The Return of an Incurable Romantic

He called himself “Mr. Romance,” and for a brief, shining moment the name stuck. At his peak market value in the mid-1990s, Robert Badal was L.A.’s self-styled oracle of the amorous. An aficionado of Southern California’s coziest cafes and most rapturous vistas. A gentle, laid-back Valley guy with a knack for dispensing earnest advice to dazed survivors of the Sexual Revolution.

Today Badal is an $11-an-hour Universal Studios guide. He regales tourists with backlot banter and spends his downtime trying to reinvent himself as an amateur Hollywood historian. His fleeting celebrity is a fading memory.

But for a while it seemed that Badal and his smooth alter ego, Mr. Romance, were everywhere: on TV chat shows proffering Valentine’s Day tips to would-be Casanovas; lecturing at colleges and corporate seminars on “50 Unusual and Romantic Things to Do in Los Angeles”; waxing poetic over the Southland’s best places to sample Japanese udon noodles or savor a lonely landscape.

Once, Badal and his wife, Terra Shelman, were even profiled on a CBS story about romantic couples. “He’s definitely the most romantic person I know,” says Shelman, an actress who moonlights as a Wolfgang Puck hostess. “He’s really like a man from another age, like the Knights of the Round Table.”

Smart, charismatic and ambitious, Badal was a telegenic salesman with an irresistible marketing pitch: better living through better loving. “It gave me an identity,” he says reflectively. “In L.A., everything is how the media defines you, and it’s like a drug. Everybody wants to be a star.”

Then, almost as quickly as it began, Badal’s wild ride was over. His champagne-and-roses shtick fell apart. His guidebook, “Romancing the Southland,” a 710-page valentine to the region’s seductive charms, sold 7,500 copies, then promptly dropped out of print. Reporters stopped calling for sound bites every Feb. 14, and “Mr. Romance” tumbled from the pop-culture radar screen.

In desperation, Badal was forced to take a minimum-wage video clerk’s job--a far cry from the previous months he’d spent holed up in a rented Hollywood Hills flat writing his book. At one point, he was reduced to selling his own blood plasma for cash. “There’s nothing romantic about selling your blood in Van Nuys,” says the former commodities broker and aerobics instructor.

Now, at age 45, Badal is on the comeback trail. Shorn of his swingin’ moniker and flowing heavy-metal-rocker coiffure, a less driven, more self-aware Badal has found a new form of minor renown on the Universal back lot, where his encyclopedic film knowledge--and the genial bedside manner he inherited from his physician father--have won rave reviews from guests and bosses alike. “He’s so warm and personable, he just comes across right away as someone who cares about people,” says Julie Harders Mazer, manager of studio guide casting and development at Universal. “I think [the studio] is magical for him, and he passes that on for our guests.”

Badal also is hoping to jump-start his stalled writing career with his second book, “Romance in Film,” which is being published by Carson-based Jalmar Press. The two-volume work chronicles Hollywood’s endless infatuation with the on- and off-screen cavortings of stars and starlets. Badal says he wrote much of it during 15-minute coffee breaks in Universal’s staff room.

“The heart of the book is trying to get people to have a little bit of that innocent love of the movies, where they wanted to be told a story, not just hit over the head with sensationalism,” he says. “It’s also about how the film industry became this kind of mirror to people’s hearts, our foolishness and the things we want to believe.”

The first volume, which traces movies from the silent film era to 1950, will be in local bookstores March 5. It’s also available at Universal Studios or online at https://www.jalmarpress.com. He expects the second volume, covering films after 1950, to be published later this year.

“This comeback has been the most validating experience in my life,” Badal says with his usual buoyancy, making his way through the courtyard of the cramped, book-strewn Studio City apartment where he and Shelman live with their two cats. “The flip side to having a valley in your life is that the peak tastes sweeter.”

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For Badal, romance--or, as he prefers, “romanticism”--never was a simplistic silver screen formula. It was an affinity for life’s temporal pleasures, a childlike capacity for infinite wonder.

Living romantically, Badal emphasized, required more than an active libido and an American Express card. It required imagination, sensitivity to one’s partner and a certain swashbuckling nonconformity. Above all, it meant striving to live in and for the moment. “People think, ‘Oh, we can have romance when we have more time, or when we have a larger house,’ or whatever,” Badal said in a 1997 interview. “That’s not romance. Romance is feeling something in your heart and going with it.”

Badal’s moonstruck nature was nurtured by his San Fernando Valley boyhood. He remembers his father waving to Clark Gable in his Jaguar and falling in love with movies on trips with his mother to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

He began sculpting his “Mr. Romance” persona in the early 1980s, publishing a newsletter, Romancing L.A., and building a name for himself through scattered speaking engagements and talk show spots. In “Romancing the Southland” he combined a native son’s yearning for the quieter, dreamier L.A. of his youth with a connoisseur’s feel for the pulsing metropolis of the present.

Nowhere did Badal practice what he preached more than in his relationship with Shelman, who walked into his life in a Long Beach jazz bar, tossing her pre-Raphaelite red curls. “I remember she had this crop top and jeans on and she looked like a little doll to me,” Badal says. “We intercepted each other, and that was it.”

Even Badal’s co-workers can’t help noticing how he dotes on his mate. “He whips out pictures of her all the time,” says Michael Sington, Badal’s director at Universal. “He gets like teary-eyed about her.”

The feeling is clearly reciprocal. On a nippy Saturday night in late January, Shelman slides into a booth at Wolfgang Puck on Universal CityWalk and gushes like a newlywed about the man who won her heart 14 years ago and became her husband in 1997. She speaks of a guy who’s so mushy he takes pictures of their cats spooning on the sofa. A guy who buys her roses “just because he’ll walk by a window and he knows I love roses, and he’ll say, ‘They were just so beautiful and I got them for you.’ ”

In particular, she recalls the stressful interlude before they were married, when she was acting in the Bay Area and Badal, hundreds of miles away, was struggling to keep his love-guru career afloat. To complicate matters, Shelman’s leading man had developed a crush on her. Worried about losing the woman he loved, Badal packed his bags and moved to San Rafael overnight. “It melted my heart,” she says.

OK, so he’s kind of sloppy at home, Oscar Madison to her Felix Unger. But “he’s really tried to change that.” And when she walks through the door after an especially grueling day, “he always gives me a wonderful massage. And we light scented candles, we listen to classical music and watch a movie.”

Well . . . unless they don’t see each other at all. For many months they’ve been on different clocks, with Badal working days at Universal and writing into the evening, while Shelman shuttles between Wolfgang Puck and play rehearsals. For some couples maybe it’s three kids, a mortgage and meddlesome in-laws; for Shelman and Badal it’s long hours, low wages and a tiny, noisy apartment that’s driving Shelman crazy.

Whatever your circumstances, Badal insists, romance is wherever and whatever you make of it. “To keep romance alive is a conscious effort, but it’s like the conscious effort of dancing. I mean, Fred Astaire wasn’t thinking ‘1-2-3-4.’ There’s a certain deftness to romance, but the deftness comes from deliberate thinking.”

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The Japanese tourists are polite but subdued, their enthusiasm chilled by the January drizzle. But the tall, mellow tour guide with the strawberry-blond hair is just warming up his act. After trundling past Universal’s familiar back lot icons--Hitchcock’s old bungalow, the faux New York streetscape--Badal smiles to himself as a gray dorsal fin knifes through an artificial lake and the “Jaws” theme rises over a loudspeaker.

A nanosecond later, the mechanical shark punctures the water, jolting the squealing tram car riders with the momentary power of illusion. “I know you’re thinking that looks pretty fake up close,” Badal says playfully, grinning into his headset. “So why were you guys screaming, then?”

Twice in his lifetime, Badal’s own dreams have come back to bite him. The first was during the go-go ‘80s when, recently out of college and searching for direction, he took a job as a commodities broker, selling silver and gold over the phone. He was 26 and, he admits, woefully naive. “I was totally sucked into it. I put on suits. I married this beautiful Austrian model. I bought a condo in Huntington Harbour. We had a cabin in Big Bear. I tried, and I tried, and I tried. And I lost some people some serious money.”

His second major comedown occurred when the bottom dropped out of his “Mr. Romance” persona four years ago. Today he sounds rueful, even penitent, about that chapter of his life. “Besides the fact that it’s too schmaltzy, there’s something a little bit too mercenary about being a love doctor,” he says. “It was taking something that comes a little too close to my heart and making it like a sales pitch.”

This time, Badal resolves, things will be different. His employer, Universal, is behind him. His publisher is flying him to the studio’s sister theme park in Orlando to promote the book, and he’ll be doing another signing today at Universal in L.A. from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. If “Romance in Film” achieves nothing else, he hopes it may steer some readers toward an earlier era’s kinder values.

“The ‘80s and ‘90s were about ‘me, me, me,’ while the ‘30s were all about ‘we, we, we,’ ” says Badal, wolfing down a slice of pizza before rushing off to his next tram tour. “Maybe they’ll see that we weren’t always this harsh with one another, we weren’t always this nasty.”

Of course, it’s not easy to live in a Frank Capra movie when the real world acts more like a Quentin Tarantino shoot-’em-up. In his head, Mr. Romance knows this. But he hasn’t yet managed to convince his heart.

“It’s like when you fall in love with someone,” he says. “You don’t know that person. But you’re basing that feeling on a hope that it is real.”