It's My Party (11 page)

It was a theory about which Long had his doubts. The usual view of the blacklist is that it constituted an act of gross unfairness,
mangling the careers of innocent people. Yet materials from the Russian archives make it clear that there were indeed Communist
cells in Hollywood. The right may have engaged in red-baiting, but the left provided plenty of reds to bait. Anyway, it is
difficult to see why events of half a century ago, when many of those running the entertainment industry hadn’t even been
born, should dominate the politics of Hollywood today.

The second thing other people would tell me about was Hollywood’s Jewishness. It was widely believed, although for reasons
of political correctness seldom stated, that Hollywood was Democratic because it was Jewish. The tycoons who built Hollywood
were indeed Jewish—Harry Cohn, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner—and the town has remained disproportionately
Jewish ever since. Ever since the New Deal, in turn, Jews have been overwhelmingly Democratic. “Take a guy like Michael Eisner
[the Jewish chairman of Disney],” Long said. “A Republican could cut his taxes, deregulate every business that he’s in, and
promise to protect Israel. He’d say, ‘Thank you very much.’ Then he’d go right out and vote Democratic.”

Yet although Jews, who make up about 3 percent of the population of the country, may make up as much as 15, 20, or perhaps
even 30 percent of the population of the entertainment industry, Hollywood still has a large gentile majority. If gentiles
in Hollywood voted the way gentiles in Kansas vote, Hollywood would be predominantly Republican despite the large Jewish population.
Instead the gentiles vote just as overwhelmingly Democratic as do the Jews.

Now that he had dispensed with the opinions of other people, Long offered me his own. “You want to know what I think is the
real explanation?” he asked. “Money.” Long believed that Hollywood was Democratic because it was full of people who had done
just what he himself had done, breezing into town to discover that they could make large sums of money with almost laughable
ease.

“It’s not that people out here don’t work hard,” Long said. “They do. They put in long hours under a lot of pressure. But
writing scripts or acting don’t feel like work in the same way that going down coal mines or teaching first graders or harvesting
crops feel like work.” Because their money comes to them so easily, people in Hollywood tend to demonstrate the same traits
that people who inherit their wealth tend to demonstrate. Feeling guilty about having so much, they attempt to absolve themselves
by performing good works. They give to charities. They join museum committees. And they support Democrats.

“What does it cost them?” Long said. “So they support higher taxes that working people will have to make sacrifices to pay.
So what? People in Hollywood will be among the richest people in the country no matter how high taxes go. So they support
bilingual education and it holds Hispanic kids back instead of helping them get ahead. So what? The people in this town would
never
dream
of sending their kids to public schools. Never. People here get to take any political position they want because they know
that they’ll never have to deal with the consequences of those positions in their own lives. They’re reflexively left-wing
because their money frees them from any accountability.”

By way of example, Long explained the economics of his current project,
Love and Money
. He and his partner had hired more than half a dozen writers. The lowest paid would receive a salary of several hundred thousand
dollars. After having breakfast with me, Long would join his partner to begin casting the show. Actors in even the smallest
roles would receive salaries, again, of several hundred thousand dollars. If the show succeeded, everyone involved in the
project would make even more money. If at the end of a run of several years the show was sold into syndication—in other words
if stations bought
Love and Money
to show the reruns—everyone would make more money still, with Long and his partner, who would receive 30 percent of the proceeds,
standing to make many millions of dollars.

Long glanced at his watch. “Gotta run,” he said. I made no effort to delay him. There was too much money at stake.

After breakfast with Rob Long, I drove to a studio in a converted warehouse on a far edge of Los Angeles to see Michael Beugg,
a friend with whom I attended business school. Unlike Rob Long and Michael Medved, Mike isn’t a dissident from liberal Hollywood—for
that matter, Mike isn’t even a Republican—and I stopped by just to say hello, not to talk politics. But when Mike, a line
producer, heard why I was in town, he promptly added another reason why Hollywood is Democratic. “Isn’t it obvious?” Mike
said. “This is a union town.”

The relationship between unions and the Democratic Party is an old one. As far back as the first years of the republic, urban
workers sided with the Democratic-Republicans, the precursors of the Democrats, while opposing the Federalists, the precursors
of the Republicans. Early in this century the Democratic Party, notably under Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York, championed
the growth of unions, and then at mid-century the Democratic Party, under President Franklin Roosevelt, made organized labor
one of the central components of the New Deal coalition. The relationship between unions and the Democratic Party has sometimes
proven uneasy—when George McGovern received the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, George Meany, chairman of the
AFL-CIO and a hawk on Vietnam, refused to permit his union to endorse McGovern—but the Democratic Party has always remained
the natural home for organized labor all the same.

Here in Hollywood, Mike explained, the people who run the studios and production companies hire and fire at will—he had only
gotten his current position because the two line producers who preceded him had both been dismissed after only a couple of
weeks on the job. And since there were always more people who wanted to work in the entertainment industry than there were
jobs, individual workers found themselves in an impossibly weak bargaining position. The transitory nature of the work compounded
their insecurity. When a soundman or makeup artist was on a project, it was difficult to predict how long the project would
last. When he was between projects, it was difficult to say how long the layoff would last.

“People here depend on their unions,” Mike said. Hollywood workers saw unions as a way of making certain they received benefits,
such as health insurance, and wages high enough to enable them to survive from one project to the next. While Rob Long had
told me what life was like for people at the top of the Hollywood pay structure, Mike Beugg was telling me what life was like
for everybody else. “When you’re watching the Academy Awards or the Emmys, you’re only seeing the people at the very top of
the business. There are thousands of others who work in this town,” he explained. Hollywood gave most of them neither fame
nor riches, just a precarious way of making a living.

To illustrate this point, Mike took me to watch a scene being filmed. The scene was one of dozens in the made-for-TV movie
that the company with which Mike was working, Imani Pictures, was shooting for BET, Black Entertainment Television. The scene
involved only two actors, yet the set was jammed with more than 60 people. I wasn’t able to take notes fast enough to keep
up with him as Mike, whispering, identified all the people, but those present included the director, the first assistant director,
the second assistant director, the executive producer, the supervising producer, three or four production assistants, the
script supervisor, the director of photography, several camera assistants, three electricians, a gaffer, several grips, a
sound mixer, a boom man, a prop master, an assistant prop master, a wardrobe supervisor, and three or four makeup artists
and hairdressers. Every one of them belonged to a union.

Back in his office, Mike explained that he himself had had to join the Directors Guild of America, and that he now acted as
the liaison between the production company and half a dozen unions, including the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild,
and the Directors Guild. “Hollywood may be full of thin, articulate, beautiful people,” Mike said. “But unions are just as
important to folks in this town as they are to the big burly guys who work in factories in Detroit.”

Mike’s telephone rang. After he picked it up, Mike covered the mouthpiece. “Sorry. I have to take this one. It’s Joe

over at the Teamsters.”

* * *

Union membership, easy money, and lots of sex. I’m not sure those add up to a complete explanation of why Hollywood is Democratic,
but they certainly set Hollywood apart from any Republican town that comes to mind.

Every so often French intellectuals denounce American films and television programs, claiming that Hollywood is undermining
their culture. It is hard to imagine that Republicans have much in common with people who chain-smoke Gitanes cigarettes and
read Camus, but members of the GOP know how the French intellectuals feel. Sex, violence, foul language, mocking portrayals
of figures, such as businessmen or clergy, that Republicans respect—all of it can seem as much of an intrusion to members
of the GOP in Kansas or Alabama as depictions of the Wild West must seem to intellectuals in Paris.

What do Republicans intend to do about Hollywood? What
can
they do? Whenever a Bob Dole or a Dan Quayle attacks Hollywood, he looks stuffy and old-fashioned, even to Republicans themselves.
Hollywood is cool. Republicans are un-cool. Some in the GOP believe that new technologies will eventually loosen Hollywood’s
grip on popular culture. The recent movie
The Blair Witch Project
was produced outside Hollywood for less than one hundred thousand dollars. When it became a hit, I got a flurry of e-mails
from Republicans, gleefully advancing the theory that a decade or two from now Hollywood will find itself forced to compete
with studios throughout the heartland. Perhaps. In the meantime just about all Republicans can do is watch reruns of
The Andy Griffith Show
and
The Brady Bunch
, nurturing memories of an earlier time, like the Irish singing old ballads during the English occupation.

As much as Hollywood irks them, when Republicans complain about the media, what they keep coming back to is the press.

Tony Dolan, President Reagan’s chief speechwriter and the author of the phrase “evil empire,” always told the speech-writers
in the Reagan White House not to worry about the press. “If the American people really believed all they read in the newspapers,”
Tony would say, “the country would be Communist by now.” What Tony was talking about, of course, was the long term, the period
over which the good judgment and common sense of the American people will always prevail. You can’t fool all of the people
all of the time. The trouble is, that still leaves the short term. This is the period over which even Tony worried about the
press. As above the fray as Tony liked to appear, if you had walked into his office one evening after the president had given
a speech, you would have seen Tony scrambling to get into the fray. He would have been on the telephone, dialing again and
again to get through to Lou Cannon of the
Washington Post
and Jerry Boyd of the
New York Times
before their deadlines. When he reached them, Tony would have pleaded, wheedled, cajoled, and begged—anything to dissuade
them from reporting the president’s remarks in a negative light. You can fool all of the people some of the time, and Republicans
are convinced that whenever it can, the press does just that.

Of course Republicans are seldom able to prove this proposition. How could they? Would the election of 1992 have been different
if the press had reported on the economic recovery when it began, midway through the year, instead of continuing to report
on factory closings and unemployed workers even after the recession had ended? Would George Bush have been reelected president?
Would the GOP have picked up seats in Congress? Republicans think so. They think they
know
so. But they are hardly able to experiment with history, holding other elements of the campaign constant while they change
the press.

Every so often, however, history provides an experiment of its own. Consider the 1984 vice presidential debate between George
Bush and Geraldine Ferraro.

I helped prepare Bush for the encounter, sitting in on the mock debates that were held to give him some practice. The mock
debates took place in the third-floor auditorium of the Old Executive Office Building, the ornate granite structure across
West Executive Avenue from the White House itself. Bush stood behind a lectern on one side of the stage while Lynn Martin
stood behind a lectern on the other. A Republican member of Congress and a friend of Bush’s, Lynn Martin impersonated Geraldine
Ferraro. It proved a tough assignment. Not that Martin lacked the talent. She was at least as combative and funny as Ferraro
herself. But the vice president had no idea how to confront a woman. First he would prove gentlemanly to the point of passivity,
as if the code of chivalry required him to lose the debate. Then he would shift to the attack, appearing, well, ungentlemanly.
When Bush was passive, Martin had to goad him. When he grew aggressive, she had to scold him, telling him to settle down.
Goad, scold. Throughout the mock debates Martin kept at it, striving to even out the vice president’s performance.

It worked. At least I thought it worked. So did most Americans—at first. And this is my point. Polls taken immediately after
the debate showed that George Bush had trounced Geraldine Ferraro—one survey declared Bush the victor by 19 percent.