McGovern’s Latest Campaign: Filling Rooms at the Inn : Politicians: The 1972 presidential candidate has bought a faded hotel. His first business venture is teaching him lessons he never learned in office.

People still waylay George McGovern as he walks down the corridors of the Stratford Inn or chats by the fireplace in the lobby.

Sometimes they want his opinions on the lofty kinds of issues politicians are accustomed to addressing: “Is this guy Gorbachev for real?” “Do we dare let those Germans get back together?” And the perennial favorite, “What’s the matter with you Democrats anyway?”

Other times, they want more towels.

It’s humbling, McGovern says. One might think that the 67-year-old former senator--who carried just one state and the District of Columbia in the 1972 presidential election, lost his 18-year Senate seat in the Ronald Reagan avalanche of 1980 and made an unsuccessful run at the Democratic nomination in 1984--had been sufficiently humbled already.

But no, McGovern had to go buy this faded 150-room motor inn off the Merritt Parkway and start worrying about boiler breakdowns and driveway resurfacing.

This is McGovern’s first business venture. He visits the place every other weekend, flying up from his Washington home to putter about with paint brushes and fabric swatches, confer with the managers and urge that bananas be offered with the breakfast cereal.

“Every picture that hangs in this place, I hung; every inch of wallpaper I picked out,” he says, happily surveying his refurbished dining room, all brass sconces and hanging ivy. “I ordered the grand piano so people could gather round and sing. . . . I think a hotel should kind of reflect the personality of the owner, and this one is beginning to.”

A curmudgeonly conservative might surmise that this is why the inn--officially reopened last year at a reception featuring a bald eagle ice sculpture, bagpipers and an impromptu address by the ebullient new proprietor--is operating in the red.

One slow recent weeknight, when temperatures were nearly sub-Arctic, the inn was one-third full. Only four tables in the dining room were in use at 7:30 p.m.--of which one was occupied by the staff, one by a reporter and one by a recently engaged young couple enjoying a complimentary dinner meant to lure wedding bookings.

But McGovern points out that the 30-year-old Stratford, once a local institution, had grown noticeably down-at-the-heels by the time he purchased it in late 1988.

“Other hotels began to come into the area, and the people that owned it kind of got discouraged and just let it go downhill.” Like any older building, it has demonstrated a sponge-like ability to absorb renovation expenditures, and that, McGovern says, is the cause of his temporarily bloodied balance sheet.

The inn, he says with true entrepreneurial dauntlessness, “is going to go. It’s got too much going for it not to.”

(Notes from a recent stay: Staff efficient and very friendly. Room spacious, well-priced at $65, needs a reading lamp. Mattress nicely firm. No room service. Broiled scallops a tad bland. Check TV reception in Room 305.)

A boyhood fascination with hotels, undiminished by the thousands he’s encountered on campaign trails and lecture circuits, is being played out here. Main Street in McGovern’s hometown of Mitchell, S.D., boasted two venerable hotels that “always seemed like mysterious, exotic places. I heard stories of what went on there.”

When a high school debate tournament took him to the Radisson in Minneapolis, “I thought I was in heaven. Checking into my own room. Big, thick towels! Hot water! Going down to the dining room and ordering anything you wanted.”

He had now and again confessed this “lifelong love affair” to his pal Jim O’Donnell, who had managed the Stratford Inn in its heyday and who passed the word when the Irish hotel group that owned the inn put it on the market.

The original asking price of $4 million was well beyond McGovern’s reach, despite a tidy income from public speaking at up to $6,500 per chat.

But when there were no takers after a year, McGovern was able to buy the place for $1 million, “a whale of a good buy for a hotel.”

About the time of McGovern’s purchase, O’Donnell says, “I used to catch him sitting in the lobby by himself, staring out the window for an hour and smiling.”

O’Donnell, now the Stratford’s managing director, and Jeanette Weir, its resident manager, actually run the place day to day and so far have staved off the boss’s pressure for bananas. ey turn black too quickly.)

Unlike the fictional Stratford Inn in Vermont that Bob Newhart runs on his eponymous sitcom (on which McGovern made a recent guest appearance), this is not a quaint clapboard antique.

The real Stratford Inn, set into a hillside, has five stucco and brick buildings, a pool and lots of parking, and it looks like a standard-issue motel. The glass-walled dining room does, as the Stratford Inn brochure puts it, overlook “the peaceful Housatonic River” and “rolling hills of trees,” but also gives patrons a good look at the parkway and the vast Sikorsky Aircraft plant across the road.

Inside, though, the renovations have been extensive, and they continue. Bedspreads and drapes, carpets and wall coverings, the fireplace and overstuffed furniture in the lobby--they’re all new. (“He’s great with color schemes,” O’Donnell says of the hotelier.)

The chef’s a recent recruit. Ditto Michael and Marcia, the Top-40 duo that plays the lounge on weekends. Weir and Eleanor McGovern, an ardent gardener, have planted 300 bulbs to ensure a colorful spring.

Besides the $1.5 million lent by Washington’s Century National Bank to finance the purchase and renovation, McGovern has sunk $700,000 of his own into the Stratford Inn.

He could use another million or three to beef up its conference facilities and improve the landscaping; discussions with potential partners are under way. The occupancy rate is “approaching 50%; we haven’t hit it consistently yet,” McGovern reports. “If you want to make money you have to be up around 60%.”

It gives him pause. “It’s a big risk. I don’t have the kind of resources that make you comfortable with that kind of investment.”

This is the sort of situation business types probably have in mind when they harrumph about politicians who never have to meet a payroll.

“I wish I’d done this before I’d run for President,” McGovern says. “It would’ve given me insight into the anxiety any independent businessman or farmer must have. . . . Now I’ve had to meet a payroll every week. I’ve got to pay the bank every month. . . . I’ve got to pay the state of Connecticut taxes. . . . It gives you a whole new perspective on what other people worry about.”

On the other hand, there’s this new contract with a medical equipment firm that’s about to book 30 rooms a night for its trainees, every night for a year.

“That’ll put us in the black almost overnight,” he declares.

McGovern, says manager O’Donnell, is “the most un-negative man I’ve ever met. I don’t think he knows he lost the election.”

Actually, McGovern has not lost sight of that event, but he does put his own particular spin on it. Two walls leading to the dining room are hung with framed magazine covers, autographed photos and other campaign memorabilia.

(Someone lifted the note from L.B.J., scrawled on a pamphlet outlining his position on Vietnam, asking McGovern--vainly, of course--for his support.) The fireplace in the lobby is flanked by glass cases displaying McGovern buttons: the short-lived “McGovern-Eagleton,” the rare “Wall Street for McGovern-Shriver,” the defiant post-election “Don’t Blame Me, I’m From Massachusetts.”

McGovern prints by Alexander Calder and Sam Francis, once used for fund raising, hang here and there around the place. The innkeeper can accentuate the positive in this small corner of New England; he can hang the Miami Herald front page announcing his nomination and not hang a front page bannered with Nixon’s victory.

“I never really felt like a loser,” McGovern says amiably. “Almost before the votes were counted, Nixon was on the way out. Agnew was forced to resign. John Mitchell was on the way to jail with practically the whole White House staff following him.”

Indeed, the NIXON RESIGNS front page of the New York Times is prominently displayed between two phone booths. “You don’t feel quite as rejected as you probably should.”

Anyway, McGovern seems a far more gregarious man than either Nixon or Bob Newhart.

Despite a 100-days-a-year speaking schedule and his college lecturing (at the University of Bridgeport, just down the pike), he’s still happy to press the flesh, welcoming guests, chatting about Poland (Romania, Panama, whatever).

He’s introduced a monthly Sunday forum on contemporary issues, which simultaneously boosts patronage for the $12.95 champagne brunch and lets him and his guest speakers muse aloud about the peacetime economy and such. It’s sort of a low-key, but continuous, campaign.

In fact, on a recent lunch hour, as the senator mingled with guests, asking if they were enjoying their lunches and saying that no, he didn’t plan to run for governor of Connecticut, a camera crew from the Fox television network trailed behind, taping footage and sound bites for an upcoming personalities show.

A minor media event right there in the dining room, overlooking the peaceful Housatonic.