Al Checchi gazes into his past, quickly calming the frenetic energy that has kept him squirming in a desk chair at his gubernatorial campaign headquarters. He lowers the chair, which he has been balancing on its hind legs like a suit-coated acrobat on a high wire.
He is remembering a time when he was flying up the corporate ladder at Marriott. A 27-year-old whiz kid, he had risked most of the company's resources on a deal, and it was falling apart. He remembers that the phone rang. It was someone "very high up," whose tone Checchi recalls as taunting.
"Well, bright boy?" the caller began. Even in repeating it, Checchi's voice turns brittle, and he stiffens.
"I said, 'I am not going to give up.' And I went and made the deal happen."
For a few seconds, Checchi is no longer the multimillionaire Democrat whose presence has dominated California politics this year. He is instead a chip-on-the-shoulder grandson of impoverished immigrants, a man with an odd name who felt he couldn't get the breaks given to WASPs and was determined to outdo them anyway.
For all the slick imagery that he purveys in his first campaign for public office, the real Al Checchi is far more complex. Critics see a ruthless businessman who knocked heads to amass a fortune and now, bored, uses the same tactic to dally in politics. Friends see a passionate pragmatist who is living a dream born in the idealistic 1960s. Whichever he is, Checchi is certainly still out to make the deal happen.
Al Checchi is rife with contradictions. He bemoans the failure of Californians to pass school bonds, yet didn't vote in a 1994 election when $2 billion in bonds were on the line. He uses photos of himself with President Clinton to boost his political standing, yet slams an opponent for siding with Clinton on the most important vote of his presidency. He vows to run a positive, issues-oriented campaign but tries to plow under his opponents as if they were competitors for a big business takeover.
Alfred Attilio Checchi, 49, is proud, impatient, brilliant, arrogant, loyal, driven, sentimental, disdainful and fiercely private, according to those who know him. He projects a tough-as-nails air even as he cries unashamedly when talking about tender moments in life. He alternates well-cut suits and ravaged cutoffs, catered lunches at his Beverly Hills estate and dinners at a $4.95-a-platter Mexican joint.
He is very used to getting what he wants. And he wants to be governor.
