When a Life Is Public, How Much Is Private? : Docudrama: Ex-President Nixon tries to stop ABC’s “The Final Days,” but less-well-known people can lose TV rights too.

Whose life is it, anyway?

* Fifteen years after Watergate, Richard Nixon objects so strongly to his portrayal in the ABC dramatization of “The Final Days” that he tries to stop production of the three-hour docudrama. In letters to executives at ABC and AT&T;, the sponsor of the show, lawyers for the former President charge that his right to privacy is being violated and imply that he can sue for libel. According to his lawyers, Nixon’s ability to do his own version of events is impinged upon by the TV drama, which is based on the best-selling account of Nixon’s last months in office by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. ABC, standing by what it says is the fairness and accuracy of the TV movie, goes ahead with the show. “The Final Days” is scheduled to air Sunday at 8 p.m. (ABC changed its mind Friday on when the movie will be rescheduled should it be preempted by a fifth game of the World Series, moving it back from Nov. 5 to Dec. 17.)

* In 1982, Elizabeth Taylor files a suit against ABC and the producers of a planned TV biography. The actress charges that the unauthorized film infringes on her ability to profit from her own life story. “I am my own commodity,” Taylor says at a news conference. “I am my own industry.” The TV movie, she maintains, “is completely fictionalized--unless there was somebody under the carpet or under the bed.” Taylor’s case never comes to trial, and the drama is not made. ABC today says the project was dropped for creative reasons.

* Two months after he was convicted of multiple murders, Richard Ramirez, the infamous California “Night Stalker,” is the focus of an NBC docudrama that will air Nov. 12. The “Night Stalker” movie joins a variety of upcoming fact-based TV dramas that are moving from headline to TV screen while the event still flashes in viewers’ recollection of the evening news. Among the upcoming fact-based dramas on CBS, NBC and ABC are the story of Hedda Nusbaum, the woman whose lover was convicted of beating to death their illegally adopted daughter; “Small Sacrifices,” with Farrah Fawcett as a woman who shot her children, and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

In some docudramas, the formerly anonymous people who happened into the spotlight have welcomed the dramatizations. But, in other instances, the people would have prefered to be left alone.

Whose life is it, anyway? The question involves legal and ethical issues raised by the proliferation of fact-based TV movies. The most compelling conflict in docudramas goes to the heart of the Constitution: the confrontation between the movie makers’ right to free speech under the First Amendment--and the value of open discussion to the society--versus the individual’s right to privacy.

This is a murky area, and it depends on who the person is and what they’ve done in the past,” says Robert Levine, a New York lawyer who specializes in creative rights. “With celebrities, it’s not so much a question of privacy as a question of who retains the rights to commercialize their experience. There’s a big difference between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Nixon. She’s spent her whole life building up the property values of her life. With ‘The Final Days,’ you’re dealing with events that are part of national history. Nixon’s a public figure whose claim to own history is not consistent with a free society.”

Although Taylor never had her day in court to test her legal theory, the argument still concerns those who favor the broadest interpretation of the guarantees of free speech.

“One has a commercial right to exploit one’s name, and Elizabeth Taylor has the right by and large to have facts told about her that are truthful,” says Martin Garbus, a New York lawyer who specializes in First Amendment cases. “But Taylor is a public figure, and anybody can make a movie about her.”

The First Amendment protects what is said about public figures, unless it’s said with a knowing or reckless disregard for the truth. That may lead to unseemly excesses in the media, Garbus acknowledges, but he argues that censorship is a far less attractive alternative.

“People should be able to say nearly anything about an elected public official,” he maintains. “If you start to decide what is protected and what’s not, you get into very dangerous areas.”

Nixon and his lawyers argued otherwise in their letters to ABC and AT&T.; The former President should have been consulted on the TV movie, a source close to Nixon’s lawyers said recently, and now has lost some ability to, in effect, merchandise his own version of events.

“They’ve misappropriated his likeness to sell telephones,” the Nixon source says.

No one has an absolute right to privacy, and, generally, people who are well known have fewer privacy rights than unknowns. Yet average citizens can lose some of their rights if they become part of a news event.

“Determining the difference between a public figure and a private figure can be very complicated,” Garbus notes. “People who are public can become private, and private people can become public.”

The family of murder victim Jennifer Levin, for example, did not cooperate in the making of the “Preppie Murder” movie that aired on ABC recently, yet they were depicted. According to attorney Garbus, the Levin family fell into “a hazy area” where they may be public figures when it comes to what was known and seen in court by the news media at the time of Robert Chambers’ trial, and private figures when it comes to intimate details of their private lives.

Being a participant in a celebrated court case is one likely way to find one’s life turned into a book, play or TV movie. Court testimony is a matter of public record, and it can be used in docudramas, such as an upcoming NBC movie about the white youths who chased a black man to his death in Howard Beach in New York. In some cases--among them the trial of Jean Harris on NBC and the trial of Bernhard Goetz on PBS--the court transcripts simply have been fashioned into TV courtroom drama.

Although they may be able legally to portray a variety of people in docudramas, producers say that, as a practical matter, they often try to gain the cooperation of their subjects. That ensures the movie makers access to the full story--and guards against possible lawsuits.

For a 1988 movie about Uli Derickson, the flight attendant who was a heroine in a 1985 hijacking, NBC did buy her rights. “We could have done the story from the public record without her permission,” says Don Zachary, vice president of legal affairs at NBC. “But we wanted to portray a human side, how she felt, what her relationship with her mother was.”

“I always go to a highly visible public figure and offer them the opportunity to participate,” says Louis Rudolph, who has produced many historical docudramas, including TV movies on Lyndon B. Johnson and Dwight Eisenhower. “In no way are we giving script approval, but they can look at the script and tell us what they know.”

But he says he did not follow that practice with his latest film, “Small Sacrifices,” an ABC movie airing Nov. 12 in which Farrah Fawcett plays Diane Downs, a woman who shot her children. Rudolph says he made no attempt to contact the subject, instead buying the rights to the best-selling book on the case by Ann Rule.

Neither he nor Rule paid any money to Downs for her story, Rudolph says. “That would be feeding into sociopathic behavior.”

In fact, in many states, criminals convicted of committing crimes with victims are prohibited from profiting from dramatizations of their story under so-called “Son of Sam” laws, named for a notorious murder case in New York.

As for “The Final Days,” Alfred Schneider, ABC’s vice president for broadcast standards and practices, says that the network not only discussed the reporting in the 1976 book with co-author Bob Woodward but also consulted other sources of information about the revelations it contained.

So far, Nixon has taken no legal action against the movie. But, in a personal protest, he canceled his AT&T; phone service and switched to a competitor.