Peg Yorkin was the housewife of the ‘50s. Now, she’s an activist with clout and money. : $10-Million Woman

The hand-lettered sign over Peg Yorkin’s office in West Los Angeles warns: “Absolutely No Soliciting.”

It’s not to be taken too literally.

On Wednesday, Yorkin told a Washington news conference that she was making a $10-million endowment and gift to the Feminist Majority Foundation and the Fund for the Feminist Majority, a sister organization that she co-founded in 1987.

Eleanor Smeal, fund co-founder and former head of the National Organization for Women, called the contribution the largest gift in women’s rights history.

Yorkin said she wanted to wake women up to the fact that their rights and lives are under attack, that they are being sent back to the Dark Ages. Citing the probable loss of abortion rights, she said women have to “put our money where our anger is or we perpetuate a system that relegates women to begging for the obvious.

“It is time to stop begging men for our rights,” she said Wednesday. It is time for women to “turn our rage into direct action.”

Rage is an operative word for Peg Yorkin.

Peg Yorkin Productions and the Feminist Majority Foundation are housed in a modest suite of offices. Stacks of papers and files overflow the table space; a messy little kitchen bears evidence of several days’ take-out. It is no-frills all the way down the crowded hall to her private office door with the brass plaque: “Peg Yorkin Is Beyond Therapy. Do Not Disturb.”

Obviously, something has disturbed her.

“It’s men telling us what to do,” she says. “It pisses me off so much. It drives you insane. I’m not a very calm person.”

Indeed. This 10 million bucks does not come from any Central Casting version of Lady Bountiful. At 64, Yorkin is an unsmiling, tiny woman who smokes cigarettes (“my only vice--no booze or drugs”) and usually wears a restless, astute, “sizing up the room” look on her face. She cracks an occasional smile, like when she says: “I’m a graduate of the ‘Thelma & Louise’ Finishing School. What a satisfying film.”

An only child, born to a Catholic father and Jewish mother, Yorkin grew up in New York City, she says, in genteel poverty. Her father’s alcoholism negated his career as a cinematographer for legendary filmmaker D.W. Griffith, she says, and forced the family to live “on the kindness of my mother’s relatives.”

Raised in neither religion, Yorkin is no believer: “The religions are patriarchal. I don’t believe in any of them, or a God, or a Goddess.”

She went to Barnard College, had a brief acting stint and an early marriage that lasted two years.

In 1954, she married television producer Bud Yorkin, whose success with such shows as “The Colgate Comedy Hour” and “The Dinah Shore Show” eventually led to a legendary, lucrative partnership with Norman Lear and co-ownership of Tandem Productions.

The marriage produced two children, Nicole (Nikki), now 32, and David, 30, both of whom write for the TV-film industry.

Peg Yorkin was part of the society and charities circuit, heading SHARE and producing their annual benefit for the Exceptional Children’s Foundation.

“I was kind of a wife of the ‘50s,” she says.

Nicole, who says Yorkin “would have made a great lawyer,” remembers always seeing her mother as a feminist “whether she realized she was or not.” And from the beginning, her mother communicated feminism to her, emphasizing the importance of Nicole’s finding work that would be important to her.

Although her mother “did Girl Scouts and all that stuff,” Nicole says, “she was never a classic housewife no matter what she says.”

Yorkin says that she was always restless--never the gracious little hostess sometimes described by the press.

“I’m very combative,” she says of her dinner-party style. “Bud could get awfully mad at me.”

Did she insult her guests and pick fights?

“Particularly with our male guests.”

She was well on her way to being angry, Yorkin says, and increasingly aware of the brewing feminist movement: “Here I am, with an IQ--what is it--something like 168, living in Encino, thinking ‘What am I doing?’ ”

As her children grew older, and before her full-time move into feminist activism, she became involved in the theater. She served as director of the L.A. Free Shakespeare Festival, and its successor, the L.A. Free Public Theater.

It was not enough.

“If I’d been a man I would have been extremely successful in business. I’m quite smart actually. As a man I would have had a much greater opportunity. It would have been very different,” Yorkin says. Then musing a bit, she smiles wryly and adds, “I could have been Bud Yorkin if I were a man.”

Instead, she was his wife of 30 years. They split up in 1984, and when the bitter divorce was final in 1986, she walked away with a fortune--every penny, she says emphatically, she earned.

Just how much money has she got?

Yorkin would rather not say. Finally, reluctantly, she says the $10-million gift represents about 25% of her worth.

It did not take the divorce to make her a feminist--and an angry one at that.

“God knows (the divorce) certainly didn’t mitigate it in any way,” she says. “Divorce is certainly a great radicalizer if nothing else.”

Smeal says Yorkin makes too much of her anger and is a warm and generous person, “who basically likes being nice to people.”

Yorkin herself seems to see seriousness and anger as credentials. Necessary ones.

“If women aren’t angry, they should be,” she says. “Look at this country--there is no support for child care, no maternity leave, paternity leave. . . .

“Women have been acculturated to not get angry, to smile all the time. I think the women with whom I associated for many years . . . have been anesthetized by their standard of living.”

The anesthesia wore off Yorkin long ago. She describes now a singularly focused, almost all-work-and-no-play life devoted to feminism:

She goes to the movies, watches videos, avoids fund-raising dinners (but sends a check), rarely goes to the theater anymore, and uses her beach house to “veg out and read” feminist books.

Yorkin neglects to mention that she goes to Dodger games with her friend Roz Wyman, the Democratic activist and former city councilwoman, who says of Yorkin: “She has a wonderful time. And she knows how important baseball is to me, so she keeps up with it, knows the players. It’s not necessarily her thing.”

Still, even a close friend like Wyman uses serious as the first word to describe Yorkin.

That description doesn’t bother Yorkin: “I find when you’re really part of this movement, there are no ‘light times.’ The friends I have are all like I am. We talk about the issues.”

And how does that set with her male friends?

Looking momentarily affronted, she replies flatly: “I don’t have any. I like my son and my son-in-law. I can’t be with most men. I have nothing to talk to them about. . . . They’re the problem.” (Yorkin later says she has a close relationship “with my investment person, who is a male.”)

As for romantic relationships or remarriage, she laughs outright: “I couldn’t be less interested. I’m happy not to have them in my life. . . . The fact is, divorce is very freeing. I love living alone, doing what I want to do.”

Yorkin does, and gives, a lot.

She is on the board of the Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center, supports the Directing Women’s Workshop of the American Film Institute, and gives to the ACLU, NOW, UCLA’s Women’s Studies Center, L.A. Women’s Foundation and the Women’s Political Committee.

“The world will come to me for contributions,” Yorkin says, acknowledging the effect of her latest gift. “I prefer to give to them for feminist causes.”

She still supports the arts and museums, she says, and will continue to endow charity.

But she hopes her gift will encourage other women to financially support feminist causes: “Ten million dollars in no way is going to save the feminist movement. It’s nothing.”

Yorkin realizes that a lot of people see her as “just a nut case.”

How does she describe herself?

She pauses, ponders and looks at the ceiling.

“I’m smart. By virtue of money, I’m powerful, but not as powerful as I would be if I were a man,” she says. “I’m angry. I’m in good health. I’m pleased with myself for doing what I’m doing with the movement and would like to think I’ve done something very worthwhile . . .”

Just then a young photographer enters the room, a stranger to Yorkin.

He looks at her for a moment, and asks, “Are you Nikki’s mom?”

The angry feminist, who has been bad-mouthing men off and on for two hours, bursts into laughter. She greets him warmly and says, with delight, “You see that? That’s the other thing I am. I’m Nikki’s mom!”