Jon Stewart, Jim Cramer and Frost/Nixon at the Ahmanson

See Dick run

Comments (0) By Steven Leigh Morris Wednesday, Mar 18 2009

There’s one scene in Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon, the touring production of which opened last week at the Ahmanson, where Richard Nixon (Stacy Keach) makes a late-night phone call in the spring of 1977 to the hotel room of David Frost (Alan Cox). Frost is in the midst of his somewhat impulsive and now historic high-stakes four-part televised interview of the disgraced ex-president, for which he’s not only flown from England to Nixon’s San Clemente home, but he’s also laid down hundreds of thousands of his own dollars to pay for the equipment, crew and hotel expenses, on the gambit that financing will eventually come in for the project. Nixon’s agent, Swifty Lazar (Stephen Rowe), has guaranteed that his client will get a sizable cut of the $600,000 fee, rendering the interview a pay-to-play scheme that engenders the derision of the Washington press corps.

Furthermore, Frost has the reputation of a lightweight, an entertainer who’s journalistic career has been built on subject-friendly chats with celebrity chefs and fashion models, while emotionally tempestuous and PR-seasoned Nixon is trying to salvage the image of a presidency that floats in the sewage of corruption and lies. Frost wants a confession and an apology; Nixon wants redemption. Both men are fighting for their legacy, and only one will triumph.

Carol Rosegg

On the brink of legacy: Cox and Keach as Frost and Nixon

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If you need a contemporary parallel for the drama and stakes of a TV interview, look no further than Jon Stewart’s highly ballyhooed recent interview with Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s Mad Money. What looks like “just talk” is really a trial, infused with humor-tinged, fury-saturated sarcasm, about the financial principles that were supposed to have guided us, and the betrayal of those principles by both Cramer and CNBC. (Stewart played clips of Cramer giving private advice on how to profit quickly from hedge funds with gambles bankrolled by our 401Ks.) Is Stewart, like Frost, just a class clown? If he’s a fool, he’s like one of Shakespeare’s fools, who speaks the truth between farts and funny faces. The satirist emerges as a journalist with far more research-based credibility than the ramblings of his rival, the co-opted “expert” from the more “authoritative” CNBC. What Frost and Stewart did was deeply satisfying but not revolutionary. With incontrovertible evidence, they stuck a mortal dagger into official truths that had already been largely debunked on the streets.

Frost/Nixon, not unlike Stewart’s televised interview with Cramer, is like the final act of Tartuffe, the one Molière never wrote — the act of contrition by the con man, the purging of communal wrath. All of these entertainments cut to the heart of how we obtain reliable truth. When do fiction, and invention, and humor and omission distort or reveal what’s actually going on? And how on earth are we supposed to figure that out?

Nixon’s late-night phone call is a stream-of-consciousness rant about the pair of them being locked out of their respective inner circles — Frost from the snobs at Cambridge, Nixon from the Washington elite. It’s a drunken stab at camaraderie, somewhat off base because Frost doesn’t feel shut out at all. Friends swirl around him like schools of fish. We see Frost alone, clutching the phone in silent amazement while, on the other side of the stage, Nixon blurts out the aria of a fallen king who feels graceless in crowds, who perspires under pressure, who doesn’t know how to tell or take a joke, who snarls and snaps at insults, whether they’re real or imagined.

“That’s the best scene in the movie,” an audience member remarked immediately after the speech, on opening night. It was a revelatory off-the-cuff remark, because it placed this live theater event in its bizarre context of occurring while Ron Howard’s movie of the same playwright’s screenplay-adaptation is still fresh in the minds of the public — particularly in our film-capital city.

The larger revelation, however unwitting, in the audience member’s crack derives from the reality that this “best scene” is a fiction, entirely invented in both the film and the play — a docudrama no less, first presented in 2006 by London’s Donmar Warehouse before transferring to Broadway the following year. If truth is supposed to be stranger than fiction, how is it that Morgan’s invented speculations are more compelling than the truths from which his play derives? Silly question really. It’s like asking Shakespeare why he interlaced the story of King John, or Richard III, with his own speculations, as though such speculations would interfere with the plays’ larger truths. Yet, try to make stuff up when you work for a newspaper. What journalist would keep a job after being caught adding embellishments to reveal some deeper truth?

Later in Frost/Nixon, Frost reminds Nixon of that late-night call, and Nixon simply can’t remember it, or says he can’t — a cagey device by Morgan to interweave the empirical with the poetical. Artists might refer to the device as “artistic license,” which raises the question of whether or not Nixon was invoking a similar license when, ordered by the Supreme Court to turn over to the Special Prosecutor taped conversations about his operatives’ break-in at the Watergate Hotel, Nixon’s relinquished tapes contained a “mysterious” gap of 18 and a half minutes. Whether you make stuff up or take stuff out, an exaggeration, a speculation or a deletion are all forms of fibbing, which is really the germinal stage of lying, which is the first cousin of storytelling. And everyone invested in legacy engages in the art of telling stories. The battle between Frost and Nixon, as between Stewart and Cramer, was a kind of literary scuffle over which story would prevail under the Klieg lights, and the under the watch of millions of viewers.