cover image Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics

Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics

Jane Alexander. PublicAffairs, $25 (335pp) ISBN 978-1-891620-06-5

The distinguished actress chronicles her stormy four-year tenure as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts with infectious passion and searching intelligence. When she was nominated in 1993, Alexander was appearing in a hit play (The Sisters Rosensweig) and, she says here, needed her star's salary because she had been virtually bankrupted by a crooked accountant. Yet she felt obligated, as someone whose early career had been shaped by the nonprofit theater so dependent on the NEA, to assume the thankless job of defending the agency against conservatives determined to shut it down. In Alexander's scathing depiction, ""philistine"" would be too kind a term for the politicians she had to confront. ""Arthur Murray never needed a grant to write a play,"" House Speaker Newt Gingrich informs one NEA supporter, ""who restrained herself from saying that perhaps the famous ballroom dancer should have applied to the dance program."" Thank goodness Alexander has a sense of humor, because she tells a grim tale only partly redeemed by a qualified happy ending, when she manages to get the NEA funded for 1998 before her departure. Although she has good words for arts supporters on both sides of the aisle, notably Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican Nancy Kassebaum, the author paints a disheartening portrait of members of Congress less interested in defending the First Amendment than protecting their political flanks. Her polite but blunt comments on Bill Clinton make it clear she thinks the president, too, has put expediency ahead of principles. Alexander's liberal activism long predates her chairmanship, and her analysis of politicians' evolution from public servants to interest-group stooges is as strong as her defense of the arts. (June)