Content area
Full Text
SEE CORRECTION APPENDED
I'm trying to get Roz Wyman to crack, to join the rest of us in our rant about a political system that has run amok.
* What about the Buddhist temple? I ask. And soft money and impeachment and independent counsels and PACs and the Lincoln Bedroom? I could keep going, but this isn't making a dent. * What about Social Security, she counters. And what about Medicare? What about my senator--Dianne Feinstein? "Do you want a hero? Feinstein pushed through an assault weapons ban when it was going nowhere; she got the desert [protection] bill that will leave all of that land for my grandchildren. And the breast cancer stamp, for God's sake. For the first time in history a U.S. postage stamp has gone for research. You don't think I feel a little piece of being proud of that? I do . . . I do."
Wyman has the voice of a performer and her hands--waving, chopping, pounding at the air--are part of the show. She's been sitting back on the living room couch in her Bel-Air home. But now she's moved to the edge of her seat, and when I glance down, she taps my knee for attention. She's passionate, her friends confirm, and then they smile as if there must be a better word for a senior citizen who is pulling late nights at Feinstein's campaign headquarters just as she did for Helen Gahagan Douglas in her race against Richard M. Nixon in 1950.
Actually, what Wyman's passion needs is an adjective: boundless, perhaps, or bulletproof; maybe legendary. She made Los Angeles history nearly 50 years ago when, at 22, she became the first woman ever elected to the City Council. Then, pregnant with her first child, she led a cliffhanger vote in 1957 that brought the Brooklyn Dodgers to Chavez Ravine. "What this lady did for baseball in this city, they should erect a monument to her," says Tommy Lasorda. That was back when there wasn't even a women's bathroom in the council chambers and official city meetings were regularly held over drinks at the Jonathan Club, which was off limits on two counts for a Jewish woman.
Surely, having invested so much of her life...