COLUMN ONE : A Man of Conflicting Images : Rodney King remains an unwilling public figure. Some still see him as a symbol of police abuse. But others say his string of encounters with the law show a troubled side.

In the neighborly environs of Altadena, his family and friends know him simply as Glenn. He is a quiet man who sticks close to home. Or he kicks back in a local park with guys he has known since childhood. When he came into a lot of money a year ago, not much changed.

Then there is Rodney. His life isn’t nearly as tidy. Rodney was beaten within a measure of his life by the police. His broken psyche and shattered bones won him $3.8 million, but no amount of money can seem to end his trouble. One of his former lawyers is fighting him for a good chunk of the award and accuses King of slander. And the run-ins with the police just don’t end--there have been eight since celebrity descended on him.

In the four years and five months since he was pummeled by Los Angeles police, Rodney Glenn King has led both of these lives. One day he is waxing like a Rotarian, pleading to save recreation programs at Loma Alta Park and extolling the virtues of his hometown of Altadena. A week later, he allegedly is knocking his wife to the ground while angrily speeding away after an argument.

“This is a man whose life is in conflict or turmoil,” says his lawyer, Steven Lerman. “There doesn’t seem to be any resolution or closure. No matter where he goes or what he does . . . he can’t ever get past March of 1991.”

While King struggles for his personal equilibrium, he presents conflicting public images. To some, he is an unreformed street thug who now is coddled by timid authorities. To others, he is essentially a troubled innocent, beaten once by police and now harassed at every turn.

His videotaped beating made him an international symbol of police abuse and thrust on him the unlikely mantle of leader. That has made for many incongruous moments, the most memorable coming during the 1992 riots that erupted after a jury in Simi Valley failed to convict four officers accused of beating King. After three days of turmoil, seemingly all of Los Angeles turned to this bewildered, reticent high school dropout to deliver some words of healing.

Many African Americans, in particular, still feel a bond with King, hugging him or calling out words of encouragement when they see him on the street. He is viewed as living proof that years of complaints about police abuse were true and that the mistreatment can be overcome.

The Rev. Cecil Murray of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South-Central Los Angeles has counseled and prayed with King several times about what King’s role should be. Murray said he told King that he has the credibility to be a leader. “Coming out of this negative situation, that God can turn to a positive,” Murray said. “When we get higher visibility, then we have a double obligation to put our best foot forward, because we represent not only ourselves but a larger cause.”

King’s approach to his fame has evolved since he was beaten March 3, 1991. It was 14 months before he made his famous plea, “Can’t we all get along?” It was not until late 1992 that, at the direction of the lawyer who is now suing him, he sought a more prominent profile. There were speeches at schools and public forums. Callers to a black-owned radio station described him as “an inspiration” and “a national hero,” and the Rev. Jesse Jackson phoned King to say: “I love you very much, buddy.”

King declined through family members to be interviewed for this story. His lawyer said he is “laying low” after his most recent arrest, trying to find some solace in the life of Glenn King.

Neighbors said they seldom see him around his modest four-bedroom home, part of a tract that fades into the brush-covered foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. His windows often remain shuttered during the day and, at night, an arc lamp and security cameras probe for intruders.

He lives with his wife, Crystal, and her young sons. Severe headaches still come without warning, as does numbness around a reconstructed cheekbone that was crushed in the beating. A broken leg is healed but often goes stiff.

When King, 30, ventures out, it is often to Loma Alta Park, a peaceful niche of ball fields and playgrounds at the base of the foothills. He has been coming to the park since he was a child. He learned to play baseball there. And to swim.

Now, he often slips quietly into the park to watch a baseball game or banter with old friends. His 11- and 12-year-old daughters play there. Penny Daniels, a recreation supervisor who has known him for years, said the park is King’s sanctuary.

“The thing he really likes about this park is that he isn’t crowded or asked about the incident,” Daniels said. “This is a place where he felt like he could escape to and not be bothered and not be harassed. . . . On this level, I know him, and he has always been helpful.”

Although he has never developed into a comfortable or polished public speaker, King agreed recently when his friends asked him to help fight a county budget proposal that would shut down Loma Alta’s recreation programs. He told a meeting of community activists that young people will feel lost if they cannot retreat to the park on hot days or when things are rough at home.

“We were all sort of talking around the sides of that idea,” said Steve Lamb, a member of the unincorporated Altadena’s Town Council. “Rodney got to the main and most important part.”

Not long after the meeting, King and other park supporters met with a reporter from the Pasadena Star News.

“For me this park is a way of, once again, everyone getting along and all coming together,” King said in the interview. “Sometimes, when the government makes so many cuts, you wonder if they realize they’ll be paying in another way when youngsters get in trouble.”

Ronald Matthews, a lifelong friend who has joined in the campaign to save the park programs, said the effort represents a happy symmetry between King’s public and private personas--a chance to use his fame, but in a modest venue.

“He doesn’t want the limelight, but as long as he has some attention, he wants to make the best of it,” Matthews said. “He emphasizes that he wants to keep it here in his own community.”

The recreation staff at Loma Alta and other county parks were saved Tuesday when the County Board of Supervisors voted to reverse some cutbacks. King had told the Pasadena newspaper that he had turned down many outside speaking offers but would continue to speak out for Altadena, his “haven”:

“You take care of your home first and once you take care of home, everything in the world will come together.”

Those words would prove sadly ironic, though, just a week after the interview. In the early evening of July 14, Alhambra police arrested King on suspicion of domestic violence and assault with a deadly weapon.

The incident followed a pattern that is becoming familiar: An allegation leads to his arrest; police claim that he is obstreperous; King supporters claim he is being harassed, and authorities are in a quandary over whether charges should be filed.

In this instance, King and a woman who had been driving with him through Alhambra pulled onto a shady residential street to conduct a noisy argument. The fight attracted the attention of a neighbor, who called 911. Gasping, the witness told the police operator: “He ran her over! He ran her over! He ran her over!”

The woman, later identified by Lerman as King’s wife, had been forced out of the car, then attempted to reach back inside for her purse when King drove off, police said. The car struck her and sent her sprawling to the asphalt, cutting her forehead and leaving her bruised, officials reported.

King sat in jail for a night before he made the $50,000 bail. It is unclear whether he will be charged. Investigators have not been able to contact his wife and are not sure she will cooperate in any prosecution.

With eight police stops on his record in little more than four years, King has been convicted only once, pleading no contest to driving drunk in Downtown Los Angeles in 1993. Five incidents did not lead to charges and two cases are pending. (Before the 1991 beating, King spent a year in prison for robbing a liquor store.)

His most recent police contact, July 21 in Glendale, reinforced the feeling among his allies that he never gets a break.

It was early evening in the city’s downtown commercial district when a man ran up to a police cruiser and reported seeing “a male black running from a group of people carrying a woman’s purse,” according to a police report. He then pointed to King. Police eventually decided that there had been no purse snatching, but first they frisked their suspect, searched his car and determined that the purse on the front seat was his own.

King told the officer he had never run out of a crowd. Obviously agitated and nervous, he demanded to know why he had been stopped, the police report says.

Lerman wonders now if the incident was just a bad practical joke by the witness and asks why police did not see if anyone had lost a purse before stopping King. “It’s the old story,” Lerman said. “A white guy runs out of a store and he is jogging. A black guy runs out of a store and he is a thief.”

Only once since the beating has King been convicted of a crime. But in that case, he for once found himself eclipsed by other news.

On Jan. 19, 1994, the media were too preoccupied with the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake to notice a one-page news release from the Los Angeles city attorney’s office: King had pleaded no contest to drunk driving, been fined $1,438, ordered to perform 20 days of community service, enrolled in an alcohol education program and placed on three years probation.

“I got letters from a lot of angry citizens, people who thought we had let him slide. They didn’t know what had happened,” said Ellen Sarmiento, a supervising deputy city attorney for Los Angeles. “They felt because he wasn’t prosecuted elsewhere that somehow he was going to get away with something.”

A drunk driving arrest this May in Union Township, Pa., could bring King his first jail sentence since his robbery conviction.

King was in the rural community for his father-in-law’s funeral when he ran off the road late at night. He allegedly declined to take a blood-alcohol test after a policeman smelled liquor on his breath.

If convicted of drunk driving, he would face a minimum one month jail sentence in Pennsylvania. Even without a conviction, his refusal to take the blood test could be ruled a violation of his California probation. That could mean up to another six months behind bars.

No trial date has been set.

Friends such as Matthews and Lerman, the attorney, peg many of King’s problems to the 1991 beating. He is still in therapy, nervous at the sight of police and struggling with nightmares about the beating, Lerman said.

Others scoff at the good-guy-done-bad scenario. Don Vincent, the assistant city attorney who defended Los Angeles against the King lawsuit, said King’s problems started long before the beating. Vincent emphasized to the jury in last year’s civil trial that King wielded a tire iron in the 1989 liquor store robbery and that, as a teen-ager, he was convicted of beating a man in an Altadena park. “This is not the nice guy they said he is,” Vincent said in an interview. “He is a man with a violent nature.”

Even the $3.8-million award from the city, given in a lump sum, has not been the balm for King that some had expected.

He has not spent ostentatiously. He lives in a neat, rented home. He bought a Chevy Suburban for himself and a Ford Explorer for his wife. “There is no trip around the world planned,” Lerman said. “He is just investing to plan for his future and his family’s future.”

But exactly how much money King will have to invest remains in doubt.

This month, his lead trial attorney, Milton C. Grimes, sued King for $1 million in legal fees in a lawsuit that also includes a $1.4-million slander claim. Grimes charges in the lawsuit that King went on television and unfairly accused him of trying to abscond with the bulk of the judgment.

During the months he represented King in his fight with the city, the Newport Beach-based Grimes assumed a paternal role. He portrayed his client as a misunderstood, regular guy and pushed King into public appearances. But now Grimes describes his former client as “an impulsive person who is going to have to learn that he is not above the law.”

The lawyer is unabashed about the 25% contingency fee he wants to collect on top of the $456,000 the court ordered the city to pay him. “Everybody forgets all the nights we went sleepless,” Grimes said in an interview. “Waking up at 3:30, 4 o’clock in the morning, sweating, thinking, ‘What has he done to ruin this case?’ ”

“I feel sorry for Rodney King in one way,” Grimes added. “I think what happened to him put him in a situation where, to handle it, required much more character than maybe he has got.”

In the convoluted world of King’s legal affairs, Lerman, who first represented King, then was replaced by Grimes, is back on the case. The Beverly Hills lawyer says Grimes is entitled to either his court-awarded fee or a contingency, but not both. “Just because he is Rodney King doesn’t mean he should be beaten up for fees,” Lerman said.

King’s family has taken about all it can of the media’s pounding. Producers from a tabloid television program have been lurking this month. When an uncle was asked about King recently, he snapped: “Why can’t you leave us alone? We’ve been trying to get over this for four years.”

Others said their distress over the preoccupation with King goes beyond the personal. Lawyer John Burton, who represented one of King’s passengers in the civil lawsuit, said the media’s “grotesque” focus on King would be better directed at police and public officials.

“Here is this poor guy beaten within an inch of his life and never wanted to be any sort of leader,” said Burton, who specializes in police misconduct cases. “Then he is manipulated by all these people and there is a fiasco [with the repeated arrests] and then you have coverage of the fiasco.

“Meantime, we still have people being beaten and murdered by the police. That’s where the real focus should be.”

Michael Zinzun, a community activist who has successfully sued police for abuse, said the black community’s interest and admiration for King will endure.

“We should look at what he suffered and came out of and not worry about emulating every thing the person does positively and negatively,” Zinzun said. “He is still a role model in terms of survival and strength and a call for justice.”

First AME’s Murray said King can be more effective if he can “subdue his appetite . . . his personal desires. We cannot afford to have the mainline white Establishment look for things where he can be negated, because not only is he negated, his whole cause is negated.”

Mark Whitlock, director of FAME Renaissance, the economic development program of the church, said past mistakes should not disqualify King from a spokesman’s role.

“If Richard Nixon can represent our country and Michael Milken can go lecture on business” at UCLA, said Whitlock, “then why not have Rodney King talk about revolutionizing the criminal justice system in our city?”

Times staff writer Jeff Leeds contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Police Log

Since his March 3, 1991, beating by Los Angeles police, Rodney G. King has had eight encounters with law enforcement. Most have not resulted in criminal charges:

* May 11, 1991: Pulled over by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies in Santa Fe Springs for illegally tinted windows. His car registration was expired and he was not carrying a driver’s license.

* DISPOSITION: Not cited.

* May 28, 1991: Arrested in Hollywood after LAPD officers said he tried to run over an undercover vice officer who caught him with a transvestite prostitute. King told authorities he thought the officer was a robber.

* DISPOSITION: No charges filed.

* June 26, 1992: Arrested at his Studio City apartment after his wife claimed he had injured her in a fight. She declined to file a complaint.

* DISPOSITION: No charges.

* July 16, 1992: Arrested on suspicion of drunk driving in Orange. His lawyer says stress from the beating may be causing King to drink excessively. Later, the lawyer says King was targeted because of his race.

* DISPOSITION: No charges.

* Aug. 21, 1993: Crashes into a block wall in Downtown Los Angeles. Breath test reveals blood-alcohol level more than twice the legal limit.

* DISPOSITION: Voluntarily entered 60-day alcohol rehabilitation program as part of his parole in his earlier robbery conviction. Later convicted of DUI, fined $1,438, ordered to perform 20 days of community service, enrolled in an alcohol education program and placed on three years’ probation.

* May 21, 1995: Drives off the road in Union Township, Pa. A patrolman allegedly smells alcohol on King’s breath but the suspect declines a blood/alcohol test.

* DISPOSITION: Trial pending.

* July 14, 1995: Arrested by Alhambra police on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon and domestic violence after allegedly knocking his wife to the ground with his car.

* DISPOSITION: Investigation ongoing.

* July 21, 1995: Stopped and questioned on suspicion of purse snatching when a witness claims he saw King running from a crowd in downtown Glendale, carrying a woman’s purse. King tells officers that he was not running and that the purse belongs to him.

* DISPOSITION: Police determine that no crime had occurred.