COLUMN ONE : Looking for Love but Finding Headaches : Beverly Hills matchmaker Helena Amram promised clients a chance at romance. But now she has left the country--and many unhappy people want their money back.

Among the pointers matchmaker Helena Amram shares with clients is that they should not expect love at first sight.

Even so, cat lover Sally Dahl wasn’t quite prepared for the guy so allergic to her three pets that he couldn’t stop sneezing. Nor was engineer Herbert Summers entirely ready for the woman who was “not quite divorced,” but was quite fed up with her husband.

“I felt like I was doing therapy,” Summers says.

No amount of romantic advice could have prepared Amram’s clients for the really big letdown. Around Valentine’s Day last year, she abruptly closed her Beverly Hills business, jilting clients who had paid her up to $50,000 hoping for a trip to the altar.

In “Dear John” letters, she blamed the Northridge quake, her health and other “challenges.” She pledged to reopen her business at another location in 90 days.

What she didn’t promise was an office with freeway access. Amram is now in Tel Aviv, on a quiet street in Israel’s capital, far from her mateless Southern California clients.

Amram, who calls herself simply “Helena,” says she is responsible for 7,000 marriages in 28 years. Her “Beautiful Women Don’t Go to Singles Bars” ads made her well-known in Los Angeles; they’ve since been adopted by another matchmaker.

She is quite possibly among the most wanted matchmakers. New York and New Jersey authorities are trying to collect nearly $4 million in refunds she owes ex-clients. In Beverly Hills, she is under criminal investigation by the police allegedly for stranding clients after taking their money.

Amram could not be reached for comment on this story. Discussing her run-ins with the law in an interview with The Times two years ago--before the Beverly Hills probe had been publicly disclosed--she called herself a “stupid businesswoman” but not a “crook.”

At that time Amram presented a letter from a grateful client who had been matched with a man she clearly liked. “Thank you for the attentive service I’ve been receiving,” it said. “M---’s a lovely man. I hope things work out between us.”

Not all of Amram’s hopefuls have been satisfied with her help.

A university educator in Los Angeles, who requested anonymity, says she paid $15,000 expecting to meet Jewish men who were well-educated and in their 50s, like herself. Instead, she said, she was fixed up with “old men” and “losers.”

Her first date, a man in his 70s, told dirty jokes and announced he was “just shopping around.” Next came the therapist who declared “it would never work” because her books and paintings didn’t blend with his New Age decor. A salesman met her at a restaurant with a stack of brochures and tried to sell her a cemetery plot. The last guy, although nice, was “four inches too short” and hadn’t gone to college.

She said that after Amram refused to give her a refund, she took her case to an arbitrator and won. The client had argued that her contract wasn’t valid because it exceeded the three-year maximum for dating service contracts allowed under state law. Amram has not refunded the money.

Beverly Hills Detective Paul Edholm said his file is thick with complaints about rancid Romeos. He described the typical beef: “If you wanted a man who is employed, with all his teeth and a nonsmoker, you got an unemployed, toothless smoker.”

Opened in 1989 at the peak of her popularity in the East, Helena’s Beverly Hills branch on Wilshire Boulevard exuded success . Covering the walls were press clippings lauding her business. There also were photos of Helena with Hollywood stars, snapped at restaurants and charity events.

Amram, 45 and married to a former limo driver, freely dispensed tips on style and beauty; her own look favored heavy makeup, cocktail dresses and gold jewelry. In Hollywood fashion, she gave clients an autographed copy of her self-published paperback and an 8 x 10 lovelier-than-life color portrait of herself.

Her ideas on romance were made for the big screen.

“I would like you to go to dinner, then go on a mini-vacation, to Hawaii or someplace like that, to give it a real chance, you know?” she told a client who called during the Times interview in 1993. “I want you to create the right atmosphere. You know, I really, really feel like you’re going to be crazy about this guy.”

In her brochures, Amram pitched her services to “successful, attractive” professionals too busy to “meet the right person.”

She accepted “only the most desirable people,” she said, all screened to assure “positive qualities in every couple.”

According to former employee Debora Jacobson, nonwhites and people who made less than $40,000 typically were screened out over the phone. Overweight people also were rejected.

“Let’s face it,” Jacobson said, “anyone who has paid that kind of money doesn’t want someone who is fat.”

Singles making the cut were sent to a Beverly Hills psychologist for an assessment, which included an inkblot test, and had their handwriting analyzed. They also had to provide results from an AIDS test.

Test costs were included in Amram’s fees. They started at $5,500 for matches arranged by one of her employees and ran as high as $50,000 when she got personally involved. She guaranteed clients nothing more than one “suggested introduction” every two months without any assurance that a date would result.

“They were writing checks for air,” says another former employee, Susan Fuhrman.

Amram was nothing if not persuasive. Jacobson says she got women to pay her hefty fees by telling them that “when you find your husband, he’ll pay you back” or “it’s an investment in your future.” She showed them Polaroids of good-looking men they might meet through her service.

“Helena gave me the feeling that she would take care of everything and all I had to do was expect my Prince Charming to come calling,” said cat lover Dahl, 62, who now lives in Carmel. “He would love me, adore me, etcetera.”

Dahl, who works as a salesclerk, says she spent $1,000 on a new wardrobe because Amram told her she would meet “wealthy men, millionaires, CEOs.” Instead, she said, she encountered cheapskates.

A self-described film director took her for coffee. A musician sprung for an evening at the Los Angeles County Fair. A prospect in Newport Beach refused to drive to Brentwood to meet her.

Dahl said whenever she asked Amram to refund her $10,000 fee, “she just squelched it.”

“She’d hold my hand and look into my eyes and say, ‘Let’s wait six to eight weeks and try again.’ Her voice was warm, like liquid honey,” said Dahl, who said she has filed a complaint with Beverly Hills police. “I lost my nerve.”

Former employees say Amram resorted to extreme measures to satisfy her ladies in waiting. Faced with a shortage of bachelors over 40, she recruited men at malls, restaurants and bars, going places where beautiful women supposedly don’t.

Men snagged in her dragnets received free Helena VIP memberships, or, as Amram put it, “scholarships.”

One recruit, Canoga Park accountant Sylvan Feld, said he was charmed by Amram, but not by the women she threw at him. Feld said he took them out “as a favor to Helena, to help her out,” although he found most of his dates “neurotic. . . . Don’t you think there’s something wrong when a woman will pay $20,000 to bag a man?”

Men evidently didn’t need to be single to qualify for a “scholarship.” Temple City dentist Terry Mills said he received a free Helena VIP membership three years before the divorce from his second wife became final.

Mills said he told Amram’s junior Cupids he wasn’t “fully divorced,” but it didn’t matter to them.

“They said they had more women than men in my age bracket, and there were a whole lot of unhappy women,” Mills said. Amram, he said, “had a need to fill.”

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Tracking down Amram by telephone from the United States is a bit like playing the children’s computer game, “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”

Amram’s accountant in Los Angeles, Murry Avidon, said she called him about three months ago--while on vacation in Europe, he thought.

A call to her office in Tel Aviv did not reach Amram, but did trigger a series of calls from associates with differing tales about her whereabouts:

Stuart Price, an Encino lawyer, said he was hired by a relative of Amram to put the Beverly Hills company into bankruptcy liquidation. He said he does not know where she is.

A man identifying himself as Ben Baroch called to say he had purchased Amram’s matchmaking service in Israel three years ago, but refused to offer documentation.

Gideon Amram of West Hills, who said he was the relative who hired Price, said the matchmaker has a “secret disease,” which he cannot name, and has been shuttling between hospitals in New York and Jerusalem.

However, a researcher for The Times in Tel Aviv easily located Amram through directory assistance. She made an appointment to go to her office as a matchmaking candidate.

Amram’s office is cluttered with Hollywood memorabilia. On the walls are photos of Amram with stars: Glenn Close, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Morgan Fairchild--plus, for the hometown gang, shots of her with Jerusalem’s mayor and an Israeli Knesset member.

There also is a framed thank-you note from Gov. Pete Wilson to “Ms. Helena Matchmaker.” (The note, for the record, concerns a women’s networking conference.)

Rounding out her collection are framed photocopies of three checks made out to her for $50,000 each. A woman introducing herself as Amram’s sister Nurit told the researcher the checks were “one more recommendation” from customers in Beverly Hills “willing to pay that much for Helena’s help.”

(Israelis pay $5,000 for her services.)

Nurit, who helps interview candidates, encouraged the researcher to think carefully about her decision to look for a spouse.

Not so her sister. “Thinking about it is doing nothing,” Helena told the researcher. “One day you’ll wake up and be 35 and will have missed your chance to have children.”

Helena Amram could not be reached for comment after this encounter.

Amram, by her own account, started as a matchmaker in Israel after the Six Day War in 1967. She was 17. In her book, “Have I Got a Date For You,” she explained: “There were a large number of military widows anxious to remarry.”

In 1979, she left for New York after a report on Israeli television accused her of fixing up women with criminals, married men and Arabs. She sued the TV station for damaging her reputation and won. Awarding Helena $23,000, a judge said the Israeli reporter “did not tell the truth.”

Accused in New York of overcharging clients, Amram’s company in 1980 signed a consent agreement with the state attorney general, promising to limit fees to $250 and pay refunds.

Her business, nonetheless, prospered. By 1989, her Helena VIP International Club had branches in Manhattan, New Jersey, Washington, London and Beverly Hills.

Matchmaking, Amram told the Jerusalem Post in 1990, had made her “very, very rich.” According to two former business associates, the Beverly Hills branch alone had 1,000 clients and took in $2 million a year.

She envisioned a business empire revolving around her matchmaking: a travel club, an investigations service, a syndicated TV show, a cosmetics line.

Prosecutors in New York and New Jersey, investigating complaints from clients about her service, upset her plans. In 1990, they charged in separate court documents that Helena VIP did not live up to its promise of matching people with similar interests. Meanwhile, Amram closed her Washington office and put her London business into voluntary liquidation.

New Jersey authorities booted her matchmaking business from the state as part of a 1992 civil fraud settlement in which she agreed to pay more than three dozen clients $39,000 restitution, $27,000 of which she paid through 1993. She faces penalties of up to $70,000 for failing to make payments in 1994.

In New York, prosecutors accused her of overcharging and produced affidavits from 50 clients saying they had been mismatched. Prosecutors said in court documents that the psychological and handwriting analyses clients received were “canned” with “whole paragraphs rearranged to create the impression” they had been prepared for each person.

In addition, authorities found “no evidence that she had matched anyone up,” said New York Assistant Atty. Gen. Adina Kling. In 1992 a judge ordered Amram to pay $3.7 million in refunds. She lost an appeal in December, 1993.

She won two legal battles with rival Jeffrey Ullman, owner of the dating service Great Expectations. In 1992, Ullman pleaded no contest to slapping her at a Los Angeles trade show. In February, 1994, he paid Amram an undisclosed amount to settle a civil lawsuit stemming from the incident.

Gideon Amram blamed Amram’s departure from Los Angeles on the Northridge quake. He said it left her so shaken that she slept on the lawn of her rented Beverly Hills home even though it, like her office, experienced little damage.

Amram had another reason to feel a bit shaky in January, 1994: She had just lost the appeal of the New York judgment. New York recorded the judgment in Superior Court in Santa Monica that March, but by then, she was gone.

Her big break from Southern California occurred over a February weekend in 1994 when, according to police, she closed her Beverly Hills office, taking $40,000 of leased office equipment but leaving her furniture to cover rent.

She evidently was well-stocked for the trip to Israel. She owes American Express $32,740 from a four-day shopping spree that January, according to a 1994 court judgment obtained by the credit card company. Stopping at Susanna’s, Cache, Nordstrom and other upscale shops, she scooped up handbags, shoes and clothes--plus $1,200 of cosmetics.

Among her spurned clients is Agoura Hills insurance consultant John McFaul who, impressed that her contract contained a “death and disability” refund clause, had paid $6,000 to her company less than two months before it closed, and never got a single date.

He later placed a classified ad in Los Angeles magazine, “Class Action--Seeking Helena.” Although he received dozens of responses--most of them from women--he decided not to sue because Amram no longer was around. He still has the names, though, and is thinking about throwing a mixer to do some matching on his own.

After all, he says, “We paid a lot of money. We should get something out of this.”

Times researcher Emily Hauser in Tel Aviv and staff writer Amy Wallace in Los Angeles contributed to this report.