Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 28, 1995 TAG: 9503280035
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD BROOKHISER NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
``Jefferson in Paris'' opens on Friday and focuses on the years from 1784 to 1789, when Thomas Jefferson was America's minister to France. But aside from one scene in which Jefferson inspects a copy of the Declaration of Independence chez Lafayette and another that has him signing papers with Dutch bankers - the International Monetary Fund of the day - all we see is personal. Indeed the film's director, James Ivory, and producer, Ismail Merchant, give us Tom's spring break in Paris.
And what a break it is. A widower in his 40s, Jefferson (played by Nick Nolte) has two love affairs, one platonic with Maria Cosway, the socialite wife of the English painter Richard Cosway and herself a miniaturist, the other not platonic with Sally Hemings, his teen-age slave.
Jefferson's flirtation with Maria (played by Greta Scacchi) was revealed through a series of letters they exchanged after the Cosways left Paris for London in 1786.
Jefferson began the correspondence with a dialogue between his head and his heart: head berating heart for allowing itself to become entangled; heart insisting on primacy in its own sphere.
Merchant and Ivory take minor dramatic license with this relationship, presenting bits of the head-and-heart dialogue as a charade played by Jefferson and the Cosways on a picnic.
The story of Sally Hemings (Thandie Newton), a young slave girl he brought to Paris from Monticello in 1787 and took home again two years later, is more problematic. The movie accepts an account given in 1873 by Sally's son Madison Hemings (James Earl Jones), that has never been proved and, in the absence of genetic testing, is unprovable.
Hemings claimed that he and three siblings had been fathered by Jefferson during an affair that lasted nearly 40 years and that all four had been freed from slavery in fulfillment of a pledge given their mother.
Jefferson's overseer at Monticello denied the story, and the Jefferson family maintained that Sally's children were sired by Peter or Samuel Carr, Jefferson's nephews. All had an interest in protecting the president's reputation, of course, even as Madison Hemings had an interest in claiming a president as his father.
But the story had already been dragging after Jefferson - ``like a dead cat,'' in the words of the historian Winthrop Jordan - for decades before Madison spoke.
It first saw print in 1802, thanks to the infamous James T. Callender, a one-time journalistic hit man for Jefferson's party who then turned to bite the hands that fed him. It was taken up by abolitionists, who wished to show that not even a critic of slavery could escape the system's snares, and by English travel writers like Mrs. Frances Trollope, the mother of the novelist, who were eager to scuff the pretensions of the young Republic.
Merchant, Ivory and their screenwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, represent the return of the travel-writer mind-set.
The sensibility of ``Jefferson in Paris'' is deeply Tory: Jefferson is a hypocrite on the slave issues; his French friends, who point this out to him, are shown playing with a model guillotine. The personal is the political, and so the movie suggests they are both botched jobs. (``Thomas Jefferson: A View From the Mountain,'' a documentary that will be shown on public television next month, addresses Jefferson's life as a slaveholder from a more somber, historic perspective.)
The movie ``George Washington,'' due next year, may be a more balanced project. Robert Redford will star and will produce with Oliver Stone. According to someone close to the production, the story will cover the life of Washington the war hero from the French and Indian Wars to the end of the American Revolution, and there is no early word of grassy knolls.
But romance will intrude here too, in the form of Sally Fairfax, the great crush of Washington's youth - and the wife of George William Fairfax, his neighbor and a distant in-law.
The Washington-Fairfax relationship was revealed in a handful of letters published in 1877, all that survive of a more extensive correspondence. Twentieth-century historians like Samuel Eliot Morrison tend to take these letters seriously, positing an affair of the heart and describing Washington's renunciation of Sally as the first of his many noble resignations.
More recently, though, the historian and biographer Richard Norton Smith has wondered how much could have taken place secretly in a society as given to gossip as the plantocracy of Tidewater Virginia. Intelligent women took an interest in Washington all his life, and Sally may have simply been the first.
My guess is that George, who was two years younger, took Sally's attentions more seriously than they were intended. He maintained his friendship with the Fairfaxes, husband and wife, after marrying Martha Custis in 1759.
The Fairfaxes moved out of his life when they departed for England on the eve of the Revolution. There are no dead-cat stories of slave lovers in Washington's life, though British journalists tried to get one going during the war by adding a sentence about ``pretty little Kate, the washerwoman's daughter'' to the published text of a letter addressed to him. One hopes Merchant and Ivory will not read it.
Even if true, the stories of the Sallys - Hemings and Fairfax - reveal nothing that isn't already known. Audiences don't need broken hearts to explain Washington's self-control: he was led to renunciation by more obvious forces, from the political theory of the day to a lifelong interest in courtesy.
And surely the starkest proof of the dark power of slavery in Jefferson's life is that his debts prevented him from freeing all his slaves at his death, as Washington had done.
Then, as now, the biggest political stories often happened in plain sight. (We'll see how the issues play out in films about Richard Nixon and Harry S Truman, currently in the planning stages.)
Storytellers need drama and hence reach for personal parables. But a focus on the sexual nexus evokes the prurience of Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey, of sex as spectator sport and confession as performance art.
Such a focus also reflects a contemporary loss of faith in the public sphere. We take a kiss-and-tell view of politicians because we don't believe in politics. Our ancestors had low tastes, too, as the career of Callender attests, but they also produced, and read, the Federalist Papers.
And speaking of Hamilton: There is at least one sexual scandal of the Founding Fathers that has not yet been made into a movie, though there is no doubt about its truth. In 1797 the former Treasury secretary wrote a pamphlet confessing that he had had an extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds, who was herself married, to a small-time criminal.
What's more, he admitted paying her husband $1,100 in hush money. Hamilton came clean to refute a charge leveled by the busy Callender that he had paid off Reynolds as part of a scheme to speculate in government certificates. He made his private shenanigans public to clear his reputation as a public official.
Hamilton's behavior managed to combine full disclosure, self-criticism and reticence. ``My greatest enemy'' will conclude ``that there is nothing worse in the affair than an irregular and indelicate amour,'' he wrote in his pamphlet. ``For this, I bow to the just censure which it merits. I have paid pretty severely for the folly, and can never recollect it without disgust and self-condemnation.'' Then the touch that is entirely pre-modern: ``It might seem affectation to say more.''
Guilty pols could take the Hamilton pamphlet as a model; so could screenwriters.
Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor of National Review and the author of ``The Way of the Wasp,'' is writing a book about George Washington.|
by CNB