Party Time in Hollywood : THE POWER AND THE GLITTER The Hollywood-Washington Connection <i> By Ronald Brownstein (Pantheon Books: $22.95; 426 pp.) </i>

If you are lucky enough to get Ron Brownstein as your tour guide on the yellow brick road that leads from Washington to Hollywood, you will learn early on that the interaction between the city of power and the city of glamour, as Brownstein dubs them in “The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection” isn’t what it used to be. In days of yore, legitimacy-by-association was the name of the game for a first generation of Jewish moguls. Louis B. Mayer, for example, went so far as to produce a movie starring William Randolph Hearst’s inamorata, Marion Davies, to curry favor with Hearst, and then used Hearst to get to Herbert Hoover. But by 1988, fund-raising was in the center tent, and the power had moved west.

When Michael Dukakis’ top California fund-raiser wanted to exploit a loophole in the post-Watergate campaign-finance law limiting the size of personal contributions--it permitted individuals to give as much as $100,000 to state parties--he chose as his first contributor “someone whose endorsement would legitimize the entire enterprise”: MCA’s Lew Wasserman, whom Brownstein calls “the last mogul.” After Wasserman signed the check, dozens of other Tinseltown fat cats did likewise.

But Brownstein, professional guide that he is, knows enough not to overload his tour with narrative freight; rather he lets the natives speak for themselves, especially when it is star-speak from such articulate experts on the politics of fame as Shirley MacLaine, Jane Fonda, Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Warren Beatty and Robert Redford (who says of Gary Hart’s palship with the latter that it was “a fatal attraction.”)

As you board the bus for this irreverent romp through 70 years of political Hollywood, be sure to pack your three-dimensional glasses! Over here, we see Jules Stein, the nonpolitical founder of MCA, “an ophthalmologist with an eye for talent”--and the man who hired Wasserman in the first place. And over there on the back lot--that’s Hollywood’s enfant terrible, Orson Welles, fresh from his “Citizen Kane” triumph, getting talked out of running for the U.S. Senate by a young Democrat named Alan Cranston, who convinces him that he can’t win.

On the left, of course, is the Communist Party, dominating Hollywood’s liberal politics from the 1930s through the 1950s, “first as a model, then as a target.” And on the right, listen to Richard Milhous Nixon describe Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas as “pink right down to her underwear.”

As a sideshow, take in the flying acronyms. Watch ICCASP (the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions) turn into HICCASP (Hollywood ICCASP), one of whose board members, Ronald Reagan, would later describe it as “pronounced like the cough of a dying man.” In fact, it merged with NCPAC (National Citizens Political Action Committee) to beget the PCA (Progressive Citizens of America), the vehicle that supported Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential run.

Across the street is that forerunner of the rad right, the MPA for the PAI (the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals), whose founders included Walt Disney, Walter Wanger and John Wayne, and which led the great postwar hunt for Hollywood Communists. A side trip to Washington shows the Inquisitors “winning a victory from which the conservatives will never recover” (so vicious were their methods).

Stargazers can see Baby Bacall go madly for Adlai, and after Bogie passes on, Sen. John F. Kennedy hanging out with the remnant rat pack. Stick around long enough and you will see some of the rats (Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr.) deserting the sinking Dems in favor of Nixon and Reagan.

For those who get their thrills from threats, and, on the left again, take a gander at the Malibu Mafia, aka the Insurgents (economist-philanthropist Stanley Sheinbaum, Norman “All in the Family” Lear, industrialist Max Palevsky & Co.), whose approach to raising and spending money Brownstein calls “both new and threatening.” These machers are not the pragmatic, centrist deal-makers in the Wasserman mode. “With the polarizing struggle over Vietnam providing the current,” the Malibu Mafia revived ideology as a fund-raising force. Their politics are aimed “not at making friends but at advancing causes.” Their gripe is as much with the Democratic establishment as with the Republicans, and, multimillionaires all, they could literally afford their independence.

There goes Mike Farrell taking his compassionate “MASH” persona down to Central America, and countless other do-gooders off on similar missions of mercy. And that background noise is rock manager Danny Goldberg unsuccessfully trying to persuade the Dukakis campaign to catch up with the culture.

But as we jump off the tour bus, we can’t help but overhear lots of high-sounding talk about the social role of the actor. Do we agree with Robert Vaughn, who says that “It is immoral for an actor to remain silent if he is asked for his public view and is qualified to give it,” or James Garner, who’d just as soon be in Philadelphia? And what does our tour guide think about it?

Although Brownstein’s basic strategy is to let the star be heard as well as seen, on those few occasions when this former Nation contributor (my other conflicts of interest are that I know too many of the people he writes about) and current L.A. Times reporter evaluates what he hears, I find that often I don’t agree with him.

For example, when he says that “militant leftist” Hannah Dohrn “airily” dismissed the idea that the CP ran HICCASP, which she really ran, I suspect he underrated that remarkable woman’s capacity for creative independence. When he attacks Jane Fonda “for using her fame against the tenets of the society that revered it,” he ignores the whole thrust of her politics which--whatever foolish things she might have said or done when she was acquiring her political education in public--had to do with bringing America back to what she regarded as its core values.

Brownstein writes: “Accustomed to relying more on emotion than analysis, artists tend to take purist positions on political and social matters.” Hear, hear, but one detects an implicit sneer: “Compelled to compromise constantly in the making of films, Hollywood figures tend to veer toward the other extreme and become purists in politics, as a sort of psychic compensation.”

Who is he talking about here--only progressives like Fonda and her ilk? How does the same analysis account for conservatives such as Heston, or middle-of-the-roaders who are so politically pragmatic that our tour guide doesn’t bother to cite them? Don’t they have psyches too? And anyway, when I hear such arguments I think it well to keep in mind Norman Thomas’ dictum that the only time you throw away your vote is when you vote for someone you don’t want and he gets elected.

Brownstein attacks HWPC for ideological abrasiveness (or is it that he finds their politics too radical?), and patronizes Norman Lear as an oblivious elitist. The cause: the Lear dinner, to which all 1988 Democratic candidates for President were invited to meet with “the cream of liberal Los Angeles,” and be subjected to several hours of liberal grilling. Why shouldn’t Hollywood liberals have the same right to interrogate candidates on civil liberties and women’s issues and disarmament as do Washington PAC people who badger them on defense, Israel, the banking laws and free-market economics?

Brownstein writes that liberals’ problems in the postwar years came primarily from their failure “to assert their independence from the Communist Party.” On the contrary, I would suggest that their problems came primarily from their failure to support those to the left of them, from spending too much time disassociating themselves from Communists and not enough time engaging in precisely the sort of First Amendment educations that latter-day progressives such as Lear’s People for the American Way, Sheinbaum and Danny Goldberg’s ACLU and Paula Weinstein’s (not coincidentally Hannah Dohrn Weinstein’s daughter) Hollywood Women’s Committees do.

Nevertheless, I recommend this tour to all those fascinated by Washington’s glamour and Hollywood’s power--or is it vice versa? I only wish our guide had included an overseas add-on.

Does Brownstein agree with those who believe Matsushita’s takeover of MCA is part of a Japanese takeover of American culture? Or does he believe (as I do) that the real issue is not the nationality of the media owners but a far greater and more ominous trend on the cultural landscape: concentration and control by a handful of transnational corporations? Either way, in a world dominated by multinational media barons, the Washington-Hollywood axis seems a bit quaint. The yellow brick road now leads to Tokyo, London, Rome and points east and west--unless Washington redraws the map.