Telling the Truth about Polly Bergen and the Queen of the Nile

I’ll always associate Polly Bergen with one of my favorite TV game shows from the late 1950s, To Tell the Truth. Bergen was one of four celebrity panelists trying to guess which of three contestants was being truthful about some unusual accomplishment. Other regulars, like Peggy Cass, specialized in goofiness, but Bergen stood out as a savvy cosmopolitan. Always impeccably dressed and coiffed, she seemed smart as well as pretty.

It was not until her recent death at age 84 that I learned about Bergen’s political side. She was a lifelong liberal, dedicated to women’s rights and to the prospect of electing women to high office. In 2008, she was a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton to top the Democratic presidential ticket. Which makes it highly appropriate that, back in 1964, she herself played the nation’s first female head of state. But I suspect she didn’t exactly consider this a giant leap for womankind. The movie was a treacly confection called Kisses for My President. Far less plot attention was paid to Bergen’s confident, competent President Leslie McCloud than to Fred MacMurray’s fish-out-of-water First Gentleman, whose discomfort with garden teas and a frilly White House boudoir was intended as a source of high comedy. MacMurray, as Thad McCloud,  had allowed his wife to run for president because he didn’t think she would win. Just when their marital situation seemed hopeless, Leslie stepped forward to resign her post, for the sake of their unborn baby. This “surprise” pregnancy could have been predicted by any moviegoer over the age of seven.  Here’s the film’s final dialogue exchange-- He: “It took 40 million women to get you into the White House . . .”  She (lovingly): “And just one man to get me out.” 

These days, of course, we’ve got a serious female presidential contender. And, on our television screens, women in high places abound. On Commander-in-Chief (2005-2006), Bergen herself played the mother of a U.S. president played by Geena Davis. Currently, Julia Louis-Dreyfus holds the second highest office in the land on the comedy hit, Veep. The brand-new Madam Secretary features Téa Leoni as Secretary of  State. Another newbie is a dramatic series called State of Affairs in which President Alfre Woodard combines the most obvious characteristics of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, thus doubly demonstrating that political correctness is alive and well.

All of the above, oddly enough, make me think of a splendid biography I recently read. It’s Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff, who like me is an active member of the Biographers International Organization. Schiff notes, at the outset, that the Cleopatra most of us have in our heads “seems the joint creation of Roman propagandists and Hollywood directors.” We think of her, in other words, as an untamed vixen, seducing Roman generals for fun and profit, then (if we’re in a Shakespearean mood) throwing away her kingdom and her life for love.

Schiff’s Cleopatra, though, is a far different creature, less Elizabeth  Taylor than Indira Gandhi or (yes) Hillary Clinton. She’s not particularly gorgeous, but she’s indisputably brilliant. With her solid classical education and her ability to speak nine languages, she puts the women of Rome to shame. A master of statecraft and also stagecraft, she uses banquets, parades, and other opulent ceremonies strategically, as a way to advance the cause of her nation. Schiff follows her to the grave, then ends with the death of her son Ptolemy in Rome at the hands of Caligula, “an appropriate end to a dynasty steeped, from the start, in blazing, supersaturated color.”

I can’t wait for the movie.

(October 2, 2014--   This just in: I've read that Ang Lee is in fact working toward a retelling of Cleopatra's story, with none other than Angelina Jolie in the title role.)
 

Saturday Night Potomac Fever

Just back from Washington, DC, I’m thinking about what a great cinematic backdrop this city makes, with its monuments and its stately marble halls. Hollywood has been in love with our nation’s capital almost since the beginning. Witness Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Frank Capra’s 1939 valentine to the power of our elected officials to do the right thing. More recently we’ve had DC-based horror films (The Exorcist), DC-based political thrillers (All the President’s Men), and aliens blowing up the Capitol dome (Independence Day).

Over the years, as Americans have become increasingly cynical about government, Hollywood has supplied us with films that comment directly on those in the seat of power. Though the names are changed to protect the not-so-innocent, Mike Nichols’ Primary Colors is unquestionably a look at the election of William Jefferson Clinton, with John Travolta deftly impersonating the big guy from Little Rock. And Oliver Stone’s W. doesn’t hide behind pseudonyms in charting George W. Bush’s rise to the White House. Films such as these hardly speak well of our current generation of leaders. Where is clean-cut Jimmy Stewart when you need him?

But it’s surprising how many fairly recent Hollywood movies find in the presidency a source of romantic optimism. A prime example, of course, is 1995’s The American President, with Michael Douglas falling for Annette Bening. (She describes their first date to a confidante: “I kissed him.” And then what? “He had to go and attack Libya.”) In the film, Douglas’s character is a widower, so their romantic escapade is basically beyond reproach. The presidency doesn’t look nearly so good in 1993’s Dave, in which a President falls into a coma while in flagrante delicto with someone other than his wife, and must then be impersonated by a wholesome lookalike. Still, it’s the innocent romance between Dave (Kevin Kline) and the First Lady (Sigourney Weaver) that drives the action.

To me the most unforgettable White House-based romantic comedy dates all the way back to 1964. In Kisses for My President, an attractive but no-nonsense Polly Bergen plays the first female chief executive. But the focus is on her hapless husband, Fred MacMurray, who finds his masculine ego shaken when he’s expected to attend a round of ladies’ luncheons and garden club teas. After much comic mishap, the problem is solved: President Leslie Harrison McCloud steps down from her office because (you guessed it) she’s pregnant. Ouch!

Real-life (as opposed to “reel life”) Washington is a trifle different. My hotel, alas, turned out to be steps away from George Washington University’s Ronald Reagan Institute for Emergency Medicine. When ambulance sirens disturbed my sleep, I couldn’t help musing about what sent President Reagan into emergency care: the bullets of John Hinckley Jr., a young man trying to impress movie star Jodie Foster. Reagan, of course, was our first movie-star president, and a deranged movie buff who confused cinematic illusion with reality nearly cost him his life.