“It’s a gorgeous color,” says Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco and Mr. Bashford’s customer and close friend of 45 years. “I wouldn’t even call that burgundy. It’s headed for ... It’s Bordeaux.” “The color is the reason I brought them over,” Mr. Bashford says. “I wouldn’t push shoes at lunch otherwise.” “Wilkes, that’s the most sensitive thing you’ve ever said,” Mr. Brown quips. As repartee, it is pure Willie Lewis Brown Jr., perfected over the four decades he has been a central figure in the city’s political and social life, and served up for almost that long at Le Central, where Mr. Brown, Mr. Bashford and a select group of others — Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist who died in 1997, was a founding member — have assembled every Friday since 1973 to talk politics, restaurants, real estate, children, grandchildren and the occasional pair of shoes. The lunches are mentioned frequently in Mr. Brown’s own Chronicle column, Willie’s World. And in their way, the gatherings capture the qualities that have made him so lastingly compelling to both his fans and critics — his mischievous wit and infectious charm, his entrancement with power and celebrity, his fondness for $5,000 suits and $2,000 shoes, his loyalty and, at times, imperiousness on full display. He is 77, 78 next month, and his eyesight has been diminished by retinitis pigmentosa. The political world in which he came of age as a Democrat in the State Assembly — a world of cross-the-aisle compromise and quid pro quo — has given way to Tea Party zeal and ideological intransigence. But he has refused to creep quietly offstage. Since leaving public office in 2004 at the end of his second term as mayor — the worst day of his career, he says, because “that was my life, my whole life, my first, second and third in my life” — he has remained a power broker, his influence still palpable. His law firm represents prominent clients, among them Aecom, an engineering firm involved in San Francisco’s central subway project, and the California Online Poker Association. And he offers informal counsel to a stream of business executives, elected officials, and bureaucrats who breakfast with him at the St. Regis, where his apartment is on the 35th floor. “There are so few people left around with institutional memory, and with a track record that makes that memory advisable,” he said in a recent interview. “I think that’s where I am, that’s who I am and that’s what I do.” Along with Rose Pak, the Chinese-American community’s powerful organizer, and others, Mr. Brown helped usher Mayor Ed Lee into office in November. A pre-inaugural bash for 400 guests that he hosted at the Palace Hotel’s Garden Court in January was, in contrast to most of Mr. Brown’s parties, not a black-tie affair; to spare Mr. Lee from having to rent a tuxedo, he said. He rises each morning at 5:30 and forces himself to go to the gym — “If I feel any little tweak anywhere, I stop,” he said. He follows politics assiduously. He gets along well with Gov. Jerry Brown, as he did with his Republican predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and retains strong ties to Senator Dianne Feinstein. The Republican presidential race inspires him to punditry (On Mitt Romney: “If Newt Gingrich really wants to get under Romney’s skin, he ought to start calling him by his first name: Willard”; On Newt Gingrich: “Extremely bright, volatile, opinionated”; On Rick Santorum: “a total and complete misfit for elective office”; On Ron Paul: “He is probably the most honest”). Yet, Mr. Brown laments the intolerance that now dominates Washington and Sacramento. “Representative democracy is handicapped by preconditions,” he said. “The system now, the participants, are all geared to whether or not their side wins, not whether or not their side is best for the system. That’s a dramatic change from my day.” Voters, he noted in his 2008 autobiography, “Basic Brown,” wanted “politicians who could make things work and who could work with each other.”
