Jacques Barzaghi, a Former Fixture Beside Jerry Brown, Dies at 82
By Katharine Q. Seelye, 6/25/21, NY Times

Jacques Barzaghi, who was a longtime confidant, alter ego &
soul mate of former Gov. Jerry Brown of California & known
for his Zen sensibility & noir presence from boot to beret,
died on June 1 at his home in Normandy, France. He was 82.

He died in his sleep without an identifiable cause, although
he had a history of heart ailments, his daughter Tatiana
Barzaghi said.

Barzaghi (pronounced bar-ZAH-ghee), who was born in France,
began his association with Brown in the early 70s, when Brown
was California’s sec'y of state.

The two were inseparable for 3 decades, thru Brown’s first
two terms as governor, 3 unsuccessful campaigns for the
Democratic presidential nomination, a failed bid for the
Senate, a stint as chairman of the Calif Democratic Party, a
move to Japan to study Zen Buddhism & much of his tenure as
mayor of Oakland. It all ended in 2004, when Brown, as mayor,
fired him after Barzaghi’s wife reported a violent domestic
dispute. Brown declined to comment for this obituary.

Barzaghi served in multiple official & informal roles for
Brown, incl. as barber, interior decorator & armed bodyguard.
He was deeply involved in almost everything Brown did, from
helping him make policy decisions to picking out his
trademark double-breasted suits.

“He lends creativity & imagination to the admin & serves as
a person Jerry can bounce ideas off of,” The LA Times quoted
a Brown aide as saying in 1977, the year Barzaghi became an
American citizen with Brown’s help.

Intense, bald & heavily tattooed, Barzaghi, who wore wire-
rimmed glasses & dressed in black from head to toe, cut an
austere figure & was given to vaguely existential utterances.

“We are not disorganized,” he told The NY Times during Brown’s
1992 bid for president. “Our campaign transcends understanding.”

On another occasion, asked for his thoughts after touring a
state prison to report on conditions there, Barzaghi
reportedly replied, “We are all prisoners.”

Jacques Georges Barzaghi was born on July 26, 1938, in the
small town of Beausoleil in the south of France, near Monaco.
His father, René Barzaghi, who was part of French Resistance
during WWII, was an officer in the French merchant marine.
He & Jacques’s mother, Marie Louise (Denoix) Barzaghi,
separated when Jacques was 6. In effect abandoned by his
parents, Jacques was raised by his paternal grandma.

He left for Paris at 16, before finishing high school.
Falling in with theater & movie people, he found work as an
actor, taking the stage name Lorenzo Poldi. He joined the
French Army at 18 & served briefly until he was injured &
returned to Paris. There, enamored of New Wave film directors
like François Truffaut & Jean-Luc Godard, he dabbled in
directing himself.

After the 1968 student uprisings in Paris, Barzaghi moved
to West Hollywood & worked briefly in the film industry.
One night at a party in Laurel Canyon, he fell into conver-
sation with a man about movies, relationships & the Navajo,
learning only later that this stranger was California’s
sec'y of state, Mr. Brown. His lack of deference, he told
The NY Times, “was the key to connecting” with him.

Some found Barzaghi a little far out. “When asked a question,
he will stare a long moment, during which the words you’ve
just spoken seem to ring with foolishness,” The LA Times
wrote. “Then he will utter a cryptic remark like, ‘Don’t
sell the skin of the bear before you shoot the bear.’”

Others found him a grounding influence on “Gov Moonbeam,”
as Brown was called in more derisive quarters, a reference
to his sometimes eccentric, New Agey tendencies. “I came
to think that Barzaghi was the ballast to Jerry Brown’s
ship,” one Brown aide told The Washington Post in 1992. “He
gave stability. He was the calm at the center of the storm.”

There was little calm in Barzaghi’s personal life: Over the
course of 6 marriages & 6 divorces he sired 8 children. In
addition to Tatiana Barzaghi, he is survived by two other
daughters, Jessica Doherty & Edwina Barzaghi; 5 sons, Ky,
Rashad, Akira, Hassan & Salam Barzaghi; 11 grandkids; &
5 great-grands.

Two years after Brown was elected mayor of Oakland in 1998,
The LA Times reported, a female city employee lodged a
sexual harassment complaint against Barzaghi. After an
independent investigation, he was suspended without pay for
15 days, and the city, which had a zero-tolerance policy for
sexual harassment, settled the claim for $50,000. (Barzaghi
attributed the incident to his effusive “Mediterranean”
personality.)

There were further embarrassments to the Brown admin, incl.
Barzaghi’s failure to report outside income he had received
from a prominent Oakland developer for serving as his feng
shui consultant. Barzaghi dismissed the episode as unimpor-
tant, saying of the requirement to report such income,
“My mind doesn’t work that way.”

In 2004, his wife called the police to report that he had
tried to push her down the stairs during a quarrel; he said
she had shoved him first. No charges were filed, but Brown,
who was eyeing a run for state attorney general in 2006,
fired him.

Barzaghi soon left the US & eventually settled in Morocco,
where he built a yoga retreat. He lived there for roughly
a decade before moving to Normandy a few years ago.

Some in Calif regarded Barzaghi as the personification of
some of Brown’s quirks.

“That this unusual & uncharacterizable character crops up
& finds a niche so close to power bespoke of Jerry’s very
unorthodox way of seeing the world,” Orville Schell, a
Brown biographer, told The
LA Times.

But as Barzaghi said — after being criticized for wanting
his personal tattooist to become a member of the Oakland
Cultural Arts Commission — “If it's not unusual, then
what's the point?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/us/jacques-barzaghi-dead.html