No sides, no prisoners

IF George W. Bush would like to get a respite from his low poll ratings, he could do worse than to invite Peter Morgan, the Oscar-nominated British screenwriter, to a barbecue on his West Texas ranch. Over slabs of ribs, Morgan probably could find a way to do for No. 43 what he’s done for No. 37, Richard Nixon: cause audiences to reconsider their opinion of the man.

“I’m sure Bush is formidable around the barbecue; I think I’d quite like him,” says the 44-year-old Morgan, delighting in the instincts that drive him to question what he calls the “tsunami of contempt” directed toward the president.

That skepticism has held him in good stead for the last couple of years as he’s shot into the limelight for films that have reevaluated such disparately powerful figures as Queen Elizabeth (“The Queen”), Prime Minister Tony Blair (“The Queen” and “The Deal”) and Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (“The Last King of Scotland”). Now Nixon and talk show host David Frost are up for a little revisionism in “Frost/Nixon,” which opens on Broadway this week after acclaimed runs in London. The film version, directed by Ron Howard, is set to begin shooting this summer.

It’s not that Morgan is politically aligned with Bush any more than his sympathetic portrayal of Queen Elizabeth makes him a monarchist. (He usually votes for Britain’s centrist Labor Party.) It’s just that he has almost as much contempt for what he calls “the vigilantism of judgment” as he has for the abuse of power. “Where is all that coming from?” he asks of the anti-Bush diatribes. “There are degrees of truth, but there is no single truth. Everything is partisan.”

Of course, if the Bushes were to invite Morgan, the person, rather than Morgan, the writer, they might find that they’d gotten more than they bargained for. Hand in glove with the writer’s contempt for rushes to judgment is an intense dislike for anything too proper. “I have a really well-developed muscle of insurgency in regards to good manners,” he says with a puckish smile. “I have this irresistible urge to misbehave. If there’s too much gentility around, I want to get a mallet out.”

The desire to both reclaim and to destroy is fitting, coming from a man who seems such a complex bundle of contradictions: the London-born son of German Jewish and Silesian Catholic refugees who speaks in a cultured European accent; a bloke at home with a pint -- or a mallet -- who has achieved success by following the fate and foibles of royalty; a writer with a competitive ego who nonetheless insists that he’s not “that good”; and an agreeable guy who at one point describes himself as “difficult, rude and coarse.”

“Peter is definitely as complex an individual as his characters,” says Michael Grandage, who directed “Frost/Nixon.” “Like the best writers, he’s engaged with them at a very high level, what drives them, their ambitions, their melt-downs.”

Dressed in faded jeans and a black sweater with a tiny hole at the elbow, Morgan is weary, having flown in a day earlier from Vienna, where he lives with his Austrian wife, Lila Schwarzenberg, and their four young children. He’d hobbled into the office on crutches supporting a broken ankle, courtesy of a football game played with his 5-year-old son. He’d been celebrating the delivery of his screenplay for a Stephen Frears film, to be based on a David Peace novel, “The Damned United.”

It’s hard to picture Nixon or Frost breaking an ankle in a backyard game. But a match between the former president and the TV personality caught Morgan’s imagination in 1992. After watching a TV biography of Frost, the writer was haunted by an image of “this glamorous playboy jetting back and forth across the Atlantic on the Concorde, and Nixon, this dark supernova of complicatedness living in exile.”

That picture was drawn from the apex of Frost’s career -- his 1977 series of interviews with Nixon, the first “get” following the president’s resignation in the wake of Watergate. What attracted Morgan was the gladiatorial nature of their encounter. The stakes -- as he sees them in his behind-the-scenes drama -- are high for the fiercely ambitious men, nothing less than the most alluring of prizes: a comeback in America.

For Frost (played by Michael Sheen), that means high ratings, money, prestige, babes and a coveted table at Sardi’s. For Nixon (Frank Langella), it means a return from the Elba of San Clemente, honored, accepted, an eminence grise in the political world.” It seemed to be naturally theatrical in its soul,” says Morgan. “I knew that it had to be on the stage,” says Morgan, who’d never before written a play.

“Frost/Nixon” took London by surprise when it opened last summer. The London Times hailed both the play and its performances as “riveting drama” that managed to give “tabby-cat” Frost some claws and Nixon himself shades of a tragic hero. Morgan whipped up the tension by posing the contest as a zero-sum game.

“What’s exciting about Peter’s work is there is always someone who is has the ability to seize the moment at the same time there’s another with a self-destructive bent,” says Sheen, who not only worked with Morgan on “The Deal,” “The Queen” and “Frost/Nixon” but will also play the charismatic, alcoholic coach in the Frears film. “He’s fascinated by the demons in people perhaps because he’s slain some dragons of his own.”

The playwright also saw the opportunity to demonstrate one of his favorite themes: the elusiveness of truth. The fact that many of the events surrounding the interviews were so well documented only sweetened the challenge. After spending six months in Washington, D.C., interviewing more than 60 people, he let his imagination fill in the blanks. “People constantly ask me, ‘How do you know that did or didn’t happen?’ ” he says. “And I reply, ‘Even if you just stick to the words that were actually said, the indisputable facts, the published record, you still have disagreement.’ ” What emerges is a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Nixon -- something Morgan says he had not intended, just as was the case for Helen Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth. “I wrote about a stubborn, haughty, narrow-minded woman,” he says. “But if you try to understand these people, if you pull it all apart ... well, we’re only human.”

Morgan’s attraction to power may well stem from an early destiny determined by the abuse of it. His father, Arthur Morgenthau, was fleeing the Nazis when he arrived in London in 1933; his mother, Inga Bojcek, emigrated from Poland after the Soviet takeover. His father was a “not successful, not glamorous” businessman who died suddenly when Morgan was only 9. Though the writer acknowledges the death was the most traumatic experience of his early life, he still describes a “happy childhood” that was “culturally, not religiously” more Jewish than Gentile.

But when Morgan was shipped off to a Catholic boarding school, where he was promptly nicknamed Fritz, he felt alienated. “I hated it,” he recalls, adding that it was there he first learned to question authority.

The debates begin

WHAT eventually saved him was going to Leeds, a university in north England, rather than the more prestigious Oxford or Cambridge. There he discovered the theater, acting in plays until sidelined by a bad case of stage fright. But his conventional world was shaken when he transferred from the English department to the fine arts department. “It was like gelignite, very radicalized, and blowing up whatever you once thought sacrosanct was the only value of the exercise,” he recalls. . “I felt liberated and independent, and that independence is still there.”

Morgan excelled in debating, assuming the role of the “attack dog.” He used humor to score points. But outside his debating life, he became skeptical of taking fixed positions, and remains so. “I have a friend, Rosie Boycott, who’s a pundit. She’s called by media day and night. I don’t understand that,” he says. “I don’t have a point of view about anything, it feels. That’s why I’m comfortable seeing all sides. I like looking, not espousing.”

An odd thing for a writer to say, but, Grandage observes of Morgan: “His greatest gift is the ability to give everybody a fair hearing and still keep a dramatic tension.”

What ignited the college debates for him was not ideology but the fun -- and the competition. He’s still very competitive. “It’s a hideous thing, a curse,” he says, helplessly. “It’s really vile, a really unattractive trait to possess.”

Nonetheless, that may have fueled his rise to the top. After college, he worked in relative obscurity, writing additional dialogue on John Schlesinger’s “Madame Sousatzka” and earning sole screen credit with “Shalom Joan Collins,” a 1989 TV movie about a North London neighborhood thrown into a tizzy by celebrity. But Morgan hit his stride in 2003 with “The Deal,” a TV movie speculating on what occurred in the exchange of power within the Labor Party between Blair and Gordon Brown, his chancellor of the Exchequer.

Today, “get Peter Morgan” is a common refrain in studio executive suites, and, Morgan says, that feels “just great, there’s no downside to it.” Among the benefits of success are invitations to L.A., which Morgan says he prefers to New York, finding the Big Apple too kinetic. “My mother always tells me to be careful in L.A., since it’s so craven and degenerate,” he says. “But I always find it much too sober. I wish it were more louche and loose. I’d love to see more mess and chaos!” And, he adds, it’s also reflected in eating and drinking habits. “I mean, they frown on you if you eat a pudding. It’s a competitive lack of sensuality.”

While Morgan’s being bombarded by offers these days, he feels inadequate to respond. For one, he doesn’t think he can “write American.” For another, he’d like to write a play (“this one in a pub, maybe”). And finally, he’s looking for a real challenge. His last royal gasp may be “The Other Boleyn Girl,” starring Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman as sisters teasing Eric Bana’s Henry VIII with their favors, due for a release in December.

“I’d like to do anything different,” he says. Asked if that might include writing a musical, he responds, “That’s where I feel a real novice. I just don’t know that form at all. It’s easy to embarrass an audience, and that’s a sin.”

Still, he’s grateful for the attention, though he maintains that the blandishments are not likely to turn his head. And what keeps him even in the white-hot spotlight? “Well, I don’t think I’m that good,” he says. “And that’s the biggest help. Really. It’s not false modesty. I don’t know how I ended up writing. I think there are more natural writers out there. But I do think I’m a good storyteller. I can only hope if you come to see something I wrote, I can confidently predict you wouldn’t be bored.”