Willie’s world

SAN FRANCISCO —  Willie BROWN is still fleet on his feet: So, careful -- you just might miss him. See, already he’s moved into the five-deep, Friday happy-hour crowd at San Francisco’s St. Regis, where he currently makes his home -- the hotel, not the bar per se. He pulls up a stool. Heads swivel. A bartender appears, pours a Chardonnay: “To your liking, Mr. Brown?”

The former speaker of the California State Assembly and more recently the everywhere-at-once mayor of San Francisco, Brown has been retired from public office since 2004, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone missing. He heads the Willie L. Brown Jr. Institute on Politics and Public Service, advises politicians -- veteran and aspiring -- and can count Bill Clinton as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger among his acquaintances.

Then there’s this new book to sell, “Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times,” in which he riffs on sex and scandals, loyalty and betrayal, and, of course, his own sartorial splendor (there’s a full chapter dedicated to it).

Which is also why he’s running -- late. Brown’s just beginning his first round of signings and so is getting busier, and, consequently, it might be why he’s feeling disinclined. “Too tired for all that.” The “all that” would be the photographer, the walking tour of his San Francisco that he’d agreed to. “Tour? I mean, what kind of tour?” He leans back on his bar stool. “I walk all of this city. Every day. Chinatown. The Embarcadero. All of it! I just do it. It’s not something specific,” he explains, one eye on the crowd, the weekend beginning to bloom. But talking about the city, its topography, seems to rouse something in him. “I’ll go up, get my hat.”

Walking the city is something Brown, 73, has done since he first arrived in San Francisco as a teenager from Mineola, Texas. And now, in this moment, a light’s gone on and Willie Brown is reconstituted. Out in the bracing San Francisco cold, resplendent in his gray wool pinstripe suit, a flash of metallic-hued tie and now his crowning glory, he’s ready for come-what-may: “You’re stylin’, Willie Brown!” “There’s the old mayor. The only mayor!” He’s trailed by double-takes, honking horns. The sidewalk becomes a rostrum. “Whataya mean, ‘the old mayor’?” Brown says with a wink. “It’s the former mayor.”

He dispenses warm hellos but keeps stepping. It was how he initially got to know the city, an early lesson from his Uncle Itsie: “In those early days, he put his pocket change on my bureau. My instructions were to take the money and go each day to a different part of the city, walk as much as I could and talk to as many people,” he writes in “Basic Brown.”

It was how he got the lay of the land, of this vivid, cosmopolitan city. Ultimately it was also how he got the lay of the political landscape -- how deals work, whom to know -- by understanding the city, from the ground up.

The book was assembled by journalist P.J. Corkery from a series of breakfast conversations. “Basic Brown” outlines Brown’s rise -- from a boy shining shoes, fishing the coins out of a Texas spittoon, to a man with a closet full of $5,000 suits and an uncanny knack for playing both sides of the aisles.

There’s nothing grander than the Willie Brown show, in person. A deal maker, a diplomat but above all a politician, Brown learned from the best how to shape the game, overseeing or working on landscape-altering legislation -- legalized abortion, gay rights, gun control, all enumerated in the book. But San Francisco itself -- elegant skyline, changing infrastructure -- serves as the fanciest of trophy rooms.

He strolls down 3rd Street, headed past the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It’s a part of the city that, block-by-block, over the last decade or so, is waking up from a slumber. It’s now alive with busy cafes, museums, sleek hotels -- many of which, he enthuses, went up on his watch. “I can show you where I was sworn in. Then we’ll take a look at the Westfield Shopping Centre -- the Bloomingdale’s I built.” It’s a commerce hub regenerating energy on Market Street.

A children’s center, mixed-use spaces: Each high-rise “For Lease” sign he points to has the effect of a shower of fairy dust -- presto! Out of nothing, something: piece by piece altering the landscape of the city.

Walking up to the Yerba Buena Gardens, Brown stands next to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the site of his inaugural. “I filled the chairs with 25,000 people,” he recalls. “It was an incredible scene. It was really overcast. Until I got up. And you know what I said? ‘Let there be sun!’ ”

Just across the way, though, the Moscone Convention Center is dedicated to Mayor George Moscone, and it will always trigger a terrible memory. Brown was the last person to see him alive on Nov. 27, 1978, before he was assassinated, along with Supervisor Harvey Milk, by former SFPD officer Dan White. That would be chilling enough, “but, damn, how ‘bout you find out several years later that he had a list . . . and you were No. 3.”

For a time, that put Brown off city politics. But having an effect on day-to-day change was tantalizing. And he was good at it. He is, as he says in the book, “a rare thing in politics. Reliable . . . because I can be counted on to put a deal together neatly and quickly with benefit to all.”

But he’s been just as expert at raising eyebrows: In civic life -- engineering a “realpolitik” plan for lowering San Francisco’s crime by brokering a deal (“do it elsewhere, but don’t do it in San Francisco”) -- to the personal -- his unusual domestic arrangement. Married for 50 years, Brown hasn’t lived with his wife, Blanche, for 25 of them, during which he’s had a spinner-rack of girlfriends (and became a father to a now-6-year-old daughter, Sydney, in addition to his three adult children with his wife). And there are rules to being Willie Brown’s date: Permanence isn’t promised. “Don’t expect it, do not demand it,” as he explains it. Asked if the revelation in the book of all of the deep background, even for such a public person, gave him pause, Brown dismisses it. “The book has only been out a week and a half! They may not read it. You don’t think I’ve read it, do you?”

Among the grand successes, there are patches of disappointments and unfinished business: There’s Moscone West, which he hoped would have housed a convertible basketball court. “The politics in this town doesn’t subsidize sports franchises . . . these progressives!” Then a sad stretch of tumbledown property next to the San Francisco Chronicle building that, given the look on his face, Brown must find just as distasteful as some political aspirant sporting a black suit with brown shoes. “Just terrible!” Old habits die hard, he admits. “I’m trying to get the guy who now runs real estate for Hearst . . . they need to do something.”

His cellphone vibrates again. This time it’s Sydney asking if she can be in the Chinese New Year Parade. Already pulling strings, knowing just whom to ask.” “I’ll get on that immediately, Miss Sydney.” Quick, simple, the deal sealed.

He rounds the last long block, the light draining from the sky, but the light in him not dimming. Outside the bustling Westfield Centre, more people crowd around. He’s still shaking hands as if he’s running for office -- an office that many people don’t seem to think he’s ever left.

A man approaches, extends a cup. “Hey, Willie Brown!” Brown counters with a “What’s happenin’?” “Oh, not so good, I’ve been here for hours. All day. . . .” Brown drops a handful of silver in the cup, that magic pocket change. The man’s eyes brighten -- whether its genuine, or he’s simply dazzled, it isn’t certain, but caught up in the Willie Brown light, what’s certain is anything can happen.

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lynell.george@latimes.com