COVER STORY : Culture Vulture-in-Chief : Bill Clinton plays the saxophone, buys art and is a voracious film buff, but how will his Administration treat the arts?

Back when he was still “at that vulnerable age when I thought dance wasn’t for real men,” Robert Peck remembers, his parents prodded him into attending a ballet performance in Washington. And there in the audience was President John F. Kennedy, not in the least perturbed, it seemed, at this public assault on his manhood.

Peck, a member of Bill Clinton’s arts and humanities transition team, traces his love of ballet back to that shameless display of arts enthusiasm on the part of a U.S. President. “That’s the sort of stuff that is every bit as important for a President as some of the policy decisions,” he says.

There is every reason to believe that President Clinton will also be caught red-handed at the ballet, as he so often has been in Little Rock, where his daughter, Chelsea, has been attending the Ballet Arkansas School four afternoons a week for eight years.

Bill and Hillary Clinton won’t be able to sneak unnoticed into the balcony of the Kennedy Center the way they used to at Little Rock’s Arkansas Repertory Theatre, where their main purpose was “to see the show, not to be seen,” as Rep founder and director Cliff Baker puts it. And it may get a little complicated if the President and his daughter personally drop by a museum to pick out loans for their official residence, as they did in Arkansas.

But it seems altogether likely, as Peck predicts, that the Clintons “will be found at concerts and dance presentations at the Kennedy Center and going to art exhibits.” They will make those personal gestures that say to the world that the arts are meaningful, not marginal.

But in the Clinton household, high art coexists with popular culture. “If he had his way, I suspect, he would see every film that was showing in America,” says Deborah Sale, an old FOB, or “Friend of Bill.” His musical instrument of choice is more honky-tonk than high-toned, Fleetwood Mac is enjoying a renaissance thanks to the campaign’s use of the group’s “Don’t Stop,” and Clinton’s fondness for Elvis Presley is legend. There will even be an Elvis impersonator in the inaugural parade.

But Elvis isn’t the half of it.

In Little Rock, the President and his family have been in the habit of treating theater, dance, art exhibitions and, especially, music and film as just so many pleasurable facts of a richly lived life. The Clintons have helped where they could--with contributions of time, advice, prestige and their own money: $300 to Ballet Arkansas in 1991 (according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy), $300 to the Arkansas Educational Television Network, $250 to the Arkansas Arts Center.

“He wasn’t taught arts in a formal setting, but because he loved music he learned about the other arts,” says Beverly Lindsey, an old friend and former Arkansas Arts Council executive director. “Then, living in Washington (as an undergraduate) and living in London (as a Rhodes scholar), he learned to appreciate not only the treasures but the process.”

The arts may not be “a driving passion with the Clintons,” as Townsend Wolfe, longtime director of the Arkansas Arts Center puts it. “But these are very educated people, and art is a part of their education and culture, and they realize the need personally and societally for the arts.”

This may come as a surprise to those in the arts community who have been waiting for the President-elect to say something--anything at all--about the subject closest to their hearts. Aside from a statement in the Democratic platform, so far his mouth has been nowhere near where his money is, but clues are emerging.

The National Endowment for the Arts will be only one facet of Clinton’s cultural agenda, says Sale, who was an arts official in the Carter Administration, is now coordinating the transition’s cultural team and may well end up heading the NEA. (Lloyd Richards, former head of the Yale School of Drama, and Cynthia Mayeda, head of the Dayton Hudson Foundation, are two other names often bandied about.)

The focus, Sale says, will be on “broadening the role of the arts, so that the arts are a part of everyday life.” Theoretically, so all-pervasive a policy would make it more difficult for conservatives to scapegoat the arts. Clinton was never morally tested in Arkansas on this issue--as one observer put it, there was no controversial “Piss Christ” there for him to worry about.

Clinton could revive the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities, which fell into disuse during the Reagan and Bush years. Robert Peck, as head of the interagency arts activities section of the transition team, says he is concentrating on how to let the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities “help other agencies carry out their missions,” in fields like health, economic development, urban renewal, product design and foreign trade.

Peck rejects an idea dear to the hearts of arts professionals: having a culture czar. He sees a potential federal council head as more low key, perhaps an NEA or NEH chairman. American University President Joe Duffey held the position when he was NEH chairman. Someone like former congressman and retired New York University President John Brademas could “act like the science and technology adviser in the White House,” Peck says. “He doesn’t give orders to NASA and the National Science Foundation. He gets them in a room and asks who is doing what.”

As arts groups anxiously sniff the transition winds for signs of how artists and institutions battered by the arts wars of the Reagan and Bush years will fare in the new Administration, there’s a great deal to be learned from what Gov. Clinton did for the arts in Arkansas, from the signals emanating from the transition camp and from the Clintons’ personal habits.

The President-elect is a legendary quick study in the symbolism department, particularly when John Kennedy was in some way connected with the symbol. Kennedy’s inauguration was notable for a poem read by Robert Frost, at a time when just having a live poet in attendance seemed revolutionary. Clinton’s rather more radical selection is the theatrical African-American Maya Angelou, who won her reputation with poems of her Arkansas childhood.

His grab-bag tastes in music will be in evidence during the entire inaugural week. The Cate Brothers, Ernie and Earl, with whom Clinton has sat in on sax, will perform their bar songs at a Bluejean Ball next Sunday (“Bill’s not too bad,” Ernie Cate says of Clinton’s saxophone playing. “He’s not fantastic. He likes to try.”) Dramatic soprano and high school friend Carolyn Staley, who made history on election night with her rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Old State House in Little Rock, will sing the hymn “Be Not Afraid” at a prayer breakfast on inauguration day, Jan. 20. And at the inauguration itself, opera star Marilyn Horne will perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a medley of American songs.

Beyond the symbolism, we can look to Arkansas as the model for how the Clinton Administration will deal with the arts. What Clinton did do in Arkansas, and what transition advisers hope he will do on a national scale, is to integrate the arts with such government priorities as economic development, urban renewal and education. In Arkansas, you can’t graduate from high school without a half-credit in music, drama or the visual arts. (Hillary Clinton was on the controversial board that instituted a mandatory arts requirement in Arkansas schools in 1987 as part of Clinton’s education reform package.) There’s also enthusiasm within the transition for a National Center for Arts Education, perhaps on a model worked out by the Kennedy Center.

In Arkansas, the state-supported Arts Council, with a modest budget of $1.6 million, spent a sizable portion of its funds building arts organizations throughout the state that could fund local tours by major institutions such as the Arkansas Rep and Arkansas Symphony. (However, economically distressed Arkansas ranks 49th in per-capita arts spending among the 56 states and territories, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.) With a population of 176,000, Little Rock supports the Rep and a symphony orchestra, as well as an opera company, a ballet company and the Arts Center, which has one of the finest regional collections of drawings in the country. And all of these have blossomed under Clinton and his predecessor in the State House, David Pryor.

But some in the New York arts Establishment worry about a model for funding that emphasizes geographical inclusiveness. “We can’t afford to sacrifice Robert Wilson to fund the symphony in Little Rock if we have to make a choice,” says New York gallery owner Richard Feigen.

However much symbolic and tactical support the arts receive in the Clinton Administration, the old populism-versus-elitism arguments of the Carter years are apt to be revived. The Solomonic problem will continue to be how to allocate scarce resources to the grass roots, the cutting edge and the “majors.”

One particularly reassuring message out of Little Rock comes from FOB Susan Purvis, who teaches studio art at one of the magnet schools the Clinton Administration set up in Arkansas. “I think he fears no art,” Purvis says, quoting the $2 “Fear No Art” buttons on sale at the Arkansas Art Center.

And Arkansas Rep’s Cliff Baker offers another: “There’s been so much support for the arts here in Arkansas at a time when states like Michigan and Massachusetts have cut arts funding to zero,” he says. “And that’s despite a state law which requires a balanced budget. I think what the governor has done is make an atmosphere supportive of the arts. The fact that he personally supports projects gives them a credibility, so that legislators can’t say the arts are peripheral.”

In Bill Clinton’s own life, the arts began with music. In Hot Springs, when they were high school students and Carolyn Staley was “the preacher’s kid next door,” she’d spot Bill Clinton’s light on, call him on the phone and say, “Let’s practice.” Their sax-piano duo produced “very intense practice sessions--no monkey business,” she says. “Virgil Spurlin, his band director in Hot Springs, said, ‘I never put anything in front of Bill Clinton he couldn’t sight-read.’ He kept pushing Bill--more 16th notes, or harder intervals.”

In those days, Clinton’s record collection leaned heavily to band classics. “He hadn’t been exposed to fine arts; concert bands were the closest you could come to symphonic orchestra in Hot Springs,” Staley says. Later, when she came home from college, she’d be practicing, “and Bill would come in and sit down and I didn’t even know he was there. I’d get through playing and (hear) clap, clap, and I’d look around and it would be Bill.” By then he was a voracious consumer of gospel, blues, folk and jazz.

Though his own practicing was intense, he’d already given up any serious ambitions toward being a musician. “I’ve heard him say there are two reasons he didn’t go into music,” Staley says. “He said, ‘I wasn’t good enough to really be a genius of international stardom’--and he would have wanted to be the best. And he saw a Democratic convention when he was 8 or 9 and he got smitten with politics and leadership.”

To this day, when there’s time to don a choir robe, he’ll sing with the Immanuel Baptist Church choir in Little Rock. And he’ll pull Staley aside to play a new tape--”you’ve gotta hear this”--of Mickey Mangun of the Alexandria Apostolics Choir, or ply her with gifts of Mozart recordings. At Oxford, friends Strobe Talbott and Brooke Shearer would accompany him to hear guitarist John Williams play Bach and Handel “at a wretched little auditorium with great sound,” Shearer remembers, though Joan Baez, Dizzy Gillespie and harder sounds were more common fare. “We were all rock ‘n’ roll babies,” Shearer says. The Clintons named their daughter after Judy Collins’ rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning,” and Collins has been invited to sing at the inaugural.

Clinton has been known to aid and abet his artistic friends. He passed along a tape of Carolyn Staley’s singing to Marilyn Horne when he presented the opera singer with an honorary Arkansas ambassadorship. The next day, he called Staley to report that Horne had called him at midnight to say how much she liked Staley’s voice and wanted to help. Horne arranged an audition for Staley in Carnegie Hall, Staley held a concert in Little Rock to raise money for the journey, and the Clintons invited the funders to a post-concert reception at the governor’s mansion.

Such parties are a much-used Clinton device to support core causes: education, health, children’s issues. And Little Rock arts groups have been frequent beneficiaries. Mimi Dortch, an arts mover and shaker in Little Rock, remembers a benefit for the ballet at the mansion a night or two before Chelsea was born. “So Chelsea was born with ballet on her mind.”

When the Arkansas Rep was looking for backers for “Pageant” (a new play currently touring as “American Beauty”), the Clintons invited 20 corporate executives to the governor’s mansion. At the door there was a bill of fare listing what they could fund--from the full production to the posters. “Maybe we would have gotten $10,000 without that,” says Rep director Baker. “But due to Hillary and Bill’s excitement, we got $18,000. For a state this poor, that’s something!” With that kind of cheerleading on a national scale, business might be more inclined to reverse its current slump in arts spending.

When the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington offered to exhibit the work of women artists from each of the 50 states, Arkansas was one of the first to organize the necessary committees, funding and local juried exhibitions. And the governor personally contributed $100 and held a party for the artists chosen.

The Clintons already knew most of the artists. In fact they collect works both from those who made the final cut--like Jane Frier Hankins, best known for her whimsical, down-home painted stoneware figures--and those who did not, like Margaret Speer.

Five or six years ago, when Speer had a studio in the heatless, waterless old train station in Little Rock, Clinton used to take a break from his run for a look at what she was doing. For Hillary’s birthday one year, he bought the little bronze “To Have or Have Not,” with its detachable baby/fetus balanced precariously in its mother’s arms. Another time, Hillary called and said Clinton’s staff wanted to buy him a piece, called “Magnetism”; he had been talking about since seeing it in Speer’s studio, with its two bronze heads confronting each other like half-moons that want to be one whole.

The point is that the Clintons actually collect art--not how sophisticated their taste is.

Bill Clinton is particularly attracted by art with a message or practical applications--such as the Thomas Moran painting that helped swing public opinion toward preserving Yellowstone as the first national park. For Clinton, the arts are often a teaching tool.

“I think it comes from his awareness of the cognitive process,” says Beverly Lindsey. “You don’t learn art just so you can learn the names of paintings. It’s a tool toward higher thinking skills.”

She remembers “so vividly one time watching Bill at the symphony with Chelsea in his arms. She was 3 or 4. The orchestra was warming up, and he was pointing out to her what the instruments were and how they sounded.”

When he could, Clinton found ways to integrate his enthusiasms. For the past dozen years, the Clintons have lived downtown, in a historic restoration district, surrounded by like-minded people dedicated to reclaiming the neighborhood. He helped preserve an antebellum house by transforming it into a decorative arts museum. And the one arts project he personally instigated, the Delta Cultural Center, built on a popular blues festival to create an economic revitalization project in an abandoned railway station in Helena.

Such crossover enterprises are made possible by Arkansas’ umbrella approach to its cultural resources, under the cabinet-level Department of Arkansas Heritage. On a national level, Clinton could envision the same role for the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities.

If that comes to pass, whoever chairs the council will surely have the President’s ear. Clinton may not have been deeply involved with the Arkansas Arts Council, but two of his oldest friends--Staley and Lindsey--directed the agency. And they had access. What will happen next in Washington may not be exactly what controversial performance artist Karen Finley has in mind, and it may disappoint the board of the Metropolitan Opera. But it’s bound once again to make the arts visible as a source of nourishment, not nastiness, on the national scene.