CommentsME AND BILL ROSENDAHL-A few years ago a friend got into a beef with a well-known multi-millionaire when he loudly protested about the mysterious building project happening on the entrepreneur’s sprawling LA property. The police were summoned by the big-shot’s entourage, including body-guards, and my friend called me, frantic and scared, asking for help.
So who do you call to stop an injustice leveraged by a rich guy’s bullies? LA City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, that’s who. (Photo above: Former Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl with former California Assemblyman Tom Hayden.)
I reached Bill at City Hall and described my friend’s situation; his reaction was immediate and emphatic. What Bill told the LAPD brass I never knew. Nor did I ask. I do know the LAPD never showed up to investigate that totally bogus complaint.
I saw Bill a few days later to thank him. “Hey,” he laughed. “You know how I hate these rich guys who think they’re above the law.”
It was vintage Bill Rosendahl, elected in 2005 as the LA City Council’s first openly gay lawmaker.
Bill had many of the instincts of politicians but didn’t share some of their worst shortcomings. “I like him personally,” he once told me after a city councilman got into a conflict-of-interest controversy. “But he’s like all politicians – they get too much power and they can’t help themselves. They’re like kids around candy.” I can’t recall anyone ever saying the same about Bill’s tenure at City Hall.
Bill often reacted viscerally to society’s privileged. Even more reliable was his instant affection for society’s underdogs.
But Bill was also the effusive, gregarious cable TV talk-show anchor who loved gossiping with journalists.
Archives at Loyola Marymount University contain 814 public affairs shows hosted by Bill between January 1989 and Sept. 2006 when he was an executive at Century Cable and later at Adelphia Communications. I don’t know Bill’s record as a TV executive but I know as a “journalist” he was an enthusiastic and skilled enabler of lively TV debates about public affairs, and that may be his most lasting public legacy.
Bill always tried to use his anchor-man platform for good.
In November 1999, Councilman Joel Wachs, then a closeted gay man, was being interviewed by Bill about his campaign for mayor. During the taping, Bill asked Wachs: "Are you a gay man?" Wachs’ answered that he was. Shortly afterward, Bill called to tip me off. Bill said he believed Wachs’ revelation would help his mayoral election chances (not enough it turned out). I got the story, and Bill was helping move the ball for the gay community.
Bill’s signature sign-off on his shows was “God bless and bye-bye!” It was corny. But endearing.
Deep-down Bill was someone who practiced “religion” – if religion means having a big-heart. For years, he provided food and shelter for a revolving crew of homeless people in his Mar Vista home. Bill had an ascetic’s indifference to appearances. His house sometimes looked like it was lifted out of the Ozarks: the free-range chickens clucking in the backyard, the ill-kept lawn, the beat-up truck. It was not the typical Westside domestic scene. Overseeing this menagerie was Bill’s big heart, providing a welcoming space for an array of colorful characters.
Three weeks ago, I held Bill’s scrawny hand in mine as he lay in a sunlit room in his house. Bill was dying from cancer; his face ravaged by illness. I said comforting words to him but I’m not at all certain he recognized me or public affairs consultant Rick Taylor who was also visiting Bill. Earlier, Rick reminded me that he had run the campaign of Bill’s fiercest rival in Bill’s first campaign for council. “But Bill never held it against me,” said Rick. “He was that kind of a guy.”
Seeing Bill in that bed – with hospice caregivers tiptoeing around - was sad and humbling. But I was also grateful to have had a chance to pay tribute to a man who was an important and unforgettable part of LA’s civic life.
A few days after that visit, I talked to former assemblyman Tom Hayden who mentioned that he too had visited Bill to pay his respects and regale him with talk about their mutual progressive political friends and roots (Bill worked for George McGovern and Bobby Kennedy in the Sixities). “He was fully conscious and in good spirits when I was with him,” Hayden said. “But he could barely talk.”
Then Hayden dropped a ‘bombshell.’
Let me explain. Hayden for months has been fighting to block a developer’s plan to bulldoze a rugged hillside and cut down dozens of trees to make way for two 15,000 square foot mansions in Brentwood’s Sullivan Canyon. The developers have included Ezri Namvar, the so-called “Bernie Madoff of Beverly Hills,” and his family. (Ezri Namvar is now serving time in a federal lockup after being convicted of running a Ponzi scheme that stole millions from the Persian Jewish community.)
During his visit with Bill (who had represented Brentwood on the City Council,) Hayden swears the dying man whispered to him: “Save Sullivan Canyon.”
Hayden told me he wasn’t trying to get an endorsement. “It was volunteered,” said Hayden. And what was it really worth anyway?
Still here’s the eerie part. The maybe-Bill-karma part.
Soon thereafter, Hayden’s crusade against the Sullivan Canyon mega-mansions project hit pay-dirt. It happened when a City Hall bureaucrat surprisingly ruled that team-Namvar had violated a seldom-used city law that made it illegal to cut down so-called “protected trees” on their property unless they had a permit. Their punishment for killing three protected trees: A five-year ban on developing anything on their property.
It was a stunning victory for Mother Nature and LA’s urban forest. It came out of the blue. Or did it?
Hayden told me the day Bill died that his Irish Catholic heart pondered the possibility that Bill’s death-bed blessing had something to do with the Sullivan Canyon “miracle.” Maybe, he said, it was just another good deed from the man with the big heart.
There’s not much more to say but this: Bill, “God bless and bye-bye!”
(John Schwada is a former investigative reporter for Fox 11 in Los Angeles, the LA Times and the late Herald Examiner. He is a contributor to CityWatch. His consulting firm is MediaFix Associates.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
Special to CityWatch: Requiem for a Big-Hearted Man: ‘God Bless and Bye-Bye’
