Jerry Brown's Wife Has Key Role -Providing Focus
Instead, the former two-term governor remained on the sidelines, stubbornly sticking to a game plan that he and his wife, Anne Gust Brown, had devised to retake the office he last held almost 30 years ago.
"It took a lot of courage to keep with it, despite all that criticism, but we did," Gust Brown said in an impromptu interview with reporters the day after the election.
"We knew we would be massively outspent," she added. "We knew that very early on in the campaign, and so we just said, 'What is our strategy going to be given that, and we're only going to have about $30 to $35 million to spend?"'
That calculation -- plus millions of dollars in summertime advertising on his behalf by public employee unions -- enabled Brown to conserve the bulk of his campaign cash for the final two months. Then he competed for air time head-to-head against Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay who poured more than $140 million of her personal fortune into the race.
The discipline in sticking to the plan illustrates the husband-wife teamwork that Californians can expect over the next four years. Longtime Brown associates say Gust Brown's influence will be felt immediately, focusing her famously free-thinking husband and getting him to zero in on top priorities.
She will be more than a first lady who attends ceremonial functions or carves out her own pet projects.
"There's a lot of important issues that will face California, and wherever I can be most helpful is where I'd like to be," Gust Brown said.
She is 20 years younger than the 72-year-old governor-elect, and previously was general counsel at the GAP Inc. before becoming executive vice president, chief administrative officer and chief compliance officer.
Petite and stylish, she projected a self-confident and sometimes feisty nature on the campaign trail. Brown looked to her often for advice.
"I think she's very well organized," Brown told The Associated Press in an interview earlier this year. "She's very insightful, very quick, sizes up things very quickly, and so in that sense she's a very good partner and has lots of great ideas."
She is expected to play a key, behind-the-scenes role in her husband's administration, as she did in his campaign and in his first years as California's attorney general.
Both said whatever role she has will be unpaid.
Friends say Gust Brown, who has been a registered Republican, Independent and Democrat, gives her husband the much-needed reality check he often lacked during his first gubernatorial term.
Joe Cotchett, a San Francisco attorney who has known Brown for 40 years, described his friend as forward-thinking but lamented that he often was unable to convey his ideas as governor in terms people could readily grasp. Instead, he was ridiculed for promoting concepts -- now mainstream -- such as communication satellites, high-speed rail and the dangers of climate change.
"The problem is you've got to grab him and point him in the right direction, and that's what Anne does for him," Cotchett said. "Jerry has the ability to become a little whimsical. That word is not known or understood by Anne Brown."
Brown and his wife married in 2005 after a 15-year courtship that began shortly after the two met through mutual friends. She represented Brown, who was chairman of the California Democratic Party at the time, in a lawsuit for free, and they began dating shortly afterward.
Neither had been married before, although Brown's life as a bachelor governor, from 1975 to 1983, often made headlines. He dated singer Linda Ronstadt and actresses Natalie Wood and Liv Ullmann.
Showing her sense of humor, Gust Brown posted a Twitter message about their relationship last August, after a federal judge overturned the 2008 California initiative that banned gay marriage: "I'm proud my husband worked so hard to protect marriage for others," she wrote, "even though it took him 15 years to pop the question to me :)"
Like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brown refused to appeal a federal judge's decision to strike down Proposition 8, saying he agreed the ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional.
In Gust Brown, the new governor said he found a companion with whom he can travel, dine out and exercise. He said he defers to her to make the decisions in their personal life, most notably finding their $1.8 million home in the Oakland Hills and ordering him to buy new suits for the campaign.
He credits his wife with playing an integral role in his campaign, from raising money to providing the overall direction, even as she avoided the spotlight. While her first campaign experience with Brown was his 2006 run for attorney general, her father, Rockwell "Rocky" Gust, a Republican, ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of Michigan in 1962.
Asked last month whom he would call in the middle of the night for counsel, Brown joked he would never have to pick up the phone because his closest confidante "is with me in bed and during the day."
"That's an extraordinary thing because I didn't get married until rather later in life, very late," Brown said at Maria Shriver's annual Women's Conference a week before the election. "And I have to say we've been working together almost every day since, and it never ceases to be exciting and imaginative."
