The First 100 Days, Babe : Has the Congressman From Palm Springs Made an Impact on Washington? Do You Really Have to Ask?

It is after 5 o’clock on this, his 57th day as the Republican congressman from Palm Springs, and Sonny Bono has a cold. His blue shirt is wilted from the latest lap on this speedway they call the House of Representatives. A pledge to keep its “Contract with America” in the first 100 days has made Congress a sweatshop and the pace is starting to show. One congressman falls asleep on the House floor in the middle of a debate. Another shows up to vote with a fever of 102. There are jokes circulating in Washington that one of these days this ambitious party might sit down and actually read some of the laws it’s passing.

Reaching into the top drawer of his desk, Bono shakes an aspirin into his hand and washes it down with the second of the afternoon’s four Cokes. There are wrinkles behind his aviator glasses and arthritic spurs aching in his neck. But all physical ailments aside, he is thriving on this new career for which colleagues address him as “the distinguished gentleman from California”--a long way from his hip-huggers and bobcat vest.

He takes a seat in his black leather chair in a cramped room in the Cannon House Building Office, at a desk with a yo-yo bearing Bill Clinton’s face. A millionaire and one of the 50 richest members of Congress, Bono has owned closets bigger than this. But he seems blind to the dings in the furniture and the wrinkles in the rug, blissfully focused on his new passion--politics.

So I ask him how his party plans to eliminate a $176-billion deficit and still cut taxes. “Easy,” he begins, leaning forward, political engines revving. “Cut government. Just get rid of it. Some departments are running at $2 billion a year, you start chopping departments like that and . . . .”

” What departments are those?” I interrupt.

“HRD,” he answers.

“HRD?” I ask. “What’s that?”

“Health and Human, uh, Health and Human . . . .” Long pause. Bono walks to his office door and gives a friendly holler in the direction of his readied staff.

“What is, uh, Health and Human what?”

“Services!” a disembodied voice yells back.

“Services!” echoes the congressman.

“HHS!” the voice reports.

“HHS!” the congressman rejoices, grinning as he heads back to his chair, unabashed. “I was right about the department but wrong about the letters.”

The temptation is to total him up right there: Just as we suspected, the dim-witted, straight-man-to-Cher act was no act. Sonny Bono is dumb as a love bead, sent to Washington courtesy of the greater Palm Springs area, where the voters evidently sat in the desert sun too long, then went straight to the polls.

But if his first 100 days in Congress have revealed anything, it is that Salvatore Bono is more complex than this rube exterior lets on, an und erdog who has managed to triumph in three different careers for which he appeared woefully unqualified. Unable to read a note of music or play an instrument, Bono made 10 gold records. With no experience in television, he turned a passe hippie act into a hit variety show. Armed with little more than a famous name and a nice recipe for marinara sauce, he opened a touristy Palm Springs restaurant. Having never voted until age 53, he got elected the town mayor. Without so much as a high school diploma, he won a seat in the United States Congress.

But Washington is a tough crowd and shedding his doltish image is arguably his greatest challenge in this latest and most demanding incarnation. This is not the kind of town that readily embraces a freshman congressman who made four guest appearances on “The Love Boat.” No sooner was he sworn in than the East Coast media seized upon him as just the Politics Lite they’d expect from the Chardonnay state. The Washington Post dubbed him the “idiot savant from way beyond the Beltway.” When a roll-call vote was held to elect a House Speaker, Bono’s high-pitched “Gingrich!” reduced some of his new colleagues to giggles.

If he came to town a laughingstock, he went straight to work making his mark. Before the first 100 days were up, he had introduced a bill to make it harder for courts to block state voter initiatives and persuaded some of the most powerful House members to co-sponsor it. He boldly upbraided his colleagues on the Judiciary Committee--where he is one of only two non-lawyers--for interminable legalese: “You break down words to the nth degree and sometimes I find it rather disgusting.”

He is at once the Norm Crosby of Washington and its Mr. Smith--invoking old surf slang like “rasty” when he means “annoyed”--(as in, “Once in a while I can get a little rasty”)--then breaking up a gridlocked Judiciary Committee hearing by ordering 15 cheese pizzas, the aroma of which brought the marathon session to an end.

Critics call him “Sonny Bonehead,” “the ex-Mr. Cher.” He is the stuff of David Letterman jokes: “Today they rejected a bill by Sonny Bono to make every Thursday national karaoke night.” Democratic committee staffers play a game: Who can look at Bono the longest without laughing?

But even the meanest put-downs appear to roll off him. With eyes front, Bono perseveres, laughing all the way to the bank, or in this case, to Congress. “If anybody really thinks for a minute, I couldn’t possibly have done the things I ‘ve done and be where I’m at today if I was a dope,” Bono says on that 59th day, evening now, in one of many moments of candor. “I’ve had three careers. I’ve come off the mat three times when I was supposed to be down. To think that could possibly be an accident, you would have to not be very bright.”

*

On the 1992 campaign trail for the U.S. Senate, candidate Bono is practiced and ready for his first debate of the GOP primary. The question is illegal immigration. The candidates have three minutes to respond. All minds struggle to cram an answer into 180 brief seconds--all minds but one. When Bono’s turn comes, he offers just this: “It’s illegal. Enforce the law.”

There it is in a nutshell, the Bono riddle. Is that a response so vapid it scarcely bears consideration? Or is it expertly crystallized, free of the rhetoric that makes so many of today’ s voters sick? Depends on whom you ask. To his fans, he is the citizen lawmaker; to his foes, the 1995 Freshman Class Clown.

“He is what the founders wanted, a citizen-politician--not a politician who pretends to be a citizen,” says Bruce Herschensohn, former TV news commentator and perennial candidate who began that Senate campaign as Bono’s rival and ended it one of his best friends. “He cares very much about issues and he studies. He doesn’t pretend to know more than he does. It is very common with people in politics to be asked a question to which they don’ t know the answer, yet they pretend they do. Sonny will say, ‘I don’t know. What is that?’It is absolute honesty.”

There is something refreshing about a congressman who seems utterly without pretense, completely approachable, willing to answer virtually any question and confess when he can’t. Yes, he cheated on Cher. No, they no longer speak. Yes, he got arrested. (Once, at age 17, coming back from a date with two open cans of beer in the car.) Yes, the issues sometimes confuse him. Even on his failure to vote until he was in his 50s, Bono offers no excuses: “Voting really is a civic duty and, you know, I get an F on awareness.”

These kinds of revelations would destroy a Bill Clinton or a Bob Dole, but the public seems to expect little else from Sonny Bono. He wrote a book revealing all this stuff and got elected anyway. “The first thing politicians do when there is a confrontation, right away they want to say whatever they can to please that person, to have that person give them a vote, be loyal, stay in their camp, give them money, all of those things,” he says. “If you stay who you are, you never have to worry about, ‘Let’s see, who was I when I talked to these guys? What was my persona?’There is a great relief in always saying who you are and what you are.”

OK, so just who is he? A conservative right down to his 18-karat Cartier elephant cuff links with the emerald eyes (if you don’t count his pro-abortion rights stand). He is unequivocally in favor of term limits, a balanced budget amendment, the line item veto, a capital gains tax cut, welfare reform and the NRA. He is soundly opposed to the assault weapons ban, higher taxes and a minimum-wage increase.

Even so, Sonny Bono is hardly the freshman prototype. He has no intention of reading anything on Speaker Gingrich’s suggested list, preferring to curl up with a Tom Clancy novel instead. USA Today is his newspaper of choice because “it ‘s simple.” He avoids most heavy reading, infor ming himself through chats with senior California lawmakers and his legislative director, Curt Hollmann. It is Hollmann, a former aide to a Republican congressman from Florida, who steers him through the legislative thicket, reducing complex issues to uncomplicated memos along the way.

If Bono has a political mentor, it is the ultra-conservative Herschensohn, their division on abortion rights notwithstanding. But Bono says he learns by “listening to everybody,” and is often guided by the words uttered to him years ago by record producer Phil Spector while trying to gauge a potential hit: “Is it dumb enough?”

“That has stayed with me all my life,” Bono says reverently. “He was saying, ‘Is it a simple enough communication to be just totally understood in just plain language?’ and he summed all of that up in, ‘Is it dumb enough?” ’

The national political process could stand some dumbing down, according to Bono, a little less loquacious blathering and a little more plain-speak. This, he vows, is his mission in Washington. Hence the now-famous scene in the Judiciary Committee last Janu ary, where he reprimanded his verbose colleagues during a debate over expanding the rights of police in citizen searches. “Boy, it’s been flying in this room like I can’t believe today,” Bono scolded. “We have a very simple and concise bill here, and I think it would be to everyone’s pleasure if we would just pass this thing.” The Democrats went right through the chandeliered ceiling. New York’s Charles E. Schumer barked back: “We’re making laws here, not sausages,” an apparent shot at Bono’s former life in the Italian restaurant biz. After listening to a rambling Bono discourse about federal restrictions on states, a blunt Barney Frank of Massachusetts was moved to note: “I have never heard a less enlightening answer.”

“He’s a clown. He’s a buffoon,” a House Democratic aide grumbles. “He sits in the Judiciary Committee and leans on his mike and twirls his finger accusing the committee of dealing with legalese. Well, excuse me, the Judiciary Committee is writing the laws. He can manage a sound bite, but press him for details and it just isn’t there. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Critics say Bono takes his marching orders from the leadership, voting with fellow Republicans and never thinking for himself. They point to a recent proposal to reimburse states for the cost of incarcerating illegal immigrants--an idea that was embraced by Republicans but just so happened to be offered by a Democrat, Howard Berman of Panorama City. “Bono was clearly going to vote against it when he saw Berman’s name,” a Democratic Hill staffer says. “Some Republican colleagues set him straight, told him even Pete Wilson supported the idea. Bono sent a staffer off to check and then voted in favor. He couldn’t think it through for himself and say, ‘A Democrat proposed it, but let me see if it’s a good idea.’I don’t think we will see an independent vote from him, ever.”

To Bono’s staff, that’s just partisan claptrap. “It’s a completely and totally inaccurate representation,” says press secretary Frank W. Cullen Jr. “The congressman was briefed and well-versed on that particular amendment.”

But Bono’s intellectual prowess has been the subject of discussion since he went to Palm Springs City Hall in 1988. Whil e his many fans called him a quick study who put the desert resort back on the map with an international film festival, others said he could hardly read a City Council agenda. It was the task of Bono’s personal public relations director to rewrite those agendas into script form. “For call to order, I wrote ‘sit.’For salute the flag, I wrote ‘stand up, face flag, mouth words.’ For roll call I wrote: ‘When you hear your name, say yes,” ’says Marilyn Baker, who ran his campaign for mayor and served on his staff for about three months before resigning in disgust.

Bono says his image suffers because of his lack of schooling and his years-long role as Cher’s punching bag. “I’ve never been formally educated. I know I am judged for that here,” he confides during one of his many eight-minute sprints from his office to the House floor. “It’s a hill that I will have to climb, that I am climbing, but they are going to find out that I know a little more than they think I do.” If this approach to government inflames Democrats, it goes over big with revolution-minded Republicans, who say Bono has the makings of a fine lawmaker--not in spite of his background, but because of it. “One thing this institution needs is a few more people who don’t come from a long political background,” says Simi Valley Republican Elton Gallegly, the Judiciary Committee’s other non-lawyer. “No one can be an authority on everything you deal with. There is not a member in this House who is not underqualified in some area. But you have to play to your strengths, and that’s an ability Sonny really has.”

“For a first-year guy, he’s really jumped in on judiciary,” says Carlos N. Moorhead, a Glendale Republican who serves with Bono on that committee. “He doesn’t know as much as people who have practiced (law) but he has a lot of common sense. There is room in Congress for people from every walk of life and every level of education.”

The key to Bono’s success has always been what he calls “horsepower,” an innate force and disarming charm that propels him to sometimes astonishing heights. If Cher was the beauty, Sonny was the brains. He composed the immortal “I Got You Babe” that made them an overnight success (and still pays him royalties three decades later). One year after their act hit bottom and they plunged into bankruptcy, he engineered the “Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour,” which zoomed into a top-five slot on CBS. After their divorce, Cher seemed to have left him in the dust with her Oscar for “Moonstruck”; the next morning, he was elected mayor of Palm Springs.

Here on the Hill, Bono’s horsepower seems to be kicking in again. He may rarely sound intellectual, but he is sometimes keenly insightful. He cannot always articulate the details, but he appears to have the issues down cold. In the middle of a revolution, his party has most of the guns. And among 435 members of the House, Bono is the only one armed with this potent combination: a Washington outsider with name identification that approaches Elvis.

*

So new is the 104th Congress that Bono’s office wing re eks of the nauseating smell of fresh paint. Raring to go, the House is doing business before all the freshmen are even moved in. Bono is living in a Washington hotel suite, his $684,000 Georgetown townhouse awaiting the arrival of furniture and his family: wife Mary (his fourth) and their children Chesare, 7, and Chianna, 4.

Bono’s first Banking Committee hearing (the other weighty committee assignment he scored) is scheduled this late January day, where he will listen to the likes of Secretary of State War ren Christopher, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan testify on the Mexican peso crisis. The league doesn’t get much bigger than this and Bono is making the trek from his office to the committee room just as fast as his 5-foot-7-inch frame will take him.

He has lost his favorite silver pen and digs awkwardly into his black leather briefcase. The Capitol maze is confusing and he keeps starting to make the wrong turns, nudged gently back on track by a loyal attend ant. As he roots around for his pen, our conversation turns to his collection of watches. “The most interesting watch I have is the watch that belonged to . . . who was the first guy who flew the Atlantic?”

“Lindbergh!” his press secretary and I respond in a chorus. His little lapses seem so innocent, his demeanor so humble, his smile so generous, that the urge to fill in the blanks is overwhelming.

“Yeah, Lindbergh! I have his watch.”

Into the paneled and cavernous hearing room we go, the stately site of last year’s Whitewater hearings. Bono takes his seat, sans pen, and listens raptly to gloomy warnings about Mexico’s future. The buzzer goes off, signaling a vote on the House floor. Bono is torn: Should he leave the hearing to vote or stick around to ask W arren Christopher a few things? He decides to vote, emerging from the hearing to set eyes on his assistant and inquire, without missing a beat: “Did you find my pen?”

Off to the House floor, where the vote turns out to be a big fizz. The congressman is treated instead to a performance by the impetuous Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), who all but calls President Clinton a traitor and is banished from the House floor for 24 hours. Bono returns to his office fatigued. “Well, that was confusing,” he sighs.

By this time he seems utterly baffled, too preoccupied with his missing pen to turn his full attention to the poor peso. But just hours from now, he will stand in black tie before a gathering of political icons and synthesize this apparent befuddlement into a searing but hilarious indictment of how stupidly Washington sometimes works. And, after a couple of glasses of wine, the federal elite will be eating out of his hand.

*

It was one of those rare moments when a public figure breaks the chains of some awful reputation and, in an instant, reintroduces himself to the world as somebody better. It came somewhere in the midst of a rambling, ad-libbed monologue at the Washington Press Club Foundation dinner, a monologue that transformed him from that guy in the big bell bottoms who got dumped by Cher into the darling of the 104th Congress.

He took the podium expecting to do three minutes; he did 25. Back in a tux, standing before an audience, Sonny Bono was home again. He may be a long way from mastering Congress, but he knows what to do with a crowd, even one as commanding as this. In atten dance were Newt Gingrich, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, Tipper Gore, Janet Reno, Colin L. Powell, George Stephanopoulos. Bianca Jagger was there on the arm of Rep. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.). Barbara Walters, David Brinkley, Peter Jennings and Sam Donaldson were there. At first, they were all too sophisticated to laugh. In the end, they couldn’t stop as Bono trained an outsider’s spotlight on an insider town.

Of Gingrich: “If you look at Newt, he’s always smiling, but then he says something to rip your head off.”

Of Frank: “He does the best Shecky Green I’ve ever heard. . . . Barney . . . I haven’t figured out what the hell you do, but it’s good.”

He described having once heard Phil Gramm, presidential hopeful and consummate Texan, tell a crowd: “You cain’t eat corn if you ain’t a pig!”--prompting Bono to look at his wife in wonderment and ask, “What the hell does that mean?”

Gingrich summed up the performance as “one of the most vividly wonderful explanations of the insanity of this process by which we govern ourselves.” The next day, Bono’s office phone did not stop ringing. There was so much backslapping in the halls that he couldn’t get to the floor in time and missed a vote. C-SPAN was swamped with reporters begging to watch the videotape.

Sonny Bono had arrived. So he really had been paying attention. Two days later, emboldened, he gave his Judiciary Committee colleagues hell. Then he started musing about a run for the Senate in ’98. He launched his first bill. Now he is in line to head a task force formed by Gingrich to address, among other things, pirating of artistic works in China.

“I got respect,” Bono says of that celebrated night. “That could have made me or broke me. I’m sure they had a preconceived impression of who I was. ‘What’s this guy doing here? He’s a singer or something who got lucky.’It was so thick you could cut it with a knife.”

The words Congressman Bono no longer elicit giggles on the House floor, even if they stick ever so slightly in the throat. His challenge now is to be taken seriously. As he said at the close of his press club shtick: “I’ll do this just this time, but from now on, I’m serious.”

Reversing an image that is decades old is no small task. If there is one thing that nags the otherwise insouciant Bono, it’s the fact that he just turned 60 and may not have the time to convert the skeptics. “I would love to have people know who I am, but I don’t think that’s ever gonna happen,” he says from his office, tired but ever gracious. “I think I’m a lot more than what they know, you know? If I have a last mountain to climb, that would be the one, to say, ‘Here’s the guy that I am, that you thought was that guy over there.’It’s fun; none of this is a bitter note at all. But now I’m racing against the clock.”

The buzzer sounds again and he rises from his comfortable chair without complaint for yet another sprint to the House floor. He rides two elevators, flawlessly navigates the hallway maze, struts down the home stretch toward the members’ entrance to the floor, and with great confidence, turns the wrong way.

Eventually, though, and in plenty of time, he finds it.