THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 31, 1994 TAG: 9408300133
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KEN RINGLE, THE WASHINGTON POST
LENGTH: Long : 221 lines
For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate error as long as reason is free to combat it.
-Thomas Jefferson
BAHMAN BATMANGHELIDJ knows those lines well. But there's one error he's having trouble tolerating, free reason or not. It's the one in the Merchant-Ivory film ``Jefferson in Paris,'' now in production.
By all accounts, the Oscar-winning Merchant-Ivory team, known for lush, literary and historically impeccable films, buys into one of American history's more enduring and defamatory legends - that the author of the Declaration of Independence kept a slave mistress who bore him several children.
``This is very serious business,'' says the wealthy Iranian-born developer, who is known as ``Batman,'' from his home in Northern Virginia. ``It is a degradation not just of the architect of democracy but of his spiritual legacy to the rest of the world. Americans don't realize, I think, how profoundly Jefferson and his ideas live on in the hopes and dreams of people in other countries. This movie will undercut all that. People around the world will view it as the defining truth about Jefferson. And, of course, it is a lie.''
The image of Thomas Jefferson has been periodically under attack ever since his death - and even before it - but so exercised is Batmanghelidj about the Merchant-Ivory film that he has recruited historians, politicians and financiers with letters and phone calls against it. He has mailed out dozens of historical citations and Jefferson biographies. He has tugged the coats of journalists and buttonholed the governor of Virginia. He has even turned against Mickey Mouse.
``I at one time was an enthusiastic supporter of the Disney theme park in Virginia because of the economic boom it could create in the area where I operate and own land,'' he says. ``Now I fully understand why the historians oppose it. . . . A better example of the disastrous effects of falsifying history cannot be demonstrated.''
As the distributor and financial partner with Merchant-Ivory in the production of ``Jefferson in Paris,'' Disney, he says, is, in effect, ``financing a soft-porn movie,'' and Batmanghelidj is missing no opportunity to tell that to Jefferson-loving Virginians with possible anti-Disney clout.
``May I suggest that we call a meeting of the board to see what can be done to bring Disney to its senses?'' he asked in a letter to his fellow advisory board members for Jefferson's second home at Poplar Forest near Lynchburg.
Just why an Iranian-born developer should care so much about the cinematic sex life of America's third president may not be immediately clear. For Batmanghelidj, there are several reasons.
The first, he says, is his general dismay over the increasing trashing of history - traceable at least in part to the deconstruction school fashionable among the more convoluted minds of academia - in which facts are subordinated to perceptions and all truths are considered relative.
He points out that in 200 years of energetic searching, no Jefferson scholar has ever produced anything more than hearsay evidence of Jefferson's alleged involvement with the slave Sally Hemings, with whom he consorts in the film. And even the hearsay, Batmanghelidj notes, is ultimately traceable to the wholly unsupported writings of an alcoholic journalist who turned on Jefferson after being refused appointment to a political job.
``Why would someone want to be part of a lie?'' he asks.
The second reason he's upset is because of the persuasive power of film to alter perceptions of history. The Oliver Stone film ``JFK'' was a historical travesty by almost any account, ``but seven out of 10 people who saw the film will tell you without any question that the CIA murdered President Kennedy. . And a movie produced with the care and reputation of a team like Merchant-Ivory ``will stay the truth for generations.''
The third reason he objects, Batmanghelidj says, is that the Hemings story flies in the face of the vast amount known of Jefferson's character and private life from descriptions of him by others and from his thousands of letters. As the most rational of men, he always forced his head to rule his heart, even when, overcome with grief for his dead wife, he became fascinated with Maria Cosway, a British-Italian painter in Paris who reminded him of the woman he had lost.
Born to the institution of slavery, he argued strongly against it as an injustice even as he felt helpless to end it without bloodshed and the creation of even greater evils. He was even more opposed to miscegenation, believing it ``a perpetual exercise of . . . unremitting despotism . . . and degrading submissions'' that ``stained the blood of the master'' with that of a race he suspected of both physical and intellectual inferiority.
Moreover, Batmanghelidj says, if the Hemings story is true, then Jefferson was not only a liar but was, ``in fact, a child molester,'' because Hemings ``was just 13 years old in Paris. He would have been bedding his younger daughter's playmate.''
If Jefferson was such a libertine and fraud in person, Batmanghelidj says, what does that say about his universal concepts of man, government and democracy? ``Don't they become suspect? . . . What does this do to the spiritual essence of this country, which continues to excite hope and democratic change throughout the world?''
Batmanghelidj's agitation over ``Jefferson in Paris'' is merely the latest chapter in a long and increasingly heated war over the legacy of the most American of our Founding Fathers. It is a war that has gone on in fits and starts at least since 1974, when Fawn M. Brodie published a widely read book dusting off the long-discredited charge of Jefferson's involvement with Hemings. The charge was dismissed by his contemporaries - who knew him best - and has been dismissed as unfounded since by virtually every historian or scholar who has looked carefully at Jefferson's life.
``There simply are none'' who believe it, said Edward L. Ayers, a University of Virginia history professor and co-author of ``The Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson: Race and Slavery in American Memory,'' in a collection of Jeffersonian essays published by the university's press last year.
Ayers, a historian outside the hard core of Jefferson defenders, looked into the Jefferson-Hemings controversy as part of a conference held at the university last year during the Jefferson Bicentennial. It was clear from a look at past scholarship that those in the relatively small universe of Jefferson scholars had traditionally been overly protective of their subject, Ayers said, but in recent years, ``even younger, rather cynical scholars highly critical of Jefferson about slavery and race'' have found no foundation for the Hemings charge.
``But what we also found is that, irrespective of scholarly findings, a lot of the public does'' believe the Hemings story, he said. ``And black Americans believe it absolutely,'' due in part to the claims of Hemings' descendants over the years - claims periodically detailed in Ebony magazine since the 1950s.
While respecting the sincerity of those claims, most historians today attribute them to the same sort of flawed and wishful intra-family oral history that leads hundreds of whites to claim unprovable genealogical ties to the throne of England. Hemings' mulatto offspring, they say, were most likely fathered by Jefferson's nephews.
Jefferson's grandson Thomas J. Randolph told historian Henry S. Randall in the mid-19th century that Sally Hemings was the mistress of Peter Carr and that her sister Betsey was the mistress of Samuel Carr. Both boys were the sons of Jefferson's sister Martha, and the Hemings girls' ``connection with the Carrs was perfectly notorious at Monticello, scarcely disguised by the latter and never disowned by them,'' Randolph said.
When shown a newspaper article charging Jefferson with the paternity of Sally Hemings' children, Randolph said: ``Peter read it, tears coursing down his cheeks, and then handed it to Samuel, who also shed tears. Peter exclaimed: `Aren't you and I a couple of pretty fellows to bring this disgrace on our poor uncle, who has always fed us!' ''
Ellen Randolph Coolidge, Jefferson's granddaughter, wrote that Peter Carr had been overheard to say with a laugh that ``the old gentleman had to bear the blame of his and Sam's misdeeds,'' and she described Samuel Carr as ``the most good-natured Turk that ever was master of a black seraglio.''
Despite such testimony - and there is much, much more - and the lack of any evidence confirming a Hemings-Jefferson liaison, ``college teachers are often dismayed to discover that many, if not most, of their students now regard this (affair) as an accepted fact,'' wrote Jefferson scholar Douglas L. Wilson two years ago in the Atlantic Monthly.
The reason for the receptivity, Wilson said, is the ``prevailing presentism'' of our era: the overwhelming tendency to judge figures and events of the past by the popular standards of our own time, taking no account for historical differences, cultural, spiritual or behavioral.
Ayers agrees, saying: ``One of the interesting things we found'' in studying the widespread acceptance of the Hemings-Jefferson story ``is that those who believe it do so for different reasons. White liberals, for example, tend to think of it as a rape - as the exploitation by power of a white slave owner on a helpless black slave. Blacks, on the other hand, tend to view it as a love story - as a triumph of the human heart over racial prejudice, which whites don't want to consider possible.''
``Jefferson in Paris'' apparently takes the second view. Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, the producer and director, refused to be interviewed or answer any questions about their characterization of Jefferson for this article. Nor would they permit interviews with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, author of the screenplay.
Instead, they released a single-sentence statement that said, ``The whole Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings liaison, if there was one, is, after nearly 200 years, a romantic legend, just as his love affair with Maria Cosway is, though the latter is more substantiated.''
From reports of those who have watched the filming of ``Jefferson in Paris'' and read the screenplay, however, the film's treatment of the Hemings story may be only the beginning of the unhappiness for Batmanghelidj and other Jefferson defenders.
Richard Covington, a freelance writer in Paris and a contributing editor to Arts and Antiques magazine, says the film portrays Jefferson as a ``rigid, occasionally wooden'' and ``famously tongue-tied'' figure roundly criticized by French libertarians for hypocrisy because he owns slaves. He is also depicted as ``politically naive'' and such a rustic that he hauls a moose skeleton into a sophisticated Parisian drawing room.
Katherine Knorr, writing in the International Herald Tribune, said Merchant expects controversy ``almost gleefully'' over the alleged Hemings relationship.
Jhabvala told Alan Riding of the New York Times that her portrait of Jefferson is ``completely'' true ``as far as we can find out. . . . There are facts, and we stick to the facts.''
But perhaps more revealing was a profile of the author last year in the Los Angeles Times magazine in which writer Michael Lassell noted that her novels and screenplays ``are about passion, often about sexual awakening'' with characters ``deeply flawed, self-deluded, often craven, crass or ridiculous.''
``Why do they want to do this?'' asks Batmanghelidj. ``America is about optimism. They could make a fascinating movie about Jefferson as a man of ideas and ideals, and do the world a great deal of good. This nihilism benefits no one but the nihilists.''
Batmanghelidj concedes that Merchant-Ivory and Disney have the legal right to characterize Jefferson in any way they want to, due in part to rights Jefferson himself fought to guarantee. But, he says, there is such a thing as ``moral persuasion,'' like that employed by Jefferson scholars 15 years ago to stop a planned CBS miniseries built around a Jefferson-Hemings relationship.
For extra firepower, however, he has sought to have Disney put pressure on Merchant-Ivory to prove that the sort of historical liberties being taken in ``Jefferson in Paris'' aren't the sort planned for Disney's America. So far he has letters of support from everyone from West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd (``I share your concerns'') to the Corporation for Poplar Forest (``singularly appalling to learn of distortions'') to the Jefferson Legacy Foundation (``We urge Jhabvala, Merchant-Ivory and Disney to uphold the highest standards of the past - their past and Thomas Jefferson's - in the best interests of the future'').
So far, there's been no reaction from Disney, and a Disney spokesman said the corporation would not comment on the controversy.
``I will not rest until we reach a solution of this problem,'' says Batmanghelidj. ``Perhaps it helps to have come here from another country to understand what the character and ideals of Thomas Jefferson truly mean to America and to the world.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Bahman Batmanghelidi
Photo
Thomas Jefferson
KEYWORDS: DISNEY AMERICA by CNB