Embellished History? Hey, It’s TV

From the quill pen of your Los Angeles Times correspondent, Feb. 11, 2000:

It is well-known that the people are in a woeful dilemma respecting the man it delighteth them to honor. The allegation against Mr. Thomas Jefferson--that he chose African stock upon which to engraft his own descendants--is of a nature whose delicacy must strike every person of common sensibility. We should be glad to hear of its refutation. Yet we are under the firmest belief that such a refutation can ever be made. As the reader does not feel himself disposed to pause, we beg leave to proceed.

Talk about your coincidences. It was just last month that the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation--keeper of his legacy and home, Monticello--acknowledged a “strong likelihood” that the slave-owning author of the Declaration of Independence had been a most fatherly founding father.

The nonprofit group announced “compelling” and “persuasive” evidence that Jefferson had fathered at least one and probably all six children borne by his slave, Sally Hemings.

Rumors of this “Tom and Sally Soap Opera,” as U.S. News & World Report titled it last year, are at least two centuries old. Although some skeptics remain, the foundation’s paternity scenario was drawn from detailed statistical evidence regarding Jefferson’s whereabouts when each of Hemings’ children was conceived, combined with a 1998 DNA test showing that a Jefferson fathered her youngest son, Eston.

Sounds like a TV script.

The two-part “Sally Hemings: An American Scandal” is enjoyable as middle-brow embellished history featuring that ravishing Brit, Carmen Ejogo, as Hemings, who was both a half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles, and a house slave at his Monticello plantation along with her mother and siblings.

The seeds of this miniseries are from Fawn M. Brodie’s respected biography, “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Biography,” whose careful scholarship and informed analysis have been air-pumped into a tumultuous CBS ratings-sweeps event that the producers acknowledge is not something you’d want to engrave in stone.

It does rub some shine off Jefferson, not necessarily because he slept with Hemings and likely fathered her children--many white plantation owners indulged similarly with black slaves--but because the private man depicted here conflicts in many ways with the one-dimensional gleaming icon of numerous histories.

But enough about him. Sally Hemings’ name doesn’t appear alone in the title for nothing.

Because the Hemings written record is very slim, Tina Andrews’ script is built substantially on oral histories and unfootnoted conjecture. That includes Sally bravely helping runaway slaves, teaching other slaves to read and having the chutzpah to repeatedly challenge Jefferson to reconcile his actions with his written words about “all men being created equal” and other lofty pronouncements.

Sally angrily to Tom (Sam Neill): “Did that include slaves?” You go girl.

It’s no news flash that the story’s historical outline is true: Slavery and its seething hostilities existed, Thomas Jefferson and the political machinations and nation-building attributed to him existed. As did Sally Hemings, with whom he seems to have had a long, amorous relationship that produced progeny of various shades.

Beyond that, enjoy--but watch with skepticism.

A much smarter flashback to the same period is “The Duel” on PBS, Monday’s beautifully told “American Experience” documentary from Carl Byker about the lethal clash in 1804 between bitter political foes Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, whose own publicized adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds contributed to his ruin.

It was the brilliant but personally flawed Hamilton who helped assure Jefferson’s 1800 presidential win over Burr that was decided by the House of Representatives on the 36th ballot after an electoral college tie. And apparently Burr never forgot it.

Burr was vice president and Hamilton a former treasury secretary at the time of their famous shootout. Just fascinating here is the suspenseful depiction of the politics and simmering personal hatreds that drove them toward their ultimate encounter with pistols on the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River. But equally so is the hour’s autopsy of dueling as decadent ritual with a prescribed code of behavior.

In this case, first came an exchange of insulting letters that made backing down unthinkable, then 10 paces each and kablooey.

Well before he took his bullet in the stomach, Hamilton’s affair with Reynolds had been exposed in the Richmond Recorder by the same James Thomson Callender who wrote of Jefferson’s enduring tryst with Hemings.

In “Sally Hemings,” the mysterious bug-eyed demise of Callender (Rene Auberjonois) comes across as some kind of weird voodoo thing.

The Hemings affair that he revealed wasn’t as scandalous for then-President Jefferson as it might have been, perhaps, because it was denied, and in modern parlance, there was no stained blue dress to nail it down. Confirmation of it probably would have finished Jefferson politically.

It’s Paris where this Charles Haid-directed TV account has the Hemings-Jefferson romance beginning in the late 1780s, and Sally being reconfigured, a la Eliza Doolittle, from an illiterate slave girl into a polished, well-read, fashionably adorned swan. We see “that stunning mulatto,” as pamphleteer Tom Paine calls her, shipped abroad from Monticello at a time when the widowed Jefferson is ambassador to France, and the rest is DNA history.

Already working there as Jefferson’s chef is her brother, James (Mario Van Peeples). In Paris, also, is Jefferson’s possessive elder daughter, Martha (Mare Winning-ham), who will come to resent Hemings and much later urge her father to “sell her.”

Neill’s Jefferson projects an intriguing ambiguity, and Ejogo is likable as this aggressively activist Hemings, who along with absorbing punishment, kicks some serious butt in Part 2. That includes Hemings somehow getting from Monticello to Washington on her own in time to crash the White House and give the embarrassed Jefferson a good talking to during an official dinner. Go figure.

Not to be missed, either, is a subsequent scene that has Van Peeples’ overcooked James resurfacing as a mad holy man. Or the makeup job on Ejogo--trenches on either side of her mouth--meant to show the magnificent Hemings succumbing to the disfigurement of middle age.

You want history, read a book.

* “Sally Hemings: An American Scandal” begins at 9 p.m. Sunday on CBS, and concludes Wednesday at 9 p.m. The network has rated it TV-PG-DLSV (may be unsuitable for young children with special advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language, sex and violence).

* “The Duel” episode of PBS’ “The American Experience” can be seen Monday at 9 p.m. on KCET and KVCR.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.