RECALLING ROSE

      She swept like a mini-tornado into a hotel conference room, trailed by several armed state police bodyguards.

      Just in case anybody tried to kill her. 

      Rose Elizabeth Bird, chief justice of the Supreme Court of California, had come to speak at a meeting of newspaper editors in Hollywood. As managing editor of United Press International, I had flown from Washington to schmooze with editors at the two-day forum in the spring of 1983.

      It was late on the final afternoon, and the editors eagerly awaited her words, hoping she would speak about capital punishment and real news might break out.  For the Bird court had blocked dozens of death penalty cases, and powerful conservatives were demanding her blond curls on a platter.

      But instead of addressing that swirling controversy, she delivered the most eloquent defense of freedom of the press I’d ever heard -- speaking 45 minutes without notes. Then, she apologized for not having time to answer questions, and swept out as swiftly and dramatically as she had swept in. 

      Racing after her through the lobby of the huge Beverly Wilshire hotel, I got to the front door just in time to watch her smoked-glass official limousine roar off.  A thank-you note would have to suffice after I got  home.

     Her reply was in a large Manila envelope, embossed with the California Supreme Court seal. Inside was a stiffly formal typewritten note, Xeroxed pages of some of her favorite judicial opinions, and a formal group photo of all seven justices. Also tumbling out was a glossy 8 X 10 color shot of her alone —  her yellow curls stark against a black judicial robe. Almost cheesecake. She had signed it, and attached a note: “Call me if you get to California.”

      A year later, I was in San Francisco on business,  and decided to try to contact her. It was too late in the day to call the court, so I asked a directory assistance operator for help —  knowing it was a long shot  — and amazingly I was given a phone number for her home in Palo Alto. 

      Who is this woman? She routinely receives death threats and travels with armed state troopers, but doesn’t   have an unlisted phone number? I dial, expecting to hear the voice of somebody screening calls for her. I'm wrong. 

      “This is Rose.” Really? I quickly reintroduce myself. 

      “Oh yes, Mr. Cohen, I remember you. Where are you?”        

      “The Fairmont Hotel.”         

      “I’ll pick you up in front in about an hour. We’ll go to dinner.” 

      This time no limo, no bodyguards — just Rose Bird, in her battered, dirt-streaked Toyota. "We will go to my favorite vegetarian restaurant," she says as I get into the car. "After my double mastectomy several years ago, I pledged to eat healthy.”

      After years of covering various semi-important and self-important people, I’m no stranger to celebrity. Yet I can't believe the chief justice of California volunteered such personal information to someone she is meeting for the first time. This promises to be an extraordinary evening! 

      We talk and talk and talk for hours, ignoring plates our waiter keeps setting down. So engrossed are we that the manager finally has to hover near the table and cough three times to get our attention. The restaurant is empty, it's an hour past closing, and the staff would like to go home, he says gently.

      We have talked about a million things. She is fascinating. No surprise. But more impressive, she also listens  — unlike many smart, famous people whose primary fascination is their own voices. 

      It is close to 3 a.m. when she drops me at the hotel —  and SHE thanks ME!  Back up in my room, a question nags. Why me?

      Sure, I can hold up my end of a conversation and my sense of humor is passable. I can sing all the lyrics to all the pop songs from the ‘40s and ‘50s. My knowledge of politics, current and historical, is adequate. 

      But she is the most brilliant person I'd ever met. And I know nothing about her field of expertise, the law. We also have no mutual friends, know nothing about each other in terms of our private lives, and not too much more about one another as professionals. So, why me?

       I try to reconstruct enough of our dinner conversation to provide hints. But as dawn breaks over Tony Bennett’s City by the Bay, I fall asleep, still dressed. 

      For 16 years after that, Rose Elizabeth Bird and I were pals. I never could really answer, “Why Me?”

      Through the years, we tried to get together when either of us was on the other’s coast. She often sent Jill and me a holiday plant, or flowers. We corresponded often —I still have a drawer full of Snoopy greeting cards in my file cabinet. When my daughter Zen graduated in 1993 from Cal-Berkeley,  Rose surprised everyone by showing up for our small celebration at a nondescript Thai restaurant.

       From time to time, she also called to discuss her ongoing battles with those she liked to call “Death Penalty Crazies” in California, where periodic “retention elections” for high court judges usually were pro forma and none had been denied until then. But she had good reason to worry. In a 1978 election, the capital punishment forces fell only four percentage points short in their bid to oust her. 

       “What lunacy makes a judge beholden to the political winds, not the law?” she once wrote to me. “That’s why God invented politicians.”

       Despite her narrow victory, the court under her lead kept overturning every capital conviction. As another retention vote approached in 1987, death threats intensified. Her detractors flooded TV and radio programs  in the state with expensive ads demanding her removal.

       She refused to fight back, maintaining that judges must be immune from politics. A prominent supporter called it "electoral suicide.” And, sure enough, it was. In November, after she was chief justice for 10 years, voters removed her and two liberal colleagues  in  a 2-1 landslide.

       Even after that, she was a pariah. In 1988, Republican Pete Wilson repeatedly criticized her by name in his campaign for governor, and (the first) George Bush denigrated his Democratic presidential opponent, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, as "The Rose Bird of governors.”

       This prompted another Snoopy card from her: "Both Pete Wilson and George Bush are running against me here in California. You'd think they'd fight like men and not hide behind my skirts!”

       Four years later, in 1992, the apple-green gas chamber in California was used for the first time since 1967.—  opening the floodgates and inspiring her to send another Snoopy.

       "I don't understand this rush to snuff out a life, to extract retribution in the extreme," she wrote. "I weep for the Constitution, and for democratic government."

       Rose Bird soon slipped into obscurity. "People lose their fight," said Jerry Brown, who as governor had appointed chief justice. "She's burnt." 

       A $1,000-a-month California state pension didn't go far. She couldn’t even afford to pay dues for membership in the bar association. She also felt her public humiliation at the hands of the voters would make it impossible for any client she represented to get a fair shake.

       At one point, she volunteered at an East Palo Alto poverty law clinic, as a copying machine operator. Nobody there recognized her initially. When the staffers found out that she had worn the judicial robes of the highest court, they were stunned. One decided to name her daughter “Rose”; another compared Bird's labors for the poor to Jesus bathing the feet of the Apostles.

       After leaving the clinic, she taught law for six months at the University of Sydney in Australia. "Students were over the moon about her. I wish I had 60 Rose Birds," the dean told the Los Angeles Times.

       But, alas, Rose’s last years were sad and lonely. She was never married and was left alone in 1991 after her mother Anne, a constant companion, died. She spent many hours tending rose bushes, simply wishing to be remembered "as a private person who gardens."

       A 1995 newspaper article portrayed her as a tragic figure, walking her dog's incognito in Palo Alto, lumpish and overweight, beauty and elegance vanished. I was alarmed and phoned her.

        "Contrary to that article in the LA Times,” she assured me, “I am not a bag lady, nor Palo Alto's Howard Hughes. I continue to believe that veggies and vitamins and herbs will keep me alive."

        In  a final greeting card to me, Snoopy was replaced by a brace of sad-faced Japanese snow monkeys. "This card represents how I feel at the end of 1998,” she wrote in her familiar scrawl. “I've been battling cancer again, but I still can function, thank God."

        Then, on Dec. 4, 1999, a dozen years after voters removed her from the state's highest court, Rose Elizabeth Bird finally succumbed to the breast cancer she had battled for more than two decades. I heard the news on the radio while in Los Angeles on business, preparing to fly to San Francisco to surprise my daughters with a weekend visit.

        I couldn't fight back tears. She was 63 years old. 

       Three days later, while driving a rental car to San Jose International to fly back east, I stopped at a store to buy two dozen red roses. As a tribute to our long, haphazardly beautiful friendship, I planned to leave the flowers on the front step of her modest bungalow on a tiny corner plot abutting the 405 freeway in Palo Alto. 

        When I got there, I could not believe my eyes.             Roses were everywhere — piled two feet high, obscuring every blade of grass. There were bouquets on the front steps. Bouquets propped against the door. Bouquets festooning every pointed slat on the white picket fence. Bouquets of every shape, every size, every hue. It looked like New Year’s  Day in Pasadena.  

        Thousands and thousands and thousands of roses. Admirers, in numbers she couldn't possibly have fathomed, had beaten me to the punch.

Ronald E. Cohen was a journalist and executive at United Press International and Gannett News Corp.