The Unexpected Mrs. Nixon, Superstar

Hollywood has always had a soft spot for movies about presidents. Both satiric comedies and heartfelt dramas have featured an American president in a leading role. There’s even a musical—an adaptation of the stage hit 1776—that features the song stylings of future U.S. presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

 Of all the American. presidents, it is Abraham Lincoln who has earned the most screen time. He’s been portrayed by Walter Huston in 1930; by Henry Fonda (as Young Mr. Lincoln) in 1939; by Raymond Massey in 1940’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois; and by an Oscar-winning Daniel Day-Lewis in 2012’s Steven Spielberg Civil War-era epic, simply called Lincoln. This is not to mention a more eccentric 2012 flick, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

 Among 20^th century American presidents, the inspirational story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt contending with polio gave rise to 1960’s Sunrise at Campobello. Oliver Stone’s  JFK (1991) is less about John F. Kennedy than about the nagging questions behind his assassination. The up-and-down career of Bill Clinton was pseudonymously handled in 1998’s Primary Colors, in which John Travolta portrays a Clinton-like presidential rogue.

 Then there’s Richard Nixon, whose checkered presidency has been scrutinized in everything from a biographical drama (1995’s Nixon, starring Anthony Hopkins) to an intimate fact-based post-resignation film (2008’s Frost/Nixon) to a wacky comedy, 1999’s Dick. In all of these settings, there’s a role for First Lady Pat Nixon, but she’s always a peripheral character.

 That remains true of most First Ladies. Moviemakers are not terribly interested in their stories, except as they intersect with their husbands’ moments of high drama. (The one big exception is Jacqueline Kennedy, whose post-White House life as the tragic young widow of JFK confirmed her movie star potential. Natalie Portman portrayed her in 2016’s Jackie, earning herself an Oscar nomination.)

 I don’t think anyone is about to make a movie with Patricia Ryan Nixon at its center. In her lifetime (1912-1993), Pat was known as the spouse of Dick Nixon, as an apparently prim and proper helpmeet good at smiling and waving. But my friend and colleague, Heath Hardage Lee, has recently published a biography that turns the spotlight on someone who preferred to remain in the background. Lee’s book, The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady, was recently named to the longlist for Biographers International Organization’s prestigious 2025 Plutarch Award. This well-researched biography explores Pat Nixon’s many appealing qualities—her personal grit, her great skill as a goodwill ambassador roaming the world on the nation’s behalf, her strong commitment to preserving her country’s history and institutions. There’s also, eventually, some revelations about the way her husband’s shadier aides tried—in the second Nixon term—to curb her enthusiasm for the First Lady’s traditional mandate to further her spouse’s White House goals. To read about Pat’s efforts to enhance the role of women in American government and on its courts is to be impressed by a First Lady who was in some ways well ahead of her time.

 Heath Lee’s book, which contains the fruits of interviews with many Nixon aides, friends, and family members, portrays its subject as a woman well worth knowing, even by those who were not fans of her husband’s politics. One of many surprises: Pat and Dick had a cordial and long-lasting relationship with Jack and Jackie Kennedy, both before and after the brutal 1960 presidential race that set them against one another. What I learned in reading The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon is that it’s fascinating to read about the woman who willingly stood behind the famous man.

 

 

(Jack) Ruby on Tuesday

My colleague Danny Fingeroth has had a full career that includes a long stint as  editor of the Spider-Man comics line for Marvel Comics. He’s also a writer, having produced several volumes on Stan Lee and his Marvel-ous Universe. But Danny’s most recent publication leaves the comic book world behind, as he takes on a long-time fascination with Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald on national television, thereby upending the American justice system and prompting decades of conspiracy theories to flourish. 

 Danny seems to know everything there is to know about Ruby, his family, and his sad little life. You can’t fault him for a lack of details, about (for instance) Ruby’s pathetic forays into show biz as the owner of a Dallas nightspot. (Danny calls him, with a nod to Arthur Miller, “the Willy Loman of strip-club operators.”)  Frankly, all those tidbits about unruly dogs and patrons thrown down staircases can get a bit much. The very strongest parts of his book are its preface and its conclusion. The preface comments sagely regarding the impact of the JFK assassination and its aftermath on the era’s young children, like Danny himself. For little boys like him, what was happening on the living-room TV on that Dallas weekend was not so different from what they were used to seeing on the era's popular crime shows, like The Untouchables.

 Danny speaks of television, but I was personally struck by the role played by motion pictures in Ruby’s story. Certainly, he himself was starstruck, and even had showbiz aspirations via a nightclub act he promoted, featuring Little Daddy, a song-and-dance kid. Regarding Ruby’s tangled motives to go after Oswald, who was then in police custody, Danny wonders, “Was he starring in some movie in his head that only he could see?”

  Then too, movies continue to be part of the public’s memories of what happened on a Dallas weekend in November 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy’s assassin (or was he?) was arrested by Dallas police while seated in the Texas Theatre, watching a flick called War is Hell. Then there’s the infamous Zapruder home-movie footage of the assassination, which has long been studied for the possibility that it explodes the lone-gunman conclusion of the Warren Commission. And of course we can’t forget all the commercial movies inspired by aspects of the Kennedy assassination, particularly Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-focused JFK (1991). Ruby is portrayed in that film, and Danny’s book ends with a listing of other places that Ruby and his associates have ended up in American pop culture (including a Stephen King bestseller). I had no idea that Danny Aiello starred in a 1992 film, simply called Ruby, which totally falsifies history by turning Oswald’s bungling killer into a slick criminal mastermind. As recently as the summer of 2020, the second season of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy found itself set in Dallas, circa November 1963, with Ruby (and his beloved dachshunds) prominently—and accurately—pictured.

Even Ruby’s Dallas rabbi, Hillel Silverman, got the showbiz treatment. Silverman, who spent many hours counseling Ruby in his jail cell before decamping for Los Angeles, played himself in a 1978 made-for-TV movie, Ruby and Oswald, directed by Stan Lee’s cousin, veteran filmmaker Mel Stuart.  (Danny thinks the world should know that Rabbi Silverman—having gone Hollywood all the way—produced an actor-son, Jonathan, who starred in Weekend at Bernie's.)

 And what is Danny’s conclusion about the importance of this odd and troubled man? “He certainly impacted history, helped change the way we view the very notions of justice and even our concept of agreed-upon truth. Whether he was a lone nut or part of a conspiracy, the repercussions of his actions will be with us forever.” 

                                                    Danny Fingeroth and his book

The Next Whiskey Bar: Jim Morrison and “The Doors”

Back in 2008 I had a long, deep conversation with one of my personal music heroes, Ray Manzarek. Yes, Ray was the keyboard master who did amazing things on an orgasmic 1967 rock hit, “Light My Fire.”  A natural leader, Ray in 1965 (then fresh out of UCLA’s film school) encouraged a shy young poet named Jim Morrison to become the lead singer of a new L.A. band called The Doors. It wasn’t long before the four Doors (having, in Manzarek’s words to me, used psychedelics to “open the gates of perception”) found world-wide fame. But Morrison’s excesses became notorious, up until his untimely death in Paris in 1971, at the age of 27.

 Like everyone else, Manzarek was stunned by Morrison’s mysterious demise. Of course he knew that Jim was—thanks to a steady diet of drugs and booze—rapidly going downhill. But he figured that Paris would provide the needed antidote, that this was Jim’s chance to recalibrate himself. As Ray told me, he foresaw Morrison turning into “an American in Paris, a poet, an American poet.  He was gonna be the next in line:  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Jim Morrison—that’s what I saw happening. He was gonna go to Paris and rejuvenate himself, and start to write again, not be a rock star but go back to being the poet that he was when we put the band together back in 1965.”

 Of course that’s not what happened, and Morrison’s heart attack in a Paris apartment bathtub became an essential part of the legend. It provided a dramatic conclusion for the biographical film released by writer-director Oliver Stone in 1991, with Val Kilmer playing the Morrison role. The Doors turned out to be only a middling success, with most of the praise going to Kilmer’s all-in performance. Watching it for the first time recently, I found myself frankly bored by the endless scenes of Jim’s bad behavior. In a new book, Roadhouse Blues (subtitled Morrison, The Doors, and the Death Days of the Sixties) pop-culture scholar Bob Batchelor weighs in on the film’s omissions, partly by citing the words of Jim’s former bandmates. He quotes at length guitarist Robby Krieger, who gripes that in Stone’s film Morrison comes off as “a pretentious, obnoxious, stupid drunk who was a dick to everyone around him.” While admitting that Jim could be difficult at times, Krieger points out that “he was funny, and shy, and when he was out of line he knew it, and he was sorry.” Krieger’s biggest regret is that, while “Oliver Stone’s movie is laughable as a historical artifact, . . . parts of it have seeped into the official record.”

 After chronicling the lives of Morrison and his fellow Doors, my colleague Batchelor moves on to appraising the group’s long-term impact. In a smart Afterword called “Jim Morrison in the Twenty-First Century,” he probes the mythic place occupied by Morrison in contemporary culture, quoting Jim’s own self-assessment as a shooting star, a celestial body bound to quickly disappear from view but never be forgotten. This section is followed by some highly personal musings titled “My Doors Memoir,” in which Batchelor explores the impact of Morrison and his fellow Doors on his own youthful life, circa 1986. It is in these pages that he discloses how important the band has been in terms of his own development: “I want to understand Morrison and the Doors because I want to decipher my own life, as well as America writ large across the ages.” Many a Doors fan will surely share this goal.