Hollywood's Closet GOP

The self-assured young professional is ready to come out of the closet. Only five years into her career, she knows the risks, but she's willing to go public, she says, to bring the issue into the open.

Ellen Treanor is a Republican. And an actor. In famously liberal Hollywood, that combination is usually an oxymoron.

"It is pretty scary to be in a public situation or a party ... and have someone talking about the conservatives. It's a joke for anyone to be supporting conservatives," she said. "If you speak up, you're limiting your chances" of finding work.

The politics of Hollywood's liberal elite are well known. Barbra Streisand has slept at the White House. Warren Beatty considered a run for president as the liberal alternative to Al Gore. Steven Spielberg hosts President Clinton during fund-raising pilgrimages.

Some actors have brought higher profiles to their causes: Ted Danson has sought to stem ocean pollution and Woody Harrelson has pushed for the legalization of marijuana.

Their money flows freely, too.

In the 1996 election, President Clinton received $442,000 from TV and movie executives and their families, compared with $166,000 for Republican Bob Dole.

Then, there's Treanor. She listens to conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, jokes about getting her Republican reading materials delivered in a "brown paper sack" and generally keeps her political opinions to herself.

Treanor and other Republican actors tell tales of being ostracized by casting directors who prefer to surround themselves with like-minded people. While a 1950s-style blacklist is probably more the stuff of paranoia, they still say they fear being cut out of the business for politics rather than lack of talent.

Treanor, who has appeared in NYPD Blue and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, said she once was rejected not for what she said, but for what she didn't say.

While waiting to do a reading of a play, Treanor and other actors saw former President Bush appear on television. When she didn't join in their criticism, one woman mocked Treanor: "Oh, he was your guy," she recalled her saying.

At a recent luncheon of the Wednesday Morning Club, a right-leaning policy discussion group considered a safe haven by many Hollywood Republicans, Treanor and other Republican women openly criticized Clinton and shared war stories about the challenge of being conservative in Hollywood.

Leah Lipschultz applauded when U.S. Rep. Jim Rogan, a California Republican whose role in the Clinton impeachment trial has made him a target for Democrats in the next election, railed on the United States as having failed its children morally.

She craned her neck to see actor Charlton Heston sitting across the room and derided Democrats as unreasoned and closed-minded.

Asked to go on record with her stage name, however, and Lipschultz declined.

As part of Hollywood's hidden culture," she said she's not about to risk a career that spans almost two decades. Having used a different name in appearances on TV's Diagnosis Murder, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and other films and commercials, she's not known as Lipschultz in the industry.

"The thing that has made it so tough through the Clinton administration is that so much of the daily conversation was about the impeachment hearings," said Lipschultz, a recently registered Republican. "That was part of the reason that I got into so many of the debates that I have that have outed me to an extent to some people."

Prominent actors, like Tom Selleck, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Heston, have succeeded regardless of their politics, but in the eyes of lesser-known actors, such outspokenness is not an option. Even Heston and Selleck, they say, have come under fire by their colleagues for their support of the National Rifle Association.

Several Hollywood publicists discounted the danger of talking politics, but agreed it's prudent to avoid alienating fans and industry people in connection-crazy Los Angeles.

"It's easier to be loved by people for your talent than to risk diminishing a portion of that regard because suddenly they're in touch with your partisanship," said David Brokaw, who works as spokesman for Bill Cosby and other actors.