WASHINGTON
ROCCO LANDESMAN, the larger-than-life Broadway producer, was digging into a hefty cheese steak and fries in the Philadelphia train station one night last month, waiting to catch the Acela back to his new home in Georgetown. Mr. Landesman, whose culinary tastes are not nearly as sophisticated as his tastes in theater, had a hankering for some Popeyes fried chicken. But, hey, this was Philadelphia, so he figured he’d have the cheese steak.
It had been a grueling day of touring art galleries and talking up local business leaders and city officials, another chapter in the self-education of Mr. Landesman, who last August traded his Broadway career for a government job: chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal grant-making agency. Ever since, he has been giving himself crash courses on the arts in American life and the peculiar customs of the nation’s capital.
Mr. Landesman is not exactly the Washington type; he is a fast-moving, risk-taking entrepreneur who is colorful (his passions include horse racing, gambling, baseball and alligator cowboy boots) and blunt. Now Mr. Broadway is busy transforming himself into Mr. Bureaucracy. It has been, he confesses, a bit of a challenge.
“You have to be very careful what you say,” he said, as his press secretary hustled to the table with bottles of chili sauce and Tabasco. Mr. Landesman took the chili sauce and kept talking.
“Everyone’s parsing every word that you utter, and I’m not used to that,” he said. “If the consequences are just you, it’s one thing. But everything has all these repercussions. I’m trying to find a balance because I have to be me, and I pride myself on being candid and direct and saying what I think. But occasionally I have to think about what I say.”
On Tuesday, the new, perhaps more politic Mr. Landesman will make his debut on Capitol Hill to testify about his agency’s 2011 proposed budget. In Washington budget testimony is a big deal: a chance for department chiefs to lay out their agendas and beg Congress for cash. Mr. Landesman, who is trying to use his star power to develop the Endowment into a catalyst that can generate far-reaching investment in the arts, has made clear that he has big ideas for his little agency.
The trouble is, he doesn’t have much money. On the up side, the culture wars that nearly put the agency out of business in the 1980s and 1990s now seem a thing of the past. But in an era of deep recession Washington is consumed with cutting the deficit, not spending more on the arts.
President Obama is requesting $161.3 million for the Endowment, the same as his request for the current fiscal year: a piddling sum in a city where budgets are typically measured in billions. Before coming to Washington, Mr. Landesman called the agency’s budget “pathetic.” Now, he insists, he will be “pounding the table” for it.
“Understandably, I don’t think the administration appreciates my complaining about the budget all the time,” he said. “If every head of every agency did that, you’d have a pretty unruly situation.” He paused for a moment to admonish himself: “I’ve got to cut down on the whining.”
So instead of just whining, Mr. Landesman has become politically creative, hitting the road to promote his new slogan, “Art Works.” It is a muscular phrase, intended to persuade Americans — including those Americans who happen to be members of Congress — that investment in art can build stronger communities and revive a flagging economy. Typically his tours are arranged by local foundations, key patrons of the arts. Always his mantra is the same: “Arts jobs are real jobs.”
Along the way he has become a kind of Pied Piper for the arts. In Peoria, Ill., a city he chose after sticking his foot in his mouth with an impolitic comment about the quality of theater there, he took in a local production of “Rent.” In Philadelphia he took a bus tour of the city’s famed murals. In San Diego he strolled through Balboa Park wearing yellow cowboy boots and a turquoise tie. And it was no accident that he turned up Monday in Idaho, home of the top Republican on the panel that controls Endowment financing.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Mr. Landesman has been sticking to his script, avoiding in-depth interviews as he prepares for his testimony. He is also quietly cultivating powerful allies in Mr. Obama’s cabinet, hoping to make an end run around his budget constraints by joining with agencies that have more money than his.
If the Transportation Department is paying for pedestrian walkways and light rail, Mr. Landesman reasons, why not bring in artists to paint murals? If the Housing and Urban Development Department is revitalizing blighted neighborhoods, why not include gallery space?
Shaun Donovan, the housing secretary, and Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary, are enthusiastic, and the White House is on board, although details are sketchy. (“We really have to put it down on paper,” Mr. LaHood said.) And there was something else he liked: at one of those staid Washington dinners Mr. Landesman turned up in a tuxedo and playful hot-pink bow tie.
“He was probably the only guy in the room,” Mr. LaHood said, “who could have gotten away with that tie.”
To understand where Mr. Landesman is going, it helps to know a few well-documented facts about where he has been.
He grew up in St. Louis, where his father and uncle ran a cabaret theater, the Crystal Palace, drawing performers like Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand before they became big names. (His Midwestern roots may account for his culinary preferences; when he is on the road, one of his favorite restaurants is Steak ’n Shake.)
He dabbled in acting as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, then studied dramatic literature and criticism at the Yale School of Drama, where he received a doctorate and taught for four years, until 1978.
In the three decades since, Mr. Landesman, 62, has built a résumé, both professional and otherwise, that defies categorization. As president and later owner of Jujamcyn Theaters, the third largest of Broadway’s big theater companies, he put on smash hits like “The Producers” and influential dramas like Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” He has also run a mutual fund; bought and sold racehorses; co-owned two minor league baseball teams; and, in an achievement hailed by anyone who has ever written about him, won $1.3 million by hitting the trifecta at the Kentucky Derby.
In 1994, in an interview with The New Yorker, Mr. Landesman expounded on his philosophy of life by extolling the virtues of carrying large wads of cash. “The most important thing in life is a sense of possibility,” the magazine quoted him as saying, “and you simply can’t have it with less than $10,000 in your pocket.”
Friends thought he was nuts to take the Endowment job. He was not even recruited; he volunteered. He was sitting in his office at the St. James Theater on 44th Street when a good friend and fellow producer, Margo Lion, who advised the Obama campaign on arts policy, mused aloud that she was looking for candidates for a new chairman.
“He said, ‘I’ll do it,’ and we all laughed,” Ms. Lion recalled.
Mr. Landesman wasn’t kidding. “I felt if you were ever going to do public service, if you were going to do more than write checks or serve on a couple of boards, if you didn’t do it now, in this administration, when would you ever do it?” he said. “I don’t know what else I was going to do in theater anyway. I was having a good time, but to some degree I was on autopilot.”
In retrospect, Ms. Lion said, it was the right fit. “I think it was the perfect intersection of opportunity and timing for him psychologically,” she said. “Even though he talks country music and wears cowboy boots and likes to eat at Arby’s, the truth is he’s a very deep thinker. He seems to be having a great time. He keeps saying, ‘Everybody here is so smart.’ ”
One of Mr. Landesman’s first acts was to hire Joan Shigekawa, an elegant, soft-spoken woman who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation, as his senior deputy chairwoman. They met for the first time on a Wednesday over lunch, and on Sunday he offered her the job. She recalled, “I said: ‘You’re not even confirmed yet. How can you be making these job offers?’ ”
In her previous post Ms. Shigekawa had financed research examining the nexus between art and community redevelopment, and she gave Mr. Landesman a stream of academic papers. The studies became the intellectual underpinning for a new signature initiative: Our Town, a $5 million pilot project aimed at helping 35 communities plan and develop arts districts and projects that emphasize design.
Mr. Landesman will formally unveil the plan on Tuesday on Capitol Hill; if it is successful, he hopes to expand it. The arts field is eager. “For too long the arts have been siloed as something that is kind of separate from life, separate from the economy,” said Gary Steuer, chief cultural officer for the City of Philadelphia. “Rocco is really eager to blow that out and take it to another level, to really look at the role of arts in economic development.”
When he arrived in Washington, the first thing Mr. Landesman did was redecorate. The chairman’s suite in the Old Post Office Pavilion, a historic structure on Pennsylvania Avenue, was painted the usual shade of government white. Mr. Landesman left white for the trim and ordered claret for the walls and buttercup for the ceilings. He hung his father’s paintings (the elder Landesman was a part-time artist) and installed an old-fashioned city parking meter — a gift from Ms. Lion — on his desk. He uses it to keep things moving.
“Rocco doesn’t like long meetings,” Ms. Shigekawa said.
He sought counsel from people schooled in the ways of Washington, like Jim Leach, the former Republican congressman, now chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Bill Ivey, who led the Arts Endowment under President Bill Clinton. Mr. Ivey, who was saddled with the fallout from controversies over agency grants for Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs and Andres Serrano’s urine-submerged crucifix, met Mr. Landesman years ago through a shared love of country music and sees him as someone who can restore the Endowment’s confidence and prestige.
“He is the kind of personality who can move it out of its defensive crouch, into a more upright stance,” Mr. Ivey said. “He’s a risk taker. I think he’s a leader who can make sense to many members of Congress, who are also, frankly, risk takers.”
Still, Mr. Landesman must be careful not to push Congress too hard. Representative Norm Dicks, the Democrat from Washington State who until recently was chairman of the subcommittee that controls Endowment financing, remembers giving Mr. Landesman a gentle lesson in how the capital reacts to overambitious newcomers.
“He asked me, ‘Well, why don’t you just put in a whole bunch of money?’ ” Mr. Dicks said. “I just said: ‘Listen, I’m trying to take this in increments. I want to have those 45 or 50 Republicans that vote for the N.E.A. stay with us, and if we went too far, too fast, we’d threaten that.’ ”
Republicans are more receptive than in decades past, but not entirely convinced by Mr. Landesman’s argument that arts jobs are just as good as construction jobs. Many balked when the Endowment received $50 million in stimulus money.
“If it created jobs, you’d have 435 members of Congress saying, ‘Let’s put in more money to the N.E.A.,’ ” said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia. “The only shovel-ready aspect of it is that they need a shovel to clean up some of the bull they believe in over there.”
Despite the challenges Mr. Landesman often seems like the happiest guy in town. Mr. Donovan, the housing secretary, said that so many people in Washington now know the new Endowment chief that no one bothers to use his last name. “It’s a little bit like Madonna at this point,” he said.
Not long ago Mr. Landesman convened a meeting of the National Council on the Arts, an Endowment advisory body. He picked up the gavel and, looking amused at himself, confessed that he had never held one before. He pounded it on the table, calling the session to order with an impish grin. “I take no responsibility,” the new chairman declared, “for what is about to happen.”