‘Dutch’ Author Has Nothing on Docudramas

The first girl I embraced at Eureka--if you call an awkward handshake and a bow an embrace--turned out to be Dutch’s sweetheart. --Nonexistent Norman Morris recalling 1928 in “Dutch” by Edmund Morris

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When little Gavin was born on the 27th, the assembly lines at Lockheed and Douglas were already bristling with warbirds.

--Nonexistent Norman Morris recalling the birth of his nonexistent son in “Dutch”

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Soon you may be hearing him on radio with Howard Stern.

Since sitting with Lesley Stahl on the “60 Minutes” summit recently, Edmund Morris has been talking his way down the food chain of broadcast interviewers, at once promoting and defending his hashed-over new authorized “memoir” of Ronald Reagan.

His book tour is traveling across the airwaves as fast as some of those new Reagan license plates will be roaring through California. And even where Morris hasn’t gone, the fury over his book has, with talk radio feeding this dispute to its bonfire of blather before moving on to Jesse Ventura, the Brooklyn Museum of Art or some other hot ember of discord.

The reviews have been mixed, with the anger directed at “Dutch” concerning not only the author’s largely dour conclusions about Reagan--based on his 13 years of rather intimate research--but also his literary device of choice.

The insertion of an eyewitness and supporting characters who didn’t exist.

That observer, whom he names Norman Morris, is described on the book jacket as the author’s own “biographical mind,” one with eyewitness hindsight flashing back all the way to Reagan’s youth, years before Edmund Morris was born. In fact, not only does fictional Norman Morris observe Reagan, but he, too, is observed by this “biographical mind,” as if the memoir were of him. All that’s missing is a biographical eyewitness to the “biographical mind.”

Morris is hardly the first respected chronicler of the past to at times transcend his subject, directly or indirectly. On the cover of his books about Abraham Lincoln and Aaron Burr, for example, Gore Vidal’s name is sized almost equally with those of his subjects. Yet each of these is accurately labeled a historical “novel,” and Vidal specifies in both that he made up some characters and conversations and rearranged some events to fit his storytelling needs, something he notes in “Burr” that “the conscientious historian or biographer ought never do.”

Others will decide if Morris belongs to either category.

Yet in a way his “Dutch” extends the trend of messengers merging with and becoming their messages. That includes celebrity journalists like Stahl often looming above the stories they cover. It includes the so-called “new journalism” pioneered in the 1960s by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and others. And it includes biographers insinuating themselves into the minds of their subjects, as Norman Mailer did years ago in a speculative essay on Marilyn Monroe.

Justifiable or not, the alternating voices in “Dutch”--Norman Morris’ mythical family and friends also invade Reagan’s life--are disorienting, at the very least.

But in any case, filmmakers everywhere are probably having a good laugh over their caffe lattes while reviewing this flap about a literary device that movie and TV biographies and other docudramas have employed routinely for years.

A fictional eyewitness? Puleeeeeeze!

If “Dutch” were to become a television movie, for example, most producers wouldn’t hesitate to give Reagan an Aunt Matilda or cousin Homer if they thought it would juice their story or help sell it to America. They’d insist that they’d done their job responsibly by depicting the “spirit” of the truth, so don’t bother them with details.

In fine print somewhere, viewers would be informed that fictional or composite characters were used, or that some scenes were fictional. But, unlike Gore in “Burr” and “Lincoln,” not which characters or scenes. And many more millions would see “Dutch” the TV movie than would read or even hear about Morris’ book.

So here’s the lament:

If only as much attention were paid to the inventions of docudramas as to the fictional Norman Morris crowd in “Dutch.” Inexplicably, though, we expect less of movies than of literary works, even though the big and small screens have become the nation’s most influential historians, even while sometimes blurring fact and fiction.

Did you know, for example, that in 1492, Christopher Columbus was welcomed to the “New World” by scantily clad dancing girls, as a TV movie once depicted?

That’s the extreme, of course, and too fanciful to be believed. Nor was it so important that a 5-foot-10-inch actor played 6-foot-6-inch Tsar Peter the Great in another TV movie, or that another showed shortish Bobby Kennedy towering over much taller Lyndon Johnson.

As the level of mythology rises, though, so must the level of concern.

It was an ABC docudrama about the eldest Kennedy son, Joe, for example, that showed him volunteering for the dangerous World War II mission that cost him his life. “I’m glad I’m not going with you, Joe,” said a fellow flier named Mike Krasna, about whom one reviewer wrote: “Like us, Krasna is at first suspicious of Joe Kennedy’s wealth and aristocratic bearing. But his ultimate acceptance of Kennedy encourages us to accept him too.”

Just one problem here. The Kennedy-Krasna dialogue never existed. We know that because, as later revealed, Krasna never existed.

Well, it was only a movie.

That phrase, “only a movie,” angers David W. Rintels, the acclaimed writer behind some of TV’s best historical films. “It suggests that movies should not be taken as seriously, are not obligated to try to be as truthful, as other forms of communication,” Rintels said a few years ago.

Hogwash, he added, noting the multitudes whose views of the world are shaped almost entirely by TV and movies because “they believe what they see and will have these images burned into their minds forever.”

Will “Dutch” the book be burned into their minds? Surely not as deeply as “Dutch” the movie would be. In any case, give Morris some credit.

No dancing girls.