But who was “The Dragon Lady” really? Almost forty years later, Fay Stender’s admirers consider her a martyr to her pioneering work in California prison reform. At the height of her career, Fay was one of the most sought after “people’s lawyers” in the nation. A client with a cause could not find a more energetic advocate. But in spite of her successes, many colleagues believed that Fay’s untempered empathy for her clients compromised her professional judgment.
Friends could easily picture Fay as the heroine of a grand opera. A highly talented musician, she had been a child prodigy who gave up training for a career as a concert pianist during her rebellious teenage years. The five-foot-eight, dark-haired advocate often appeared striking and glamorous, whether she was passionately defending the merits of her favorite novelist, Marcel Proust, or decrying unfair penalties faced by black prostitutes, but not their “johns”. Though fiercely devoted to her children, she believed the Movement came first, a commitment to political activism shared by her husband Marvin through a quarter of a century of an intermittent and unpredictable marriage.
At gatherings, Fay often dominated the conversation, while waving her expressive hands for emphasis. Upon meeting her, many people found her charismatic; she exuded an aura of sexuality not unlike that of presidents John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Yet cameras seldom did Fay justice. When she was animated, her face glowed. At other times, her mood swung from contagious passion to deep melancholy. Then she might come across as eccentric and oblivious, wearing mismatched, dowdy outfits or letting her slip show. Afraid of guns herself, she acted as a cheerleader for clients bent on armed confrontation with police. Yet she never identified with the anarchism of her revolutionary clients or the militancy of some of her young Leftist colleagues.
As much as Fay worked to bring like-minded radicals together, she was also at the center of the most enduring rifts among Leftists in the tight-knit East Bay community. Muckraker Jessica Mitford — who collaborated with Fay on prison law reform — put Fay firmly in the category of “frenemy.” Some colleagues found Fay’s inflexibility repellent and questioned the course she charted; others felt used and dismissed when Fay’s focus shifted and she no longer needed them. Yet Fay always found new collaborators as she forged ahead to her next cause célèbre.
The May 1979 home invasion left Fay both wheel-chair bound and devastated. While under twenty-four hour a day police protection, she repeatedly announced that her only motivation to live was to help convict her assailant. She told the few friends admitted to her San Francisco hideaway to “call me Phaedra [pronounced ‘Fay-dra’],” a tragic heroine from Greek mythology. In college, Fay had been fascinated by French playwright Jean Racine’s masterpiece, Phèdre, the retelling of the story of the ancient queen Phaedra, daughter of King Minos of Crete. Phaedra came under the spell of the goddess Aphrodite and fell hopelessly in love with her stepson, Hippolytus, whose mother was the queen of the Amazons. Hippolytus rejected his obsessed stepmother, who sought to make him king. On the return of Phaedra’s husband, King Theseus, Phaedra accused Hippolytus of attempting to usurp the throne. Outraged, Theseus had Hippolytus killed. The guilt-ridden Phaedra then killed herself.
Racine followed the classical formula that hubris leads to downfall. Fay saw parallels between Phèdre’s ill-fated sexual obsession with her inter-racial stepson and Fay’s own flouting of traditional taboos in becoming obsessed with her black clients Huey Newton and George Jackson. Ten years her junior, both young militants brought out Fay’s strong maternal instincts as well as her passion. At the outset, Newton and Jackson greatly appreciated Fay’s legal help. But the two radicals later emphatically rejected her as too controlling — a Liberal white Jewish woman who affronted their macho Black Power image with her determination to shape the world’s perception of them as sympathetic victims of a racist justice system. Though Fay seemingly bounced back from her rejection by both revolutionary clients to champion other causes, she, in fact, never fully recovered.
ACT ONE
∎ 1 ∎
The Battle of Wills
“At times I felt I was literally gasping for life itself.” 1
— FAY STENDER DESCRIBING CHILDHOOD CLASHES WITH HER PARENTS
Fay likely inherited her strong will, talent and ambition from her mother. Ruby Fay Lefkowitz was a native San Franciscan, born a few months before the 1906 earthquake to an immigrant rag and bottle peddler. Louis Lefkowitz had arrived in America as a sixteen-year-old stowaway from Hungary. Ruby’s mother, Lena, had been born in San Francisco of German immigrants, and boasted a rare eighth grade education. Lena, in turn, encouraged Ruby to become an accomplished piano player and star pupil at Girls’ High School. Ruby then won a $100 scholarship that covered four semesters’ tuition at the University of California in Berkeley. She later liked to remind Fay how she had to rise daily at five a.m. to get to the campus by street car, bus and ferry each day for the privilege of attending college.
Commuting to Cal was how Ruby met Sam Abrahams, who was taking the same time-consuming route across the bay in pursuit of a chemical engineering degree. Sam and Ruby finally saved up enough to marry in the winter of 1928 only to lose half their savings in the stock market crash of 1929. When the Great Depression followed, Ruby lost her teaching position at an elementary school to a man with a family to support. By then, Sam was earning a modest salary as a chemistry researcher. When Ruby became pregnant in 1931, the Abrahams splurged on a beautiful standing bassinette on wheels, a handsome white, wicker basket that would be reused by countless cousins and returned to Fay for her own babies.
During Ruby’s last trimester, Sam suffered from a near fatal kidney infection that kept him hospitalized for three months. As his life still hung in the balance, on March 29, 1932, Ruby delivered Fay Ethel Abrahams. Ignoring Jewish custom, Ruby gave her daughter her own middle name as a first name. When Ruby and her newborn went home, Ruby was unable to breastfeed, likely due to ongoing stress. Ruby split her attention between her infant and ailing husband as Sam slowly and miraculously recovered without losing a kidney, despite the doctor’s dire prediction. Yet Fay suffered all her life from mixed emotions about her mother, likely rooted in an early sense of abandonment.
Growing up, Fay was closer to her father. The Biblical injunction to help the needy was coded into the Abrahams’ genes. All of the family on her father’s side were brought over by her grandfather Harry Aviron from the Polish city of Brest-Litovsk, since medieval times a trading center with a longstanding Jewish population. When Harry Aviron was a youth, Brest-Litovsk had been under Russian control for over a century. Renewed pogroms caused many Jews to flee for their lives. Harry set off for New York, leaving behind his pregnant wife Eva and two-year-old son Sam. Immigration officials anglicized the spelling of his last name to Abrahams. The family would always pronounce it “Abrams.”
After months of fruitless search for carpentry work, Harry read the headlines about the Great San Francisco Earthquake and fire that left half the city’s population homeless. He headed west in April 1906 to be part of the rebuilding effort. He soon joined San Francisco’s well-established Jewish community and sent for his wife, young son and new baby, six siblings, his Orthodox Jewish parents and diminutive grandmother. After ensuring his own family’s safety, Harry Abrahams quickly joined the fledgling Hebrew Free Loan Association at his local synagogue. The group provided interest-free loans to help newer Jewish immigrants launch small businesses by buying a sewing machine or a vegetable cart to push through the streets. Harry took great pride in his own family’s quick rise to the middle class and his personal role in San Francisco’s recovery. He later drove family members around San Francisco, pointing out the houses he, as a carpenter, had built.
In