The Money Weapon : Harvey Gantt is trying to unseat NEA opponent Sen. Jesse Helms with the help of arts activists from around the country

Gold Mountain Entertainment president Danny Goldberg, an influential figure in both music industry and political activist circles, is accustomed to familiar proximity--if not outright closeness--to elements of the nation’s political power structure.

Thus, it was not unusual for him to find himself at a Los Angeles luncheon with local celebrities and Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) a few weeks ago. Metzenbaum, said Goldberg, “is one of the few people in Washington with some sort of progressive consistency.”

What Goldberg didn’t expect was the signal he got from Metzenbaum. The senator also beckoned to Stanley Grinstein, an influential arts patron and part owner of a prominent art printing firm, Gemini G.E.L., as well as a political stalwart in liberal causes.

When Metzenbaum got the two men together, he wanted to talk about Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte who is trying to unseat Helms in a race that has attracted enormous national attention.

“He took me and Grinstein aside,” Goldberg recalled of Metzenbaum, “and said, ‘This is a really amazing opportunity and Gantt needs your help.’ ”

From that exchange and from unrelated grass-roots encounters among figures in the arts world across the country--from the music industry to theater and visual arts--has grown what is apparently the broadest program of arts-related political fund-raising ever seen in an American congressional election.

It is a disjointed, spontaneous enterprise whose players hope to raise more than $2 million for Gantt, according to Grinstein--who makes his living from a South-Central Los Angeles forklift dealership. It features chain letters--even fax chain letters, private mailing lists, benefit concerts, art auctions, checkwriting parties and a great deal of plain, old-fashioned talk .

“I would say that if the arts community doesn’t raise $1 million to $2 million for Gantt, we will have failed him,” said Ronald Feldman, a New York City art gallery owner who has helped to organize several pro-Gantt events. “I don’t think we’re going to fail him.”

Gordon Davidson, director of the Center Theatre Group, produced one of the first chain letters, which he opened with an acknowledgment that “I am not one ordinarily to send or perpetuate chain letters.”

“I was trying to think of a way to get to as many people as possible,” Davidson said. “I was very moved both by Gantt himself when I met him and by my concern over the National Endowment for the Arts.

“I’ve been a contributor, but never a fund-raiser. This is wider than simply Los Angeles. It is something you could reach out to a lot of people with.”

Entertainment industry executives have opened their Rolodexes and sent out mailings to hit on their friends. For example, Danny Goldberg’s foray into his phone directory brought in, he estimates, $15,000.

In New York City, Goldberg’s letter arrived on the desk of Polly Anthony, senior vice president for promotion of Epic Records. She adapted it to her own use and raided her own Rolodex for more possible contributors.

“I haven’t done anything like this since I was in college and we did a huge mailing for the (1972 George) McGovern campaign,” Anthony said, laughing. “It makes me feel as if I’m doing something for my children’s children. Someone like Jesse Helms should not be totally misusing freedom of speech.”

In San Francisco, a coalition of business people--without a single artist among them--organized under the name First Amendment Crisis Team to raise money for an anti-Helms television, radio and newspaper advertising campaign planned for North Carolina. The effort is exclusively anti-Helms and is not directly advocating the Gantt candidacy. The group solicited money through ads in the Village Voice, the New Yorker and weekly Variety in which people are encouraged to call a 1-900 telephone number, which results in an automatic $9.99 contribution. Organizer Rob Staley said that the group came together out of concern for the NEA crisis and events like the state court obscenity prosecution of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie.

Helms declined to be interviewed but a spokeswoman for the senator said he has not attempted to challenge Gantt’s reliance on contributions from the national arts community, but that Helms believes “people have a right to know where a candidate’s money is coming from and who is supporting them.” However, she charged, “much of Harvey Gantt’s support comes from special interest groups who are interested in big government.”

She said that Helms believes arts issues are relevant to the campaign because “the people in North Carolina resent their tax dollars funding pornographic art”--a reference to the ongoing NEA political imbroglio.

The decentralized arts-for-Gantt campaign has unmistakable elements of the eagerness for revenge. There are at least half a dozen congressional races around the country in which arts issues play a role--involving incumbents who have staked out the arts as part of their turf.

The races range from the Senate reelection campaign of Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), an original drafter of the NEA’s enabling legislation 25 years ago, to the House race of Rep. Pat Williams (D-Mont.), the pro-arts freedom chairman of the subcommittee responsible for the NEA. Actor Carroll O’Connor played host at a Beverly Hills arts community fund-raiser for Williams several weeks ago.

There is also the reelection campaign of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach) here in Southern California, but it is clear that the principal object of political attention in the arts community narrows to just a single election--Helms-Gantt.

Indeed, Long Beach area artists have developed a miniature political action committee to work for Rohrabacher’s defeat. But to arts figures like Goldberg--who believes that Rohrabacher is probably unstoppable in this particular campaign--putting all the eggs in the Helms basket has the greatest promise for success.

That is because Helms was the first Washington politician to wade into the broad fight over freedom of artistic expression involving a range of agencies from the NEA to the Federal Communications Commission. To the extent that the gay community has a natural attraction to arts causes as well, there are elements in the Gantt support of combining the arts battle with Helms with the fight against his well publicized disapproval of homosexuality and lesbianism.

“I felt that Gantt has a real chance and I feel that Helms is the first person we want to get,” Grinstein said. “We should get to the heart of the dragon first and then (Rep. William) Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) and Rohrabacher are next. The message will be sent to them if Gantt either wins or comes very close because of this kind of support.

“Politicians are very clever about recognizing that money is the mother’s milk of politics. I hope that (a victory or a narrow loss with strong arts support) by Gantt will send a message to these people: That they’re playing with something that’s very vital to many Americans. People are starting to believe in this issue. There are more and more people in this country who realize how crucial that race is.”

Nine acclaimed artists--from Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg to Robert Motherwell and Edward Diebenkorn--have created special lithographs and silk-screen prints that Grinstein is sending out to anyone who sends Gantt $1,000. Grinstein said he wrote the artists asking them to produce the work as a result of the meeting with Metzenbaum, after which he decided to break a long-standing personal prohibition about asking artists to donate their work to political causes. Each piece was created expressly for the Gantt campaign.

Fund-raisers of all hues--from a bash at a Broadway brownstone last Monday hosted by New York theater producer Joseph Papp to a rap concert organized by Bob Guccione Jr.--publisher of the rock magazine Spin--have materialized across the country.

In tandem with the specific Gantt efforts, arts figures are taking roles in Senate Vote ‘90, a North Carolina political consciousness raising program whose major component is a voter registration drive. Registration booths have been set up in places like record stores because, said Jeff Ayeroff, the Los Angeles-based president of Virgin Records, planners concluded the population under 25--the record industry’s key target audience--”has not been a constituency that is volatile to a politician, because less than 17% of them vote.

“We want to sort of politicize a generation that we have entertained, to say to them that there are American ideals that you aren’t informed about. We have an obligation because of what we do to earn our money to be able to educate the public as to what value there is to freedom of speech.”

Arts-for-Gantt has strong bicoastal elements, with most of the activity focused in New York and California. But it also has strong home-state ties within the sizable and increasingly vocal North Carolina arts community itself. And there are offshoots like a party in Chicago whose organizers included James Wood, director of the Art Institute of Chicago and a member of the National Council on the Arts--the advisory board to the politically beleaguered NEA, one of Helms’ favorite political targets.

“It’s not orchestrated,” chuckled Jan Brooks Loyd, a North Carolina artist working for Gantt in her home state. “The irony is that we wanted it to be. But forget it. The arts community is fundamentally anarchistic.”

“There’s a lot of cottage industry fund-raising throughout the arts and entertainment industry in addition to the normal big players,” Goldberg said of the broader national arts community. “I don’t know that it’s going to make the difference, but people who don’t normally write checks are.”

This has happened quietly, with no press agents and largely behind the scenes, partly because Gantt--an architect by training and an African American by birth--wants it that way, to deny Helms the opportunity to make the involvement of prominent movie stars, musicians and artists a campaign issue. But the lack of public fanfare has been observed, as well, because this foray into fund-raising activism is uncharted territory for much of the arts community.

In North Carolina itself, there is a bit of the sense of evening old scores. One key fund-raising event--an art auction scheduled for Friday--was organized by officials of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem. The Gantt fund-raiser is to be held off the grounds of the nonprofit art center and was carefully organized without any direct tie to SECCA.

But the alacrity with which the arts center’s staff participated reflected nagging bitterness over Helms’ central role in attacking an exhibit organized by SECCA that contained the photograph titled “Piss Christ,” an image of a crucifix immersed in urine that precipitated the ongoing NEA political imbroglio after Helms seized on it.

This partnership with artists--especially out-of-state artists--has clearly become a sensitive topic in the Gantt campaign.

An unwritten ground rule exists--acknowledged by people in the campaign and close to Gantt--that out-of-state arts money is welcome, but out-of-state artists making appearances in North Carolina are not. Gantt, taking a lesson from attacks by Helms on visits by artists to his opponent’s campaign when he last ran in 1984 against Gov. Jim Hunt, has made it clear that touring benefit performances by big-name superstars within North Carolina would be counterproductive.

Eschewing interviews and attempting to court arts money as quietly as he can, Gantt has traveled widely in search of support. There have been two fund-raisers on his behalf here in Los Angeles--one hosted by Grinstein and attended by artists, musicians, agents, entertainment executives and other arts community figures. Half a dozen events were held in Washington last weekend alone, followed by two more, including the Papp party, in New York on Monday. Gantt had visited both Washington and New York on several previous occasions.

Grinstein’s party drew a broad range of big-money arts patrons, including Fred Nicholas, Eli Broad and Peter and Eileen Norton. Also attending were artists John Baldessari--who later contributed one of the original prints in Grinstein’s fund-raising program--as well as Robbie Conal, whose anti-Helms billboard has roused a minor local controversy, and Kim McCarty, who happens to be married to restaurateur Michael McCarty.

His campaign routinely denies requests for interviews at these events, which are normally not publicly announced. In Los Angeles, a Gantt campaign consultant first offered The Times five minutes on the telephone with the candidate, then rescinded the offer when told the topic for the interview would be Gantt’s fund-raising in the arts community.

Gantt campaign officials in North Carolina specifically asked that both reporters and photographers be barred from Papp’s fund-raiser last week and urged at least one other arts-related fund-raiser not to discuss her activities.

The reluctance to acknowledge national arts links seems to have some of its roots in wanting to avoid giving Helms an issue, but some observers of the campaign believe the concern is misdirected since Helms is likewise vulnerable on the sensitive issue of out-of-state support. With that, though, there is an undercurrent of sentiment among people in, or close to, the Gantt camp that the candidate may have been hurt by sloppy and sometimes inept staff work outside of his home state. There is a belief--though people who express it declined to have their feelings attributed to them--that Gantt has sometimes made poor choices in selection of people to carry his message and fund appeals more broadly across the country.

“We’ve gotten wonderful support from the arts community,” said Mel Watt, Gantt’s campaign manager. He contended that the reluctance to publicly discuss the arts involvement of the campaign is part of a broader policy not to talk about fund-raising in general. “The problem we have is all the North Carolina newspapers want to write about is fund-raising,” Watt said. “They’ll go all the way to California to write about that, but they won’t go into the next county to write about the issues that we’re talking about in this campaign.”

Ironically, Gantt has not given arts issues a significant role in his campaign strategy. In fact, said Reg Hanes, a wealthy Winston-Salem arts patron who is working for Gantt, while the challenger has publicly opposed censorship and endorsed reauthorization of the NEA in Congress without restrictions on the kinds of art it can support, he has deliberately tried to avoid having the arts more broadly dominate the Senate race.

“I’m working for Harvey’s campaign because I would be proud to have him as a senator,” said Hanes, whose family--founders of the Hanes undergarment company--has strong ties to SECCA. “But is Harvey going to make the NEA one of his key issues? No. I think Mr. Helms is. Nobody can argue against emotion. That’s what makes abortion (Gantt is pro-choice and Helms vehemently opposes legal abortion) such an explosive issue. It’s like faith. You don’t need facts and figures and proof.”

Hanes downplays the extent of arts support for Gantt. “There have been some very generous outpourings,” Hanes said. “But we have not had a very large number of people involved. There’s a certain feeling out there. In New York, I talked to art patrons and they said, ‘I’d love to see (Helms) beat, but there’s no way a black man is going to beat Jesse Helms in North Carolina.’ ”

But to Goldberg, a key to galvanizing artists to dip into their bank accounts for Gantt has been the ability to persuade them that the challenger actually has a realistic prospect of unseating the incumbent. Polls help. So far, they show Gantt and Helms even, with a decisive proportion undecided. “Gantt is extremely attractive in person,” Goldberg said. “He’s articulate. He exudes the confidence and clarity about how he’s going to go about doing what he’s doing. He makes you believe he can win.

“I don’t think it’s an easy race. I probably would say the odds are against Gantt because can a black man really defeat Jesse Helms in North Carolina in 1990? I don’t know. You can speculate, but I do think a victory by Gantt could be in the ballpark.”

Even if the money yield for Gantt reaches the strata hoped for by Grinstein, Goldberg and other arts money mavens, it will still place Gantt woefully behind Helms in war chest size. Helms is expected to raise substantially more than the $7.9 million he had in hand at the end of June--to Gantt’s $808,000. The Helms campaign said last week it had raised “approximately $8 million” so far.

Recent estimates indicate Helms may spend more than $10 million by election day. Arts fund-raisers say it would be impossible for Gantt to even come close to that total--but that they hope to produce enough to give Gantt a credible presence in television advertising in the crucial closing weeks of the campaign.

In a way, Gantt’s new-found arts community friends hope to use Helms’s financial success to neutralize an anticipated attack from the Republican--who might be expected to charge Gantt with fiscal carpetbagging from the politically suspect arts community. If Helms joins battle on the out-of-state money issue, say Goldberg and most other organizers of the arts money campaign, Gantt can easily counter by showing that 80% of Helms’ financing comes from outside of North Carolina.

“I ordinarily do not get involved in politics,” said Papp. “I try not to be supportive of any individual candidate because, even though I’m functioning as an individual, and not as the head of the New York Shakespeare Festival, I can’t avoid being (identified as) the head of the Shakespeare Festival.

“But this has been consuming me. Jesse Helms’ impact has been national, not local. I very clearly feel I’d like in some way to do something about that.

“Even though I can’t vote in North Carolina, I will be speaking.”