ALLIANCE DIRECTOR SEES LOBBYING AS A FINE ART

Carrying a “briefcase”--a large black canvas bag made by an artist and decorated with colorful felt patches of young girls who look as if they’re about to break into dance--Anne Gaynor Murphy set a brisk pace, walking the mile from her office up to Capitol Hill. Her bag is like a trademark, a passport to conversation, even with strangers, about her favorite subject: the arts.

Although most of her job compiling the roster of witnesses for public testimony on the arts budget the following day was completed, Murphy, as chief lobbyist for the arts, still had appointments to keep and points to be made.

In these hard Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget-balancing days, with hearings on arts matters resuming here next week, Murphy, who is the director of the American Arts Alliance, is not only dealing with the fallout from lowered numbers. She also must juggle a myriad of other issues where the arts “point of view” must be “communicated”--from matters of tax changes to nonprofit postal rates and categories.

Her first stop was Rep. Les AuCoin’s (D-Ore.) office and a chat with Kevin Lynch, AuCoin’s staff person for the House Appropriations interior subcommittee, which hears the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. AuCoin is a friend of the arts, but there isn’t always total accord. Lynch focused on the unsettled timber industry in his state. Murphy stayed close to the subject of the arts.

“Let’s face it,” she said, “an unemployed violin player is just as unemployed as an unemployed timber worker.”

Murphy thought it would be helpful if the Portland congressman asked the mayor of Binghamton, N.Y., who would be part of the public witness roster, about the impact a possible loss revenue sharing would have on state and local aid to the arts. “I don’t know,” Lynch said. “He had to tell Oregon leaders there isn’t any more revenue sharing (scratched in the Reagan budget for fiscal 1987), and when you have to tell that to the leading mayors of the cities and county. . . .”

Murphy and Lynch moved to safer territory. “Watch television the other night?” she asked. “Did you see your leader talking to you (on aid to Nicaragua)?”

“That’s the kind of revenue they want to share,” Lynch chortled. “One hundred million dollars. That works out to about $10,000 per contra. If we had a student loan program of $10,000 per student. . . . “

“How about guaranteeing to every arts organization in the country with budgets of less than a million dollars--$10,000?” Murphy countered. She laughed--and so did he.

Next stop was subcommittee Chairman Sidney R. Yates’ (D-Ill.) office. “Do you like your surprise (witness)?” Murphy asked Yates. She was referring to Megan Follows, the 18-year-old Canadian actress who played Anne in the “Wonderworks” presentation on PBS’ “Anne of Green Gables.”

Yates had high praise for the show in hearings with arts endowment officials March 4, and Murphy saw to it that Follows would be at Yates’ second hearing March 19.

“She’s going to bring you a set of her tapes,” Murphy told him.

“Really?” the chairman beamed. “Oh, how wonderful. For my granddaughter. . . . Come, sit down. Make yourself at home.”

But a good lobbyist also knows when to bow out.

Anne Murphy became the second director of the Arts Alliance, the principal advocacy group for the professional arts community, in November, 1979. The organization itself was chartered in 1977 on April 20--her birthday.

She was in on the founding talks that took place at an American Indian festival in Santa Fe, N.M., in the summer of 1976. At the time she was director of the congressional liaison for the National Endowment for the Arts under the renowned Nancy Hanks. Before becoming alliance director, Murphy was PBS’ director of national affairs.

The alliance, which has a staff of six and a relatively trim budget of $400,000, serves as the advocacy or lobbying arm of 350 professional nonprofit arts institutions across the country--theater, dance and opera companies, orchestras and art museums. (Its board includes Los Angeles members Earl A. Powell III, director of the County Museum of Art, and William P. Wingate, executive managing director of Center Theatre Group. Beverly Sills and writer Maya Angelou are immediate past members.)

“Up until and through 1975,” said Murphy, in her sunny parlor office on the top floor of a town house here, “the presence of the arts was done through the endowment. As the endowment budget reached about $100 million (it’s $158.5 million today), it was determined that indeed outside sources were needed to ‘lobby.’ An agency is prohibited from lobbying--it can pass on information but it can’t lobby.

“At the time, American Symphony Orchestra League was on the Hill, Opera America was on the Hill, Theatre Communications Group, and the group that was the progenitor of what became Dance U.S.A. And all of us determined, because we had innumerable experience in government, that it would be better to present a united front. . . . It was also cheaper.”

One of her earliest assignments involved room-temperature restrictions during the energy crisis. Arts organizations needed--and got--special dispensation from the Department of Energy. “You’d have to re-tune a piano every 10 minutes; dancers’ bones would break at those temperatures.”

Murphy’s congressional experience began in 1965 when she became office aide to the late Rep. John E. Fogarty, a Democrat from her home state of Rhode Island. When Fogarty, who had been an Appropriations subcommittee chairman, died in 1967, Murphy worked several months for Sargent Shriver at the Office of Economic Opportunity, then went back to work until 1975 for Fogarty’s successor, former Rep. Robert Tiernan,

“I got my graduate degree in poli-sci there,” she said. “I did everything from making coffee to feeding the fish to being in charge of the office.”

The second of five children, Anne Murphy grew up in Providence, R.I. Her father, Edmund Murphy, was a shipyard foreman, who died when she was 9, and her mother, Mary Canning Murphy, did survey work until her children were old enough for her to take an outside job. “Our dining-room table was covered with surveys,” Murphy recalled, “and I always still answer every phone survey, because I think of the poor woman at the other end who did what my mother did.”

She graduated at 16 from St. Patrick’s, an all-girls’ school where, to prepare for college, students wrote a term paper a month. Despite several scholarships, it was determined that Murphy would go to Rhode Island College, a state-supported school, and study to be a teacher.

“I wanted to go away and we had this little talk at the kitchen table, my mother and I, that it was not possible--financially. I was quiet and shy and retiring, and going to school with people of my own ilk, my own background, turned out to be a good social experience. I met a lot of people who continue to be my closest friends.”

Murphy graduated in 1959 with a major in child psychology. She laughed heartily, noting that it prepared her well for her career as a lobbyist.

“And then I made a deal,” Murphy went on, “that I would stay at home for three years when I graduated from college and earn enough money so the next one could go. That’s the way families were, and we still are a very closely bonded family.”

She taught for three years in Warwick, close to home, then moved to Bladensburg, Md., a suburb of Washington. “Boston was too close, and New York was too big and Chicago was too far, and a lot of my friends were moving to the Washington area.”

It was, of course, the middle of the Kennedy years. In the spring of 1960 Murphy had gone down to the local Democratic club to volunteer several nights a week. She did such a good job she was invited to join the state delegation as an aide at the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. There she met Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), who was elected that November to the Senate and is one of the staunchest supporters of the arts. (He introduced the legislation in the Senate that established the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities in 1965.) In Los Angeles, as well, she found herself occasionally squired by then Gov. Dennis J. (Denny) Roberts--”the bachelor governor of Rhode Island who was in his 50s”--to Perle Mesta and some Kennedy parties.

Murphy had also made a reputation as a diligent worker. Nearly five years later, when Fogarty asked colleagues back home who would be a good office aide, he was told that “Anne Murphy is the perfect person and she lives right near Washington. . . .”

“Boy, did I learn about power (there)!,” she said.

Does she enjoy being a lobbyist? Murphy’s response was quick. She reached behind her desk, over which hangs her own rose and gray abstract painting, and brought forth that briefcase. “If you’re going to be a bag lady,” she said with a laugh, “have a great bag.

“Yes, I enjoy it,” she continued without skipping a beat, “because the product I’m lobbying for is so important to the future of society that I can think of nothing I’d rather do. Because without creativity, we’re going to self-destruct. Society does not move forward without vision, and vision is inspired by creativity.

“The role of the arts in this country is to inspire creativity, to make people have a new way of looking at something. It may only happen twice in your lifetime, but if something helps you to look at something differently, you’re a different person. . . .

“And right now we’re looking at a society that is being limited, and my role is to say, ‘I won’t accept those limits.’ ”

Asked how can we support the arts when other issues are perhaps more pressing, Murphy responded quickly again:

“A community doesn’t choose whether it’s going to support a fire department or a police department. We’re not talking about either-or. If everything is gray and we have no outlets, we’re not going to move forward. One of my favorite quotes. . . . “

In the days when she was working for the endowment, she recalled, Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.) was a congressman, and the witness before him was conductor Maurice Abravanel.

“Tell me in 15 seconds or less, why I should support the arts,” Murphy quoted Pressler as asking.

“ ‘For the same reason your farmers grow flowers’,” she said Abravanel replied.