The Speaker’s Speaker

There’s mirth in Tony Blankley’s baritone as he settles into his roost near the House speaker’s office. Winston Churchill scowls from a poster that reads, “Deserve Victory,” Dionysian maidens rumba on the walls, and barbarous Newt-isms are regularly shorn of thorns.

“Yesterday was great,” the former child actor says, grinning.

Blankley, 48, had turned in an encore performance of his best role ever--that of press secretary / press darling for House Speaker Newt Gingrich and as a man who can refine the image of a revolutionary while bending a little of the spotlight toward himself.

“You have a person who can both interpret me and be a figure in his own right,” says Gingrich of Blankley, adding that he is nothing short of “the best known non-presidential press secretary in modern times.”

Case in point: When the Whitewater convictions emerged from Little Rock, Ark., 16 hours before, Gingrich wasn’t in Washington, nor was he even remotely a part of the story. Still, his stout press aide, whose famous whisper of an English accent somehow survived a childhood in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park, rose to the scent of blood in the water.

First were phone calls to the major newspapers and wire services, offering an opposition quote-of-the-day: “At 5 p.m. today the cover-up began to unravel. . . .”

The New York Times and USA Today picked it up for their front pages. That evening, it would be repeated on ABC’s “Nightline” by Ted Koppel, and Blankley would be on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” barely able to contain himself while comparing the defense of Clinton with the ill-fated defense of Nixon during Watergate. He gleefully added that when the verdicts were announced, “this town lit up.”

Even more recently, when news broke that FBI background files on hundreds of former Republican White House officials--ex-Reaganite Blankley included--had been pulled and reviewed by a Clinton staffer two years ago, the press secretary was back on front pages and airwaves, incredulous at this breach of privacy.

“In the last two weeks we’ve had this wonderful relationship where he is making the news and I’m focusing on passing the budget,” Gingrich says.

Perhaps more important than what was said by Blankley, a Loyola Marymount Law School graduate and former California deputy attorney general, was the fact that the media wanted so badly to listen.

It may have begun with the authoritative way Blankley distills the Gingrichian view he has lived with for better than six years.

“I think the strategy is to use Tony as a political weapon who also understands campaigns and the nuances of what needs to be said,” says Ed Rollins, longtime Republican strategist who recommended that Gingrich hire Blankley in 1990.

It helps that Blankley has an instinct for the jugular and a knack for appetizing 10-second sound bites--”poor-man’s poetry,” he calls it. When the stream of ethics complaints against Gingrich began to blur early last year, Blankley dismissed them with the phrase “malicious imbecility” and the media gobbled it up.

The speaker calls Blankley a strategic advisor and confidant, someone who plays his own image as adeptly as he plays his boss’: “He’s a little bit like Deion Sanders. You have somebody who can play both offense and defense, and it’s a nice asset to have on the team.”

Add to this how minions are drawn irresistibly to a viceroy of the Gingrich rebellion, who so deliciously embodies the popular backlash against political correctness.

It could hardly go unnoticed when Blankley’s silver Lexus, photographed with the Capitol in the background, was included in a car magazine layout on prominent Washingtonians who buy foreign. He told the Washington Post that veal for the famous osso buco he prepares with such abandon simply must have a “film of fat around the edge.” He smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, chronically high blood pressure be damned. His wardrobe includes a velvet smoking jacket. Blankley plays violin at the chili and tequila blowouts he hosts with fellow libertarian Dana Rohrabacher, GOP representative from Huntington Beach.

Some traditionalists, even in his own party, take a dim view, murmuring things about self-promotion and cult following.

“He has broken the mold [of press secretaries] by becoming a media personality outside the shadow of his boss. And that is just so far away from anything that I’ve ever been brought up on,” says one longtime Republican congressional aide who requested anonymity.

*

For Blankley, relishing a Winston in his office, there is always the joy of elaborate explanation.

“You know in Edwardian England, I’d be perceived as very uninteresting,” says Blankley, whose period as a subject of the queen ended when he was 1 and his parents moved from England to Los Angeles. “But if you live in a town of empty suits, then any slight deviation from the norm is noticed. So I was English, I was an actor. . . . There was just enough different about me so that when the spotlight fell on Newt, a little bit came on me.”

The eccentricities of Tony Blankley have helped make him, by almost any measurement, one of the most successful press secretaries in Washington. That is, of course, with one glaring exception: His boss remains among the most unpopular politicians in the United States. A recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll shows him favorably rated by only 22% of Americans, with 54% giving him a negative job rating.

It is a public relations failure that only a colleague who has been in similar scrapes might appreciate and explain.

“You can provide the most profound spin . . . you can get high marks for being a good press secretary at a time when your leader is taking a very tough press,” says Mike McCurry, press secretary for President Clinton and a Blankley friend. “If Newt Gingrich goes out and shoots himself in the foot, all the press secretary can do is apply the bandage.”

Or, put another way by Gingrich himself: “You can’t blame Tony for 10,800 [anti-Gingrich] commercials.”

Another case in point: a press breakfast in November where Blankley could do little more than chain-smoke and pace the halls as Gingrich self-immolated, complaining of being snubbed by Clinton on Air Force One, consigned to the rear of the plane on a return trip from the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated prime minister of Israel. Gingrich was telling reporters how the episode was part of the reason budget negotiations stalled, an impasse that ultimately led to a government shutdown.

When a New York tabloid ran a front-page rendering of Gingrich as a bawling toddler under the headline “Cry Baby,” the label stuck.

“Newt’s error was one of good intentions,” Blankley says. “The point he was trying to make was that if the president wasn’t serious enough to discuss the budget when he had 25 free hours to discuss it . . . then he, in fact, was going to be in bad faith during negotiations rather than good faith.”

But the distinction was lost on the far simpler image, that of pettiness.

“It’s odd that sometimes the incorrect is more plausible than the correct explanations, and this was one of those instances,” Blankley says. “I knew it was happening and could see it, sort of like a bad dream in slow motion. You can’t reach out and change it.”

*

Tony Blankley was born in London, the youngest of Jack and Trixie Blankley’s two children. His father was a Price Waterhouse accountant who, some years before with another firm, had handled Churchill’s account. The British prime minister was revered in the Blankley household.

But the postwar slump led the family to Los Angeles, where Jack Blankley worked as a financial executive in the movie industry. They settled in the basin, eventually near Hancock Park.

One day, someone mentioned to Jack Blankley that children were being sought to throw a beach ball around for a bread commercial. Young Anthony was volunteered. Mild parental encouragement, singing and dancing lessons and an agent followed.

Growing up in Los Angeles, two aspects of Anthony made him feel different, unique, from his chums. One was the accent, the other was that every three or four weeks he was absent for a few days doing appearances on “Lassie,” “Sky King” or “Highway Patrol.”

“It was just enough to be special in my little circle of friends,” he recalls. “I think there was a certain advantage for any person in having some sense of specialness if it doesn’t become the creator of some dilated ego.”

Blankley was hired either as the English boy or prep school student and can still recite his Anglophiled walk-on line for “Make Room for Daddy,” where he is introduced by Rusty Hamer to an aproned Danny Thomas: “Your faaaather? He looks more like your mother.”

The first time Blankley saw Ronald Reagan, who would dramatically influence his adult years, was during a USO performance in the ‘50s where Anthony and his sister, Margaret, were among entertainers at Edwards Air Force Base. Reagan, his movie star diminished by then, unpretentiously strolled over and helped button up the sleeves of Margaret’s cancan costume.

Blankley’s biggest thespian year was 1956. He was 8 and did a “Playhouse 90” with Charles Bickford and Nina Foch, and two films, “Cavalcade” with Michael Wilding and Merle Oberon, and “The Harder They Fall,” with Humphrey Bogart.

Four years later, his cuteness giving way to gangliness, Blankley’s acting career ended. “It was sort of something slightly more than a lark,” he says, although residuals would trickle in for 20 years.

His political development was influenced from adolescence by the writings of Barry Goldwater (“The Conscience of a Conservative”), Ayn Rand and William Buckley, among others. Blankley and a core group of high school conservatives clashed frequently with, and were thereby alienated from, the more liberal students and faculty of Fairfax High School.

“You really became battle-tested when you had that kind of political orientation,” says childhood pal Arnold Steinberg, a conservative political strategist from Calabasas.

High blood pressure kept Blankley out of the military. He finished his undergraduate and law studies at UCLA and Loyola, passed the state bar on the first try and joined the attorney general’s office for eight years, his longest employment yet. Blankley handled a mix of criminal and appellate cases, work that eventually bored him.

Meanwhile, Blankley volunteered for each of Reagan’s gubernatorial and national campaigns, and in 1980 he wrote position papers for Bobbi Fiedler, then campaigning for Congress. He later became her legislative director.

Two years later, he joined the Reagan administration, where he served as deputy director for the Office of Planning and Evaluation and, later, as senior policy analyst with the White House. He even wrote half a dozen speeches for Reagan, including a defense of the ill-fated Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination.

After a brief period as a freelance political consultant, when he toyed with a tell-all book before realizing he did not have that much to tell, he joined Gingrich in 1990.

*

Today, he and wife Lynda C. Davis--a lobbyist and native of Pacific Palisades--share a “California ranch” house on an 11-acre tract in Great Falls, Va., with sons Spencer, 10, and Trevor, 7, and a menagerie of two dogs, two horses, two goats, three lambs and 14 cats.

“I like animals, both dead and alive,” Blankley says with a grin, sitting beneath the stuffed head of a mountain goat that hangs in his office. (It was a gag gift from Davis that came with a don’t-let-them-get-your-goat admonishment.)

When a blizzard shut down Washington in January, he wrote for the Washington Post op-ed page a paean to the ensuing peace and quiet, quoting Dante and relishing the discovery of rare wine in his cellar: “Croft ’66.”

A query about favorite music might elicit a short discourse on Beethoven versus Mozart, and a quick chorus of Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again.”

He is frequently celebrated as a man of gonzo appetites and quirks, from his daylong cooking frenzies (Says Lynda: “The only drawback is cleaning up after him, spaghetti sauce on the ceiling. . . .”) to his disdain for wearing any jewelry, even a wedding band.

On his night stand now is English historian Edward Gibbon’s 18th century opus, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” apropos, Blankley cautions, of nothing.

But his strongest passion lies with his role at the epicenter of the Gingrich rebellion, albeit one that has cooled in the last several months. Tapping on Blankley resentments of how the media have covered his boss is to watch those feelings crack open and spill out many explanations.

There is first that overall skepticism of authority, which is to be expected, Blankley says. But he also believes there is a predominantly liberal world view within the press corps, so ingrained that Blankley has regularly counseled network or newspaper correspondents about their slants on stories.

Add to both of those elements a historical discomfort with Gingrich from his bomb-throwing, back-bencher days as minority whip, and there is “a more intense and ferocious kind of [media] negativism than even Clinton has had, and Clinton has had a tough time,” Blankley says.

After a three-month period of planning and assessing, Gingrich is back on the Sunday talk-show circuit and was asked recently about his continually dismal showing in the polls. His response--blaming it on daily press briefings early last year that became increasingly confrontational--put him at surprising odds with his press secretary.

“Newt and I have a tactical difference of opinion on that,” Blankley says.

He agrees that the briefings were too confrontational. But they were also, with live coverage, piping the speaker’s views directly into local news markets, unfiltered by the national media. “We were framing the issues that everybody in town was then reacting to,” he says.

In fact, the first six months of the 104th Congress was a period far more frenetic even than that. The “contract with America” was in play, ethics charges against Gingrich were multiplying, and there were a thousand media calls a day. He describes the period from the 1994 election to April of last year as the most intense period of his life:

“For the first time I was actually at the center of where some national decisions were being made. . . . I was obviously at ground zero.”

It’s a feeling, Blankley says, that’s impossible to describe: “It’s like how can you imagine feeling in love if you haven’t been in love.”

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Tony Blankley

Age: 48.

Background: Born in London; when he was 1, family moved to Los Angeles, where he grew up. Now lives in Great Falls, Va.

Family: Married to Lynda C. Davis, a lobbyist. They have two sons, Spencer, 10, and Trevor, 7.

Passions: Cooking, playing the violin, old films and history.

His politics: “I think of myself as sort of a libertarian tempered by a sense that we need to at least, in some affirmative way, encourage useful moral behavior.”

His boss: “I happen to believe in the Newt star. I think if he were president, he’d be able to drive legislation through to enactment, the country would be vastly better off. . . . I think he has an extraordinary comprehension, a deep understanding, of what’s right and wrong about America, and a practical way of taking steps that can make a real difference.”

His cooking: “I like to eat and I like to cook and I was never trained. I just was sort of teaching myself. I like intensity of flavor. . . . My osso buco would shock a classic Italian cook because I put more oregano in it. I put sun-dried tomatoes. I put pureed green and black olives in it. I put more garlic in it. I think it tastes great.”

His view on political correctness: “I have my own internal sense of good manners. I don’t feel the need to comport to phony standards. So I’ve just never hidden whatever my natural traits or habits are.”