Party Power : ‘Proudly Liberal’ Hollywood Women’s Political Committee Backs Up Its Message With Money and Muscle

When Sen. Edward M. Kennedy showed up in Beverly Hills to talk politics not long ago, he was unprepared for the question.

Was he, his hosts wanted to know, a liberal in retreat?

For a man whose liberalism is as recognizable and inescapable as his ancestry, whose liberalism is every conservative’s favorite nightmare, the question was manifestly surprising.

“I’m frankly not used to having to defend myself as a liberal,” Kennedy replied sourly.

But then again, Kennedy had never before gone to Beverly Hills to talk politics with the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee.

Seventy or so of the entertainment industry’s notable Democratic women--stars and executives and professionals--the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee has suddenly become one of the most conspicuous and talked-about political fund-raising groups in the country.

Also, it has become one of the most important, thanks to $2 million it raised for the 1986 congressional, gubernatorial and California elections, a sum few other organizations could dream of. This included a $1.5-million take on a single celebrated night when committee member Barbra Streisand sang for the cause.

“Star Power,” said the headline in Philadelphia. “Lights! Camera! Activism” went an account in Washington. “A Star is Born for the Democrats”--New York.

The committee’s ability to raise money in breathtaking amounts is founded in the riches of Hollywood, its abundance of entertainers and ready cash. But as Kennedy and other politicians are finding to their surprise, the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee is not to be regarded just as a group of glamorous women who throw an elegant party.

From their Westside living rooms, they show themselves to be a bold, ambitious, naive, determined, optimistic, energetic, elite, unorthodox, don’t-say-die band of women brash enough to advance the cause of liberalism in the 1980s. And so there is no mistake; this is old-fashioned, cod-liver-oil liberalism, with no sweeteners and no apologies in concession to the conservative times.

“We are not consensus Democrats and are never going to be,” said movie producer (“American Flyers”) Paula Weinstein, one of half a dozen leaders.

“We are very proudly liberal. Unabashedly so,” echoed Bonnie Reiss, attorney and another group leader.

The committee’s celebrity roster includes stars Streisand, Jane Fonda, Morgan Fairchild and Melissa Manchester. But the organization is shaped and its work carried by off-stage women with big-caliber reputations in the industry, women like Weinstein, consultant to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and former president of production at United Artists; songwriter (co-author of the “The Way We Were”) Marilyn Bergman and entertainment attorney Susan A. Grode.

Other members include Barbara Boyle, executive vice president of production for RKO; Barbara Corday, president of Columbia Pictures Television; Bonnie Lee, creative affairs vice president at Warner Bros., and Allyn Stewart, vice president of theatrical productions at Warner Bros.

The group began meeting in the summer of 1984, when a dozen or so women in the entertainment business began talking over “how irked it made us” when President Reagan referred to Hollywood as his town. Then on July 12 Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale named a woman, Geraldine Ferraro, as his running mate. It was a call to arms.

By August, they had a name and had filed organizational papers. Within two months, they raised $750,000 to help the Democratic ticket.

At the core of the group were women experienced in advocacy politics. That was not the case with many of the others who became rank-and-file members. Weinstein identified these newcomers as part of a class of people in California with talent, money, recognition and professional success who were still restless for meaningful expression.

“There is a generation of people now in their 30s and 40s who had been activists, who had tasted activism when they were young,” she said. “But for the last 10 years they have been committed to their careers and success. And now they’re yearning for activism again, to give back something for what they’ve got.”

During 1985, the committee grew quietly and ever so earnestly around a nine-point manifesto. They agreed that they were for civil rights, womens rights and in opposition to the religious right. They spoke for education and health care at home, for an independent judiciary and against “a balanced budget as an excuse to dismantle the social agenda of this country.” Their environmental plank proclaimed it time “to expose and penalize as criminals those who knowingly destroy the balance of nature.”

On international affairs, the committee urged global nuclear disarmament and U.S. support for self-determination of all nations.

When they welcomed Kennedy to Bergman’s Beverly Hills living room at the end of the last election cycle, a leader of the committee challenged the senator. Is he drifting from the left to the soft center of politics? The reference was to a watershed speech he made at Hofstra University two years earlier. In the address, Kennedy gave fellow Democrats the backside of his glove for growing too dependent on big spending and special constituencies, women, minorities and labor.

Kennedy’s meeting with the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee was closed, but his reaction was recalled by several who attended. “He looked at them like they were from outer space,” one said.

Recently, committee members sought out Kennedy to assure him, in the words of one, that “it was a case of us being hardest on our own. Kennedy is the single best leader on issues that are of importance to us, so we may have been pushing him a little.”

Still, the evening helped establish among political professionals the committee’s reputation as not only powerful and fervent but slightly unpredictable.

At a private weekend retreat to Santa Barbara earlier this year, the committee sharpened its agenda for the 1988 elections to three main concerns: (1) opposition to Reagan Administration activism toward Central America and its lack of activism toward South Africa, (2) opposition to the Reagan Administration’s space-based Strategic Defense Initiative and, oddly enough for a group whose power is measured by the money it can raise, (3) support for wholesale campaign finance reform to curb the influence of special interests.

Almost immediately, another U.S. senator felt the committee’s bite. This time, it occurred in public for everyone to see.

The target was Bill Bradley of New Jersey, a cerebral nouveau Democrat who was in Hollywood last month to raise money for his political committee and an early tryout for the 1992 presidential race. The $1,500-a-couple event for 200 was hosted by important industry figures Michael D. Eisner, chairman of Disney, and Michael Ovitz, the super-agent of Creative Artists Agency.

On the day Bradley arrived, the Hollywood women’s committee purchased a $1,350 full-page advertisement in Variety warning Hollywood liberals that the senator had voted last year to provide U.S. financial assistance to the Nicaraguan rebels.

“When a senator from the East Coast comes to California to raise money from our community, then this becomes a community issue, and one we feel we must speak out about,” the committee said in a prepared statement. “We hope Sen. Bradley will change his position.”

“ Seppuku !” Ritual suicide. That’s how a dissenting veteran of Southern California’s chic fund-raising circuit described the Democrats thrashing one of their own in public. Others in the patio politics scene joined in the denunciation under the protection of anonymity.

“They are demanding absolute purity. Dammit, there isn’t absolute purity in politics,” said one of the state’s most important Democratic peacemakers. “They are going to self-destruct if they keep this up. They are going to make more trouble than even their money is worth.”

Even critics acknowledged, however, that the Variety ad showed the kind of flair worthy of appreciative reviews in Hollywood. “If their goal was to be felt in their own community, they were,” said one confidant of Bradley. “If their goal was to become part of the broader political community, it wasn’t very smart.”

Interviewed recently, six committee leaders said the advertisement was a smashing success.

“What it did, respectfully, was to make it the subject of the evening,” Bergman said. “Are we going to bother taking out an ad and trying to influence (North Carolina Republican Sen.) Jesse Helms? Obviously, if we’re going to try and influence somebody, it has to be somebody with whom we have leverage and somebody with whom we agree on probably everything else--so that maybe he would care and would listen if we raised our voices.”

Bradley told Hollywood what he tells his constituents: It was a tough call to support the contras , and he will watch developments in Nicaragua closely.

“One of the nice things about groups is that they don’t have to run for office and they can be true to their causes,” said California Democratic political consultant Kam Kuwata, an admirer of what he calls “this gutsy group.”

Committee leaders fret, however, that the attention drawn to the sparks generated by their encounter with Kennedy and Bradley will stigmatize them as overbearing. Which is only sometimes the case. Other times, their private meetings and interviews with candidates are described by participants as intellectually stimulating, up-until-dawn political jam sessions the likes of which have not been seen much around Hollywood since gas was 50 cents a gallon. The committee is “so jazzed” that it plans to open some of its functions to the public, perhaps by staging community forums.

“It comes back to the reason we formed in the first place,” Reiss said. “The issues we are concerned about basically are a better, fairer, safer America. And part of that is saying, ‘Why aren’t we getting better leaders?’ ”

Going into its third year, the group is still looking for a harmonious balance between being tough but not too tough, committed but not caustic, Hollywood but not trivial, dissenting but still Democratic.

It is not, however, a group looking for a technique. When it comes to raising money, the committee is proof that the Hollywood grand stroke is alive and thriving.

Of the $2 million the committee raised for the 1986 elections, three-fourths came in the one celebrated night--Sept. 6--that Streisand performed in public for the first time in the 1980s. For that kind of collector’s ticket, Hollywood’s biggest celebrities dug deep into their wallets and brought out their darkest sunglasses against the massed paparazzi.

For their financial support, the celebrity audience was spared all but a glossy once-over on politics. Many in the committee may be passionate in their views, but they acknowledge that Hollywood prefers a good show, to say nothing of the HBO audience that saw a tape replay of Streisand’s singing that night.

Impressively, the event was staged despite the knowing advice of Democratic Party heavies who said the upstart group was in over its head. The women were told that Hollywood’s political donors--the kind who shell out $5,000 per couple for congressional races--are too few in number and not up for grabs by newcomers.

Against such a challenge, leaders of the women’s committee turned down motion picture contracts, closed their law practices and went to work full time for weeks and months to prove the experts wrong.

The chief beneficiaries of money raised by and through the committee in 1986 have been liberals in U.S. Senate races--incumbents Alan Cranston of California and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and candidates Tim Wirth of Colorado, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, Bob Edgar of Pennsylvania, Wyche Fowler of Georgia, Harriett Woods of Missouri and Broc Adams of Washington. All but Edgar and Woods were elected.

The committee was also active in a handful of gubernatorial races.

Sometimes the group made compromises in its ideological standards. Most noticeably, it supported Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley in his unsuccessful 1986 race for governor even though the mayor retreated from important liberal causes. He declined to support then-California Chief Justice Rose Bird and gun control and favors the death penalty and oil drilling at Pacific Palisades.

Other California campaigns to benefit from the committee in the last round of elections were campaigns for the toxics initiative, Proposition 65, and against the LaRouche measure, Proposition 64, dealing with acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Despite the $750,000 dinner for Mondale-Ferraro’s get-out-the-vote efforts in 1984, the Streisand dinner last fall and a handful of other fund-raising events in between, doubters still shadow the committee the way doubters seem to stalk most of Hollywood’s rapid-rising sensations.

Can the women do it again? Can they last? Can they hold together behind such an uncompromising liberal credo and continue to tweak the Democratic Establishment? Will the committee scare off the very Democratic leaders it wants to influence? Can it raise as much money for the 1988 elections? After all, how many Streisands are there to bring out of hiding? And so on.

“If we’re accustomed to anything, it’s to surprising ourselves,” attorney Grode answered.

One of the biggest challenges for the group is how to face up to the 1988 Democratic presidential primary race.

The incentive is powerful to act early and decisively. Once the Democratic nominee is chosen, taxpayers will provide the $45 million to cover direct costs of the general election campaign. Fund-raising organizations like the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee will be sharply reduced in influence, left to provide ancillary money for such activities as voter registration.

Arranging for 70 of Hollywood’s most important women to back a single contender in a field that could number six or more serious candidates will not be much easier than getting a litter of hungry puppies to hold still for a photograph.

That will not stop them from trying. Major Democratic contenders have been invited to meet with the committee.

“There has been consensus in this group that is amazing, so I don’t rule out the possibility at all of us agreeing,” Bergman said. “Is there anybody who doesn’t want to fall in love and feel excited about a candidate?”