When it got here to being a politician within the sense we knew one — a cautiously crafted, assembly-line product of focus teams and consultants — Dick Riordan was not that man.
No political guide would have thought {that a} plurality of voters would go for a pro-choice Republican whose favourite motion pictures have been “Harold and Maude” and “Witness for the Prosecution,” a person who liked studying Evelyn Waugh and Marcel Proust — who liked studying, interval — and who may play Broadway requirements on the piano like a nightclub virtuoso.
But Riordan obtained elected and reelected mayor of Los Angeles, from town’s post-riot PTSD and earthquake and into the millennium yr of 2001.
He was additionally, political variations or no, my good friend, affable and generally persuadable, and we stayed mates for greater than 20 years, till his loss of life Wednesday at 92. By way of all of the head-butting over politics and insurance policies, every of us knew the opposite wished one of the best for the nation and, particularly, this metropolis. He was considered one of that imperiled species, a noblesse oblige Republican.
You possibly can’t say he was guileless. No man who amasses hundreds of thousands can do this with out being canny and far-sighted and possessing a strategic ruthlessness that he deployed on the chessboard and on the poker desk in addition to within the boardroom.
Earlier than Donald Trump’s exultingly vicious character corrupted the cheerier thought of “authenticity” in politics, Dick as a politician remained an beginner, perhaps even a little bit of a naif, generally impatient with the horizontal mechanics of democracy versus the vertical authority of the company world.
However the public got here to know and like his earnestness, his goofiness. He was the man who’d clap a wacky hat on his head for the cameras. He bristled at information protection he didn’t like — and I definitely obtained many earfuls from him about that — however he may chortle at himself. It got here naturally, because it does to all genuine leaders (not you, Donald Trump). He was an unique “as is” man. Until somebody put him to rights, he may present up for a speech together with his shirttail out, or carrying his lunch on his tie.
Dick was a shocking athlete — skier, bicyclist and ice skater. When the famend L.A. photographer Gary Leonard snapped an image of Dick falling on his ass on the vacation ice rink at Pershing Sq., Dick purchased copies. He blurted out jokes — some good, some groaners, just a few outright tone-deaf and offensive, born of the age and station that created him. He beta-tested some on his daughter, Trish Riordan Torrey.
“Do you assume I can inform that joke?” he’d ask. And she or he’d say, “Dad, in the event you’re asking me, you’ll be able to’t.” After all, he didn’t at all times ask.
He was, as The Instances wrote after he was elected in 1993, a research in contradictions. We within the Riordan e-book group noticed all of this up shut.
Our group started not lengthy after I visited Riordan’s astounding residence library — 40,000 books, most of them bulk-bought when Immaculate Coronary heart Faculty closed within the Eighties and augmented by the a whole lot by Dick’s book-buying fervor.
It’s a dream library, with higher and decrease tiers and a cine-dramatic round staircase to get there. There have been books within the basement, the loos, all over the place. On his nightstand the day I requested to see it: “The White Nile” by Alan Moorehead, a e-book about academic insurance policies, one other on nice speeches of historical past and an amusing bonne bouche by G.Ok. Chesterton. He was that form of reader.
Our unique members have been Dick, his legislation colleague and good friend Bruce Merritt, the fabled author Ray Bradbury and me.
We quickly added others, and in time, the core group stuffed 10 or a dozen or 14 chairs at his eating room desk each month. Some members finally moved away, like Alan and Arlene Alda — the actor and his author spouse — and scholar James Q. Wilson and his spouse, Roberta, as new ones arrived.
My mates Michael and Pat York, the actor and the photographer, joined us. The state historian Kevin Starr and his spouse, Sheila; my L.A. Instances colleague Martha Groves; fellow columnist James Flanigan and his spouse, Patricia. KNBC TV standouts Kelly Lange and Fritz Coleman — the latter a current member whose comedy performances Dick loved. Dick’s nephew Mike Riordan and spouse Nancy. Quite a few distinguished L.A. philanthropists.
Merritt, a former federal prosecutor, now retired from the legislation, and his spouse, Valerie, are nonetheless regulars. Dick’s great spouse, Elizabeth, sat on his proper. I used to be the sergeant at arms, at Dick’s left, and, with stern faucets on a wineglass, enforced the “one dialog” rule, lest the dialogue fracture.
Our e-book group was collectively for thus lengthy that variations of opinion may occur. Books do this, are supposed to do this: a serviette thrown down on the desk as a chair was shoved again, a prelude to strolling out. However we at all times, at all times, bore respect and affection for each other.
At that first assembly in January 1995, we 4 had learn “Einstein’s Desires,” and we have been puzzled by bits of it. Different e-book teams may carry on puzzling, however Dick, the mayor of L.A., obtained the writer, Alan Lightman, on the speakerphone to grill him.
L.A. had many different multimillionaires however just one mayor. At the same time as ex-mayor, it tickled Dick that he may wheedle an writer into becoming a member of us. A number of of us thought that was a awful thought. It inhibited dialog a couple of dangerous e-book. That occurred as soon as, after we all disliked the e-book, and there we sat, with the well-known writer anticipating accolades that didn’t come.
But as soon as, Sidney Poitier joined us to speak about his autobiography and was nothing lower than a delight. We learn “Shopgirl” with Steve Martin there, and after most individuals had drifted on residence, Mr. M and I wound up on the Riordan kitchen flooring, taking part in with the canines.
We learn large books, critical books: “Black Lamb and Gray Falcon,” concerning the historical past of the Balkans. We revisited Dickens and Fitzgerald, Philip Roth, Graham Greene — one other Riordan favourite — and, sure, Proust. Once we learn a e-book about Eisenhower as supreme commander in World Battle II, Dick unearthed a bottle of 1945 port.
The day in 1989 that considered one of our members, Peter Allen, met Dick, the 2 started their friendship with a chess recreation — and the friendship and chess by no means stopped. Dick, Peter marveled, was “absolutely alive.” Dick took ski and bicycling holidays at Peter’s place in Solar Valley, Idaho, the place his sleep-apnea loud night breathing, thundering from the living-room couch, as soon as awakened Peter’s mom.
From his deep wine assortment, Dick gave Peter a bottle of 1976 Chateau Lafite Rothschild.
“Peter,” he mentioned, “I’m too low cost to drink this costly wine, and I’m too proud to promote it, so I’d somewhat give it to you!” Alas, it turned out to be undrinkable, however the kindness, and the reminiscence of it, lasted Peter to at the present time.
Author Donna Foote is one other of our members. A number of years again, her good friend’s father was dying with one want: Dick had been his finest good friend in highschool, and he wished to speak once more to the person he’d misplaced contact with. Dick “dropped all the things, referred to as the dying man and stayed on the cellphone reminiscing as if not a day had handed since that they had final spoken,” Foote recalled. “His good friend died shortly after that, a cheerful man.”
Merritt, from our unique foursome, bonded with Dick over their shared love of Greene and Waugh. Merritt was stunned to search out such a bookish fellow in a company lawyer’s go well with — and such a “pure schmoozer” too.
“Lengthy earlier than he obtained concerned in politics, I met him for lunch someday on the Polo Lounge,” Merritt mentioned. “He had reserved a desk on the patio on the far finish of the restaurant. It took us virtually 20 minutes to stroll from the doorway of the restaurant to the patio, as a result of he knew any person at virtually each desk we handed and needed to cease to speak with them.”
His birthday events have been sprawling, genial affairs, with youngsters, canines, meals, motion pictures. His nephew Mike remembers Dick’s favourite rejoinders, stitched on caps Dick gave to his friends: “What’s your level?” and “I couldn’t agree with you extra.” I keep in mind one other favourite: “I used to be younger! I wanted the cash!”
He didn’t undergo fools gladly, Mike remembered final week, however “he was keen on just about everybody’s story.”
We teased Dick about the truth that he, a loyal capitalist, shared a birthday with worldwide celebrations of labor actions and a Communist vacation — and he may reply, “What’s your level?”
The late Richard J. Riordan, former mayor of Los Angeles, with Instances columnist Patt Morrison.
(Elizabeth Riordan)
A few of the obituaries famous that considered one of Dick’s daughters, Carol, died at 18 of an consuming dysfunction, and his son, Billy, died at 21 in a scuba accident. However there was an earlier technology of tragedy.
Sure, he turned wealthy, and sure, he was born on the cusp of the Melancholy right into a comfortably affluent household, the youngest of eight youngsters.
However cash, as he discovered time and again, couldn’t brick him off from tragedy. Certainly one of his sisters died at age 5 from a mind tumor. One other sister burned to loss of life in a fireplace. A brother died in a mudslide on L.A.’s Westside in 1969.
When he mentioned “I’m a rescuer,” he meant folks, and establishments. Ten years in the past, terribly sick within the intensive care unit with critical flu, he instructed his daughter Trish that the work that had made him happiest was his philanthropy.
His rescue canines have been his delight, and so they have been with him when he died. Way more than earlier mayors, he paid consideration to town’s animal companies and appointed his daughter Kathy to the fee accountable for their care, the place she served admirably, I believe, holding to account practices that had by no means been questioned earlier than.
Kathy is much more tenderhearted about animals than her dad. As soon as, when Dick’s third spouse, the late kids’s activist Nancy Daly Riordan, purchased a crocodile purse, Kathy seemed stricken.
“Kathy, Kathy,” her dad soothed her. “That crocodile had a cat in its mouth.”
His marketing campaign slogan in that first election was “Robust sufficient to show L.A. round.” Figuring out him as I got here to, I may need rewritten it to “completely different sufficient,” however hey, I’m no politician, both.
