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“Is he related to the other Sheen?” he asks.
Brown has a vague sense that there was a meltdown with a TV star. But the former Governor Moonbeam is now Governor Laser Beam; the only meltdown he cares about is California’s, with its $26.6 billion budget shortfall.
“There’s only one game in my life,” he tells me, as we split Southwest Airlines peanuts and a turkey and cheese sandwich in a hotel at the corner of Disneyland Drive and Magic Way, where he has come to address a police convention.
If you want to dish on tiger blood and Adonis DNA, go elsewhere. In the fantastic, monastic world of Jerry Brown, the talk veers toward Wittgenstein, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and preventing the collapse of the American empire.
“We’ve got to hunker down,” he says. “We’ve got to get more discipline. We don’t have a lot of time, and we’re an aging white society for the most part, and we need to get our act together.”
The shock of dark hair is gone, but Jerry Brown is still Jerry Brown. The prickliness, bluntness, questioning, calculating. That against-the-grain attitude; disdain for materialism, emptiness and politics as usual; that Jesuit-Buddhist outlook.
And yet, Jerry Brown is very different. The Howard Beale rants have become amiable riffs. Instead of tossing off insults, as when he called the Clintons the Bonnie and Clyde of American politics, he offers dry wit. He is less coiled.
“I’m very happy,” he says, adding with a grin, “I have a wife.”
Once a priest-like bachelor and loner whose only visible attachment was to power, Brown now seems almost cuddly. At an Oscar lunch at the Beverly Hills mansion of Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller, Brown and his wife, 52-year-old Anne Gust Brown, stood by the fire chatting with other guests.
Brown has a spiritual calling—using his savvy about his state to save it from the brink—along with a wife he’s crazy about.
If the legislators approve his plan, a mix of spending cuts and tax extensions, the big test will be a referendum on it in June. If his plan passes, California could become the laboratory for how to do things right, the anti-Wisconsin. It is remarkable to watch the governors on two coasts, Brown and Andrew Cuomo, both sons of iconic liberal governors, boldly go against the grain to do what works today. They are eliminating or reforming many of their dads’ hallmark programs.
He calls himself “an insider with an outsider’s mind.” He strives to avoid the sort of “group-think” that led to Vietnam.
Was he cheap as a child? “During World War II, to get butter, we had little ration tickets,” he says.
Noting that he followed actors into the Statehouse twice, Brown observes: “A lot of this is theater. How do you communicate to 38 million people? You’re not sitting down talking to them. So it’s gesture, symbol, the narrative, the drama. Who’s the protagonist? Who’s the antagonist?”
He speaks of his father more fondly. “He always told me to get married,” he says, noting that his parents had liked Anne, a former Gap vice president, whom Brown dated for 15 years.
“I’m slow to make commitments,” he says. “Once you get into these things, it’s hard to get out, the permanence thing.”
Now, he says, “it’s just fun to do things together. And she’s very smart. And she’s very loving. And fun.”
Maybe, he muses, he should have married her earlier, but “my ambition was, you know, soaring in a different direction.”
His mom once told me she hoped that he and Anne would have a little Edmund G. Brown III. “It would have been nice, but stressful,” he says. “When you have a couple kids, that becomes the dominant focus. So our dominant focus is what we’re doing.”
On his way out, he grabs an apple and a banana. They’re free.•
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Dowd, who won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, is a columnist on The New York Times’ Op-Ed page.Send comments on this column to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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