As antidote to the Moral Majority, there is now the Musical Majority, consisting of about 100 managers and agents combatting a record-rating plan, as in the movies. Majority's Danny Goldberg, president of Gold Mountain Records and the newly named chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California, also helped stage three Countdown '87 concerts nationally. Countdown was created to stop further aid to the contras.
"Norman Lear is a real role model," noted Goldberg, 36. "He uses the entertainment industry as a platform to express his political ideas," said Goldberg, who recalled that his own parents were friends with actor Howard Da Silva, blacklisted from 1951-1963. "I learned early how dangerous these things were."
Once the rallying symbol of the New Left, Tom Hayden now calls such terms as \o7 Left\f7 "obsolete. What is a Left view of AIDS?" he asked. "We're a clearing house," he says of Network. "We put you (artists) in touch with causes and candidates. You figure out what you want."
And the same faces keep popping up at different organizations. Fonda is on HWPC's letterhead. So is Morgan Fairchild, who last weekend stood with Hayden when he decried pollution in Santa Monica Bay. Actress Alexandra Paul, 24 ("American Flyers," "Eight Million Ways to Die"), who helped found Young Artists United, is part of the Hayden-Fonda Network.
Recently Paul and a half dozen or so of her industry friends returned from a trip to Nicaragua, which they coordinated with Operation California, the private, nonprofit relief organization. Today, another group of more than a dozen young artists including Judd Nelson ("Breakfast Club," "St. Elmo's Fire"), Esai Morales ("La Bamba") and Mary Stuart Masterson ("Gardens of Stone") are in the Soviet Union filming a 30-minute documentary for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE).
In a merging of real and \o7 reel\f7 Hollywood, many of the creative people involved in the 1973 movie "The Way We Were," which involved the blacklist, are involved in politics today. One of its themes was the disintegration of a marriage between activist Katie Morosky (Barbra Streisand) and make-no-waves screenwriter Hubbell Gardner (Robert Redford).
In the summer of 1986, Streisand raised a stunning $1.5 million through the Hollywood Women's PAC with a concert at her Malibu home for Democratic senatorial candidates. Redford has spearheaded Hollywood's participation in environmental causes.
Lyrics for "The Way We Were's" title song were co-written by Marilyn Bergman, one of HWPC's founders. The movie was directed by Sydney Pollack, at whose home Hollywood raised $100,000 for the ad campaign against Bork--the campaign that Leonard Garment, Washington lawyer and Bork confidante, said on ABC-TV's "Nightline" was "mounted by Norman Lear, by Hollywood and by special-interest groups."
On the day the Judiciary Committee voted against Bork, Patrick Lippert, who works out of the Hayden Committee and serves as the liaison for Network, accompanied half a dozen artists--including Oscar-winning Marlee Matlin ("Children of a Lesser God"), Sarah Jessica Parker (NBC's "A Year in the Life") and Rob Lowe ("About Last Night," "St. Elmo's Fire")--around Capitol Hill.
Their last stop, after a heady, unexpected visit to the Judiciary Committee, was to California Republican Sen. Pete Wilson, who is pro-Bork. The young actors presented Wilson with an eight-foot poster-petition containing about 750 names of those who had signed postcards against Bork to three committee undecideds and to Wilson. Lowe, 23, remarked afterwards that he said to Wilson, " 'Look here, we came to tell you that young Hollywood and old Hollywood and Americans who are your constituents don't support the way you feel on this issue..' "
Wilson told them he would stick with Bork.
Forty years after HUAC's hearings on Capitol Hill, when some in Hollywood were summoned East, it's now routine that Washington politicians come West--for money and star power.
At Jesse Jackson's "pre-announcement" birthday party at the Hollywood Roosevelt Oct. 8, Ann F. Lewis, former political director of the Democratic National Committee and a consultant to the Jackson campaign, pointed to the arc of TV lights and said: "Count the cameras, count the reporters. At this stage of a campaign, candidates look for that electronic billboard in the hopes of getting their message across. Hollywood is one of the best places to find that billboard."
Gary Hart captured more than billboards during his Democratic presidential bid. Hayden wrote speeches for Hart and in Warren Beatty, Hart found a best friend. With Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) gone from the race too, the entertainment industry is mostly sitting back, waiting.
