Even the Passions of Harvey Stearn Seem Button-Down

Harvey Stearn looked like he just stepped out of a Brooks Brothers ad. Trim. Tanned. Self-contained. Handsome as a runway model. A well-dressed package despite the unseasonal late-winter heat. His gray suit didn’t have a wrinkle. His tie was knotted to the neck, his shirt stiff at the collar. There wasn’t a hair out of place. Even when he spoke he had a buttoned-down voice.

But somehow the topics that interest the 49-year-old chairman of the California Arts Council slipped out of him during a recent interview like shaggy dogs let loose for a light morning canter.

He talked about “Einstein, the violinist.” About “the bum rap on intuitive, right-brain thinking.” About his enjoyment of the martial-arts novels by Eric Van Lustbader, among them “The Ninja” and “Jian.” About the “emotional impact” of Ernst Haas’ photographs. About everything from the discipline of Zen to the study of nuclear engineering.

It was the sort of conversation you might have expected to hear from a flamboyant arts type during the colorful Jerry Brown administration in the ‘70s, but not from Stearn.

Though widely respected as a civic-minded businessman with a reputation for managerial efficiency--he is also president of the California division of the Mission Viejo Co.--Stearn has left some arts advocates, including his admirers, wondering whether he harbors any compelling enthusiasms beneath his low-key exterior.

Utterly different from previous arts council chairmen such as actor Peter Coyote or San Francisco Art Institute president Stephen Goldstine, who were outspoken activists, Stearn “is too quiet and reserved for a lot of people,” said Robert Walker, president of the California Confederation of the Arts, an arts advocacy group based in Sacramento.

Stearn, a resident of South Laguna, was appointed to the 11-member arts council by Gov. George Deukmejian in July, 1984. He became vice chairman six months later, was elected chairman in February, 1987, and reelected chairman in January. He is the first and only Orange County resident to serve on the council. The post is unsalaried.

The council, which supervises a staff of 55 government employees, dispenses grants to arts organizations and to individual artists throughout the state. It operates on a budget of $14.6 million. Deukmejian has proposed a budget of $15.7 million for fiscal 1988-89.

“From what I can see,” said Walker, who is also the business manager of the San Francisco Opera, “Harvey is running the council very well. He’s organized and he does a lot of thoughtful planning. The one thing that is lacking perhaps is passion. He takes a businessman’s approach to the arts. But it would be nice if he could take the governor by the arm and say: ‘You’ve got to see the Bolshoi tonight!’ I think you need someone to do that, too. And I don’t think Harvey is inclined toward that kind of thing.”

If buttonholing politicians and turning them into converts is not Stearn’s strong suit, amateur photography surely is. The walls of his unpretentious office in Mission Viejo are lined with his outdoor works, including one photo of a pair of elk standing in a clearing near Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada.

“That tied for best-in-show in an exhibit at the Orange County Fair,” Stearn said, not making too much of the prize, but proud just the same. “I’ve done everything from portraits to fashion. You name it, I love it all.”

Stearn recalled taking up photography at age 13 because “somebody gave me a Brownie” and his father, a dentist, had a darkroom. He didn’t get serious about photography, though, until he reached college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I became a part-time photographer to defray expenses,” he said.

Today, though he has reverted to his amateur status, Stearn has become something of a connoisseur. He said he has an extensive library of photography books and a collection of old cameras. He also collects old photographs going back to 19th-Century daguerreotypes.

Asked to elaborate on what kind of photography appeals to him, he pointed to a Yosemite landscape by Ansel Adams that he keeps opposite his desk on a wall with other, more mundane photos, such as a shot of President Gerald Ford launching his 1976 presidential campaign in Orange County.

“Everybody likes Ansel Adams, of course,” said Stearn. “What I especially like is the way he interprets his tones. He lets large areas go dark. He prints down. Or he develops a tonal scale so the dark areas create a graphic drama. But he’s not just making sure he has all the tones from white to black. He’s interprets the scene with those tones. And that makes the difference between a photograph with impact and one that’s ordinary.”

On the other hand, Stearn said, he also loves the way Ernst Haas uses “color saturation and movement to create emotional impact.” Sounding like he could give a photography lecture at the click of a shutter, he explained that Haas “gets the essence of an emotion” whereas Adams “captures the grandeur and the magnitude of a scene.”

Stearn, who was born and raised in Queens, N.Y., arrived in California with his wife Barbara in 1964 to take a job with Hunt Foods in Buena Park. He had a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from MIT and several years of work toward an unfinished doctorate in economics at New York University.

While contemplating a career in nuclear engineering, he said, it occurred to him that he would have to work for the power industry for the rest of his life--not what he considered to be a terrific option.

So after college he went to work instead for the Allied Chemical Co. in New Jersey, doing metallurgical research. That wasn’t too thrilling either. “I started to wonder if I wanted to end up trudging around an oil refinery,” he said.

Stearn eventually landed at the Mission Viejo Co. in 1967 as director of public affairs and shortly afterward found his niche in market research and corporate planning and development. Moving steadily up the executive ladder, he was named president of the company’s California division last June.

It was only six years ago, and by way of business rather than aesthetic interests, that Stearn began his odyssey as a policy maker for the arts.

In a nutshell, the Orange County Performing Arts Center asked his former boss, Philip Reilly, then the president of the Mission Viejo Realty Group, to serve on its board of directors just as it was about to launch a fund-raising drive for building construction.

“Phil felt he had all he could handle,” Stearn recounted. “So he volunteered me.”

At about the same time, the Orange County Business Committee on the Arts invited Stearn to serve on its board. Then, in 1984, when the governor deemed it important to fill a California Arts Council slot with someone from Orange County, the committee on the arts executive director Betty Moss recommended Stearn.

“Business disciplines were badly needed by the council at that time,” he said. “Once I got there I began to realize it didn’t have a formal long-range planning process. They had good programs but no defensible basis for moving on to new ones. There seemed to be a need for organization.”

Stearn filled that need in what seemed no time at all. Within months he established a planning committee, ultimately rescuing the council from a loss of National Endowment for the Arts funds over the lack of long-range planning as well as an absence of ethnic minority programs.

Moreover, he turned both problems around so effectively, as far as the National Endowment for the Arts was concerned, that this year it recommended a three-year grant for the council so it does not have to re-apply every 12 months.

“The state now has planning that is the envy of other states,” said Walker of the California Confederation of the Arts. “And (Stearn) was instrumental in getting individual fellowships to artists. That hadn’t happened in a long time. The last time it did it just blew apart because it was mishandled. He shepherded that through, as well as the multicultural programs.”

Still, when it comes to establishing a legacy, Stearn must face the uncomfortable fact that California ranks a lowly 26th among the states--behind Oklahoma and ahead of Georgia--in per capita spending on the arts.

According to statistics compiled in 1987 by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, California spends 50 cents per person. That compares with $3.72 in Massachusetts, the state that spends the most on the arts per person, and $3.04 in New York, which ranks fourth.

California ranks even lower-- 41st, behind North Dakota and ahead of Maine--in terms of the percentage of general funds allocated to the state arts agency.

“You have to realize that has a long history,” said Stearn. “We have lobbied as hard as anybody out there and more effectively than anybody out there. I think (arts council executive director) Bob Reid and I have taken as strong a role as anybody can in getting more money.”

Noting that Deukmejian has proposed a new program of matching grants this year, which represents a $1.1-million increase over last year’s arts agency budget, Stearn argued: “It’s a lot better to ask for a million dollars a year over four years, and get it, than to ask for $4 million in one year, as the Confederation has done, and get nothing. We had to make some trade-offs, but we anticipate more gains.”

Even so, Stearn is convinced there is “only so much in the way of public dollars that can be spent on things of this nature.”

That is why “the council’s mission is to make sure its dollars are spent as wisely as possible,” he said. “Beyond that, if we’re going to do more things, I think we are going to have to rely increasingly on private support.”

For anyone who still needs convincing that Stearn is the right man to strike a blow for California arts, or anything else for that matter, keep this in mind: “I have an 80-pound bag in the garage--a ‘heavy bag’--and I work out on it every other day,” he said, “practicing my karate moves.”