Robin Abcarian: Gavin Newsom is a lot more complicated than you think

One thing you can say for California Gov. Gavin Newsom: He's not afraid to tick people off.

In 2004, as mayor of San Francisco, he defied the law and ordered that gay couples be allowed to marry. The move, he was told, was a career ender. He did it anyway.

In 2013, as lieutenant governor under then-Gov. Jerry Brown, Newsom took the occasion of Brown's absence from the state — on a trade mission to China — to declare the avocado the state's official fruit. Brown was not amused. Newsom called it "a benign act of defiance."

With his bespoke suits, Pat Riley hair and annoying verbosity, Newsom has always been easy to lampoon, easy to underestimate and he knows it.

In his new memoir, Newsom describes the "visceral reaction I triggered in a subset of Californians."

"It wasn't simply my politics that rubbed them the wrong way," he writes of his critics in "Young Man in a Hurry." (The title comes from a 2009 headline for a Newsom profile in the Economist.)

"It was my personage — my perceived privilege and how I spoke and walked through the world and even wore my hair — that would turn me into a different sort of lightning rod."

Ah, the hair. When Newsom played in high school basketball games, he writes, his gel-slicked mane inspired the cheerleaders to chant "Dippity-do, dippity-do, Gavin, Gavin, we love you."

After 30 years of public service, beginning at age 27 with his appointment by then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown to the city's Parking and Traffic Commission, Newsom has now emerged at 58 as President Trump's chief Democratic antagonist, which has put Newsom squarely in the national spotlight and inevitably fed rumors of higher aspirations.

And so we have one of the now-mandatory building blocks of a presidential campaign: the personal memoir. Newsom's ghostwriter, Mark Arax, is a former Times reporter.

If all politicians think they are misunderstood, Newsom is the exemplar.

His memoir delves deeply into his family history and life up until his election to succeed Brown in 2018. It is a 276-page effort to correct the misimpressions of him as a spoiled rich kid who has skated through life.

In fact, Newsom's struggles are pretty well known to anyone who has paid close attention to California politics over the last couple of decades. Newsom was a gangly, dorky kid from a broken home who famously overcompensated for his undiagnosed dyslexia by learning to memorize, by enlarging (some might say engorging) his vocabulary, by becoming a policy wonk.

As an adolescent, learning to do magic tricks helped Newsom overcome his shyness; in living room performances for family and friends, he dubbed himself "the Great Gavini."

Newsom's was a curiously bifurcated childhood. His parents divorced when he was 3, for reasons that were never made explicit to him. Afterward, he and his younger sister, Hilary, ping-ponged between his mother, Tessa, who worked three jobs — legal secretary, bookkeeper, waitress — to support the family, and his mostly absent father, William, an attorney, then judge.

William Newsom, who was lifelong best friends with Gordon Getty, scion of the billionaire oil clan, served as the Getty family consigliere. In 1973, William helped deliver the ransom money for his godson, 17-year-old Paul Getty, who was famously maimed during captivity by his kidnappers.

Gordon Getty, a classical music composer, was among a number of Newsom's family friends who staked his first business, a wine shop called PlumpJack that grew to include wineries, three San Francisco restaurants and a boutique hotel near Lake Tahoe.

During summers and vacations, away from their mother, the Newsom children were swept into the Gettys' magical circle of African safaris hosted by Mary Leakey and helicoptering over Hudson Bay to watch polar bears frolic. They met Luciano Pavarotti, Arthur Miller and the king and queen of Spain at a coming-out bash for the princess. For that trip, Newsom writes, Gordon Getty's wife, Ann, sent him to the renowned San Francisco haberdasher Wilkes Bashford to be fitted with lunch and dinner ensembles for each of the eight days they were in Spain. When Getty's private jet touched down, Ann Getty handed each child six crisp $100 bills and told them, "Have fun with it."

"This was the split personality of my life," Newsom writes.

His mother resented the lavish trips and was cold once the children returned. "After two or three weeks of being gone," Newsom writes "it was almost like we were strangers to her."

When Ann Getty sent lavish Christmas presents to Gavin and Hilary, they pretended not to like them so their mother could exchange them for gifts she chose.

In 2002, suffering from terminal breast cancer, she left him a voicemail, "Gavin, if you want to see me, you should probably do so before Thursday. Because that's going to be my last day on Earth." He was with her when she died at 55 by assisted suicide.

We don't hear much about Newsom's brief marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle, with whom he infamously posed lying on a rug at the Getty mansion for a Harper's Bazaar story on "the new Kennedys."

"Had I been there," his sister told him later, "I would have said, 'Get your ass off the floor. You're the mayor of San Francisco.' "

And though Newsom calls his disastrous post-divorce affair with the wife of his campaign manager "the worst betrayal of my life," he pretty much boils down that time, when he was drinking too much, as "my second act of bachelorhood, which I did not handle with discernment." An unusual moment of understatement by the Great Gavini.

You won't find deep discussions about why, for example, he championed the effort to legalize marijuana for recreational use in 2016, or what drove him to defy his own rules during the pandemic and dine maskless at the French Laundry. Save that stuff, I guess, for the debate stage.

Instead, you will find a poignant moment when, in 2020, his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, then 46, lost a baby who would have been their fifth child. "Jen received healthcare that would very soon be denied to countless women in red-state America because of the decision of Supreme Court Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Barrett." True enough, but a rather jarring pivot from the personal to the political.

Such is the way of a man on the brink of a presidential campaign.