Brown study

Willie Brown was the mayor of San Francisco when Rico lived in Oakland, and Erica Goode has an article in The New York Times about him now:

Wilkes Bashford, of the renowned San Francisco clothing store that bears his name, places a John Lobb suede oxford, size 11, marked down to $1,650, on the table at Le Central. “It’s a gorgeous color,” says Willie Brown (photo), the former mayor of San Francisco and Bashford’s customer and close friend of 45 years. “I wouldn’t even call that burgundy. It’s headed for... It’s Bordeaux.”
“The color is the reason I brought them over,” Bashford says. “I wouldn’t push shoes at lunch otherwise.”
“Wilkes, that’s the most sensitive thing you’ve ever said,” Brown quips.
As repartee, it is pure Willie Lewis Brown Jr., perfected over the four decades he has been a central figure in the city’s political and social life, and served up for almost that long at Le Central, where Brown, Bashford, and a select group of others (Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist who died in 1997, was a founding member) have assembled every Friday since 1973 to talk politics, restaurants, real estate, children, grandchildren and the occasional pair of shoes.
The lunches are mentioned frequently in Brown’s own Chronicle column, Willie’s World. And in their way, the gatherings capture the qualities that have made him so lastingly compelling to both his fans and critics: his mischievous wit and infectious charm, his entrancement with power and celebrity, his fondness for five thousand dollar suits and $two thousand dollar shoes, his loyalty and, at times, imperiousness on full display.
He is now 77, turns 78 next month, and his eyesight has been diminished by retinitis pigmentosa. The political world in which he came of age as a Democrat in the State Assembly— a world of cross-the-aisle compromise and quid pro quo— has given way to Tea Party zeal and ideological intransigence.
But he has refused to creep quietly offstage. Since leaving public office in 2004 at the end of his second term as mayor— the worst day of his career, he says, because “that was my life, my whole life, my first, second, and third in my life”— he has remained a power broker, his influence still palpable.
His law firm represents prominent clients, among them Aecom, an engineering firm involved in San Francisco’s central subway project, and the California Online Poker Association. And he offers informal counsel to a stream of business executives, elected officials, and bureaucrats who breakfast with him at the St. Regis, where his apartment is on the 35th floor.
“There are so few people left around with institutional memory, and with a track record that makes that memory advisable,” he said in a recent interview. “I think that’s where I am, that’s who I am and that’s what I do.”
Along with Rose Pak, the Chinese-American community’s powerful organizer, and others, Brown helped usher Mayor Ed Lee into office in November. A pre-inaugural bash for four hundred guests that he hosted at the Palace Hotel’s Garden Court in January was, in contrast to most of Brown’s parties, not a black-tie affair; to spare Lee from having to rent a tuxedo, he said. He rises each morning at 5:30 and forces himself to go to the gym; “If I feel any little tweak anywhere, I stop,” he said.
He follows politics assiduously. He gets along well with Governor Jerry Brown, as he did with his Republican predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and retains strong ties to Senator Dianne Feinstein. The Republican presidential race inspires him to punditry (On Mitt Romney: “If Newt Gingrich really wants to get under Romney’s skin, he ought to start calling him by his first name: Willard”; On Newt Gingrich: “Extremely bright, volatile, opinionated”; On Rick Santorum: “a total and complete misfit for elective office”; On Ron Paul: “He is probably the most honest”).
Yet, Brown laments the intolerance that now dominates Washington and Sacramento. “Representative democracy is handicapped by preconditions,” he said. “The system now, the participants, are all geared to whether or not their side wins, not whether or not their side is best for the system. That’s a dramatic change from my day.”
Voters, he noted in his 2008 autobiography, Basic Brown, wanted “politicians who could make things work and who could work with each other”.
Brown’s determination to stay involved has kept his appeal undiminished; the curious still drop in at Le Central to catch a glimpse of Da Mayor, and every stroll through North Beach or Nob Hill draws a shower of greetings.
“Californians like good entertainers, and Willie is as much Hollywood as Sacramento,” said James Richardson, the author of a 1996 biography of Brown.
Notorious for bringing a different date to every party, he is still surrounded by women: Sonya Molodetskaya, his girlfriend of nine years; Blanche Brown, his wife and the mother of his three adult children, who remains a friend though they have lived separately for a quarter-century; Sydney, a fourth child, ten, who, already fond of high-end apparel, appears to rule his life.
But his continued public presence has also kept alive the ardor of his critics. As mayor and during the almost fifteen years he served as speaker of the California Assembly, where he reigned as the self-declared Ayatollah, he was admired for his negotiating skills— as adept at working with Republicans as with Democrats—his loyalty to friends and expert filleting of enemies. But he also drew criticism for his use of political patronage and for what some saw as shady backroom deals. He was investigated by the FBI more than once; no indictments resulted. He once joked, a former colleague said, that the “e” in email stood for “evidence”.
Now that he is out of office, the critics have focused on his column, arguing that he uses it to promote clients’ interests. “People read this stuff and they actually think here’s this nonpartisan retired mayor,” said Aaron Peskin, a former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the chairman of the local Democratic Party. “They don’t realize that he’s on people’s payrolls and has access to the mayor and the ability to needle people or destroy them.”
But Brown has always been unapologetic about his style, be it in politics or business, and he seems almost delighted at the persisting barbs. They are proof he is still in the game. “I’m sorry that he hasn’t been successful in many of the things he’s tried to be,” Brown said of Peskin. “The paper asked me to share my world and I am sharing my world. Food, taxis, clothing, friendship, movies, stories; that’s my world. I am not a journalist. I’m not much of a writer. But I’m a good storyteller. And fact-checking won’t help. So there.”
Brown’s friends and even some journalists who tried unsuccessfully over the years to nail him for improprieties, say they think that much of the criticism is driven by envy or racism.
“I think he gets a lot of cheap shots for those reasons,” said Don Solem, a political analyst and president of Solem & Associates, a public relations firm. “He leaves himself hanging out and people find ways to attack him.”
In fact, it can be hard to remember that behind the Brioni suits, the trendy restaurants, the endless fund-raisers and celebrity events, is the young boy who grew up in segregated Mineola, Texas, in the 1940s, his grandmother once a slave, his mother a domestic servant, who had to scrabble for everything he achieved.
Brown, though, has not forgotten. Asked what the expensive clothing means to him, he says: “It’s my golf game, it’s my pleasure craft, it’s my Bohemian Club, it’s my annual vacation. It’s all the things that everyone else does and I do them in one place.” He confesses to using a clothes brush on his suit each day and getting annoyed with himself “when I don’t get it exactly right”, when the color is wrong, or the fabrics do not quite match. How much of this can be traced to his childhood deprivation? “All of it, all of it, all of it,” he says.
When the plates have been taken away at Le Central, Brown stops in at Bashford’s store to try on the suede oxfords. “That’s a good-looking shoe,” he says. “You know what you’d wear them with, though? A very pale gray.”
“Obviously it’s not going to be a shoe that every man is going to buy and understand,” a salesman tells him.
“Okay, okay, I’ll take them,” Brown says.

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