Perot’s California Roar: 500,000 Scratching Pens : Campaign: From mall to shining mall, his backers are gathering more than the required signatures to greet him on his upcoming visit.

The tuneful tinkling of a white baby grand makes an unlikely soundtrack for revolution. But while brass bands may come later, it has been the music of a Ross Perot rebellion gathering force in California from shopping mall to shopping mall.

No one will yet say just how many signatures Perot organizers have collected in their bid to win the maverick Texan a spot on the state’s November ballot. But even as Californians try to catch their political breath, Perot and those backing his expected presidential bid are preparing to deliver a major jolt.

Their petition-table appeal has already tapped a middle-class unease that smolders here even among indoor fountains and kiddie carousels. Now, Perot has told associates he intends to hold rallies in the state within the next two weeks. And the Ventura-based committee coordinating the Perot cause in California envisions using the occasion to transform their long lists of signatures into a primal political scream.

“We want to send . . . Washington a shock wave,” says Mike Norris, a top organizer in Los Angeles.

The Perot camp need not submit petitions signed by the required 135,000 registered voters to state election officials until Aug. 7. But to maintain the drive’s momentum, his supporters hope to greet the candidate in mid-June with a “first installment” of 500,000 signatures.

There is little doubt the Perot camp can meet that goal. The evidence from public opinion polls and dozens of interviews with Perot volunteers and petition-signers around the state makes it clear that he has tapped a powerful strain of discontent.

To Californians, Perot’s attraction as an alternative to President Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton is also such that a swelling army of volunteers has come to regard his expected independent presidential bid as less a campaign than a cause.

But as Perot sets his sights on California’s 54-electoral-vote prize, he faces the danger that his rebellion could founder on its internal tensions. Its up-from-the-roots structure has already bred rivalries over influence and direction. And the disenchantment it feeds from may be more apt to produce passing protest than enduring support.

“A great amount of the interest in him is simply an indicator of protest,” acknowledges 67-year-old Walter Spears of Sherman Oaks, a full-time Perot volunteer who recently was gathering petition signatures for him at the nearby Galleria.

Even if that is the motivation, a measure of the movement’s surprising strength could be felt as Californians voted in Tuesday’s primary.

Perot held no place on any ballot and the Perot petition committee made no formal effort to encourage supporters to write in the candidate’s name. But some Perot supporters around the state set up shop as close to polling places as legally possible and were rewarded with a flood of support from disgruntled voters who added their names to the petitions aimed at putting him on the ballot in the next election.

“It’s just a lack of enthusiasm for the other guys,” explained 29-year-old Jeff Stuart as he stood near a Perot petition table just 101 feet from a Brentwood polling place. Nearby, Democratic and Republican monitors looked on with visible unease.

Stuart, a medical resident at UCLA, had cast his Democratic vote for former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. He said a California groundswell of support for Perot could, at minimum, “make sure the candidates have to address why people are disenchanted.”

At the same Brentwood polling place, Jean Leserman hadn’t decided as she parked her car whether she would cast her Republican vote for President Bush. But she had no second thoughts about pausing on the quiet street to add her name to a list on which Perot volunteers were collecting about 30 signatures an hour.

“I think I would like to have another choice,” she said. “I think it’s time to take a look at somebody who is watching out for what is happening in this country.”

Their voices are part of an oddly unified chorus that can be heard across the state. It is sounded by voters who say they have never before paid much attention to politics but now eagerly grasp for a pen.

In a matter of weeks, settings better known for Valley-girl accents and political apathy have now become places where a Victoria’s Secret saleswoman like Linda Pappas rushes up to Perot supporters to ask: “Does it take a long time to sign up?”

“Maybe it’s time for a change,” the 23-year-old said after signing her name to a Perot petition at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. She had seen the Texas tycoon in a television interview the night before and was impressed. “You know, maybe we should just restructurize the whole thing.”

To be sure, some of those who stop by to add their names do so with a whisper of disbelief. “There’s something really scary about someone who comes from nowhere,” 29-year-old Christy Varga said after adding her name to one of the petitions.

But the procession is more often marked by the kind of discontent that offers no room for second thoughts. “Bush has been lousy, and ‘Slick Willie’ (Clinton) is questionable,” says 50-year-old Marty Pell. “So you’ve got to think that maybe it’s time to try someone new.”

The Perot campaign’s Los Angeles headquarters in Sherman Oaks is crowded with dozens of volunteers to the cause, many of them self-employed or retired, most of them well-educated and affluent. Across the state, hundreds have donned official badges to circulate the petitions; thousands more have filled out forms expressing interest in joining the crusade.

Perot sometimes cites such efforts in portraying himself as a passive instrument of popular will. But the California operation also benefits from a quiet orchestration by him and his aides from their Dallas headquarters.

It is Dallas, Perot organizers acknowledge, that has provided an undisclosed amount of money to allow the California steering committee to establish nearly a dozen offices around the state. It is Dallas that quietly offers advice to ensure that the Perot volunteers do not violate Federal Election Commission rules as they accept help ranging from campaign contributions to services.

And it is Dallas that provides advice to 38-year-old Ventura civil engineer Bob Haden, the Perot state coordinator, and the 11 other members of an executive committee that has taken charge of the petition drive in California. The self-appointed panel is made up mostly of professionals without previous political experience, and it limited further access after an all-comers group grew to an unwieldy size. None of its members are paid, but officials said their travels across the state for regular weekly meetings are subsidized by the Perot organization.

A spokesman for the group, Jack Broadbeck, insists that its role is to work “just underneath (of) and support” the volunteer effort. “They’re really on top.”

But officials at the main Perot headquarters are somewhat more candid about the chain of command. “There are a lot of people out there who want to have a piece of this thing,” Dallas-based spokeswoman Susan Davidson says, urging a reporter to put questions only to Haden and Broadbeck, the Dallas-designated “points of contact.”

If the structure has made the Perot effort better organized, it has left some supporters uneasy, and the resulting tensions bring the threat of a movement divided.

A Los Angeles businessman angered the formal campaign by setting up an 800-GO-PEROT number to market his own support efforts. Sellers of Perot T-shirts who operate independently of the structure are accused of profiteering. An Orange County woman charges that the supposed grass-roots campaign has set up “a hierarchy because that’s the only thing they know.”

“There used to be a sign on the bulletin board saying don’t take action without consulting so-and-so,” the woman, Vera Armstrong-Cherry, said in describing a scene at Orange County headquarters. “I think that’s a little ironic when this is supposed to be all about taking action.”

Broadbeck insists that the campaign has no intention of discouraging those who want to serve Perot in their own ways. But he adds somewhat wearily: “This is like trying to organize Tian An Men Square.”

The half-million signatures the Perot organizers hope to pour forth by the middle of this month represent only a first step in grander planning. They intend to continue the statewide petition drive through the Aug. 7 deadline to maximize its impact--and its power to mobilize voters.

And even though Perot has not yet formally announced his candidacy, the organizers have already begun to talk of new tactics when their quarry shifts from petitions to votes. “We are slowly turning this into a campaign,” says Norris, the Los Angeles co-chairman.

In that effort, they hope to capitalize on misgivings made raw by what many regarded as an unsatisfactory presidential primary. With a slogan that touts Perot as “finally, a choice,” the campaign aims squarely at disgruntled voters like Phil Boatwright, a 40-year-old Ventura County Republican who emerged from Tuesday’s vote in a bad mood.

He had cast an absentee ballot for Bush as the “lesser of two evils” compared to Patrick J. Buchanan. But he decided that if he could vote all over again, it would be by write-in for Perot, and he made a trip to the Sherman Oaks mall to register his discontent by seeking out the Perot forces.

As gentle melodies wafted from the nearby piano, Boatwright described a revelation brought on by despair with the major party candidates. “All of a sudden, I thought, ‘This guy’s really legit,’ ” he said of Perot. “He’s kinda like the old Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda, when they played the politicians in the movies. They said, ‘Why don’t we do it like this? Why don’t we just give it a shot?’ ”