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The Sculptor of Dreams

By RJ Smith — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Photograph by Spencer Lowell

Chris Burden has been shot, has stuffed himself into a locker for five days, and has crawled across the Mexican desert. He has slithered over 15 yards of broken glass in downtown Los Angeles wearing nothing but bikini briefs, and lived on a ledge for 21 days, out of view, with only celery juice for nourishment.

In one vintage action Burden hid in a chrysalis sack affixed to the wall of a museum in Salt Lake City, with lit candles on the floor by his head and feet. That piece was called Oh Dracula and was meant to define him: rebel, punk, indestructible, undead.

It was all some time ago. Even the undead can grow old. Burden enters the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a Wednesday when the place is closed, confidently treading to the cafeteria. There is a fresh scar on his left hand, a hospital identification band wrapping his right wrist. The scar he got when he was bitten by a dog he was baby-sitting. The band is from Cedars-Sinai, where Burden has just had another round of tests following the discovery of a melanoma on his scalp. After a life of dangerous performances that have left his body intact, at 66 Burden finds himself marked by things he can’t control. Things like a neighbor’s dog, and renegade cells.

Chris Burden is alive. In a while he will shake hands with a local TV station crew and do a segment in front of his massive kinetic sculpture Metropolis II. Agile, compact, a little thick in the middle yet taut and wired, he looks ready to give orders. His face is round, his hair clipped close. All he needs is a Bluetooth earpiece and he could be the foreman on a high-end construction job. Instead he is the coolest guy in the room, watching a pair of jumpsuited assistants flip the switch on LACMA’s newest, biggest toy.

Metropolis II embodies Burden’s geek-boy inquisitiveness, not to mention what might happen if you dropped Hot Wheels into a Fast & Furious world. The sculpture, which fills a large gallery and is viewable at eye level as well as from a balcony, imagines a futuristic cityscape made up of an assortment of parts a toy collector could find on eBay. Threading through this child’s dystopia are 1,100 cars, whirring up and down ramps, shooting the canyons between high-rise towers, and weaving through a city that seems as frightening as it does fun. Eight people and more than four years went into building Metropolis II, on long-term loan to the museum since January. Its traffic is powered by gravity and magnets, which keep the cars mostly from jumping the track. They move at a scale speed of 230 miles per hour, endlessly, mindlessly circling the roadway, a parody of progress built on the illusion of infinite resources.

Not far from where he is standing, in a courtyard that gives Wilshire Boulevard a loving caress, another giant Burden sculpture induces grins from passersby. Urban Light is his collection of 202 cast-iron Los Angeles street lamps, arrayed in a grid like candles on an altar. From the moment it was plugged into the Miracle Mile in 2008, the piece has been bathing the boulevard’s nighttime traffic in a warm glow, emerging as a treasured symbol of L.A.

Urban Light gives citygoers the kind of stage set we like to chew. “There’s always people around it—it’s weird,” Burden says with barely suppressed pride. “At one in the morning people are in front of it kissing, hugging, having their pictures snapped. I never thought it would become such an iconic landmark, but it has.” He jokes that he should have given LACMA a reduced price for Urban Light in exchange for a percentage of the gate, an arrangement, he says, that sculptor Ed Kienholz once negotiated. What other local icons are there? he asks. The Hollywood sign, sure; Grauman’s. He offers the Santa Monica Pier, and then takes it back. The Theme Building at LAX? He laughs. “Is that our Statue of Liberty?”

Decades ago Burden said, “I’m not afraid of death. I’m afraid of the Pacific Coast Highway.” The artist of Metropolis II seems at peace with L.A. traffic and even, perhaps, with embracing the city of wheels. With Metropolis II, he lets the thrill of the ride riffle through his hair. Burden has, of all things, rebranded himself as the sculptor of Southern California dreams.

He began as an artist bent on dividing viewers and confronting them with uncomfortable questions. Now he has them singin’ in the rain. It’s a little like Iggy Pop returning to Detroit to run the tourist bureau. The way Paul Schimmel sees it, the new role came largely by accident. The former chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Schimmel first saw Urban Light when it was illuminating the hillside of Burden’s Topanga Canyon home and studio, and then helped bring it to the city. “He has recast himself as somebody who makes public art but the kind that comes from something private and personal, out of a collector/hobbyist/inventor/engineer mentality. It’s a different kind of public art.”

A kind that would never have survived the typical commission process. Public art that is both gregarious and withdrawn, that connects with the public without explaining itself at a glance. “It has become an important representation of a new kind of civic art that’s private. And isn’t that L.A.?” booms Schimmel. “Everyone lives in their homes, in their private realms. So the private becoming public seems perfectly symbolic of this place. And Chris appreciated this from the beginning.”

There aren’t many artists who would be happier to land the cover of Make magazine than of Artforum. Burden reads a lot of magazines, subscribing to 29 at his home, and it’s a list heavy on the subject of building stuff: Aviation Weekly, Science News, numerous model railroad journals. He is the garage tinkerer with means. An avid scavenger on eBay, he recently missed out on the winning bid for a 60-foot Great Lakes ferry built in 1947. It’s the sort of fixer-upper that appeals to him.

On a sunny summer morning his Topanga Canyon compound is hopping. An assistant standing by a boat points uphill to a parking place. “Just watch out for the bulldozer,” he says as it comes barreling down the incline and almost flattens my car. From a distant building waft the sounds of a Dixieland jazz record and electric saws. I am directed to a metal structure, guarded by rows of garden sculpture, the type you might see at a Home Depot: mermaids, bumper car-size turtles, a merry-go-round horse.

Typically Burden wanders from quadrant to quadrant, overseeing the projects that assorted teams are assembling. On call are fabricators and engineers, auto mechanics and artists and former students. Unlike Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, Burden doesn’t hand off a set of instructions and wait for the completed work to come in. He is engaged and vocal, circling the work in his studio, kibitzing with staff as an idea evolves into a physical reality. “ ‘I want to build a crazy cityscape with cars running through it,’ ” is all that Zak Cook, Burden’s chief engineer, recalls being told at first. “What follows are the huge design and engineering problems. That one conversation might lead to three or four months of work.”

Walking me around the hangar, Burden indicates a few of his many projects. There are drawings and models for Ode to Santos-Dumont, inspired by a 19th-century Brazilian airman. The piece incorporates a dirigible and a model of the Eiffel Tower. There are obelisks and a small trolley car. There are studies for a model of an 18th-century mortar from the Tower of London and a mock-up of the building for a Burden museum retrospective that’s being planned.

Burden was bred to build stuff. Only gradually did he become an artist. His father was an engineer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, specializing in economic development and water resources for the Rockefeller Foundation. Robert Burden worked in various countries for the foundation and occasionally brought his family along. As an infant Chris lived in China, in a house with two servants. His father had dinner with Mao, who was still leading the revolt from the mountains. When Chris was 12 and living on the Italian island of Elba, he crushed his foot in a car accident and needed an emergency operation; it had to be performed without anesthesia. While Burden regained mobility, he began studying photography, which kindled an interest in art. Soon the family moved back to Cambridge, where Burden’s father became an assistant dean at Harvard and his mother, who had a master’s degree in biology, worked as an art restorer at the Fogg Museum.

The first time Burden saw California was in 1962. A student at a Boston prep school, he had a National Science Foundation grant for the summer and was living with schoolmates in La Jolla, pursuing photography as much as science. He was hanging out with surfers and riding motorcycles up to Mount Baldy. He ate his first takeout tacos. Burden was becoming a Californian.

A new social archetype was emerging. Artists like John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha were cool, denying the primacy of East Coast emotion, all that expressionist sweat. By the early 1970s, Burden had put them in check. In his hands fire and broken glass and gunshots and nudity seemed downright chilly. He wore sunglasses in some of his performances. He produced advertisements for himself that aired on local television. He liked it here.

As it happens, the early ’60s were an excellent time for an artist to be washing down tacos in the Golden State. A posse of young men and women was getting attention with art that harnessed fresh materials and techniques, in a place free from New York orthodoxies. There was a high level of craftsmanship to Kienholz’s dioramas, and Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, and others were applying the advances of surfboard fabricators and automobile customizers to their own twisted ends.

Driving back to Massachusetts in late summer with a friend, Burden stopped at Pomona College and looked around; he liked the campus so much that he returned to pursue an architecture degree. But his interest in the field faded soon after a stint at an architectural firm showed him how long it could take to make a mark. Enrolling in the University of California at Irvine’s M.F.A. program, he studied with Kauffman and another pioneering West Coast modernist, Robert Irwin. Kauffman made a point of telling students they could go down to the beach every day and still get their degree, as far as the department was concerned. The message got through to Burden: It wasn’t the piece of paper that would give you success as an artist; it was making work that mattered.

don’t think of myself as a California artist,” Burden once told an interviewer. “But it certainly has influenced me.... I used to hate it. In L.A. the first thing that bugs you is that the horizon is really weird—it’s more spaced out because you’re usually looking at it in your car, traveling at 60, 70 miles an hour....”

He wasn’t about to slow down to grasp the horizon, however: He was picking up speed and making adjustments on the fly. The art Burden created at Irvine involved the body and movement, including performances where people did exercise-like motions with implements he had made. The problem was that viewers kept seeing the apparatus as the artwork rather than the process Burden put it through.

One day, a revelation. Burden wanted to make a box—something so mundane that it wouldn’t be misread as sculpture—and squeeze himself into it. He peered down one of the school hallways at Irvine and saw a row of book lockers that were even less likely to be viewed as art than anything he would build. For five days Burden remained bent into the two-foot-by-three-foot-by-three-foot space. There was a container of water in the locker overhead with a tube he drank from and an empty open container in the space below that he urinated into. After five days, the dean called the police to extract him. Burden named that 1971 performance Five Day Locker Piece. It became a sensation beyond the campus, a fairly early example of performance art, a staple today but a genre outside of theater, sculpture, or art school when Burden crawled from his locker.

It was an era when artists in ever-greater numbers were casting aside objects and notions of permanence to inhabit the moment with their actions. The term “performance art” was still to come, and James Franco and Lady Gaga hadn’t yet put it on their résumés. This work shook people.

What followed was a burst of art making as productive as any in American history. That fall, in a gallery in Santa Ana, Burden engineered Shoot, his most famous piece. The idea, the artist says today, was to have an accomplice fire a Winchester .22 that would graze him. Nicking his torso was out, so he chose an arm. Images from the event carefully document what happened: Burden standing in front of a gallery wall, arms by his side, a bullet penetrating his left biceps. Slowly walking toward the rifleman. Close-up in a white T-shirt, looking like a fallen Dean Stockwell, a trickle of blood running down his arm. “It was a flesh wound, so it was not serious,” he says. “Worse would have been if he missed—do you do it again? Do you pass out rain checks and say, ‘Come back Friday?’ It got complicated.”

Burden took another shot at immortality in 1972, when he lay down on La Cienega Boulevard beside a parked car and covered himself with a tarp. Deadman lasted only minutes, but it was enough to get Burden arrested. “That’s not something I would have predicted,” he’d later say in an interview. “I mean, I was more worried about getting run over.”

Two years after that, Burden presented Trans-Fixed to a group gathered outside a garage in a Venice alley. The assembled could hear a car engine revving from inside, and pounding. When the garage door opened, out came a gray Volkswagen Beetle with the engine roaring. Across the back was Burden, shirtless and arms extended, nails freshly driven through his hands and into the car. (His lawyer did the deed.) The Bug was then pushed into the garage, and the door came down. It was a crucifixion enacted atop a car the Nazis had designed.

“I was always impressed by his risk-taking, which I thought should be something artists should aspire to,” says Baldessari. “But I think he does it in more extreme ways than I would ever tackle.” The intensity of the images from Burden’s performances solidified his nascent standing as a badass. There was little to even compare his work to.

One competitor was a New York poet named Vito Acconci, another cool Jesus who stalked strangers in public, rubbed a cockroach on his belly, and in a memorable bit, lay naked beneath a ramp in a gallery, masturbating and speaking fantasies into a microphone. Game recognizes game. “Each time they had to escalate what they were doing just to remain the same,” recalls Baldessari. “And you could see where that was going—the audience would want them to kill themselves! You thought, ‘Well, let’s see how they get out of this.’ ”

That Burden was in Los Angeles, so far from where the important art supposedly was being created, only made him more puzzling, more outside of any context. He had a reputation that extended beyond the art world and a gift for working the media. Esquire named him one of the most important people of 1973. Norman Mailer disparaged Burden, comparing him to graffiti writers. Punk magazines wanted to interview him. He was “The Honcho” and The Next Duchamp. With a Winchester.

The performances forced viewers to reconsider their relationship to art. They had to decide not to intervene in his work, which in itself was a declaration of involvement. This was never more the case than in a gallery piece in which Burden lay on copper strips while shackled to the floor. Beside him were two buckets of water that also contained an exposed electric line carrying a 110-volt current. His life depended on the viewers not spilling water and electrocuting him.

Such brinkmanship strained his personal relationships. Asked to hammer him for Trans-Fixed, his first wife left a note saying “cannot do nails.” A subsequent woman in his life, artist Alexis Smith, refused to kick him down the stairs for another performance. “We had a heavy-duty romance and stuff, but there were things I saw that I declined to do or thought were scary or alarming. We had one of those relationships where we argued a lot over stuff like that,” says Smith.

Burden today places the works in the context of the Vietnam War—not as a protest exactly but as a way of dealing with pain and passivity while Americans were watching body bags come home on the evening news.

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In November 2005, the messianic performance art star Marina Abramovic asked Burden for a favor. She had an idea for a kind of monument. On each of seven successive days Abramovic would reenact a revered piece from the performance art canon, putting herself in the place of the original artist. On the final day she wanted to redo Trans-Fixed.

It was a canny gesture—the global performer stretching her arms around the entire field. It might seem churlish to say no, but when she asked Burden for permission, he said no. “I guess because she asked me, you know? I thought it was a stupid idea, and I just gave her my opinion,” he tells me in his studio. “I said she could do it, but I wouldn’t give her permission. It wasn’t like I was gonna sue her.”

Even in the 1970s, Burden—focused, quiet, private—was no messiah. Over the decades he’s only gotten more that way. He courted the celebrity, and the swagger he adopted from time to time certainly helped establish his reputation. But ultimately it wasn’t who he was, and he ended up walking away from that image, leaving the work to inspire those who find it.

Just as Burden was being typecast as modernism’s Evel Knievel, he had begun to draw on his interest in engineering. By 1975 he had constructed the B-Car, a life-size soapbox derby vehicle that could go 100 miles per hour and travel 100 miles on a single gallon of gas. Projects like this were an important step, looking back to more conventional sculpture and forward to conceptual objects that didn’t seem particularly expressive but rather were ideas built into the world. Burden displayed golden bullets and the nails from Trans-Fixed on red velvet in vitrines, as if they were relics belonging to a saint. He exhibited collages of some of the more outlandish press accounts as well, tabloid headlines that mocked the media. Burden was having his cake and bleeding on it, too.

The machinery that began leaving his studio would establish Burden as a maker of fascinating, loud, kinetic sculptures that neatly embodied intellectual concepts. Seven years after 1979’s Big Wheel—a massive iron wheel powered by a stationary motorcycle—he deployed a 100-ton jack to press against a museum’s weight-bearing walls for Samson. A turnstile installed at the door counted each viewer entering the building, and with each rotation, more pressure was put on the museum’s structure. Theoretically, an influx of patrons could have caused the very demolition of the museum they were attending.

These pieces of hardware unleashed apocalyptic forces in the exhibition hall. They are engines of creation and destruction, and the ideas will outlive the iron. Dawn Kasper is among the young artists who have found new possibilities in Burden’s notions. One of the breakout pieces from this year’s Whitney Biennial was Nomadic Studio Practice, in which Kasper moved the entire contents of her K-town apartment-studio into the Whitney. She worked, read, played her records, all as people shuffled by. The artist talked to viewers, and the piece has a shaggy, David Foster Wallace feel: “Hi, I’m Dawn Kasper. Thank you for coming!”

Kasper studied with Burden when he was on the faculty at UCLA and has worked with him in his studio. She regards his classic ’70s pieces as crucial to what she does. “Chris has been a huge influence and inspiration,” says Kasper. “Without him and his earlier work, I don’t know what I’d be doing—maybe working in a coffee shop.” She talks with the easily distracted intensity of the postironic generation, merging high and low without shame or impediment. Asked why Burden’s art shouldn’t be compared to an episode of Jackass, she says it does share some connotations with Jackass—and what’s wrong with that? “He’s really testing some sort of boundary—in himself first but challenging the audience, too, to take responsibility and feel something for somebody else. He’s very macho, for sure,” she continues. “Not in a misogynist way, but he’s very assured…. I see him as a sculptor, and he was always a sculptor. He just used his body in a sculptural way.”

Burden married the sculptor Nancy Rubins in 1987, and she taught with him at UCLA, part of a famous staff that included Baldessari, Paul McCarthy, and Lari Pittman. In 2005, Burden found himself again a local media obsession when the artist Ron Athey was leading Burden’s class and a student named Joe Deutch came in, announcing a piece that centered on a game of Russian roulette. He pulled out a pistol, seemingly loaded a bullet into the chamber, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger. Click. Deutch walked out into the hallway and set off a firecracker, which freaked everybody out. Burden complained to the university when immediate action was not taken against Deutch; though it was reported that the gun wasn’t really loaded, today Deutch admits it was.

The student’s act was called “domestic terrorism” by Burden, and Deutch spent the next two years at UCLA trying to live it down. “Whether I was a typical student from that point on is questionable,” he says.“At the same time I learned an infinite amount from that piece—it was a piece I needed to do, there or somewhere else. As far as informing what I think about art making and what is viable or appropriate even, it had a huge effect on me.”

Almost universally the opinion has been that Burden was a hypocrite—the guy famous for Shoot blanching when someone followed his example. But Burden says he felt responsible for the other students’ safety, noting he wasn’t in a classroom when he did Shoot and that those who attended were more like willing observers than the unsuspecting UCLA students. Another art student did a piece using blood and cream pie, and Burden had to raise the point that in the age of HIV, the artist had better clean the site with bleach. Somebody else wanted to catch a wild boar at San Simeon and live with it at home. Burden said no. “You do give up certain rights when you become a student. If this kid wants to drop out and go downtown and do Russian roulette art, that’s different,” Burden says, a slight smirk on his face. “He’s no longer in Mummy’s bosom. But if you wanna be in Mummy’s bosom in the university, you have to abide by the rules.”

Deutch, who recently had a show at the Marlborough Chelsea Gallery in New York, never spoke with Burden after the incident. But like Kasper, he considers himself in the tradition of Burden, although maybe even Burden would have stopped short of being bitten by a venomous snake, which is what Deutch did in a Culver City gallery.

Ultimately Burden and Rubins resigned over what they saw as UCLA’s not taking a firmer disciplinary stand. “When an institution goes screwy on you, then you have to leave that institution,” says Burden.

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The Topanga canyon hilltop enclave where Burden and Rubins live and work is an area with a long history of sheltering social outliers. Back when the region was part of a Spanish land grant, its hillside nooks and crannies were a convenient hiding spot for bandits. Pointing to a ridgeline, Burden shows where FBI agents spied on lefties who lived here in the ’40s and ’50s. Wallace Berman and Woody Guthrie knew the ravines and hillsides. “And of course, there was Manson,” he says.

Yesterday Burden spotted a juvenile condor flying over the compound. He describes the bird’s characteristics, then pulls out a Roger Tory Peterson guidebook and starts reading about condors.

Is he in Topanga Canyon for good? I ask.

“Yeah, I think so,” he says with a laugh. “But never say never. You never know. If dirty nuclear happens, I might have to move.” He’s joking, sort of. But the statement reminds me of a remark one of his former assistants shared, about how after September 11, Burden—who has always had a paranoid streak—had grown more paranoid. I ask Burden whether he thinks that’s true, and he provides a convoluted stream of answers.

Why worry about Afghanistan? he says. “Now if I was in La Jolla, I’d be worried. Yowza! A 15-minute drive to the border. People in La Jolla don’t even lock their doors! It’s gonna spill over. You read all these articles about Nogales and how the cartels want to keep the violence on the Mexican side, but eventually it’s gonna break down, I think.”

There’s a small bridge in his studio—its arches made of tan stone building blocks—and as he talks I lean against it with one hand. Only then, and very laconically, does Burden explain that the work is interesting to him because every one of its concrete cast pieces is fitted together without any mortar. Gravity is holding it all together, and gravity could bring it all down. “It’s a perfect physics lesson. If one of these breaks...,” he says, pointing at a spot where the pressure comes to bear on the tightly fitted pieces. Carefully I straighten up and pull my hand from the bridge.

Yowza. Chris Burden today is full of himself, and utterly improbable. Arguably the guy should not be standing, yet here he is, rooted to the ground and orbited by waves of assistants. A moment later and he’s talking about the hypocrisy of U.S. drug policy and how if drugs were sold and taxed, their glamour would disappear. Which reminds me of one more thing the assistant recalled: coming up to the house and finding Burden on the floor, smoking pot and playing with his trains.

Give or take the prep work for dirty nuclear, it seems like a pretty good life in Topanga. “Will people who see the lamps say, ‘Hey, isn’t that the guy who shot himself in 1971?’ I don’t think their sense of history is that thorough,” he says. “Shoot was a long time ago, you know. It’s been a long time. I’ve been up here since I started camping in ’83, when nobody was up here.”

He still has a lot of acres more or less to himself, his team, Rubins, the bobcats, scorpions, and a juvenile condor. He briskly pads back into the hangar as drills whistle in the distance.

RJ Smith, author of The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, wrote about the band the Negro Problem in March.

Where The Sidewalk Ends

By Amy Wallace — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

When we see a shrine, we’re usually on the move. In that, we have something in common with the individuals these pop-up memorials are meant to honor. Those people, too, were on their way somewhere when they reached the ultimate end of the road. And then, suddenly, nothing.

Most of us don’t know the men, women, and children whose points of departure are marked with bouquets and candles and teddy bears. But we feel the loss. Maybe we’ve heard about the accident on the news—the celebrating twentysomethings who drank too much before they got behind the wheel, the mother and her two young daughters who had the bad luck to be in their minivan when a senior citizen with a suspended license lost control and veered into their lane. To read about these tragedies is to realize it could have been you. Which is probably why once a shrine goes up, it can grow quickly with offerings from strangers. Maybe, we think, if we take a moment now to mark the fallen, we’ll be better able to take our foot off the pedal later, to proceed with more care. We point out these shrines to our teenagers as cautionary tales. No texting, we say, barely able to fathom the irreparable loss we are trying to guard against.

No one wants to be the one who—out of grief or anger or a need for closure—assembles the ordinary items that make for such extraordinary public gestures. But when we see a shrine, for a moment we understand the person who built it. Because a shrine is more than a mock headstone. It is a reminder that life can be too short, horrible things can happen to anybody, and—and here’s the important part—when you love someone, sometimes you have to say it out loud to anyone who will slow down long enough to listen.

RIP: Luke Akao, 30
Date: May 20, 2012
What Happened: Akao’s motorcycle struck a pole at the Metro bus stop on Beverly Boulevard, on the southwest corner of Rossmore Avenue, Hancock Park

RIP: Saida Juana Mendez-Bernardino, 27, and her daughters, Hilda and Stephanie Cruz, ages 6 and 4
Date: August 29, 2012
What Happened: Mendez-Bernardino’s minivan collided with a car that swerved into her lane on Highland Avenue at Willoughby, Hollywood

RIP: Armando Villanueva, 40
Date: April 30, 2012
What Happened: Villanueva’s motorcycle smashed into a tree across from 7667 Mulholland Drive, Upper Nichols Canyon (For more details on this shrine, click here.)

RIP: Jason Shmelnik, 23, Pavel “Pasha” Volodkovich, 25, and Ekaterina Botvinieva, 23
Date: September 9, 2012
What Happened: Volodkovich, who was intoxicated, lost control of his vehicle and crashed into 11412 Ventura Boulevard, Studio City

RIP: Julia Cukier Siegler, 13
Date: February 26, 2010
What Happened: Siegler was hit by two cars while walking across Sunset Boulevard at Cliffwood Avenue, Brentwood

RIP: Jean Carlos Galaviz, 34
Date: August 19, 2012
What Happened: Galaviz’s bicycle hit the curb and crashed into a hillside on Canon Crest near Avenue 45, Mount Washington

Photographs by Damon Casarez

The Road Taken

By Suzanne Rico — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 02:05:00 GMT

Photograph courtesy of Suzanne Rico

One minute you’re an anchorwoman in L.A. The next you’re unemployed. What to do? Why not rent out your house, pack up your bags (and your family), and travel Ruta 40 in Argentina? Or sell your cars to pay your way to Machu Picchu? Or ditch your Botox injections hippos in Africa? Whether you’re going camping in Montana, freezing your ass off in Iceland, or hanging on tight while leaping off a cliff in Croatia, you may well discover that the best part of you is present no matter how far you go.

I was fired from my job as the morning anchor at CBS2 on a “March Madness” Friday, immediately after a newscast featuring a story on how the number of vasectomies always increases before college basketball’s biggest weekend. After almost eight years of reporting on wildfires, traffic, and celebrity misbehavior, I was summoned by the news director to a conference room. He was, he said, “restructuring.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, though I suspected I wasn’t getting a promotion.

“It means today is your last day,” he answered, clutching a clipboard to his chest like a cartoon squirrel with a precious cache of nuts. My perfectly tweezed eyebrows tried to knit together in alarm, but the Botox that helped me stay competitive with the station’s younger talent kept my face unruffled.

Instead I flashed a bright morning anchor smile and stood up, towering over him in Prada heels, and wished him good luck, adding—in my mind only, I think, though I can’t be certain—“you little asshole.” Then a human resources manager named Alice, who happened to live down the street from me, escorted me out of the building. I’m not sure who was more mortified when she asked for my security card.

Being suddenly anchorless—cut adrift in a city that puts a high premium on success—I tried to get angry. I’d graduated from UCLA and worked hard for my master’s degree in broadcast journalism. I’d played by the rules, painting surfer-girl highlights into my dirty blond hair and making sure my butt never exceeded a size 2. I’d climbed the ladder of local news, turning tragedy into a storytelling art form as a field reporter. And when I finally earned a full-time seat at the anchor desk, I’d begun setting my alarm clock for 3 a.m. and popping Ambiens like Tic Tacs at night.

In the midst of this career frenzy, my husband, Ethan, and I had tried to start a family. Seven in vitro fertilizations and three miscarriages later—plus countless dashes from the news set to barf in the bathroom—my son Griffin was born premature and colicky. I often sat up holding him at night, afraid he would die if I didn’t.

With blow-dried hair and airbrushed makeup, I walked through life like a pretty, pampered zombie, missing Griffin’s first steps and first day of school. When Adrian, my second son, was born, carried by a surrogate mother because my body couldn’t handle this basic female function again, I was back at the anchor desk in less than three weeks. But instead of feeling indignant that CBS had not respected these sacrifices, I felt ashamed that I’d never had the courage to quit. Driving off the CBS lot for the last time, I put my head down and ignored the security guard’s friendly wave.

My family, however, was ecstatic when I joined the ranks of the unemployed. “Now maybe you won’t put your car keys in the fridge,” Ethan said. “Now maybe I get my wife back.” He didn’t mention that now neither of us had a job. My husband, a house flipper by trade, had been Mr. Mom ever since the real estate bubble burst in 2008.

“Does this mean you won’t leave in the darktime anymore?” Griffin asked. I’d been out the door before he woke up for all of his four-and-a-half years. “Yes, baby,” I replied, eyes stinging from the first treacherous tears as Adrian, who had just turned two, toddled over.

“Don’t cry, Mommy,” he said. “Want some ice cream?”

But ice cream wasn’t going to soothe the panic that was starting to bang around in my chest like a kid with a couple of pots and pans. I’d been gainfully employed since I began selling Burrito Supremes at Taco Bell at age 15, and the workaholic inside me wanted answers.

“What,” she demanded, “are you going to do?”

The Pelican Epiphany
As news of my firing spread via the L.A. Times and Variety, my agent called with a job offer from KNBC—a shot at redemption that tempted me to claw my way back up. Being the daughter of a Superwoman—a 1970s mother of three who wore groovy polyester pantsuits to her teaching job while earning her Ph.D.—that fight was in my blood. In 3rd grade I beat Robbie Baxter (a boy!) in the national Physical Fitness Test. In 8th grade I aced wood shop and shunned home ec. In 12th grade I set my goals (“Earn $100,000 before I’m 30!”) the way other girls listed the qualities they wanted in a husband (“Nice! Fun! Cute!”). But here I was, a 45-year-old mom suffering from mild career-related battle fatigue and moderate perimenopause. There was little fight left in me.

In an ironic coincidence, the day after I was fired we left for Mexico on a planned vacation. Sleeping late and relaxing should have been the first priorities, but every margarita made me feel more like a loser. Vacations, I discovered, were more fun when I had a job.

One morning misery nudged me out of bed at dawn, and I sneaked down to the beach, hoping the roll of the determined waves might spark some elegant insight. A flock of pelicans was dive-bombing the surf, as intent on nabbing a fish as I was on distilling the difference between what I thought I should do and what I really wanted, when I heard a voice, direct yet childlike.

“Do you know how brown pelicans die?” A young woman was clearly talking to me, so I shook my head. She was close enough that I could see a smattering of freckles across her nose, but her eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses.

“They hit the water so hard when they fish,” she said, “that eventually they go blind.” She turned back to the ocean. “And then they starve to death.”

Yikes! I thought. They’re killing themselves, and they don’t even know it!

A bird plunged into the water on cue, coming up empty beaked, and my melodramatic metaphor about the hard-charging, self-destructive pelicans hit home. In that moment I realized that diving back into the troubled waters of my career—one that hadn’t been fulfilling for years—would certainly cause vision problems. What I needed was a new way to fish.

That night I shared this pelican epiphany with Ethan. I pitched the idea of leaving Los Angeles, which I saw as partly to blame for the rat-racing, beauty-worshipping, stress-driven life I’d created. The KNBC job offered me a direct route back into that life, one that would allow us to maintain full-time help, the Bloomingdale’s credit card, and the kids’ expensive school. But taking the job now would be the psychological equivalent of a pelican’s slow suicide. A low-budget quest to find a new way of living, I insisted, would lead to happiness.

“Sounds like an expensive midlife crisis,” Ethan said, being as cautious as I was being impulsive.

“It’s a midlife adventure!” I argued. “We’ll rent out the house and sell our cars to pay for it.” Ethan’s green eyes still looked doubtful. My germaphobe husband loves to travel, but not when hot water and soap aren’t readily available. “And I’ll homeschool the kids!”

Now he looked horrified. “You can’t run away from your problems, Suzanne,” he said, but I could see he understood that this opportunity to change might never come again.

“I know,” I sighed, “but in this case running feels right.”

Ethan thought for a moment, considering whether to take this leap of faith, and then smiled. “Then let’s run, baby!” he said, and I hugged him, feeling his strong, unfrazzled heartbeat beneath his blue Triumph T-shirt. “Let’s run.”

The Minivan Diaries
We’d gotten as far as Wyoming when Adrian asked what a cowboy was. We were at a gas station to refuel the Honda Odyssey minivan we’d crammed with medicine, homeschooling materials, and clothes for every climate before pushing off from L.A. Inside the station’s minimart I pointed to a man standing by the beer cooler and wearing Wranglers, boots, and a battered Stetson.

“Howdy,” said the cowboy, his face a little round and a little red. He looked like a skinny Garth Brooks.

“Are you a real cowboy?” Adrian asked, suspicious.

“That’s right, little man,” he replied in a husky drawl. “And what do you wanna be when you grow up?”

“Um-um-um,” Adrian stammered, batting his long black eyelashes. I prayed for him to say cowboy, or race car driver, or garbageman. Anything remotely studly. “I wanna be…” he continued in his high, sweet baby voice, “a MOMMY !” Then he clapped his hands as if he’d nailed his solo in the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. The cowboy laughed and walked off with his 12-pack of Coors. “That’s right, little dude!” I whispered to Adrian, aware of how his future surged with possibility. “You can be anything you want.”

Two days later at an isolated campground in Montana, Griff and Adrian were also introduced to God and the Devil by a group of Mormon kids who offered toasted marshmallows along with holy salvation. As storm clouds blackened the sky, Griffin came running back from their campsite.

“Is there really a guy who lives inside the earth and does evil things to people?” he asked. “His name is Statin.”

“Well,” I began, buying time to answer, “some people think there is. And his name is Satan, not Statin.”

“Yeah, him,” Griff said, and then, “What is God, Mommy?”

I hesitated. I have struggled with this question before, mostly at the time of my father’s sudden, early death and my own sudden, early divorce.

“If you take all the love I feel for you and Adrian and Daddy,” I answered, “and roll it into one big rainbow-colored ball, that’s what I think God is.”

Griffin thought for a minute, trying to connect the spiritual dots.

“But Mommy,” he asked finally, “is the ball a boy or a girl?”

“That’s up to you, baby,” I laughed. It occurred to me that this journey—this impulsive, poorly planned, open-ended choice—could lead anywhere we wanted. A lifestyle with less fear, stress, judgment, and needless acquisition—weeds that grow all too easily in the garden of L.A.—sounded pretty good, and if I could ditch my designer worries about wrinkles and weight along the way, that would be a bonus.

We kept rolling through places we knew only from books: Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, and Lake Michigan, where we stayed with a friend I’d met while working at WLS-TV in Chicago. “I have not seen you so relaxed in years,” said Barb at the end of our two days together. Barb does not mince words—and rarely softens them. “You didn’t pace or pick up the phone. You focused on conversations. It was wonderful.”

This compliment felt more like a slap. Had I really been so clueless and self-involved? Had I really paced? The more I consulted my inner Magic 8 Ball, the more the answer was “yes, definitely,” and I didn’t like the girlfriend I had been.

But on star-strewn nights, watching the campfire dance with the shadows, I felt the giddy joy of a kid who had just mustered enough courage to leap off the high dive. The freedom that came from controlling my own destiny outweighed the anxiety that my new skill might result in a belly flop. Our consistent forward momentum quieted any fear.

With the darkness whirring and breathing around us, Ethan and I used our iPhone’s Star Walk app to pick out constellations overhead. This nascent life had the robust feel of a post-Modern Family meets Little House on the Prairie, and our old one in L.A.—where we never bothered to search for stars—flickered only faintly, like the dying fire.

The Start of Civilization
Rising in the shape of a crescent moon out of a sapphire Aegean Sea, the Greek island of Chios is the reputed birthplace of the poet Homer. We flew to Chios from Boston to wander the medieval villages and monasteries that cling to scrubby mountainsides. The insulated beauty of pebbly beaches and lonely hills, where donkeys are still a mode of transportation, filled us with a sense of well-being.

In a high, shallow valley the 11th-century monastery Nea Moni lies nestled among gnarled olive trees. Only one monk was living there now, and only one winding road led in, its tired asphalt covered with dry pine needles that glinted bronze in the morning sun. We drove carefully, passing sky blue beekeeping boxes tucked next to tiny white shrines marking the spots where drivers had left the curvy road and this earth.

I was reading aloud from our guidebook about a display case at the monastery that holds the bleached bones of deceased monks when the car skidded to a stop. An older man wearing a white fishing hat was standing in the road waving frantically, and two bicycles were spilled against the rocky hillside. A woman lay motionless in the dirt, her short, spiky hair covered in blood.

In broken English the man said he was from the Czech Republic, repeating “doctor” and “please” over and over with a desperate smile, as if he were sorry to be bothering us. Grabbing one of our beach towels, the Costco price tag still dangling from a corner, I knelt next to the woman and slid the towel gently under her head.

Staring at her face, a hole the size of a penny drilled deep into her forehead and her teeth demolished, I found that the world’s vast expanse had contracted down to one small stretch of mountain road. Over the years I had reported hundreds of tragedies far worse than this to my morning audience, reading the grisly details off a teleprompter from the safety of a climate-controlled studio. But this was raw and real.

A breeze stirred the scent of salt and pine, and a black butterfly, its wings brushed with yellow stripes, perched on the woman’s left arm. One aquamarine eye fixed on me, unblinking, while the other quickly swelled shut, bruises forming around it. In a voice I use to calm my children, I spoke reassuring lies. “You’re going to be fine, honey,” I whispered, holding this stranger’s tanned, wiry hand in mine. “Help is coming.”

After an hour, the ambulance we had called finally arrived, and two tough-looking locals in jeans and T-shirts loaded the woman brusquely into the back as if she were already dead. I put my arms around Ethan, sobbing, and when I raised my face, his own was wet with tears.

“Mom!” Griffin pleaded when I climbed back into the car. “Wipe the blood off your hand.”

The seriousness of the decision to drag my family around the world pressed hard against my heart. Gone were the layers of protection we’d had in Los Angeles: the luxuries of Grandma and Grandpa living nearby, of speaking a common language, of knowing the nearest hospital was two miles from our house. Even though driving through the Sepulveda Pass can be just as dangerous as the road to Nea Moni, it was clear we were much more vulnerable away from home.

When we arrived at the monastery, I lit a candle at the altar of Mary Magdalene and asked this kindred mom to keep us safe.

Healing Waters
The Muslim call to prayer woke us at 6 a.m., blaring from loudspeakers wired to the slender tower of a mosque in a small Turkish town. To my foreign ear the prayer sounded a bit like a wobbly Tarzan yell, only longer and more beautiful.

Dodging donkey carts stuffed with fig branches, we headed for the ruins of Hierapolis, an ancient spa town built on a terrace of white travertine pools. We arrived at the magic hour, the sun’s dying rays gilding the marble entrance to the Sacred Pool, where Cleopatra is believed to have bathed. Legend has it that the water here can cure almost anything—anxiety, PMS, even sun damage!—so I waded right in, badly needing the maximum bang for my 20-Turkish-lira entrance fee.

The long drive in a subcompact diesel Citroën, stuffed in the backseat with a kid on each side, had cranked up the stress level. A repetitive song called “Purple Pig” that promised to teach my kids phonics blared from crappy speakers, and Griffin, recalcitrant and unfocused, had tried to wriggle out of his homeschool lesson by teaching me one instead:

Griff: “Mom, stop picking your nose.”

Me: “I’m not picking my nose. Read this word.”

Griff: “Yes, you were.”

Me: “No, I wasn’t. I was itching it. Read the word!”

Griff: “No, you were picking it. I saw you.”

Me: “STOP TALKING about nose picking and READ THE WORD, or I’ll throw you out the window!”

Griff (calmly): “Pig. P-I-G. Why were you picking your nose?”

To my left, Adrian, nicknamed “Ado the Tornado” because of his ability to stir up disaster, had squirmed out of his seat belt. He kicked my laptop so hard that it died, taking my travel notes with it into the Great Beyond.

At that moment the early-morning grind at CBS flashed into my mind, and it seemed like an oasis. I had not anticipated that my new full-time mommy gig (not to mention working as a travel agent, teacher, navigator, and referee) would have such a steep learning curve, with 24/7 family togetherness pushing me straight toward the asylum door. Sensing my distress, Ethan had pulled over beside a roadside fruit stand for a break, where a smiling, crinkly-faced Turk gave the boys two eggs and a fluffy baby chicken. I sat down in the dusty weeds, defeated.

Standing now with my toes sunk in the sediment of a travertine pool, I looked out across a vast valley, where wisps of smoke curled up from small settlements. The setting sun was perfectly balanced by a full moon rising in the east when three microlight airplanes launched from a neighboring mountaintop, sweeping through the sky like bright birds of the future.

“What does ‘micro’ mean, Dad?” Griffin whispered, spellbound by the scene.

“It means ‘tiny,’ ” Ethan said. “You were a microbaby when you were born.” The runty result of our third in vitro attempt, Griff had come into the world looking like an extraterrestrial with a black mohawk. His birth had seemed downright miraculous, since some of the best fertility doctors in Los Angeles had put my odds of having biological children near zero.

Now, watching my strong five-year-old resume splashing in the chalky blue water, I felt a big zipper in my mind—one that usually closes off any possibility of transcending the everyday physical world—peel open. My lifelong need to be successful, beautiful, and respected seemed silly when weighed against the hard-won gift of my family. Everything I needed I already had. I closed my eyes and mentally reached out, trying to hold onto this powerful realization, but the more I tried, the faster it faded.

We spent the night at a small family-run inn called Melrose House Hotel, half a hemisphere away from the famous avenue in L.A. With Griff and Ado asleep, Ethan and I sat on the cracked concrete patio of a milky swimming pool and watched an episode of Mad Men on our iPad. Don Draper, a quintessential American man of the 1960s, was caught in a midlife crisis, screwing up his life with liquor and lies and slowly seeing that his high-profile job might not be the ticket to spiritual fulfillment.

“Things haven’t changed much in the last 50 years,” I joked, the moon turning the sheets drying on a line across the courtyard into gently flapping ghosts.

Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina
Without intending to, we had begun following an endless summer, landing in Buenos Aires six months after leaving Los Angeles. Speaking fluent Spanish had always been a dream (along with playing the guitar, doing a standing back flip, and winning American Idol). The funky neighborhood of Las Cañitas, where we rented an apartment for three months, became my classroom. When Griffin tried to grab an ice cream out of a beat-up freezer in a small mercado, the door snapped shut, pinching his finger. I turned to the group of Argentine men watching him sob.

“Pinche dedo!” I explained, holding up his hurt hand. An embarrassed Ethan whispered that I had just used the slang for “fucking finger,” and after that, he did most of the talking.

In late January we celebrated my 46th birthday with a dinner of strange cuts of steak boiled in a dented fondue pot we’d found in our apartment, preferring home-cooked meals to Argentine restaurant entrées like stir-fried bull testicles and brains stewed in tomato sauce. The year before, my dream birthday gift had been a Louis Vuitton bag, but this time around I received the tools of a traveler—a waterproof notebook, binoculars, a pocketknife, and one of those Buff do-rags made famous by the TV show Survivor. I was settling into my new identity.

I was also settling into a new face. The Botox I used to have injected twice a year had worn off, leaving nothing but my own diminishing collagen to fight gravity. My forehead had looked lumpy at first, the muscles sluggish after a five-year nap, but lately I’d noticed neat horizontal lines starting to form.

I tried to see this as a wrinkly badge of courage, which was easier in Buenos Aires than in Los Angeles, as the porteñas seemed less concerned about physical perfection than my fellow Angelenas. A belly hanging out here or shorter-than-supermodel legs there—the Argentine’s body language and dress said, Who cares? By not hiding their flaws they helped me stop worrying about mine.

That night, to a soundtrack of Spanish, sirens, and barking dogs floating up from the street, I walked to the bathroom to try on my Survivor do-rag. It may have been the lighting, but the middle-aged mom staring back was sassy and smart, her brown eyes more challenged by the future than scared of it. The hard edges of the L.A. anchorwoman, who had struggled to maintain a facade of perfection, had softened until she was just a blur.

Head in the Sand
Every light at Namibia’s Hosea Kutako International Airport clicked off simultaneously at 9 p.m., leaving us waiting for our rental car in a blinding rainstorm. We carried no luggage because the airlines had lost our bags somewhere in Johannesburg. Skirting huge sinkholes and hopping frogs, we drove to our motel in the capital city of Windhoek and slept in our clothes.

The next morning, after buying T-shirts, shorts, and toothbrushes, we drove almost 300 kilometers on gravel roads through platinum-tipped grassland as wild dogs with vampire teeth and elegant springbok scattered at the sound of our engine. Finally we reached the Namib Desert, where saffron-colored sand dunes roll for more than a hundred kilometers in constantly changing formations until they reach the sea. Hiking up one ridgeline, we looked down into a dried-up riverbed called Dead Vlei, the only sign of life being two ravens sitting in a blackened tree. We joined hands and jumped off the edge, tumbling and rolling in the forgiving sand down to a place that seemed like the most desolate side of heaven.

The wild, unfamiliar beauty of Namibia provoked an intense feeling of melancholy. For ten months I’d been without my girlfriends in L.A., Ethan and the kids my only support. This isolation made me feel more secure at first, as there were no expectations to measure up to. But now, without this council of women—the human barometers I’d always used to determine what was “normal”—worry blossomed.

Late that evening in a safari tent surrounded by crickets the size of mice, I lit a candle my mother-in-law had given me at the start of this journey. The wick was worn and the wax had teeth marks from a baboon that had grabbed it off an outdoor table and tried to eat it, but the familiar little flame soothed. The spicy-sweet scent of Africa wafted through the mesh windows while I slowly read through a backlog of e-mails, savoring the badly needed virtual connection.

“With all the moves, the financial uncertainty, and two teenagers to worry about, I’m going down the path of too much wine every night to find solace,” wrote Deanna, a friend who had just sold her Hancock Park home to get out of debt. “We all agree that we would never want to do our teenage years over again, and yet I realize that as parents, we do.”

That’s it! I thought. I did feel 16 again: the hormonal fluctuations that made me either short-tempered or giddy, the odd changes in my face and body, the anxiety about the future. The only difference was that now my adult responsibilities kept me from locking myself in a room to play “I’m Sailing Away” over and over again in moody yearning for something I couldn’t identify. Ethan began to laugh less, too, the gray in his dark brown hair turning white as nearly a year of schlepping suitcases started to wear him down. But when he mentioned he was getting tired of being unsettled, I ignored the subtext that said he wanted to go home.

“It’s unsettling not to know where we’re going to settle,” I babbled like a child, “but settling to know we’ll eventually settle somewhere!” He sighed and said he missed L.A., but I simply babbled further about how going back now would be like running into my fool of an ex-husband in a bar. Even though I’d divorced him, it would be uncomfortable. And what if I ran into my ex-TV husband, anchorman Kent Shocknek, with whom I’d only spoken once since I’d been fired? No way! Sticking my head in the sand like a Namibian ostrich with its tutu of feathers might be immature but, like, whatever. It was safe. Ethan didn’t mention home again, but his melancholy magnified mine—especially after we met a woman named Yolandi Claudine.

We spotted Yolandi in safari country, where blue sky pressed against savanna that spread to the horizon. We’d seen cheetahs hunting, giraffes nibbling treetops, and amber-eyed baboons perched on top of termite mounds, shoving grubs into their mouths in a lazy autopilot of motion. But on a road so rutted with gullies that one knocked off our front license plate, the most unusual sight was a woman holding a cloth bag and a plastic Coke bottle filled with water.

“Do you need a ride?” Ethan asked as he stopped the car.

“Yes, sir,” Yolandi answered, climbing in. “I’ve been out here for two days.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Trying to get work at a farm.”

“Did you get it?” asked Ethan.

“No,” she replied.

Yolandi lived 70 kilometers away with her aunt and 16-month-old son. The boy’s father had been killed one night while hitchhiking to his job in a uranium mine, she said, left to die by a hit-and-run driver. When I offered Cheddar Bites and yogurt, I thought she might cry.

Her house was a small, neat green box with a cardboard sign stuck to its chain-link fence that listed prices for homemade fudge, spices, and pork. Ethan gave Yolandi all the Namibian money we had left—sort of like spitting into a hurricane—and she looked dazed by the unfamiliar kindness. Then she ran inside and came back with her child and a smile that dimmed the sun. As we bumped away down the dirt road, I watched Yolandi Claudine disappear in the rearview mirror. She was helping her son wave good-bye with his perfect little brown hand.

The Mourning After
The unraveling began at Iceland’s Seljalandsfoss, an icy waterfall that tumbles 300 feet into a deep, rocky pool. At its base four people in wheelchairs sat staring upward, their matching blue coats standing out against white mist. Their refusal to let a lack of working legs keep them from living life made my skin feel as if it had turned inside out. The iron grip I’d kept on my emotions was weakening, and when both of my boys slipped and fell in the cold, sucking mud, which covered them like pigs in a sty, I snapped.

Iceland is a sorrowful rock of purples, browns, yellows, whites, and greens rising in defiance from a concrete-colored Atlantic Ocean. We hadn’t planned to visit this volcanic island, but Iceland Air had the cheapest tickets to northern Europe, where we were headed next, and layovers were free, so we figured, Why not? When we drove east on the 830-mile Ring Road, my cheek was pressed against the car’s rain-streaked window, and I was sobbing.

For six weeks I had been ignoring a raw, painful place inside, caused by a double tragedy that had happened in Los Angeles in late spring. Within 72 hours two of my friends had died, both of them just 42 years old. Tracey, a mother of three whom I had known for more than 20 years, had an unstoppable breast cancer, and James, a kind, thoughtful colleague at CBS2, died unexpectedly.

The last time I’d seen Tracey was during a layover in Los Angeles on our way back from Africa. She was on her living room couch, licking a morphine lollipop, the dark circles under her eyes the only thing marring the angular beauty of her face. Her postchemo hair was cropped short, like Halle Berry’s. “Not bad, right?” she said when I complimented her on it. “A woman stopped me the other day to ask where I get it done, and I told her Cedars-Sinai!” Tracey’s deep, raucous laugh sounded just like it had back when finding a cute boy and a cold beer had been our biggest concerns. There was everything to say and nothing at all, and so I told her stories of being chased by a hippopotamus in South Africa and floating down the wide Rio Negro in Uruguay.

“Do it all, Rico,” Tracey urged—she had never called me by anything but my last name. I put a hand on her arm, careful of the bruises and needle marks that made the cancer’s progress sickeningly obvious. “I’ll be dead in a month—maybe two—and there is so much left to do.” And then Tracey Firestone Greenberg, who lived only 12 more days, laughed again. “I just don’t have time to die!”

Now, here in Iceland, the tears kept coming as we crossed a steel bridge spanning a dry mile-wide wash. I was so sad and confused that I barely noticed the brilliant slashes of glacier bisecting fields of purple lupines and lava rock. Despite the progress I’d made in reordering my priorities, which had dropped into place in Argentina and Africa like the lost pieces of a puzzle, here I was trying to apply the same white-knuckled, must-succeed philosophy to this journey that I’d used in my career. Why was it so hard to quit something that had outgrown its usefulness? I needed my community of family and friends, but they were thousands of miles away. Intuitively I knew it was time to quit running, but I had been stubbornly ignoring my gut.

“Please stop crying, Mommy,” Griffin begged from the backseat. “I promise I’ll take care of you!” Turning to look at my boys, their faces scared and bewildered, it was clear I’d hit some sort of bottom—but when I reached back to hold their hands, it felt more like a turning point.

“You guys want to go back to Los Angeles to see Grandma and Grandpa?” I asked. They nodded, and Ethan looked over with a hopeful smile. “OK then,” I said, thinking of Tracey and what she would have given to have one more day, one hour—even one minute—with her family. “Let’s wrap up this last trip and go home.”

Fever Dreams
Days had melted into weeks, weeks into months, and months into more than a year when Los Angeles, the city with which I’d had such a painful falling-out, began to shimmer in my memory as an over-the-rainbow place where all problems might be solved. As the minutes remaining on this long, strange family trip ticked down, it was clear the running from had become a running to.

We had come to Germany and eastern Europe to experience my family ties to World War II and the remnants of Communism. But somewhere between visiting the grave of my grandmother, who was killed when an Allied bomb hit her Bavarian farmhouse, and eating emerald green pumpkin oil pressed by a Slovenian farmer, a virulent mystery illness hijacked our last hurrah.

In the Croatian capital of Zagreb, which sits like a dirty thumbprint far inland from the tourist meccas on the Adriatic, I knelt over my three-year-old son, his green eyes bright with fever. A church bell tolled 2 a.m. somewhere in the hot, humid night.

“You’re the goodest mommy in the whole world!” Adrian whispered, the wet towels I placed over his burning body warming up too fast.

No, I thought, I’m not! The goodest mommy would be at home in Los Angeles speed-dialing her pediatrician, not thousands of miles away in a cheap rented room with metal-shaded windows, a disintegrating rug, and a shower the size of a coffin.

From that cell-like room in Zagreb, where Adrian’s fever spiked close to 106 degrees, we rushed to Hungary, checking into a fancy Budapest hotel with an English-speaking concierge, a house doctor, and a room with a bathtub. I did not have the time or energy to feel guilty about the splurge, as now it was Griffin’s turn to burn. We did not see the world’s second-largest synagogue, the famed thermal baths, or Heroes’ Square, where Soviet tanks quashed a Hungarian rebellion in 1956. Ethan and I were too worried to care.

Hanging just outside our window, which was framed by Budapest’s Széchenyi Chain Bridge arcing gracefully over the Danube, I did see a large yellow spider. Body still as death, it waited for the insect equivalent of a jackpot. Stronger and more flexible than steel, the spider’s web anchored it to the hotel’s sheer wall, and I felt a sudden desire to be anchored again myself—not to a job but to a place. Only a spider, I thought, is able to weave a new home each night with such effortless skill.

In the 18 months since I had walked off CBS’s Radford lot for the last time, we had visited 22 countries, taken more than 40 flights, and driven almost 20,000 miles. But sickness crushed any adventurous spirit we had left.

“What do you miss most about home?” I asked Ethan.

“The Apple Pan,” he replied quickly, naming his favorite hamburger joint, in West L.A.

“What about you, Griff?” He had just turned six.

“Mammoth!” he answered. That was where he’d learned to ski.

What I missed most was not as easy to define. Was it the way the rising sun hit my bedroom window so that I knew the time before I opened my eyes? Finding the light switch at night without banging a shin? What about the owls hooting in the eucalyptus and the distant screams coming from nearby Universal Studios that made up the melody of my neighborhood? Adrian, who’d now been traveling for nearly half his life, couldn’t miss much about a place he barely remembered.

“Nana,” he said when I asked him, speaking of my mother, whose soft voice and healing hands we all could have used. “I miss my nana.”

Dropping Anchor
As I drove down Ventura Boulevard in Ethan’s 1973 turquoise blue International Scout, Los Angeles appeared fresher, like the face of an old friend who’d sneaked in some skillful cosmetic surgery. The truck had been pressed into service, since I no longer had a car, and its hand-cranked windows and AM radio felt ageless, not old. L.A., with its surplus of sun, sand, and celebrities, was certainly no gulag, and I’d long since concluded that blaming the breakdown of my former life on a place was kind of like blaming a weight problem on a comfortable couch.

In front of me a new Range Rover, its vanity plate declaring “ACUMUL8,” idled at a stoplight. I laughed because my family was going in the opposite direction—sometimes to the extreme. After I sewed up a rip in Adrian’s shorts that immediately ripped again, it was obvious that ten bucks spent at Old Navy would be a good investment. And when Ethan came home one day looking like an AWOL Marine from Camp Pendleton, I wondered if he’d lost his mind.

“What happened?” I asked my normally handsome husband, whose salt-and-pepper hair was abnormally high and tight.

“There was an Airstream trailer parked on Riverside Drive with a sign saying ‘Barber,’ ” he said, rubbing a hand across his head, as if that might fix it. “Only 17 bucks!”

Back in the steady pulse of energy that is L.A., a city fueled by the excitement and possibility of dreams coming true, I began to think about a job. Raising two kids isn’t cheap, and besides, the work gene is in my DNA. But the big CBS2 billboards around town featuring the evening anchor team, seemingly thrilled to be guardians of the public airwaves, made me queasy, the potential paycheck dangling like poisoned bait. That’s when I remembered the doomed brown pelicans and the monotonous, mindless dives that steal their sight.

In what was either a foolish or courageous decision, I declined an offer to go back in front of the camera five days a week and accepted one from an Internet company that provides resources to people struggling with infertility. In this field nobody knows who I am, the pay is what I was making 15 years ago, and the learning curve often makes me feel like I’m back in school. But my heart is in the job, and mostly I am happy as I head down to my home office in pajamas after getting the kids off to school.

There are times when I miss the glossy anchorwoman I used to be. When I recently played myself on HBO’s True Blood, reporting a war between vampires and humans in a low, carefully cultivated news voice, I was hit by a wave of nostalgia. Feeling like a ragtag remnant of that informed, ambitious player, my face clear of makeup and Botox, it’s hard not to compare myself to the lovely would-be actresses working at the coffee shop or the latte-drinking moms who, with their Tory Burch boots and sleek ponytails, look so effortlessly chic and uniquely L.A. I glance at the running shoes and shorts that have replaced my sexy heels and designer suits and wonder, What the hell happened to me? But Ethan insists he prefers this stripped-down version (or perhaps he just loves that I’m less bitchy, stressed, and sleep deprived), and my children are precious, perfect mirrors that reflect how beautiful I am to them, no matter what I do, how I look, or where in the world we go.

“Mommy,” says Adrian, looking up as we share a last bedtime hug. “I love you more than the sun.” Something like rapture shines in his eyes. “I love you more than the stars,” he continues, “and the planets…and my penis!”

“Baby,” I tell my son, laughing, “that’s an awful lot.”

Suzanne Rico is working on a memoir about her trip. This is her first feature for Los Angeles.

Where The Sidewalk Ends

As told to Amy Wallace — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 17:56:00 GMT

Photograph by Damon Casarez

Sandy: Our neighbor told us our acacia tree out front would catch fire if someone threw a cigarette out of their car. We’d just seen a Japanese art exhibit that talked about how each piece of wood has its own spirit. So when we cut the tree down in 2005, we asked our gardener to leave a stump nine feet tall.

Ed: It started as an art piece. I am a sculptor and a photographer, and everything here in our home and yard relates to art.

Sandy: The first thing we put up were Sylvie Blum’s shoes. She’s a wonderful artist, and she was Helmut Newton’s muse. I told her I wanted a pair of her shoes, and she gave us a white pair. They are still up there, on the west side of the tree. Then the daughter of a neighbor made us a frame with a valentine in it. Then we went to a block party, and we met an artist named Glenn Fox. A few days later he comes to the gate and says, “How do you feel about black cats?”—just as our black cat walked by! So Glenn put cat paintings up on the tree. Then we put up Easter decorations. A friend said, “OK, where’s the matzo?” Someone had left all these wicker baskets at the tree, so we started stocking them with matzo. We do it all year-round now, so anyone who’s hungry in the neighborhood has something to eat. One day we stopped at a kid’s lemonade stand. “We’re the people with the tree,” I said. “Oh, the holiday tree,” the kid said. “On our way to school my mother and I put up a wreath.” After that, we started putting up decorations from the 99 Cents Only Store for Halloween, Thanksgiving, New Year’s Eve. Then about four years ago we were walking down our driveway, and there’s a couple in a convertible. He looked very classy. She looked good: dangly earrings, a turban. The guy said, “Hey, we pass by here all the time when we take our Sunday drive. We want to know about the tree.” I said, “It’s an art tree. If you have anything you want to donate, leave it at the gate and we’ll put it up.” He said, “Well, this is my wife, Esther Williams.” That was phenomenal. When Michael Jackson died, Ed put up a drawing of him with a top hat and tears coming down his face. Then the tsunami hit Japan. I went and bought some big yellow poster boards, and I called my friend Yosh and asked him to come over. We put up a sign that Yosh wrote in Japanese and English: “Japan, Hang in there!” A few days later we see this Japanese girl in front of the tree, with somebody taking her picture. She said, “My parents back in Japan think Americans have no idea what’s going on. I wanted to show that the people in America care.” After that, many Japanese people stopped by. Then last October we began to hear a motorcycle go by—fast!—every afternoon at about the same time. He’d speed by one way on his purple Ducati, and then a few minutes later back the other way. Sometimes he’d go slowly if he was stuck behind a car, and we’d wave, and he’d wave back. He was a nice guy. He was just going too fast.

Ed: I would say, “That guy’s going to lose control and hurt himself.”

Sandy: So we called our neighborhood LAPD officer, Ralph Sanchez, and he came and parked in our driveway with the motor running. He chased the motorcycle twice but couldn’t catch him. Then on April 20 the motorcyclist was driving by our house again, and he lost control, hit a tree on the other side of the street, and died. Armando Villanueva. The day after the accident we went out to get the mail, and there was his whole family. They’d brought flowers. We put up a cross. About a month later there were fresh white flowers and red streamers with lettering that said, “Beloved Brother, Uncle and Love.” Villanueva’s girlfriend had put them up.

Ed: I made a big sign to put on the tree: “Slow Down or Rest in Peace.”

Sandy: Villanueva kind of threw us for a loop. Just the fact that we knew it was going to happen, and it happened. Since he died, we haven’t added much to the tree. I have a piece of his Ducati that I’m going to hang, but it hasn’t felt right. But now comes Halloween, and the kids in the neighborhood will be coming by and dropping stuff off. That’ll pull us out of it. Our tree is part of the community. It has a life of its own.

To see and read about more shrines in L.A., pick up a copy of the November issue on newsstands or subscribe now

The Final Frontier

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 16:28:00 GMT

In the 30 years between the first launch, of Columbia in 1981, and the last, of Atlantis in 2011, the space shuttle program accomplished much. It ferried critical research tools such as the Hubble Space Telescope while helping make the International Space Station a reality. But it also suffered tragedies: the loss of 14 lives and two ships, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. Last year photographer Dan Winters, who built every Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo model he could find as a child, shot the final takeoffs of Discovery, Endeavour, and Atlantis for his new book, Last Launch (University of Texas Press). With Endeavour becoming a permanent resident of the California Science Center in Exposition Park, we thought Angelenos should see how this product of Palmdale could really fly.

May 15, T-Minus 19 HRS 46 mins

"I shot this the day before... they had rolled the tower back early, which was a real treat..."
May 16, T-Plus 1.2 secs

"The atmospheric conditions the day of the launch were incredibly dramatic... almost ominous..."
May 16, T-Plus 7.9 secs

"Once the shuttle's solid rocket boosters fire, that's it... they call it lighting the candle..."
May 16, T-Plus 12.3 secs

"The cloud ceiling was so low that Endeavor was only visible for 20 seconds... if you went to..."
May 16, T-Plus 22 secs

"...see the spectacle, you probably felt gypped... the giant smoke column dissipates slowly..."
May 16, T-Plus 5 mins 32 secs

"I shot a lot of that because it's so beautiful... hours later I went to get my remote cameras..."
May 16, T-Plus 3 hrs 11 mins

"...I matched the first shot...the empty pad always looks lonely... it's served its purpose"

ALSO: Read Rocket Man, a Q&A with Dan Winters about how he photographed the Endeavour

Photographs by Dan Winters

Let Us Now Praise Famous Women

By Ann Herold — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 17:16:00 GMT

- Carol Biondi
  
  Commissioner
  
  L.A. County Commission for Children and Families
  
  See her nominees
- Rabbi Naomi Levy
  
  Founder
  
  Nashuva
  
  See her nominees
- Jeanie Buss
  
  Executive Vice President
  
  Los Angeles Lakers
  
  See her nominees
- Janis Spire
  
  President and CEO
  
  Alliance for Children's Rights
  
  See her nominees
- Barbara E. Wagner
  
  Head
  
  Marlborough School
  
  See her nominees

- Mara Brock Akil
  
  Producer-Writer
  
  Akil Productions
  
  See her nominees
- Dr. Beth Karlan
  
  Director
  
  Cedars-Sinai Women's Cancer Program at the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute
  
  See her nominees
- Lynda Resnick
  
  Entrepreneur
  
  POM Wonderful, FIJI Water, Wonderful Pistachios, Cuties, Justin and Landmark vineyards
  
  See her nominees
- Sandy Jo Mac- Arthur
  
  Assistant Chief
  
  LAPD
  
  See her nominees
- Mia Lehrer
  
  Founder
  
  Mia Lehrer + Associates
  
  See her nominees

Carol Biondi

Commissioner

L.A. County Commission for Children and Families

WHY HER? Because she has long been a no-punches-pulled advocate for reforming the juvenile justice system.
Biondi's nominees
- The head of the Everychild Foundation, Jacqueline Caster raises $1 million each year for children's services. She has also been instrumental in the upgrading of the county juvenile detention facility Camp Kilpatrick.
- Deputy mayor Aileen Adams has forged private sector alliances that include youth mentoring, while the Summer Night Lights initiative keeps parks open after dark and has led to a dramatic reduction in crime.
- Before "conflict mediation" was a household phrase, Avis Ridley Thomas was getting South L.A. neighbors to talk. Through her Days of Dialogue, she has even taken the conversation into locked juvenile facilities.
- It's not enough to lecture about gang violence. UCLA adjunct professor Jorja Leap is out listening in the projects, identifying what works and who's making a difference. Her memoir, Jumped In, is a bible of L.A. race relations.

Rabbi Naomi Levy

Founder

Nashuva

WHY HER? Because her books teach people how to pray and her community of faith draws in Jews and gentiles to reclaim what's lost within.
Levy's nominees
- Children with special needs have no fiercer guardian than attorney Valerie Vanaman, who fights in the courts to ensure that schools provide equal services.
- From changing the LAPD to negotiating gang truces that brought peace to the urban core, Connie Rice of the Advancement Project has proved herself one of L.A.'s most concerned and effective citizens.
- Breakthroughs with autistic children are the specialty of Elaine Hall, who uses music as a creative outlet for kids on the spectrum. She's enlisted lots of celebrities, from Holly Robinson Peete to Jack Black, to help out.
- With obesity and diabetes on the rise, the research of Dr. Francince Kaufman of Medtronic Diabetes is more critical than ever. Besides, you've got to love anyone who engineers a ban on sodas in the LAUSD.

Jeanie Buss

Executive Vice President

Los Angeles Lakers

WHY HER? Because she watches over our most popular professional sports franchise, without which L.A. would be a sadder place.
Buss's nominees
- When the NBA All Star Game, the ESPN X Games, or the Grammys come to town, we have Kathryn Schloessman of the L.A. Sports & Entertainment Commission to thank. She sells the rest of the country on the merits of our city.
- Through her group PATH (People Assisting the Homeless), Claire West Orr helps the indigent living on the streets acquire housing, job training, and whatever tools they need to never go back.
- After saving thousands of pets from shelters, the Amanda Foundation's Teri Austin took animal rescue to the next level by creating the Spaymobile program, which neuters animals at no cost.
- Arguably the greatest women's tennis player of all time, Compton-raised Serena Williams is a role model for athletes who defy stereotypes-while also modeling her singular clothing designs that have changed the way tennis dresses.

Janis Spire

President and CEO

Alliance for Children's Rights

WHY HER? Because she never stops thinking about how to protect L.A.'s most vulnerable residents-neglected and abused kids.
Spire's nominees
- Even as she fights for her constituents from D.C., Representative Karen Bass maintains a lasting legacy in South L.A. with the Community Coalition she founded in response to the '80s drug epidemic.
- A former NBC executive, Leslie Gilbert-Lurie knows how to hold an audience. In addition to her best-selling memoir on the Holocaust, Bending Toward the Sun, she has shouldered the education of at-risk youth.
- From her seat on the L.A. County Commission for Children and Families, Patricia Curry asks the tough questions on foster care and juvenile justice, and she rarely takes no for an answer.
- More than a pretty face, veteran TV anchor Christine Devine has her mic working to find homes for foster kids as the host of "Wednesday's Child," the Fox 11 News segment that is entering its 18th year.

Barbara E. Wagner

Head

Marlborough School

WHY HER? Because as the top gun at one of the city's leading all-girls' schools, she is shaping L.A.'s future female activists.
Wagner's nominees
- Who else would turn happy summers as a YMCA counselor into managing a massive capital campaign for a new Westside Y? That would be Cathy Hession, who's also the grant guru at the Carol and James Collins Foundation.
- A career shaper,Dr. Carol Bennett, clinical professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, mentors girls on their way to becoming doctors.
- From making the planes land on schedule as the onetime executive director of LAX to managing a massive construction company Lydia Kennard, has always thought big.
- In an act not unlike moving Mohammed's mountain, Belinda Smith Walker founded the New Village Charter High School in downtown L.A. so that more girls would have the benefit of an education like that offered at Marlborough.

Mara Brock Akil

Producer-Writer

Akil Productions

WHY HER? Because she has used her platform in film and television to tell uniquely African American stories.
Akil's nominees
- The first African American woman to win the Sundance Film Festival best director prize, Ava Duvernay is ensuring artistic purity through her African American Film Festival Releasing Movement.
- Up-and-coming artists have a special patron in Lauri Firstenberg, who opened the nonprofit contemporary art space LA-ART in Culver City.
- Living in extreme fear, battered women frequently stay under the radar. They don't elude Karen Earl, who serves as executive director of the Jenesse Center, the oldest domestic violence intervention program in South Los Angeles.
- Hitting bottom is often the reason women find their way to the Downtown Women's Center, headed by Lisa Watson. The center addressed the rising number of women on skid row with a new 67,000-square-foot building.

Dr. Beth Karlan

Director

Cedars-Sinai Women's Cancer Program at the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute

WHY HER? Because her work has made it possible to detect ovarian and other cancers earlier.
Karlan's nominees
- After the death of her mother, celebrity boutique owner Elyse Walker founded the Pink Party, a glamorous event that combines fashion and philanthropy in support of breast and ovarian cancer research.
- Not content to stand in the shadow of her county supe-husband, Barbara Yaroslavsky has spent more than two decades assisting the Saban Free Clinic and is a member of the City Commission on Children, Youth and Families. She makes Zev proud.
- The president of the Entertainment Industry Foundation, Lisa Paulsen has harnessed Hollywood to form one of the nation's most respected philanthropies. She's also the force behind Stand Up to Cancer and the Revlon Run/Walk for Women.
- For her master's thesis, Kelli Sargent designed a plan for the 5K run and walk that became Run for Her, honoring her mother's fight against ovarian cancer.

Lynda Resnick

Entrepreneur

POM Wonderful, FIJI Water, Wonderful Pistachios, Cuties, Justin and Landmark vineyards

WHY HER? Because she established an art pavilion at LACMA and a neuropsychiatric hospital at UCLA and funded sustainable energy research at Caltech.
Resnick's nominees
- An activist's activist, Laurie David takes on childhood obesity in her latest documentary, The Big Picture, which could change the way we eat.
- Donors dithering? Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum, knows how to keep the dollars coming so that her museum stays on the modern art map.
- The singer had us at Funny Girl. But Barbra Streisand's crusade to improve women's cardio health by establishing a center in her name at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute will leave a lasting legacy beyond stardom.
- From publishing ventures (Latina magazine) to producer credits (Spanglish and Chasing Papi), Christy Haubegger keeps Latino back stories resonating within pop culture.

Sandy Jo Mac- Arthur

Assitant Chief

LAPD

WHY HER? Because as a number two to Charlie Beck, she's put responsible leadership front and center.
MacArthur's nominees
- Hollywood Division could have no more finely attuned a leader than Captain Beatrice Girmala, who pioneered Project Restore Hollywood and has identified the safety of the LGBT community as a priority for her staff.
- In her years as a federal prosecutor, Eileen Decker sent away plenty of bad guys. In her current assignment as the deputy mayor for Homeland Security and Public Safety, she's even more intent on outthinking them.
- As the administrator of the LAPD personnel group, Gloria Grube excels at hiring the best and the brightest for the force's many officer and civilian positions, from emergency communication to ID technology.
- After emerging as a fair-minded enforcer of LAPD reform during her months as the Police Commission inspector general, Nicole Bershon is applying that same prowess in her job as a Superior Court commissioner.

Mia Lehrer

Founder

Mia Lehrer + Associates

WHY HER? Because her landscaping visions, from the Annenberg Community Beach House to the Silver Lake Reservoir Pedestrian Path, have made L.A.'s outdoors greater.
Lehrer's nominees
- For many L.A. teen-agers, the high school experience is richer because of Megan Chernin. As chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Fund for Public Education, she instituted the Go for College, Power Lunch, and Career Day programs.
- While principal of Franklin Avenue Elementary School in Los Feliz, Dr. Verna B. Dauterive inspired students, teachers, and parents to work as one, never losing sight of the importance of an arts education.
- A past president of Heal the Bay, Paula Daniels still advises city hall on urban runoff and advocates growing more of our food in our own backyard.
- Robin Kramer was the first woman to serve as an L.A. mayor's chief of staff, with Richard Riordan and then Antonio Villaraigosa. She's since taken her talents to the Board of Harbor Commissioners.

PLUS: View our 2011 list of 50 L.A. Women Who Inspire

The Cop Whisperer

By Ed Leibowitz — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 15:55:00 GMT

Photograph by Joe Toreno

Last spring Jake Gyllenhaal showed up at the Silver Lake offices of writer-director David Ayer to pitch himself for the lead role in End of Watch—a cop movie whose $8 million budget was less than what the actor reportedly took home for starring in the Prince of Persia. “I told Dave I was ready to devote my life to this,” Gyllenhaal says. “I’ve said in the past I’ve wanted to devote myself to a project, but I’ve never done that in a way that I did for this movie.”

Gyllenhaal had recently returned to town from a press tour for the science-fiction movie Source Code, and it was five in the morning when he picked up Ayer’s script about an LAPD officer working on a homemade documentary about the struggles, small victories, and male bonding that he and his partner experience as they patrol South Los Angeles. “I just blew through it,” Gyllenhaal says. “I knew David Ayer, but I had never seen such a big heart in any of his work before—the sense of relationship. When I finished it, the sun was rising, and I consider that a metaphor in many, many ways.”

Much of the action for End of Watch was shot with a camcorder that was strapped to Gyllenhaal’s abdomen. Focusing on the day-to-day, the film offers an even more authentic look at police work than Ayer’s screenplay for the 2001 film Training Day, whose unvarnished vision of L.A. made so many other movies about the city’s toughest streets seem clichéd. Denzel Washington earned a best actor Oscar for his portrayal of a corrupt detective.

To make LAPD officers of Gyllenhaal and his costar Michael Peña, Ayer put them through five months of punishment. Several days a week Gyllenhaal reported to an Echo Park dojo run by a friend of Ayer’s. “Dave said, ‘I really need you to know what it’s like getting the crap kicked out of you and how to beat the crap out of somebody,’ ” Gyllenhaal says. “And in the beginning it just started with getting the shit beaten out of me by 14- to 20-year-old kids literally every morning. Towards the end I definitely got some good kicks and punches in on those boys.”

Instead of the couple of nighttime ride-alongs that have become obligatory research for cop movies, the actors spent weeks in L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, LAPD, and Inglewood police squad cars. Over yogurt and granola at a Silver Lake café, Ayer describes how during Gyllenhaal’s first time out, he saw a gunshot victim die on the street. “Jake called me up that night and he was like, ‘That shit changed me,’ ” says Ayer, who is 42. His head shaved, he wears cargo shorts and a plaid button-down shirt whose loose fit only manages to make his shoulders look more massive. “I’m like, ‘Good, that’s exactly what I was hoping.’ It was horrible, and I know it isn’t going to sound right, but my hopes were that in this process he would encounter some truth and some reality about what’s really going on in L.A.”

Ayer needed no such education. He grew up in the neighborhood of West Adams in the mid-1980s, when the area was overwhelmingly Mexican and Mexican American, with a growing influx of Salvadoran immigrants. The MS 13 gang was expanding its reach, and the violence was getting worse. In a soft voice Ayer talks about the crack house that opened down the block from him, about avoiding puddles of congealed blood when he walked to school, about administering CPR to a victim shot at a party across the street. Though the guy died, Ayer was targeted by the shooter because he’d disrespected the neighborhood when he tried to save the enemy.

In those days, Ayer says, the line blurred between spectator and participant. He spent his teenage years on probation—he won’t say for what, other than it didn’t involve drugs and no one was hurt. Ayer gained a thorough familiarity with the tactics of the LAPD. Police didn’t think a white kid could possibly live in the area; the assumption was that Ayer was there to buy drugs. “They’d fly their helicopters at phone pole height,” he says, “and you could see the pilot staring at you through his Ray-Bans.” Once the police beat him so badly, he needed to go to the hospital. “They did it with joy in their eyes,” Ayer says, a rueful grin stretching across the confines of his neatly trimmed goatee. “That was the mind-blowing piece.”

His path to the neighborhood began on Christmas morning when Ayer was four years old and his father, who held a doctorate in geology and worked for the navy and U.S. Geological Survey, committed suicide in their Miami home. “It’s like, ‘Hey, Merry Christmas,’ ” he says. “That was my send-off into life.” Ayer’s brother and sister were much older than he was and already out of the house at the time, so he alone accompanied their mother as she began moving around the country. “She was a quote-unquote venture capitalist, whatever the hell that means,” Ayer says. “She was always trying to start companies and get things rolling.”

The itinerant existence only deepened Ayer’s sense of loss and dislocation. Then puberty hit. “I was feral,” he recalls, “uncontrollable, did my own thing. Brushes with the law and all that stuff.” He punctuates this with a gruff laugh. “It was a disaster.” Most everyone who knew Ayer was predicting a future in prison for him. “It was just the expectation that a lot of people had of me. Because I was not a good kid, and the consequences were getting more serious.” When he was 14, his mother sent him to live with cousins who were among the first urban homesteaders to move into a West Adams Craftsman, in the shadow of the 10 freeway. “The irony is, I was just a bush-league juvenile delinquent,” Ayer says. “And I end up in fucking South Central. Now I’m around the professionals. I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ I quickly grew accustomed, though. You can get used to anything.”

Ayer read a lot while he was in high school, but he also liked to smoke on campus. After repeating 11th grade, he dropped out. While Ayer remembers fitting in well enough as one of the only white kids in the area, his friend Paul “Sparky” Barreras isn’t so sure. Barreras met Ayer when they were both security guards downtown at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in the early 1990s. He says Ayer’s nickname used to be “Crave”—short for “Crazy Dave.” “He was a crazy white boy hanging out with a bunch of Mexicans,” Barreras says, “and people would pick on him. He was drunk and getting into fights and other stuff.”

Around the time Martin Scorsese was shooting the remake of Cape Fear, the film’s screenwriter, Wesley Strick, and his wife, Marla, bought fitness pioneer Jack La-Lanne’s house in the Hollywood Hills. “It was a very cool house,” Strick says, “but it was also a shithole, if I may say so. And one of the big problems was the electrical.” A 22-year-old David Ayer was an electrician on the contracting crew brought in for renovations.

He had recently left the navy, where he’d served as a sonar man in a submarine that tracked Soviet nuclear subs in hostile waters. “The whole point,” Ayer says, “was to pump them full of torpedoes before they could launch and to smoke as many as you could.” Nobody onboard expected to escape the retaliatory onslaught from the escorts. In other words, Ayer had put himself either on track for annihilation or, if he was lucky, a Cold War military career. That plan collapsed with the Soviet Union. “One discovers that one isn’t dead and hasn’t died in the apocalypse,” Ayer says, “and then it’s like, ‘Now what am I going to do?’ ”

He returned to L.A. and worked construction, writing short stories on the side. Ayer had always been a storyteller, and with his experience in the navy and West Adams, he had more authentic material to work with than most film school grads. After spending a little too much time eavesdropping on Strick’s conversations with his agent, directors, and studio executives, Ayer decided to take a chance. Still wearing his tool belt, he approached Strick and shyly asked him if he would take a look at his work.

Strick might have balked if, like others, Ayer had handed him a screenplay. But the stories were only a few pages long. “I could see that he was self-taught,” Strick says. “The stories weren’t sophisticated. They were raw, and that was part of what I found powerful about them. They seemed honest.”

Ayer ended up hanging out at the Strick home off and on for the next three years, living and writing in the poolside cabana. Strick has crafted his share of violent action—Cape Fear as well as the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street—but the carnage in some of Ayer’s scripts was of another order, and he advised him to notch it down.

The Stricks knew Ayer had a wild streak, but they trusted him implicitly. He even baby-sat for them. Strick was out of L.A.—and sometimes out of the country—for long stretches of time working on projects. “It was comforting to know David was around,” he says, “because he was a big guy.” The couple also felt protective of Ayer and worried about him. “I’m not someone who goes looking for protégés, by any stretch,” Strick says, “but we both could see he was a little lost—it was ‘a mind is a terrible thing to waste’ situation. While it was clear the guy had potential, it was also clear that if somebody didn’t take hold of him soon, he might wander off in the wrong direction.”

Ayer wasn’t pleased with his early screenplay attempts. “I wrote this script called Squids,” he says, “about my life in the navy. It sucked.” He made enough progress to get into some meetings, but little more, and it was in a mood of sour dejection that he came up with Training Day in 1996, about a charismatic LAPD detective who is beyond redemption. The script went nowhere. “People told me I didn’t know shit about cops,” Ayer recalls, “but I was hearing these stories from the gangsters, and I saw what went on from my own experiences growing up.” Three years later the news broke about a group of antigang officers at LAPD’s Rampart Division who had become violent criminals themselves. “Once that happened,” he says, “it was like, ‘Oh shit, maybe this is real.’ It got me jobs.”

In 2000, Ayer cowrote U-571, director Jonathan Mostow’s World War II submarine saga. Training Day premiered the next year as did The Fast and the Furious, which was based on a script Ayer had overhauled. By 2004, he was living in Los Feliz with his wife, Mireya, who’d met him when she was working at Daily Donuts in Los Feliz. It impressed her that the Anglo guy, tanned from relentless runs in Griffith Park, spoke fluent Spanish, chatting her up while he waited for his coffee and chocolate doughnut. When they started dating, he told her he wanted lots of kids. Mireya, who had just graduated from high school, wasn’t ready for that, and they lost touch. Years later she contacted him after seeing his name on a poster for U-571. “I come from a big family,” says Mireya, “and almost every weekend there was a party—somebody’s birthday—and he just liked the idea of being surrounded by all these family members. And I think he was yearning for that, something he never had.”

Despite his strides, Ayer continued struggling. “He would drink with his buddies, and that was kind of like an outlet,” Mireya says. “I always knew he felt maybe anger towards his family. There was something inside him. I knew he needed help, but I didn’t know how to help him.”

////

Ayer typically takes about four weeks to hammer out a script. He wrote End of Watch in six days. “It just kind of hemorrhaged out of me,” he says. “There was something so intuitive and natural about writing in that space and about these characters. I guess it was time for me to tell this story—I don’t really know how to explain it.” For an Ayer screenplay, End of Watch is a departure in that the main characters are not bent on the destruction of themselves and everything in their path. It’s partly a reflection of how the LAPD has transformed itself since the days of the Rodney King beating and the Rampart scandal into a community-policing organization with officers who look a lot more like those they protect and serve. But it’s also a testament to how Ayer has reconciled with his past. “It just took me years to work through a lot of things,” he says, “and then create a life on my own terms and create a family and create stability—to get over the need to destroy the world.”

The Los Feliz neighborhood where David and Mireya are raising their four children looks nothing like the working-class, predominantly Latino area in Chicago where Michael Peña grew up. Nevertheless, during the many hours he spent at the Ayer home preparing for End of Watch, the actor found himself in familiar surroundings. “There were all these aunts and uncles and grandmothers,” he says, “and all these kids running around.”

Ayer put that house on the line in 2004 to finance Harsh Times, his debut as a writer-director. In the film Christian Bale portrays an unhinged military veteran, fluent in Spanish from a childhood spent in an L.A. barrio, who has a girlfriend in Mexico and ambitions to be a cop, even though he is plainly psychotic. Harsh Times came out the year after Bale starred in Batman Begins. Most of the critics who panned Ayer’s film wrote that it was too violent, bleak, and despairing. The box office—about $6 million—was enough to keep his house.

Around that time Ayer took a trip to find out what he could about his father. He spoke to his father’s friends and colleagues, read scholarly papers he’d written, and listened to a tape recording his father had made of himself and given to a friend. Ayer hadn’t heard the man’s voice since he was four. “I think that was just closure for David,” Mireya says. “He needed to know who his dad really was, and after he did that, everything changed. It was a big transformation, from drinking David to nondrinking David. It was just nice to finally have him back.” Though Ayer has made his peace, the scars flare every December. “Let’s just say Christmas is a downer,” he says. “I’ve got these kids, and it’s like fighting with a demon every year.”

This month Ayer begins shooting Ten, a thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a dirty DEA agent. “I’m basically going to reinvent him,” Ayer says. “He put himself in my hands. I’m going to cut his hair, throw tattoos on him, and put him in a different sort of space he’s never operated in. This isn’t like, ‘Shoot a guy, crack a joke.’ ” He’s also considering a project that might address his early years more directly, in a children’s movie sure to make Rumble Fish seem like Mary Poppins. “It will be like some East L.A. stuff,” he says, “facing some of the dilemmas I faced. ‘Do you take the gun out of the house? Do you get into the car? Do you do that thing they’re asking you to do?’ ”

Writer-at-large Ed Leibowitz wrote about LAUSD superintendent John Deasy in the September issue.

Chefs of the Year

By Lesley Bargar Suter — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 22:49:00 GMT

Fasten your aprons—this could get delicious. The 20 recipients of our first-ever Chef Awards won for more than just their exceptional cooking. Over the past 12 months they have expanded empires, transformed neighborhoods, fused old cuisines, conquered new ones, and challenged our very idea of what a restaurant should be. They’ve also created the dishes that have helped put Los Angeles on a culinary pedestal. Here’s a taste of the year’s best!

And the winners are...

The Comfort Master:

Ernesto Uchimura

[Plan Check]
Why we picked him →
The Sweet Sensation:

Zoe Nathan

[Milo & Olive, Sweet Rose Creamery, Huckleberry, Rustic Canyon]
Why we picked her →
The Italian Saviors:

Steve Samson & Zach Pollack

[Sotto]
Why we picked them →
The People’s Cook:

Govind Armstrong

[Post & Beam]
Why we picked him →
The Solo Artist:

Josef Centeno

[Bäco Mercat]
Why we picked him →
The Asian Ambassador:

Kris Yenbamroong

[Night + Market]
Why we picked him →
The Graceful Grower:

Ricardo Zarate

[Picca, Mo-Chica]
Why we picked him →
The Big Boys:

Jon Shook & Vinny Dotolo

[Son of a Gun, Animal]
Why we picked them →
The Fusion Artist:

Bryant Ng

[The Spice Table]
Why we picked him →
The Friends of the Farm:

Daniel Mattern & Roxana Jullapat

[Cooks County]
Why we picked them →
The Wood-Fire Wizard:

Andrew Kirschner

[Tar & Roses]
Why we picked him →
The East L.A. Emperor:

Ricardo Diaz

[Bizarra Capital, Dorados Ceviche Bar, Guisados, Cook’s Tortas]
Why we picked him →
The Modern Mensch:

Micah Wexler

[Mezze]
Why we picked him →
The Professional Pop-Up:

Craig Thornton

[Wolvesmouth]
Why we picked him →
The Bridge Builder:

Josiah Citrin

[Mélisse]
Why we picked him →
The Newborn Activist:

Roy Choi

[Sunny Spot, A-Frame, Chego, Kogi]
Why we picked him →
The Vegetable Sculptor:

Gary T. Menes

[Le Comptoir]
Why we picked him →
The Neoclassicist:

David Féau

[The Royce at the Langham]
Why we picked him →
The Not-So-Mad Scientist:

Michael Voltaggio

[ink., ink.sack]
Why we picked him →
The Everyday Gourmet:

Suzanne Goin

[The Larder at Maple Drive, The Larder at Tavern, Tavern, A.O.C., Lucques]
Why we picked her →

The Takeover Artist

By Ed Leibowitz — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 18:21:00 GMT

Photograph by Mathieu Young

The way L.A. schools superintendent John Deasy sees it, he could make 100 percent of his high school graduates ready for a four-year college, rid the beleaguered district of lousy teachers, and rescue the most disadvantaged students from a life of poverty. All this in less than a decade. The key? Doing things his way

John Deasy, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, doesn’t walk in particularly long strides. He’s only a shade above average height and, at 51, is past his athletic prime. His cap-toed leather shoes resist the bounce in his step more than they enhance it. Deasy started out as a science teacher, and if he someday has a spare moment, maybe he’ll devise a formula that demonstrates how he covers so many yards in such a brief amount of time.

Well before dawn on September 7, 2011, Deasy begins his barnstorming tour of the nation’s second-largest school district, which will lead him from East L.A. to the City of San Fernando, from South L.A. to Granada Hills, from the south end of Hollywood to Glassell Park, before the afternoon dismissal bell rings. It’s the first day of his first full academic year as the LAUSD’s superintendent, with direct responsibility for 664,000 students spread across 710 square miles. Several of the principals and teachers will greet him as “Dr. Deezy,” and although the actual pronunciation is “DAY-see,” he won’t correct them. To the women he extends a gentle palm; the guys are treated to the signature Deasy handshake—a thrust of the forearm, a vigorous grasp, a single hard pump carrying all the electric force of a defibrillator. He fixes them with pale blue eyes as he thanks them for the remarkable job they’re doing.

Then he’s off, punishing the linoleum of the corridors, his lean form blurring past banks of lockers and trophy cases. Within seconds the welcoming committees have lost ground, catching up only when he flings open the door of a classroom and barges in. “Room to room,” he’ll tell me later, “the students’ experience with the teacher is the single most important factor. That’s why I’m obsessively focused on it—the right to teach, how do we help teachers get better, how do we build the skills, how do we define quality, how do we deal with quality control?” Ducking into his chauffeured Crown Victoria after each visit, he pulls out his voice recorder and in a singsong New England drawl dictates a letter of congratulations to the principal, to be typed up and sent by his assistant.

But his mood sours when he arrives midmorning at South Region High School #2 in South L.A. After picking his way through the disorder of a principal’s office packed with still unregistered students and frustrated parents, he drops in on classes, where he surveys the bare walls and the distracted-looking teenagers with a grimace. The school is one of seven new LAUSD campuses debuting today, funded by a multibillion-dollar school construction bond that voters passed eight years ago to relieve half a century of overcrowding. Marching back to his car, Deasy is fuming. “The general quality of teaching and instruction that I saw in the classroom was less than acceptable and needs your attention immediately,” he dictates, gripping the tiny recorder. “I will look forward to working with the local district to make sure that the amount of support is immediately there, beginning tomorrow.” As he pockets the device, a frown playing across his thin, colorless lips, he says, “No, I’m not a happy camper in that site at all.”

Deasy has already seen seven campuses by the time he dashes into a luncheon photo op at a South L.A. middle school to be hailed by the likes of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and school board president Mónica García. In recent months Deasy has come to be regarded as the last great hope for fixing the LAUSD—at least among those politicians and philanthropists who believe it is broken. “I feel there’s an alignment of the stars right now,” Villaraigosa says, “with Mónica as president and the board majority to support these changes, and with John Deasy, clearly a visionary but also someone focused on results and hands-on.”

Under contract terms that Deasy requested when he accepted the job in January 2011, his bosses on the school board can let him go without notice, and if he grows too dissatisfied, he can put in his resignation, effective immediately. But at this moment García is talking about staying power. “I can tell you without doubt that the LAUSD board chose John Deasy to lead us in the next decade,” she says, laughing. “He doesn’t know he signed up for ten years.”

Toward the end of the school day, Deasy’s car scuds past warehouses, shipping yards, high-tension wires, and the convergence of two freeways near the Long Beach border. Amid the industrial squalor, Rancho Dominguez Preparatory School, another newly built campus, pops like a diadem, its blue glass atrium and ocher facade untouched by graffiti or wear. Bounding up a flight of stairs, Deasy opens the door of Michael Dempster’s seventh-grade world history class and navigates his way to the back of a room packed with 50 students.

Mr. Dempster has passed out photocopies of a map of North and South America and instructed the students to fill in as many place-names as they can. One boy stares at his blank sheet with knit brows, looks up, as if he might find an answer there, and sees the LAUSD superintendent. Deasy introduces himself and takes a seat next to him.

“So,” Deasy asks, spreading his hand over North America, “what’s the whole continent called?”

“Los Angeles, right?” says the boy, who is not an English-language learner.

“That’s the city,” Deasy explains, marking L.A. on the map with his pen.

“OK,” Mr. Dempster warns the class. “About 30 seconds.”

“If you think about it this way,” Deasy says, “California, the state we live in—what country is it a part of?” His fingers circle the United States.

“Mexico?” the boy asks.

“No,” Deasy says patiently, “we don’t live in Mexico. Do you know what country we live in?”

The peal of the teacher’s timer signals it’s time to put pencils down.

With a smile Deasy says good-bye to the boy. The school day has ended, but the superintendent has to run. A long afternoon and evening of debriefings and strategy sessions await.

There is no better monument to the immovable object that is the Los Angeles Unified School District than its downtown headquarters. In classic 1970s style, the 30-story tower is sheathed in acres of black glass. Pressed against the sooty perimeter of the 110 freeway, it squats along a two-lane street so narrow that the protesters who gather outside during board meetings have almost no room to march. For the past 20 months, on the 24th floor of that tower, Deasy has been running the school reform equivalent of NASA’s Apollo Program. He has set a goal that seems the present-day approximation of a moon shot: 100 percent college and workforce readiness for every graduating senior in the district, beginning with the class of 2016. To get there the superintendent has directed the rapid development of such data-driven systems as the Academic Growth over Time index and the Response to Instruction and Intervention framework, which track student achievement levels at all schools.

In certain ways what Deasy is doing is in line with the No Child Left Behind Act. Passed during the George W. Bush administration a decade ago, it seeks to identify failing schools, imposes timetables for improvement, and prescribes corrective action if those timetables aren’t met. At the end of his presidency, Bush declared No Child Left Behind a piece of civil rights legislation. Both Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, have proclaimed curing what ails public education the civil rights issue of our time, and billionaire philanthropists Eli Broad and Bill Gates, whom Deasy has worked with in recent years, have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to school reform based on that assumption.

During the speeches Deasy delivers—and they are many—he paints the image of a district mired in segregation, where destitute students of color are pushed into remedial classes instead of the rigorous courses that could lift them out of poverty. “All our youth deserve orange juice,” he likes to say to the audience, “not just orange drink.” He usually ends his address by quoting from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” beginning with the impatience of black people denied their equal rights in a nation that is “creeping at a horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at the lunch counter.” As his speech reaches a crescendo, he’ll say, “It isn’t so much the cup of coffee at a lunch counter anymore, but it is an AP course and it is a college counselor and it is college knowledge and it is algebra for real and it is equal reading classes at third grade—that is the cup of coffee waiting still empty for most of the kids in the LAUSD. And that is why I draw strength from the fact that we’re just not going to wait.”

The district’s challenges would overwhelm a leader attempting merely to keep it afloat, let alone one who has set out to be an emancipator. Almost 80 percent of LAUSD students live below the poverty line or slightly above it, and only 62 percent are likely to graduate. Close to 30 percent show up for class without command of the English language. Seventy-five percent of students are Latino, 10 percent are African American, and 4 percent are Asian. The less than 9 percent of the student body that is white disproportionately attends the district’s charter schools, which pull funds from the LAUSD but operate without its direct oversight or, for the most part, unionized teachers.

Over the past decade, the district has become a relative pauper. The State of California provides it with $5,800 per student, only $3,700 of that in cash. So money starved is Sacramento, it delivers the rest in IOUs. By comparison, New York City’s school system receives $18,618 a year in state and local funds for each student. Before 1978, property taxes for Californians rose along with the market value of their homes, providing stable or growing revenues for public education. That year Howard Jarvis—a real estate lobbyist and onetime candidate for U.S. Senate, mayor of Los Angeles, and the LAUSD board—won the passage of Proposition 13. The referendum limited tax increases for new or existing home owners to 1 percent a year, whether their property retained its value or quintupled in worth. Through the 1970s, California consistently ranked among the top ten states in pupil spending. By 2009, according to a survey by the National Education Association, it had fallen to 47th, behind Mississippi and Arkansas. In teacher-to-student ratio, it’s dead last. Deasy is pushing for total transformation at a time when the district’s finances are the worst they’ve ever been. He’s already cut back $390 million for the 2012-13 school year, and if Governor Jerry Brown’s tax increase initiative does not pass this November, he’ll lose another $255 million, bringing the budget to just above $6 billion—$800 million less than it was four years ago.

When Deasy accepted the job, he knew money was tight. So he did what a lot of politicians and charitable foundations do: He lined up wealthy supporters. In addition to Eli Broad, there’s Megan Chernin, wife of former News Corp. president Peter Chernin. And there’s Casey Wasserman, who runs a sports management agency as well as the family foundation established by his grandmother and grandfather, the late MCA/Universal chief Lew Wasserman. Together he and Broad have helped fund the six-figure salaries of Deasy’s executive team, something the district itself could ill afford. Last fall Wasserman invested $4 million in L.A. classrooms. For him the issue speaks to the long-term viability of the city. “You cannot have the dislocation of an entire generation of kids in Los Angeles,” he says, “and not have it have a profound economic effect over a long period of time.”

But among L.A. elites as a whole, a public education system in free fall hasn’t spurred the same spirit of generosity as, say, the construction of a concert hall or museum. When the superintendent and Chernin launched their charitable-giving program, the Los Angeles Fund for Education, last September, Deasy spoke of reaching a $200 million target by 2016. Chernin says that many of the prospective donors she’s contacted have little awareness of the district’s predicament. “You never ever have to see how seriously grave it is,” she says, “and the dire circumstances of some of these schools and the lack of resources the teachers have to teach.” As of this past summer, Chernin told me, only $10 million had been raised. “By definition we’re talking about the poorest kids in the most economically challenged communities,” Wasserman says of the LAUSD. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy on some level that it’s going to get the least amount of support in Beverly Hills or Brentwood because it’s an issue that really doesn’t directly affect them or their kids.”

Structurally the LAUSD seems the work of a madman, although its grotesque shape and inconsistency are more a result of historical accident than anyone’s design. The district is not contiguous with the City of Los Angeles but spreads amoeba-like into unincorporated areas and towns and cities—even fragments of towns and cities—in L.A. County. In charge of this beast are seven school board members, each elected to a four-year term to represent a geographic segment of the district. Their constituents rarely know anything about them; they’ve won their seats in large part because of support from United Teachers Los Angeles, the district’s most powerful union, or from get-tough education advocates like Villaraigosa and Broad in elections with as little as 7 percent voter turnout.

In big-city school districts such as Chicago and Atlanta, the board is appointed and relegated to an advisory function, rubber-stamping policies set by the superintendent and the mayor. In the LAUSD school board members represent an area larger than a congressional district, oversee a multibillion-dollar budget, decide on programs that affect hundreds of thousands of students, and hire or fire the superintendent. Yet they are classified as part-timers and paid $24,000 a year, half of what an average teacher brings home. “Right now we have the worst of two systems rolled into one,” says board member Tamar Galatzan, who represents more than 100 schools from Van Nuys to Chatsworth while serving as a prosecutor with the L.A. city attorney’s office in Van Nuys. “I think we either decide to make being a school board member a full-time job, with an appropriate pay scale, or we make it an appointed job with a much more advisory role.”

In 2006, Villaraigosa persuaded the California legislature to pass a bill establishing a “Council of Mayors” to have a say in district budgetary matters as well as the hiring and firing of the superintendent. As the mayor of the city with the largest LAUSD population by far, he would dominate the panel. A state judge voided the law, saying that by giving Villaraigosa so much power, it violated both the state constitution and the L.A. city charter.

Even before Deasy began his job in the summer of 2010 as the LAUSD’s second in command, his appointment to the top spot by the board seemed preordained. Then-superintendent Ramon Cortines moved out of his spacious corner office to a smaller one so that his new deputy could occupy it. When Cortines announced his early retirement, Deasy was presented to the LAUSD board as the sole candidate, with strong lobbying from Villaraigosa and civic backers like Broad. Only board member Steve Zimmer, who represents an area stretching from Woodland Hills to Venice, abstained from the voting, not because he disapproved but because there had been no talent search—at least by elected officials. “We actually recommended him,” Broad says, speaking of his foundation. “We thought of all the people in America and thought that John would probably be the most effective.”

It’s accepted wisdom in many education policy circles that New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein transformed that city’s schools and that Arne Duncan did the same as Chicago’s school chief before becoming President Obama’s secretary of education. Los Angeles represented the last available opportunity to enact change on such a nationally significant scale. Nevertheless Deasy says there were “moments of very sobering reflection” before he accepted the job. “Given the district’s structure,” he says, “and history of moving slowly, and the state’s fiscal situation, which has only gotten worse—it’s a tough place to work.”

The school board’s instability was also a consideration. Because of the part-time pay and full-time commitment, some LAUSD board members decide they can’t serve more than a single term. Within a year or two a board majority that hires a superintendent can be replaced by one not so enamored with him. Last year Yolie Flores, one of Deasy’s strongest advocates, left and was succeeded by Bennett Kayser, who has emerged as the superintendent’s nemesis. The board’s balance could tip as early as next year, when Nury Martinez, one of Deasy’s most ardent backers on the board, is expected to run for the Los Angeles City Council.

“It’s ridiculous,” says Klein, who served eight years as chancellor under New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. “You don’t do big changes in two-and-a-half years. It just doesn’t happen. It’s a ridiculous, ridiculous thing because it’s all about politics, and it’s all about adults.” Klein, who is CEO of the education division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., considers Deasy a “bold innovator” and a friend but has spelled out to him that in his current position, velocity and decisiveness won’t be enough. “What I said to John when he took the L.A. job is, ‘I sure hope you can stay there for at least eight or ten years because that’s how long it’s going to take.’ ”

Every weekday at 3:15 a.m. Deasy steps off the tiny porch of his Westchester home for a morning jog. In the darkness the bungalows on his street blend into one another as he glides by. He chose the neighborhood because his wife, Patricia, travels a lot as a nursing executive and she wanted to be close to LAX. With two bedrooms and two bathrooms, the home is beyond modest for a big-city school superintendent making $330,000 a year. Deasy gets as far as Loyola Marymount University, then turns around to complete his three-mile loop. Around 4:30 a.m. his chauffeur picks him up for the drive to LAUSD headquarters. Typically he won’t return home until 10 or 11 at night.

Deasy was a sprinter on the Saint Raphael Academy track team in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and he can still tell you his best time in the 330-yard relay hurdles. At Providence College he studied biology and chemistry, subjects that satisfied his desire for certainty. “There’s a beauty and an elegance and a crispness to those subjects,” he says. “Causes of war can be debated. Four plus four is going to be eight no matter how you figure that out.” His mother was a kindergarten teacher; his father, a high school history instructor who later taught college. After graduation, Deasy landed a job teaching science at a military academy in Long Island, but he wasn’t about to restrict his influence to one classroom. By 28, he was principal at Lake George High School in upstate New York, where he introduced a program through which most high school seniors completed 9 to 12 college credits. Seven years later Deasy was appointed superintendent of the Coventry School District in Rhode Island. It wasn’t the largest district in the nation’s smallest state, but the gumption with which he implemented Rhode Island’s nascent school reform program won him national recognition. Under his aegis, Coventry received one of the first grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—for $3 million—and Deasy began spending the money by hiring a teaching coach for every school.

In 2001, after five years at Coventry, he left to lead Santa Monica-Malibu Unified. Deasy helped pass two parcel taxes to mitigate the damage caused by state education cuts and waged his first major civil rights battle as a superintendent. At the time, parents in Malibu were giving as much as $1,000 per pupil to support their local public school, while Santa Monica’s most disadvantaged campuses were receiving as little as $17. Deasy’s idea was to collect 15 percent of school contributions districtwide (or 15 percent of the market value of donated computers and other equipment) and redistribute the money largely to the district’s poorest schools. Deasy called his “equity fund” a “proposed solution to one of the most vexing issues we face: the inequitable distribution of resources available to the school community.” Over the shouts of irate parents—“It looks like a tax and smells like a tax,” said one Malibu mom—Deasy won the board’s approval by a narrow margin.

During the spring of 2004, while at Santa Monica-Malibu Unified, Deasy managed to earn his Ph.D. in education from the University of Louisville. One semester was all he needed to enroll, complete a research course for nine credits from out of state, and submit and defend his dissertation. Robert Felner was dean at the university’s College of Education and Human Development as well as Deasy’s adviser and the chairman of his dissertation committee. He granted his student a series of waivers. One enabled Deasy to apply 77 credits he’d taken at other schools—including 44 he’d earned studying under Felner back in Rhode Island—toward his degree. Felner had also been a beneficiary of Deasy’s: During the three previous years, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified had paid $375,000 to a research center headed by Felner to conduct surveys of parents, students, and teachers, on the superintendent’s recommendation.

Armed with his doctorate, Deasy accepted a job offer from Prince Georges County School District, Maryland’s second largest, in 2006, and for the first time in his career the majority of his students were nonwhite inner-city poor. Prince Georges was struggling—77 of its schools were on the state watch list, having fallen short of performance levels mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act. Deasy sent platoons of support staffers to Prince Georges’s most challenged campuses, expanded advanced placement courses in all high schools, and launched a pilot program to award bonuses to high-performing teachers. In the summer of 2008, Maryland released its statewide school assessment exam results. Prince Georges students in grades three through eight attained their best scores since the testing program was implemented five years earlier. Students living in poverty, English-language learners, and those enrolled in special education programs showed more progress than the district average, improving their English and math scores by double digits in some grades. “I think we feel confident we’re on the right track, but we’re not cocky,” Deasy told a Washington Post reporter in late July. “We have a lot of work ahead of us.” Nevertheless that September he resigned from Prince Georges to become deputy education director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he would oversee the Microsoft founder’s $335 million investment in developing more effective ways to evaluate teachers and boost their performance.

Between the test score victories of summer and his resignation from Prince Georges in early fall, Deasy had been faced with questions about possible improprieties in his own education. The University of Louisville had initiated an investigation into Robert Felner’s financial misdoings as well as into the legitimacy of the doctorate Deasy had been awarded under his supervision. Felner would plead guilty and serve prison time for defrauding the university as well as another higher-learning institution of $2.3 million. But after the eight-month investigation, Deasy’s Ph.D. was upheld. When I ask Deasy about the controversy, he tersely focuses on outcomes. “I have a doctorate, given to me by the university,” he says, “and two additional ones since then—albeit doctors of humane letters, of course. I’m remarkably proud of my work.”

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Late one December morning Deasy leads me into his corner office, its windows filled with expansive views of downtown. Behind his desk are framed portraits of Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. As the superintendent sits at the head of his conference table—the Barack Obama of Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster glimpsing a better tomorrow over his shoulder—Deasy’s jubilation threatens to get the better of his empirical sense. A few weeks ago United Teachers Los Angeles president Warren Fletcher had agreed to his plan allowing potentially all teachers, principals, and parents the same freedoms to shape their students’ instructional path that only charter schools and a handful of district pilot schools had been permitted. “They were as nervous about making sure it goes well as we were,” Deasy says of his once and future union adversaries. “When you make huge leaps like this—a vast leap forward—you need a buildup of trust. We didn’t have any, so there was a giant blind trust on both sides. We both agreed that the past behavior of blame and shame and fighting was getting us nowhere, absolutely nowhere.”

To reach the pact, Deasy agreed to exclude charter school operators, which are mostly nonunion, from the competition to take over any schools until at least 2014. In exchange Fletcher waived union rules that force district schools to accept “must-place teachers”—instructors who may be returning to work after an illness or after being let go from another school due to unsatisfactory performance. Instead the local initiative campuses, as they are called, will be permitted to select staff based on merit alone. “In three to five years,” Deasy predicts, “people are going to look back and say, ‘Oh, what the hell happened? This is just stunning.’ That’s what I believe is going to be the outcome.”

To him, the agreement was all the more remarkable given the union’s antagonism toward the rest of his agenda. In a speech to the membership last year, Fletcher warned that “the purveyors of these phony reforms share two overriding beliefs—one, that teachers should have no voice and that teachers’ unions must be either subjugated or eliminated.” UTLA sued to block the voluntary small-scale deployment of Deasy’s Academic Growth over Time index, which factors in the feedback of parents and principals, along with test scores of students under a given instructor. The current evaluation system mandated by the UTLA contract excludes the use of such test data and yields exceedingly positive results. For the 2009-10 school year, 99.3 percent of all LAUSD teachers received the highest scores possible, and 79 percent were shown to need no improvement in any area of their work.

Months from now a California Superior Court judge will hand down a decision that the existing system violates the state’s 41-year-old Stull Act—specifically, a 1999 amendment requiring that test results be incorporated into teacher assessments. The judge’s ruling in Doe v. Deasy will be in response to a lawsuit launched on behalf of unnamed LAUSD parents by EdVoice, a Sacramento group bankrolled by Broad and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Though named as a defendant in the case because he is LAUSD superintendent, Deasy readily testified against himself.

The way he describes it, LAUSD educators who want change as much as he does—including more meaningful evaluations—have been silenced by the dogmatic mentality of their union. “It’s politburo-like,” Deasy says of the UTLA leadership, “so therefore I think teachers get discouraged. At least they say that to me. ‘What’s the point of discussing this? We’re never going to see this as an option to talk about.’ And there’s a lot of fear. It’s not so grandiose a statement to say there’s inordinate pressure on the current leadership in these negotiations to not give anything away.”

In almost every regard Fletcher’s differences with Deasy seem irreconcilable. About the only area where the two men converge is in how they characterize each other. I meet with Fletcher at UTLA headquarters in Koreatown, where files litter the tables and chairs of his office. His thick eyebrows forming an isosceles triangle above steel-rimmed bifocals, he sums Deasy up. “You know, in the ’20s and ’30s in the Soviet Union, millions of people died of starvation,” he says, “and essentially what happened was, ‘This is how we will proceed. This is the Soviet vision of how we will proceed.’ People who had been agronomists since the days of the czar said, ‘But that’s not how wheat grows,’ and they were told, ‘This is the new era.’ I am very concerned that in the current environment in the LAUSD there’s a mind-set that’s very similar—a belief structure that’s hermetically sealed. Anyone who agrees, loves kids, and anyone who disagrees, doesn’t.”

Not much is going to get done in this climate in which each side is an existential threat to the other, so the superintendent has exerted control in those limited areas where he doesn’t need the union’s agreement. When Deasy arrived, about 98 percent of eligible teachers were granted tenure. Now the approval rate is less than 50 percent. “As far as I could imagine what used to happen,” Deasy says, “you got tenure because you weren’t fired. It was automatic. You just breathed another year, and you got it.” Today principals must approve a tenure decision in writing; that way, if the teacher turns out to be undeserving, there’ll be a paper trail.

Of course, since 99 percent of the district’s teachers already have tenure, it will take years for his strictures to have much of an impact. And although Deasy has unilateral control in hiring, he lacks money to tap into the surplus of recent college graduates who remain unemployed. “We have the hottest job pool that you could imagine,” he says, “and we’re laying people off rather than dipping into it.”

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Five months into the school year, and despite the setbacks posed by UTLA opposition and the state’s ongoing budget crisis, Deasy has eked out some additional reforms. Even before statistics from the U.S. Department of Education revealed that African American students in the LAUSD were suspended more than those in other districts, Deasy ordered principals to try to refrain from sending kids home simply for being defiant, one of the main reasons for dismissal. The rate will be cut in half before the school year is over. He’s also set to announce a new policy that limits the amount of homework teachers can assign, a move intended to placate parents who complained that the amount had become excessive and counterproductive.

However, during much of the spring semester, the superintendent’s working hours will be claimed by a scandal that begins with revelations about the alleged sexual crimes committed by Mark Berndt, a former third-grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary in South L.A. Soon after, at least ten other LAUSD teachers and aides will be arrested on lewd conduct charges, and the scouring of district files will uncover hundreds of additional misconduct allegations. Back in October 2010, a CVS photo technician alerted Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies to dozens of images Berndt was said to have taken documenting the molestation of young students, who are shown blindfolded, allegedly being fed the teacher’s semen on a blue plastic spoon or spread on cookies, or with a giant Madagascar cockroach crawling across their faces. A blue plastic spoon found in Berndt’s classroom tested positive for his DNA. Although Berndt had been removed from Miramonte more than a year before, district officials had informed parents only days ago. The reason for the delay, Deasy will explain to me, was to avoid compromising the sheriff’s department’s long investigation.

As Deasy braces himself for what may be the most crowded press conference of his career, his face looks gaunt. “I’m a dad and a teacher,” he begins on this evening in early February, “and I can’t imagine anything more horrible than the trust that was violated of our students. I try to think about what I’d say to my own child, and you struggle for words.” In a somber voice he announces a decree—soon to be criticized by some parents and by UTLA for being too severe—to relocate Miramonte’s staff to a high school that’s still under construction. “We are talking in this case the entirety of the staff, and that would be custodian to secretary to teacher to administrator,” he adds. The idea is to give stressed teachers time to come to terms with the events and to avoid having sheriff’s deputies question faculty in the presence of students. Besides, he says, “I can’t have any more surprises at Miramonte.”

Amid the roomful of journalists, many of them angry at being barred from an earlier parents’ meeting, one reporter asks whether Deasy intends to seek the dismissal of another Miramonte teacher who had been arrested after Berndt for alleged child molestation. The superintendent refers her to the district’s legal counsel and tries to move on, but the reporter persists. On her third attempt to extract an answer, Deasy loses it. “I have enough struggle in my life,” he tells her. “I’m not going to argue with you. I’m just not going to.”

Days later Deasy is still trying to get his head around what he calls Miramonte’s “culture of silence.” In the early 1990s, two girls reported to a guidance counselor that they had seen Berndt as he appeared to be masturbating behind his desk. The counselor told them to stop making up stories. Given the scope of Berndt’s alleged crimes, there should have been recent signs as well. “Because the school was so large and so troubled, there were more adults on the campus,” Deasy tells me, shaking his head. “Dozens and dozens and dozens of aides, classroom assistants. Its teacher-pupil ratio was one of the lowest in all of the LAUSD. It makes it all the more hard for me to understand what was taking place there for years.”

Ramon Cortines had tried firing Berndt in February 2011, the month after the sheriff’s department presented the school district with the photos. Under state law, however, any tenured public school teacher can appeal his or her dismissal before a panel composed of an administrative law judge, a representative from the district, and an advocate selected by the teacher. Filing Berndt’s demand for a hearing, his attorney argued that he was “fit to teach” and that the charges against him “fail to state any facts and are inconclusive in nature.” In exchange for Berndt’s voluntary resignation, the district agreed to cover attorney’s fees and compensate him for lost earnings since his suspension. He would also get to collect his pension.

“I want to be very careful to check my emotion around this issue,” Deasy says. “Do I share people’s frustration? It’s more than beyond frustration. But I’ve taken that anger and moved it toward legislation.”

Weeks from now, with Deasy’s support, state senator Alex Padilla will introduce a bill empowering California public school boards to unilaterally fire educators accused of sexual abuse, violence, or drug use with students, following an advisory recommendation from an administrative law judge. The bill will pass the state senate, but in late June the Assembly Education Committee will let it die. Fletcher, opposed to the bill from the outset, will argue that the district had another option to remove Berndt—namely, by referring his case to the state teacher credentialing commission, which could void his California teaching certification. To the union leader, Padilla’s bill is exploiting a tragedy. “Miramonte has taught us that when education politicians start playing to the cameras,” Fletcher will write in a letter to his members, “actually finding the truth and actually protecting and nurturing children take a backseat to political expedience.”

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Throughout the school year Deasy rarely allots himself more than four hours of sleep, but by spring the schedule and the sex scandals and the financial setbacks are clearly wearing on him. His blue eyes have lost their luster, and the sandy crew cut that so powerfully evoked the confident project manager of Apollo moon landings now seems the badge of a beleaguered ’50s accountant forced to pore over books that can never be balanced. It’s a fair argument that that’s what Deasy’s job has come to.

He asks the board in March to consider cutting the LAUSD’s entire elementary school arts program, its adult school program, its academic decathlon, and as many as 1,800 teachers, administrators, and support staff. The decathlon and the arts programs will be saved, but the adult school will be decimated, and 1,550 K-12 teachers will be laid off. The $390 million budget deficit Deasy is wrestling with for the 2012-13 school year is an improvement over the previous month’s projection. Before he learned about a windfall from state lottery earnings, the deficit had been pegged at $557 million. Deasy pressures UTLA to accept furloughs to close the gap, prompting another court battle.

In the predawn hours of a Tuesday morning—a board meeting marked by drastic proposed cuts and shouted invective ahead of him—Deasy is castigating the media. He’s irritated about the fuss recently made over the journey of a 340-ton boulder from a pit in Riverside to its new home at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it will be the centerpiece of Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass. “This whole week we’ve watched you all cover on the news this fascination of this rock being moved from the quarry to the museum,” he says to a KTLA reporter. “I mean, I like art, too, but I like art teachers better, and a fraction of the money in moving that rock could have saved elementary art for many, many years.” It couldn’t, of course. The total cost of moving the boulder, setting it up, and paying Heizer was about $10 million, while the district’s art budget for 2012-13 is about $18.6 million. But Deasy can hardly cloak his disgust at the largesse demonstrated by wealthy Angelenos for the artwork, largesse that has been in short supply for the LAUSD.

Not even the half-day Sunday he cordons off from work each week is exactly pressure free, as the LAUSD’s amoeboid tentacles reach into the backyard of his Westchester bungalow. That’s where I find Deasy one late afternoon in a V-neck T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, standing beside his gas grill, seasoning some eggplant medallions. Liz and Emily, his daughters, have stopped by with their significant others, and Deasy’s son, Patrick, who recently graduated from college and lives at home, is riffling through a magazine. As the superintendent presses down the spatula, the jagged ends of tattoos on both biceps peek out from his shirtsleeves. When I ask what they are, the best he’ll give me is a glimpse of a Chinese character on his left pectoral as he pulls his collar aside. Later he’ll tell me, with some reluctance, that it’s the symbol for courage.

Shoehorned at the head of a table that consumes almost the entire dining room, Deasy can’t help picking up his iPhone when it alerts him to yet another e-mail in a carpet bombing campaign by a charter school operator itching to expand, but, he tells me, “it ain’t gonna happen.” Tomorrow he’ll be making a joint TV appearance with Warren Fletcher. That, he says with a smile, “will be a laugh riot.” Over forkfuls of grilled chicken and vegetables, he tries to lose himself in the details of his kids’ lives. Liz talks about her job directing a camp in Glendale. Patrick talks about his gig tutoring math. “It’s really hard sometimes,” Patrick says, “to get a kid motivated.” Deasy laughs. “Try figuring out how to do that,” he says, “when you’ve got 660,000 kids.”

By 8:30 p.m. the meal is done. Deasy jumps up from his seat, rinses the dishes, loads the dishwasher, pulls out the two leaves from the table, collapses the table into its smallest configuration, positions two satin runners across its surface, and centers two decorative lamps atop them. Then he excuses himself. He needs to get back to work.

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When Ramon Cortines retired and Deasy stepped in, Casey Wasserman realized that the LAUSD board had chosen a leader who wasn’t much interested in the art of the possible. “Obviously Ray had been through a lot of wars,” says Wasserman, who has been closely involved with both superintendents. “He was working in a world where he could assess what could get done and couldn’t get done and would focus on the things he could get done, trying to do those well. I think Deasy takes the opposite approach, which is, ‘I’m not going to worry about whether people don’t think I can get them done. I know what I need to get done to fix the problem, and I’m going to go after it all.’ ”

Despite his scientific faith in statistics, number crunching, and data-driven reform models, much of what Deasy has attempted reveals the soul of a gambler who is convinced that his own instincts and beliefs will trump odds that are clearly not in his favor. Board member Steve Zimmer has been struck—even spiritually moved—by the superintendent’s sense of moral obligation and certitude. “John has as firm a sense of ‘Caucasian-ness,’ of white privilege, and how it affects children and poverty, as anyone I’ve ever witnessed in my 20 years of doing this,” he says. “I believe that forms a sense of righteous conviction that is undeniable—whether you agree with his tactics to bridge the achievement gap.” A growing segment of the board, however, has begun to reject Deasy’s tactics, along with what it regards as his monopolistic claim on virtue.

In May Deasy places his biggest bet: making college readiness the price of a high school diploma. To be considered for admission to the University of California or the California State University systems, high school students must pass a series of preparatory courses known as the A-through-G curriculum. In 2005, the district voted to adopt A-through-G for its students by 2012 but laid no groundwork to implement it. What Deasy is recommending now is the reaffirmation of A-through-G, except with real consequences. Four years from now only students who complete those courses with at least a C average can graduate. Kids who fall short will have to retake A-through-G courses until they pass.

The most influential critic of this notion of increasing student achievement through categorical demands is Diane Ravitch. A professor of education history at New York University, Ravitch is a former U.S. assistant secretary of education and author of the best-selling The Death and Life of the Great American School System, in which she attacks many of the get-tough educational reforms of the past decade—charter schools, standardized testing, the No Child Left Behind Act—with the heat of an apostate. When I ask her about Deasy’s impatience for change and his tight timetable for making every student college ready, a stern tone creeps into her voice. “We will judge him by his record in three or four years,” she says, “but I think patience is a virtue. It’s one thing to say that people who are black should have their rights as citizens immediately. But we’re talking about children, and children don’t change from being non-English speaking to English speaking overnight, and they don’t go from being nonreaders to proficient readers overnight. Anyone who thinks that believes in magic.”

At an LAUSD board meeting, before an audience heavy on UTLA activists, the superintendent advances his proposal. It’s in these settings, when Deasy is taking on the most intractable issues of our day and appealing for what he calls simple justice, that his gift for oratory shines, but as he once again invokes Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as justification for adopting his proposal right away, his opponents groan. An African American union activist seated behind me whispers, “How dare he!” One more time Deasy insists that poor and minority students being served the educational equivalent of orange drink finally receive their orange juice. To those who argue that he’s setting the bar too high, Deasy says, “Nothing I’ve ever seen in any school—in the LAUSD or elsewhere—leads me to believe that any youth in LAUSD is screaming to have a lower bar.” And to those who argue that the district lacks money, he says, “This isn’t a budgetary issue. It’s a ‘will’ issue. It’s an issue of belief in students.”

During the hours of debate at the school board session, Bennett Kayser, the board member representing northeast and southeast L.A., homes in on Deasy’s penchant for inspirational language. “You know, I appreciated your quote before about orange drink and orange juice,” says Kayser. “I just want to make sure that I have the choice of V8.” As the activists chuckle, Deasy shakes his head. “My comments were made in the frame of youth human rights,” he says. “Not humorous.”

The board passes Deasy’s policy by the slimmest of margins. The 4-to-3 victory underscores how the body has changed since hiring him without a single no vote 20 months ago. After next March’s elections, the balance could turn against him. But, says Deasy, “the biggest political unknown is not the board seats. It’s that building over there.” He nods out his window in the direction of City Hall, which Villaraigosa, L.A.’s self-styled “education mayor” and Deasy’s strongest political supporter, will be vacating. “That’s up for transition in March as well, and that’s huge.” None of the leading candidates to replace Villaraigosa have offered specifics on what they would do to reform L.A.’s public schools. “So far,” Deasy will say, “I can’t get an educational platform from anybody.”

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It’s early June—graduation time—and John Deasy is nearing the end of his first school year with the LAUSD. What began as a sprint has turned into a grinding marathon. Sitting in his office, I remind Deasy of Mónica García’s comment on the first day of classes, that she was anticipating his remaining at the helm for ten years. “I’d like to be here ten more days,” he says, laughing. “I think I have said very publicly that I think the work I’m hoping to lead is an eight-year piece of work. That’s very consistent and hasn’t changed, but thinking seven years out is becoming more a stretch of the imagination. It’s not a stretch of the will.”

Even if city hall and the board continue to back him, Deasy will be pressing forward with his compulsory college-readiness curriculum in circumstances beyond adverse. The LAUSD’s guidance counselor-to-student ratio is 850 to 1. Though the dropout rate is almost 40 percent, only 14 campuses offered the most recent remedial summer high school program. Students will have 10 less days of learning in the coming academic year than they did in 2011-12, and 18 fewer than they would have had four years ago. They are being packed into ever larger classes—not for lack of space but because of teacher layoffs. The district has no funds to maintain the personnel levels of this past year, let alone invest heavily in the kind of high-level support services that already struggling students will need in order to pass the A-through-G courses. “You can’t do it on the cheap,” Ravitch tells me. “You can’t say ‘I believe in children but I’m not going to pay to educate them, and if they can’t clear a four-foot bar, I’m going to raise it to six feet and see how they do.’ If all you can give them is rhetoric, that’s not giving them much at all.”

“Should we just not do it?” Deasy says, answering his critics. “I can’t be there. I can’t be on the side of the argument that we can only do it when we have the money to do it, because then we’d have to say ‘OK, you guys are losers—you’re going to lose in this deal—and you guys are winners.’ ”

I tell Deasy about a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with Michael Dempster, the teacher of the seventh-grade world history class at Rancho Dominguez Prep we visited on the first day of school. Fifty percent of his pupils flunked the course. He would have required some of them to take it over again or even tried to hold some of them back. But that would have gone against the district’s policy, which advances all middle school students to the next grade no matter how many classes they fail. The LAUSD simply can’t afford to have them repeat an academic year. Given this reality, how is the student whose best guess was that California is in Mexico going to be able to pass the algebra courses of the A-through-G program and earn his diploma? “Well, first of all,” Deasy says, “I’m not sure knowing where Mexico is and being able to do algebra are at all linked. I would argue they’re not. I don’t think that’s a precursor to whether you can actually do linear equations.”

There’s a pause. “Yes,” Deasy concedes, “a dispassionate person who only wants to take a look at the pluses and minuses would say that things are overwhelmingly stacked against laudable goals. This equation doesn’t balance. But it’s not mercury and lead we’re working with here. It’s human beings.”

That evening at Dorsey High School in South L.A., Deasy removes his sport coat and pulls on his doctoral robe with blue velvet stripes across the chest, which he’s wearing for the commencement of the class of 2012. As usual, he shuns the doctoral cap because it’s floppier than a mortarboard. “It looks like a bit of a Mafia thing,” he says. When Deasy enters the gates of Jackie Robinson Stadium, the R&B song blaring from faraway speakers segues to Edward Elgar’s graduation march. The superintendent holds himself back to keep time with the procession as he advances along the stadium’s regulation running track.

He addresses the graduates from a plywood dais. “Good evening,” he begins. “Buenas noches, estudiantes, gradoados familias y amigos, de l’escuela preparatoria Dorsey dos mil doce. We look forward to your leadership in this city and in this state and in this country.” As he builds, his voice grows as hearty as a New England pastor’s. “You’re going to take a number of great things from Dorsey,” he says. “Obviously a good education, respect, but the most important thing you’ll take away is the quality of integrity. It will always set you apart; it will be the quality that will mark the rest of your lives.”

Fewer than 44 percent of freshmen who enrolled at Dorsey four years ago have arrived here in emerald cap and gown. There’s a common theme among the speeches being delivered by student government leaders and the 4.3 GPA overachievers: thanks to God for getting them through poverty and the deaths of friends and family members, and proving wrong the naysayers who told them they would never make it to this moment, that the odds were just too remote, and they just weren’t good enough to beat them.

By the time the last diplomas are handed out, the superintendent is beaming, the balls of his feet nearly lifting him from the ground, his hands grasping and pumping with defibrillating gusto. It’s pushing 8:30 p.m., and he has another graduation
ceremony to attend tonight. Unrestrained by pomp and circumstance now, he’s burning up the track. “Isn’t this nice?” he says
to me, his eyes bright with emotion. “This is why we do it.” Hurtling toward the parking lot, Deasy sees a small opening in the crowd and darts through it. His agile figure pulls away until, swallowed by a pulsating crush of emerald polyester, screaming air horns, and bobbing Mylar balloons, it disappears entirely.

Ed Leibowitz is a writer-at-large for Los Angeles. His last piece for the magazine, a profile of radio hosts John Kobylt and
Ken Chiampou, appeared in the May issue.

In Plain Sight

By Steven Mikulan — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 16:27:00 GMT

Illustration by Sean McCabe

“Her face is just the wrong color," thought John Ruetten as he approached the supine figure of his wife on the night of February 24, 1986.

Moments earlier he had pulled up to the couple’s Van Nuys condominium after returning home from work. The garage door for Unit 205 was open, and Sherri Rasmussen’s 1985 BMW—Ruetten’s engagement gift to her—was gone. Glass fragments glittered on the asphalt. Ruetten’s mind filled with questions, but he figured that his wife was away and perhaps had done something to her car backing out. Nor did he panic when he found the upstairs door ajar. At each step Ruetten seems to have been oblivious to the gathering signs of tragedy.

That Monday morning Rasmussen told him she wasn’t feeling well. A 29-year-old supervising nurse at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, she was going to linger at home a bit—maybe even skip work. Why not? She had been scheduled to deliver one of those motivational HR speeches she hated giving, a pep talk titled “People Difference.” Six feet three and TV handsome, the 27-year-old Ruetten was complemented by his wife, a big-boned light brunet who stood only a few inches shorter. By 7:20 a.m. he had left for his engineering job at Micropolis, a hard drive manufacturing company 20 minutes away; he eventually called home and Rasmussen’s office five times but thought nothing of it when he couldn’t reach her. The couple’s townhouse, located in a gated complex that dominates the 7100 block of Balboa Boulevard, had three levels and a garage below. Their bedrooms, kitchen, and dinette were on the upper floors, with a short staircase leading down to a carpeted living room.

It was on this carpet, in front of the fireplace, that Ruetten discovered Rasmussen, who was wearing her red bathrobe, a camisole, and black panties. “What was Sherri doing lying in the middle of the living room floor?” Ruetten wondered in the split second before comprehending the horror of his wife’s death. When the police arrived to photograph the crime scene, they found the young woman on her back with stiffened limbs raised off the floor like those of a dead animal. The strangers who crowded the couple’s home studied her battered face, its beauty mocked by a bloodied nose and half-closed eyes. One of the lids was swollen shut, and a criminalist from the coroner’s department would later guess it had been struck by the muzzle of a pistol. Three dark holes grouped in a tight constellation about her heart marked the entry of .38-caliber slugs, and a bruise on her left arm indicated where someone had bitten her during a ferocious struggle. Fragments from a heavy ceramic vase lay nearby; a little farther away a trio of roses sat in another vase, marking the couple’s three-month wedding anniversary.

The attack on Sherri Rasmussen did not seem to be a random act of violence but rather one driven by a personal animus. The crime’s lead homicide investigator, Detective Lyle Mayer, told her father she hadn’t been killed—she’d been assassinated. Mayer, however, hypothesized almost right away that two burglars had surprised and murdered Rasmussen before fleeing. Stereo components were piled near the front door, ready to go, and a drawer had been pulled out from a living room table. It was textbook stuff. His theory was only bolstered six weeks later, when a woman on the same street surprised two armed men who were burglarizing her condo.

Still, Mayer followed procedure and asked Ruetten about the people in the couple’s inner circle whom the police might want to interview. Ruetten tried to gather his thoughts: There was Rasmussen’s sister and brother-in-law, who had recently spent time with her. There was a nurse who’d been her roommate before Ruetten moved into the condo. And there was a woman named Stephanie Lazarus, a friend, he said, from his student days at UCLA.

In 1978, Ruetten, a mechanical engineering major from San Diego, was a tanned athlete who played basketball on an intramural squad; Lazarus, who was studying political science, had made it onto the women’s junior varsity basketball team. They both lived in Dykstra Hall, a dorm with a jock reputation. Lazarus would steal Ruetten’s clothes as he showered and photograph him in his underwear as he slept, but things didn’t go beyond what Ruetten later described as “necking and fooling around” until he graduated in 1981. During the next four years the pair would have sex dozens of times, though Ruetten, who didn’t regard Lazarus as a girlfriend, never told her he was seeing other women.

One of those women was Sherri Rasmussen, whom Ruetten fell for as soon as they met in June 1984. They were engaged within a year. Lazarus, by then a patrol officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, came unglued when she discovered the relationship. She pleaded with Ruetten over the phone to come to her Woodland Hills condo. Once he arrived, she declared her love for him, swearing that she had deeper feelings for him than Rasmussen ever could. The couple ended their meeting by having intercourse. Rasmussen only learned of the visit after Lazarus showed up at Glendale Adventist before the couple’s November 1985 wedding and aggressively confronted the nurse, telling her that she’d been Ruetten’s girlfriend and was still in contact with him.

Ruetten kept much of this from Detective Mayer, describing Lazarus merely as a former girlfriend who’d become an LAPD officer. Her name appears just once in the investigators’ notes, entered nearly 21 months after Rasmussen’s murder. Lazarus’s unwillingness to end their relationship, her confrontation with Rasmussen, the violence of the crime scene—nothing seemed to stir suspicions in Ruetten. They did in the dead woman’s parents, however. Nels and Loretta Rasmussen pressed Mayer in vain to look into a woman their daughter had said harassed her. Ruetten wouldn’t reveal her name to them, but they knew two things about her: She was their son-in-law’s ex-girlfriend, and she was a cop.

It would take 23 years for the LAPD to home in on Stephanie Lazarus as a suspect in the Rasmussen murder. She would hardly be the first Los Angeles cop to be accused of homicide. Two officers, Robert Von Villas and Richard Ford, were convicted in 1988 of murder in a case involving a contract killing. More recently Dan DeJarnette, a retired LAPD detective from the Van Nuys Division, was arrested in Hawaii and charged with murdering his wife there in 2006. In 2007, John Racz, a retired sergeant from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, was convicted of murdering his estranged wife, who disappeared in 1991. Like Von Villas and Ford, Lazarus was charged with committing murder while serving on the force, and for nearly a quarter-century was never on anyone’s radar except Nels and Loretta Rasmussen’s.

In late 1985, the parents had grown alarmed by phone calls they were getting from their daughter, calls describing unwanted visits from Ruetten’s ex. “She had been to the house at least three times,” says Nels, referring to the Balboa Boulevard condo. “Sherri described one time when Stephanie brought over her snow skis to have John wax them. Sherri left and went into another room while Stephanie and John talked. Later, when Stephanie returned to get the skis, Sherri told her she didn’t want her to come back to the house.” Suddenly Rasmussen was spotting Lazarus whenever she’d go shopping or to the gym. Her parents knew about the clash at Glendale Adventist, yet their daughter never told them the name of John’s old girlfriend.

Stephanie Lazarus had been in elementary school when her family moved from Inglewood to Simi Valley at the start of the 1970s. Their new town of 57,000 was in the middle of an epic population boom, having grown more than 600 percent since 1960. Still, compared with Inglewood, it offered wide-open spaces and the presence of a horse culture that was vanishing elsewhere in Southern California. “It’s probably safe to say we were middle class, maybe below middle class,” says Steven Lazarus, Stephanie’s younger brother. “I don’t recall any of us being deprived of anything, ever.” He remembers the Lazarus kids playing with other children well past midnight on summer evenings in the serene new neighborhoods of the Santa Susana Pass. Those were the days when they were devotees of The Partridge Family and when, before Stephanie left home for college, a Bobby Sherman poster hung on her bedroom wall.

Kathleen Blakistone had just entered UCLA when she met Lazarus, by then a sophomore, in Dykstra. Lazarus had immersed herself in the campus’s sports subculture, befriending football players, swimmers, and people who worked out in the weight rooms. She passed along tips to her new friend about jobs and parties. “Stephanie was very gregarious and a wonderful ambassador in the dorm,” Blakistone tells me. “She created a community around herself and had a lightness about her.”

Soon after graduating from UCLA in 1982, Lazarus entered the LAPD academy in Elysian Park. Friends were surprised, but the decision made sense. She was good with people, and she was athletic. She was intelligent, too. “She had a very perceptive mind,” says Blakistone. “I believe that the idea of being a detective was something she really wanted. I remember watching movies with her, and she would be able to figure out the ending, and I’d say, ‘Oh, my God, how did you do that?’ ”

Over the years Lazarus worked in the anti-drug DARE program, followed by a stint in the department’s Internal Affairs office. In 1993, she made detective, when she was also serving as treasurer of the Los Angeles Women Police Officers and Associates. During that time, Lazarus began competing in various athletic contests; 18 months after Rasmussen’s murder, at the World Police and Fire Games in San Diego, she won a gold medal in the 1,600-meter relay, and silver medals for the 400-meter relay and women’s basketball. Eventually she became an instructor at the academy, specializing in research techniques and computer skills. But in those early years as a patrol officer, her life revolved around Ruetten. “She didn’t date anyone but John,” Michael Hargreaves, an officer who roomed with Lazarus at her condo, would later recall. “She told me she was in love with him.”

Late one night he was awakened by Lazarus, who had just come home distraught. She told Hargreaves that she had been dumped by Ruetten. “We talked some,” he would recall, “and she suggested we do buddy sit-ups to burn energy.” In her journal in June 1985, she wrote, “I really don’t feel like working. I found out that John is getting married. I was very depressed, very sad. My concentration was negative 10.” Over the next few months she would frequently become despondent about the man she had lost. “She had a ‘John standard’ and was very picky—any man she went out with had to be tall, athletic, handsome. Like John,” according to Hargreaves. Then Lazarus told Hargreaves about visiting Ruetten’s fiancée at Glendale Adventist, offering that “she wasn’t that good-looking.” Hargreaves moved out of Lazarus’s condo on Valentine’s Day of 1986, two weeks before Rasmussen’s murder.

Ruetten and Lazarus would have sex twice more following Rasmussen’s death, but nothing resembling the relationship Lazarus wanted came of it. After their last tryst, she fell out of contact with him. In 1996, she married LAPD officer Scott Young. The couple adopted an infant daughter and lived in Simi Valley, which had become a suburb popular with law enforcement officers. Young was stationed in the San Fernando Valley before being promoted to detective, while Lazarus continued on as an instructor until 2006, when, at 45, she took a position with the LAPD’s two-detective Art Theft Detail, the only full-time unit of its kind in the country.

Lazarus’s investigative skills and her record of recovering stolen property put her “head and shoulders” above other applicants, says Detective Don Hrycyk, who has run the unit for 18 years. To better understand what she was looking for, Lazarus learned how to paint, building an art library and visiting galleries, where she asked artists how they worked. “I’ve had a dozen different partners,” Hrycyk tells me, “and Steph was probably the very best. Although lots of guys her age are counting the days to when they pull the pin and retire, she looked forward to coming in to work every day.”

In early 2008, Lazarus’s name popped up in a story about the theft of a bronze statue that had stood in Carthay Circle Park since 1925. The seven-foot figure of a gold prospector had been pulled off its pedestal by metal scavengers, who took it to a scrap yard. Lazarus and Hrycyk set up surveillance cameras to track the suspects, and two weeks later Lazarus was announcing their arrest to the media. Shortly after, Sherri Rasmussen’s cold case file was shipped to Van Nuys from Parker Center, where it had been kicked around for nearly five years. It was one of thousands of unsolved murders dating from 1970 that the department had been looking into since the Cold Case Homicide Unit was formed in 2001. A promising lead emerged in December 2004, when the bite-mark DNA sample—which had been forgotten once it had been stored at the coroner’s department and not, as assumed, at the LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division—was located and sent to SID. This was 11 years after an offer from Rasmussen’s parents to pay for DNA testing had been rebuffed by the LAPD. (The couple had also offered a $10,000 reward.) The trail vanished again when the saliva sample failed to produce a match to any criminals in the FBI’s database. But the SID analysis did bring out one interesting new fact: The attacker had been a woman.

Van Nuys Division homicide detective Rob Bub had the day off when he got the call from the crime lab. “Not really good news,” the voice at the lab said. Bub didn’t have to hear the rest. He knew: Stephanie Lazarus’s DNA, secretly obtained the week before, matched the saliva sample from the bite on Sherri Rasmussen’s arm. That meant the only suspect in the cold case was another LAPD detective. It was May 2009, four months after Bub and the trio of detectives he supervises—Jim Nuttall, Pete Barba, and Marc Martinez—had picked the Rasmussen file back up. Because of the velocity with which news and rumor travel in the LAPD, the team had kept its work hermetically sealed off from the rest of the department when it began digging. Not even Bub’s immediate superior knew of the investigation during its first 60 days.

Bub, a congenial man, has been on the force 30 years. The detail he leads at the Van Nuys Division headquarters shares an office on the third floor, whose open, modular layout resembles that of an insurance company, except here everyone carries a gun. “Our main concern was keeping it within a small group of people,” he says, sitting in a soundproof interrogation room. “We could’ve been dead in the water if it got out.” The news could have given Lazarus time to think up plausible answers to the questions she would be asked or caused her to flee; if she were innocent, on the other hand, a leak could have tarnished an impeccable reputation. There was something else: Her husband worked on the same floor in the Commercial Crimes Division.

So the detectives pursued the case only behind closed doors or after hours. They came up with cover stories to explain why they were curious about the old DNA evidence and the actions of a fellow officer more than two decades ago. The team encrypted its notes and made sure “Lazarus” was never mentioned in its communications—she was given the code name “No. 5,” and all information related to her was kept in a separate binder. “We had an LAPD officer accused of murder, and so the investigation took on an entirely different tone from any other,” says Nuttall, a 17-year veteran. “Department resources that were available to us in all our other murders would not be available to us.”

In February Nuttall had been looking over the Rasmussen file when he spotted the line in the SID report identifying the likely killer’s DNA as being that of a woman, which narrowed down the list of potential suspects considerably. He notified Bub. Then the team discovered the lone mention of a “Stephanie Lazarus” and that she was an LAPD officer. (Of all the detail members, only Bub would have recognized Lazarus’s face from working at Parker Center, but even he could not recall her name.) When Nuttall contacted Ruetten one week later, Ruetten confirmed Lazarus had been a girlfriend. But what made throats turn dry was a report in her LAPD record revealing that 14 days after Rasmussen was shot dead, Lazarus reported her backup pistol—a .38 caliber—had been stolen in Santa Monica. That she filed the theft report in Santa Monica and not to her own department only whetted suspicions. The more the detectives studied the findings about the murder scene, the more it seemed like a textbook study—but not from Lyle Mayer’s textbook. “It became apparent that it was a staged crime scene,” Bub says.

Why would the thieves, for example, commit a weekday, daylight burglary unless they knew with certainty nobody was home? Especially at a property surrounded by other units in a gated complex. There were other reasons to doubt the scenario in the original police report. The couple’s front door bore a placard announcing that it had an alarm system and betrayed no signs of being forced open. Only Rasmussen’s purse and car were stolen, and police found the intact BMW not far away, its key in the ignition. What really gnawed were the CD player and a VCR left at the foot of the stairs: If a mortal struggle had begun at the top of those steps, as bullet holes in an upstairs sliding-glass door suggested, wouldn’t the equipment have been knocked over when victim and thief fought their way down to the living room? “Common sense tells you that after a murder happens, the burglar just wants to get out—they’re not taking any property,” says Bub. His detail had begun its investigation in early February 2009 with a list of five women who had ties to Sherri Rasmussen at the time of her death, yet it didn’t take long for the detectives to eliminate all but Lazarus from suspicion.

In April Jim Nuttall picked up the phone and called the Rasmussens, who lived in Tucson. “Nels,” Nuttall began, “I want you to walk me through a history of this case. I want to know if there were any women involved who may have had an issue with your daughter or John or was troubling [her] life.” Nels instantly keyed in on the police officer who had once been John’s girlfriend. By then the only way to prove Lazarus’s guilt or innocence would be to obtain a sample of her DNA and compare it with what SID had downtown.

////

DURING THE Van Nuys homicide team’s four-month investigation, Lazarus was winding down a cold case of her own. “We had recovered stolen property from a receiver—odds and ends,” says Don Hrycyk. “One of the pieces was a painting with a name on the back. We hunted down the home where this elderly woman lived in the Wilshire District. The place was padlocked, though.” The detectives learned that the woman, Tamara Guinkh, had been suspiciously spirited away to a nursing home and her property removed by an unknown man. “This case got into elder abuse and real estate fraud,” Hrycyk says. “Steph dived into it for three years and put together a great case.”

Guinkh, a Shanghai-born White Russian, had been a concert pianist before becoming a patron of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She died in 2007 during Lazarus’s investigation, and her unclaimed body lay warehoused in a hospital morgue. Lazarus arranged a funeral service for the forgotten woman at Hollywood’s Beth Olam cemetery and even rounded up detectives to attend the burial.

As Lazarus was finishing the case, a special LAPD surveillance team began following her, waiting for the detective to discard something with her DNA on it in a public place. After nearly two weeks, at a Simi Valley Costco in May, Lazarus tossed a soda cup and straw into a trash can. Days later Bub got the call from the SID lab. After hanging up, he notified his crew and prepared to begin briefing the chain of command, a climb that would conclude downtown at the district attorney’s office. However long the meetings would last that day, Bub knew his team’s role was over. By nightfall the cold case had been handed to the Robbery Homicide Division. No. 5 had become Stephanie Lazarus.

For the next week the team that would handle her arrest was quietly assembled and vetted against any possibility that the officers knew Lazarus. Then, at about 4 a.m. (“o-dark-thirty” in police slang) on June 5, 2009, dozens of LAPD members gathered for an operational briefing in an auditorium at the police academy in Elysian Park. They were told only that some of them would be participating in an operation involving search warrant service outside the city limits. Teams were to go from the academy to prearranged locations, where, upon receiving phone calls, they would open sealed envelopes containing instructions about their target searches.

Soon detectives were in place at the Simi Valley police headquarters and the town’s Metrolink station. The moment Lazarus boarded her L.A.-bound commuter train, a detective also boarded. It was drizzling, and when the train arrived at Union Station, the detective tailed Lazarus to Parker Center. Back in Simi Valley the LAPD plainclothes officers who’d been instructed to assemble at the local police station awaited word to proceed to Lazarus’s home and seize her computers and private journals. Another team at the train depot’s parking lot would begin searching her car.

By about 6:30 a.m., once Lazarus had settled in at her desk, detective Daniel Jaramillo from Robbery Homicide dropped by. He’d been working on a case with an art theft angle, he told her, and needed her to question a suspect. Lazarus was hungry. After surviving a bout of thyroid cancer some years earlier, she was required to take a synthetic hormone each morning on an empty stomach. But she skipped the yogurt she normally ate around now in order to help out. If Jaramillo’s choice of an interrogation room near the center’s jail seemed an odd venue, she didn’t mention it. In fact, he led her there because it was among the few places in Parker Center where an officer could not carry a firearm. The last thing Jaramillo wanted was to be talking to an armed murder suspect before arresting her. Once inside the interrogation room, she was greeted by Detective Greg Stearns, and the two men got down to their real subject: Sherri Rasmussen’s murder. The conversation, captured by a hidden camera, eventually made it on TV—and on YouTube. As it begins, the detectives tell Lazarus they’ve called her in because her name came up in a case they’ve been reviewing. They explain they’re solely after information about Rasmussen and Ruetten but then throw in questions about hostility Lazarus might have felt toward the nurse as a romantic rival. Lazarus is clearly startled by the initial questions but settles into a strategy of acting as though Ruetten was just some guy she knew at UCLA in the last century.

“What year is it now, 2009? I mean, I graduated in ’82?” she asks, shrugging and shaking her head “no,” her eyes wide in disbelief. “Eighty-two, yeah. Um, you know, we dated, um—I dated other guys. I’m sure he dated other girls.”

Asked about Rasmussen, she allows that she “may have talked to her” but when pressed about a possible physical fight between the two, answers, “I don’t recall…It just doesn’t sound familiar.” Stearns and Jaramillo’s patient questions and Lazarus’s dissembling lasts for more than an hour. Then Jaramillo asks whether she wouldn’t mind submitting a DNA sample. Moments later Lazarus has had enough and walks out into the hall, where other detectives are waiting for her. With hands manacled behind her, Lazarus is returned to the interrogation room and placed under arrest by Jaramillo.

Stearns would later call Lazarus’s interview and arrest “surreal,” a description that’s hard to dispute. Although the official video ends with her arrest, an audio transcript captures the awkward moments of small talk that ensue as she is searched and Stearns instructs an officer to remove the suspect’s ring and necklace. Apparently the ring won’t budge. “Oh jeez,” Lazarus says. “See if I can get it off.” Stearns, however, relents: “Just wait on the ring.” At some point a knee bandage is discovered on Lazarus, and an officer asks her about it. “I tore my ACL playing basketball,” Lazarus says. “Didn’t get fixed right.” She is finally sent on her way to the women’s jail at the sheriff’s Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood. The next day the attorney general’s office would drop the case Lazarus had built in the Tamara Guinkh matter. There was no way prosecutors could win it now.

Jim Nuttall was on the hook for one more assignment in the case. “Chief Bratton wanted the Rasmussen family notified in person the moment Stephanie Lazarus was arrested,” Nuttall says. This wasn’t standard procedure, but Bill Bratton didn’t want the media to find out about the bust before Sherri Rasmussen’s family did. So Nuttall and a Robbery Homicide detective were dispatched to Tucson and checked into a Marriott, awaiting the call from Los Angeles. “If anything went wrong,” Nuttall says, “we didn’t want to be standing in the Rasmussen home explaining that we don’t have her in police custody.” He passed the early morning of June 5 drinking coffee and practicing his speech to the Rasmussens in front of a mirror. “ ‘On behalf of the Los Angeles Police Department,’ ” he remembers reciting, “ ‘you have our condolences and the condolences of Chief Bratton,’ yada yada yada.”

When they got the call and arrived at the Rasmussens’ two-acre spread in Tucson’s foothills, Nuttall was nervous. The family had been right about their daughter’s murderer all along, and it was his predecessors who had blown the investigation, partly by spurning the Rasmussens’ pleas and suggestions. “I walked in there and drew a blank—the entire family was there,” Nuttall says. “I just stood there until Loretta Rasmussen walked through this crowd of people and gave me a hug. It sent chills up my spine. We didn’t have to say a word. The magnitude of what we just did hit me—two decades of missed opportunities by our department, two decades of frustration for the Rasmussens. And then I explained everything. I realized everything was OK. They were going to let me go out that door.”

////

Lazarus’s story was media crack—a love triangle, a cold case, a homicidal cop, a woman scorned. And there would be the transformation, through trial testimony, of Stephanie Lazarus from cop to “murderess” at the very moment when true-crime TV shows had been elevating that noir trope to new heights in such programs as Snapped, Scorned, and Deadly Women. But underlying it all was the disturbing notion that Lazarus’s role in a murder might have been concealed by her colleagues. This charge lay at the heart of a civil suit filed by Nels and Loretta Rasmussen against Lazarus, the LAPD, and the City of Los Angeles.

“Beyond a shadow of a doubt there was a cover-up,” Nels Rasmussen tells me. “It’s so evident—if this wasn’t a cover-up, what was it? Any detective in his right mind wouldn’t solve a crime of this magnitude in four hours.” Besides raising the cover-up charge, the Rasmussens’ complaint claims that investigators had allowed Lazarus to look at the case notes—some of which, Nels says, subsequently disappeared. (“I’ve never heard that allegation,” says Bub when I ask about Lazarus’s access to the case material.) In addition, the Rasmussens accuse the original LAPD detectives of trying to mentally and physically intimidate them from pressing the case—by sarcastically dismissing their questions, throwing papers around their office when talking to them, bumping into Nels and leaning over him in a menacing manner during some meetings.

Nels Rasmussen recalls his frustration with hearing about the phantom burglars, who the LAPD was convinced had murdered his daughter. “When I tried,” Nels says, “to point out to Lyle Mayer that the odds were greater that the person who killed Sherri was someone closer to her, he said, ‘You know, you’ve been watching too much TV.’ And when I brought up Stephanie, he told me, ‘Don’t go there, there’s nothing there.’ ”

Although these charges will be decided at a future proceeding, they hung in the air at Stephanie Lazarus’s murder trial and in some people’s minds made the LAPD her unindicted coconspirator. Lazarus wore widow black to court the first day of the trial on February 6 of this year—a change from her pretrial appearances during the previous 32 months, when she was shackled and dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit. The early photos of Lazarus, following her arrest, showed a moon-faced, middle-aged woman confronting the world with a wild, cross-eyed stare that seemed to belong to a cornered animal. Yet when the trial began, the 51-year-old defendant was calm and focused. She was also much thinner, her phosphorescent pallor bearing testimony to the three years she’d been incarcerated under the crush of a $10 million bond.

The case, prosecutor Shannon Presby announced in his opening statement, was about “a bite, a bullet, a gun barrel, and a broken heart,” words that sent reporters’ pens arcing across steno pads. A middle-aged man who puckishly smiles with a downturned mouth, Presby had been a film and TV actor in his youth, and he hit all his marks that morning. The bite on Rasmussen’s left arm, he said, contained a tiny Stephanie Lazarus—a DNA match that confirmed Lazarus’s guilt.

Defense attorney Mark Overland was the anti-Presby. Seventyish and unexpressive, Overland spoke in a dry, detached voice. Because retinitis pigmentosa has left him legally blind, his attorney daughter, Courtney, guided him nearly everywhere in court. Defending Stephanie Lazarus would be his most difficult and exhausting case. It cost Overland even before the trial began, by provoking a billing dispute among the partners of his downtown law firm when he agreed to handle the case almost pro bono. “Partly as a result, I left the firm,” he says.

Lazarus, who denied the charges, did not testify, although John Ruetten, who has remarried, appeared as a prosecution witness. With a shock of ash gray hair and still athletically trim at 53, he choked up several times and reached for a Kleenex box when reconstructing the day of his wife’s murder. Presby tried to get Ruetten’s sexual visits with Lazarus out of the way early in his direct examination. “Um...basically she’d had no closure” was how Ruetten explained his decision to have intercourse with Lazarus after their stormy meeting in 1985. “She was upset—I felt bad. I was a stupid and young man.” Ruetten seemed to shrink a little as he also acknowledged the sex they’d had after his wife’s murder as well as his decision in 1989 to join Lazarus (albeit chastely) in Hawaii after he learned that she and some friends were vacationing there.

He was asked by the prosecutor to explain why he hadn’t forcefully brought Lazarus to the attention of the LAPD in 1986. “It never crossed my mind that Stephanie had anything to do with it,” he answered, glancing furtively at the defendant. He said that Lyle Mayer (who along with Ruetten declined to speak for this article) had told him shortly after Rasmussen’s murder that he’d cleared Lazarus of any suspicions, but Nels Rasmussen has another opinion. “I think John wanted to save his own ass,” he told me after the trial. “I never thought John had anything to do with it, but he knows more than he’s said or admitted to. That bothered me, and it bothers me today. John could’ve helped more than he did, but he wouldn’t talk. If John would’ve backed me just a little when I was saying they needed to talk to Stephanie, I think the story would’ve been different.” Nels and Loretta attended the trial every day, spending their nights in a 37-foot motor home they’d left in an RV park in Loma Linda; on weekends they’d drive their car back to Tucson.

Overland, the defense attorney, wasn’t so forgiving. Ruetten resumed dabbing his eyes as soon as the lawyer began grilling him. Lest any jurors feel sympathy for the man, Overland turned to that night during his wedding engagement when Ruetten had sex with Lazarus. “Did you take a shower before leaving Miss Lazarus’s place?” he asked. All the shattered Ruetten could do was look down and weakly answer, “I don’t recall that.”

The high card played by Presby and his coprosecutor, Paul Nuñez, was the DNA evidence from a crime scene that otherwise bore no hair, fiber, blood, or fingerprint traces of Stephanie Lazarus. A forensic serologist told the jury that the chances the saliva DNA found on the victim came from someone besides Lazarus were 1 in 1.7 sextillion. The defense’s main counterargument was that the 26-year-old envelope containing the tube of DNA had a small tear that looked as if it had been made by somebody in order to remove the tube. Plus, the coroner’s department had held on to the envelope 18 years after it should have given it to the LAPD, raising the possibility of tainted evidence. Overland summoned these facts, hoping to cause jurors to entertain the possibility that someone, somehow, could have planted a swab of Lazarus’s DNA in the tube.

It wasn’t enough to convince the jury. On March 8 the four men and eight women on the panel, who had taken three days to resolve a case that had gone unsolved for so long, found Lazarus guilty of first-degree murder. Lazarus’s husband and mother immediately left the courtroom. Nels and Loretta Rasmussen sat in their second-row seats, motionless except for the sobs that racked their bodies. On May 11 Judge Robert Perry handed down Lazarus’s sentence: 27 years to life.

Later that afternoon Presby sat down with me in his office, the sound of rush hour traffic barely penetrating the fortresslike Criminal Courts Building. “I don’t see murder trials as occasions for joy,” Presby said of the win. “They are always tales of loss. There’s satisfaction if you feel the right result was reached, but not joy.” He had just finished supervising the video recording of the victim impact statements Loretta and others had read in court that morning.

They were being preserved for future parole hearings when Lazarus will apply for release. “I won’t be around to harass anybody,” Nels says about those hearings in the years to come. “With the luck I’d had before with the LAPD… ” But when he looks back on his efforts to keep his daughter’s case alive, he sees the paradox: Had the police listened to him in 1986, before the advent of DNA evidence, he and his wife may never have had the chance to read their statements. “If they had arrested her with the evidence they had back then,” Nels says, “she could’ve squeaked out of it.”

Steven Mikulan is a writer-at-large for Los Angeles. "Left Behind," his last piece for the magazine, on the life and death of B-actress Yvette Vickers, appeared in the February issue.

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