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The Dating Game: An Overview
Listen to "Sally's White Image" (8 minutes):
"Think of the millions of people," exclaimed Jefferson defender Dumas Malone in 1979 as he contemplated with horror a film or television series based on Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings: A Novel. Then fast-forward to 1995 and imagine the revered scholar writhing in his grave (he died in 1986) at the scene in Jefferson in Paris with the camera eye poised just off Jefferson's right shoulder as he hovers over the prone Sally, whose nearly bare bosom pulses prominently with emergent passion in the moment before consummation. Yes, that kind of consummation. Imagine Jefferson's husky whisper off camera a little to our left asking, "Are you still scared of me, Sally?" To which this "markedly immature, semi-educated, teen-age virgin," as Douglass Adair memorably described her in episode 6, readily but shyly replies, looking almost straight at the millions of us voyeurs, "I ain't scared of you, Massa." Imagine all of that and you can understand why this film is the next hammer blow to the official narrative that Jefferson was as immaculate a man as God ever created and that a Jefferson-Hemings liaison was a moral impossibility. In this film, we see them in bed if not literally in flagrante delicto. As Patsy Jefferson utters, in something between a snarl and a whimper, "It's unspeakable."
Jefferson was American minister to Paris from 1784-1789, the period leading up to the French Revolution. In this film our American in Paris defends democracy, snarls at the effete Old World aristocracy, comments on the nearing upheaval, but -- most importantly -- falls in love. One reviewer aptly remarked, for instance, that the film might better be titled Jefferson in Love. Upper-class France and the revolution provide a sense of spectacle for the film, but they are clearly of secondary importance for us to a focus on Jefferson's love life. In the first part of the film Jefferson's attention is riveted on the elegant and married Maria Cosway -- the "delectable Cosway," as Adair calls her -- a woman who sweeps his heart away from his head so far that he breaks a vow of celibacy to his dead wife, makes a vow to take Maria to Monticello, and injures his forty-something self jumping over a woodpile in a gesture of amatory exuberance.
This film, in fact, introduces Maria Cosway to our miniseries for the first time. Cosway was a beautiful, intellectual, cosmopolitan, sophisticated artist, composer, and socialite. She was married to the celebrated yet eccentric miniature portrait painter Richard Cosway in what is thought to be a marriage of convenience. In real life Jefferson spent a sensuous several weeks in Paris with Cosway, and on their separation he writes the much remarked "Dialogue between My Head and My Heart" to her, and their correspondence continued sporadically for years. The film, therefore, follows the lead of Fawn Brodie (an acknowledged source for the film along with Olivier Bernier) in depicting the re-awakening of the "heart" side of Jefferson six years after the devastating death of his beloved wife. Whether his love for Cosway enjoyed physical consummation is not clear, but there seems no doubt that Jefferson was deeply in love.
Enter Sally Hemings. Precisely halfway through the film, Jefferson's fifteen-year-old beauty of a slave from Virginia makes her first appearance in visual history. This is truly a milestone in the controversy. Heretofore we had only such minimalist word-portraits of her as James Thomson Callender's wooly-headed concubine, Isaac Jefferson's very handsome Sally with the long straight hair down her back, and Thomas Jefferson Randolph's light-colored and decidedly good-looking Sally. But now, for the first time, as "reel" life is wont to do, we have a "real" image of Sally embodied in actress Thandie Newton. And Newton's earthy Sally gradually eclipses the angelic Maria.
The tale turns nasty, however, when Sally becomes pregnant and, with her feisty brother James as advocate, the Hemings siblings declare they will remain free in France rather than return to Monticello as slaves. But, in a tense conclusion, Jefferson cuts a self-aggrandizing deal (shades of the initially ruthless Jefferson we saw in episode 10's Arc d'X) in which James and Sally will return to America in return for freeing James there and freeing Sally's children there at age twenty-one. The ending is haunting, one to send Barbara Chase-Riboud writhing to her grave. Whimpering and cowering, completely without agency, a physically shriveled Sally silently endures adjudication of her fate by an ice-cold lover, his contemptuous daughter, and her courageous but overmatched brother. The film literally fades to black on the face of a sniffling, sobbing, sober-minded Sally again looking almost directly at the millions of us.
Why would, as Adair put it, Jefferson choose the "markedly immature, semi-educated, teen-age virgin" over the "delectable Cosway"? Why would Jefferson do the unspeakable? That certainly would be an intriguing question for a film that on purpose self-consciously pits the two women head-to-head to answer. But it does not. This work by the long-established and well awarded and rewarded team of Ismail Merchant (producer), James Ivory (director), and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (writer) was not well received. Though praised as a period piece, by and large reviewers hammered Jefferson in Paris on everything else.
First among the negative criticism, not enough was done with the French revolutionary context. Jefferson is simply an uninvolved outsider documenting it. Second, now turning more to our purpose, Jefferson's image and reputation is traduced (which to we miniseries viewers is a yawningly familiar charge by now). Actor Nick Nolte does not do a good job playing our third president, and Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings is a lie (the official narrative still alive and kicking). Third, that relationship in the film is itself unbelievable, inconceivable, lacks chemistry and passion (there are no "love" scenes), and, ironically, makes one doubt that such a relationship ever existed. Fourth, the film has nothing substantive to say about race; in fact, it may itself be racist, for Newton's Sally makes you think of pickaninnies and Stepin' Fetchit, that is, of racial caricatures. The most intriguing things in the reviews are suggestions for different kinds of films that could be made on this subject: for instance, one probing Jefferson's thoughts on a relationship with Sally, or a film about Maria Cosway and Sally competing for Jefferson, or a film that centers on the complex and tragic issues of slavery cum miscegenation raised in the last scene.
Perhaps Jefferson in Paris falls flat because the Merchant-Ivory team had, so to speak, "no dog in the hunt." Though their research trail would lead to Brodie, the idea for this film began with Ivory's reading of Olivier Bernier's Pleasure and Privilege: Life in France, Naples, and America, 1770-1790, where, for example, we are swept into the fabulous and privileged world of Versailles and Marie Antoinette through descriptions of fashions and fads of the indulgent rich. Thus, the original appeal of the film for its creators seems to be its potential for recreating an interesting historical period in meticulous detail, something the team is renowned for. "We didn't set out to point a finger at this guy who is [America's] hero," said Ivory, showing that he had no aggressive political agenda here, and about the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, Jhabvala said simply, "it's a fact."
It's not clear, then, that the Merchant-Ivory team fully realized what kind of a controversy it was stepping in to. If so, it might have realized, for instance, what disappointed film critics and other commentators. Of that haunting last scene, for instance -- which, after all, is their representation of the crucial meeting in which Madison Hemings reports that his mother extracted a "solemn pledge" from Jefferson -- Richard Alleva says, "The last close-up of [Sally's] tear-stained face is moving but frustrating. It's a fragment of a movie we haven't seen." That's a piercing insight. And a promising recipe. In the final analysis, then, Jefferson in Paris is meaningful to the evolving Jefferson-Hemings controversy because of its dramatic visual juxtaposition of Maria Cosway and Sally Hemings and because of the retrograde image of Sally, but disappointing as a film because it lacks "edginess." That will not be the case in the next episode of our miniseries. Annette Gordon-Reed has a dog in the hunt. Maybe more than one.
