The Political Show Goes On

By Frank Trippett

"Basically, show business is politics. And politics, with its media blitz, is very much show biz. The big difference is that politics is real, very real, and that show business is a fantasy world."

These words of novice wisdom come from Television Celebrity Phyllis George. She picked up her insights working in her husband John Y. Brown's campaign for the governorship of Kentucky. Now that the national presidential campaigns are lurching out of various closets and back rooms, everybody will get a chance to sample and even overdose on that admixture of reality and stagecraft that politics has become.

Even in its hardest reality, politics has more and more entailed a practice of the theatrical arts. Candidates recite words set down by craftsmen who for purely technical reasons are not called scriptwriters; they sell themselves with minimovies called commercials; they thrive on pseudo events--of which the Big Announcement is but one--contrived by people who work like stage managers; once in office they are quite as concerned with images as Fellini, though hardly for artistic ends.

Politics, moreover, has fashioned what has begun to seem like a permanent alliance with show business itself. In season, the same names that decorate the gossip columns and Variety begin popping up in political chronicles. Last week a squiblet on Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin turned out to be a note about a Boston fund raiser for Ronald Reagan. Singer Glen Campbell, it seems, is slated to give a benefit concert for John Connally. From the White House, via a guest list for a recent campaign dinner, comes word that supporters of the Carter-Mondale team include Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Cheryl Ladd, Leontyne Price, Andre Previn and Andre Kostelanetz.

Such news has become commonplace and so is usually received without reflection. But it must be time to wonder how the promiscuous mingling of politics and show business affects the public's capacity to distinguish between imagery and substance. The question is not idle when asked about a society in which Actor John Wayne and Comedian Bob Hope could wind up widely admired not only as entertainers but as political philosophers.

Indeed, the entertainment world itself has been displaying an ever-more-conspicuous political face. Jane Fonda fights nuclear energy. Robert Redford preaches environmentalism. Paul Newman turns up as an emissary to the U.N.--where Pearl Bailey also once sat. Ideology has begun blurting forth even at Oscar shindigs, injected in 1973 by Marlon Brando for the American Indians and last year by Vanessa Redgrave against Zionism.

Granted, show business folk have every right to politick. And politicians are entitled to use every self-serving gimmick that the law allows. Still, given the American tendency to worship stars, one may wonder whether eventually show business might be too casually accepted as an appropriate training ground for political leadership. The question is pertinent even if California's election of Actor George Murphy as a U.S. Senator is shrugged off as a typical West Coast aberration.

The trend that invites such inquiries has been developing for quite a while. It had started well before it was dramatized in the memorable gymnastics of Sammy Davis Jr. flinging his little arms about Richard Nixon. Franklin Roosevelt, in fact, enlisted Playwright Robert Sherwood as a ghost, and subsequent Presidents increasingly turned to theatrical artisans for help, especially after TV got big. By the 1970s the political scene seemed so stagey that Anthropologist Edmund Carpenter was moved to say that "the White House is now essentially a TV performance." He exaggerated, but not by much.

The mixture of politics and show business is not merely expedient; it is also natural. Each world, by its nature, plays to the crowd. The politician and the performer equally require public attention and feed on popular adulation. As either politics or statesmanship, government has always relied on a heaping measure of theatricality. Royal pageantry evolved not entirely to oil the vanity of the overlords but also to satisfy the human craving for symbolic ceremonials. The politician's own requirements in a democracy carried things a step further. To win a constituency, the politician must first gather a crowd and turn it into an audience. Enter show biz. In the old days the string band on the courthouse square became as indispensable for that purpose as are the musical groups and superstars in this day of mass culture. Says Joanne Woodward of theatrical personalities who get drawn into campaigns: "Let's face it, we're shills."

Perhaps, but there is more to it than that. The politician, with a little luck, gets more than a crowd out of the star. There is also a hope of inheriting the excitements the star stirs up, of having some popular sympathy and prestige rub off as a result of a supporting star's popularity. In turn, the star, on top of perhaps serving personal philosophical interests, enjoys a chance to bask in the presence of power. That may seem little reward, yet it may be of considerable importance to a king-size theatrical ego.

Money, to be sure, lies alongside, and sometimes above, other factors at the roots of the politics-show biz alliance. Impressive sums, $75,000 here, $100,000 there, were added to campaign treasuries in 1976 out of the proceeds of concerts by celebrated musical performers. Singer Linda Ronstadt was producing bucks for Governor Jerry Brown long before the two of them had become a hot gossip-column item. The Allman Brothers and Johnny Cash similarly helped out Jimmy Carter. This fund-raising mode was facilitated by a financing law that allowed concert receipts to be considered as donations not of the performers but of ticket-buying members of the audience. There will be more political concerts though the law has been tightened to curtail the federal matching money that can be awarded.

The sheer fact of the politics-show biz mingling may be no cause for worry. Still, too intimate a consortium would do the country no good. The electorate should remain a skeptical and demanding constituency, but the ubiquitous looming of star performers does tend to turn it into a distracted audience. The capacity to achieve effects by glitter and glamour is not likely to inspire politics toward greater integrity. Nor are theatrical atmospherics apt to move the public to examine more soberly issues that too few Americans take seriously even now.

The trouble is that show biz will always remain all but inseparable from the fantasies that produce its stars, and the allure of its performers all but inevitably overshadows substantial matters they associate with. Virginia's U.S. Senator John Warner learned as much last week when, attending a Manhattan bash, he found himself little noticed, while gapers clamored after his wife Liz Taylor.

"We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions," Historian Daniel Boorstin wrote in The Image. He was probably right. The rub is that one American vice, as both politicians and actors well know, is a weakness for illusion. So the show, beyond doubt, will go on. --Frank Trippett

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