Big Fat Story
Frost says he was wrongly portrayed as an underdog.
When David Frost went to see himself portrayed by Michael Sheen in the London stage version of Frost/Nixon, the audience, aware of his presence, were unnaturally quiet. “Whether they were nervous because they were thinking I might leap up and object or cheer or yell, or whatever,” Frost tells Sir Harold Evans in an exclusive interview in which Frost speaks about the movie for the first time. While judging the finished movie “terrifically strong,” Frost admits that “there are one or two fictional bits that I wasn’t mad about.” He thinks Peter Morgan got his character deliberately wrong to make a better story. “Peter wanted to build up me as the underdog, as it were, before the climax at the end.” Frost says Morgan took liberties with the chronology to make the climax more dramatic. The key moment, when Nixon confronts the Watergate criminality, was not the climax of the interviews, as the film portrays. “One of the key lines in the film … ‘If the president does it, it’s not illegal,’ that came from one of the earlier tapes.”
Photo: Joel Ryan/AP
Tapes of Nixon reveal the bitterness of America’s most paranoid president.
However brilliantly Frank Langella portrays Nixon on screen, nothing can beat eavesdropping on America’s most paranoid president. Although elected by the largest margin in history—he took 49 states to McGovern’s one and attracted 49 million votes to McGovern’s 29 million—the latest tapes reveal a crippling obsession with mythical enemies. “Never forget,” rasped the 37th president to his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger. “The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The Establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times.” As Nixon’s investigative assassin Carl Bernstein point out, “There’s nothing on these tapes in which the president of the United States talks about what’s good for the country,” he told Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “It’s always about his enemies and what’s good for Nixon.”
Listen to Nixon’s Watergate Tapes
Photo: AP
No complaints from a journalist who works in show business.
ABC'S Diane Sawyer was Nixon’s researcher at the time. Though she didn’t witness the interviews, the movie gives her a walk-on role anyway. “Are you shocked?” she asked Lynn Sherr in mock horror. “That entertainment people don’t always remain faithful to the facts?” As a journalist-cum-interviewer, she thinks it unfair to judge the movie, which she hasn’t seen, too harshly if it gets some things wrong. “They should ban people like us from going to see these things. You sit there and go, ‘Didn’t happen. Didn’t happen. Not that way. Not like that. It was this way.’” She is protective, however, about the portrayal of Nixon’s ex-Marine aide, Jack Brennan, played by Kevin Bacon. “Jack Brennan is portrayed as a stern military guy,” Sawyer said. “And he’s the funniest guy you ever met in your life, an irreverent, wonderful guy. So there you go. It’s the movies.”
Photo: Jennifer Graylock/AP
Frost/Nixon: The true likeness
Frost/Nixon brings America's least-loved president back to life--but how well did Frank Langella capture Nixon's tormented character? And how closely does the movie catch the true likeness of those involved and what went on?
Frost’s sometime girlfriend forgives the embellishments.
Caroline Graham was Frost’s girlfriend at the time of the interviews. She was consulted by the filmmakers and found she could revise her own history. “I met with the costume designer and he had spent a lot of time making sure my character had nice clothes,” she recalls. “I’m not the least bit fussed about the clothes I wear in the movie, or the handbags I carry. I never would have worn a strapless dress to meet Nixon, that’s for sure.” She is grateful to have been portrayed by Rebecca Hall, “a very good Shakespearean actress.” “I only wish I’d been as beautiful as she is,” Graham said. While the portrayal of Frost was off-key—“All the stuff about David’s girls is perhaps a bit of a stretch.”—she has no complaints. “Sure, Peter [Morgan] embellished upon it, but it was a drama anyway. … I don’t have any issues at all.”
Photo: R. McPhedran/Getty
How a satirist became a political interviewer.
Clive Irving, Frost’s former producer, helped transform David Frost from a lightweight late-night comedian into a heavyweight interviewer of the rich and powerful. “That’s why seeing the Ron Howard movie was so gripping for me,” he writes in the Daily Beast. “I was in at the creation.” “I felt that the instinctive rapier wit David had deployed as a satirist might—just might—be the right underpinning for journalism, if we could persuade him to go serious and mix wit and gravitas,” he explains. The result was a long series of often-caustic encounters between Frost and major public and political figures. “An essential dramatic conceit of Frost/Nixon is that David Frost was a TV lightweight who, with Nixon, was getting in over his head,” says Irving. But by the time of the Nixon interviews, Frost was already well-equipped to tackle “his true apotheosis” with “such deadly effect.”
Photo: AP
Michael Korda, Nixon’s book editor, marvels at Langella’s lifelike Nixon.
Michael Korda says he finds the movie unnervingly brings Nixon back to life. “Anybody who knew Richard M. Nixon well … will have the creepy feeling that he is back, alive and well,” he writes. The David Frost character, too, is “played with stunningly appropriate unctuousness” by Michael Sheen. “He captures the scowl, the dark, intense stare, the bullying manner designed to hide a deep insecurity, the undisguised envy of those who are able to enjoy the good things of life.” But the core of the movie, suggesting a wily Frost coaxed a reluctant, belated confession out of Nixon, is far from the truth. “Frost was no match for Nixon. Far from being an intrepid and challenging interviewer, he was a pushover.” But while “Michael Sheen… makes Frost more of a wide-eyed innocent than he really was,” the movie “captures [Nixon’s] … brilliant, well-planned and ultimately successful attempt, of which the Frost interviews were the first, canny step, to rebuild his image.”
Photo: Ralph Nelson
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