The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Jerry’s reelection in November would depend on how he oversaw implementation of the most profound changes to California’s financial system in decades. As voters went to the polls on June 6, Quinn went to Linda Ronstadt’s house in Los Angeles and made Jerry spend the day going through the plan,17 point by point. He drafted a mailgram sent to local officials: “If Proposition 13 is approved today, it will create a critical need for close and continuous working relationships between state and local authorities.” He set up a Proposition 13 Communications Center in the governor’s office to coordinate with local officials in five thousand jurisdictions and field emergency calls about layoffs, cash flow, assessments, and legal interpretations.

  Proposition 13 passed with 65 percent of the vote. Jerry Brown declared himself a “born-again tax cutter.” Two days later, he addressed the legislature:

  Over four million18 of our fellow citizens have sent a message to city hall, to Sacramento, and to all of us. The message is that property tax must be sharply curtailed, and that government spending, wherever it is, must be held in check. We must look forward to lean and frugal budgets. It’s a great challenge. And we will meet it. We must do everything possible to minimize the human hardship and maximize the total number of state jobs created in our economy. We have only three weeks to act. Three weeks to decide multibillion dollars of fiscal questions.

  He pledged to avoid new state taxes, make budget cuts, and use the surplus to help local governments.

  About $4 billion of the state surplus went to plug holes in local budgets, averting the most severe cuts. Los Angeles libraries closed on Mondays. Many school districts canceled summer school. Cities ended dial-a-ride services for the elderly. School budgets declined19 an average of more than 2 percent, the first drop since the Depression. The mood of austerity sapped once proud institutions, which would take years to recover.

  “I sometimes have great faith in the people and think that they’ll always do the right thing,” Pat said sadly. The people had overwhelmingly chosen to “cut the guts out20 of a great government … My faith has been hurt terribly by what happened.”

  His son was more dispassionate. “This is a hurricane. The people have spoken,”21 he said. “We will make do. We are a pioneer state.”

  The focus on immediate financial pressures overshadowed more significant long-term structural change. State government assumed control of apportioning tax revenues to the schools and municipalities. That centralized power in Sacramento. Because tax increases now required a two-thirds vote, even a weak minority in the legislature became a powerful player. A grassroots movement that purported to restore authority to the local level had achieved the opposite result.

  The intended and unintended consequences of Prop 13 would be unraveled, reknitted, and patched over for decades, shaping not only how Californians spent public money but where they lived, how they learned, and what their neighborhoods looked like. California would drop from near the top of the states on spending per pupil to near the bottom. Municipalities unable to raise property tax became reliant on sales tax and courted retail development, which hurt efforts to build housing. The state became more dependent on the volatile, economically sensitive personal income tax, which precipitated big downturns and upswings. Fees for services increased, exempt from the two-thirds requirement for new taxes. Budgeting by initiative became a popular way to siphon off revenue for a particular cause, further debilitating the budget process.

  “When California voters approved Proposition 13, the blockbuster initiative that mandates sweeping reductions in property taxes, it was interpreted around the nation as the beginning of a tax revolt—a modern Boston Tea Party,”22 reported the New York Times. Over the next two decades, there were 148 tax-cutting initiatives across the country. By 1994 almost all states had followed California and imposed some new restrictions on taxes or spending.

  As soon as Prop 13 passed, Jerry ordered a hiring freeze and compiled lists of potential budget cuts. One of the first items to go was the satellite. The $5.8 million cost over three years was an insignificant expenditure. But Jerry understood the value of symbols. There would be no California space program in the post–Prop 13 world. Three weeks after the election, Rusty Schweickart wrote a colleague to thank him for support, now moot. “Operation successful—patient died23 but not through lack of effort.”

  Initial polls after Prop 13 showed Jerry in a tight race with Republican Evelle Younger, the attorney general. Jerry asked Chavez for help; Marshall Ganz and a group of UFW workers were loaned for the rest of the campaign. Then Younger went on vacation to Hawaii. The Brown campaign rushed to make a commercial, with Hawaiian music, showing Jerry hard at work. More significantly, Jerry Brown embraced Prop 13 with such fervor that he was dubbed “Jerry Jarvis” by those who viewed him as politically expedient.

  Jarvis became a folk hero, featured on the cover of Time magazine. He filmed a television ad that praised Younger, though he stopped short of an endorsement. The Brown campaign asked for equal time, and the man Jerry had called a demagogue happily obliged. Four days after his Younger commercial aired, Jarvis recorded a new spot: “I knew it would work24 and I knew Governor Brown was the man who could make it work.”

  Soon, polls showed a majority of Californians believed Jerry Brown had been a force behind the passage of Prop 13. He drew comfortably ahead. The percentage who saw him as an opportunist willing to do anything to get votes had also gone up significantly between March and August. Other views had not changed. The top adjective Los Angeles Times poll respondents picked to describe Jerry was “different.”

  He won in a landslide. “I see myself as an individual who has been given a second chance25 and a very big job. And I intend to do it,” he said the next day. If there were any doubt that his attention remained divided, he added, “What happens after that I don’t know.”

  Pundits from the East Coast, more interested in the “what happens after,” saw Prop 13 as an opportunity. “The Jarvis tide26 will run back east across the country and, if he manages to adjust to it in a manner that appears to be just, equitable and compassionate, he will unquestionably revive his own currently shadowed presidential prospects,” wrote the columnist Mary McGrory.

  Less than two weeks after the election, two very different dramas captured national headlines and shook California. Jim Jones, leader of a group called the Peoples Temple, had been for many years a prominent part of the San Francisco political scene. Temple members worked on Democratic campaigns, and leading Democrats, including Jerry Brown, routinely attended events that honored Jones. The Peoples Temple was credited with helping George Moscone, a rising star in the progressive wing of San Francisco Democrats, win a close mayoral race in 1975. Moscone appointed Jones to the city housing commission. In 1977, amid allegations of physical and psychological abuse within the organization, Jones suddenly moved his followers to a remote location in Guyana. Ex-members and relatives remained in the Bay Area, worried about friends and loved ones unable to escape from the cult settlement in the small South American country. Bay Area congressman Leo Ryan flew to Guyana to formally investigate the community known as Jonestown. As he concluded his visit on November 18, 1978, Ryan was assassinated, while Jones orchestrated the murder-suicide of 918 followers, including more than three hundred children.

  As San Franciscans struggled to absorb the news from Guyana, tragedy struck at home. Much as Jerry used his appointments to diversify state government, Mayor Moscone had appointed record numbers of women, minorities, and gays to positions in San Francisco government. The gay community in the city had been rapidly growing in size and political clout, and in November 1977, Harvey Milk’s election to the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors made him the first openly gay elected official in California. A year later, just days after the news of the Jonestown massacre, a conservative ex-police officer who had resigned his seat on the Board of Supervisors decided he wanted it back. When Moscone refused to reappoint him, Dan White assassina
ted the mayor, then walked down the hall and shot and killed Milk. The governor ordered flags flown at half-mast.

  On January 8, 1979, Jerry was sworn in for a second term and delivered his inaugural address on statewide television, sounding more like a Republican candidate than a Democratic governor. He focused on national economic problems, attacked Congress for failing to control inflation, and proposed an income tax cut. Some of his most loyal supporters and appointees winced at the centerpiece of the address, a call for a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a cause espoused by the conservative National Taxpayers Union.

  Undeterred by the difficulty of challenging an incumbent Democratic president, Jerry increasingly aimed his message outside California. Did he want to be president, Washington political consultant Robert Shrum asked? “I wouldn’t mind it; I am certainly thinking about it … Obviously I have an interest.27 But the future is uncertain. Perhaps one of my qualities is the ability to live in the midst of uncertainty with a certain degree of …” Shrum finished the sentence: “Equanimity.” “Yes, and I think the ability to try new things.”

  Jerry continued to try new things. He visited a small coastal town two hours north of San Francisco where the state had funded a mobile listening station that amplified the voices of migrating whales as they passed by. (“He’s not going to talk to the whales?”28 said a disappointed reporter who had traveled there in hopes of a big story.) He marched again with Cesar Chavez, taking sides in an acrimonious lettuce strike in the Salinas Valley and cheering on thousands of farmworkers gathered for the UFW’s biennial convention. And in the most publicized event of his second term, he celebrated his forty-first birthday in Liberia at the start of a trip to Africa with Linda Ronstadt. One of the couple’s infrequent forays in public, the vacation landed them on the cover of People and Newsweek, sparked polls about the propriety of an unmarried presidential candidate going on safari with a rock star, and provided fodder for Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who ran two weeks of strips lampooning the noncandidate’s ambitions.

  Jerry seemed restless in Sacramento, more eager to campaign than to govern. A March 1977 memo from White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan to President Carter proved prescient: “We should presume a challenge from Jerry Brown for the Democratic Party nomination. I feel strongly that he will probably run against you. By 1980, he will be bored29 with the job of being Governor. He probably feels that he would be President now if he had gotten into the race earlier.”

  As he looked for issues that would play well with a national constituency, Jerry turned again to the environment. His cautious approach to nuclear power had frustrated some of his supporters. Once again, he found the right moment. The alarming meltdown at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant on March 28, 1979, came as several nuclear plants sought licenses or permits to begin construction in California. Five weeks after the accident, Jerry spoke at a mass protest in Washington, D.C., seeking a nuclear power moratorium. He opened by thanking Ralph Nader, Tom Hayden, and Jane Fonda,

  prophets in their own time30 without honor, but prophets today of the future of this country. The antiwar movement was scorned, was looked upon as some kind of subversive effort, and yet history has vindicated those who stepped out first, to stand for truth, to stand for the future, to stand for peace.… This is not a Republican issue or a Democratic issue. Nuclear power and its lethal impact for hundreds of thousands of years looms larger than any political personality, any political party, any country. It is a matter of the species of life that now inhabits this planet. We are living and profiting off the addiction to nuclear power. It has become a pathological addiction in that it has made many feel good, while storing up for generations to come, evils and risks that the human mind can barely grasp.

  Two months later, an estimated thirty thousand people shut down California Highway 1 to protest the planned opening of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in San Luis Obispo, along the coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Organizers grilled Jerry privately for an hour before they allowed him to speak. “I just came by to join your effort to deny the license to Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant,” Jerry said, promising to fight31 any effort by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to grant the permit. The crowd in jeans and T-shirts exchanged hugs and cheered the politician in the three-piece suit, then listened to Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, and Peter Yarrow.

  Jerry’s Hollywood connections became significant as he eyed another run for president. Musicians and movie stars had gained new importance as revenue sources for candidates after federal election law limited individual donations to $1,000 per candidate. Under the 1974 law, celebrities could still donate services of unlimited value. The “rock music loophole” also allowed a portion of concert ticket sales to count toward federal matching funds in a presidential campaign.

  The changes coincided with a shift in the politics of the entertainment industry. Warren Beatty’s support for George McGovern in 1972 was viewed as a turning point, ending the era of Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple Black and ushering in the Hollywood politics of Helen Reddy and Jane Fonda. In 1975, Beatty, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Neil Diamond financed a Washington-based nonprofit to battle the influence of oil companies. The next year, Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden formed the Campaign for Economic Democracy, which organized around grassroots issues in California and was funded primarily through the entertainment industry.

  Hollywood’s clout as a political player increased along with its profits and reach. Gross receipts from movies doubled between 1971 and 1979, and record sales tripled. By the end of the 1970s, the average American family went to more movies, bought more records and tapes, and watched 250 hours more television than a dozen years earlier. Politicians who could tap into the celebrity world had a large reach. “Let’s face it, people are more into the lives, habits and political preference of today’s celebrities,” said Gray Davis. “I mean, it might sound ridiculous,32 but people really care who is Suzanne Sommers’s [sic] favorite governor. It wouldn’t even have entered anyone’s mind five years ago.”

  The same skills that helped celebrities and their managers attract large audiences translated to the political arena. “There isn’t much difference33 between selling Donna Summer or Jerry Brown,” said Richard Trugman, who had done both—he left his job at Casablanca Records to be Jerry’s finance chair in the 1978 campaign.

  One of the most prominent industry moguls, Jeff Wald, had been a Jerry Brown supporter since the earliest days, along with his wife, the singer Helen Reddy. At the end of 1979, Wald helped arrange two concerts that featured Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles, and Chicago and raised about $300,000 for Jerry’s nascent presidential campaign. The first concert was in San Diego, and about 180 contributors paid $150 apiece to take the train from Los Angeles with Jerry and celebrities, taking part in an onboard surprise party for Jane Fonda’s forty-second birthday. But most of the audience came for the music, not the politics; when promoters finally let Jerry onstage around one A.M., he was booed.34 The next night at the Las Vegas concert, the musicians gently told him not to come onstage at all.

  His presence in the third row was acknowledged from the stage, however, by Linda Ronstadt, who broke with the program format to note that she hadn’t seen Jerry in a while since he had begun to lay the groundwork for his next campaign. “If it hadn’t been for the fact that I got to see him on TV I would have forgotten what he looked like,” she said. “But he came back yesterday, and he’s going to make it all better now.” Then she launched into “My Boyfriend’s Back.”35 At the end of the song, Jerry jumped up and greeted her with a hug as she walked offstage, a rare public show of affection. “I wanted to lighten up the whole thing a little,” Ronstadt said after the concert. “Whenever people write about us, they always wonder if there is a political motive. We just like each other,36 that’s all.”

  The worlds of Hollywood, politics, and media came together at Lucy’s El Adobe, where Jerry and Ronstadt had first met. Du
bbed by one magazine “the epicurean epicenter of Hollytics,” the restaurant had long been a second home for musicians; now they were joined by Jerry’s entourage. When Marshall Ganz worked on campaigns in Los Angeles, he would head over to El Adobe late at night to drink margaritas, talk to the Casados, and see who was around. The Casados were proud of Jerry’s success. Frank Casado was scouting out a location in Washington—just in case. “Where Jerry goes,37 El Adobe goes,” he said.

  By 1980, Ronstadt had five platinum records and had just finished a new album, Mad Love. The daughter of an English-Dutch-German mother and a Mexican-English-German father, she had been singing since she was four and moved from her Arizona home to Los Angeles when she was eighteen. When Lucy Casado introduced her to Jerry in 1971, both of their careers were just taking off. Ronstadt hit stardom just as Jerry was elected governor; at the end of 1974, Heart Like a Wheel became her breakthrough album. She and Jerry were both public figures who valued their privacy, and her Malibu home, with a glass teahouse that jutted out onto the sand, offered a welcome sanctuary. She had asked to go along when Jerry planned a trip to Africa, thinking she could keep it secret, then thinking they could duck the press once they arrived. Instead, they were besieged, and she hid in the bathroom on occasion to avoid photographers and covered her face as she ran out to board small planes.

  Unlike others in the industry, Ronstadt had deliberately avoided using her celebrity38 to lobby for issues or candidates. “I don’t want people to take my word for something because they like my music,” she said. But she revised her view after thinking about artists in pre-Hitler Germany who had refused to take a stand. Fundraising for Jerry was even more complicated; she had vowed not to do so for fear people would think their relationship was based on her ability to raise money. As Jerry moved to enter the 1980 presidential race, she reconsidered that, too.