Lights, cameras, action?

Sacramento

And now for some hardball, Mr. Gov.-elect Schwarzenegger. The people demand to know: What’s up with that tan? Also, will you be sporting a tie or going open-collar with this administration? What’ll your ride be, motorcade-wise? Shouldn’t you be taller? Will your Kennedy-pedigree wife be transforming this Delta burg into Camelot-by-the-river? Will there be groping? OK, then how about an autograph?

It’s Arnold-mania, baby, and it’s sweeping the nation, from California’s statehouse to Washington, D.C. Last week, when Schwarzenegger visited Congress, Cannes-style mobs trailed him through Capitol hallways. Nationally known lawmakers leaped and jockeyed for pictures -- not with him but of him. People with advanced degrees laughed insanely every time he said “Collectinator.”

It was a repeat of his earlier meet-and-greet with state leaders, except even giddier, and with wildfires besieging the lower half of California. But trailing the excitement is the natural follow-up movie-star question: How long will Schwarzenegger’s new job be upstaged by his old job?

Or, as weary state workers were asking after his last visit to Sacramento, how long can this circus be sustained?

Experts are placing their bets.

“Forever,” predicts Ralph Pipes, whose special-events firm has done security for Schwarzenegger’s movie premieres and has extensive experience with manic fans. “Arnold is a great story. Sacramento is gonna look like downtown Hollywood for the next three years.”

More like three months, counters Republican political strategist Arnold Steinberg. He believes the state’s troubles, from the recent fires to financial disaster, will sober the Capitol, but not before the 100-day honeymoon that is enjoyed by most newly elected politicians, and not before the holidays.

“Six months to a year,” estimates one of Steinberg’s Democratic counterparts, political consultant Bill Carrick. “The truth is, culturally, there’s a huge difference between a place like L.A. and Sacramento. There has been almost a Gomer Pyle-like reaction from the political community in the capital -- they seem to be standing around going ‘Shazam!’ They all look a little star-struck, and I think they are.”

“As long as he is responsible for making it go on,” says veteran public relations man Lee Solters, whose clients over the years have included Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand. Schwarzenegger, he and others say, has an instinctive grasp of publicity and how it works and can demystify himself -- if he wants to.

“When Madonna and Britney Spears kissed and it made a lot of news but they didn’t want it to continue, they kept quiet about it and it just died,” Solters said. “The headlines about Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez’s wedding stopped as soon as they stopped talking about it.”

But, he added, the question is whether Schwarzenegger the performer can bear to play second banana to Schwarzenegger the state official. During his recent visit to Sacramento, political reporters repeatedly advised the governor-elect’s handlers that making him more accessible would supply the demand for pictures and sound bites, thus easing the madness. But that didn’t happen.

Instead, Schwarzenegger materialized on the fly, his appearances brief, his remarks more so, his audiences clamoring at every stop for more. Walls of humanity greeted him at every destination. “Just ... trying ... to ... focus,” moaned Joseph Swabeck, a round-faced, 11-year-old sweating as he stood on tiptoe in a vain attempt to maneuver his camera through a mass of TV reporters.

State employees trying to work had to detour around rope barricades and past blocked stairwells. Elevators had to be locked down every time Schwarzenegger entered the Capitol, a security precaution that left aides and legislators huffing up and down stairs one morning when his motorcade arrived nearly an hour behind schedule.

And when he did face the public, it was with a star’s instincts rather than a politician’s. At one point, stopping at Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante’s office, he touched Bustamante’s elbow and expertly turned him in mid-sentence to better face the cameras, which snapped wildly as Schwarzenegger posed and the lieutenant governor looked confusedly at the big, manicured hand on his jacket.

Politicians mobbed by reporters when Schwarzenegger was around found themselves as lonely as Maytag repairmen when the governor-elect moved to his next venue, the press stampeding behind him.

“This could go on and on and on,” Solters said. “Schwarzenegger is a showman, whether he wants to be or not. Sometimes you can’t help it, you are what you are.”

Political strategists believe, however, that the crowd scenes will end when Schwarzenegger and the Legislature begin wading into the state’s red ink, a situation that is unlikely to be eased by the cost of the recent fires. “What’s going to burst the bubble will be this huge deficit in the state budget, and it’s going to confront him so fast,” says Carrick, the Democratic consultant. Thus far, he and others say, Schwarzenegger has displayed a sort of innocent’s confidence in his ability to vanquish the state’s profound problems, and that lack of self-doubt has been contagious.

But, Carrick said, “Pretty soon, it won’t be about the people’s squeals when he comes into the building -- it’ll be about their squeals when they open their morning paper. At some point, he’ll have to sit down and make a budget deal and all the simple sound bites will evaporate. And there will still be this extremely big number that’s got to be fixed.”

Steinberg, the Republican strategist, adds that Schwarzenegger’s political advisors will almost surely begin working soon to reduce the public’s expectations. “If everybody gets conditioned to the idea of, say, massive state layoffs and they turn out to be less massive, people won’t feel as bad,” he said. But the management of those expectations will necessarily force Schwarzenegger to present himself as only human, which, in turn would hasten his transition from living legend to public servant.

And if expectations are insufficiently managed, Carrick adds, there is the lesson of former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, whose novelty dramatically wore off as his human frailties became too apparent for even his supporters. “Ventura was a lot less interesting,” Carrick said, “as people saw he was doing an ineffective job as governor.”

But some experts believe that notwithstanding the recent hoopla, the excitement is fading -- that the recall campaign just prolonged an arc of celebrity that was already drifting toward denouement.

“There was probably a fourfold increase in demand for shots of him after he announced,” says L.A. paparazzo Phil Ramey, who is perhaps best known for his unauthorized wedding photos of the then-pregnant Catherine Zeta-Jones marrying Michael Douglas.

“But before the recall? You couldn’t give him away.”

Despite (or maybe because of) a 1998 incident that sent two paparazzi to jail for aggressively photographing Schwarzenegger and his wife outside their son’s preschool, Ramey said most publications viewed the actor as “a married guy who mostly hung out with his kids” -- well-known, “but not that interesting.”

And since the election, he and other photographers said, demand for pictures of the governor-elect has flattened. “It’s not something our subscribers are interested in anymore,” said Sandy Ciric, a senior news editor at Getty Images, which provides photos to The Times as well as such international outlets as MSNBC.com and Le Monde.

“There’s always going to be demand for pictures of him doing something he shouldn’t, but that goes with the office,” noted Los Angeles event photographer Kathy Hutchins. “But will it be worth it for 50 photographers to trail him for the next three years?”

The paparazzi’s prediction? A spike in attention around the swearing in, followed by a two-month decline in buzz. And then, hail to the has-been, at least in the giddy realm of celebrity gossip. “Listen,” Ramey said, “it’s not as if he’s Justin Timberlake or Cameron Diaz.”