Arts & Entertainment A weekly guide to music, theater, art, movies and more, edited by Rebecca Wallace
FORTY YEARS LATER, ARTIST’S PORTRAIT SERIES RECALLS THE HIGH EMOTION OF THE WATERGATE HEARINGS
THE FACES OF
SCANDAL
by Rebecca Wallace
F
orty years ago, political drama at the highest level captivated the country through television and radio. A fascinated Trudy Reagan sat on her Palo Alto couch and watched the Watergate hearings unfold. Then she recorded the lead players, not secretly and not on tape. Her oil-pastel, pencil and crayon portraits continue to tell the story of the 1973 U.S. Senate hearings investigating the scandal. There’s ferret-faced Hugh Sloan, treasurer of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP); adversarial advisor John Ehrlichman, complete with lip curl; beach-boy presidential aide H.R. Haldeman. “I was riveted,” Reagan says. Every spring evening when PBS replayed the day’s hearings of the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, she was in her living room drawing away. As an anti-war activist, she was fascinated by the politics; as an artist, she had to capture the perfect oval of convicted Watergate burglar James McCord’s face. “Such a cast of characters, central casting could not have imagined them. And the drama!” she would write later. “They were so colorful that, in spite of the fact that I was watching them on a black-and-white TV, I drew them in colors, ones that seemed to match their personalities.” Strong red for the skeptical senator Lowell Weicker, for example, and sickly green haze for New York “hush money” deliverer Tony Ulasewicz. “Like he was in a New York City subway station,” Reagan says, looking up at her drawing. Today, the artist, who often goes by the art name Myrrh, is marking the 40th anniversary of the Watergate hearings with an exhibit of her 16 portraits at Palo Alto’s Midpeninsula Community Media Center. The lead players, heroes and fallen heroes and miscreants all, line a yellow hall off the center’s main entrance. Most are done in oil pastel, with a few in pencil or crayon. Sideburns and hornrimmed glasses abound. The portraits have been shown from time
Trudy Reagan’s drawings of Watergate figures include, clockwise from top right, presidential advisor John Ehrlichman, CREEP treasurer Hugh Sloan and U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin.
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