fame as a landscape architect who designed aesthetically pleasing, habitable spaces. Southern California was ideal for designs that incorporated the outdoors into living space. Eckbo, committed to socially and ecologically responsible landscape design, experimented with planned communities that would minimize driving. After zoning restrictions foiled a housing cooperative in the San Fernando Valley, many of the prospective residents ended up in Laurel Canyon. Eckbo helped design19 Wonderland Park, sixty-five homes built on a graded, filled-in shelf on the west side of the canyon. In 1950, he built his own home on a half-acre lot, at an elevation of 1,600 feet.

  Six years later, the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) asked Eckbo if he would be interested in creating an experimental garden with aluminum. The material had been widely used during the war years as a component in airplane manufacture, and ALCOA wanted to promote peacetime uses for the lightweight metal. Eckbo had developed a respect for basic materials when he worked for several years designing migrant labor camps in the Central Valley for the federal Farm Housing Agency. He accepted the ALCOA challenge and designed a garden for his own house using large quantities of aluminum in screens, trellises, sunbreaks, and most spectacularly in a centerpiece fountain shaped like an abstract flower.

  When Jerry arrived in the early 1970s, Laurel Canyon had a flourishing music scene, less well chronicled than that of Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury but just as influential. Musicians had clustered in the relatively affordable, secluded houses that Joni Mitchell sang about in “Ladies of the Canyon.” She lived with Graham Nash in the home memorialized in Nash’s hit “Our House.” For the cover photo of the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album, the band posed on the porch of a canyon house. Mama Cass Elliot, Jim Morrison, Jackson Browne, Don Henley, and Glenn Frey were drawn to the community of singer-songwriters and the easy proximity to clubs like the Troubadour and Whisky a Go Go, just down the hill. They worked in relative anonymity in a setting only Los Angeles could offer—bucolic beauty within minutes of an urban scene.

  Jerry bought Garrett Eckbo’s house, most of the ALCOA “Forest Garden” still intact. The wood-and-glass house had echoes of Japan, where Eckbo had spent a lot of time. “It’s rather isolated,20 with lots of trees around it, the way Jerry likes,” said Bernice, who had approved of the purchase. Jerry valued his privacy, especially now. “It takes a very strong sense of yourself21 to be yourself,” he said four days before the election. “The inevitable tendency is to become what everyone wants you to be.”

  On election night, a handful of friends awaited results with him at the Laurel Canyon house, including Tony Kline, his law school classmate. Pat and Bernice hosted a dinner for fifty family and friends at one of their favorite spots, Perrino’s, a legendary restaurant from the golden age of Hollywood. Pat was nervous.

  The margins were narrow, but Jerry was ahead all night. He headed downtown to the ballroom where his supporters waited. Always conscious of symbolism, he had rejected the Democrats’ traditional Beverly Hills Hotel in favor of the utilitarian downtown convention center. The music was mariachis, jazz, and a Sufi choir. The food was Mexican, Italian, and Chinese. Two big banners hung on the ballroom wall: “We are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream—Martin Luther King Jr.,” and the Jesuit motto, “Age Quod Agis.” Do what you are doing.

  On his way into the hall, Jerry was philosophical about the slim margin, neither visibly distressed nor dismissive. “What’s the name of that book by Maxwell Taylor? The Uncertain Trumpet? Or something like that? That’s what this mandate is, an uncertain trumpet.”22 He won by 2.9 points, or 180,000 votes. It was the closest election for governor in California since 1920. Turnout was 64 percent, the lowest since 1946. Of the eligible voters, only 46 percent cast ballots. Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s pardon of his predecessor, just a few months before the election, helped Democrats do well across the country.

  Pat and Bernice mounted the bandstand in the cavernous convention center alongside their son. “Some say I got here because of my father, but it’s actually my mother,” Jerry said. Bernice smiled. Unlike primary night, Pat took the microphone, albeit briefly: “I just want to say that I had something to do with it.” His son agreed. “I’m just glad he didn’t run against me—he’s the only one who could have beaten me,” Jerry said.

  “People have always come to California to find a place in the sun. We have the resources,23 but we lack the will. We can be a model for the whole country,” he said. The biggest problem was not the recession sparked by the 1973 oil embargo and energy crisis, he said: “The main c
risis is the human energy crisis.”

  In the following days, the congratulations poured in, everyone from Marlon Brando to Sister Alice Joseph, the former principal of St. Brendan school, who kept on her office wall a framed copy of the Time magazine cover with Jerry’s picture.

  The father of an old girlfriend recalled a conversation in Jerry’s office when the secretary of state looked out the window. “You pointed to the Mansion24 and said, ‘it really is not far from here to there,’ ” he wrote. “More power to you, Jerry.”

  Father William J. Finnegan, the former vice principal at St. Ignatius and uncle of Jerry’s childhood friend and fellow seminarian Peter, wrote to Pat and Bernice, thrilled at the victory. “Who, twenty years ago, would have thought things would turn out this way?”25

  “If Jerry does a good job, his mother and father will take the credit—if anything happens we are going to blame it on the Jesuit Community,” Pat wrote back. “I seriously believe the 3½ years he spent at Los Gatos, the year at Santa Clara, and the 4 years at St. Ignatius left an indelible effect upon his mind and actions. I don’t believe you fathers ever realize the impact you have26 upon human beings and particularly those of us who go into politics.”

  On this, father and son agreed. In an interview for an Esquire magazine profile that ran just before the election, Jerry offered one of his clearest articulations of the relationship of his Jesuit training to his political career:

  The Jesuit ideal27 is that you should prefer neither a long life nor a short life, neither riches nor poverty, neither health nor illness; it’s all a matter of indifference. All you care about is the greater glory of God. You try to reach that state of mind. When you do, then you are ready for God to use you as his instrument. But you must take direct action. You can’t just wait. The Jesuits say, “You act as though everything depended on you, although you realize that everything depends on God.” I don’t think I have achieved this mental outlook, and I don’t know that I ever will. But I haven’t forgotten it. It’s in the sense that your self has to diminish, that you try to transcend your own ego. That’s the concept. Obviously in my structure of the world, when I deal with uncertainty, the unknown, I have certain habits of mind that I fall back on and rely upon … I want to understand the world, fit into it, and make whatever splash and contribution I can.

  Ida Brown did not live to see her favorite grandson elected governor, though she did witness his victory in the Democratic primary. Until the last year of her life, she had continued in good health and spirits. At her ninety-fourth birthday party at Jack’s restaurant, she downed a scotch on the rocks and talked about her daily walks around her neighborhood. Many of her seventeen grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren were there to celebrate, and she regarded the secretary of state with particular affection: “A fine boy.”28

  Hardly ever sick her whole life, she was diagnosed with cancer the next year. After several operations, she was forced to give up the independence and apartment she had cherished. She moved in with her youngest son, Frank, who had always been a favorite. Smart, gifted, and accomplished at an early age, Frank’s struggles with alcoholism had made him alternately the troubled child and the prodigal son.

  Ida’s last birthday party was at the Browns’ old Magellan Avenue home on January 11, 1974. At ninety-six, she said she was content. “I’m not a social person,” she said. “I love to read.”29 Jerry presented his grandmother with Portraits from North American Indian Life, by Edward S. Curtis, which reminded Ida of reading early California histories by Hubert Bancroft. “I’m so glad my eyes are good so I can still read,” she said. “It seems to me that many old people waste their time. They don’t seem to know about reading.”

  She was still strong enough to attend fundraisers for Jerry during his gubernatorial campaign. Pat sent her copies of Jerry’s speeches. He called his mother every day unless he was overseas and couldn’t get a line. When they talked on July 5, 1974, Ida told Pat that Frank had taken her out to the loveliest lunch at the Palace Hotel. She recited what she had ordered, including a scotch and soda. She died the next afternoon.

  “You may have gotten lots of your warmth and charm from the Irish side. But I always sensed in your mother an individual of tremendous human poise30 and strength and intuitive understanding about all that was going on, as well as having about as sharp an intellect and knowledge as anyone could,” Fred Dutton wrote to Pat. “It was the convergence of all those various facets in you, that I came to conclude, provided the initial foundation for all that you’ve come to achieve.”

  Joseph Houghteling wrote how much he had enjoyed seeing Ida at events, first for Pat and then for Jerry: “She was so deservedly proud31 of her family and her presence not only showed this pride but also gave the rest of us the understanding of the heritage she passed on to her children and, in time, the successive generations of that fine Brown family.”

  In her old age, Ida had called herself a “mountain woman,” embracing the past she had long ago escaped. She was buried in Colusa, not far from where she was born. On her gravestone, at the suggestion of Frank’s daughter Faye, was the quote Ida had so often recited to her grandchildren: WHAT DOTH THE LORD REQUIRE OF THEE BUT TO DO JUSTLY AND TO LOVE MERCY AND TO WALK HUMBLY WITH THY GOD? Pat and Harold waited until November to have the stone engraved and placed in the Williams cemetery. There were the names and professions of her four children: Edmund, governor, Harold, judge, Constance, teacher, and Frank, attorney. And at the very bottom: GRANDMOTHER OF EDMUND G. BROWN JR., 34TH GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA.

  13

  The New Spirit

  The invitation to the Brown transition team Christmas potluck opened with a quote from a letter written in 1915 by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “I often have to turn,1 asking what force is perhaps now passing there behind me to its work, each to its work, and the way of so many, leads through the center of our heart.”

  Those who expected Edmund G. Brown Jr. to govern in the tradition of his namesake—and there were many—were soon disabused of such notions. From its outset, Jerry Brown’s administration was an attack on the status quo.

  To his father’s dismay, Jerry canceled the inaugural ball and reception. “I really believe the problems that face us are not just material problems,” Jerry said at the traditional prayer breakfast on inauguration morning, January 6, 1975. “I think the crisis is not just that of energy or the environment, I think it’s a crisis of the spirit.2 We don’t lack for anything in this country. What we really lack is leadership.”

  The crowd moved from the convention center to the capitol, gathering in the Assembly chamber. In the balcony, surrounded by their three daughters and ten grandchildren, Pat and Bernice watched their son sworn in as governor. His seven-minute inaugural address set a record for brevity. Speeches turned off young people, Jerry said; besides, he had not started writing until the night before. He had stayed up reading all the inaugural addresses back to Hiram Johnson and found them full of repetitive promises. The thirty-six-year-old governor issued instead a rebuke to the standing-room-only audience of more than seven hundred, most of them veteran politicians:

  What have we learned?3 More than half the people who could have voted refused, apparently believing that what we do has so little impact on their lives that they need not pass judgment on it. In other words, the biggest vote of all in November was a vote of no confidence. So our first order of business is to regain the trust and confidence of the people we serve. And we can begin by following not only the letter but the spirit of the political reform initiative, the biggest vote getter of all in the primary election.

  He left for San Francisco, where he was greeted at City Hall by his vanquished rival, Mayor Alioto, then flew south to speak at Los Angeles City Hall, now presided over by Mayor Tom Bradley, who had succeeded in his second attempt and become one of the first black mayors in an overwhelmingly white city. The inaugural party had dinner at Man Fook Low, across from the wholesale produce market in the city
’s old Chinatown, a decades-old Cantonese restaurant with a following that included Mae West.

  Jerry Brown took office after the failure of the Vietnam War, the scandal of Watergate, and the crippling impact of the 1973 oil embargo and ensuing recession. Voters who had endorsed Ronald Reagan and his outsider’s critique of bloated government did not want a return to expansive state spending or Pat Brown’s “responsible liberalism.” Jerry’s asceticism and belief in limits suited the reduced expectations of the 1970s. In a political world where television was the medium, Californians embraced this unconventional politician who was neither warm nor fuzzy but promised honest, incorruptible leadership. His candor was refreshing and his unusual style appealing, even if his agenda remained murky.

  California was continuing to grow, but the school-age population stagnated as the baby boom generation grew up. Efforts to integrate schools through busing tore districts apart and spurred white flight. Traffic and pollution worsened. Inflation eroded incomes. The recession of the early 1970s had left behind an altered economy. Aerospace and the defense industries, long the economic engines of the state, were in decline. Technology companies were transitioning to a peacetime economy in an area of Santa Clara County near the Los Gatos seminary.

  Jerry demonstrated an ability to intuit what mattered to people and home in on their concerns in direct, frank language. He welcomed crises as a way to spur action. He did not avoid delivering bad news. “You have to be optimistic and visionary,” he said. “But there’s a darker side,4 a tragic side, that cannot be overturned … I think this country has to come to terms with its limits and to make its choices.”

  Jerry Brown took office as the youngest California governor in memory, tested in campaigns but a novice in the world of governing. He had made almost no campaign promises and owed no political debts. He had antagonized much of the political establishment with his crusade for reform and its inherent implication that legislators were easily bought and sold. He surrounded himself with people he valued for their intelligence, creativity, and willingness to challenge authority. They were either idealistic and inspiring or arrogant and brash, depending on your point of view, or maybe all of the above. Pat Brown had worked hard to accomplish things within the system. Jerry came to blow the system up.