THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 17, 1995 TAG: 9504150033
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Interview
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 215 lines
SHOULD THE MAN on the nickel issue a NEW declaration of independence?
Thomas Jefferson, the architect of American democracy, makes his movie debut this week when ``Jefferson in Paris,'' the $15-million film from the respected team of Merchant and Ivory, opens in his home state.
Historians, Jefferson descendants and Monticello guides await the event with a fury backed by considerable research. They are, to put it mildly, ready to jump on the movie with both feet.
``Jefferson in Paris'' opens locally on Friday.
At the center of the anticipated debate is the so-called ``Sally Hemings affair'' The screenplay, as well as some researchers, assert that Jefferson had six illegitimate children by Sally Hemings, a mulatto slave who lived at his Monticello plantation. Then there's his ardor for an English-Italian aristocrat named Maria Cosway, wife of a noted European painter, the subject of his well-documented ``heart and head'' letter in which he ultimately ruled his head the winner. Was she just a flirtation?
It was inevitable that Hollywood would eventually turn its lens on Jefferson. Consider the tabloid possibilities: The most American of the founding fathers is living in a foreign land and mourning the death of his wife. Stir in a beautiful, aristocratic and highly intelligent European woman and a young slave girl (thought to be around 14 or 15). Add a jealous daughter (a theory seldom, if ever, even hinted at by researchers), and you wonder how Hollywood stayed clear all these years.
``Jefferson in Paris'' stars Nick Nolte as Jefferson at age 41 arriving in Paris to represent his new nation as ambassador to France. Greta Scacchi plays Maria Cosway, complete with an awesome wardrobe of wigs and gowns.
Thandie Newton, a Zambia-born actress, is a rather flighty Sally Hemings.
Naysayers were momentarily quieted when the project was announced two years ago when they learned the production would be mounted by Merchant and Ivory. Producer Ismail Merchant and Director James Ivory have a respected reputation for producing period, costume dramas. Their last three films, ``Room With a View,'' Howards End'' and ``Remains of the Day,'' have all been hits with both the critics and the public.
There was a sigh of relief: If the ``Jefferson picture'' had to be made at all, it would be made by a respectable team. The relief was short-lived.
``Off With The Wigs!'' screamed a headline in the New York Post. The New York Daily News claimed the film is ``too soft on slavery.''
Bahman Batmanghelidj, a wealthy Iranian developer who lives in northern Virginia, has been the most vocal denouncer of the movie, and has launched something of a crusade against it in Virginia.
``If it were true, the greatest voice for democracy the world has ever known could be conceived as both a liar and a child molester,'' Batmanghelidj said in The Washington Post. ``People believe what they see in the movies.''
Historian Alf J. Mapp Jr. of Portsmouth claimed in his Jefferson biography that Hemings would simply have been too young.
``Racial bigots of both races promote the story and, perhaps, wanted it to be true,'' Mapp said, ``but there is no real evidence.''
A crew from Connie Chung's CBS magazine show ``Eye to Eye'' filmed at Mapp's Portsmouth home to get his point of view, but used only one moment of the footage.
Mapp, who has written two books on Jefferson, said, ``I had read the film's script and found it outright dull. That comment was cut from the show. Most of my criticisms were cut.''
Nathan Schachner, another biographer, doesn't even mention Sally in his book.
Others disagree. Fawn M. Brodie, in a popular 1974 biography, was so convinced of the affair, that it was she who provided Ivory's theory dating the birth of Hemings' children to Jefferson's Monticello visits.
Brodie found what was regarded as evidence in favor of a Sally liaison in Jefferson's expense book. Brodie discovered expenses, dated 1787, for French tutors, dresses, a locket, elegant gloves and boarding for Hemings while Jefferson was living in Paris.
The anti-Sally-affair side counters that this was perhaps a fatherly interest in the intelligent youngster and that such expenses were not unusual for favored slaves.
Mapp claims that Brodie's book is ``notorious. It uses extensive footnotes to make it look well-researched but many of them are undocumented.''
Edward L. Ayers, a University of Virginia history professor and author of Jefferson articles, claimed in interviews for other publications that ``no one believes the Hemings affair.'' Ayers reasons why people want to believe the Hemings-Jefferson affair. He told The Washington Post that ``white liberals tend to think of it as a rape - an exploitation by 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.''
So how, and when, did the whole discussion start?
It may all be a result of dirty politics. The first printed report of the Hemings affair is believed to have surfaced in The Richmond Recorder in 1804. The author was James T. Callender, a journalist who had, reportedly, borrowed money from Jefferson, wanted a political job he didn't get and subsequently switched his political allegiance.
Callender also dug out what he called another ``scandal'' - a Jefferson flirtation with one Betsey Walker, a married neighbor at Monticello.
The Boston Gazette, on Oct. 1, 1802, printed a nasty ``poem'' in which it claimed ``a lass so luscious ne'er was seen/As Monticellian Sally.''
Director Ivory claims, quite correctly, that his movie doesn't really examine life at Monticello. Instead, it focuses entirely on Jefferson's life in Paris.
While both Ivory and actor Nolte came to Monticello to do research, Ivory says that ``We never considered doing any filming in Virginia. For one thing, Monticello is completely different now than it would have been then. Jefferson remodeled and enlarged it later. It doesn't now look anything like what it did at the time he left for Paris.''
Merchant, a native of India who has been working with director Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as a successful team for 33 years, is ecstatic that in spite of bad reviews, the film has been doing good business.
``Jefferson is a fascinating person. I would think everyone would want to see this film,'' he said.
Ivory, the more serious member of the team, sat in the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills and admitted that he expected the criticism.
``The project has been in the planning for 10 years, and it has been thoroughly researched,'' he said. ``The truth is that the historians don't agree on much. Jefferson never denied the Sally Hemings affair. In fact, he never acknowledged it either. We can find no record that he talked about it at all.
``As for the Maria Cosway affair, there are those who think it was never an affair at all, and that possibility is left somewhat open by the film. Here was a man who was mourning the death of his wife and, at her death bed, had promised never to marry again. Here was a woman in an age when divorce from her husband was unlikely. Maria Cosway was a Catholic. But their letters exist for years afterward - and they were very romantic letters.''
Ivory firmly believes that Jefferson had six children with Hemings and that she was by his death bed when he expired on July 4, 1826.
``There is too much evidence that Sally Hemings had a child almost nine months to the day after each time Jefferson visited Monticello from Washington,'' the director said. ``Those who oppose the theory usually use the Carr brothers argument.''
He is referring to the fact that Jefferson's grandson, Thomas J. Randolph, told historian Henry S. Randall in the mid-19th century that Hemings was the mistress of Peter Carr and that Sally's sister, Betsey, was the mistress of Samuel Carr.
The Carr brothers were nephews of Jefferson, sons of his sister Martha. Randolph said the affairs were ``simply notorious at Monticello and scarcely disguised.'' The brothers reportedly expressed grief, years later, that ``the old man'' had been given the blame.
Ivory says that he, and his film, have been snubbed by the Jefferson family. Promoters claimed that many scholars even refused to attend advance screenings, presumably because they were afraid they'd be asked to give opinions.
``Some of them said they had a reputation to think of and didn't want to see, or comment, upon the film publicly,'' one Disney employee observed.
The other great risk for the ``Jefferson in Paris'' film was the casting of Nick Nolte in the title role. Nolte is 54 while Jefferson was just 41 when he went to Paris. Nolte, too, is more known for aggressively macho roles while this script described a torn, mourning man in a foreign land.
``I wanted, above all, a tall Jefferson,'' Ivory said. ``The most famous bust of Jefferson in Washington looks a great deal like Nick. In it, Jefferson looks older than 41. I also wanted a kind of macho actor for the role. That was Jefferson - passionate and outgoing. Most of all, I found Nick a quiet and careful actor. He wanted to research the role fully. I felt that he was particularly `up' for it and could do it well.''
Nolte himself, a native of Omaha, Neb., said he spent two years reading Jefferson biographies and visiting Williamsburg and Monticello.
``The trouble is that historians want to cast Jefferson in stone,'' said Nolte, returning to his blustering, modern stance. ``He wasn't stone. He was a human being. What is wrong about speculation? All the historians I talked with refused to speculate. He is a very difficult character to flesh out. I ask them questions, and they merely tell me `We can't speculate. We have reputations to think about.' ''
Nolte, who received an Oscar nomination for ``Prince of Tides,'' says he didn't hesitate to take the part. ``I wanted it. I knew it was a risk, but there is the fact that no one had played him in a major film before. There wouldn't be comparisons in that way. I felt him to be a very passionate man. I can't believe that, after his wife's death, he never had another romance.''
Nolte admits to a good deal of hard-living and hard-drinking in his own life and continues to be surprised that some think it unusual that he is so dedicated to research and preparation.
The film flirts with a factor that had never been suggested by even the most wild Jefferson critics. Was Jefferson possibly overly concerned with his daughter Patsy? The film has long, lingering scenes in which he talks of how much he needs her and forbids her to enter a Catholic convent in France.
Mapp agrees that the lingering scenes are not just a matter of imagination. He read them in the script and questioned them, too. ``I felt that emphasis was a bit much, but you have to understand the way parents wrote to children in those days. The language is much more affectionate than it might be today. It might be considered strange today.''
Nolte rejects the idea and claims the film doesn't even make such a suggestion. ``You have to remember the times. A love between a father and daughter was perhaps greater then. In some ways, I think Patsy was the most important woman in Jefferson's life. She was his hostess at the White House. America was no more than a Third World country would be today. There was a feeling that Virginian children should be kept in Virginia - not sent away to Europe for education. He wanted Patsy to be an American - a Virginian. He saw the Catholic Church as something that promoted and backed kings.''
Nolte claims that the film's treatment of slavery is accurate for the times depicted. ``Certainly slavery was an evil - and one that no one felt would survive. Jefferson himself thought it would be stamped out, but not in his lifetime. He was against it, but he had to make compromises to get a new nation started.''
``He was an idealist caught in the middle of the time in which he lived. He was a lover of freedom.''
In any case, ``Jefferson in Paris'' is not just the man on the nickel. MEMO: THE WOMEN IN HIS LIFE: GRETA SCACCHI AND THANDIE NEWTON TALK ABOUT THEIR
ROLES/E5
ILLUSTRATION: The real Thomas Jefferson
[Color Photo]
MERCHANT IVORY PRODUCTIONS
ABOVE: Nick Nolte as Thomas Jefferson falls for the sophisticated
Maria Cosway (Greta Scacchi).
LEFT: Jefferson forms a life-long relationship with Sally Hemings
(Thandie Newton) during his years in Paris.
ABOVE: Jefferson served as ambassador to Versailles.
MERCHANT IVORY PRODUCTIONS
Jefferson, played by Nick Nolte, second from left, spent five of his
most significant years as ambassador to the court of Louis XVI.
by CNB