Maniac or Messiah?

The day California went to the polls the old man fortified himself with his usual morning drink: four parts apple juice and one part cranberry juice. Later, seated in a barbershop near his West Los Angeles office, he held court, conducting interviews, mugging for photographers and reworking his victory speech. A concession statement? Howard Jarvis did not see why he should waste his time. Sure enough, a few hours later, an ecstatic Jarvis stood on the podium in the Los Angeles Biltmore, blowing kisses to his screaming supporters. "Now we know how it felt when they dumped English tea in Boston harbor!" he exulted. Still in a buoyant mood, Jarvis told TIME, "We have a new revolution. We are telling the government, 'Screw you!' " Jarvis, 75, the man behind Proposition 13, calls himself "a rugged bastard who's had his head kicked in a thousand times by the government." In a state known for its smooth-talking, image-conscious politicians, he is a gruff, rumpled throwback to Mencken's soap box demagogues. The face is bulldoggish, the figure dumpy, the voice a throaty croak. There are no silken buzz words in Jarvis' earthy speeches. In his repertory of epithets, Republicans are "the stupidest people in the world except for businessmen, who have a genius for stupidity"; the League of Women Voters is "a bunch of nosy broads who front for the big spenders"; others who oppose his beloved proposition, "dummies, goons, cannibals or big-mouths." The tax issue, he says, is "Armageddon, a war of machetes. They're going to cut off our heads. Or we're going to cut off theirs."

Jarvis has been waging that war for 16 years now. While others talked of Viet Nam and Watergate, he pursued with almost monomaniacal fervor what he calls his Holy Grail: reduced taxes and reduced government spending. In three unsuccessful campaigns for public office (the 1962 Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, the 1972 race for the State Board of Equalization and the 1977 Los Angeles mayoral primary), Jarvis frequently failed to mention his own candidacy; all he wanted to do, he says, was publicize the tax issue.

For a long time, no one listened. Undaunted, Jarvis played high school auditoriums, Holiday Inn lunches, civic luncheons, and he was lucky if a dozen people went to hear him. At city hall, he was regarded as a persistent pest who showed up at every tax meeting, drowning out the civilized monologues of his opponents with his battering-ram attacks. "We never knew whether he was a messiah or a maniac," says an aide to one of the supervisors. "He was surly, arrogant and when the mikes were turned off, he just raised his voice so that you never knew the microphone was dead. Many times they had to call the sergeant at arms to persuade him to sit down."

Nothing deterred him. Three times Jarvis tried and failed to get property taxes rolled back. Suddenly, in the past year, soaring property taxes, ever-rising state and federal taxes and the prospect of double-digit inflation combined to wed Jarvis' obsession to the public's anger. The old gadfly has become a kind of California folk hero, an unlikely St. George to voters who hope that he can deliver them from the tax dragon.

While he sardonically remarks that "everyone is entitled to my opinion," Jarvis emphasizes that his success is the result of sheer stubbornness. The son of a state supreme court judge, Jarvis grew up in the mining town of Magna, Utah. After graduating with straight A's from Utah State University, he talked a local bank into loaning him $15,000 to buy an ailing weekly newspaper, the Magna Times. By the time he was 30, he had parlayed his purchase into eleven papers worth $105,000.

From the start, Jarvis was a dedicated right-winger. He and his father once campaigned for separate seats in the Utah state legislature, Judge John Ransome Jarvis running as a Democrat, his son as a Republican. Howard managed his father's winning campaign as well as his own unsuccessful one. At a 1931 G.O.P. convention in Chicago, he shared a suite at a crowded hotel with a California district attorney named Earl Warren.

According to Jarvis, Warren persuaded him to sell his newspapers and move to the golden land. "When I arrived there, I was wet behind the ears; all I had was money," recalls Jarvis. Nonetheless, he went on to make considerably more, first with an Oakland chemical firm and then after World War II, by running a chain of home-appliance factories employing 13,000 people. In 1962, fearing that the pressure would give him a heart attack (his second wife died of a heart attack), Jarvis decided to retire and planned an extended vacation.

He never left. A group of L.A. neighbors, incensed about high taxes, called on the old man for advice, and he soon found himself chairman of the United Organization of Taxpayers.

Jarvis, his third wife and her sister live in an unpretentious two-bedroom, $80,000 house (on which he annually pays $1,800 in taxes based on a 1976 assessment) in West Los Angeles. Though he was raised as a Mormon, he drinks vodka and smokes a pipe as well as cigars. He spends most of his days in a cluttered downtown office, dividing his time between his duties as un-salaried chairman of the taxpayers' group and paid director ($17,000 a year) of the Apartment Association of Los Angeles County, a landlords' organization. He devotes hours to unearthing new details supporting his case for lower taxes: he has determined, for instance, that the $8,000 sticker price on his Thunderbird includes some $4,500 of taxes and that 116 different taxes are levied on a loaf of bread.

There was a time when Jarvis would get up in the middle of the night to practice his speeches in front of the living-room lamps. Now he can count on the attention of his audiences. Groups in 40 states want the feisty Jarvis to give them a hand in promoting tax reduction measures. "I am going to help out in some other places," he says with atypical understatement. Batten down the hatches--Howard Jarvis is going national.

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