Go Ahead, Voters, Make My Day

By Paul A. Witteman/Carmel

It is springtime in California, and as they have been doing for years, the Winnebagos are lumbering back to Carmel-by-the-Sea. So are the sedans and station wagons, tour buses and minivans, disgorging hordes of tourists to take in the jade-tinted surf and the sweeping Monterey cypress trees. But a new attraction is luring the curious to this tidy village that clings to a slope above Monterey Bay, some 120 miles down the coast from San Francisco, one far more riveting than the scenery. The big draw is, of all things, a municipal election.

Next week the 4,142 voters of Carmel will elect a mayor. New York City or Chicago should have such a choice. The incumbent, Charlotte Townsend, 61, is a no-nonsense woman who cut her teeth on the board of the village library. Paul Laub, 41, who has amassed a million or so as Carmel's czar of schlock, purveying T shirts and other bric-a-brac, made his name fighting city hall over issues like illegally washing his sidewalk. A college-trained tenor and restaurant worker named Tim Grady, 27, an echo of the Woodstock generation who has no use for cars, wants to turn Carmel's main street into a horse path. Finally there is a guy named Eastwood. Clint Eastwood.

That's right, the No. 1 box-office attraction of this generation (Dirty Harry and Pale Rider), the actor turned director who made Hollywood accept him on his terms, not its, wants to serve his fellow Carmelites in a job that pays a modest $200 a month. "I don't need the money," says Eastwood in that no- wasted-words fashion he has made famous onscreen. "There is nothing ego gratifying in it. This administration has simply been cruel to people."

Fighting words, and Mayor Townsend has some of her own. "It's not entertainment," she sniffs. Dismissing Eastwood as "our cinema star," she says, "I understand that young women are rushing out of restaurants to assault him." That has been happening to Eastwood, 55, since he first sauntered across television screens in 1959 as Rowdy Yates on Rawhide and, in the mid-'60s, appeared as the taut-jawed, tight-lipped hero of three movies dubbed spaghetti westerns. But it is clearly not the kind of scene that the mayor likes to see playing in Carmel.

Townsend prefers the Carmel of her past, preserved from fast-food outlets and the like. " 'Save our village' is not just a slogan," she says. "It's an appeal from the heart." Most Carmel residents agree, up to a point. McDonald's will never rear its golden arches within the one-square-mile village, and franchisers are likely to get a warmer reception in Moscow. This is a town that has banned neon and has precious few streetlights or sidewalks. Residents pick up their mail at the post office because houses are identified by names like "Apricot Pit" or "Little Sur" but have no street addresses. The mayor would like to guard this ambience even more vigorously; she is proud of the fact that during her two terms the business district has actually got smaller.

This has not endeared her to the owners of many of the 67 art galleries, 31 real estate brokerages and scores of restaurants and bars. It definitely riles Eastwood, a part owner of the town's funky hot spot, the Hog's Breath Inn. When he attempted to construct a new building adjacent to the Hog, as insiders call it, the village government turned him down. Dirty Harry would have handled it one way. Clint chose another. He threatened to sue, and the planning commission approved a modified design.

But the dispute led to his newest role. Encouraged by a group headed by a saloonkeeper named Bud Allen, Eastwood stunned the town with his decision to run. Candidate Laub was stunned too but recovered quickly. He stocked CLINT FOR MAYOR T shirts in his stores, giving them only to customers who bought a LAUB FOR MAYOR shirt for $11.95. All of which has made grand entertainment for the camera crews and reporters drawn to Carmel from France, Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Japan and points between. The race has even become the target of a running satire in the comic strip Doonesbury. The media blitz is one of the things that prompted Mayor Townsend to call the approaching vote, only half in jest, "the second most important election this year, after the Philippines'."

Eastwood's campaign seems to have shaken the mayor. Waving a letter from a local woman, Townsend says, "There's a rumor that tour-bus companies are selling tickets to future city council meetings. It's not appropriate." Candidate Clint is not falling for any of that. On the tea-and-cracker circuit around town, he is setting forth his position on burning local issues like "second kitchens." A tradition in Carmel, second kitchens have been put in many cottages to allow older residents to live at home while renting out the rest of the house. A tough new ordinance proposes strictly regulating and possibly eliminating them. "If you've read that ordinance," he says, "it's like Adolf Hitler knocking on your door. A lot of people could be evicted from their homes."

Eastwood has been doing his own door knocking in the town's four precincts. Dressed in a tie and tweed sports jacket, he tells voters that he too wishes to preserve Carmel. "The residents and the business community must cooperate to solve the parking and tourist problem," he says. The low-key approach and easy smile have won over folks who knew him only from film. The race appears to be between Eastwood and Townsend, but no candidate seems ready to concede. "I'll whip his butt," vows Laub, the T-shirt salesman.

Eastwood is venturing no predictions, but he does allow as how he is not fretting much about the possibility of losing the personal privacy he so values. Nobody knows the back alleys of Carmel better; he has been using them for quicksilver exits for the past 14 years. "I'm not known as the Phantom of Carmel for nothing." But will he be a phantom mayor? "I will not miss any council meetings," he pledges. "This will be my first priority." As for the charge that he has political aspirations beyond the city limits, Eastwood explains that Carmel is a big enough arena for him. "Carmel is my home," he says.