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Nothing about the city is more surprising, at first glance, than the man it has elected and re-elected its mayor. This week he will be sworn into office for the fourth time.
Peace & Quiet. At 61, after ten uninterrupted years in office, plump, greying, long-winded little Fletcher Bowron often seems oddly like a preacher running a wild-animal act. He is obviously appalled by the way his charges snap and yelp, and he says so—his remonstrative cliches have antagonized not only the City Council (a group which he is certain is plotting the city's Downfall), but virtually every civic organization in town.
In throbbing, booming Los Angeles, he is a man who hankers after peace & quiet. Said he, sadly, last week: "The good Lord didn't intend this to be an industrial city." He is still apt to speak of automobiles as "chug wagons" and to recall with a reminiscent sigh the good old days when Santa
Monica Boulevard was nothing but a dusty lane running between outlying farms.
He is the antithesis of the type which even Los Angeles fondly believes typical of its executives—the flamboyant figure in a shaggy sports jacket who barks decisions into three telephones. Fletcher Bowron wears dark suits, black shoes, and rimless spectacles. His desk, in Los Angeles' 32-story City Hall (the 13-story limit in earthquake-conscious Los Angeles was relaxed to make it the highest building in town) is a hopeless clutter of papers and reports.
He is the slow-moving despair of complaining citizens, committees intent on getting information and newspapermen with deadlines to make. Three red chairs stand at attention before his desk: interviewers often sink into them like dental patients steeling themselves for a long, tedious inlay job.
Bowron listens politely to a question, tilts back, forms his hands into a steeple on his paunch, and answers—sometimes for half an hour without a stop. He seems to forget time, and his voice rises and falls as soporifically as the sound of distant surf. Said one defeated interrogator: "Asking him questions is like trying to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon."
But for all this, Fletcher Bowron is the people's choice. The town often ignores him—only three days before he was re-elected last month, the Los Angeles Examiner put him and his campaign back on an inside page, ran a Page One banner line which read ALY KISSES RITA'S FOOT. But his constituents know he loves them.
He is a fiercely honest man, and is eternally intent on protecting Los Angeles from itself. Last week, when one Brenda Allen, queen of Hollywood's call girls, charged (from jail) that Los Angeles cops had accepted bribes from her, Bowron reacted less like an injured politician than a father whose children have been caught smoking cigars behind the barn.
Despite his misgivings about its didoes, he is fantastically proud of the city, and works 14 hours a day at his trying job. He seldom sees his wife, or his 15-year-old adopted son, Barry, except at breakfast. His most vehement critics agree that he would scrub City Hall down with a toothbrush if he decided, after thorough investigation, that the gesture would help Los Angeles.