Heather Thomas arrived at a restaurant in Santa Monica and ordered a cheeseburger and a margarita — “top shelf tequila,” she whispered to the waiter. It was several days later President Biden’s Disastrous Debate Donald Trump is gone, and Thomas, like many liberals looking for a settlement, is wondering what Democrats will face in the fall. Can Scranton’s favorite 81-year-old son win? Will the party rally? What will Hollywood do?
“They don’t like the old man’s voice,” he said. Biden’s Rasp and the way his words seemed to disappear. “But he remains one of the most influential presidents we’ve ever had Roosevelt or at least since JohnsonTrump is a dictator. Why would anyone want to live in that despair? Seven of the last eight recessions have been caused by the Republican Party. I don’t want to go bankrupt.”
A sip of margarita, a bite of burger. A look of disgust.
As dusk fell on the beach, jazz played softly, and Thomas, 66, a sensation in the 1980s and star of the TV series “The Fall Guy,” talked about the upcoming election and recalled her decades as a political activist and fund raiser. She and her husband Skip Brittenham, One of the entertainment industry’s most prominent lawyers, who has represented Harrison Ford, Eddie Murphy and Ridley Scott, is accustomed to big-ticket cases. He co-hosted a 2023 re-election event for Vice President Kamala Harris, who is Allegedly picked up Nearly $500,000. Thomas attended the June gala, where George Clooney and Julia Roberts helped bring in more than $500,000. $30 million for President Biden.
According to the report, between 2019 and June of this year, Thomas donated more than $400,000 to candidates, political action committees and other organizations. Federal Election Commission. Their biggest recipients include Fair Fight ($45,033), a voting rights group founded by former Georgia state Representative Stacey Abrams; Really American PAC ($33,240), an anti-Republican organization; and U.S. Democratic Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania ($12,536) and Mark Kelly of Arizona ($10,722).
But most of Thomas’s work takes place on the ground and away from the spotlight. In 2003, he and Dan Carroll, who would later become an energy adviser to President Obama’s administration, and Jessica Tully, An artist who has long been immersed in politics started Regime Change CaféA salon that operated mostly from Thomas’s Santa Monica home connected politicians and activists with money and strategies. The group later changed its name to the L.A. Cafe. Thomas’s guests have included Gloria Steinem; Maria Teresa Kumar, founding president of Voto Latino; Arianna Huffington; Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), Governor Gavin Newsom, and members of the Sierra Club and the Center for American Progress.
“I got tired of eating lobster when nothing was happening,” Thomas said, adding that political money is often lavished on candidates and personalities rather than issues. “They treat the big donors great. They treat the bundlers great.” But, she said, the money and support don’t always reach people on the grassroots level, such as “someone working with inner-city kids who will vote if you talk to them. There was a league of punk rock voters, there was a league of angry voters. I wanted to fund all the boots on the ground.”
Heather Thomas at an event to raise funds for the Rape Foundation in April 2005.
(Los Angeles Times)
Thomas has the political instincts of an old-time ward leader and the sharp tongue of a socialite who knows the secrets of housekeepers and the intricacies of offshore bank accounts. She remained loyal to President Biden even though he was not a presidential candidate. Clooney and most of Hollywood’s elite After Trump’s debate in June, she called on him to step down. She now supports Kamala Harris — “I’ve liked her for a long time” — and says Hollywood’s biggest fear is the rise of the anti-Semites. Christian nationalism and Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric.
“People in the entertainment industry don’t want to see their ability to make art threatened,” said Thomas, the daughter of a special education teacher and an aerospace scientist who has more than 113,000 followers on X. “As twisted and messed up as it is, it’s the business of art. We want to keep making our stuff. This town knows damn well we’re going to get punished by hell for being a blue state. If you put Bible people in charge, they’ll ruin us. I’d look like crap in a Duggar dress.”
A sip, a bite, an eye roll.
“Reagan is the guy who put the evangelicals and the neocons together.”
She paused as a waiter passed and cooks were seen moving quickly around the kitchen.
“This time, the right wing is really going to take away freedom.”
Thomas has read Project 2025, The more than 900-page manifesto is one that conservatives hope Trump will implement if he is re-elected president. “Who does fracking in national parks?” she asked with a flash of disbelief. She has long worked on women’s and environmental issues, serving on the advisory boards of the Rape Foundation and Amazon Conservation Team Protecting indigenous rights and biodiversity in the rainforest.
His political awakening came at an early age and has since shaped an unshakably liberal worldview.
“I was 5 years old and I couldn’t do what the boys did. It’s not ladylike. I learned right away that life isn’t fair,” said Thomas, who went to Santa Monica High School and UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. “My first march was a Cesar Chavez March. United Farm Workers against the lettuce industry. I was in high school. I had a wonderful sociology teacher. He gave me a lot of books. He was from Mexico. He said, ‘You have to know the real story.'”
“Heather is very clear about what civic life means,” said Tully, who in 1996 was national field director for Rock the Vote, which drew pop stars such as Madonna and Sheryl Crow to register young voters. She said Thomas views politics as “more than a candidate flying in an election year. It’s about listening deeply. Heather’s frame was around the environment … and she (later) raised the issue with me that the right wing was taking away people’s right to vote.”
Thomas was indelible in the 1980s, the era of mullets, leg warmers and “The Fall Guy,” in which she played stuntwoman Jodie Banks opposite a bounty hunter created by Lee Majors. Pinup posters of her, Farrah Fawcett, decorating bars, dormitories, locker rooms, janitors’ closets and garages of guys who started bands and worked on cars. She went to rehab for cocaine addiction and married Alan Rosenthal, the founder of Cocaine Anonymous. They divorced, and Thomas, who had given up acting for fear of stalkers, married Brittenhamwith whom she raised a daughter and two stepdaughters while writing screenplays and novels “Trophies.”
Heather Thomas and Lee Majors starred in the ABC TV show “The Fall Guy,” which debuted in 1981 and ran for five seasons.
(ABC via Getty Images)
Published in 2008, the year the L.A. Daily News ran the headline, “Whatever Happened to Heather Thomas?”, the novel is a deft portrayal of the trophy wife, the often maligned but powerful bejewelled presence who controls husbands and directs fortunes into charity and politics. Dorothy Parker, Thomas once told an interviewer, “You know, about 80% of the money given to charities in this country is controlled by the second wives of wealthy men.”
The opening paragraph of the novel’s first chapter explains the political dangers of too much bling: “The bar crystal was wrong … probably from a Tiffany set. And he didn’t need to wear his glasses to recognize the Buccellati ice bucket, which meant the whole affair was overdone — the biggest mistake you can make at a political event. Donors like to think every penny of their money is going to grassroots media campaigns for the average working Joe and other rolled-up sleeve stuff. This bar said the Pope and Queen Elizabeth were coming to burn dollar bills.”
Thomas, like her book’s main protagonist Marion Zane, keeps an eye on emerging select talents, including Adrian Fontes, secretary of state in Arizona, a crucial swing state. “He’s a rising Democratic star. An absolute badass,” she said. “His family goes back almost 1,500 years in this area. A Marine. A lawyer. Brilliant. I found him on a call. People find me. I have a flat lawn. If you have a flat lawn they’ll find you. A lot of the houses are on the hill.”
She refers to the “flat lawn” without irony—it’s a Hollywood marker that signifies accessibility not just geographical but on a changing scale determined by the whims of the zeitgeist, fame, and fortune. That openness has led to long-lasting relationships. Her enthusiasm for Fontes, to whom she has donated money, is similar to what she felt Barbara Boxer, When she was running for the US Senate in the 1990s, she was not well known in the entertainment industry.
Thomas and Brittenham “introduced me to a lot of people who could organize events and raise money,” said Boxer, whose progressive ideas appealed to Thomas. “Heather opened her home to us. We did an exercise class on her lawn. She said, ‘Everybody come and bring a towel.’ There were exercise gurus and snacks. I was so grateful. She opened the door to grassroots people and her friends.”
Such personal touches are complemented by Thomas’s knowledge—she studies policy documents—on even the most obscure political issues. A 2004 story in W magazine noted Thomas’s environmental activism: She “can spend 20 minutes on the plight of endangered elk near her second home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she recently held a grassroots ‘truth-telling’ session at one of Dick Cheney’s favorite restaurants.” The article added, “And don’t get her started on the subject of fuel efficiency: ‘I’m convinced everyone with a Hummer has a small penis.'”
The country’s sense of division has deepened over the past few years, and Thomas, who fishes, raises pet chickens (his rooster is named Jay) and describes himself as a “secret farmer patriot” on X, is uncomfortable with the hostility. “We’re all Americans,” he said. “All these people are saying, ‘Oh, it’s time to grab guns.’ But you know, if they lived next door they would have helped me with the flood and I would have helped them.”
She was sipping her margarita. A saxophone was playing a 50s jazz song; tourists were hanging out and anyone of a certain age could reminisce about the tail-fin Cadillac and Irwin Shaw’s short story, “Girls in summer clothes.”
“I miss my Republican friends. A lot of them died,” she said. “I used to tease (Hollywood executive) Alan Hirschfield. He was my neighbor in Jackson Hole and my boss at 20th Century Fox. I loved him. I fished with Senator Al Simpson. He would have taken away my rights in a moment, but we could talk about it and we could still be civil.” She said the Internet has destroyed civility. “People get dopamine from surfing. It’s getting uglier, weirder and more confusing.”
Thomas co-founded the website don’t get cleanseda voting rights effort that tracks state registration rules to raise awareness among minority voters. She’s also working on an outreach program to help college students register to vote. “TikTok is like fire,” she said. Despite a recent foray into acting, most of her time — she appeared in the new “Fall Guy” movie starring Ryan Gosling — is spent behind the scenes.
“I can be the napkin lady,” she said. “I don’t have to be seen.”
The L.A. Café plans to meet again in the fall to raise final funds. Before that, or perhaps after, she’ll be back in Jackson Hole, watching the whitewater and flowing rivers and fishing for rainbow trout, about which, she said, “It’s like looking for buried treasure. You listen to the wind, see what the moon did last night.” She notices such things in politics and nature, and she said it’s mostly about storytelling, how a story comes to you and what you do with it when it gets there.
(Times data reporter Gabrielle Lamar Lamy contributed to this story)
