Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  Unlike my peers, I had no career that conflicted with my council work, so I dedicated all my time to it and became a spokesman for the majority (formerly the “minority”) opinion. Because we operated at antipodal ends of the political spectrum, any compromise that suited both Karney and me was practically guaranteed to pass a council vote.

  The next year, in 1976, I was elected chairman. My watch continued for more than three years and might have continued indefinitely had the legislature not passed a law prohibiting my continuance—such was my popularity with the powers-that-were. One might have thought from the press coverage dedicated to the council and its programs and from the scorn and furor that we aroused that we were the largest and most important agency in the state of California, rather than a puny afterthought to the business of making money, like public radio and television.

  My tenure as chairman was a crash course in political awareness. I learned the hard way to speak to the press in concise, uninterruptible sentences. I saw firsthand the way legislators heeled to commands from important contributors, and despite my cynicism, I admit to being shocked the first time a powerful assemblyman blatantly informed me that the only way I could get his critical budget vote was to include one of his important constituents in the current round of grants. After about twelve seconds of deliberation, I did as he demanded—much to the consternation of my staff, who would have been unemployed had I refused.

  Most important, I learned what I was doing wrong. My Maoist notions of “heightening the contradictions” between the haves and have-nots was not only not producing results but had frozen the state’s arts community in gridlock. I had alienated the major cultural institutions and administrative staffs, and while they may not have been powerful enough to force their own agenda through the council, they were powerful enough to bring our political progress to a halt. Furthermore, honest reflection forced me to acknowledge that all the citizens of California were taxpayers and that our mandate was to serve them all. Fairness and equity and good public policy did not mean simply punishing the previously dominant class and rewarding the previously disenfranchised. This revelation created problems with several old comrades who behaved as if my tenure as chairman was a guarantee of an annuity for whatever future projects they chose to pursue. When I asked them to abide by the same rules as everyone else, they accused me of selling out and in one instance ruptured a valuable friendship. Finally, it seemed that the furor we were stirring up over a million dollars in a state the size of California was not worth the trouble. I felt that if the stakes were raised considerably and if I apologized and ate some well-deserved crow, it might be possible to build a constituency powerful enough to win sufficient money from the legislature to make positive changes.

  At this critical juncture, fate delivered me an angel in the form of Arthur Bolton, the man who created the Office of the Legislative Analyst for the California legislature. Art is an owlish man with tightly wavy hair and an implacable calm, whose accent betrays his youth as a labor organizer in New York City. His work here had created the first full-time professional state legislature in the nation, and respect for him in Sacramento was universal. I don’t remember who introduced us, but we met for coffee in a small, neon-lit fast-food place constructed primarily of Formica. I was on fire with ideas, plans, and optimism, and running at a hundred miles an hour. Arthur must have been amused or felt some resonance with his own youthful passion, for he agreed to sign on as a consultant to help the council formulate strategy, and from that day our fortunes changed for the better.

  We determined that the sum of twenty million dollars was needed to adequately serve the state’s needs. We devised a series of programs that would not only serve the various constituencies in the arts community but were designed to integrate artists and their programs into the budgets of “bulletproof” agencies like Education, Health, and Welfare (separate departments in California), and Corrections, to protect the arts from being the first to be cut in hard times.

  The first step in the process was to secure a request for the funds in the governor’s annual budget proposal. With Gary Snyder beside me providing moral support, I sketched out a no-lose situation for Governor Brown, assuring him that if he requested twenty million dollars for the arts from the legislature, he would not have to spend a penny of political capital fighting for it. If the council failed to organize sufficient support to win the day, the arts community could not complain about the governor and he could claim credit for trying. If we did triumph, he would get all the credit for a bold and innovative move. He concurred.

  The next step required winning the support of the cultural “establishment.” I scheduled endless meetings with the major opera, ballet, theater, and symphonic companies, which I always opened by apologizing for my divisive and rancorous behavior until then. It is amazing how readily an honest apology can defuse a hostile situation, and I am surprised that professional politicians do not utilize the apology more often, even as a ploy. When I introduced the twenty-million-dollar pie and the governor’s support for it into our newly cordial discussions, the result was electrifying. In the proposed council budget, the major institutions were guaranteed 10 percent of the funds (a triumph in my eyes, since most state arts councils award them about 50 percent of available money, more a recognition of their political power than policy-driven need), a windfall to them. The year before, the Los Angeles Philharmonic had received two thousand dollars from the arts council; if we were successful in acquiring our new budget, their next council grant would be more than two hundred thousand dollars.

  It is not too difficult to forge alliances when you come to the table with a big bag of money. (If you question this, study American foreign policy.) Sums of this magnitude afforded us the opportunity of crafting programs of sufficient size to actually effect social change. Since we were paying for service (à la Noah Purifoy) rather than buying art or indulging artists as a unique population, we had a reasonable chance to win the legislative support to pass the budget.

  Giving money to artists and institutions to make art is a precarious undertaking politically. From a conservative perspective, it appears that the state is taking money from lots of people who may not like what they do for a living and giving it to a few who love what they do, who would probably do it for free, and whose products are often at odds with “community standards” and consequently would be punished in the marketplace. Our perspective was that artists were cultural workers and should be paid for their services like anyone else, not treated as an elite caste. Other government agencies paid consultants and contracted for services; why should the arts be an exception? This was a radical idea to which conservatives might relate—we hoped. To begin the process of winning them over, Karney Hodge and Art Bolton arranged for me to visit every important legislator on both sides of the aisle. I wanted them to get to know me without the intervening filter of the press—and it worked. Once they determined that I was not an ideologue bent on demonizing them, they relaxed. After a few minutes of apparently obligatory conversation about the length of my hair or the earring I continued to wear, we found we had much in common as we discussed hunting and fishing, land use, wilderness issues, personal responsibility, and the appropriate role of the state.

  My success at bridge building and fence mending became apparent during the formal committee reviews, the rubber-hits-the-road moment when the votes are cast and counted. Several conservative committee chairs, previously extremely vocal opponents of the council, overruled their own budget analyst to ensure that our budget got to the floor for a vote. Having assured us passage, they then voted against us on the record to protect their flanks from zealots at home.

  I am not so naive as to believe that all our successes were a result of my efforts. It was widely known that the arts council was one of Governor Brown’s pet projects, and I’m sure that for those votes many favors were extracted from him of which I am ignorant. Still, these legislative visits were a significant help and taught me a l
esson I have never forgotten concerning the efficacy of truthfulness, common decency, and respect for one’s opponents.

  We didn’t get our twenty million. Proposition 13’s tax-cutting fever, soon to ruin California’s infrastructure and public school system, was just gaining momentum, and legislators were under extraordinary pressure to cut all agency budgets, across the board, by 10 percent. Fistfights were breaking out during the back room negotiations, which were sometimes corrosive and ugly. With serious money at stake, however, the state’s arts communities coalesced into a potent force which pressured the legislature sufficiently so that the council budget rose from one to eight million that year and to fourteen million dollars the next, remaining there throughout our tenure, the highest it has ever been and about six million dollars more than it is today.

  There is one arts program I helped create of which I am inordinately proud. Largely crafted by Luis Valdez and myself, our able executive director Bill Cook, appointed by the governor at my behest, and Paul Minacucci, a Joyce scholar who was the council-appointed deputy director. It was called the State-Local Partnership, and it broke new political ground. Several council members, myself among them, felt uneasy about designing programs that forced all interested Californians to jump to our commands in order to receive money. We felt that the diversity of California was not being served by the concentration of power fixed in Sacramento and decided that the regions should determine their wants and needs for themselves and then petition the arts council for funds to implement them.

  We began by establishing one paid position in each of California’s fifty-four counties. The role of that person was to organize meetings so that each county could one day produce a cultural plan. There were real issues at stake. Should each and every county have a symphony hall, or might that money be better spent sending the most excellent orchestras on tour? Should Lassen County create an imitation of San Francisco County or find its own indigenous culture and seek the means to express it? The California Arts Council would create the rules of the debate and supervise it to ensure fairness and representation of the state’s varied races, cultures, and population with special concerns like seniors or the disabled. As the centralized information bank, we would make options available to cultural committees to be assembled locally to explore options. We built in rewards for attracting private and local funds and demanded that the local political structures be consulted and signed on. We gave this part of the process a five-year deadline.

  From the furor following the announcement of this plan, you might have thought we had lined California’s artists up against the wall to be shot. “What do you want us to do?” was the plaintive lament from all quarters, and when we responded, “Hell, we don’t know; you tell us what you want,” pandemonium ensued. Angry protests were organized, but the council held firm, even over the resistance of many staff members. We insisted on local initiative and local control, in partnership with the central government. Eventually, every county began holding hearings and organizing cultural policy. The arts were hot news across the state. Despite high resistance, we knew we were on to something when the next year, the National Endowment for the Arts created their own State-Local Partnership program, and so did the New York State Council on the Arts, after Kitty Carlisle Hart, its president, grilled me on our plan over lunch in New York one day.

  My tenure as chairman ended in 1983 after Republican George Deukmejian unseated Jerry Brown as governor, and I did not get to see this plan come to fruition. However, sometime in 1989 or 1990, I received a letter from a council staff person who admitted she had been one of the staff members most resistant to the program in its early years. She had just finished calculating the new moneys attributed to the arts in California as a result of the State-Local Partnership and felt honor bound to inform me that the total was then over fifty million dollars annually.

  Of course I felt pleased and vindicated by this information, but what seemed clearest to me were two things : (a) that creative resolutions of complex public problems are indeed possible but that (b) they require committed and diligent leadership that is not afraid to stand firm against public opinion when it is appropriate. I am still waiting to see evidence of such leadership in national politics.

  At my last hearing before the State Senate Finance Committee, eight years after I was sworn in as a member, the crusty senators who had tried to abolish the arts council multiple times during its early years—several of whom had gone on record condemning me personally—donned hippie headbands and applauded me. The gesture moved me, and I accepted it as my passing grade in civilian life, an indication that my years in the wind had been put to good use.

  The time had come to choose the milieu in which I would pursue my livelihood. The skills and insights I had gleaned from the last dozen years of free life had proved remarkably utilitarian. I could talk to anyone without judgment and rancor and usually discover some common ground between us. My political visions were communicable and often had more support than I would have predicted. I realized that I did not need to remain isolated in a remote kingdom of my own devising—which at one point had shrunk to the dimensions of my truck.

  Jerry Brown had been pleased with my performance and asked me whether I would be interested in running the State Department of Education—a two-billion-dollar agency. This was a high compliment and tempting, but I had already determined that if you inspire people, they will govern themselves. The legislative landscape is reconfigured each election, and while I admire the men and women who make the necessary concessions to hang in for the long haul, chipping away at obdurate problems, this was not my temperament. I would rather be the pressure than under the pressure. The arts would be the realm in which I would henceforth work.

  I began to act again, at the Magic Theater in San Francisco, rehearsing and performing continually for two solid years, shaking out the rust of a long hiatus. I was a better actor now than when I left. I had seen more of life, and experience had stretched me in new and unpredictable ways. The acceptance of the gift that I had once spurned and the relative stability and order of domestic life had had a healing effect on my life. I discovered that while acting might not be revolutionary, or even terribly important, it was not oppressing anyone (except myself sometimes) and that I enjoyed it: human behavior was the means by which I made my view of the world comprehensible to others. This epiphany, honoring the facets of my personality that I had once “needled” and “kept asleep,” allowed some internal integration that finally rendered drugs not only unnecessary but an impediment to my freely chosen work.

  Some combination of success in theater, including the world premiere of Sam Shepard’s True West, and the new confidence that I felt from my work with the arts council, allowed me to admit to myself that I had always nursed a secret desire to play on the biggest of all actors’ stages, the screen. From a Digger perspective this would have been unthinkable: movies are corporate culture, fueled by money and fame. But the rush of free fall had burnished my sharp edges, and the buffeting winds and tumbling had made me supple and smoother. Now the world appeared wide and boundless, curving away in all directions under a collar of fluffy cloud.

  I was almost forty, an impossible age to begin a film career, but I resolved to give it a try. I gave myself five years to either succeed or pack it in, after having given it my best shot. That was eighteen years ago—but that’s another story.

  AFTERWORD

  time to take a break

  Everything that has been wrested from doubt I welcome.

  RILKE, Sonnets to Orpheus, X

  It is a bright, sunny Sunday in 1992, and I am taking Nick, my eight-year-old son, and his chum out to visit the Olema ranch, almost twenty-five years after I left to begin the caravan. I want to show them where I lived and to see it myself once more.

  As we slip under the fence and begin the walk up to the house, the boys run ahead to the watering ponds to search for frogs and turtles. Their joyful cries are swept away by the brisk win
ds scudding in from Tomales Bay. Half a moon, pale and nearly transparent, hangs in a dusty blue sky.

  The red clay road is alive for me, every square foot of ground drenched in memories. The Coast Range is still fog-capped, and I can almost see the deer and certainly remember the lairs where I hunted them for food. The small town of Point Reyes Station looks unchanged, though on closer inspection it has evolved from the sleepy town it was in the sixties into a place that now offers imported delicacies in the food shops, sophisticated crafts, and cappuccinos in the restaurants.

  We descend into the gullies, wind through the Live and Chinquapin oaks draped with Spanish moss, and climb to the large field leading directly to the house where we once played football against the Red House. But there is nothing there to stop the eye: no house, no barn, no outbuildings—nothing but whispering grass. I cannot contain my amazement, and the boys and I walk forward to investigate. They ask me if I could have made a mistake; are we in the right place?

  We walk the grounds, among the apple trees and past the lilac bushes that once flanked the house. There are no splintered boards, no ashes, no foundation stones, abandoned hot water heaters, or broken glass. The barn is gone, so is the shed where Bryden and J. P. hunted one another with pistols. The yard where we once dug a sweat lodge for sixty people has lost its perimeters and is patchy with coarse weeds. Only the corral fence still stands, open at the rear where it once abutted the barn. We walk past it to the site of my old cabin, but it too has turned to grass.

  All that remains is a lump in my throat. The sunlight is painfully bright and I can feel myself wincing. The wind flutters against my cheek. I am thirsty and sick with disappointment. I march the boys up the steep hill behind the house where I once set a statue of Buddha on a little thumb of rock protruding from the crest. From that vantage point we can view the whole countryside, and it is exactly as I remember. The only thing that has disappeared completely is every physical trace of my history with this place. I look at the moon and realize that my past here is like its invisible other half. I know it’s there but cannot see it or show it to anyone. The boys play obliviously, and I sit down and gaze over the twinkling bay. I feel that I am part of this geology; I feel responsible to it. Ghosts rustle the grasses, and if memory is to have a mouth, it must be mine. I don’t know what relationship the invisible half of the moon has to the visible. I don’t know what relationship my years in free fall have to the present, but I am in and of the conventional world now. My daughter is a doctoral candidate. I have made more than fifty films for the movies and television. I deal with money, have been scarred by a broken marriage, and tempered by the joys and anxieties of parenthood. I still struggle to speak for other species and defend their necessities. I had hoped to share some of the continuity between my past and the present with these blithe boys, now growing impatient with my distracted mood, but I am unable. How can I explain to them what we tried to do, what was won, and what was lost?