Only on TV: Rethinking FDR . . . and Roseanne

Dueling Rosies.

That’s tonight’s exotic television matchup as PBS opens a two-part biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Fox premieres its one-nighter quickie about Roseanne (the former Roseanne Arnold and Roseanne Barr).

The latter is a Fox crotch job, with “Roseanne: An Unauthorized Biography” doing to its subject pretty much what she did to the national anthem a few years back.

Much more melodic is “The American Experience: FDR,” a 4 1/2-hour documentary about the nation’s 32nd chief executive, whom many historians regard as having redefined the presidency while leading the United States through the Great Depression and horrific World War II. Charismatic and commanding despite being disabled by polio, Roosevelt was a “President like no other,” narrator David McCullough notes tonight.

Yet it’s Roseanne, star of tabloid headlines, of squabbles with her estranged spouse, Tom Arnold, and of her own hit ABC sitcom, who’s much the better known today. Such is our obsession with boisterous celebrities who are ultimately devoured by the very media they spend much of their careers manipulating.

*

Not that there wasn’t a broad streak of show business in Roosevelt, whose own epic manipulation of the press is arguably unmatched in modern presidential politics. “You and I are the two best actors in America,” he’s recalled saying to Orson Welles in tonight’s “FDR,” a memorable documentary from David Grubin, whose impressive PBS credits include a grand 1992 biography of Lyndon Johnson and “Marshall, Texas; Marshall, Texas,” an extraordinary chronicle of Bill Moyers’ return to his hometown a decade ago.

And now, happy days are here again, so to speak, for despite offering little that appears new, Grubin’s “FDR” is a fascinating, meaningful rendering of history, stylishly crafting diverse data into an irresistible narrative that has great relevance for a 1994 audience.

After all, it was Roosevelt whose bold signature in the 1930s and early 1940s was the kind of big government that today is increasingly reviled by outspoken politicians, reformers and others who insist that only through federal smallness can a troubled United States ever achieve salvation.

“FDR” shines a light on the complex man behind the caricatured broad grin and long cigarette holder. By and large, it’s a warm light--one that also leaves some shadows, for, as we’re told here, he was a “charming but a distant figure” even to those who were closest to him.

They included his controlling, ever-looming mother, whom we meet here as matriarch of the Hyde Park estate that symbolized young Franklin’s cocooned upbringing as a product of old-monied New York royalty, a family that was already represented in the White House by FDR’s cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, when Franklin graduated from Harvard with his own aspirations for the presidency.

In 1905, he marries his distant cousin, Eleanor, who will also have an enormous influence on him while much later becoming a renowned political figure in her own right, her independence growing after she discovers his affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, in 1918. After this, Eleanor moves to a separate cottage two miles from Hyde Park, and the couple never again “shared the intimacies of married life,” McCullough says, a political union supplanting their marital partnership. This relationship continues through Franklin’s dozen years in the White House, which ended with his death in 1945.

The uniqueness of that relationship is described here, as are FDR’s famed Depression-era policies, the tactics he used to aid England even before the United States was drawn into World War II and his special relationship with another epic figure of history, Winston Churchill. Roosevelt was “flawed, inconsistent and often deceitful,” McCullough says. But, most agree, he was very good at being President.

Of special interest here are unusual old photographs and home-movie footage that relate a separate story about an FDR whose paralysis was much more severe than most of the public ever realized. There he is in 1921, at age 39, after contracting the dreaded polio, the last time he is seen standing alone on his own feet. And there he is cavorting in a pool with children at the Warm Springs, Ga., clinic he established for victims of the disease.

And quite stunningly, there he is in a four-second sequence, played in slow motion, appearing to walk even though he couldn’t. Knowing that to be disabled in those days was “political poison,” he devised a rocking-motion technique--one hand pushing down on a cane, the other on the arm of one of his sons--that gave the illusion of him walking. “I don’t think five in 100 Americans even knew he was paralyzed,” says observer Alistair Cooke.

Wearing black braces that blended in with black pants and black socks helped, as did a “conspiracy of consent” on the part of White House photographers--which would be unthinkable in the 1990s--to not reveal the extent of the President’s disability.

For whatever reason, “FDR” has its own information blackouts--never telling us how Roosevelt felt about his paralysis, for example, or his feelings about civil rights for blacks, an issue on which Eleanor apparently pressed him. The program also dismisses in a couple of inadequate sentences FDR’s approval of Japanese Americans being rounded up and interned after Pearl Harbor and his decision not to intervene in the Nazi death camps.

What does come through is the personal magnetism that he relied on. “Meeting Roosevelt,” Churchill said at a eulogy for the President, “was like uncorking your first bottle of champagne.”

*

Fox’s film on Roseanne (NBC has another scheduled later this month) is the cork minus the champagne.

Despite Denny Dillon occasionally locating glints of humanity beneath her subject’s shrill veneer, and David Graf persuasively cloning Tom Arnold’s mannerisms, “Roseanne: An Unauthorized Biography” is as dispensable as all those self-serving photo ops and talk-show appearances these two orchestrated en route to their noisy breakup.

If there is anything new to say about them--given the clanging media music that has accompanied every aspect of their volatile lives--this mishmash of flashbacks and flash forwards doesn’t say it.

Roseanne moves through her troubled adolescence (she’s institutionalized after blindly walking in heavy traffic with a towel over her head), then through her teen pregnancy, until one day, a year later, she wakes up looking like Denny Dillon, who, in some of the wigs she’s given to wear, looks like Meat Loaf in drag.

Fox says certain characters and events in its movie (directed by Paul Schneider and written by Karen Harris) have been “fictionalized,” so take it literally at your own risk.

Dillon’s Roseanne is part witch, part victim, miserable as a kid in a dysfunctional environment, later miserable in a marriage with her first husband--a beer-guzzling, belching good old boy. More misery awaits at the end of her marriage to Tom, whom she meets at a comedy club in Minneapolis.

By this time she’s already lived to the hilt, doing guys for money while working as a cocktail waitress. Tom does drugs. Then he’s in rehab. Then Tom and Roseanne are in a mansion. Then Roseanne’s chewing out someone. Then Tom and Roseanne are chewing out each other. Then Roseanne chews out her family, accusing her father of molesting her after Tom says he was molested as a kid. Then they chew each other out again. Then Roseanne locks Tom out. Then Tom pounds on the front door. Then Roseanne hides under the sheets.

This gets you to the end credits. Meanwhile, if you really haven’t had your fill of Roseanne, she’s available playing herself on Wednesday’s season finale of HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show.” The script has Roseanne helping poor Larry recover from his own prescription-drug addiction. If he reveals he’s in rehab, Larry’s producer warns him, “Fox will make a TV movie about you before the end of the year.”

That you can take literally.

* “The American Experience: FDR” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, and at 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24. “Roseanne: The Unauthorized Biography” airs at 8 tonight on Fox (Channels 11 and 6). “The Larry Sanders Show” airs at 10:30 p.m. Wednesday on HBO.