The year after the Bicentennial commemorated America’s declaration to fight off British monarchy, another historic Anglo-American face-off took place. This time, a single Brit would confront the American who had attempted to reign as ‘Imperial President.’British television interviewer David Frost had paid Richard Nixon $1 million for a dozen interview sessions that would be broadcast over a week in shows sure to be heard around the world. While some clarification of history was inevitable, both men were primarily concerned with improving public sentiment towards them.
As we have seen in subsequent Presidential over-stepping such as the Iran-Contra Affair and the misuse of intelligence gathering to deceive the public about the urgency of invading Iraq, a sense of supreme self-righteousness permeated the Nixon Presidency. It was not seen as criminal for government employees to leak damaging lies about the other party’s front-runners in order to have them withdraw in disgrace and make way for less viable candidates. Or, for them to attempt electronic surveillance of the Democratic National Committee leadership so they could learn the opposition's tactics in time to sabotage them. These activities were not seen as illegal because they were sanctioned by a President who, in their eyes, was as sovereign as King George III.
The surveillance of the DNC never happened because the men sent to break in to its Watergate Hotel offices in June 1972 were caught by the night watchman. From then on, the former President continued to barricade himself behind executive privilege and fallen bodies of sacrificed staffers. He held his ground through his landslide re-election, but by August 1974, with impeachment a certainty, he handed the reign to Gerald Ford.
CONTINUATION FROM 'NOTEBOOK' BEGINS HERE: In August 2006 Peter Morgan's dramatization of Frost’s interviews with Nixon premiered at London’s Donmar Warehouse. Frost/Nixon came to America in 2007 and within a year was a film version was on its way to several Academy Award nominations including best picture, director, and actor for Frank Langella as Nixon. This week the play opens its West Coast premiere (with Stacy Keach as Nixon) at the Ahmanson Theatre.
For most theater reviews, rather than enter a play with preconceptions affected by inevitably interpretative marketing and publicity materials, I prefer to listen to what the play has to say for itself. However, in the case of semi-documentaries, preparation is necessary. Here, the work of the playwright and actors is not rooted in the realm of imagination but in the real world. To gauge how their artistry enhances the recreation, we must freshly re-gather as accurate as possible a picture of what happened.
A short cut to this is provided by the recollections of Frost and two research assistants: reporters James Reston Jr. and Robert Zelnick (both of whom are also characterized in the play).
"It is a curious feeling to go to the theater and watch yourself onstage," Frost writes in Frost/Nixon: Behind the Scenes. "I attended a preview of Frost/Nixon two or three nights before the play opened in August 2006. I thought it was brilliantly written, directed and acted. There were more fictionalizations than I would have preferred, although one such piece of fictionalization – Nixon's phone call to me on the eve of Watergate – was, I thought, a masterpiece.”
Last year, prompted by the film, an enterprising reporter at Boston University's student paper, interviewed Zelnick, who said he had not seen the film, “but I’ve seen the play."
“It was great theater,” he said, “and the overall account is reasonably accurate. But there was poetic license taken for the stage that was somewhat in excess of what I was comfortable with.
"The character of Frost as portrayed on stage presents him as the kind of guy who rose to the occasion one time in his life. I don’t think that’s true. . . . [Whether it was once in his lifetime or more] he should be applauded for doing that. A lot of people have the opportunity and don’t rise to the occasion."
“I was not so sure about some of the other fictionalizations," Frost continues. "Why was Watergate now the twelfth of twelve sessions and not – as actually happened – two sessions in the middle? Why did James Reston's discoveries from the Watergate tapes only reach me on the morning of the Watergate session and not eight months earlier, as had actually been the case? Why did the early sessions, which contained a lot of good material, have to be depicted so negatively?. . . . Whenever I made these points to Peter [Morgan], he would simply sigh and say, 'David, you've got to remember this is a play, not a documentary.' However, aware of my concern, he thoughtfully added an author's note to the program, making the point that he had sometimes found it irresistible to let his imagination take over."
That note has not made it to the Ahmanson program. (Ironically, the description of this as "a new play" has survived from the original Donmar production.) However, the folks at Center Theater Group have honored Morgan's promise by incorporating the caveat in a question asked of director Michael Grandage in a program Q&A entitled "The Fact and Fiction of Frost/Nixon."
Ahmanson audiences will now weigh how theater has used language to balance reality and myth in depicting how one fallen leader used language to navigate around fact and fiction. It should be a fascinating battle between the imaginative and the impeachable, in the state whose only native son to become President was the only one to resign.
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