Lady Power in the Sunbelt

By JORDAN BONFANTE SAN DIEGO

One balmy night in September 1988 San Diego's Mayor Maureen O'Connor spent the night in Balboa Park, not to take the air beneath the palm fronds but to sample the life of homeless people. In jeans and baseball cap, she watched a series of drug deals go down. She spent a second night among more vagrants at a skid row mission. Throughout most of her 48 hours on the streets, she went unrecognized -- until Sister Raymonda, a nun who has known the mayor for years, spotted her resting on a bench reading the paper and whispered, "If you want to conceal your identity, you should remember that homeless women don't read the financial pages."

The mayor's expedition into the world of the downtrodden was indeed an attention-getting departure for someone who also happens to be a millionaire. But the excursion was less startling in this city, which tends to write its own rules for its free-form public life. One rule is that a woman politician, perhaps better than a man, can attempt the new and different. For San Diego is where the new is the norm and woman power is a dominant force in the political game. Here the "smoke-filled rooms," such as they are, tend to be flamingo- colored restaurants overlooking the Pacific surf. And here the "machine," such as it is, rests in the hands of a key coterie of women, especially three elegant ladies from the smart set.

Mayor O'Connor, 43, -- "Mayor Mo," as she is airily addressed by her constituents -- is at the center of a powerful troika of female leadership. The other two members do not hold public office and hardly need to. One is the region's foremost publisher, Helen Copley, 67, the stately owner of the San Diego Union and Tribune and a chain of 40 other papers. The other is philanthropist Joan Kroc, 61, the vivacious majority stockholder in McDonald's and owner of the San Diego Padres.

Together these wealthy women call many of the shots in the West's second largest city. They set the tone of its breezy conservatism. They generate much of its impulse for urban face lifting and instant culture. They influence, and in fact make, many of the city's major civic decisions. "Every day I get up and thank God that we have Mrs. Kroc and Mrs. Copley in San Diego," the mayor says extravagantly. "They go not just the extra mile, but the extra 100 miles. What they do for this community -- and they don't have to -- goes beyond any mayor's wildest expectations of private-public partnership."

The teamwork can produce useful political results. O'Connor, a Democrat, has for years enjoyed the regular support of Copley's conservative Republican papers. So have other candidates for county and state office after O'Connor introduced them to her powerful friend. One recent beneficiary was newly elected State Senator Lucy Killea, a Democrat famed for having been banned from Catholic Communion for her pro-choice abortion stand.

The teamwork can produce even more impressive civic results. When Kroc in 1988 decided to donate $18 million, to start a hospice for AIDS and other terminally ill patients, O'Connor enlisted Killea, then an assemblywoman, to sponsor the regulatory legislation needed from the state. Just when everything seemed to be in place, Republican Governor George Deukmejian vetoed the bill. The team closed ranks once more. Copley and her editor in chief, former Nixon aide Herb Klein, agreed to turn some Republican heat on the capital by dispatching a ringing letter to Deukmejian. The Governor was sufficiently impressed to reverse his decision and sign the hospice legislation. "Now that is how you use power," says Kroc admiringly. "That is just the way the men used to do it when the old boys controlled the city," says a friend of Copley and Kroc, Del Mar marketing executive Sonny Sturn. "But the men would do it for a factory. The women do it for human services."

Another prominent O'Connor to Copley to Kroc triple play made possible San Diego's recent Soviet Arts Festival. The mayor first dreamed up the idea of a big 22-event festival with a flashy Faberge show couched among operas and ballets. But it took the money and clout of her two friends to surmount vehement opposition to it. Copley and Kroc covered half the festival's budgeted cost by anteing up $500,000 and $1 million respectively. Then Copley's opinion-making dailies swung behind it. To clinch the deal, Kroc kicked in with a $2.8 million Faberge egg she had bought at auction for the occasion in Europe.

Woman power in San Diego extends beyond this golden triumvirate. Four of the nine city council seats are occupied by women. So are the presidencies or chairs of the school board, the chamber of commerce, the Centre City Development Corp., both the Republican and Democratic county committees and the deputy mayor's post. Their rise, say these women, has been surprisingly unchallenged.

Growth is the most frequently cited explanation for woman power in San Diego. The shimmering harbor city grew nearly 30%, to 1.1 million in the 1980s and was transformed from a sleepy Navy town to a booming metropolis. It became second only to Los Angeles in the West and sixth in the country, ahead of both Detroit and Dallas. Its industry diversified into high-tech research as well as low-cost maquiladoras manufacturing across the border in Mexico. Unemployment, at 3.9%, came to stand well under the national rate.

The explosive growth extended the bleak stretches of treeless housing tracts, especially inland. It intensified the traditional local conflict between a laid-back resort atmosphere and a stressful development. It imposed urban ills like crime and overcrowded jails. But at the same time it threw open the doors of opportunity, creating a fluid new nonpartisan politics. And, in the absence of blue-blood dynasties like those in Boston or San Francisco, it engendered an unapologetic admiration for new money.

San Diego's three leading ladies did not always live in mansions in Point Loma and Rancho Santa Fe. O'Connor, one of 13 children of a local boxer named Kid Jerome, once worked after school as a chambermaid in the Westgate Hotel next to the City Hall she now occupies as mayor. She was a phys-ed teacher with a shoestring campaign budget when, at 24, she became the youngest-ever member of the city council. In 1986 O'Connor handily won the mayoral race, after the incumbent mayor was convicted of perjury. By then financing a campaign was less of a problem: she had married a banking and fast-food millionaire, Bob Peterson.

Copley was a secretary from Iowa who married her boss, James Copley, and at his death in 1973 hesitantly took over his press fiefdom. Surprisingly, for a reticent, private figure, she proved to be a hands-on publisher who expanded the Copley newspaper chain and quadrupled its worth to more than $800 million. Kroc, whose personal fortune is estimated at $950 million, was a music teacher and supper-club organist from Minnesota who married McDonald's founder Ray Kroc in 1969 and moved to San Diego with him in 1976 to run his newly acquired Padres. After Kroc's death in 1984, she turned his conservative Republicanism on end by contributing mightily to disarmament causes and to the Democratic Party itself. Her philanthropy is legendary. Once at a party at the house of Dr. Jonas Salk in La Jolla, so many other guests accosted her with solicitations for money that she excused herself and left.

For all their close personal and social ties, the three women hold very different political views. Democrat O'Connor and conservative Republican Copley like to kid about their inability to convert each other. "I haven't given up, but she never takes my advice," says Copley, smiling, about O'Connor. Neither does the liberal Kroc. What binds them, according to O'Connor, is camaraderie and a shared boosterism in regard to San Diego. Yet why do they do it? Part of the answer lies in old-fashioned values that Kroc and Copley attribute to their Midwestern upbringing, and O'Connor to a strict Catholic girlhood that taught "you have to give something back."

And why does San Diego cede them so much prominence? One theory is that in the Sunbelt perhaps more than other places, power is there for the taking. Says San Diego Tribune editor Neil Morgan, an insightful observer of the city: "Relatively few people really want positions of leadership here. They came here for the climate, for opportunity, for all those beautiful beaches -- not to assume responsibility."

Not everyone is enamored of the reigning matriarchy. Copley has been embroiled in a prolonged dispute at the newspapers in which labor accuses her of intransigence. Kroc, as a woman, finds herself even more maligned than other baseball owners in the current players' dispute -- the dugout being one of the last all-masculine bastions, even in San Diego -- and has been seeking to sell the team. As mayor, O'Connor gets most of the flak. Councilman Bob Filner, a fellow Democrat, accuses her of dodging systematic dialogue and instead "bullying people, one issue at a time." Some political regulars charge that she shuns partisan duties to concentrate on her "populist" appeal that one of them describes as "a mile wide and an inch deep."

O'Connor, however, sticks to her vision of a "global" San Diego that somehow, with strict limits on new growth, will also preserve its beach-town quality of life. And she sticks up for women leaders as being more approachable than men, more service oriented and more concerned with their communities than with their personal ambitions. "When I took office three years ago, we had a mayor who'd been convicted. We had a councilman and a housing director under investigation. The city had gone through five mayors in four years," she says. "I was elected as a Democrat in a heavily Republican city with 60%. Mayor Mo must be doing something right."