Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Frank Langella vs. Frank Nixon

Actor Frank Langella buys into a psycho-biographical portrait of Richard Nixon as an abused child for which there is no evidence:
Langella said some of his most important research was visiting Nixon's birthplace at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif., and sitting for an hour in the closet-sized room the boy once shared with three brothers. He says a part of Nixon probably never left that space...."

What you walk around with are the first two to five years of your life," he says. "What Nixon had was a horrible kind of existence and a lack of belief in himself, with a father who whacked him on the back of the head all the time and told him he wasn't as good-looking as his brother, wouldn't get girls and would never amount to anything."
Wouldn't get girls? May we have a footnote on that? Great actor, but not much of an historian.

No comments: