Frizzelle Feels Protege Has Betrayed Him : Politics: Assemblyman faces challenge by colleague Tom Mays in newly constituted 67th district in which they both reside.

With more than a trace of irony in his voice, Assemblyman Nolan Frizzelle (R-Fountain Valley) explains how he taught colleague Tom Mays (R-Huntington Beach) a thing or two about politics.

He hired Mays more than a decade ago to be a part-time intern in his Orange County district office. And when Mays ran for Huntington Beach City Council, Frizzelle and his wife managed the campaign, supplied volunteers, penned campaign literature and held strategy sessions around their dining room table.

But there was one thing Frizzelle now says he overlooked.

“I forgot to teach him loyalty,” the 11-year legislative veteran complains bitterly.

These days, Frizzelle is making no secret how betrayed he feels by the onetime protege who has decided to run against him in the newly constituted 67th Assembly District rather than move out before the June primary election.

A California Supreme Court panel, in redrawing the lines, lumped both men into the same Assembly seat during reapportionment. The miracle of electoral map making has set up an awkward contest between teacher and pupil, Old Guard and the New.

To Mays, it is a matter of harsh political reality, not fealty.

“I’ve been a personal friend of Nolan’s, and I’ve been loyal to him for 12 years,” Mays said. “Now, I’ve got this situation where I don’t have any other alternatives. And I’m not looking forward to it.”

In general, showdowns like this are avoided in politics through the gentlemanly rule that officeholders of the same stripe stay out of each other’s way. In San Diego County, two Assembly members also hemmed into the same district by reapportionment simply got together, looked at the voting patterns and politely agreed on who would be moving on to an adjacent seat.

No such luck in Orange County, where Mays and Frizzelle are both stubbornly staking a claim to the gold mine of conservatives in Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley.

The result has been a squeeze play on Republican faithful who, as in a messy divorce, must choose sides.

“I’m caught in the middle with two people I like very much,” said former Huntington Beach Mayor Wes Bannister, who served with Mays on the council but has campaigned for Frizzelle in the past. “If I could, the nicest thing I could do is stay neutral. But Nolan’s too good of a friend . . . and so is Tom.”

“You’ve got almost a father-and-son relationship . . . ,” he said about the two. “This thing’s like incest.”

Bannister, now an insurance executive, was forced to make the agonizing choice days after the court unveiled its preliminary district maps last month. Frizzelle and Mays telephoned him hours apart to lock up his support. In the kind of pretzel logic that exemplifies the underlying conflict, Bannister agreed to serve on the steering committee for Frizzelle’s primary campaign--although he believes that Mays will win handily.

“I think Tom will beat the heck out of Nolan, to be honest with you,” he said.

Whatever the outcome, Orange County voters will face a choice that’s as much generational and stylistic as anything else.

Frizzelle, 70, is a white-haired, avuncular figure who can be irascible and long-winded. He is one of the “cavemen,” the archconservatives Orange County exported to the Capitol during the Reagan Revolution. The former optometrist has refused to play the Sacramento game, retreating instead to his partisan perch to bash liberals, vote reflexively against bigger government and plot ways to have soul mates elected.

Mays, 37, is dark-haired, articulate, painfully polite--the new kind of Republican who wears a red tie with smiling faces. He approaches the Legislature more like an efficiency expert than a back-slapping party loyalist. A former McDonnell Douglas systems analyst, Mays has shown a willingness to engage the Democrats in a nonpartisan spirit and has criticized his own leaders for being long on talk but short on action.

The most obvious difference between the men is over the environment.

Catapulted to fame as the surfer mayor during the Huntington Beach oil spill, Mays favors some environmental controls. As a rookie assemblyman, he pushed last year to firm up restrictions on coastal oil drilling. In contrast, Frizzelle has always been a supporter of offshore drilling and, days after the 1990 environmental disaster, voted against a tough oil spill bill.

Yet on most bread-and-butter issues, the two men are ideological twins. They are sympathetic to business, wary of government. Both took part in the Assembly Republican cabal last year that held the state budget hostage for weeks by steadfastly refusing to vote for more than $7 billion in new taxes.

Those are the kind of shared views that brought the men together in the world of Orange County politics. Their paths first crossed shortly before Frizzelle decided to challenge Democrat incumbent Assemblyman Dennis Mangers in 1980.

Mays, a young man with a master’s degree in political science, was eager to help with the nitty-gritty of local campaigns. During the ensuing months, he signed on to help then-Rep. Dan Lungren. And when he heard Frizzelle speak at a local function, he dutifully volunteered for much of the grunt work in his Assembly race as well.

“I did just about everything,” Mays recalled. “Put up signs. Walked the precincts. Helped run the office.”

Added Frizzelle: “He was one of those young guys who put his shoulder to the wheel. He impressed me.”

Frizzelle said he was so impressed, in fact, that he ended up hiring Mays as a part-time employee, responsible for being his “eyes and ears” on local issues. While working full time at McDonnell Douglas, Mays spent up to 20 hours a week attending Huntington Beach council meetings, writing reports, issuing press releases and serving as a Frizzelle surrogate at official functions.

Frizzelle continued to pay Mays to attend Huntington Beach council meetings even after reapportionment pushed the Assembly district below Beach Boulevard. And when council elections came up in 1984, Frizzelle was among those who encouraged his employee to strike out on his own.

“He had been close enough to the council that he knew the issues fairly well, but he didn’t know how to write campaign material or to strategize adequately,” said Frizzelle. “It was around my dining room table that we wrote a number of his campaign pieces.”

Frizzelle’s wife, Ina, served as campaign chairman. The assemblyman helped organize volunteers to walk precincts. He wrote endorsement letters.

It wasn’t enough, however. Mays lost by several hundred votes. When he ran--and won--a council seat two years later in 1986, Frizzelle played less of a part although he still offered advice, Mays said.

The tendrils of local party activities kept the men in touch. And Mays’ parents routinely invited Frizzelle and spouse to join the crowd gathered at their Huntington Harbour home to view the annual Christmas “parade of boats.”

Yet, in retrospect, the election would prove to be a fork in the road. Those who served with Mays on the council said his ties with Frizzelle weakened over the years as he “matured” into a solution-oriented officeholder. His style became much different than that of his former boss.

“It’s like talking to petrified wood, sometimes, when you carry on a conversation with Nolan,” said a former colleague. “And I think Mays is a bit embarrassed by that. I think (Mays) has changed a lot.”

Frizzelle acknowledged that he has been a bit disappointed by some of Mays’ positions, especially votes for government-induced redevelopment in downtown Huntington Beach. But the veteran lawmaker appears just as hurt by the fact that his onetime protege grew distant and didn’t seek counsel after winning election to the Assembly in 1990.

“He didn’t consult with me very much,” Frizzelle said. “I expected him to, but he had his own independent view. . . . We’re friendly but uncommunicative.”

Even those friendly relations, however, have become strained since the state Supreme Court panel released its Assembly redistricting map on Dec. 2. It rearranged the boundaries so drastically that Mays, Frizzelle and Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress) wound up living in the newly created 67th District.

The move took Long Beach away from Mays, whose district office is in that Los Angeles County community; Frizzelle lost all or parts of Irvine, Costa Mesa and Tustin. Both men would keep between 130,000 and 140,000 of their current constituents.

Most important, the court’s move would unite Huntington Beach, which had been split 60%-40% between Mays and Frizzelle. Since nearly half of the district’s 109,400 registered Republican voters live there, Mays has decided to stay put and stake his claim as former mayor.

“It’s a little difficult to move away from that base of support,” Mays said. “I’ve talked to a lot of supporters, and there was not one person who felt I should move. They felt I would be abandoning my community. . . . There are just too many roots there after 20 years.”

Mays delivered the news to his former boss in a telephone call. “I said, ‘Nolan, I really don’t have any other choice,’ ” Mays recalled.

Frizzelle wasn’t thrilled.

“It seemed to me there were other areas he could run in,” said Frizzelle, suggesting a Mays candidacy would do well in Long Beach.

The showdown between mentor and protege will have some mutual supporters running for cover, said Jim Richheimer, past president of the 2,300-member Huntington Beach-Fountain Valley Board of Realtors.

“I think what you’re going to see is a lot of people aren’t going to say publicly who they are going to back,” said Richheimer, who declined to state a preference. “It’s definitely an uncomfortable situation.”

So uncomfortable, in fact, that when both politicians showed up for a dinner in Richheimer’s honor last month, “we didn’t put them at the same table.”

As the behind-the-scenes wrangling for support and contributions intensifies, Frizzelle and Mays vow to run a clean, hard race--despite the regrets.

“I guess you can look at it as a changing of the guard, but it’s forced by the court,” Mays said. “I feel strange running against a friend and someone I’ve known for a long time. Unfortunately, there’s nothing else I can do.”

Added Frizzelle, his onetime mentor: “I wouldn’t do it. . . . I didn’t do all those things to obligate him and I didn’t do it to make him feel responsible to me, (but) I would feel loyalty to a person and the area too.”