Ask author Robert Mailer Anderson, who shot to fame with the critically praised 2001 novel "Boonville," how a blue-collar kid growing up on food stamps ended up married to an heiress, fundraising for the new SFJazz Center and hosting President Obama at his Pacific Heights home, and he shakes his head.

"F- if I know," he said.

The 43-year-old native San Franciscan, celebrated for his unhesitatingly frank opinions and noirish attire, is sure about one thing, however. He wants to project a quirky image during a photo shoot in the apartment where Dashiell Hammett wrote "The Maltese Falcon" (which Anderson has rented and restored), and e-mails to ask whether he can bring a straight-edge razor as a prop.

"Sort of like, 'looking sharp,' " he writes. "But also like, 'He may look like a safe white boy, but watch out. Cutting-edge art ... I like the idea of looking good but making people slightly uncomfortable."

Pushing boundaries is second nature for Anderson, who grew up alongside disciplinarians and juvenile delinquents and learned to get along with both. He shows up for the shoot with a 1940s-style Gucci suit and his signature fedora, his homage to heroes past. An empty antique bourbon bottle substituted for the razor, which he left at home, as a symbol of life on the edge.

'If it's not dangerous'

"If it's not dangerous," he said with a grin, "it's not art."

This is the mind-set of the man who is co-chairing the $63 million capital campaign for the new SFJazz Center, the first stand-alone jazz center in the nation, where questions of art, politics, race, class and music will be discussed. When it opens at Fell and Franklin streets in January 2013, the 35,000-square-foot community and educational center will offer 200 performances a year, including those by its own poet laureate. The other co-chairs are Shona Brown and publisher Nion McEvoy.

"Jazz is the only American-born art form; it came out of slavery and rebellion," said Anderson. "It's improvisational and democratic. It's multiethnic and inclusive. It swings, and it's smart."

For the SFJazz gala on May 4, Anderson spent six weeks urging organizers to bring in 20-year-old Harlem rapper Azealia Banks to perform her expletive-laden YouTube hit, "212," and was told by organizers that would be too much for white-glove society to handle. Banks, an unknown until a recent profile in W magazine catapulted her to national prominence, is now represented the William Morris Agency, Anderson said.

"It has got to be edgy - you've got to have appeal," said jazz drummer Eric Harland, a member of the SFJazz Collective, who agrees with Anderson's views. "Look at the history of music. Art was always a reflection of what was going on in society. You could always tell the art forms that were suffering, because they went safe - and people feel the lack of energy in that as well."

If danger is truly a driving force in Anderson's philosophy of art, look no further than his childhood, where danger lurked.

Anderson and two siblings were raised by divorced blue-collar parents. He moved 20 times, he says, before he was 20. In elementary school, he lived in San Rafael with his mother and her parents. His grandfather was a prison guard at San Quentin ("with forearms the size of my legs," recalled Anderson's high school chum and best friend, Mathieu Salgues) who instilled structure in his life, made breakfast for the family every morning, and played big band and jazz music on the radio, exposing Anderson to soulful tunes at an early age.

Every other weekend, he went to Mendocino County, where his father ran a group home for juvenile delinquents. In high school, he lived with his father but spent her senior year with paternal uncle Bruce Anderson, who ran a foster home and the local newspaper, the Anderson Valley Advertiser, in Boonville. (The valley wasn't named after the family.)

Anderson read literature, wrote for his uncle's paper and competed in sports, excelling in baseball.

Crop protection

In summer, Anderson and his friends sought out rural swimming holes - in rivers, ponds and creeks - often to be confronted by property owners protecting their illicit marijuana crops with guns.

"Charles Manson used to live up there, serial killers, pot growers and people protecting the properties, people cooking meth," said Salgues, whose father worked for Roederer Estate winery. "Back then, those were the people who used to live there, so at least you knew them. Now it's people who are temporary hired guns."

Anderson enrolled in University of Miami to play on the baseball team, but didn't, and transferred to the College of Marin, eventually dropping out to move to Mexico. He went next to New York, where he did odd jobs like selling suits, telemarketing and moving furniture. He moved back to the Bay Area, and his first novel, the 225-page "Boonville" (Creative Arts, 2001) - which plumbed the depths of his life in the town with hippies, rednecks and yuppies - was written in San Francisco in a single-room-occupancy unit above Caffe Trieste in North Beach, the only housing he could afford at the time.

He has since written a screenplay bought by Miramax, developed a TV series for FX channel, executive-produced Tom Waits' "The Black Rider" at American Conservatory Theater, and co-wrote "Pig Hunt," a 2008 horror flick with his cousin, Zach Anderson, in which a group of multiculti San Francisco friends go to the woods hunting for a 3,000-pound pig and run into life-or-death trouble with survivalist mountain folk and a hidden cult.

On the personal side, in 1999 he married Nicola Miner, the daughter of the late Oracle co-founder Robert Miner, in a small ceremony at San Francisco City Hall. (The auditorium in the new SFJazz Center is named in Robert Miner's honor.) The couple met by chance in Boonville through one of Anderson's cousins on a July Fourth holiday.

"He's dynamic, funny, a great storyteller, profoundly creative, and one of the best, most perceptive readers, viewers and listeners I know," said Miner, who holds a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and is earning a master's in English from Mills College, with the aim of becoming a teacher.

Anderson's uncle, Bruce Anderson, said Miner is a steadying force in his nephew's life.

"She's a conventional, stable person, and I think he's like the rest of us in our family - he needs a stable, strong female person in his life," Bruce Anderson said. The couple live in Pacific Heights with their four children, ages 5 to 12, where the household help includes a babysitter, a housekeeper and a chef three nights a week. The children have been trained to load the dishwasher, fold the laundry and perform other chores.

With childrearing and philanthropic ventures aplenty, Anderson's writing has fallen by the wayside.

"His writing is sharp and wild and angry," said author Daniel Handler of "Lemony Snicket" fame, "and I wish he did more of it."

But Anderson's situation is "not like that of most authors, and I do not just mean the money," said Jonathan Lethem, Pomona College's Disney chair in creative writing and author of "The Fortress of Solitude." The two met after sneaking in to the pool at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles during a booksellers' conference in 1994.

"He doesn't live like an author," Lethem said. "He's not sitting on panels talking about the semicolon. He's a guy living an amazing life, but he's not worried too much about his role as an author. His persona, his childhood and his garrulousness were there before he was with Nicola, and somehow he was never going to be one of us slug-like novelists. He was going to live a different life, and he did."

The once-starving artist and his wife, both Democrats, now donate to the Natural Resources Defense Council; Dave Eggers' nonprofit, ScholarMatch; a variety of San Francisco arts groups; and Planned Parenthood, and they provide college scholarships to Boonville students, among other things.

In February, Anderson and Miner opened their home to a $35,800-per-person fundraiser for President Obama, enlisting Al Green, Charlie Musselwhite, Booker T. Jones and Les Claypool to help with entertainment, as the "house band."

But looming large before the November election is the SFJazz project. Once it is complete, Anderson hopes to delve back into writing, perhaps in the Hammett apartment at Post and Hyde streets. The view out the fourth-floor window is nearly the same today as it was in the late '20s. Even though the city has grown larger, the cars and fire engine sirens creating big-city clamor outside, there is something soothing about the space, with light streaming through wheat-colored curtains. Visitors are lulled into the feeling they've stepped back in time.

That is, until Anderson opened his mouth. "You want me to John Wayne it?" he asks the photographer, slapping one foot on the seat of a chair and leaning over his knee in a take-charge stance.

No thinly mustachioed gent here, a la William Powell in the "Thin Man," but a blue-collar boy who by virtue of marriage is now flush.

"I'm more of a cross," he said, "between Cary Grant and Jerry Lee Lewis."

Carolyne Zinko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. czinko@sfchronicle.com