Riordan Runs With Enthusiasm, Candor

On the red brick streets in downtown Santa Ana, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan darts in and out of tiny shops like he’s just arrived at an amusement park and has to try every ride. He shakes every hand he can reach. He pats every baby’s head.

Bystanders watch as he makes his rounds on his quest to be governor of California. With a few exceptions, they have no idea who he is. Most of the people he approaches in this predominantly Latino city speak little English but seem pleased enough by the diversion of this candidate and his posse of staff, reporters and local politicians.

“What’s your name?” Riordan asks a young woman.

“Monica,” she answers.

“I’m Ricardo,” he says.

“Yo quiero . . . ser . . . su gobernador,” he adds, beaming as he slowly delivers “I want to be your governor” in American-accented Spanish.

A day later, as his glossy black campaign bus hurtles toward Palm Desert and lunch with the Coachella Valley Lincoln Club, he says he can read Spanish, he just can’t speak it well.

“I think Latinos appreciate that I try,” he says about his Spanish. “They love to laugh at me. If you sound too perfect, like Al Gore, you sound like a nerd.” He laughs. “I just sound like an idiot.”

He is anything but. He is a former two-term mayor, a respected lawyer and a successful businessman whose fortune is believed to hover between a quarter- and a half-billion dollars but who delights in insisting that he never knows how much he’s worth. He is also one of the most generous philanthropists in California and he does know how much money he has given away--$30 million.

A man who started his career in elective politics only 10 years ago at the age of 61, Riordan has never cultivated the politesse of the public candidate. When he’s angry, he shows it. When he tells a funny story, he laughs the hardest. When he breakfasts with Riverside politicos carping about their traffic problems, he listens sympathetically but says, “You’ve got to come up with a solution. I can’t as governor tell you what to do about your traffic.”

And when he addresses a group of supporters who have paid $250 to mingle with him at a cocktail party at the Mission Inn in Riverside, he starts by telling the mostly white group that their political party must be more inclusive. “We are the new Republican Party,” he says. “We can disagree with each other. We can be pro-choice, pro-life, and respect each other.”

He strings thoughts together in a stream-of-consciousness patter that more carefully packaged politicians wouldn’t dream of doing. He derisively tells a story of Gray Davis holding up a commercial plane flight--that Riordan just happened to be on.

“I don’t want to be like a king,” Riordan scoffs, saying that Davis sat in the front. “I sat in the back. I felt like Rosa Parks,” he says, then adds, “who’s a friend of mine, by the way.” Of course, he meant it as a quip--and he got it wrong, because she sat in the front of the bus. But few rich white men would reach for a poor black woman and civil rights icon for a joke--then try to fix it by insisting the person was a friend.

His candor and engaging playfulness may constitute his greatest assets in a race against the famously bland and stiff Davis. But the flip side--a coursing wrath--poses a constant threat to his ambitions.

Upset that this article might mention previously reported details of the untimely death, 20 years ago, of one of his daughters, he ended a conversation with a reporter by suddenly jumping to his feet and screaming at the reporter to get out--of a moving campaign bus. An aide took Riordan’s arm and coaxed him away.

Minutes later, Riordan was smiling and chatting with supporters at a Sacramento printing company as if nothing had happened. A few hours later in Modesto, he was wolfing down In-N-Out burgers with a klatch of reporters, including the one who had displeased him.

Successful in business and politics, Riordan’s life nonetheless is clouded by a series of devastating tragedies--the death of three siblings at young ages and the deaths of two of his five children. His relationships have been troubled. He has been married three times and divorced twice, despite a lifelong devotion to his Catholic faith. (All his wives have been Catholic.) Stubborn and quick-tempered, he has pushed away colleagues and friends.

The most glaring example is his troubled relationship with Bill Wardlaw, the Democratic activist who defied his own party to mastermind both of Riordan’s mayoral campaigns. They had a blistering parting of ways when Riordan, who could serve only two terms as mayor, decided to support Steve Soboroff as his successor. Wardlaw decided to support James Hahn, and Riordan took it as a betrayal. Today, Wardlaw and Riordan are just beginning to repair their relationship.

In some ways, Riordan is the model of the contemporary, pragmatic elected official. As a Republican mayor, he gave money to Democrats (including the governor he hopes to unseat) and happily opened the Democratic Convention in his city. His wife is a registered Democrat who can’t even vote for him in the primary. He supports abortion rights for women and rails against constraints on business. He seems to regard politics the same way he regards shopping--a necessary but unappealing task.

But why at 71, an age when many prominent men are contemplating their memoirs, would he want a job that he once called a nightmare? His answer reveals a combination of civic-mindedness, sincerity and arrogance.

“Well, you start out by saying there’s a vacuum of leadership,” he explains on his bus. “And . . . if you had somebody else in who could beat Gray Davis, I’d be out of that race in a second.”

Pursuing What He Called a Nightmare

“My worst nightmare in the world is waking up in the morning, and realizing I’m governor of the state of California . . . [The governor] is just running the most convoluted bank there is.”

On a cool winter afternoon, seven years after he uttered those words, Riordan is dressed in gym shoes and jeans. He has decided to turn an interview into a walk around his lush Brentwood Park neighborhood. Behind gates and hedges sit some of the city’s most prized real estate, including his own 7,000-square-foot Mediterranean home. A voracious reader, he built a cozy two-story library inside, which holds only a fraction of his collection of more than 40,000 books. Outside the house, tiny lights adorn trees so high you marvel at how anyone got them up there.

“It took me about two days,” Riordan deadpans. (He hired people to do it.)

As he walks, Riordan launches into his campaign appeal: Everything in the state is in crisis, there’s not enough housing, there are no long-term plans for water, California schoolchildren rank nearly last in math and science scores. He would hire “the best and the brightest” to run the government. Business is the salve for most problems.

“One of the main themes of my campaign is, if you’re the most liberal person and you’re for the poor, you should want businesses to be successful in California so that they will create quality jobs for the poor and others.”

Riordan’s former law partner and close friend, Carl McKinzie, says Riordan feels compelled to run. “He loves problem-solving; he loved it as a lawyer, solving problems for clients. He sees problems with the state he can solve--fiscal problems, energy problems. To have California rank where it does in education is appalling to him.”

As he strolls his neighborhood, he recycles an anecdote he has told for years about a couple he hired to do housework. As the story goes, they quit because they had nothing to do.

“They said I didn’t know how to live like a wealthy man,” he says, chuckling.

But he does live like a wealthy man. He has a house in the expensive ski resort of Sun Valley, Idaho, and he just finished a yearlong remodel of his Brentwood home. “That’s a sore subject,” he says, grumbling about the cost of the project like any other homeowner. He spent millions on his successful run for mayor in 1993. He often has breakfast at the unpretentious downtown restaurant, the Original Pantry--but then, he owns it.

He loathes buying expensive clothes and once chided the wealthy Al Checchi, when he was running for governor in 1998, for wearing an expensive suit during the campaign. But even Riordan makes some concessions to taste. On a recent campaign outing, he was wearing a Trussardi suit that he said would have cost him $3,000 here. Ever the bargain-hunter, he bought it for $600 in Italy.

“Maybe it’s a little Irish guilt or something,” he muses.

Even though he was born only a year after the stock market crash that opened the Depression, Riordan grew up comfortably in the suburb of New Rochelle, N.Y. “When I went to public school, it was about half very poor blacks and half very well-off whites, and yet I don’t think any of us thought there was anything strange about it. The blacks came over to my house. I went over to their house. Never thought twice about it.”

After an all-male Jesuit Catholic high school, he went to college at Santa Clara University, hoping to make their highly rated football team. He never did better than third string. After two years, he transferred to Princeton University, where he studied with the renowned Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Despite the perks of an elite university--he once met Albert Einstein at a small cocktail party the physicist hosted for students--he wasn’t happy there.

“There were a lot of preppies at Princeton. I wasn’t that comfortable with them,” he says. “Nice people. I’ve gotten more comfortable with them since then.” He’ll be returning in June for his 50th reunion along with such famous alumni as former Cabinet members James A. Baker III and Frank Carlucci.

A stint in the Army in Korea followed college. He never saw combat, but the experience changed the direction of his life. There, he abandoned his goal of being an academic and decided to take up law. He learned how to play chess--a game he loves to this day--and win. But most of all, as a lieutenant leading a battery of 210 men, he went from being a shy boy to a leader.

After Korea, he entered University of Michigan Law School at the age of 24, blazing through in two years because he attended classes during the summer as well. Somehow, he managed to find time to court a woman he had met on a visit to a New York resort. While he completed law school, she finished up an internship as a hospital dietitian in Westchester County, N.Y.

The couple married and settled as newlyweds in South Pasadena. Riordan had been drawn to California ever since college.

“I’ve never known anyone who loved California as much as this man,” says Jill Riordan Harris, who later became his second wife. “It felt new to him.”

Genie Riordan eventually bore five children as her husband set about building a law practice, starting off at O’Melveny & Myers and eventually setting up his own firm.

As he was nurturing his law career, he was also beginning to make his fortune. In the late ‘50s, he put an $80,000 inheritance from his father into the stock market and in two years made $300,000.

In the early ‘60s, he put $50,000 into a company that made audio cassettes. After about a year, the company was sold and he reaped seven times his investment.

There were some mistakes--he invested $2 million in a promising memory chip company in the ‘80s that went belly-up “in a flick.” There were a few missed opportunities--he passed on a chance to invest $200,000 in Intel. “If I had kept it in, it would be worth $2 billion today,” he says.

Mostly, however, he was thriving, bankrolling two investment companies. He helped start Riordan Freeman & Spogli in 1983 but left it five years later. And he started Riordan Lewis & Hayden, in which he still has an interest.

One of the most important relationships in his life came from his work at Riordan Freeman & Spogli. Wardlaw joined up with Riordan in 1983 to handle the legal work of Riordan’s investment company.

In the late ‘70s, Riordan and his first wife, Genie, separated. The same year that they officially divorced--1980--he married Jill Herndon. The two, who met through mutual friends, were passionate about reading and children’s issues. Together they bought the house in Brentwood that Riordan still calls home and spent hours helping out at the downtown restaurant, the Original Pantry, that Riordan purchased.

But tragedy came as well. Riordan’s son, Billy, was 22, fluent in French, filled with the same sense of humor as his father, when he died in a scuba diving accident on the East Coast. “He was picking up shellfish to cook for his friends,” Riordan recalls, his voice thick with pain at the memory.

Several years later, in 1982, he lost his daughter, Carol, at 19. She died of complications from anorexia and bulimia, according to her death certificate. Her death was devastating for the entire family. “One of the things we do in dealing with any tragedy is, if we work, we put ourselves more into our work,” observes Jill Riordan Harris, 57, who is now remarried and lives in Malibu with her pediatrician husband. She remembers her ex-husband being “very strong. He was stronger about this than I was.”

He Emerged as a Political Player

It was a decade when Riordan’s life was changing in several ways. He was emerging as a political player in the city. He loaned $300,000 to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s unsuccessful run for governor. Despite the fact that Bradley was a Democrat, the Riordans were both enthusiastic supporters of him. Riordan was also getting involved in a more direct way. He was appointed to the Coliseum Commission and the Recreation and Parks Commission.

And Riordan helped run the controversial but successful 1986 campaign to oust state Supreme Court Chief Justice Rose Bird.

Riordan’s entrance into the 1993 mayoral race was the brainstorm of Wardlaw and his wife, Kim, now a federal appeals court judge. Bill Wardlaw, a staunch Democrat, was so convinced that Riordan would be a good mayor that he ran the successful campaign even though his candidate was a Republican.

At that point, Riordan had separated from his second wife, Jill. He was just settling into a relationship with Nancy Daly, the woman who would become his third wife.

Deeply involved in foster care issues, Daly had met Riordan in the ‘80s, when she sought funding from the Riordan Foundation, the conduit for his charitable giving. Both were married at the time and they didn’t start dating until the early 1990s, when they were separated from their spouses.

“I was not excited about his running for mayor,” recalls Daly, 60. “I thought I had had my public life.” Daly would eventually go through a contentious divorce from Bob Daly, now the chairman of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Although Nancy Daly Riordan is active in her husband’s campaign for governor, she was not a prominent figure during that first mayoral campaign. She did, however, accompany him to his first fund-raiser at the home of friends.

“He was brand new at it,” she say. “It was very dear. Slick, he wasn’t. He held some notes in his right hand and held my hand in his left hand, and he said he was running for mayor.”

He swept into office despite the late revelation of three alcohol-related arrests, the latest in 1975. Riordan says that at the time, he and his business associates sometimes drank heavily after work. Today, he says, he drinks “sometimes a glass or two of wine at night. Most of the time, I don’t have anything.”

Supporters and detractors will argue into the next decade over how much he accomplished as mayor, but his quirky style is burnished into the minds of all in the city. He was the mayor who, even in his 60s, could bike-ride 30 miles at a stretch but also shamelessly catnapped between meetings.

Uninterested in the details of city governance and embroiled in a generally combative relationship with the City Council, he had little desire to deal with its members. But when he was interested in an issue, he forged relationships even with those on the other side.

“He is so unlike a politician,” says Alice Callaghan, an advocate for the homeless whose access to Riordan included his home phone number. “Every politician in town, you cross them once and they won’t talk to you again. Riordan, he’s willing to disagree with you on the issues he disagrees with you on and work with you on the issues he does agree with you on.”

Riordan thought about running for governor in 1998 but, among other things, he was getting married. His wife wasn’t too keen on starting a marriage as her husband was starting a campaign for governor. The two were married on Valentine’s Day by their friend, Kim Wardlaw, in a civil ceremony in Sun Valley.

Riordan had gotten his first marriage annulled by the church. But his second marriage was not annulled when he married Daly. On the eve of his wedding, his good friend Cardinal Roger Mahony, the archbishop of Los Angeles, released a statement lamenting the third marriage, which the church does not recognize as valid.

In deference to the church’s view of his marriage, Riordan does not receive the Sacrament of Holy Communion when he attends Mass, usually at St. Monica’s in Santa Monica.

“I believe in God, I believe in honesty, I believe in helping people,” he says. “And to me those are the most important Catholic traits.”

His faith has helped him through some of the most wrenching moments of his life, including the deaths of his children. “Probably my religion, my beliefs, my character said, ‘You have three children and family that are left.’ I have other people who need me.”

His surviving daughters keep a relatively low profile. Kathleen, 42, an animal welfare activist, sits on the city’s Animal Regulation Commission. Patricia, 41, worked in television on the business side but now raises her children with her husband and lives on the Westside. Mary Beth, 44 and a resident of Santa Barbara, is a mother and the manager of her husband’s chiropractic business.

As Riordan rounds a curving street in his neighborhood, he comes upon two chimney sweeps leaving a house. Their faces light up when they see him.

“Mr. Riordan, you’re awesome!” one exclaims.

“What’s your name?” Riordan asks.

“Billy,” he says.

“That’s my son’s name,” says Riordan.

He sometimes speaks of his son in the present tense.

“A lot of times, if I go into a debate or something, I’ll think of Billy and Carol, and I’ll say they’re looking at me, and even if I look like a damn fool, they’ll still be on my side.” He laughs softly. “I really do that.”

Touring the State in Luxury Campaign Bus

He has spent part of the primary campaign touring the state in a luxurious bus with black leather upholstery. From this moving headquarters, he hits conventions, factories and open air markets. He makes tacos at a taqueria in Santa Ana, inquires about wages at the Fender guitar factory in Corona, and watches in fascination as a worker sorts oranges on a rumbling assembly line in a Riverside citrus packing plant.

Riordan began this campaign relying on his personality to make his mark. But as the campaign has progressed and as Davis has started attacking him, he has had to adjust. Any illusion that this campaign would be easier than his mayoral ones has been quickly dissipated. The stakes are higher. And the architect of his mayoral campaigns, Wardlaw, is not on board in any official way.

And then there is the issue of his age and his health.

Last year, Riordan underwent radiation to treat prostate cancer. Two months before he entered the governor’s race, his doctors declared he had a “clean bill of health” and an excellent prognosis.

“He’s the father of my children, and I care about his own personal health,” says first wife Genie Riordan, 70, who has donated $25,000 to his campaign. “After he made his decision, I said, ‘I’m concerned about what the stress is going to do to you.’ He thanked me. He’s a person who needs to be active.”

For Riordan, health is just another issue to be shrugged off--in this case by citing his exercise regimen. (He bikes, ice skates and recently gave up smoking cigars.) On this, as on other subjects, he is neither reflective nor inclined to self-doubt. He tackles problems but does not dwell on failure or loss. He moves forward.

“I distinguish myself by how much I do today and tomorrow, not by what I did yesterday,” says Riordan. “It’s about what I can accomplish every day.”

Richard Riordan: His Life, His Words

* Born: May 1, 1930

* Residence: Brentwood

* Education: Bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Princeton University, 1952. Law degree, University of Michigan, 1956.

* Party: Republican

* Career: Mayor of Los Angeles, 1993-2001. Started his law career in Los Angeles in 1956. Later, opened two venture capital and investment firms. His own investments are now held in a blind trust.

* Strategy: Presenting himself as a non-ideological politician, a former businessman with a longtime interest in education, who believes fostering business is the key to improving economic conditions. He repeatedly tells voters he will hire “the best and the brightest” to tackle the state’s problems.

* Personal: married since 1998 to Nancy Daly. Two previous marriages ended in divorce. Five children by his first wife, Genie. Two are deceased.

On leading a battery of men during his Army days: ‘I wasn’t a leader in what people usually think of as a gung ho, charismatic leader, but I was somebody who was always looking for better ways to do things.’

‘The Republican Party has to learn that people who differ can get along--particularly on the issue of pro-life and pro-choice. I respect people who are pro-life and I think they should respect people who are pro-choice.’