Bradley’s Tough Times Amid Crisis : Mayor Gets Few Chances to Enjoy Place in History

In the autumn of his life, when he might have been adding the last flourishes to his monumental history, Tom Bradley finds his solace in the shouted words of a sunburned beach girl, revving her car’s spitting engine amid the blare of traffic in West Los Angeles.

“Hi, mayor!” she shouted raucously, raising a defiant fist toward a street corner where Bradley stood one day last week. “Hang in there!”

Her words sliced through the electronically amplified comments of Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who was discussing the area’s traffic woes in a circle of officialdom that included the mayor.

As fast as the advice reached Bradley’s ears, the stoic veil that ever guards his massive, impassive face lifted. His eyes brightened, his arm reached toward the street in a schoolboy’s shy wave, and he giggled.

There have been precious few moments of undiluted joy for Tom Bradley this somber season. Four weeks after the day he etched yet another first--winning an unprecedented fifth term as Los Angeles’ mayor--Tom Bradley is captured in his worst political crisis.

Packs of reporters, ignoring the mayor’s regal countenance and rigid silence, chase him down hallways. Ceremonial park openings and community gatherings are interrupted with questions about his finances. Back at City Hall, lawyers ferret out the affairs of a man renowned for guarding his privacy.

Bradley’s friends and allies have wrapped the mantle of business-as-usual around the mayor, and Bradley has partly complied. But there are moments when it slips, and a wave of sadness seems to cloak Tom Bradley, and suddenly he seems every one of his 71 years.

Days ago, at a gathering to commemorate the move of an historic mansion from land to be cleared for the expansion of the city’s convention center, Bradley meandered toward a wind-ruffled table holding pastries and a transparent lemonade cooler. Behind him, swept clean of smog and its discordant clatter muffled by distance, spread the angular profile of the downtown Tom Bradley helped create.

“Who’s responsible for this coffee?” the preoccupied mayor asked. Then he shrugged. “It’s not coffee,” he said to no one in particular. “It’s lemonade.”

‘His Place in History’

Said one city councilman, reflecting on the private cost of public controversy:

“All he’s looking for is his place in history. Tom Bradley is history in this town . . . he’s got to be dying.”

At the very least, Bradley is overseeing a very public sullying of the image of the city’s first elected black councilman and its first and only black mayor. Once the personification of stalwart integrity, the conciliator who forged a political and racial coalition that has lasted almost a generation, he is now a man confessing to errors in judgment and the subject of myriad investigations.

Despite the furor, Bradley has maintained his typical schedule, two or three events a day outside his downtown office, in the far reaches as well as the near neighborhoods of the city he has led since 1973.

Last week on his public journeys, Bradley’s moods reflected a catalogue of emotions. When reporters and the bright lights of television cameras pressed in, he tensed and grew aloof, expecting trouble. When bystanders clasped his hand or shouted greetings, he loosened his guard and hobnobbed happily, relief washing over his features. And often, at odd moments in the public appearances that mark the daily routine of political life, Bradley seemed lost in thought, dispirited.

But few were the times when Bradley’s troubles were specifically broached, in part because his gatherings tend to attract the faithful. His hosts never mentioned allegations that he interceded with city officials on behalf of local firms that paid him for his advice. Bradley, for his part, certainly never brought it up.

Unmentioned by Friends

Indeed, some friends have recoiled from its mention even in private. Jim Wood, the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency chairman, a Bradley supporter through campaigns that won and lost, said he has yet to raise the subject with the mayor. “From my point of view,” he said, “there are plenty of people discussing it.”

Bradley’s only public concession to crisis comes in the hint of defensiveness when he speaks about the length of his public service--47 years as a police officer, councilman and mayor. The mayor raises it repeatedly, uttering it in the plaintive hope that lengthy perspective will outweigh current furor.

The mayor’s tonic is his full schedule. On Friday night, after a full day of meetings at City Hall, Bradley donned a tuxedo and presided over the 11th annual Mayor’s Asian-Pacific American Heritage Awards dinner, held in the bitter chill of the Pacific Design Center’s patio.

After a day in which a council committee presented evidence contradicting his contention that he had not known the city dealt with a bank that paid him $18,000 last year, Bradley was more convivial than he had been all week.

He shook hands and issued sharp waves like a veteran campaigner in the thick of a tightening race. He embraced Hollywood actors and straight-laced businessmen. At one point, he swiped two white chairs from a dinner table and sat, alongside a beaming little girl in a gray pinafore, for a formal portrait.

As the evening progressed, he grew downright talkative, a trait unusual for the taciturn man. In his keynote speech, Bradley urged the audience to “just kind of hunch over and tighten up” to warm themselves.

Then he targeted Mike Roos, the area’s state assemblyman, with uncharacteristically risque patter.

“Mike Roos, great weatherman,” Bradley said. “Told his wife, when she asked, ‘Should I wear a coat?’--he said, ‘Oh no, balmy Los Angeles, West Hollywood weather.’

“And he’s going to get it when he gets home. Or maybe he won’t get it when he gets home.”

The crowd gasped. Some laughed.

Later, after watching a silent movie praising French Hospital, the Chinatown institution now threatened with closure because of financial losses, the mayor delivered his summation of the movie plot in bombastic tones usually reserved for revival meetings.

“The bottom line is,” Bradley hollered, his voice booming across the patio, “Hell with the deficit! Ten million is nothing! Save the patient!

“Heal!” he demanded. “Heal!”

Then he dropped to his politician’s baritone.

The next morning, less than 10 hours after he had left the dinner, Bradley held a broom in his hands and lectured 20 school children about the virtues of community service. The youngsters--members of a city-funded environmental cleanup program--listened raptly. Bradley was upbeat and inspirational.

“You not only have cleaned up many of the neighborhoods, alleys, vacant lots, cleaned off graffiti, but you’ve helped build a sense of pride in your own community and I think that’s very important,” he said.

“We’re going to give you all the help you need to stay out of trouble, stay out of gangs,” he added.

As he greeted the schoolchildren, a couple dressed in painting clothes approached the mayor. “Oh!” Marion Ingalsbe said, thrilled. “It’s nice to see you!” The mayor beamed.

‘It’s Politics’

Neither Ingalsbe nor her husband, Frank, longtime Bradley supporters, worry much about the mayor’s troubles. “So far as I’m concerned, it’s politics,” shrugged Frank Ingalsbe. “About the same thing is happening in Washington. Everyone is trying to find something on everyone else.”

Days earlier in West Los Angeles, where he spoke about traffic with Galanter and other elected officials, Bradley appeared similarly moved when a small group of passers-by forwarded slips of paper for him to autograph. As he headed toward his car, two aides in tow, a woman shouted from the passenger window of her truck.

“You got nothing but my support!” she told Bradley. The mayor’s step quickened to a bounce.

Indeed, Bradley said in an interview with The Times last week that he finds comfort in the waves and grins and salutes he has seen across the city.

“The reaction which I get from people is heartwarming,” he said. “ . . . They’ll call, they’ll write me, and they say we’ve known you for 16 years, we don’t believe that you would do any of these things deliberately, and we want you to know we’re with you.

“I think that’s a reflection of the kind of respect that has been built up between me and the people of the city over that 16-year period of time.

“It’s actually 47 years,” he added pointedly, “if you go back to my career prior to mayor.”

But there remains the daily drumbeat of bad news and continuing allegations, and the probability that investigations will stream out for months. Bradley remains, very likely for months to come, essentially a man under siege.

Public Appearance

Under the full, late spring leaves of the trees guarding City Hall’s southern flank, he stood the other day to endorse an abortion rights group’s latest tactic. Looking drawn and preoccupied, he spoke for a minute or two.

Then as another speaker reached the microphone, Bradley bolted toward the nearby doors of the City Hall in which he has served for 26 years, the doors over which is carved the saying of Cicero: “He that violates his oath profanes the divinity of faith itself.”

In the plaza he fled, a street woman with a pink overcoat fashioned over her ivory pants applauded alone in tribute.