Sue Ellen Gamadge
[played by Ann Sothern, far right]: [to William Russell, played by Henry Fonda, center]
“We want to see a lot more of your wife—a great deal more. You know, there are
still people who don't trust the English.”
Dick Jensen
[played by Kevin McCarthy]: “Mrs. Russell was sick during the
primaries.”
Sue Ellen:
“Yes, yes, yes. I know. But she has to be at your side at all times. She must
seem to be advising you. It did Adlai Stevenson great harm not having a wife
and trying to be funny all at the same time, too. Great harm.”— The Best Man (1964), screenplay by Gore Vidal, based
on his play, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner
Gore Vidal’s political satire has lost little if any
of its sting, six decades after he wrote it. The setting—the smoked-fill rooms
at a convention that will determine a party’s candidate—may have lost its
importance, but his Broadway play and adaptation are at heart about power and
its use in smashmouth politics.
And, even though we now—courtesy of Ronald Reagan and
Donald Trump— have Presidents who’ve been divorced, voters are still awfully
curious about candidates’ spouses.
Which brings us to William Russell’s wife Alice in The
Best Man.
The actress who played Alice on Broadway, Leora Dana,
was American, as were the actresses who took on the role in 21st
century revivals: Michael Learned, Candice Bergen and Cybill Shepherd. So perhaps
that line about “the English” above was made to account for the casting of the
admittedly marvelous Margaret Leighton (pictured far left) when the play became a movie.
But, as a student of history, Vidal would probably
have been struck by the irony of a foreign-born First Lady. For the first two
and a quarter centuries after the founding of the republic, there had only been
one such spouse: Louisa Johnson Adams, born in—yes, England.
Then came Melania Trump, Donald Trump’s second
wife from Eastern Europe. (Perhaps he might want to reconsider his position on
imports?)
For the longest time, I thought Louisa Adams underwent
some of the worst experiences of any First Lady as the marital and political
partner of John Quincy Adams, a notably frosty fellow who suffered bouts
of depression.
After being largely ignored in the White House by her
husband, Louisa became something of a recluse and worked on an unpublished
autobiography whose title signals her misery: Adventures of a Nobody.
But I’m afraid that the Slovenian-born Melania
has—well, trumped her. Ms. Trump has been largely AWOL as her husband plotted
his return to the White House (her appearance with him at the Al Smith Dinner
being a curious and rare exception), and her memoir, Melania, has just been
published.
There is one line from The Best Man, flung out
by Leighton, that First Ladies Adams and Trump wish they could have said to their
husbands, I’m sure: “I’ve had twenty years of nonsense, of being a good sport.”
At least Mrs. Adams, however, never had to read about
her husband’s affair with an adult-film actress conducted during her own
pregnancy, sexual misconduct accusations by dozens of other women, and even a
civil court jury finding that he’d sexually abused and defamed one of them.
What does the Slovenian Sphinx think of all this? Publicly,
nothing. Privately, if she’s ever had a chance to watch The Best Man, I
bet she snorts at Ann Sothern’s line about “seeming to advise” the
candidate—but nods vigorously at Leighton’s “twenty years of nonsense.”
