The City: Brightness in the Air

(6 of 10)

she sometimes arouses. "Inside of me I am very loving and warm, but the position in which I've been placed, the responsibilities I have, make it necessary for me to be very strong and very firm. Often I've had to be the catalyst simply because nobody else would make a decision. So in my way I've had to be much more firm and forceful in my appearance and speech than I really would like to have been. I know that, and I'm not the ideal of the person I set out to be."

Five-Ply Personality. Buff Chandler does so many jobs that it is hard to say just what she set out to be. She starts every day with a before-breakfast swim with husband Norman in the family pool behind their house in the Hancock Park area of northwestern Los Angeles. Then any of several things can happen. She may turn up at her office at the Los Angeles Times (she is a company vice president) or attend a meeting of the University of California's board of regents (she is chairman of the building and grounds committee, which has a yearly budget running into tens of millions of dollars among the university's seven campuses). This may be followed by an editorial conference on the content of the women's section of the Times, followed by a dinner for 20 at home. Next day there may be a grandmotherly get-together with her two children and eight grandchildren.

Every one of these segments of her time gets her intense attention. "I don't jump back and forth among unrelated activities," she explains. "If I need clothes, I set my time and I go out and put my mind only on shopping for clothes. If it's time to fix up the house, I don't just run in and out and try to sandwich that in—I'll spend a day, or whatever time is needed, and I won't take phone calls unless they're very urgent. I'm extremely organized."

So organized, in fact, that the effect is not always endearing—as she well knows. "When Buff Chandler walks into a meeting, the rest of us might as well go home," says another L.A. committee lady. One of her best friends, who has worked with her on the Music Center, correctly forecast early in the campaign that nobody else would raise much money but Buff. "First," she said, "she's got all the weapons—the Times, the Chandler name, the real power. Second, she's just so competitive that she couldn't bear the thought of not winning the victory all by herself."

Buff admits to the competitiveness. "I'm most comfortable when I'm around men," she says. "Most women just don't seem to be competitive enough."

From Sprint to Shimmy. Dorothy Buffum first learned the joys of competition in high school at Long Beach, Calif. Her father had moved to California from Lafayette, Ill., when she was about a year old, opened a general store and built it into a chain of department stores. Eventually he became mayor, and Buff became a fine sprinter. "I didn't take to boys much except to run against them and beat them," admits Buff. She had an anxious sense that there was not enough time. "I'd wake up frequently with a feeling that there was so much for me to do, but would I ever have time to get it done?"

The anxiety momentarily quieted when she got to Stanford and discovered boys ("I don't think I ever missed