Heather Thomas: How a TV star evolved into a behind-the-scenes politico

Heather Thomas is a longtime political activist and a co-founder of a salon that connected politicians with strategies.

Sept. 8, 2024 3 AM PT

Heather Thomas arrived at a Santa Monica restaurant and ordered a cheeseburger and a margarita — “top shelf tequila,” she whispered to the waiter. It was days after President Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump, and Thomas, like many liberals staring at a reckoning, wondered what Democrats would face in the fall. Could the favorite 81-year-old son of Scranton win? Would the Party rally? What would Hollywood do?

“They don’t like that old man voice,” she said of Biden’s rasp and the way his words seemed to disappear. “But he’s one of the most effective presidents we’ve had since Roosevelt or at least since Johnson. Trump’s an authoritarian. Why would anyone want to live in that bleakness? Republicans have brought on seven of the last eight recessions. I don’t want to go broke.”

A sip of margarita, a bite of burger. A glimmer of disgust.

Jazz played low as dusk settled over the coast and Thomas, 67, who in the 1980s was a pin-up sensation and a star in the TV series “The Fall Guy,” spoke of the upcoming election and recounted her decades as a political activist and fundraiser. 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, are accustomed to big ticket affairs. They co-hosted a 2023 reelection event for Vice President Kamala Harris that reportedly raised nearly $500,000. Thomas attended the June gala where George Clooney and Julia Roberts helped bring in more than $30 million for President Biden.

Between 2019 and June of this year, Thomas donated more than $400,000 to candidates, political action committees and other organizations, according to the Federal Election Commission. Among her biggest recipients were 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. Democrat senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania ($12,536) and Mark Kelly of Arizona ($10,722).

But much of Thomas’ work is grassroots driven and out of the limelight. In 2003, she and Dan Carol, who would become an energy advisor for President Obama’s administration, and Jessica Tully, an artist long steeped in politics, started the Regime Change Cafe, a salon mostly run out of Thomas’ Santa Monica home that connected politicians and activists with money and strategies. The group later changed its name to the L.A. Cafe. Thomas’ guests have included Gloria Steinem; María Teresa Kumar, founding president of Voto Latino; Arianna Huffington; Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Gov. Gavin Newsom and members from the Sierra Club and the Center for American Progress.

“I got tired of eating lobster while nothing was happening,” said Thomas, noting political money is often lavished on candidates and personalities instead of issues. “They treat the big donors wonderfully. They treat the bundlers wonderfully.” But, she added, the money and support don’t always reach the people on the ground like “someone working with inner-city kids who will vote if you talk to them. There was a league of punk rock voters, a league of pissed-off voters. I wanted to fund all the boots on the ground.”

Fundraiser for The Rape Foundation at the home of actress Heather Thomas

Thomas has the political instincts of an old-school ward leader and the sharp tongue of a socialite who knows the secrets of housekeepers and the intricacies of offshore bank accounts. She stayed loyal to President Biden even as Clooney and much of the Hollywood elite called for him to step down after his debate in June against Trump. She now supports Kamala Harris — “I’ve liked her for a long time” — and says Hollywood’s biggest fear is the rise of 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 be able to keep making our stuff. This town is well aware that we’ll get punished to hell for being a blue state. If you put the Bible people in charge, they’ll f— us up. I’d look like crap in a Duggar dress.”

A sip, a bite, an eye roll.

“Reagan’s the one who put the evangelicals and the neocons together.”

She paused as a waiter passed and cooks moved in swift silhouettes in the kitchen.

“This time the right-wing is really going to take out freedom.”

Thomas has read Project 2025, the 900-plus page manifesto conservatives hope Trump will carry out if he’s reelected president. “Who does fracking in national parks?” she asked with a flash of incredulity. She has long worked on women’s and environmental issues, serving on advisory boards of the Rape Foundation and the Amazon Conservation Team to protect indigenous rights and biodiversity in the rainforest.

Her political awakening came at an early age and has shaped an unflinching liberal worldview ever since.

“I was 5 years old, and I couldn’t do what the boys did. That’s not ladylike. I learned life is not fair right away,” 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. The United Farm Workers against the lettuce industry. I was in high school. I had a wonderful sociology teacher. He gave me a bunch of books. He was from Mexico. He goes, ‘You gotta know the real story.’ ”

“Heather is very clear-eyed on what civic life means,” said Tully, who in 1996 was national field director for Rock the Vote, which drew in pop stars like Madonna and Sheryl Crow to register young voters. She said Thomas sees politics is more than a candidate “flying in in an election year. It’s about deep listening. Heather’s frame was around the environment ... and she [later] brought the issue to me that the right-wing is taking away people’s right to vote.”

Thomas was indelible in the 1980s, the age of mullets, leg warmers and “The Fall Guy” in which she played stuntwoman Jody Banks opposite a bounty hunter created by Lee Majors. Her pinup posters rivaled those of Farrah Fawcett, decorating taverns, dorms, locker rooms, the closets of janitors and the garages of boys who started bands and worked on cars. She went to rehab for cocaine addiction and married Allan Rosenthal, a founder of Cocaine Anonymous. They divorced and Thomas, who had largely quit acting over fears of stalkers, married Brittenham, with whom she raised a daughter and two stepdaughters while writing scripts and the novel “Trophies.”

Heather Thomas and Lee Majors starred in the ABC TV show "The Fall Guy," which debuted in 1981 and ran for five seasons.

Published in 2008, the year the L.A. Daily News ran the headline, “Whatever Happened to Heather Thomas?”, the novel is a clever portrait of the trophy wife, that often maligned yet powerful bejeweled presence that navigates husbands and directs fortunes to charities and politics. In a quip reminiscent of Dorothy Parker, Thomas once told an interviewer, “You know, close to 80% of donated money in this country is controlled by second wives of wealthy men.”

The opening paragraph in the novel’s first chapter notes the political perils of too much glitz: “The bar crystal was wrong ... probably from the Tiffany set. And she didn’t need to wear her glasses to recognize the Buccellati ice bucket, which meant that the whole shebang was way too much — the biggest mistake you could make at a political event. Donors like to think every penny of their money is going into boots-on-the-ground media campaigns for the average working Joe and other rolled-up-sleeves stuff. This bar said the pope and Queen Elizabeth were coming over to burn dollar bills.”

Thomas, like her book’s protagonist Marion Zane, keeps watch on emerging electable talent, including Adrian Fontes, the Secretary of State for Arizona, a critical swing state. “He’s a rising Democratic star. A complete badass,” she said. “His family goes back something like 1,500 years in the area. A marine. A lawyer. Brillant. I discovered 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 homes are on a hill.”

She mentions “flat lawn” without irony — it is a Hollywood marker connoting accessibility not only geographic but on a shifting scale determined by zeitgeist, fame and the whims of luck. That openness has led to long-lasting relationships. Her enthusiasm for Fontes, whom she has donated money to, is similar to how she felt about Barbara Boxer, who when she was running for the U.S. Senate in the 1990s, was not well known by the entertainment industry.

Thomas and Brittenham “introduced me to a lot of people who could put on events and raise money,” said Boxer, whose progressive ideals 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 breakfast. I was so appreciative. She opened the door to grassroots people and her friends.”

That kind of personal touch is complemented by Thomas’ knowledge — she studies policy papers — of even the most obscure political issues. A 2004 story in W magazine noted Thomas’ environmental activism: She can “spend 20 minutes expounding on the plight of the endangered elk near her second home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she recently organized a grassroots ‘truth-telling’ session at one of Dick Cheney’s favorite restaurants.” The piece added, “And don’t get her started on the subject of fuel efficiency: ‘I’m convinced that everyone with a Hummer has a small [penis].’ ”

The nation’s divisiveness has deepened over the years, and Thomas, who fly fishes, keeps pet chickens (her rooster’s name is Jay) and describes herself on X as a “closet farmer patriot,” is uneasy about the enmity. “We’re all Americans,” she said. “All these people saying, ‘Oh it’s time to grab the guns.’ But you know what, they’d help me out in a flood if they lived next door and I’d help them out.”

She sipped her margarita. A saxophone played a ’50s jazz ballad; tourists roamed outside and a person of a certain age could conjure tail-fin Cadillacs and Irwin Shaw’s short story, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.”

“I miss my Republican friends. A lot of them died,” she said. “I used to tease (Hollywood executive) Alan Hirschfield. He was my neighbor up at 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 heartbeat, but we could talk about it and we could still be civil.” The internet, she said, did away with civility. “People get dopamine from surfing. It’s just going to get uglier and weirder and more confusing.”

Thomas co-founded the website Don’t Get Purged, a 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 to vote. “TikTok is on fire,” she said. Much of her time, despite a recent foray into acting — 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 need to be seen.”

The L.A. Cafe plans to meet again in autumn for last minute fundraising. Before then or perhaps later, she’ll be back at Jackson Hole, watching the whitewater and the run of rivers and fishing for rainbow trout, which, she said, “is like looking for buried treasure. You listen to the wind, see what the moon did the night before.” She notices things like that, in politics and nature, and she said it’s mostly about storytelling, how a narrative lifts and rolls towards you, and what you do when it gets there.

(Times data reporter Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee contributed to this story)