MR. ROMANCE STARTS ANEW : NO LONGER L.A.'S LOVE GOD, BADAL DISCOVERS NEW JOYS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

You'd think that a guy known as ``Mr. Romance'' would sport head-to-toe Armani, drive a Fiat and dine by candlelight.

But no. Bob Badal is wearing a beige polo shirt, dutifully inscribed with the logo of the video store where he makes $5.15 an hour. Every day he walks 1-1/2 miles (round trip) to his job in Universal City. His last car, uninsured, was stolen months ago.

Most nights, Badal takes his meals alone in a Studio City apartment strewn with old newspapers, stray clothes and crusty dishes. His sole companions are two cats, Ariel and Macbeth.

``Sorry about the mess,'' says the mildly graying, 40-year-old Glendale native, who's living in the Valley for the first time since he left his parents' Encino home two decades ago.

This is ``Mr. Romance,'' L.A.'s sultan of suave? The man Southern Californians once held as a high priest of warm and fuzzy?

The story of how Badal stumbled on the threshold of fame might make even a tough guy reach for the tissues. It's a tale that the connoisseur of dreamy sunsets and elephant-seal mating rituals calls ``the most romantic act of my life.''

Labors of love

Barely 18 months ago, the Birmingham High School graduate was the toast of L.A.'s self-help circuit. Reporters from San Diego to Santa Barbara quoted his amorous insights. Television chat shows lined up to interview this intensely bright, photogenic young man with a gift for turning emotional conundrums into soothingly humorous sound bites.

Though Badal lacked formal guru credentials, more than 34 area colleges (several in the Valley) invited him to share tips on how to keep passion ablaze. When a reporter dubbed him ``Mr. Romance,'' the moniker stuck.

Romance, Badal preached, meant more than procuring a sticky box of caramels and a crotchless teddy every Feb. 14. It meant creativity, imagination, a devotion to life's microscopic pleasures. It meant seeing infinity in a Santa Monica tidepool and heaven in a run-down Hollywood movie palace or a dewy Sylmar cornfield.

As kids, Badal and his older brother, Jeff, had been dragged to many such places by their parents. Over time, those boyhood memories had deepened into a world view that was sensual, eccentric, unpredictable. Very L.A.

Above all, Mr. Romance urged couples to yield themselves to the same spirit of shared adventure that launched 1,001 classic Hollywood screwball comedies.

``People think, `Oh, we can have romance when we have more time, or when we have a larger house,' or whatever,'' Badal said. ``That's not romance. Romance is feeling something in your heart and going with it.''

Personal experience

Unlike most swamis, Badal heeded his own advice - especially when it came to Terra Shelman, his long-distance girlfriend of the past 10 years.

The 6-foot-3 Virgo and the 5-foot-1 Pisces met at a Long Beach jazz club when both were aerobics teachers rebounding from failed first marriages. That night Shelman wore a crop top, jeans and high heels over her 90-pound frame.

Said Badal: ``I haven't touched another woman since.''

If you've never seen Shelman play Shakespeare's Ophelia or one of Noel Coward's droll high-society heroines, you may recall her as the former belly dancer with the perfect stomach and the rose tattoo at Babouch Moroccan Restaurant in San Pedro. Born in Hollywood, she also had a bit part in the unreleased feature film ``Roman Plastic,'' as the belly-dancing queen of the Cult of New Virginity in a futuristic Los Angeles.

``It was actually quite an amusing movie,'' Badal said.

On rare occasions when they weren't working, the couple doted on each other. He wrote her love sonnets. She starred in his adaptation of ``Shahrazad and the Tales of the 1,001 Nights,'' a three-course dinner show with sultry Arabian dancing. For their 10th anniversary, Badal composed a scrapbook of Shelman striking come-hither poses.

``Whenever I come into the room, his face lights up, literally, and it's been that way for 10 years,'' she said.

When Shelman followed her career to Sonoma County and they were separated for months at a stretch, the couple basked in their quality time. Once Dr. Joyce Brothers even featured them on a CBS news report on romantic couples.

What they loved best was finding some secret nook of L.A., far from the maddening crowds and mouse ears. Many of their exotic discoveries eventually wound up in ``Romancing the Southland,'' Badal's 710-page mash note to SoCal's coziest bistros, loneliest landscapes and biggest flakes, like Kevin Thongpricha, the bell-bottomed, rhinestone-studded ``Thai Elvis'' at the L.A. Food Court in Hollywood. Investment broker Douglas Campbell, who had made friends with Badal after hearing one of his lectures, staked $100,000 to publish the first edition in the fall of 1994.

As a lawyer friend put it, Bob Badal was fast becoming ``a walking intellectual property.''

No best seller

Today Badal does plenty of walking. To his 9 to 5 job at Suncoast Video in Universal Citywalk. To the supermarket to buy cat food. To his mom's house.

It's a major comedown from being ensconced in a Hollywood Hills apartment, getting paid a $36,000 advance to write ``Romancing the Southland.''

On paper, the book deal looked like a marriage made in heaven between Badal and Campbell, his financial angel. Only in retrospect does it seem more a shotgun wedding of mismatched temperaments.

First-edition word of mouth was strong.

``We got nine minutes on KTLA,'' Badal said. But the tome's hefty price ($34.95) coupled with its small press run (5,400 copies), nipped at the profit margins.

Nor were all Badal's entries commercially savvy. He devoted a half-page to Al's Bedspread Kingdom, but not one word to Disneyland.

When the time came for a second printing, Campbell opted out.

``As far as I was concerned, I lost 100 grand. That's enough,'' he said.

Badal professes no hard feelings, but admitted that, ``I made a fool of myself, to some extent.''

``Bob has this wonderful childishness to him,'' said his fiancee. ``He's always thinking everything's going to turn out wonderful, and unfortunately it often doesn't.''

Badal now had to jump-start his career after letting most of his contacts slip. One day while he was pondering how to pay the rent, Shelman called to say that her leading man was in love with her. Unless she and Badal were ready to commit, she thought it best to start seeing other people.

Within hours, Badal was on the overnight Greyhound to San Francisco.

Back together

When the couple reunited at a Bay Area hotel, Badal said, it was ``the most emotionally powerful moment of my life.''

``We didn't even make love. There was a lot of crying, a lot of looking at each other. But it was obvious that we were back together.''

So in February 1996, Badal moved to San Rafael and took a job selling Toyotas. Despite sending out dozens of resumes and pounding the hilly pavements, he'd discovered that no one in San Francisco needed an unemployed idealist.

Occasionally, he felt flashes of resentment, even self-pity. But the move cemented the couple's trust.

``I was kind of shocked, because he loves L.A., and all his family and contacts and everything are there,'' Shelman said. ``When he was willing to move up here, I was pretty amazed.''

Last summer, they decided to take the nuptial plunge on April 26. Soon Shelman will return to her hometown and begin the task of finding work as an L.A. stage actress.

Meanwhile, Badal already has landed two Valley speaking gigs on romance in the movies (he regards his day job at Suncoast Video as field research). He's also working on a second edition of ``Romancing the Southland,'' with his brother Jeff.

Years before the big dreamers came to L.A. with concrete and glass, guys like William Blake and Victor Hugo envisioned Romanticism (capital ``R'') as a web of empathy that encircles us all. It's that kind of romance Badal now hopes to inspire in others: the romance of the perpetual tourist.

``Tourists have this sort of naive delight about everything: `Oh, there's the footprints in front of the Chinese Theatre!' And if we could keep that delight, maybe we wouldn't need to spend so damn much money.''

As for keeping his Fabioesque nickname, who knows? ``There's really something schmaltzy about it,'' he said, laughing.

Whether his alter ego stays or goes, Badal seems assured of remaining L.A.'s most hopeless romantic.

Wait. Better make that ``most hopeful'' romantic.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Mr. Romance

Skip the box of candy and let this story sweep you off your feet

(2) Terra Shelman and Bob Badal have been seeing each other for 10 years and are recently engaged.

David Sprague/Daily News