NEA Head Knows About Weathering Storms

John E. Frohnmayer still unwinds by rowing a shell on the Potomac River four times a week at dawn, but the controversy bedeviling the National Endowment for the Arts has virtually silenced his singing.

Of all the slings and arrows he has suffered in his 18 months as NEA chairman, none stung Frohnmayer more deeply than an allegation that he required a subordinate to give him free voice lessons during and after working hours.

Frohnmayer, 48, an accomplished amateur baritone, insists that the story published by a local newspaper last June was false. Nevertheless, the damage was done, and it took a personal toll.

Except for singing and playing the guitar for his family, and performing a Mozart operatic trio at the NEA employees’ spring talent show, Frohnmayer has abandoned his beloved hobby.

“I should never have let this happen,” he said, “but the (story) was so distasteful to me that I have hardly performed since then. I just thought that was such a low blow, such a cheap shot, that I think I let it get to me far beyond what I should have.”

Today, the arts endowment is recovering from bloody battle over obscenity, censorship and freedom of expression that erupted two years ago, when conservative lawmakers protested NEA support for exhibitions of controversial works by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and artist Andres Serrano.

“I’m feeling pretty good about things right now,” Frohnmayer said in a recent interview.

He noted that Congress repealed an unpopular NEA obscenity ban last fall and approved a $174-million budget for the federal arts agency, a modest increase over the previous year. Morale is on the upswing at NEA headquarters, he said, and he plans to resume singing practice.

“I have a sense that we’ve weathered a very substantial storm, have come through with our integrity intact,” he said, “and I’m feeling as if we’re really going in the right direction.”

Although the worst may be over, Frohnmayer still speaks with a tight-lipped wariness. He remains, after all, the target of unrelenting sniper fire from avant-garde artists on the left and religious fundamentalists on the right, with no discernible help from the White House.

John Brademas, president of New York University and co-chairman of an independent study of NEA grant-making procedures, once used a metaphor from the Persian Gulf War to describe Frohnmayer’s lonely plight.

“When the Scuds were fired at the NEA, no Patriots were fired from the White House,” he said.

The NEA chairman seems unconcerned, even amid widespread suspicions that some of the sniping at Frohnmayer is inspired by leaks from junior-level conservatives on the White House staff.

President Bush has maintained public silence about the NEA controversy for more than a year, though Frohnmayer said: “On every occasion I have met with the President, he has expressed his personal support. This has been reaffirmed recently.”

He scoffed at conservative critics’ demands for his ouster, and has moved aggressively in recent weeks to counter their charges that the endowment is still subsidizing obscene and anti-religious works with tax funds.

In late March, Frohnmayer called a news conference to defend his agency’s $25,000 grant for the movie “Poison” against an attack by the Rev. Donald Wildmon, who had sent members of Congress a letter declaring that the film contained “explicit porno scenes of homosexuals involved in anal sex.”

Frohnmayer said the movie, which included a prison rape scene, was “neither prurient nor obscene.” He invited his critics to judge for themselves at a special screening of the film at NEA headquarters.

In mid-April, Wildmon struck again. The president of the American Family Assn. charged that a $12,000 endowment grant to the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival represented “misuse and abuse of tax dollars.”

Frohnmayer quickly retorted that Wildmon’s complaint “seems to be that he doesn’t believe federal funds should go to homosexuals.” He said NEA refuses to make grant decisions on the basis of sexual orientation.

“I think they ought to throw Frohnmayer out. He’s a disgrace,” said television evangelist Pat Robertson, echoing similar demands by an official of the Southern Baptist Convention and Human Events, a conservative weekly.

But Frohnmayer made it clear that he is no quitter. “There’s no chance that they would succeed in persuading me that I ought to go,” he said.

Frohnmayer, a lawyer in Portland, Ore., and chairman of the Oregon State Arts Commission before coming to Washington, spent two years in divinity school in the mid-1960s, and received a master’s degree in Christian ethics.

He is rankled by conservative charges that NEA grants are violating mainstream American standards of decency and morality.

“I wouldn’t cede the values issue to anybody in this society,” he said. “I think values are fundamental to the business of being a member of a democratic society, and I’m very suspicious of any individual or group who . . . suggest that they have a corner on the values market.”

Frohnmayer denied a published report that he has been warned by senior Bush Administration officials that his job may be in jeopardy if he doesn’t avoid another major conservative uproar over NEA grants.

These officials are known to have pressured Frohnmayer to lower his agency’s profile. Though the NEA chairman is viewed in some White House circles as charming but politically inept, one knowledgeable Administration source said none of Bush’s top advisers had ever threatened Frohnmayer’s ouster.

Frohnmayer dismissed suggestions that the White House had engineered the appointment of former U.S. Information Agency official Anne-Imelda Radice as his senior deputy chairman in an effort to put the arts endowment on a short leash.

“There is a recognition that some art is controversial, and indeed sometimes that is a function of art,” Frohnmayer said. “So I don’t believe anybody in the White House believes that you can simply put a lid on the place and the issue will go away.”