That Was Zen, This Is Now: Brown Cashiers a Pol Mate

OAKLAND —  For more than 30 years of Jerry Brown’s adventurous political life, the stylish, bald Frenchman with the designer tattoos and Zen haiku banter was Brown’s soul mate and sounding board.

People compared the relationship of Brown and Jacques Barzaghi to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the visionary knight and his faithful sidekick. To others, it was more like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, the bohemian buddies from Kerouac’s classic novel “On the Road.”

Since they bonded in 1971 at a Laurel Canyon dinner party, Brown and former French Legionnaire Barzaghi had been practically inseparable, first in Sacramento, where Brown served as secretary of state and two terms as governor; later during three presidential campaigns; and finally in Oakland City Hall, where Brown is in his second term as mayor.

Initially, Barzaghi was named to head the city’s arts program. One of his first acts was to push for the nomination of his personal tattooist, Don Ed Hardy, to the Oakland Cultural Arts Commission.

Defending the unconventional choice, Barzaghi said, “If it is not unusual, then what is the point?”

But Barzaghi’s colorful career abruptly ended this month when his sixth wife called police from the communal loft they once shared with Brown in Oakland’s warehouse district, alleging domestic abuse. Aisha Barzaghi, 30, accused Barzaghi, 66, of trying to push her down the stairs. Barzaghi said she shoved first.

No charges were filed, but last weekend, Brown told his longtime friend, who regularly haunts Oakland jazz clubs, that the long gig was over. On Monday, Barzaghi was fired from his $89,000-a-year job as an advisor to Brown’s administration.

Neither Brown nor Barzaghi has spoken publicly about the split. Friends said that Brown, who has announced plans to run for state attorney general, could no longer afford to have his old friend on the city payroll. He had already suspended Barzaghi once and reduced his salary after a sexual-harassment allegation.

Barzaghi embarrassed the mayor again when he neglected to file required paperwork showing that he was also on the payroll of a developer doing business with the city.

“Jerry is just cutting his losses,” said a City Hall colleague. “Politics is a very harsh business, and friendship is another thing.”

The firing is a postscript to a bygone era when Brown, who was tagged as “Gov. Moonbeam,” made eccentricity and unorthodoxy seem like desirable political attributes.

“That this unusual and uncharacterizable character crops up and finds a niche so close to power,” said Brown biographer Orville Schell, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, “bespoke of Jerry’s very unorthodox way of seeing the world.”

In today’s political world, for example, is it possible to imagine a governor dispatching such a mystical pal, as Brown did Barzaghi, to represent him at a state prison seminar? At the conclusion of the meeting, Barzaghi, once a protege of the leftist Parisian filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, was asked about the administration’s position. “I think we are all prisoners,” Barzaghi responded enigmatically.

He was a master of the confounding statement. As a campaign manager during Brown’s last presidential campaign in 1992, Barzaghi, a devotee of chaos theory, announced “our campaign transcends understanding.”

Regardless of his title, Barzaghi’s duties for Brown were never quite clear. “Jacques was always an odd, spectral figure that made people wonder and scratch their heads,” Schell said.

Barzaghi was born in France, served as a paratrooper in Algeria and worked as an assistant director to French New Wave filmmakers Godard and Francois Truffaut before coming to the United States to pursue his own film career. Along the way he dabbled in martial arts, acting and Zen Buddhism.

On various occasions, Barzaghi has functioned as Brown’s driver, clothing consultant, interior decorator and even impromptu barber. Early in their days in Oakland, Barzaghi applied for and received a concealed weapon permit so he could accompany Brown to late-night meetings in dangerous neighborhoods.

Even when Brown was not in office, Barzaghi was often at his side. In 1987, when reporters tracked the former governor to a remote Zen Buddhist monastery in Japan, they found Barzaghi and his family there too. Barzaghi and Brown have dined together with Fidel Castro in Havana and, more recently, met with dignitaries in Agadir, Morocco, an Oakland sister city.

Friends say Brown’s falling out with Barzaghi has been gradual, linked to Brown’s ambitions for attorney general and Barzaghi’s legal scrapes.

The trouble began in the fall of 1999 when a female city employee, a 32-year-old married mother of two who had been on the city payroll only a month, accused Barzaghi in a lawsuit of sexually harassing her on a trade trip to Mexico. The woman alleged that, among other offensive acts, Barzaghi tried to nibble on her ear and leeringly demanded to know the color of her underwear.

Barzaghi blamed the incidents on his effusive “Mediterranean” personality.

Barzaghi was suspended for three weeks, ordered to undergo counseling and had his salary cut from $118,000 to $89,000 a year. The city later settled the harassment suit for $50,000.

In 2000, Barzaghi attracted more unwanted publicity after he failed to report $13,500 he received as a feng shui consultant to Oakland developer and Port Commissioner John Protopappas. City employees are required by state law to report outside income in annual economic interest statements.

In an interview with a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Barzaghi downplayed the matter. “For me as a human being,” Barzaghi said, “it is not important. A piece of paper is not my life. My mind doesn’t work that way.”

By the spring of 2003, Brown had begun to distance himself from Barzaghi. The mayor moved out of the cavernous communal loft, which Brown had christened “We the People” and where he had lived for eight years with Barzaghi and an eclectic group of other residents.

Taking his dog Dharma with him, Brown put the loft up for sale for $4.37 million and moved into the apartment of longtime girlfriend and Gap executive Anne Gust.

“As a result of the Mexico fallout,” said a mutual friend in the Oakland arts community, “Jacques’ influence was already seriously weakened. The domestic problems were the final blow.”

At 11 a.m. July 13, police responded to a domestic abuse call from Aisha Barzaghi at the couple’s loft home not far from Oakland’s Jack London Square.

“It was just a family dispute that caused no harm to anyone,” Barzaghi told an Oakland Tribune reporter.

But it was enough to get him fired. The reaction in Oakland was a mixture of political realism and regret that the colorful, enigmatic character had been forced off the stage. “My guess is that it was a political decision,” said Oakland Councilwoman Jane Brunner. “Jacques had probably become more harmful to Jerry than good.”

Theater fans may be disappointed. A musical parody of the Brown administration, “Casino,” was performed this year at the city’s Fox Theater. At one point in the musical, the Barzaghi character, Jack Az, sings: “I’m the harem meister of City Hall, in number of wives I’m above all. If you are under 30, give me a call.”

At Yoshi’s, an Oakland jazz club and sushi restaurant that Barzaghi favored, bartenders wondered if the Frenchman would still be a regular.

Saddest of all over the firing were employees of Spaccio, a clothier across the plaza from City Hall where Barzaghi and Brown shopped. For years, Barzaghi has bought his black Italian suits there and helped Brown pick out his trademark double-breasted suits.

Almost every day, Barzaghi lunched with Spaccio owner Maurice Himy, who is vacationing in Italy. Jeffery Anthony, who was running the shop in his place, spoke for him. “I was shocked. Everyone was shocked. Most people thought that Jacques might get a slap on the hand. How do you get rid of someone who is your confidante and who helps you pick out your clothes?”