Free-For-All : With no incumbent to chase, 24 mayoral rivals are each scrapping for a piece of the electorate, dividing a city desperate for unity.

Julian Nava can’t stand it any longer. The Cal State Northridge history professor and long-shot candidate for mayor of Los Angeles has appeared at a dozen forums in front of hundreds of voters and still hasn’t had a chance to mix it up with his so-called “top-tier” rivals, who have passed up several debates to dial for dollars and glad-hand potential contributors.

Nava, running his campaign on a shoestring budget and hopes of free press coverage, peers down the long dais set up in the ballroom at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and sees, to his satisfaction, that City Councilman Michael Woo has shown up. When it comes time for Nava’s two-minute introductory talk, the former ambassador to Mexico grabs the microphone.

“Boo hoo, you’ve got me looooking for Woo” he croons in a fairly decent tenor, to the tune of a 1930s song about a jilted bride waiting at a church. “Although Mike’s trying to hide, I know he’s got to come outside, Mike Woooooo, you’ve got us looooking for you. Are mayor’s forums taboo for you, or will you speak out tooooo?” Nava, who has not exactly been wowing voters with his proposals to institute a citywide salary tax and give green-card holders the vote, is suddenly the man of the moment. The crowd thunders with applause.

A few days later, Richard Riordan, the wealthy white Republican in the race, sits staring out at a crowd of nearly 300 African-American voters at First African Methodist Episcopal Church, the most influential black church in the city. He is frozen in mid-speech, unable to decide upon the proper word for the 1965 Watts riots. He finally settles on rebellion after a six-second pause that lasts an eternity. Audience members laugh so hard that some actually weep. Later, however, Riordan wins sustained applause for his comments on attracting small businesses and fighting crime.

There, in two snapshots, you have the surreal quality of this campaign: on one hand, an almost small-townish buffoonery; on the other, a spooky streak that plays to the city’s deep recession-ridden, post-riot anxiety. In the simplest terms, the race is unprecedented for Los Angeles--the first in 24 years in which Tom Bradley is not on the ballot, the first since 1929 to offer no mayoral incumbent. Bradley’s departure attracted a swarm of 24 richly varied candidates, bloating the ballot into what looks like a post-Communist election menu in Eastern Europe.

For all of these reasons, the race is as wide open as the Sargasso Sea, holding out the promise of fertile ideas, fervent political exchange and a frank discussion of how Angelenos can restore their quality of life. Candidates are practically stumbling over one another to issue red alerts about the city’s problems, as they do downtown one night when, in a span of six minutes, Woo tells a crowd of voters that the city “is dysfunctional,” Riordan says the city “is a war zone,” City Councilman Joel Wachs says the city “is in crisis” and Assemblyman Richard Katz says the city “is a mess.”

But against the backdrop of the Waco, Tex., siege, reports of thousands more layoffs in Southern California and the second Rodney King trial, the SOS signals that are emanating from the mayor’s race can barely be heard. There is no superstar candidate, no Tom Bradley, the young police hero whose cachet helped draw an unusually high 57% of voters to the polls in 1973. That year, Angelenos changed direction and moral tone by dumping Sam Yorty, electing Bradley and nearly ignoring third-placer Jesse Unruh, then the powerful Assembly Speaker.

This year, the candidates are stuck elbow-to-elbow in an orchestra pit trying in vain to play solos. Second-tier guys like Nava fear they may get drowned out, so they’re taking risks and pulling goofy antics. And among the half dozen leading candidates, there’s a controlled sense of panic as they become increasingly drawn into a nasty one-upmanship, turning the race into a free-for-all.

AT THE PACIFIC DESIGN CENTER ONE SATURDAY, AN ANGRY NATE Holden, city councilman, leans into a microphone to attack Woo on several sore points between them, including the state of Hollywood Boulevard and the breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which Holden supports and Woo opposes. Holden’s dark eyes glower, his rich voice bellowing up in disgust from seasons of politicking as the perennial outsider. He shouts, “You are a phony!”

Woo, a bland public speaker whose favorite phrase is “in terms of,” responds blandly. “I’m proud of my record,” he says, his toothy expression looking sometimes like a smile, sometimes a grimace. Transit Commissioner Nick Patsaouras clucks his tongue and says, “Shame, shame.” Investor and attorney Riordan starts cracking up. Wachs shakes his head emphatically. “Am I right, Joel Wachs?” Holden demands. Wachs nods, smiling a little troll-doll smile. “You’re right,” he coos into the microphone. The audience variously boos and hoots. At the far end of the table, former Deputy Mayor Linda Griego struggles with what appears to be a sneer. Griego would make clear in interviews later that she prides herself on “not pounding tables.”

Way, way back in January--before Richard Katz called Woo a “pander bear” and Woo called Riordan a “millionaire check writer” and Wachs called Woo a “liar” and Holden called Woo a “nut”--before all that, the mayor’s race had fairly crackled with promise.

This, after all, is post-riot Los Angeles. Ordinary people are supposedly debating over cups of caffe latte and plates of frijoles negros about how to reinvent their city in order to save it. And saving Los Angeles seems plausible to a metropolis that reinvented itself when city fathers brought faraway water to a near-desert in the early 1900s and again when World War II urgently required a huge shipbuilding and military center on the West Coast.

But as the race slouches toward the April 20 primary, from which just two winners will move to a June 8 runoff, few candidates are articulating a grand vision for Los Angeles or demanding a Clinton-like transformation from its citizenry. The unwieldiness of the field has forced the candidates to appeal to slices of the city’s economic and ethnic mixes just when Los Angeles is desperate for some unity. And instead of the big ideas, the campaigns are mired in the incremental, policy-bound, technical changes needed to increase the police force, fix the schools and attract business.

Reporters have grown so desperate for a colorful turn of events that they hand out their home phone numbers to fringe candidates like “Melrose” Larry Green, who gets on TV because he is both fun and offensive. Melrose Larry, a white tax accountant, cries out to the forum of black voters at the First AME Church, “I’m a dark horse! I’m dark! I know what it is to be dark!” sending the crowd into fits of laughter. Late one March evening, a call-in questioner to a KTTV news broadcast adds some off-the-wall zest to the race by asking Katz, live on the air, “Does Howard Stern give you a woody?” Katz deals with the question like a pro, laughing and moving on to the next questioner.

So it is left largely to the long-shot candidates, who have nothing to lose, to talk about the tantalizing possibilities for change. One is Adam Bregman, a fresh-faced, 22-year-old musician in red high-top sneakers who wants to expand the City Council into a several-hundred-member governing body. “I’m the only one who can bring to this city a randomly appointed City Congress, where people would be given time off from work so that each neighborhood can make the decisions that affect their lives, and we would have new urban housing blended with greenery and rooftop gardens, all revolving around regular multiethnic festivals,” Bregman tells a rapt audience of the Progressive Democratic Club in San Pedro.

Write-in candidate Chrystal Starling, a financier and film writer, proposes to “give complete amnesty to every drug dealer in this city and work with the international banking industry to help move these people and their millions of dollars in profits into legitimate businesses and investments.” Doug Carlton’s total platform is historic preservation (“Restoration awaits us!”); taxi driver Randy Pavelko is the only candidate promoting an anti-abortion platform; Frank Teran is running as a born-again Christian. Hopefuls John Borunda, a former policeman, physician Oscar Valdes, homeless advocate Ted Hayes Jr. and City Hall gadfly Leonard Shapiro (“Michael Woo was put in charge of just one thing--the government efficiency committee--and that committee hasn’t met in two months!”) all insist that only an amateur pol can clean up this city.

The improbable candidates for mayor are merely struggling to articulate a new dream for a city that badly needs one. USC professor Kevin Starr, author of four history books on Southern California, says he watched and waited for the leading candidates to clash over the big visions and wrangle over the big picture--especially the massive economic retooling of Southern California that the new mayor must grapple with.

“Los Angeles is like the Venice city-state when it ruled the world, and its mayor’s office has an almost monarchical magic to it,” says Starr. He dismisses the commonly repeated notion that the Los Angeles mayor’s job does not carry enough power, saying the power rests with the quality of the person elected. But, he says, “I can think of only one or two candidates asking, ‘Whither, Los Angeles?’ ”

Starr, it must be noted, supports Patsaouras, who has won praise from many of his rivals for his plan to reinvent the local economy with high-tech manufacturing and to remake the city’s shabby neighborhoods with San Francisco-style districts in which businesses occupy the ground floors and people live above. Patsaouras has Southern California’s resident genius, architect Frank Gehry, on his side.

But he is a long shot, having collected only $300,000 against the millions raised by the four fund-raising leaders, Riordan ($4 million), Woo ($1.7 million), Katz ($1.3 million) and Wachs ($655,000). Laments Starr: “Nick got called a policy wonk for bringing these things up, but these are the very issues that drive urban dwellers around the twist, like Michael Douglas in ‘Falling Down.’ ”

There are plenty of reasonable theories about why the big ideas are being articulated by the long shots while the small ideas dominate the time of the big shots. “People are plenty skeptical,” Katz says of the voters he has talked to, “and that’s why when George Bush gave people his ‘world leader’ vision, Clinton was the one saying how, exactly, he would change things. The pundits are looking for vision, but voters are looking for more police.”

Dick Rosengarten, publisher of the subscriber newsletter California Political Week, sees something else at work. Some candidates are venturing into unfamiliar areas of the city and seeing its worst problems for the first time. Wachs, for one, admits he didn’t understand how afraid black residents are of the LAPD until after the King trial.

“Maybe it’s sinking in that they cannot fix Los Angeles if elected,” Rosengarten says, so they’re focusing on smaller victories. “You know: I can slow down growth a little here, develop more over here, along Metro we can attract business and in the Valley we can concentrate on gangs. That’s how it would sound if they had all just discovered that the city is unmanageable.”

CITY COUNCILMAN AND MAYORAL CANDIDATE ERNANI BERNARDI IS the angriest 81-year-old in Los Angeles because he understands better than most how the race for mayor is being waged, and it makes him damn mad.

While critics sometimes dismiss Bernardi as a fogy obsessed with abolishing the Community Redevelopment Agency, his mind is as quick as his comedic delivery of one-liners against a downtown Establishment that for 32 years hasn’t let him sit at the head of the table. At various forums, Bernardi calls his rivals for mayor “a joke” and accuses them of “talking gobbledygook.”

In a city looking for star power and finding none, his hilarious swipes at inane government institutions make him an instant hit with audiences. It is at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel forum a few weeks ago that Bernardi finally cries something truly incisive into his microphone. “These candidates are waging a high-tech computer war that is turning us into Sarajevo!” he booms. “They are driving this city apart!”

What on earth is he talking about? Not everyone in the audience understands his oblique reference, even though they raucously thump their feet in support of him. But the professional campaign managers huddled in the back of the room understand Bernardi very well.

The moneyed candidates appear to be following the same basic plan: Divvy up the city into its known “voter types” and then use mail, radio, phone calls and TV to pound your message out to the distinct types who look--or sound--most like you. Thus will you gather enough votes to win the primary. (Of course, if there is a second King verdict just before the election, the best-laid strategy could become irrelevant.) Then, in the runoff, instantly transform yourself into a candidate who speaks to all people and multiply your votes into a win.

The early TV campaigns show the splintery nature of things. Katz goes on MTV with a montage of hip urban scenes designed to court 18- to 24- year-olds; Wachs goes after people looking for reliability in a stylish commercial that makes him look mayoral, and Riordan feeds yet another anti-Establishment message to voters who want City Hall to crack down on crime first and foremost.

“The mayor’s race is nobody against nobody, with none of them having a hold on voters, and it’s potentially winnable for a lot of people,” says one veteran Democratic consultant not involved in the race. “It’s a money game of getting your dollars together and then making no mistakes about how to spend it. And it’s a mistake to spend it on voters who don’t already agree with you.”

The consultant says the city generally breaks down into three groups of “true believers” who dominate low-turnout municipal elections: roughly 30% Republican, 18% black and 18% Jewish. The remaining 30% or so are a disparate collection of non-Jewish Democrats, gays, Latinos, Asians and others who do not constitute a voter bloc. (In 1990, Latinos comprised 40% of Los Angeles’ total population but only 17% of its voting-age U.S. citizens and just 11% of registered voters, according to a consultant’s report to the City Council.)

Few consultants expect a rousing turnout, in part because the mayor’s race in 1989 drew only 24% of registered voters. This year, there are no superstar candidates or juicy ballot issues to tempt the armchair voters. If April 20 is as bad as 1989, as few as 350,000 voters in a city of 3.2 million might participate. And in the bizarre mathematics of a 24-way race, the top two winners might draw only 15% of the vote, or as few as 52,000 votes each, to make the runoff.

Candidates are spending fortunes to identify, down to street addresses, the active voters (anyone who voted in a few recent elections) who may be on their side. Having found them, the candidates will carry on a robust dialogue directly with these clusters. Everybody else “gets crow,” says the consultant.

Even candidate Eileen Anderson, the friendly, middle-aged Irish immigrant who campaigns in a miniskirt, low-cut blouse and colored tights as the “singer, dancer candidate” and delivers her platform speech entirely by song, admits that she narrows her message for the particular crowd. “Pray and support our police and give them a fair shake at the trial,” she croons to a mostly white group at the San Pedro Progressive Democrats forum. Afterward, Anderson confesses, “I don’t include that part with black audiences. I used to, but they hated it, so now I don’t.”

In February, Woo told Newsweek that he calls the 1992 riots an “uprising” before black audiences and a “riot” in front of everyone else. After that, it is no mystery why he gets a lukewarm reception from black voters at the First AME Church. The applause goes to Patsaouras, who says something so direct in his thick Greek accent that it wins the hearts of the nodding crowd: “Do not hear my accent,” he entreats them. “Hear my words.”

Away from the rhetoric, each of the leading campaigns is carefully crafting a secret strategy for making sure the right voters, and enough voters, hear their words. The voter-rich San Fernando Valley and Westside are shaping up as key battlefields as Katz, Riordan and Wachs operate from Valley-based headquarters to pull in thousands of Jewish, senior citizen and other likely voters.

“We have identified six major voter groups who will back a candidate like Joel,” says Wachs’ campaign consultant, Harvey Englander. “But of course I can’t tell you who those groups are. That’s strategy information.” Wachs wasn’t given much of a chance a few months ago, but he did well in early polls, running second. At his campaign headquarters, instead of high-priced consultants, you’re more likely to find people like retiree Oscar Stoller, who remembers how the senior citizens were going to lose their Colfax Avenue recreation center before Wachs stepped in. “We didn’t ask, but Joel Wachs came up with the rent for us,” Stoller says.

At Riordan headquarters in Encino one Saturday, Mike Dolan, who ran the volunteer effort for MTV’s Rock the Vote, gives 50 Riordan volunteers a pep talk, suggesting an old tactic for getting inside the security apartment complexes that dominate the Valley.

“Ring the buzzer, and when they answer, you say, ‘Western Union,’ ” Dolan says. “When they come downstairs and say, ‘I thought I heard Western Union,’ you say, ‘No no, Lester Newman. I’m a precinct worker. May I come in?’ ”

Riordan’s volunteers use a huge map of the city, marked in colors that signify how individual precincts have voted before. The pale blue areas, a volunteer explains, signify streets with voters who are highly interested in Riordan and likely to go to the polls. Riordan has been trying to attract Republicans and Ross Perot Democrats who don’t trust politicians. But when a reporter asks a volunteer if “the blue streets are Republican,” one of Riordan’s consultants puts an abrupt halt to the discussion. “This is a reporter,” snaps the consultant. “She can look at the map. That’s it.”

At Katz headquarters in Sherman Oaks, consultants are tackling the “Sacramento anonymity” problem by fighting to increase his name identification among his likeliest supporters. A harried Peter Taylor, campaign manager, barks into a phone, “Can you tell me why Richard is going to a high school when he’s so booked up?” A disembodied voice replies via speaker phone: “Yeah. There are going to be about 100 voting parents there, and they were the state football champs.” Taylor sighs. “I see. We’ll have to work it out,” he says.

Katz is the closest thing to a Bill Clinton in the race, and he touts the fact that Clinton’s election guru, James Carville, is giving him advice. A centrist who backs the death penalty, Katz also wrote tough environmental protection laws and is a strong supporter of women’s rights. But he can’t afford to miss important high school functions. Still, Katz has been oddly reserved at forums, his flat, unemotional voice sometimes obscuring his message, his thick black mustache hiding a brilliant but seldom-seen smile.

Garry South, Woo’s communications director, says the race is so fluid and voter preferences so volatile “that despite the best planning and strategizing, money can change everything.”

On a warm afternoon at Woo election headquarters in a sixth-floor Chinatown office, the door to a tiny inner office swings open. A damp blast of body heat pours out. Inside, Woo and several volunteers look up, phone receivers to their reddened ears. They smile lamely. They are dialing for dollars, asking utter strangers for money. It’s not a pretty sight. “We spend an inordinate amount of time fund raising,” says South, “and it never gets any easier. There’s just not that much money out there.”

Woo is the only “multicultural” candidate who is basing his campaign on keeping intact the liberal-leaning black and Jewish voter bloc that largely stuck by Bradley. He continually reminds voters that he was the first City Council member to demand that former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates step down. But lately he’s been fending off credibility-gap problems. The Times revealed that Cathay Bank, long dominated by Woo’s father, hadn’t made a loan to a black person in two years; Woo, once a stockholder at Cathay, says he had no influence over the bank. Then there was Woo’s decision to enlarge his Silver Lake home in 1991, after which he backed a law that made such hillside remodeling almost impossible.

Rosengarten, of California Political Week, who has been handicapping the candidates’ chances of winning since last year, notes, “We are always looking for the big turning point in a big race, and the attacks on Woo may have been it.” Rosengarten rated Woo as the early front-runner, as did the polls. But, he says, “Woo could self-destruct in the black community, and if he does, the black vote could splinter in a thousand new directions.”

HE RACE IS SUCH A CRAPSHOOT THAT CONSULTANTS FOR SOME leading candidates privately admit that if any of the lesser-knowns suddenly win the California Lottery, the race could be upended.

One consultant to a leading candidate says that if Stan Sanders, the Parks Commission president, had $1 million, “we’d be running scared because he looks like Hollywood and is a Rhodes scholar.” Says another consultant: “We’d be in deep doo-doo against Patsaouras if he had big money, because he is a consultant’s dream, a guy who speaks in sound bites.”

Voter preferences for the top candidates seem remarkably soft. When the Daily News polled 100 people leaving a debate at Los Angeles City College, they found that more than half had abandoned their candidate for somebody else after seeing the choices up close.

Typical is the comment of Joan Wilson, government affairs manager for the giant Southland Corp., owner of 7-Eleven stores. In March, she attended her second forum, which was sponsored by the Central City Assn. “I have a few favorites, and I know most of them personally,” Wilson says. “But the truth? Nobody has really drawn me in.”

Because none of the candidates appear to have a lock on bloc voters, they’ve been trying to upstage their rivals at the forums by taking personal whacks at them and acting like badly behaved game-show contestants. Woo, Katz, Wachs and Holden especially have been at one another’s throats. The fur began to fly in mid-March, when Wachs called Woo “a charlatan” for trying to win black votes by demanding that banks receiving city deposits, like Cathay, be required to make loans to minorities.

The very next day, Woo chomped on Katz, accusing him of low moral character for dropping his support of an above-ground monorail in the San Fernando Valley after getting campaign money from a subway builder. A steaming Katz then called Woo a “hypocrite” for bragging about sponsoring ethics reform laws and then violating local and federal contributions laws himself.

At a forum late one evening in Brentwood, Patt Morrison, veteran Times writer and public TV co-host, wearing her trademark distinctive hat, holds up an exercise timer, which will signal candidates when their time is up. But despite her warning, several candidates quickly become unruly, with Nava and Wachs talking faster and faster after hearing their buzzers. Others step on their rivals’ answers, making disparaging cracks.

Morrison draws a six-inch-long hatpin from her hat and waves it ominously in the air. “Don’t make me use this!” she cries. The group promptly simmers down. Among the upstarts sits the restless but quiet Riordan, his fingers picking at a tablecloth hem. When called to answer, his voice wavers like an Edison recording from the 1930s. But he is one of the few who politely stop when the buzzer sounds.

Maybe that’s because Riordan realizes that the forums are just window dressing for the real race--the one via airwaves and mailboxes. Riordan donated $1 million of his fortune to his campaign and blasts his opponents for accepting public funding for theirs. He’s sending out slick mailers with one crystal-clear message: Nothing will change for Los Angeles until crime is tackled head-on.

With half the money of Riordan, Wachs uses these public appearances to aggressively tout his idea for 106 neighborhood councils to meet citywide and advise the City Council. His huge eyes dart around the audience that night, his large body bobbing in the chair, his small hands chopping the air expressively. He glares at Morrison. He ignores her buzzer.

Almost every one of the top 11 candidates has had a day or night when the crowd has swung magically into his or her camp, even if only for an hour. Even Tom Houston, who has drawn hisses for his plan to deport illegal-immigrant gang members, has won a few evenings. It is always unpredictable. This night, the well-heeled homeowner group gravitates toward Holden, who eloquently describes growing up with racism in 1940s Georgia. They applaud wildly when Holden says he went to court as a city councilman to force stores to lock up spray-paint cans. The law, designed to end graffiti, took effect last month. “You’re an impressive man, Mr. Holden,” a middle-aged woman tells him afterward. “I’d like to volunteer for your campaign.”

FINALLY, IT’S “MAYOR” Carvey to the rescue. The scene is the Columbia Bar and Grill, Hollywood. A fashionable crowd of yuppies is crammed inside for a private $250-per-person party for Katz. But the star attraction is “Saturday Night Live’s” Dana Carvey, whose wife once worked for Katz in Sacramento and is now a family friend.

Carvey tools up to a small stage, grabs the microphone and launches into a wacky, off-color diatribe against every sacred cow, attacking Jerry Brown, President Clinton and every single candidate for mayor, including his very own Richard Katz.

“Jerry Brown would like to extend the monorail from Disneyland up the 405 because it’s festive,” says Carvey in his wheedling, whining Garth voice. “And Richard’s the guy who wanted to turn the L.A. River into a freeway!” The audience guffaws and hoots. Reading from a list that ranks the top candidates for mayor, published by California Political Week, Carvey skewers each candidate mercilessly.

Carvey tells a “knock-knock” joke. “Knock, knock. Who’s there? Woo. Woo who? Don’t cry, he’s not mayor yet.” The audience roars. Carvey moves on to Joel Wachs. “He don’t got a prayer in hell. He has a broad range of support. That means he don’t mean nothin’ to nobody.”

Next up, Linda Griego, who enjoys the support of Emily’s List and other key women’s groups: “She’s just trying to prove her manhood. She’ll probably want to go to lesbian bars with Katie Couric.” The audience groans. Some women hiss. “Now, here’s a column (of candidates) called ‘the others,’ ” Garth whines. “Now that’s where you don’t want to be in life.”

In the final weeks of the mayor’s race, Carvey’s acidic humor may start sounding tame as the candidates scramble for votes and are drawn into what some consultants expect to be the priciest mudslinging Angelenos have ever witnessed. No choice, say the candidates’ consultants, who argue that in a field this large, with voters not exactly revved up, candidates will do whatever is required to get noticed.

Translation? Mud is going to flow like the slopes of Pacific Palisades on a rainy day.

At a recent downtown luncheon, six of the leading candidates are asked to pledge not to attack one another. Wachs leans into a microphone and states simply, “No. We have an obligation to point out who is playing with the truth and defend ourselves.”

But there will be moments, amid all the tactics and smears and techno-babble, when the candidates will take a breather from it all to talk about the big dreams, the vision thing, the grand plans that people like Adam Bregman, Chrystal Starling, Eileen Anderson and Melrose Larry Green would like to hear.

“We will talk about vision, but I’ll tell you it is going to be tricky,” says Katz, yelling over his car phone one hectic afternoon. “I was at a forum in Los Feliz last night, and they asked us about our vision, and they asked us to be specific. Then they said you each have 60 seconds. Okay, in 60 seconds, I talk about a city that works, one in which people can actually get to work, and where kids can go to school for six hours a day without getting shot. Then time’s up.”

It is away from the forums and press conferences that the dreams have time to emerge. Late one night, after meeting with a group of supporters, a tired-sounding Michael Woo pauses for a moment to speak about what people expect in a city like Los Angeles.

“To be something they can’t be someplace else,” he says, “the best possible aerospace engineer, the best possible trombone player. . . . There is something about a big city that encourages people to be their best. It is the competition, the quality of people all converging in one place. But Los Angeles is becoming dysfunctional, no longer the laboratory of innovation. This is a chance to give life back to that dream of what a city is all about.”