Sweet Charity
by Elizabeth Mehren, photograph by Alyson Aliano
Los Angeles Times Magazine
September 23, 2001

To reach power hostess Cheryl Saban, you might try contacting her political and charitable advisor. Appointment secured, you wend your way through hills and canyons overlooking Beverly Hills and come to a halt before a gate, where a guard stops just short of fingerprinting you. The gate opens and you drive into a veritable theme park. Over there sits a Moroccan palace; down the block is Windsor Castle; across the street, a château from the Loire Valley.

As it happens, that is the house Saban shares with her husband, Haim, CEO of Fox Family Entertainment, and their retinue of family and staff. (Luckily you do not have to embarrass yourself by using the service driveway.) Saban's personal assistant waits at a door so massive it would dwarf Magic Johnson, a neighbor.

"Hi, I'm Joy," beams the assitant. Joy guides you past a series of rooms in which the Sabans stage at least two dozen formal fund-raisers each year. They are such charitable mavens, the joke in the family is that friends marvel when they are invited to diner and don't have to pay. Soon you are in a kitchen many restaurants would envy. Off to one side is a door with a sign that reads, "Please knock because Cheryl is writing." Another sign, this one inside the office, says, "Your husband called. He said to buy anything you want."

This is Cheryl Saban's nerve center, where she spends most of her waking hours pursuing charities that aid children. It's where she created a Website, www.50ways.org, listing major children's philanthropies and offering advice on how to help kids. (Saban has expanded the site into a book, "50 Ways to Save Our Children," to be published by HarperCollins.) This is where Saban fields calls from her political and charitable advisor, who screens the thousands of requests that come in annually to use the Saban's residence or solicit their money.

Saban is a part of the EveryChild Foundation, a woman's charity network that pools substantial donations for members to make a single annual contribution to a children's charity. She's on the board of several foundations aimed at helping children, including Children's Hospital. She also supports the Los Angeles Rape Crisis Center and the Los Angeles Free Clinic. She has written screenplays for television and scripts for "Power Rangers," the show that made her husband famous and very rich (net worth, about $1.5 billion, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal). She has four children and four dogs, and in her so-called spare time she writes steamy suspense fiction.

Now that she is a grandmother, to Marley (named for the late reggae musician), she has replaced some of her comfy office chairs with a crib, a bassinet and other accouterments of designer infancy. Family photos abound. Playfully, Saban also maintains what she calls her Ego Wall: rows of pictures from her days as a model and disco singer with the improbable name of Flower. Flower was a brunet. Saban, who cheerfully admits that she is 50, is a blond. The straight, no-bangs hairstyle favored by wealthy female Los Angeles sets off Saban's fine bone structure and disarming absence of anything resembling a wrinkle.

Which helps when you're one of the city's hottest hostesses. Oozing glamour, and nearly always thin, hot hostesses use family money to make a mark on the planet. They are a timeless phenomenon-confident, smart women who generously and energetically support worthy causes, gaining influence, access and ego gratification in the process. The parties they plan raise serious money for issues, organizations and individuals. A glitzy fund-raiser can vault a cause or a disease onto the map of social awareness.

Naturally, hot hostesses have their detractors. A veteran of L.A.'s nonprofit scene-who did not want her name used-says they sometimes overpower their causes, "taking the focus off the organization's mission." In addition, "they alienate old, established donors," muscling in with money and grand personal agendas. They can be fickle, often switching charities when they have reaped whatever exposure they were seeking, and sometimes taking other donors with them. And there's no stopping them.

Among the party divas who stay at the top of their game, star power is key. Saban (pronounced Sah-BAHN), for instance, can command heads of state such as the president of Israel. She has hosted soirees for both Bill and Hillary Clinton. She and Arianna (Huffington, like you had to ask?) are buds. She and Nancy Daly Riordan are tight as well. Gray Davis is a pal. At a party Saban threw recently fo Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, "Jane Fonda was here. What a sweetheart, oh my goodness."

For the past three years, Saban has organized something called Frost Fest, an outdoor party for 2,500 underprivileged kids from all over Los Angeles. She imports real snow, and rounds up volunteers from Fox Family Entertainment (which has agreed to be purchased by Disney). Each child goes home with a backpack filled with toys and other goodies.

She stages cocktail parties on the terrace of the family mansion. She supervises dinner parties, al fresco meals too swank to be called barbecues and political gatherings for important Democrats. Solicitations for causes and individuals who want her backing pour in. Even when the party machine is quiet as Casa Saban, "we're writing checks all the time." Recently, the executive director of a Los Angeles nonprofit that works with central-city teenagers opened her mail to find such a check from Cheryl Saban. "Twenty-five hundred dollars," says the administrator, who did not want her name or her organization's name used, "from their personal account."

All this is a distant cry from her youth as a lifeguard from La Mesa. Next came a hippie phase, protesting at nuclear power plants and such. A marriage at age 20 produced daughters Tifany and Heidi. Divorced at 24, Saban tried modeling, singing and a second marriage-to her manager. When that union disintegrated, she decided it was time to get a real job, which in this case meant going to work for a producer. She answered a blind ad in the Hollywood Reporter and found herself in the office of Haim Saban, who is now 49. She got the job. Within a week, she also go the man.

"I assumed because he was so handsome and so successful and so sophisticated, that he was already married," she recalls. "He was not a young puppy," and she, by the way, was the oldest woman he had ever dated, 36 at the time. Cheryl pictured him as the stereotypical studly studio exec who "everyday had a different girl on his arm." Working as his assistant, she saw those girls come and go: "We started to date anyways."

There were complications. Before they met, she'd had a hysterectomy, and "if he married me, I could no bear him any children." Saban plunged into deep research mode. Ness, their 12-year-old son, became the world's eighth child to be born via gestational surrogacy: Haim and Cheryl's DNA, someone else's womb. Daughter Tanya, 10, arrived the same way. "Miracle Child," Cheryl Saban's first book, tells the story of how the Saban children came into the world.

Almost no one comes to her with a bad cause, Saban says, a problem of sorts when it comes to setting limits on giving. "We've tried, but we don't really stick to anything," she adds. Saban also recognizes the growing dependency of philanthropies on donations from the private sector. "One thing that is so disturbing to me about the new [Bush] administration is thinking that charities should rely on the private sector," she says. "The private sector does a lot already. It puts enormous pressure on the top 1%."

Saban insists Hollywood celebrities are less likely to attend her parties than many other stops on the fund-raising circuit. "Our business was never connected to many of the stars," she says. "We did cartoons," and, in fact, her husband describes himself as "a cartoon schlepper."

"We don't have that kind of pull," Saban says. "But a lot of our friends do. It's always fun for people to see screen stars and TV stars at parties. People get a big kick out of that."

But why open your grand magnificent house to guests who drink too much and turn over the knickknacks, looking for price tags? What, finally, is the personal payoff?

"I wake up everyday with a smile on my face. Every single day," Saban says. "I am so blessed. When you are given things, it is my belief that you have a responsibility to give back."

Easy to say: After all, the butler has just removed a tray of tiny, crustless sandwiches. This is another world, and Saban herself says it sometimes feels like a fantasy. She has had many lives, Saban says, "sort of like a cat." In this incarnation, she is purring.