Color Gloria Allred All Rebel

By Anastasia Toufexis

A California feminist fights with showmanship and scholarship

There is nothing pastel or pale about Gloria Allred. From her jet-black hair to her brilliant red lipstick to her usual attire of electric purple or Chinese-red dresses, she is as brightly colored as her name suggests. But there is a lot more to this Los Angeles attorney than vivid packaging. By adroitly combining showy tactics and solid scholarship, Allred over the past ten years has become one of the nation's most effective advocates of family rights and feminist causes. Declares Allred: "The law should be a sword and shield against the wrongs that women are forced to suffer."

When a grandmother was abducted from the parking lot of a shopping mall and raped, Allred sued the center for lax security. She won an $85,000 settlement; the adverse publicity forced the mall to adopt more stringent protection for shoppers. When an oil company refused to promote a woman to its marketing department because customers in South America were reluctant to deal with women, Allred sued. An appellate court ruled that a company may not discriminate because of customer preference. Badgered by Allred, a dry-cleaning chain decided to equalize the prices it charged for cleaning similar men's and women's shirts.

Allred, 43, has not limited her "sexploitation" cases to women. When Actor LeVar Burton wanted custody of an illegitimate child that he admitted siring, Allred got him joint custody. She has also countersued the producers of the movie Hardrock for $1 million on behalf of another actor, Neal Sheldon, who walked off the film because he was asked to appear in the nude.

The crusader has been at her agitating best in the past few weeks. As cameras rolled, the pixieish, 5-ft. 3-in., 110-lb. lawyer perched atop two volumes of the California Annotated Code stacked on her office chair and exulted over a state court ruling striking down a mobile-home park's adults-only policy. Next day Allred vowed to continue pressing a suit for $21 million against the city's Roman Catholic archdiocese on behalf of a woman who claims that she was sexually abused by seven priests, even in the confessional of a church, and that she bore a child by one of them. At issue, insisted Allred, is "clergy malpractice."

Last week she scored again. Before a poster of the traditional Thanksgiving bird that carried the slogan DON'T BE A TURKEY. PAY YOUR CHILD SUPPORT, Allred and Los Angeles District Attorney Robert Philibosian announced the encouraging first results produced by her controversial campaign to persuade newspapers to publish the names of delinquent parents. After papers publicized 254 of the "deadbeat dads," 30 of them were located. Says Allred: "To paraphrase Gloria Steinem, 'You have to perform an outrageous act or rebellion every day.'"

Born in Philadelphia to a door-to-door salesman and his English-born wife, Gloria Rachel Bloom began rebelling in college. As an English honors major at the University of Pennsylvania, she insisted, despite faculty reservations, upon doing her thesis on black Novelists James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. She met a young man in her freshman year, married him as a sophomore, gave birth to a daughter in her junior year and got a divorce before graduating. Allred went on to earn a master's degree in English education at New York University, taught at an all-black boys' school in Philadelphia, then moved to Los Angeles to teach in the Watts ghetto after the 1965 riots.

Appalled by the plight of female teachers and becoming aware of the growing feminist movement, "I started asking myself about women's rights," recalls Allred, "and I started asking what rights we didn't have." She had several personal experiences to draw on. While at N.Y.U. she had worked as a buyer at Gimbels department store. She earned $75 a week, while a man doing the same job got $90 "because he had a family. Well, so did I -- an infant daughter."

Earlier there had been a more brutal awakening. While on vacation in Acapulco after college, she met a local doctor who invited her out to dinner after he made some house calls. The last stop, says Allred, was a motel, where the man pulled a gun and raped her. She says she nearly died after a subsequent illegal abortion in the U.S.

The solution to social inequities, as Allred saw it, was in the law. She graduated from Los Angeles' Loyola Law School in 1974 and set up a practice with three classmates, specializing in family law. Allred, Maroko, Goldberg & Ribakoff now numbers five women and six men -- "all feminists," boasts Allred. The firm's star operates from a plush office jammed with antiques and feminist bric-a-brac. Among the items: a captain's desk with female gargoyles and a bewigged mannequin bearing a plaque THE QUEEN IS NOT GRANTING AUDIENCES TODAY. The sign is a gift from her daughter Lisa, a second-year law student at Yale. Working 14-hour days leaves Allred little time with her husband William, 53, an aircraft-parts dealer. The two married in 1968. William Allred supports his wife but jokes, "The sole saving grace between me and John Zaccaro is that Gloria will never run for public office."

She is, however, not abashed about running after public officials. When archconservative State Senator John Schmitz chaired some hearings on abortion in 1981, Allred presented her testimony and then gave Schmitz a black leather chastity belt. Schmitz, in a press release, later described the meeting as filled with "hard, Jewish and (arguably) female faces" and called Allred a "slick butch lawyeress." Allred did what came naturally, slapping him with a $10 million libel suit. At a subsequent press conference called by Schmitz to discuss Middle East tensions, she showed up to present him with a box of frogs. Cried Allred: "A plague on the house of Schmitz!"

Such flamboyant gestures trouble some of her colleagues. Says Attorney Marvin Mitchelson, no shrinking violet himself: "Her style is a little bit rough on the edges." But others see nothing wrong with her flair for the dramatic. Noting that Allred is careful to keep her theatrics out sides of court, Justice Joan Dempsey Klein of the California Court of Appeal says, "She does her homework; her success rate is good. She is both style and substance. So long as there is not an equal rights amen ment, there will be lots of work for Gloria Allred . "

-- By Anastasia Toufexis. Reported by Joseph J. Kane/Los Angeles

With reporting by Joseph J. Kane