The Return of an Incurable Romantic - Onetime guide to all things amorous is back with a history of Hollywood.
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.
