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Some of Feinstein's former employees accuse her of requiring absolute loyalty while giving little in return. "She doesn't remember what people have done for her," says ex-Transportation Chief Richard Sklar. "When something goes wrong, she is anxious to find someone to blame." Away from politics, she can be surpassingly generous and compassionate. Feinstein once spotted a wino collapsing in the seedy Tenderloin district and rushed to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. For much of the past year, she has seen to the care of the nine-year-old son of a former housekeeper, who was trapped by immigration problems in her native Guatemala. Says Sklar: "She can be a warm Jewish mother. She would like to do good every day of her life."
The eldest of three daughters of a prominent San Francisco surgeon, Feinstein was raised in comfortable but hardly happy circumstances. Only in the past few months, since her mother's death at 72, has she spoken publicly of a painful childhood filled with irrational punishments doled out by her mother, who was suffering from an undiagnosed case of encephalitis. Feinstein's mother was a Catholic from Russia, and enrolled her daughter in the Convent of the Sacred Heart for her high school education. But Dianne never joined the church and eventually adopted her father's Jewish faith. She attends temple on major holidays.
Entering Stanford University in 1951, Feinstein majored in history and political science, and was elected vice president of her senior class—the highest office to which a Stanford coed could then aspire. After graduating, she worked briefly for a criminal-justice foundation before marrying Attorney Jack Berman and bearing her only child, Katherine, now 26. The marriage ended after four years in a bitter divorce; Berman, a superior court judge, says that Feinstein still refuses to speak to him, although nearly 25 years have passed. Her second marriage, to Neurosurgeon Bertram Feinstein, lasted 16 years, until his death in 1978.
By then, Feinstein, though lacking a law degree, had parlayed her early interest in criminal justice to an appointment to the California women's parole board and the mayor's commission on crime in San Francisco. In 1969, bucking the Establishment, she became the only woman to win a seat on the eleven-member board of supervisors without having first served out an unfilled term by appointment. As supervisor, Feinstein won a reputation for being responsive to her constituents' wishes, but her political career listed badly when she failed in two attempts at winning the mayor's job. At the time of Moscone's assassination, she now recalls, "I thought I was not electable as mayor."
Just 14 months after becoming mayor, she married Investment Banker Richard Blum. For a time, he assumed such a visible role in helping to run city hall that Columnist Herb Caen took to calling the mayor "Feinblum." These days Blum stays closer to the couple's investments, which besides his banking firm include the 165-room Carlton residential hotel in downtown San Francisco. They maintain houses in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco, in woodsy Marin County, and on the beach near Carmel.