Judges and Judiciary
Aug. 16, 2002
Screenwriter-Jurist Loves Doing Family Law Cases
SANTA ANA - With two CBS television movies under his belt, Gale P. Hickman not only enjoys a thriving career as an Orange County Superior Court commissioner but also is a bona fide Hollywood screenwriter.
Gale P. Hickman
Superior Court Commissioner
Orange County (Santa Ana)
Career highlights: Commissioner, Orange County Superior Court, 1979-present; juvenile court referee, Orange County Superior Court, 1977-79; deputy public defender, Orange County, 1975-77; criminal defense attorney, Purcell Hickman & Fredrickson, Santa Ana, 1974-75; deputy public defender, Orange County, 1969-74
Law school: Hastings College of the Law, 1968
Age: 59
Hickman, 59, also is known in Sacramento and Tinseltown as a man who stands up for his ideals.
Twice he has withdrawn his application for judicial appointment rather than compromise his integrity, and he once petitioned for the removal of his name from movie credits.
He has never regretted those decisions, he said.
"You know when you're doing something you think is the right thing? Then the decision is never difficult," he said.
Besides, Hickman loves what he's doing. As a family court commissioner with a long-cause calendar, the ex-public defender keeps busy with the hundreds of dissolutions that come before him every year.
When he began his tenure as a bench officer in 1977, he worked his way through a juvenile calendar before he was assigned to what he calls the "Mississippi River" of family law.
"I just love the complex cases," he said. "The more the better. Everybody comes down the river of family law."
Hickman said he loves the job for the full spectrum of family law topics he has to master, including domestic violence, psychiatric, property and custody issues.
But when assigned to the family law court for the first time in 1994, Hickman did not go gently.
"I was sniveling, and I didn't want to go," he said.
But Judge Frank Fasel told him that there were three things he needed to know about family law before deciding he didn't want to be there.
First, Fasel said, Hickman would make more decisions in a day in family court than in a month in juvenile court. Second, he told Hickman, he was going to love the lawyers who would appear in front of him. And third, he said, Hickman would have latitude when it came to ordering equitable attorney fees.
And Fasel was proved right, especially about those attorneys.
"What I really love most about family law is the lawyers," Hickman said.
He starts each case off with an informal meeting in chambers to put attorneys at ease.
"A little storytelling tends to loosen tensions," Hickman said.
But when he takes the bench, it's all business, he added, with each day reminding him of what it would mean to be a short-order cook with a dozen orders or more to fill all at the same time.
"At the end of the day, all of the meals have been served and the dishes washed," he said. "We're in the business of helping solve other people's problems."
The people he sees have had a death in the family, he said. It's called a marriage.
"The biggest secret of family law is to care about the people in front of you but not to [absorb] their emotional life. You have to avoid becoming an emotional chameleon," he said.
Lisa Staight, a family law attorney who has known Hickman since she was a law student, said while some bench officers make it hard for an attorney to do her work, Hickman can be counted on for sympathy.
"He really understands what it's like from our side of the courtroom," she said. "He approves and respects what we need to do."
Thomas Garrett, a Newport Beach attorney who represented the estate of a dead millionaire in one of Hickman's most memorable cases, said the commissioner worked at home nights and weekends to get a firm handle on the issues.
The case, in which the man's ex-wife, girlfriend, two children and a new baby fought over his estate, left a tangled web of family, juvenile and probate issues that had to be unraveled by Hickman - the only commissioner or jurist in the county with experience in all three areas, Garrett said.
"He is one of the shining stars in our Orange County judicial system because, with the commissioner, you always know you will receive his undivided attention and that he will go the extra mile," Garrett said.
"He's always fair and even - in the toughest of circumstances," he added.
Hickman never "wanted to do the judge biz" until he got a call in 1977 from Judge William Murray, then the presiding judge of Juvenile Court. Murray made Hickman a deal: Hickman should give the job a try for six months, and if he hated it, he and the court would go their separate ways.
"After six months, he was totally fed up with me because I had an independent mind, and I wouldn't follow the policies he set," Hickman said. "But he wouldn't fire me, so I stayed."
His career hit a sweet note in 1993 when the state Supreme Court upheld a decision he made two years earlier, ruling that an Orange County man had waited too long to declare his parenthood. In re Zacharia D., 6 Cal. 4th 435 (1993).
In a footnote to its ruling, the high court quoted from Hickman's ruling:
"Men on this planet for several million years have, with impunity, planted their seeds and then moved on," Hickman stated in the ruling. "So, if you don't keep in touch with a woman with whom you have had intercourse, then you are putting yourself at risk of being a day late and a dollar short."
The high court's ruling reversed the Court of Appeals, which had reversed Hickman by holding that the biological father did have a right to reunite with his son and obtain custody.
Hickman's own family would have made a pretty interesting case.
His father, Olete Hickman, was a convicted three-time felon who once tried to "cut the guts out of a guy" named Mickey, Hickman said.
It might not have helped that his father had the same last name as William Edward Hickman, a Los Angeles divinity student who kidnapped and mutilated a 12-year-old girl named Marian Parker in 1927.
When he was a youth, the younger Hickman would hear his father complain about not getting jobs because of "that other guy."
Born in East Los Angeles, Hickman attended at least 17 different elementary schools in Los Angeles, Bakersfield and Louisiana.
Living at the Hotel Harvey in downtown Los Angeles for a time, the 8-year-old was busy selling newspapers for the Los Angeles Daily Mirror for 7 cents a copy when he discovered something that would change his life: the bookmobile.
The first time he checked out a book, Hickman said, he got angry. The bookmobile wasn't coming back for at least two weeks, and he had checked out only one book about a chicken.
When the rolling library again finally ground to a halt near his school on 10th Street, Hickman was ready for something a little more advanced. He was given a high-school level book about sports.
"I read it and fell in love with that kind of story," he said.
When the bookmobile ran out of new material for the avid reader, the boy hit up the local library for more books. He checked out a dozen the first time he went in.
Those days changed when he turned 13.
Pursued by Los Angeles police for a hit-and-run, Hickman's father decided it was time to head home to the backwoods of Louisiana, where it was easy to hide from the law.
But Hickman and his 15-year-old brother, Kenneth, refused to go. For two years, the boys lived alone in a $10 room on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles.
Kenneth Hickman got a job in a drugstore. Gale Hickman worked at a local grocery.
Both boys were high achievers. Gale Hickman was elected class president at his junior high, and his big brother held down the senior class presidency at his high school.
As Gale Hickman grew older, sports took a front seat. Given a football scholarship to UCLA, he majored in physical education for a few years before switching to English on the advice of a friend. He graduated from Hastings College of the Law in 1968.
Since that day, he has put ethical considerations first, according to lawyers who have appeared before him.
"Let me tell you how ethical he is," Straight said. "I couldn't even give him a used book that I got for free.
"I think he's brave. He stands up for what he thinks is right."
Of the dozen screenplays Hickman has written, he's sold four to Hollywood, two of which have made it to the small screen.
British director Tony Richardson shepherded the first script into the 1986 CBS television movie-of-the-week, "Penalty Phase," starring Peter Strauss as a Superior Court judge who must either ignore a warrantless police search or let a murderer go free.
But you won't find Hickman's name on his second screenplay, the 1990 made-for-TV thriller, "83 Hours 'Til Dawn."
Based on the real-life kidnapping of Florida heiress Barbara Mackle, who was buried alive for 83 hours, Hickman's script got the go-ahead from CBS.
But he took his name off the adapted screenplay after the producers rewrote so much of it that he didn't recognize it.
"They brought in another hack who rewrote all my great dialogue," Hickman said, adding that it "made my wife cry when she saw the movie."
Faced with having his name connected to work he wasn't proud of, Hickman petitioned the Writers Guild of America to put the pseudonym O.R. Keyes on the film.
O.R. Keyes was a play on the name of Hickman's beloved stuffed toy whale ... Orkey.
"I reasoned since they wanted a puppet for a screenwriter I would give them one," he said. "My agents at the time cried and screamed. They said, 'You'll be a marked man.'
"I said, 'Fine, I've got a day job.'"
That sense of ethics may have cost Hickman a chance at a judgeship, however.
The first time he applied - to then-Gov. Jerry Brown - Hickman said that he learned the hard way what it would take to make the right connections to get his name noticed: cash to line a politico's pockets.
"It became very clear that the path to a judgeship was to make political contributions to this local politician," Hickman said. "And I couldn't stand the politician."
Declining to name the Orange County politician who asked for his "donation," Hickman said he felt obliged to hand over money to the public servant in order to be considered for a judicial appointment. But Hickman didn't do it.
Sometimes, he realized, wearing a black robe meant having to sell your integrity to the highest political bidder.
"I just felt it was all too clear that, in order to get a judgeship, you had to make political contributions to someone you wouldn't vote for," he said.
In 1999, Hickman gave it another shot and applied for a judgeship under Gov. Gray Davis. The following year, he withdrew the application after news agencies quoted Davis as saying that he expected his judicial appointees to resign if they could not support the death penalty.
Davis did an about-face the next day, professing his respect for an independent judiciary. But the commissioner said that he could not, in good conscience, keep his name in front of the governor.
"I wrote him a letter explaining what an independent judiciary is, and I withdrew my application," Hickman said.
The governor's judicial appointments secretary, Burt Pines, declined to comment.
Hickman turned those judicial disappointments into a script - a story of political corruption and redemption called "Soft Money" that he has yet to sell.
The saga of a lawyer who essentially "buys" a judgeship by cutting a $10,000 check to the governor's political party, Hickman's script echoes a common theme in most of his work: the ethical hero beset by challenges to his integrity.
When the attorney's son in "Soft Money" demands to know how his father could have ignored how corrupt the politicians he paid off really were, the father defends himself by referring to life as "one long plea bargain."
In a later speech, Hickman lays out just what politicians think of their constituents.
"The people with most of the money make most of the rules," Hickman's villain says. "And most of the time most of the people don't give a damn. Most of the people cheat on their taxes, and they cheat on their spouses, and they don't bat an eye or fart in the wrong direction when they find out that politicians are bought and sold, by people like me, like so many rolls of toilet paper."
By the end of the story, Hickman's hero, Paul Francisco, makes the choice to give up the judgeship in order to redeem himself as an "honorable man."
He hands his black robe back to the corrupt official with the words: "No thanks. It was supposed to be an honor."
Here are some of Commissioner Hickman's recent cases and the lawyers involved:
• In Re the Estate of Rozar, A194810
For the petitioners: Thomas Garrett, Cheadle Garrett & Heaton, Newport Beach; Laurence Ross, sole practitioner, Laguna Hills; Nikki Ann Presley, Good Wildman Hegness & Walley, Newport Beach; Steven Briggs, sole practitioner, Newport Beach; Howard Bidna, Bidna & Keys, Newport Beach; Nelson Handy, Reish Luftman McDaniel & Reicher, Los Angeles; Margaret Lodise, Sacks Glazier Franklin & Lodise, Los Angeles
• Noroski v. Noroski, 96D001841
For the petitioner: Michelle West, Garden Grove
For the respondent: Eugene Zech, Newport Beach
• Johnson v. Johnson, 00D005208
For the petitioner: Lisa Staight, Irvine
For the respondent: Jacqueline Whisnant, Phillips & Whisnant, Newport Beach
• Villanueva v. Villanueva, 98D009677
For the petitioner: Jennifer J. King, Tustin
For the respondent: Curtis Barnes, Santa Ana
• Holler v. Holler, 98D004427
For the petitioner: Jack Kayajanian, Costa Mesa
For the respondent: Richard Sullivan, Orange
Attorney for guardian: Robert Bergen, Orange
Jenna Bordelon
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