Arts and the Hill: A Local Legislator Leads Charge of the ‘Right Brigade’

Somewhere in the bowels of that part of Hollywood where unproduced treatments and scripts are consigned lurks a World War II melodrama called “The French Doctoress.”

Thrice optioned and thrice spurned by producers, it is a would-be R-rated tale of spies, Nazis and the French Resistance whose heroine, in one bedroom scene, somehow finds time for steamy lovemaking with a shot-down pilot.

Despite long odds, its ever-hopeful author talks about a pending deal in which “The French Doctoress” is under consideration for major studio production.

“They could make it (the love scene) as graphic as they cared to,” the aspiring screenwriter says. “It wouldn’t bother me one bit if they made it into an R.”

There are hundreds of such scripts in Hollywood. This one is noteworthy not for its subject matter, but because the writer is a freshman congressman--with a district straddling Los Angeles and Orange counties--who has enthusiastically taken on the role in the House of Representatives of chief conservative antagonist of the National Endowment for the Arts.

The antagonism focuses on the propriety of federal financing of the arts in general, and on taste, decency and sexual explicitness of subject matter in particular. And it has become a day in the sun for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita), the man who sits and talks about his ill-fated movie deal on a sunny weekend afternoon in Hollywood.

There is, he says, nothing inconsistent in the tastefulness of his own aspirations as a screenwriter and the moralistic tone of his position on the arts endowment in Congress. It’s strictly a question, he says, of the conflict between private- and public-sector values.

The klieg lights are to be turned back on today in the Washington controversy, which has been developing since April. Were it a movie, it could be said to have undergone unremitting script revision. Today’s scene is the scheduled opening meeting of a House-Senate conference committee that is to debate a compromise version of the national endowment’s 1990 appropriation bill.

And it is Rohrabacher who says he will wage parliamentary guerrilla warfare against the compromise bill when the legislation returns for a ratification vote in the House. Rohrabacher wants the bill to contain at least some requirements stipulating the content extremes at which federal funding for arts projects must be cut off. If the conference committee bill includes such standards--even if they are less severe than wording Rohrabacher supports--he will call off the fighting and move on to his next issue.

If the conference committee report contains no such restrictions, Rohrabacher says, he will wage a floor fight intended to make his squirming colleagues participate in a recorded vote in which he will threaten to portray anyone voting against him as a pornography advocate.

But does he think he’ll win?

“When you believe, as I do, that 95% to 98% of the American people happen to favor fervently what you’re saying,” Rohrabacher says with the conviction of a Chautauqua tent preacher, “that only the power structure of your opponents is what’s preventing you from accomplishing what you want to accomplish, you’re optimistic.

“Only the wealthiest people from my district have had any negative reaction to what I’ve been doing. Working people--and 90% of the people who represent my constituency--think what I’m doing is the most wonderful thing they’ve ever heard of their congressman doing.”

Rohrabacher took over as the most visible congressman in the arts controversy when Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) abandoned a territory he had staked out for himself in the issue several weeks ago. Rohrabacher has been even more visible lately because the chief of conservative strategy in the whole affair, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), has pulled back--at least temporarily, a Helms aide said earlier this week--from his own highly visible role in the controversy.

Rohrabacher, 42, is a former speech writer for President Ronald Reagan and former editorial writer for the Orange County Register who said in an interview that he would prefer to do away with every penny of the endowment’s proposed 1990 budget of $171.4 million.

But he says at the same time that the $193 million the Defense Department is spending on military bands this year--scheduled to increase to $200.4 million in 1991--shouldn’t be touched because of “how necessary they are for the morale of the men. And the job of defense is the job of the federal government.”

“At a time of high deficit spending, when we are struggling to come up with funds for the elderly and prenatal care,” Rohrabacher says, “for (the national endowment) to go around and spend it on art is something we might have been able to afford in past years, but we can’t afford today.

“The NEA people should have their own standards for what is decent and what is indecent. If they are so far off the wall that they end up endorsing things that are no better than what you find at a porno bookstore, then you have to say their values on this are out of touch and they shouldn’t be the ones making the decisions.”

A graduate of Palos Verdes High School, Rohrabacher attended Harbor Junior College and got a degree in history from Cal State Long Beach and a master’s--in American studies--from USC. He worked as a reporter for a local wire service in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, then as an assistant press secretary in Ronald Reagan’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign and then in 1980, when Reagan won.

His reward was a White House job as one of Reagan’s five senior speech writers, during which he came to identify with key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal, specifically forming a friendship with former Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North. When he left the White House to run for Congress in March, 1988, Rohrabacher recalls, “they said, ‘You’ll have to shave your beard and stay away from Ollie North.’ ” Rohrabacher--who thought he knew the 42nd California Congressional District better than that--did neither. And he won.

Today, he chuckles when he is asked if the subject of censorship is something he and North have discussed.

“He (North) would probably want the money (budgeted for the NEA) delivered to the Contras,” Rohrabacher says, laughing. “But, I swear, that is not my plan.”

He insists that, ideologically, he is his own man. He notes that he voted against full funding for the B-2 bomber even though all other California Republicans voted for it, and that he defied President Bush and opposed the Midget Man missile. The B-2 vote was especially wrenching, Rohrabacher said, because his own brother is employed on the project.

Rohrabacher is single and lives in Lomita, but as a freshman congressman, he has learned the existence of red-eye flights between Washington and Los Angeles--a life style he says he figures he can handle for about 10 years, tops.

“This is bad,” he says of living weekdays in Washington and weekends in his district. “I mean, this is bad.”

He says he’s not much of a sports fan but favors spending his free time reading or writing. When he gets out of politics, he says, he hopes for a career as a novelist or screenwriter.

“Nobody,” he says, “should think I’m anti-arts. I’m a man of the arts. I like the arts. I like the symphony. I used to go to the Kennedy Center (in Washington) all the time.”

Rohrabacher has had a difficult transition to life in Washington and the Congress. For one thing, he complains, waves suitable for his favorite sport, body surfing--so plentiful at his favorite haunts in Seal Beach--are available nowhere within less than a four-hour drive of the Capitol.

And there is another problem: “They don’t even know how to make a margarita in Washington.”

In a broader sense, though, observes Rohrabacher, being a congressman is like being a guest at the Mad Hatter’s tea party in “Alice in Wonderland.”

Would he care to identify the Mad Hatter? “I am working in the Mad Hatter’s tea party, (and) the Mad Hatter wasn’t the only crazy person there,” Rohrabacher says, indicating a bipartisanship to the insanity. “That’s certainly what (you see) when you take a look at Congress.

“To try to predict and base (the planning of) your life on what the Mad Hatter is going to be doing as he runs around the tea party is impossible. How long would Alice have remained sane had she stayed there?”

Rohrabacher says he realizes that first-term congressmen like him are, by definition, appropriately described as obscure. And he may be a somewhat contradictory personality.

But Rohrabacher’s embrace of libertarian-conservative ideology and a clear recognition of the need to quickly make a name for himself have cast him in the role as one of the leaders in a right-led arts protest like none Washington has ever seen. It is the most spirited--and, arts advocates contend, threatening--controversy in the national endowment’s 25-year history.

Yet in the midst of it, Rohrabacher’s polite invective spares no one. Even Helms, he says, is part of the problem, because the North Carolina senator has too entrenched a reputation for waging hate campaigns against life styles with which he disagrees.

“What really has served to polarize this debate, unfortunately,” Rohrabacher says, “was Sen. Helms’ image and the old-line image of (other) people involved in this. Basically, they do not have the same libertarian notion of the First Amendment that I have.”

At the same time, though, Rohrabacher says Helms is to be congratulated for devising the wording of an amendment to the NEA money bill that now bears Helms’ name. It would bar federal funding for artworks alleged to be offensive, indecent or obscene.

What he’s really getting at, Rohrabacher concedes, is the undercurrent in the debate over the national endowment that clearly is a dispute over the morality of gay life styles. It arises because one of the photographers whose work brought about the current controversy was the late Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS this year and whose work includes some graphically sexual images of male nudes.

What some critics contend is a homophobic preoccupation has underlain many of Helms’ public statements on the controversy and been a dominant theme in speeches and comments by Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton). Among these critics is Jock Reynolds, director of the Washington Project for the Arts, which agreed to display a Mapplethorpe show after the Corcoran Gallery of Art canceled it in an ill-fated attempt at defusing the NEA controversy in June.

Supporting Rohrabacher’s attempt this month to preserve restrictions on the arts endowment in the pending legislation, Dannemeyer noted that the motion picture “Cabaret” depicted Germany in the 1920s and the “growth in toleration of homosexuality in Germany in the era. Let us not kid ourselves. The toleration of pornography and homosexuality is . . . the symptom of a moral decay in a society that has lost the ability to say that there are standards that governed mankind down through time.”

It is at this juncture between ideological objection to federal spending for the arts combined with distaste for the subject matter of some federally funded art and unadulterated gay-bashing that Rohrabacher parts company with his more established conservative patrons.

Rohrabacher winces when he is asked, for instance, whether he parts company with Dannemeyer in terms of the relevance of homosexual subject matter in the current debate.

“Oh, absolutely,” Rohrabacher says. “I don’t want to characterize what his (Dannemeyer’s) motives are. Any attempt, by anyone, to try to make this into an attack on someone’s personal life style has actually detracted from the central issue, and I have not done that at all. And I do not ever plan as a congressman to use my office as a forum to attack people’s personal life styles. Period.”