Putting a Face on the Mayor’s Race

Into the humorless world of Campaign ’97 has stepped Los Angeles’ own guerrilla caricaturist, Robbie Conal, whose Richard Riordan picture--”Tunnel Vision”-- is now posted on various L.A. telephone poles and construction fences.

Anyone who drives the streets of L.A. is familiar with the liberal Conal’s renderings of faces of such famous conservative leaders as George Bush, Bob Dole, Ronald Reagan and Daryl Gates. Riordan, no doubt, will hate the job Conal did on him, portraying his face as being as corrugated as the inside of an old cardboard box. Guys of his vintage--and mine--don’t like anything that emphasizes our wrinkles and this particular texture adds evil as well as age.

But this election needs a provocateur to brighten things up and we won’t get that from either of the candidates--neither the drearily apocalyptic gloom-and-doom Tom Hayden or the buttoned-down mayor.

That’s why, when a colleague suggested I interview Conal, I immediately called the artist and made a date to see him at his home in the West Los Angeles neighborhood of Mar Vista.

He greeted me at the door. He was dressed in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. He offered me a cup of coffee and we settled down to talk in his backyard. His wife, artist Deborah Ross, worked inside, but her mind was on the Oscars. She had done the titles for “The English Patient,” the film that hours later was named best picture.

Conal has been plastering his political posters around Los Angeles since 1986, aided by a band of volunteer assistants. This year Conal got interested in Riordan and his considerable influence over the MTA, which is having all those difficulties with the subway.

I wondered why he made Riordan look so mean. The fact is, Riordan’s a gentle sort, unless you cross him. But Conal has made the mayor fiercer than J.C. Dithers, Dagwood Bumstead’s boss in the “Blondie” comic strip who is always threatening to run Dagwood’s little finger through the pencil sharpener.

“This guy is acting as if he were CEO of Los Angeles,” said Conal. “He represents the business community very well but as far as taking care of people in the neighborhoods who aren’t his cronies, he’s not interested. That’s where tunnel vision comes in.”

What about Hayden? I asked. How would you draw him? Tell me about his character?

He paused. I could see loyalty struggling against insight. Insight won. “I know him a little, but if he became mayor, I could count on him paying me a lot of money not to draw him. . . . I would go after the promises he makes that he might not be able to keep. The twinkle in his eye and the serpent on his tongue.”

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Why are we wasting our precious news space on this anti-Riordan caricaturist?

It’s because a political campaign needs to engage us, needs to get our juices flowing.

We all accepted the silent generation grayness of the Eisenhower era until Mort Sahl showed us what fools the politicians were. Then we laughed, discussed and argued. The silent generation woke up.

I turn on Rush on my way to work in the mornings to hear him rip the pompous hypocrisy of the Clintonites. He’s very funny--and gets my attention more than some deadly tome by an earnest advocate of campaign financing reform.

And whether people hate or love our Paul Conrad, he starts them hammering away at each other over important issues.

Robbie Conal’s wall posters aren’t exactly humor. They’re too dark and bleak for that. Only someone who really can’t stand one of his subjects might laugh.

But they’re eye-catching, especially in a town where wallside art consists of content-light graffiti and concert posters.

Like Mort Sahl and Rush, like Letterman, Leno and Conrad, they make people talk, fight and maybe even vote.