Jefferson & Hemings

I was perhaps in my junior year of high school when the news broke that, after many years of speculation and debate, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States, did father children with one his slaves, Sally Hemings. Jefferson had always been my favorite Founding Father. John F. Kennedy once remarked at a dinner honoring a group of Nobel Prize winners, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent—of human knowledge—that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” I always thought of Jefferson as a true genius—literarily, architecturally—but perhaps not politically in the sense that his presidency was so-so, and it seemed to me he was dragged kicking and screaming into most of the events that led to the founding of this nation. He was, in essence, a quiet man who wanted to be left alone.

Early in life, he lost his wife Martha and he never recovered. Reading Jefferson’s letters (and they are voluminous), you have a sense of how he changed. One of the most interesting of his correspondences is referred to as “My Head and My Heart,” written in dialogue form to the Anglo-Italian artist, Lady Maria Cosway. It is certain he loved her—he even broke his wrist permanently during one of their outings, attempting to impress her by trying to jump a fence. But that relationship was never to be as Cosway was married and Jefferson was staunchly opposed to dalliances with married women.

But, for nearly forty years, he fathered many children with Sally Hemings, his wife’s half-sister (Sally’s mother Betty belonged once to his father-in-law John Wayles). The cognitive dissonance of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence which intoned that all men were created equal owning slaves and bedding one (and, coincidentally never freeing Sally, although he freed their children) is one many students of history can’t reconcile. The fact that most geniuses are flawed in deeper ways than we yokels can understand reveals itself more and more as time goes on. Yet people, in this activist age, have become rather tired of trying to reconcile these facts. Things are, to coin an unfortunate phrase, only black and white. No grey area allowed.

The obvious question becomes was love involved or was it what it was in many plantations of the South (sexual contact without consent). We will, of course, never know as an entire year of Jefferson’s letters was destroyed and, for years, historians denied the reports of James T. Callender, a muckraker who sold the story of Hemings to the papers in an effort to prevent Jefferson’s reelection because Tom would not give him a governmental post. Callender made the news of Sally a national scandal and, only by orchestrating the Louisiana Purchase, did Jefferson leave Washington unscathed.

The only historian for many years to even tell the tale was Dr. Fawn M. Brodie, a psychobiographer whose early work (No Man Knows My History, etc.) was inspiring, but later work (Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character) was perhaps blinded by hate and ill health. Her volume on Jefferson though, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, was finally vindicated by DNA results proving lineage through the descendants of Eston Hemings. Later scholarly inquiries include the work of Annette Gordon-Reed, whose massive The Hemingses of Monticello is a must read for anyone interested in the story. And indeed, I was.

I remember visiting Bennington College before I was accepted and being asked by the playwriting professor if I had any projects I was working on. I said I wanted to write something about Jefferson and Hemings (my idea being vacillating monologues from one character to the other through "letters"). He said, “Yeah, you have that idea and about a hundred other people.” Deflated, I abandoned my sketches.

Yet, certain dramatists and writers have tried to tell Hemmings’ story even though there is not much to tell. It is all left to conjecture. There are those who think it was rape and Stockholm Syndrome and those who believed it was love and those who believed it was somewhere in between. There is so much room for dramatic license that you could write anything, but the potency of the idea propagates more and more as our country sees itself further divided on racial lines and, while interracial relationships are more common now than when I was a child, one need only look at how such connections are mistreated in the media, whether by Spike Lee in Jungle Fever (though that mess of a film has its moments) or something more measured, like Jeff Nichols’ Loving (2016).

The first writer to try to tell the story from Sally’s point of view was novelist/poet/sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud, whose 1979 novel Sally Hemings was a bestseller, so much so that CBS was interested into adapting it as a telefilm until staunch Hemings-deniers shut the project down. A historically minded playwright, Granville Burgess, who achieved some regional success, offered the story as a play onstage for the first time (and Dusky Sally was even published for licensing—I own one of the few copies in circulation), but a landmark court case deemed the play to be a plagiarism of Chase-Riboud’s novel and it was withdrawn.

The next time Sally was onscreen was for the Merchant-Ivory film Jefferson in Paris. The work of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was praised for many years for elegant, prestige pictures like A Room with a View, Howards End, and The Remains of the Day. Though never money-making crowd-pleasers, they were well-respected and critically beloved. Their efforts on Jefferson in Paris (1995) were almost uniformly ignored—mainly because the film itself never makes up its mind as to what it wants to be. Cosway is there in the first half, played by Greta Scacchi, and Hemings is there in the second, played by Thandiwe Newton. An inspired (no, really!) casting choice was Nick Nolte as the lonely widower. But it was clearly Merchant-Ivory at their least strong—the film equivalent of lukewarm tap water.

It would take many years, but the heroic efforts of dramatist Tina Andrews to bring Sally’s story to the screen finally were realized in the early 2000s. Andrews had been the actress who played Valerie Grant on Days of Our Lives when it became the first soap opera to show an interracial kiss on national television. Shortly after angry, racist fan reactions, she was fired and scrimped by for many years until some took note of her plays and she had some success with her screenplay for Why Do Fools Fall in Love?, a biopic of Frankie Lymon.

Andrews necessarily believed the story of Sally should be told from an African American woman’s point of view and her view was that it was a love story—a deeply ironic and painful one, but definitely love. After all, 38 years? Due to life expectancy, that’s longer than most marriages lasted in that period. Andrews first wrote a theatrical version, The Mistress of Monticello, which was produced in the mid-80s in Chicago. This caught the attention of talent agents who shepherded her through early drafts of a screenplay version, which was never made. Many people, like her mentor Alex Haley (author of Roots), encouraged her to proceed. Her research, detailed in a book about the making of Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, was exhaustive—she visited Monticello many times and interviewed the black descendants of Jefferson.

It wasn’t until the DNA proved the relationship conconclusively that her screenplay became a four-hour miniseries starring Sam Neill and Carmen Ejogo, which premiered on CBS in 2000. I can remember my attempt to catch it on television because, by that point, I was obsessed. But bad weather in Birmingham, Alabama prevented it from being seen as the first night was wall-to-wall tornado coverage. Alas, it would be a few years until I found a VHS copy of it at a Blockbuster and finally saw it.

When comparing it with her final revised draft (printed in her book subtitled The Struggle to Tell the Controversial True Story), it is most certainly a compromised effort. The director, Charles Haid, apparently rewrote some of the scenes and, in the editing, rearranged many of the scenes for more ease of flow, sometimes with good results and sometimes not. Some elements, just being a TV miniseries from over twenty years ago, are “cringeworthy” as the kids say. Mario Van Peebles’ suicide scene (and, in fact, his entire trajectory as the freed brother of Sally) was mishandled to say the least. But Neill has great screen presence as Jefferson and Ejogo was probably seen for the first time to many American audiences (the British actress has gone on to a laudable career).

Still, when the series was screened for a crowd of 800 descendants of the Monticello manse (black and white), tears were flowing. Many of them lived their entire lifetimes being derided for knowing the truth and they felt like they saw a respectable portrayal of their family’s story for the first time. Andrews’ memoir of the production is more engaging than her teleplay in many respects (though terribly copy-edited by the folks at The Malibu Press). The story behind the story was a little stronger, but the miniseries did lead Andrews to win the 2001 Writers Guild of America Award for Original Long Form dramatic writing (as well as an NAACP Image Award)—quite a feat for the actress who shouldn’t have been fired from a TV show over twenty years before.

There have also been at least three operas of the story, two musicals, and a more recent play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks, Sally and Tom, which is a play-within-a-play about the writing of a play of the story (Say that three times fast). But none come close to at least asking the hard questions than Andrews’ miniseries. While she flatly denied the relationship was not coercive, she depicts many other such instances in the film and makes room for a complicated story of a complicated family, told in a no-holds-barred kind of way. Bravo for that.

As for Mr. Jefferson, my feelings on him have not changed. I accept him as a complicated man I’ll never understand. I feel for Sally and her descendants and for the scourge of slavery upon our nation. And yet, I’d like to think if Jefferson had put his money where his mouth was, he might not have had to live a secret life. But we all know, given how such stories play out even today, that would have never been possible.

O. J. and the Nature of Tragedy

In 1994, the family had rented a vacation home in Kissimmee St. Cloud, Florida so we could easily access Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, and SeaWorld (back when that park didn’t seem like such a terrible destination). It was my second or third trip to Disney. Whatever one thinks of the company as it is now, the park has retained its charm. To a child, it really is the most magical place on Earth except for, I guess, the limits of a child’s imagination. We were taking a break from the parks, swimming in the pool, and listening to the radio when the news came out that Orenthal James Simpson—"The Juice”—was a fugitive of justice, on the run from an inevitable arrest. Off to the television we went to watch the slow speed “chase” that captured the world’s attention and the magic of theme parks turned to thoughts of murder.

I was very young and suppose I only knew O. J. from The Naked Gun movies, the first of which I thought was top-notch and didn’t need the so-so sequels that followed. But suddenly the initials O. J. were on the lips of every American for good or ill—young or old, black or white, man or woman. The chase preceded my first year at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and the trial was in full swing by the time I was a seventh grader. One lunch period that year, I was discussing the case with an older African American student (the place was so small, there was little that divided us, so a seventh grader talking to a freshman was not uncommon).

She asked if I thought O. J. was guilty. I had spent the entire summer watching gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial (I suppose a weird thing for a young boy to do, but I wasn’t exactly normal). To me, my answer seemed so self-evident. We were all so saturated with the media’s reportage, I repeated words I had heard on television: “I think he (long pause) brutally murdered both Ron and Nicole.” My “brutally” was as harsh as any of the prosecutors (and if you’ve ever seen the crime scene photos, the word is perhaps not enough to do the crime justice). But the student I gave this answer to was cautious in conversing with me from that time forward. Even in my small world (albeit in Birmingham, a town with a notorious past when it comes to race relations), the gap between races was widening. We were in a small war over a former football player turned broadcaster turned actor and the two people he killed.

It seems perverse to talk about a murder trial as being “must-see-TV” but, the entire summer before I started drama school, it was all one could think about. It did seem, as Larry King pointed out, like a show more so than a legal proceeding. All the lawyers and most of the witnesses became household names, the way you’d know any celebrity. (Even today, Marcia Clark, now a crime novelist and sometime journalist, is one of my favorite public figures—she has a bullshit detector like no one else). Young women pined for Kato Kaelin, the “Dancing Itos” were doing their Rockettes number on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Norm Macdonald was ruining his career by landing joke upon joke about O. J. (I still regularly watch the YouTube clips of his infamous and damned funny jokes about the trial). And, of course, we first heard a name that we had no idea would become so ubiquitous today: Kardashian.

The racial divide the trial and acquittal exposed was indeed strong. When O. J. was found not guilty, like most white people, I was shocked while black people cheered. Even as a preteenager, I could see the evidence was so voluminous and the defense “Dream Team” so smug and self-righteous that “not guilty” couldn’t have possibly been the outcome. I suppose it was not until Ezra Edelman’s masterful 2016 documentary O. J.: Made in America that I truly understood why it all unraveled the way it did.

I am not much a fan of sport (save a live baseball or hockey game every now and then) but, for some reason, I always like sports documentaries. I have no “teams,” I suffer through football season with its requisite nonstop chatter, but I remember crying watching Ken Burns’ Baseball. Go figure. ESPN commissioned an excellent series of sports docs called 30 for 30. Many of the episodes were enthralling, especially the one by Alex Gibney, the only real successor to Errol Morris, though perhaps that’s an unfair comparison given Morris’ canonical strangeness. But the coup de grace was Edelman’s movie—a nearly eight-hour film you wished were eight hours longer. Deserving of its Oscar, I maintain it’s one of the finest films (not just documentaries) I’ve ever seen.

Beginning with O. J.’s rise to prominence as a Heisman Trophy-winner at the University of Southern California whilst also presenting an eagle-eye view of race relations in Los Angeles (with Rodney King’s beating being the catalyst for so much unrest), Edelman weaves the whole thing together so beautifully that it will be, for many years, the final word on the matter though, like all great art, it raises more questions than it answers.

In the film, we essentially have O. J.’s former manager telling us he confessed to the murders privately, we have jurors who fess up to the fact the verdict was not so much about O. J., but as retaliation against the acquittal of the policemen who nearly beat King to death. These items in themselves are maddening because, so many years later, there are still many of us whose hearts go out to the victims of the crime. When O. J. passed away (from a very painful form of cancer—karma?), most people on social media posted pics of Ron and Nicole. That’s the appropriate response.

Still, with his death, I realize how large a figure he loomed in all our lives, at least those of us born in the 1980s. The racial ramifications are still with us and conditions in that arena are perhaps worse than they’ve ever been. Yet, there are those who prefer to remember his athleticism. I rewatched Made in America this last weekend and, I must confess, watching him play football in historic footage was akin to watching a prima ballerina perfecting a Tour Jetée. He was remarkable player, but also a remarkably flawed human being. He lived a phony life. His charming smile belied the reality that he was a typical wife beater whose rage and jealousy, almost Othello-like, finally overcame him and brought about his downfall. The story of Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown is indeed a tragedy. O. J.’s story, however, is a tragedy on the scale of Ancient Greek tragedy—perhaps the most precipitous fall for any major contemporary figure that we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

Now he’s gone, but our situation hasn’t improved. If anything, that verdict divided whites and blacks in an irrevocable sense. All the activists working on his behalf at the time—often as smug as the folks sitting at the defense table—made sure that race was the defining factor, the truth, the DNA, the obviousness, be damned. If he had been found guilty, perhaps L. A. would have turned Bedlam again, just like the riots of the ‘60s and ‘90s.

Racism in America is not a situation we will ever really live down, I fear. The stains of slavery will never be truly washed away. O. J.’s case simply put all the cards on the table (the race card, an unfortunate term, especially) and we watched with rabid interest. Then, because of Court TV and the like, we entered a new world where so-called “trials of the century” pop up every ten years or so. None of them, however, reach the level of societal significance that that trial did—its implications weigh on us every single day. That was the true “Trial of the Century” (at least in the U. S.)—maybe even a pivotal part of our national history, sadly to say.

Maybe that’s the greatest tragedy of all.

Christopher Durang (1949-2024)

Christopher Durang

Christopher Durang was a playwright and actor from Montclair, New Jersey. He wrote the plays Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (Tony Award), Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, Adrift in Macao, Miss Witherspoon (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Mrs. Bob Crachit’s Wild Christmas Binge, Betty’s Summer Vacation (Obie Award), Sex and Longing, Laughing Wild, The Marriage of Bette and Boo (Obie Award), Baby with the Bathwater, Beyond Therapy (adapted into a film co-written by Durang), Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (Obie Award, adapted into a telefilm by Durang), The Vietnamization of New Jersey, and The Idiots Karamazov (with Albert Innaurato). His short plays include Wanda’s Visit, A Stye of the Eye, For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, The Actor’s Nightmare, Titanic, Death Comes to Us All, Mary Agnes, ‘dentity Crisis, and The Nature and Purpose of the Universe. In addition, he wrote the book and lyrics for the musical A History of the American Film. For television, he wrote for the series My America, Trying Times, and Comedy Zone in addition to co-writing the telefilm Off-Hollywood. As an actor, he appeared in the films The Out-of-Towners (re-make), Simply Irresistible, The Cowboy Way, Life with Mikey, HouseSitter, The Butcher’s Wife, and The Secret of My Success as well as episodes of Frasier and Tales from the Crypt. He graduated from the Yale School of Drama and Harvard University. He died in Pipersville, Pennsylvania.

An inspiring book.

I had written three plays by 1998 and had caught the bug, as it were. Back then, I averaged only a couple of hours of sleep at night. One can do that at that age, I suppose. I was up on one of these long nights and picked up a book on my nightstand that I had borrowed from the Alabama School of Fine Arts’ (ASFA) play library—it’s the same copy I have now as most of my teacher’s collection was bequeathed to me. The book was Christopher Durang: 27 Short Plays. I said, “My. 27. Better write another one if I’m to keep up” and, later that night, my first play edging toward maturity, A Plumber’s Story, was composed. I realize this is not a story about Durang’s work inspiring me, but more about his voluminous bibliography, but it was the first thing I thought of when I heard the news that Durang had passed away due to aphasia, with which he had been living for some time. It should be noted that many of the plays in the above-mentioned collection have given me years of laughter. I suppose the first thing folks of when they see a Durang play is how funny they are. But, beneath that exterior was a weeping heart for the folly of humankind and an anger toward the follies of the world. As far as the theatre is concerned, he was our great satirist—mostly of beloved institutions, but also of society itself.

Durang was a student at Harvard University during the age of the Vietnam protests. The University decided to address these on-campus protests with a pamphlet which was slipped under every dormitory door. The pamphlet was entitled, “The Nature and Purpose of the University.” Glancing at it, Durang thought he read “The Nature and Purpose of the Universe.” The idea that Harvard would put their official stance on such an existentialist idea amused him and a play emerged with that same title. As usual, it was very, very funny.

Yes, that's Durang with Julie Andrews in PUTTING IT TOGETHER.

Later, he attended the Yale School of Drama with his friend Sigourney Weaver and where he was mentored by the late director/critic Robert Brustein. Durang often turned in assignments that ignored all rubric, which delighted Brustein. At Yale, Durang formed a cabaret act with Weaver called Das Lusitania Songspiel and Durang would even accompany Weaver when she hosted Saturday Night Live (and appeared as himself in a Church Chat sketch (Well, isn’t that special?). While he wasn’t particularly known as a performer, he did so sporadically through his life. Perhaps the biggest accomplishment in that arena was playing the Commentator in the Stephen Sondheim revue Putting it Together. A cast recording of the original production featuring his performance is available.

As for his plays, he had a rocky start in New York where theatre sizes often dwarfed his rather modest staging needs. A very funny long one-act called Titanic, which featured Weaver as a little girl stuffing lettuce up her dress amidst the biting jabs of a bickering husband and wife aboard the ill-fated ship, did well in its first small house, but as it moved Off-Broadway, it had much the same critical problems of the 1997 musical Titanic. A critic need only describe the show itself as a sinking ship (how original) and the run was cut short.

Yours truly, at left, in 'DENTITY CRISIS.

Another early play he wrote in school, ‘dentity Crisis, in which I played Robert in a production at ASFA is a perfect encapsulation of what Durang does best. In it, a clearly sane young woman has been institutionalized for being crazy while it is, in fact, her family that is in desperate need of medical attention. In the play, the character of Robert (in which I was cast) must continually change in and out of several characters (onstage, often within the same line) from being the young woman’s father, grandfather, brother, and mother’s lover. The part was daunting but, of the comic roles I played, it is the one of which I was most proud. I would call the play both side-splittingly funny and terrifying. That is the world Durang depicts: both equally tragic and comic. Sadly, comic playwrights always get short shrift in America as if what they do is somehow lower than naturalistic drama. Hence, it was rather late in life that Durang finally won the Tony for the Chekov-inspired Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, perhaps one of the few plays written since the 2010s that is both crowd-pleasing and masterfully written. This more than made up for his first foray on Broadway: a crash-and-burn turn as the librettist and lyricist for A History of the American Film, with a score by Mel Marvin. Much admired in regional productions, somehow the show didn’t land in New York, though productions appear every now and again in the heartland.

The original Sis. Mary Ignatius.

As it was, Durang’s breakthrough came with a scathing attack on his religious upbringing. The abrasive, even shocking Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (which was adapted into a television film with Diane Keaton years later) premiered in 1979, with the lovable The Actor’s Nightmare as a curtain-raiser. The play is a reunion of Sis. Mary Ignatius’ Sunday School class as adults and shows the result of an all-too common phenomenon among lapsed Catholics. Those raised in the pre-Vatican II era had orthodoxy shoved down their throats and largely rejected religion as adults. Disappointed in her students, Sis. Mary ends up murdering them to save their souls.

BEYOND THERAPY onstage (with a young Niles at left).

The 1980s were perhaps Mr. Durang’s most fertile years beginning with Beyond Therapy. While that play—a simple conceit (the doctors are crazier than the patients, with a love story front and center)—also failed in its New York premiere, but it has gone on to become a staple of regional theatres with its small cast size, short zippy scenes, and virtually no major staging requirements. In reviewing Robert Altman’s film adaptation of the play, Leonard Maltin called it “paper-thin” and perhaps there is an argument for that, but the dialogue always seems to sparkle if the overall play doesn’t have much deep to say regarding neuroticism.

BEYOND THERAPY on film, with the Fly.

That 1987 film adaptation soured Durang on working in Hollywood. While credited as a co-screenwriter, he must have been unaware that Altman used screenplays as jumping off points and often left writers feeling like second or third bananas. From my point of view, Altman’s film basically tells Durang’s play straight, but these scenes are juxtaposed with awkwardly inserted shots of nosy extras and other oddments that distract from the simple story. Altman himself, at that time, was at a low point, adapting plays for television and film and Beyond Therapy is often considered one of his worst films overall. Those people must not have seen the same year’s O. C. and Stiggs (shot in ’84 but released in ’87).

However, the 80s also saw three highly respected plays from Durang—Baby with the Bathwater, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and Laughing Wild. Largely, Durang’s reputation rests upon these plays. They are what great comic theatre should be. One moment, your jaws on the ground and the other you can barely stay in your seat. Durang made you uncomfortable, of course, but he saw the comedy in the bleakest of life’s intricacies. Perhaps there is a comfort in knowing the abyss but also laughing at it.

FOR WHOM THE SOUTHERN BELLE TOLLS.

The ‘90s were a mixed bag for many playwrights who dominated the ‘80s. Durang’s apparently too on-the-nose Media Amok was ridiculed at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston (no version of the play has ever been published), but his evening of one-acts Durang Durang (get it?) included razor sharp parodies of the plays of Tennessee Williams (For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, maybe the greatest parody in the history of the theatre) and Sam Shepard (A Stye of the Eye). Finally, in the 2000s, his Miss Witherspoon became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, his closest shot at being recognized for the mastery with which he wove comedy and tragedy. Durang spent the rest of his working life training playwrights at Julliard with Pulitzer Prize-winner Marsha Norman. I’m sure his students benefited from his askance view of the world and skill in navigating minefield-like subjects in his plays.

Perhaps my favorite Durang piece is a comic sketch he wrote for a Carol Burnett special. The Funeral Parlor, a vehicle for Burnett and Robin Williams, was aired twice in the special—both the version as written and a version in which Williams did his typical rapid-fire ad-libbing to try to break up everyone in the room. You can guess which version I preferred (It’s in 27 Plays—check it out).

As a friend pointed out, the world is less funny without Durang. But it also has lost a true satirist—someone who held up the mirror to our iniquities and scalded us with small doses of boiling hot water when we needed it. May he rest in peace, free from the bonds of the world that puzzled and pained him and may he bring laughter to the afterlife.