A Telltale Heart Has Mr. Price : Tasting: In Costa Mesa, a Mondavi director sponsors an evening when $150 buys a choice of recent vintages, a gourmet dinner and the actor who takes his cues from Poe.

By JESS BRAVIN

Oct. 27, 1990 12 AM PT

COSTA MESA — Eric Hansen had been plying Vincent Price with wine for months. Thursday night, just in time for Halloween, those bottles of pinot noir finally paid off.

Making a rare public appearance, Price came to Costa Mesa to be the centerpiece for Hansen’s upscale answer to trick-or-treating. The director of the Robert Mondavi winery’s Southern California outpost, Hansen had organized an evening when $150 bought a grab bag of recent vintages, a gourmet dinner and the presence of Price, who read a sampling from his favorite poet. In order of descending importance, the black-tie affair was titled “Price, Pinot and Poe.”

Charged with upgrading the image of wine in a culture more familiar with Night Train Express than Chateau Rothschild, Hansen reasoned that the presence of the famed actor would add a touch of class to the business of drinking.

“We try to associate fine wine with the artistic community, and the man is truly an artistic treasure,” Hansen said of Price, who has appeared in films ranging from “Laura” to “Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.”

“But more than that,” Hansen said, “he is a great connoisseur of fine food and wine.”

Price, whose viticultural expertise once led President Lyndon B. Johnson to seek his advice on California wines, opened his remarks with a crowd-pleaser: Poe, he recalled, “could juggle the book and the bottle with equal dexterity.”

He then launched a 20-minute discussion of the appropriately disturbing poesy of Poe, beginning with “The Conqueror Worm,” a comment on mortality as well as the title of one of Price’s many Poe-derived films.

The actor continued with such works as “The Bells” and concluded with what might be considered Price’s own signature piece, “The Raven.”

Would he read it again? “Nevermore,” he answered.

Instead, Price had more current terrors on which to comment. He made pointed reference to the crusades against artistic freedom led by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and others.

The chilling of free speech particularly concerns Price, who recalls that when he started making movies in the 1930s, filmmakers were severly restricted in what they could show.

“We’d gotten so far since then. We emerged as the most creative nation on earth,” Price said. “Then we get set back by some fool trying to make his name in politics. It’s such a shame.”

Nonetheless, Price said he was heartened by the recent acquittals in the obscenity trials of Contemporary Arts Center officials in Cincinnati and the rap group 2 Live Crew.

“I think it will all pass eventually, just like it did before,” he said, referring to the McCarthy era. “Somebody will finally say no (to censorship), just like the people on that Cincinnati jury did.”

He had less faith, however, that the audience at hand would see the linkage of Poe, Luther Campbell and the First Amendment.

“I think it went straight over their heads. It’s Orange County. You’re never sure what they’ll get down here,” the Yale-educated actor said.

Indeed, this was not a group that was ready to discuss 19th-Century poetry, 1990s rap or, for that matter, the Roger Corman exploitation pictures that etched Price his place in film history.

Instead, like children lining up to meet a shopping center Santa Claus, the stemware-clutching sophisticates waited eagerly to have their pictures snapped with the macabre legend.

Perhaps in testimony to the potency of the evening’s treats, they amused Price with somewhat inaccurate attempts to compliment him.

“I was pleased to hear you knew Sinclair,” said a local developer, apparently confusing Price’s reference to Sinclair Lewis, the author of “Babbitt,” with the novelist-politician Upton Sinclair. Price nodded politely.

When a woman forthrightly asked Price his age, the 79-year-old actor deviously replied, “90!”

“You know,” she said reassuringly, “my grandmother lived till 96.”

Price smiled at the woman, before making an aside: “These people are so full of it. They’ll swallow anything.”

To be fair to the 100-odd folk who came to experience the good life with Price, few had any pretensions of expertise.

“It’s a good idea to bring fine wine and fine acting together,” said Yorba Linda drapery company owner Rick Ashbrook, 43. “But I certainly didn’t appreciate these things in my 20s. I grew up as a surfer in California. What did we appreciate? Probably nothing.”

Some confessed that they didn’t even have that much familiarity with Price himself.

“I didn’t even know he acted,” said Darci Davis, one of the youngest at the affair. The 17-year-old from Dana Point, who came with her father, a Mondavi employee, remembered just one exposure to Price’s distinctively diabolical voice.

“The only time I ever heard him was on the ‘Thriller’ record,” she said, referring to the Michael Jackson song that features Price’s narration.

Price may be cultivated, but he’s no snob.

“People kidded the pants off me when I did that,” he said. “But it’s a good album. I listened to it the other day, and it really holds up.”

So, it seems, does Vincent Price.