Dan Glickman: Best Original Song

By Laura Blumenfeld
Thursday, February 23, 2006

"Rhoda!" Dan Glickman belted it out. "I'm home!" He slammed the door.

Rhoda gave him the kind of look that only a first wife could conjure. It hooked into his slumping shoulders and reeled back 39 years. There were secrets in her smile, things she knew.

It had been a demanding day for the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, busy in the run-up to the Academy Awards, where he'll stroll down the red carpet with the stars. For much of his career, Dan, 60, has been an earnest, balding politician, a self-effacing Kansas congressman and then a Clinton agriculture secretary. He has an accountant's wise brown eyes. He buys dark, dotted ties because he knows he slops his soup. His idea of entertainment is watching the Weather Channel for hours.

Now Dan has to perform the role defined for 38 years by the flash of Jack Valenti. Being MPAA president is the most glamorous lobbying job in Washington, championing studio lawsuits and fighting piracy. Yet newspaper stories about Dan have described him as "inelegant" and "as flat as Kansas."

Rhoda knows better. She smiled as she watched him take off his blazer, a close-lipped smile that takes time to ripen, the thin, smiling line between mockery and awe. They walked into the living room of their Dutch Colonial in Northwest Washington, and he sat in his favorite seat.

Yes, Dan was wearing black socks with brown shoes. Yes, he hangs around Whole Foods and compares vitamin labels. True, he studies the Official Airline Guide -- "He saw an airplane in the sky and knew where it was heading," said Rhoda. "Well, Northwest only flew in the morning to Detroit," Dan said. "I read the flight routes."

But there was another side to Dan, beyond evaluating Omega-3 fish oil.

He sat down, as he often does at night, at the old, chipped, upright piano, and briefly closed his eyes. He crushed the pedal under his shoe. He tinkled the keys wildly with one finger. He arched his eyebrows and puffed out his chest, and opened his mouth.

"What kind of fool am I?" Dan sang loudly. Then he stopped: "Wait -- that's too low."

"Danny, it doesn't matter," said Rhoda.

"What kind of fool am I, who never fell in love?" He interrupted himself again: "That's too high."

"You're never going to hit it," Rhoda said.

His right index finger skittered over the keys. It wasn't a song; it was a show. The New York Times called him "about as bland as Jack Valenti is colorful," but when Dan sang he was another man -- a grand, charismatic showman.

"You are my sunshine!" Dan boomed. "My only sunshine!"

The couch vibrated with the noise.

"You don't have to push the pedal the whole time," Rhoda said.

His range was too narrow to reach all the notes, so he jumped octaves, vaulting up and down, as he moved from phrase to phrase. His performance exercised the ear with feats of audio-acrobatics.

"Enough! It's enough," Rhoda said.

She added: "In life, you're a politician, you're cautious. But when it comes to singing, you don't care."

"You're not vulnerable when you're singing," Dan explained. "Well, I'm not."

"A lot of people find that fairly amazing," Rhoda said.

At Dan's birthday party, Washington lawyer Bob Barnett recalled with an affectionate laugh, "he stood up and sang -- poorly." At Dan's anniversary party, recalled columnist Margaret Carlson, Dan also sang: "It was beautiful only because it was off-key. It brought tears to my eyes." And, at a gathering of Democratic congressmen, when Dan began to sing, Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.) led a walkout.

"-- and I stopped," Dan said.

"No, Danny," said Rhoda. "You finished your song."

"Like a showman," he offered. "I fully recognize I'm not Pavarotti."

But the worse Dan sings, it seems, the more people love him. If his life were a movie, Dan said, it would be called "The Kansas Boy." Opening scene: Wichita, Kansas, young Danny, the son of a Jewish junk dealer, charms the gentile neighbors by singing "Swanee!" on his knees. At Danny's bar mitzvah, after he chants from the Torah scroll, his grandfather, the synagogue president, says: "Maybe your brother Norman should finish the service for you."

Undeterred, Dan went on to the University of Michigan, where he tried out for "Wonderful Town" and played a conga dancer. He fell in love with another chorus member, Rhoda. Dan went to law school and ran for Congress from Kansas. "But secretly, Dan Glickman had a plan," joked his son, Jonathan, a Hollywood producer, in a 60th-birthday video he recorded. "Great actors had always been able to become politicians, so why couldn't he do it in reverse?"

Dan's theatrical antics actually helped him in politics, Dan said. In 1992, Dan was tarnished by writing 105 check overdrafts at the House Bank.

"It was murder -- I was getting hell," Dan recalled. "I had a clean-cut, honest image." He glanced at Rhoda, "Then you wrote that song."

Rhoda wrote a parody to the tune of "Hey Big Spender." At a Kansas political dinner, Dan performed it wearing a giant Uncle Sam hat, showering dollar bills. Fourteen years later, he could still bang it out: "The minute I walked in the bank, they could see I was a man with good credit . . ."

"It inoculated you," Rhoda said, and disarmed his critics.

Of all of Dan's vaudeville fantasies, one remains unfulfilled: singing at the Oscars.

"That would be a real hoot," Dan said.

"That would be embarrassing," said Rhoda.

Last year's Oscars were embarrassing enough. He backed into Reese Witherspoon and stepped on her foot.

But a man can dream. The next morning, Dan drank his weak coffee and knotted his dark, spotted tie. He swung open the front door, squinting into the pale spotlight of a sun. A woman passed by, walking her dog. If she listened closely, she might have noticed: "Home, home on the range!" The lawyer in the stiff, drab overcoat was humming.

Off Camera is a monthly column featuring Washington's top decision makers in their off hours -- outside the office and inside their lives.