Outside Looking In (9 page)

Frank Deford, the great writer for
Sports Illustrated,
agreed. As someone who had covered all sports for many years, he had been given many autographs and souvenirs. But he kept only two—a signed basketball from Bill Russell and a signed football from Unitas. He described Unitas as not only the greatest football player he had ever seen but the greatest athlete. When Unitas died in 2002, Deford wrote that whatever other developments had occurred in the game since his retirement, and whoever had played brilliantly at quarterback after him, nonetheless: “If there were one game scheduled, Earth versus the Klingons, with the fate of the universe on the line, any person with his wits about him would have Johnny U. calling signals in the huddle.” All of us Baltimorons (as Mencken called us) emphatically agreed.

Another Maryland family I had dealings with in Baltimore was the Shrivers. One day Sargent Shriver came to my house in Baltimore to go over a speech on Jefferson that I wrote for him to give in France. He had earlier asked me to write campaign speeches when he ran for vice president. I told him I do not write politicians' speeches, but he invited me for lunch, and then for dinner, at his home in suburban Maryland. Shriver, who was born in Westminster, Maryland, comes from an old Maryland family. Most people now associate him with the Kennedy family, but his own clan was deeper in history than the Kennedys—his ancestor David Shriver signed the Maryland constitution in 1776. Sarge got rather absorbed by the Kennedys, but he was a striking figure on his own. I once asked the longtime business manager of the
Yale Daily News,
Francis Donahue, who had been the best chairman (chief student editor) of the
News,
and he answered with no hesitation, “Bill Buckley.” Second best? Equally unhesitant: “Sarge Shriver.”

Shriver's wife, Eunice, was very gracious to me at their home. Their children, Maria and Bobby, came in from playing tennis. Maria, who still had her teenage glow, was radiant. Bobby, who would arrange, as a Yale student, for me to teach a visiting course there, was friendly then and after, when I visited him in California. It was a little different with Eunice. I had met her at a Special Olympics event in Baltimore and wrote a column praising her work. She was grateful then, but she did not stay friendly. She was on the board of directors of Holy Cross College, and she voted with the rest of the board to give me an honorary degree in 1982. But between that vote and the college's commencement, my book
The Kennedy Imprisonment
came out, highly critical of Joseph Kennedy's regimen for his family.

Eunice called the Holy Cross president, Jesuit father Jack Brooks, and said my award had to be rescinded. He told me about that, and how he protested to her that he had no power to cancel the award—the board had voted on it. She said she would get the board to reverse itself. She tried. But at the commencement, after my degree was given me, another member of the board, lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, came up to me, and said, “Did you notice that there was only one board member who was not here?” I said I had not expected her to be there. I know when I'm on another enemies list.

J
ohn Waters, though considered an “underground filmmaker,” was a professional in his tastes, as I found when the two of us served on a jury for the Baltimore Film Festival. The jury was made up of four people—a mistake, since even numbers make it hard or impossible to break a tie. The two non-Baltimore judges came from the American Film Institute in neighboring Washington. Waters and I argued that first place should go to a film based on Flannery O′Connor′s story “The River.” As fellow Catholics, we had a soft spot for O′Connor, and John's affection was strengthened by her gothic weirdness. My son, who has been a part-time filmmaker and was a nonvoting participant in the festival, agreed with John and me. But the AFI people dismissed our film as “too professional.” They saw film festivals as meant to encourage the amateur, the experimental, or the “nonslick”—they thought Waters was deserting his own cause when he went with a conventionally filmed religion-themed movie. Long argument failed to budge either side, so the award money was split between two choices, and no first-place prize was given.

I reported on other film festivals, Sundance for
Harper's,
the annual Pordenone (Italy) Silent Film Fest for the
New York Review,
and I taught film in the American Studies Program at Northwestern University. While writing my book on Ronald Reagan, I watched Reagan rarities (like the Brass Bancroft series) on a Moviola in the Republic archives at Madison, Wisconsin. In Los Angeles, I listened to tapes of the Screen Actors Guild meetings at the time of Reagan's prominence in the SAG—I had to go into a closet off the current SAG president's office, since its building was being vacated for a new structure. There were no earphones for the recording machine and I had to keep the volume low, so as not to disturb the president on the other side of the door. On the other hand, I could hear clearly the curses and vulgarities that the president (Patty Duke) shouted over the phone or at someone in her office.

Once a person writes several books about presidents of the United States, editors or agents ask that person to write about each president who comes along. I was asked, then, to write books about Presidents Ford, Carter, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. I told those asking that I preferred to write about presidents who were lightning rods, reaction to whom revealed something about the American people. That is what first drew me to the book an editor at Houghton Mifflin wanted about Nixon, or to the all-American Reagan. When I turned down ideas for other presidents, my editor at Simon & Schuster, Alice Mayhew, asked me if there was another figure of that sort who had
not
been a president.

I told her John Wayne was such an outsize figure—a political symbol as well as a film monument, for some the very epitome of patriotism and manliness. His movies had been used as recruiting tools for the marines. Yet John Ford had mocked his favored actor for the way he dodged military service during World War II. Liberals were so offended by his political stands that they foolishly belittled his acting achievements. Since Ford was my favorite American film director after Orson Welles, I welcomed the opportunity to spend many hours with the people who had worked with him and with Wayne. I haunted the film archives at New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress, whose curators (Charles Silver and Madeline Matz, respectively) became friends. I read the Ford Papers at the Lilly Library in Indiana, and went to see Andrew McLaglen on his island off the coast of Washington State.

But I had never seen a film being made until Oliver Stone's publicist called and asked me to come talk with him about his new project,
Nixon.
I hesitated, because I thought Stone's
JFK
was a laughable distortion of history. He had turned a flamboyant liar, “Big Jim” Garrison of New Orleans, into a quietly wise Atticus Finch, with a porch scene where he rocks his daughter taken straight from
To Kill a Mockingbird.
There were rumors that Stone was going to push his conspiracy theories onto Richard Nixon. But the publicist assured me that, while this was true of the first draft of a script, people who had read it, like Robert Scheer, persuaded him against the idea. These people included Anthony Hopkins, who was playing Nixon in the film. He had at first refused when offered the role—he thought it improper for a Welshman to participate in an attack on an American president. But Stone told him the characterization of Nixon would be sympathetic—pitying but sympathetic—and the publicist confided to me that Stone had given Hopkins my
Nixon Agonistes,
indicating the approach he would take. So I went to Los Angeles.

The filming was in progress when I arrived. I talked at length to Hopkins. Though he is a wonderful mimic, treating me to takeoffs on Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, he said he was not going to do a Nixon impression, but would try to get inside the man. He had interviewed his daughters. He had ruled against the effort of makeup people to give him a false nose. Though he did suggest Nixon's hunched-over walk, as a way of getting his spirit, he did not imitate his voice. The result is that this movie draws on
Citizen Kane,
not
To Kill a Mockingbird.
It is the picture of an emotionally wounded man who rises to power without ever becoming a full human being. That was roughly the picture drawn in my book.

Stone had read my Ruby book, because he reads everything about the assassination of Kennedy. He still has a picture of Jim Garrison on his mantel. He wanted to argue about the assassination, but I had learned from experience that discussions with conspiracy theorists are a waste of time. Still, I admired some of his other movies—
Platoon, The Doors, Salvador, Natural Born Killers.
And I was curious about his days studying with Martin Scorsese at NYU. He said, “Marty's love of movies is what he conveyed. In those days, the only place you could see some foreign films in New York was late at night on Channel 11. He would come in the next morning with red eyes and a hungover look from being up all night in front of the TV.”

Stone had learned that I was a classicist, and he told me that his fondest dream was to make a movie about Alexander the Great. He had written a script and scouted out locations. Why hadn't he made it? “Not enough money.” He wanted an epic scale for this film. I said that Scorsese had made
The Last Temptation of Christ
on a modest budget. “Yeah, and it looks it.” When Stone later published his autobiographical novel, I found out what intrigued him in the Alexander story. Stone's French mother, who was separated from his father, tried to seduce him (according to the novel), just as Alexander's mother seduced him. This idea so enthralled Stone that, when he did make
Alexander,
he ridiculously cast Angelina Jolie as Olympias and Colin Farrell as the king, though Farrell is only one year younger than his supposed mother in the movie.

I had heard that Stone bullied his actors. That may have been true in his earlier days, when he was still uncertain of his authority and was using drugs. But he was a model of patience and understanding in the scenes I saw him shoot, and the actors I talked with on the set showed great admiration for him—not only Hopkins but Paul Sorvino (playing Henry Kissinger), James Woods (as H. R. Haldeman), J. T. Walsh (John Ehrlichman), and others. When Stone wanted to instruct an actor, he would take him or her aside rather than correct the person before others. And he took suggestions graciously.

When Joan Allen, playing Pat Nixon, was seated in the front cabin of the Air Force One mockup, she had to listen to Haldeman and Ehrlichman making anti-Semitic comments against the absent Kissinger. She told Stone she felt uncomfortable just sitting there and listening to such talk. Could she do something to signal her lack of ease? Stone said that was a good idea, but what could she do? She suggested that she take a magazine out of the rack in the plane and pointedly start leafing through it. Stone approved the idea, and reshot the scene that way. It did not make it into the commercial cut, though one never knows what factors go into the editing of scenes.

I reviewed Martin Scorsese's film
The Last Temptation of Christ
for the
New York Review of Books.
It fascinated me—I still think it the best movie about Jesus—and I called up its writer, Paul Schrader, to discuss it. The film is formed at the confluence of three religious traditions, the Greek Orthodoxy of Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote the novel on which it is based; the evangelical Protestantism of Schrader; and the Italian Catholicism of Scorsese. The film was widely condemned by religious people. Patrick Buchanan denounced it without ever having seen it. What upset them is that Jesus is seen in bed with Mary Magdalene. But that is a fantasy which Jesus rejects. His “last temptation” is to give up his divine mission and become an ordinary human being, avoiding crucifixion, and having children in a happy home. Instead, he returns to the cross.

As I got to know Schrader better, he told me of his Calvinist upbringing, being forbidden to see movies. His father rejected him when
Last Temptation
came out, even demonstrating against the movie when it ran in a nearby theater. Schrader's alma mater, Calvin College, denounced it (though some students sneaked away to see it in Detroit). Only after many years did the college honor its alumnus with a festival of his films. Schrader invited me to interview him onstage during the festival. His hometown, Grand Rapids, Michigan, had forgiven him for an earlier offense, when he made it the locale of the first film he directed as well as wrote,
Hardcore
(1979). He used the site and its citizens for a scathing picture of Calvinist religiosity and hypocrisy. He said he had to use the town, since he had so little money for this, his first directing job.