One and Only Client

There is a tiny girl in a red shirt and orange socks standing in the doorway of Ramona Ripston’s office.

“Ready now, Ramona? Ready for my song?�

Ripston nods and the child begins to sing:

It’s still the same old sto-ree. A fight for love and glo-ree. A case of do--or die! The fund-a-men-tal things ap-ply . . . AS . . . TIME . . . GOES . . . BY.

It is the day of the American Civil Liberties Union’s first victory in the battle to overturn state Proposition 209. And in the Pico-Union fortress that is the Southern California affiliate’s headquarters, phones are ringing in every room, the law library is full of TV cameras, and there is a yet-to-be-written public statement on the fight for affirmative action due to be delivered in less than two minutes.

But Ripston, the ACLU’s legendary firebrand, pauses to lean against her door until the song is finished.

“Thank you so much, Rebecca,� she says sweetly. The 4-year-old, a daughter of Ripston’s associate Liz Schroeder, curtsies elaborately and moves on to the next office.

“Well, all right, perhaps I have mellowed just a bit over the years,� Ripston volunteers. “But remember now, I always have adored children and animals.� She looks away and adds, “And I do love that song. . . .�

No one will say exactly how much time has gone by in the life of Ramona Ann Ripston. But enough has passed to cover four decades of civil rights work, more than a quarter century of feminist struggle, of butting heads with politicians and police, five marriages, the birth of three children and the heartbreaking death of one.

Some believe she may be mellowing as she moves toward a more reasoned, even gentle, approach to life and its inevitable inequities.

That is not to say “Ramona the Ripper�--as former Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates still insists on calling her--can now be recast as a softhearted, puppy-loving grandmother. Although she is all of those, she also is the same steel-willed, quick-tempered champion of the underdog she was when she fled her comfortable life as a ‘50s suburban homemaker to devote her life to speaking out for human rights.

*

Imagine the Statue of Liberty as a buff blond, pencil-thin eyebrows perfectly arched, rosebud mouth slightly open in expectation of . . . well, something, anything exciting.

Imagine the torch a flame of righteous outrage.

It’s Ramona Ripston: social warrior, glamorous guardian of the Constitution and, yes, the fit body. This icon of California liberalism has a bicoastal retinue of friends and supporters, generally rich and often famous, including the Kennedys; Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem; the entertainment elite, especially Rob Reiner, Norman Lear, Barbra Streisand and Billy Baldwin; and any number of Los Angeles’ well-heeled, socially committed glitterati, lawyers and judges.

She taps them all for the big-bucks support that has made her ACLU the most prosperous in the nation and given her affiliate the resources to take as many as 100 cases at a time to court on behalf of the American way as she perceives it.

Her causes are high-profile and urgent--and occasionally troubling for even the most loyal liberals. Ripston occasionally loses patience with those who don’t understand “the ACLU’s unbending commitment to our one and only client--the Bill of Rights!�

As executive director of the Southern California ACLU, Ripston, who is not a lawyer, oversees and mobilizes the ACLU’s 35-person staff and lineup of volunteer litigators and works with them to select the issues they will pursue. She also supervises a growing number of less adversarial, more cooperative projects, including policy research and grass-roots community organizing.

But every year, no matter what the big issues are or what tack she takes, it seems there is always something to upset someone.

Although the radical right blames the ACLU--and in vitriolic letters, sometimes Ripston herself--for encouraging “mass murders of unborn children,� the radical left may be angered by the ACLU’s work protecting the rights of Nazis and pornographers.

As a civil libertarian, Ripston has protected the constitutional rights of Black Panthers and Ku Klux Klansmen, Democrats and Republicans, undocumented workers and union bosses.

“If we aren’t under attack every day, then we’re not doing our job,� says Ripston, who has been under attack often enough since she came to Los Angeles in 1972.

Two years ago, she was nearly stripped of her hard-won feminist credentials for directing the ACLU to defend an L.A. County Fire captain’s First Amendment right to keep his Playboy magazine at work and read it in the firehouse between alarms. Although the ACLU won the case, Ripston lost a few feminist friends in the fight.

More recently, Ripston’s ACLU used its legal muscle to convince the Garden Grove Police Department that its policy of stopping and photographing all Asian teenagers who happened to be wearing “gang-style� clothing was contrary to the U.S. Constitution.

Those who don’t know Ripston--or her beloved Bill of Rights--very well are surprised by the occasional unpredictability of her zeal. Those who know of the national ACLU’s opposition to drug laws, for example, are startled to learn that Ripston routinely helps her Union Place neighbors alert police to ongoing drug deals.

But Ripston sticks to the ACLU party-line when she argues for rapes to be treated in the same manner as any other crime, even while agreeing with feminists that a policy of publicly naming rape victims will surely discourage women from reporting attacks.

“Our business,� she likes to say, “is to defend not people but principles.�

But sometimes, her critics charge, she takes that responsibility too far, jumping in to attack police videotaped beating a black motorist or a truckload of undocumented workers in Riverside without regard for the officers’ right to due process.

“I find her very, very harsh in her judgments, harsh even by ACLU standards,� says former chief Gates. “After the Rodney King situation, she was on television the very next morning proclaiming the guilt of the officers. . . . I’ve never seen anyone jump out in that manner, and then she did it again with the Riverside officers. I said, ‘Ramona, you’re convicting them!’ and she said, ‘No, I’m not.’ But of course, you know that she was.�

After the King beating, Ripston was the first to show the videotape to the media--an act that some legal experts called dangerously inappropriate for an officer of the ACLU. But for many, that sort of quick action is one of Ripston’s great strengths.

“Ramona has the best eye of anyone I’ve ever worked with for identifying an issue in the rough, some important issue not yet recognized by the public at large or by policymakers, but where action cries out to be taken, where--and she knows this!--there is going to be big trouble very soon if we don’t act,� says Allan Parachini, the ACLU’s public affairs director for five years.

*

When Ripston was growing up in Queens, N.Y., she learned at her mother’s knee how to spot social injustice and how to act to--if not eliminate it--at least soften the blow.

“Our mother was Jewish and our father was German Catholic, and for them to marry was very risky, very daring,� recalls Ripston’s brother, Robert. “But it created a climate in which both Mona and I were exquisitely aware of prejudice, not just anti-Semitism, but against any minority.�

Although their father, a physics instructor at Brooklyn College, was a stern but loving presence in the children’s lives, it was their mother, Elsie Fleischman, who instilled their values and the courage they would need to be true to those values.

“I recall very clearly how aghast the neighborhood was when, during World War II, our mother invited black soldiers into our home to eat Thanksgiving dinner with us,� Robert recalls. “I was so proud and so impressed, but it was Mona who was affected most dramatically and acted out mother’s lessons most diligently.�

Although Ramona, who earned a degree in political science from Hunter College, was a regular marcher in civil rights demonstrations in the South for years, her social conscience had few outlets after she married and assumed the role of a privileged suburban wife in the tony suburb of Great Neck, Long Island.

“I have always had a lot of guilt in my life,� Ripston confides, “and so I just looked around, saw society’s problems and felt it was just so unfair, so outrageously unfair that some--like me--should have so much and others so very little.�

The discomfort chafed and chafed until Ripston left that marriage. She entered another only slightly less conventional union, which didn’t last much longer. Independent again, she traded her volunteer work with ACLU into a full-time job.

As a director of the ACLU of New York, and then of New Jersey, she met and, in short order, married fellow activist Henry di Suvero. By then, her children Laura, William and Mark were beginning to have political lives of their own.

“I remember growing up with all sorts of Black Panthers and antiwar demonstrators, the Weathermen and so on, all sitting around our house. It was great!� recalls son William Caplin, who now lives in Santa Monica and owns the children’s equipment company My Gym.

When William was about to be bar mitzvahed, his father (by then Ramona’s ex) persuaded him to have his long hair cut off for the ceremony. But minutes into the shearing, William bolted and ran to his mother’s office for consolation. He found it there--not only from his mother but from her friend Abbie Hoffman, who assured William he had done the right thing.

For daughter Laura Ripston, having an activist for a mother meant having a legal guide and cheerleader--if not always someone home in time to make dinner.

“One day, I remember asking Mom why my high school had this rule that I couldn’t wear pants,� Laura says. “She said she had no idea and suggested I wear pants to school and find out. Well, I did and I got suspended, so we went to court and after that, any girl at Washington Irving High School [in New York City] could wear pants. Pretty cool, huh?�

Ripston also rushed to the courts to rescue her daughter when she was expelled for putting out a student newspaper that, among other messages, used the “F-word� in connection with the school principal.

Together, di Suvero and Ripston ran the New Jersey ACLU until 1972, when Ripston was invited to take over Southern California’s foundering ACLU and become the first woman to head a major affiliate in the United States.

Although the marriage soon withered, her relationship with the ACLU here bloomed. Ripston, who has always retained her birth name, then married Superior Court Judge Stanley Malone. But while she was married to him, she fell in love with another judge--the most outspoken liberal on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Stephen Reinhardt.

While the tale of their meeting at a Constitutional Rights Foundation dinner and the whirlwind romance that followed sounds like a fairy tale, Ripston says the love affair had sad and ugly results for the spouses spurned.

“It was like finding the person of my dreams. It was very, very wonderful and beautiful, but the fact is our falling in love broke up two marriages and hurt a lot of people, and I am very sorry for that.�

Shortly after their marriage, Ripston’s youngest son, Mark Caplin, 36, died of complications from a long battle with alcoholism. “I was talking to him in the hospital and he was doing well, and we went out to get a bit of dinner and when I came back, he was lying there in the same hospital room where I’d left him, but now he was dead. It was the most horrible, horrible moment you can imagine, and I fall apart every time I think about it. . . .�

Gates, who has been open about his son’s battle with drugs, believes Mark’s death contributed to the mellowing of his feisty nemesis. “I know that was a terrible, terrible loss for her, as it would be for any parent,� Gates says. “Personally, Ramona and I have shared our private griefs more than once, and I appreciate her compassion.�

Her husband is convinced that there has always been “an extraordinary and honest warmth to Ramona� that too few made the effort to uncover. “She loves people and cares deeply about their pain,� says Reinhardt, who says his most serious tiff with his wife has been over her willingness to let small animals--stray dogs and arrogant cats, mostly--dominate their home life.

After more than seven years together, they still gush over one another. She calls him darling, he calls her sweetheart. They car pool, they walk on the beach together and they hold hands at the movies. What they don’t do, both are careful to explain, is talk shop.

Because some of the cases litigated by Ripston’s ACLU can and do end up in Reinhardt’s federal appeals court, it works to the advantage of both the courts and the liberal cause to meticulously avoid any possible conflict of interest.

*

Noontime on a bright winter day. A handsome man in uniform pulls up in front of the ACLU offices to collect a perfectly coiffed Ramona Ripston and take her out for lunch.

They hug warmly and he gallantly holds the door for her as she slides into the front seat of his patrol car.

“This is my friend--yes, really!--my friend, Capt. Nick Salicos of the Los Angeles Police Department,� Ripston explains. “We try to get together to catch up on things and, you know, chat and eat. Where are you taking me today, Nick?�

“Cha Cha Cha, that Caribbean restaurant you always like,� Salicos says.

For more than a year, the activist and the cop--who is also a lawyer and boss of the largest precinct in Los Angeles--have been meeting monthly like this.

Over salads and jerk chicken sandwiches, the two argue amicably and not so amicably over everything from the number of women in Salicos’ Rampart station (“Too few, still!� says Ripston) to the need for better understanding of the criminal threat.

“Don’t forget, Ramona, that when your house got broken into, it was the police you called, not a civil rights lawyer,� Salicos says.

“The trouble with you, and the whole ACLU, is that you don’t give us credit. You don’t call press conferences when we do something great, when we do our jobs well, which 99.9% of all police officers do all the time. . . .�

“You may be right, Nick,� concedes Ripston. “But I did send you a big bouquet of flowers on Officer Appreciation Day.�

“You did? I guess I didn’t get it.�

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I guess all we can do is keep trying, keep trying. . . .�

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Ramona Ripston

Background: Born in Queens, N.Y.; has lived in Los Angeles for 25 years. Still, she says, “I’ll always be a New Yawker.�

Family: Married five times, divorced four. One daughter, two sons--one of whom died in 1994. With her husband, federal Judge Stephen Reinhardt, she enjoys spending time with and showing off four young grandsons.

Passions: Animals. On more than one occasion, Ripston has expressed the desire to take up sheep farming or pursue work in veterinary science. Until then, she busies herself with canine friends she meets on the beach and tries to placate an extraordinarily domineering stray cat that shares her waterfront condominium.

On her marriages: “My dear, dear friend Frances Lear, who died recently, gave me this framed bit of advice from the poet Maya Angelou, which pretty well sums up that subject for me. It speaks to the notion that people find a certain capriciousness in [marital] frequency and somehow find it worthy to stick out even the worst of relationships. I went into each marriage with great hope and gave each of them the very best of me at the time. But I know it hasn’t always been easy for a man to be married to me.�

On her heroes: Why, Eleanor Roosevelt. Of course!