Beverly Hills Top

SPOTLIGHT

ANNABELLE HEIFERMAN

She's the mayor of Beverly Hills, and she won't even shop outside the city limits

Producer Allan Carr, arms flailing, voice reaching a strident pitch, is barging his way through lunchtime diners in the stately El Padrino room of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. "I'm calling for the impeachment of the mayor of Beverly Hills," says Carr. "God, traffic in this city looks like Times Square."

With that, Carr reaches his destination—a choice banquette—and plants a kiss on the beautifully manicured hand of the mayor of Beverly Hills, a woman who presides over 32,000 people, 32,000 trees, and one hundred miles of paved alleyways, all situated on six square miles of the most expensive terrain boxoffice receipts can buy.

When people meet Annabelle Heiferman for the first time, the reaction is always the same: Central Casting must have chosen her. Heiferman, with a closet full of Adolfos and a Cadillac Seville in the garage, has the perfectly coiffed look of a matron whose ambition in life is to keep a frantic social calendar. At times, she even sounds as if she'd be more at home on Dynasty than clicking down the corridors to her office in City Hall. Ask her age and this grandmother demurs, with just the right touch of Joan Collins wickedness: "I thought we were here to talk about my qualities, not my age."

"Well, I always knew Annabelle would distinguish herself way beyond Brownie Scouts," says Wallis Annenberg, who has known Heiferman since her days as an activist mother (she headed up practically every education group around). That all began twenty-eight years ago when Annabelle and her husband, Joe, a costume-jewelry manufacturer, came west to settle their family in the home they still share. Bom and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, this younger daughter of a Methodist minister turned a business degree from the University of Georgia into a career in merchandising, which she promptly relinquished when the first of her five children arrived.

In 1980, Heiferman was narrowly defeated in her initial run for a seat on the Beverly Hills City Council, a five-person political panel that grants members a one-year mayoral term as part of the package. Two years later, in 1982, Heiferman's campaign was a success. While her pet projects have included senior citizens' rights, education, crime prevention, and traffic and rent control, her main campaign position was simply "to provide the best quality of life available for every member of the community."

Heiferman, who still speaks with a delicate southern accent, figures she knows just about everybody in town by now, in part because unabashed civic pride keeps her from shopping outside Beverly Hills city limits. Ever. Ceremonial duties attached to the office require almost nightly appearances on the local social circuit. The highlights of her term, which expires next month (she intends to stand again and if elected could be mayor again in 1986), include presiding over Olympic functions last summer and attending this month's Academy Awards splash. "She is a perfect ambassador," says another acquaintance, "because she is to Beverly Hills what Jane By me was to Chicago. Annabelle Heiferman looks like she was bom on Rodeo Drive."

In a township where urban blight comes in the form of broken lids on specially designed city garbage containers ("That drives me crazy"), Heiferman admits that she's not plagued by the same problems other metropolitan chieftains routinely confront. She likens her job to running an exclusive specialty business. "To me, Beverly Hills is the most renowned city in the world. Just the name itself is magic," she trills, reeling off budget statistics and growth-potential data. A cool smile creases her peachy lips as a waiter recognizes Madam Mayor and performs a quick bow. "You see," she says, nodding, "everyone wants to come here. I've always said that when you live in Beverly Hills, there really is no place like home."

Wanda McDaniel