There were many Richard Nixons, and Hall’s manic interpretation shows at least a few dozen wrestling for control: the braggart, the underdog, the scrapper, the supplicant, the statesman, the momma’s boy. Hall, who would in years to follow become a much in-demand character actor for film and television, was fifty-three years old when Secret Honor had its first public screenings—almost twenty years younger than Nixon, but still very far from being a male ingenue with his baleful, hangdog expression; the low, doleful timbre of his voice; and the capacious bags beneath his eyes. He was born at the height of the Depression in 1931 in Toledo, Ohio, and raised in what he described as slum conditions in the north side of the city. As a child he performed a magic act around town, then toured Ohio and Michigan as a teenager with an Al Jolson routine. After attending the University of Toledo, he was drafted and stationed, serving as a translator, in Germany, where he married before returning to the Buckeye State to work as a high school teacher and radio announcer. He was thirty before he tried in earnest to make a career as an actor, first in New York, then in California. Years later he would recall an agent out west, apprising his prospects: “what I see is a middle-aged guy, not especially good-looking, short, over forty.”
An unlikely star, as Nixon imagined himself, Hall is quite literally the whole show here, addressing himself in monologue to a tape recorder and an unseen amanuensis named “Roberto” as he pours and downs glass after glass of Chivas Regal, becomes increasingly sozzled, and careens on an emotional bumper-car ride that snaps between self-pity, angry defiance, and grim hilarity. The film takes place entirely inside a study that has the character of a bunker—presumably this is Saddle River, where Nixon and Pat had set up residence by the middle 1980s, though only black shows through the windows, and the scene has something of the air of the besieged Führerbunker. (In fact, in 1984 Hall would also play Hitler in Los Angeles’s Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s production of Christopher Hampton’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.) The president’s only companions are the oil paintings on the walls, depicting the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, Woodrow Wilson, and a much-berated Henry Kissinger; a few framed memento photographs; and his own image, reproduced on a bank of four video monitors hooked up to a network of closed-circuit television cameras, including one in the room. It’s a portrait of a man alone, a mutt chasing his own tail, self-flagellating and self-aggrandizing. As cabin feverish quarantine viewing goes, you could do worse.
The form of the monologue is that of a defense, presented to an invisible court and its presiding Your Honor, in the interest of gaining exoneration and rehabilitation. In the course of mounting his defense, Nixon falls repeatedly into rambling digressions, swept up into harangues or pulled down into teary reflection. In the jumble of words, fragments of Nixon’s personal and public history rush past, a fractured, a-chronological autobiography: the hardscrabble early years in Yorba Linda, the toll of tuberculosis on the family, the forming of the Orthogonian society at Whittier College, the hand-selection to run for a seat in California’s12th congressional district, and then the political ups and downs. To these known facts Hall’s Nixon adds another layer, the president’s revelation of a conspiracy that, as he tells it, shadowed his political career from the outset, his defiance of which should leave him remembered by posterity not as a Dirty Trickster but as a martyr who’d delivered the Republic from the hands of both communist and fascist totalitarianism.
Placed alongside the implausible facts of Nixon’s career, this feels almost credible. Should we interpret it as the shocking true revelation of a cabal of power brokers’ vast conspiracy, or as the elaborate self-justification of a guilt-ridden, shamed public figure looking to unload blame? If the latter, what cause has the president to keep up the charade away from the public eye, addressing only himself and the unseen Roberto? This question, though, presumes that a wholly private Nixon still exists. Altman and Hall’s president is a pure creature of the media, a persona called “Richard Nixon” created over the course of forty years. His national audience gone, Narcissus Nixon is left to address his own mediated image. After a lifetime’s campaigning, the mask has nearly become the face, and the president shifts jarringly between scotch-squiffed boyo and statesman. The opening titles label Secret Honor a “Political Myth,” but this could refer to any number of myths that thicken the air of the presidential redoubt as Nixon rambles on: the myth of the poor-boy-made-good-up-by-his-bootstraps, the myth of Peace with Honor, the myth of “the little people . . . Maggie and Jiggs,” the myth of the patriot who sacrificed all for his country. Nixon’s myths sustain him, and by now they bore him to tears. He can’t get through the Checkers speech without blowing a raspberry.
Secret Honor belongs to an ongoing examination in Altman’s work of the inextricable relationship in American culture between entertainment and politics, which runs through Henry Gibson’s performance of “200 Years” at the beginning of Nashville (1975) and into Altman’s other supreme accomplishment of the 1980s, the Garry Trudeau–written campaign trail miniseries mockumentary Tanner ’88 (1988), which in large part revolves around Pirandellian slippages between the private and public—or authentic and manufactured—personages of Michael Murphy’s presidential hopeful. “There’s no TV screen here,” Murphy’s Tanner is told at one point by a constituent disappointed that she’s receiving the prerehearsed, sound-bite treatment—the constituent none other than actress Rebecca De Mornay, playing herself, at a Hollywood poolside fundraiser.
Beginning its existence as a stage production, Secret Honor is in the fullest sense a work of political theater—or the theatricality of politicians. The tape recorder suggests Beckett’s Krapp, a loaded revolver on the president’s desk, Chekhov’s rifle, but the key reference is Shakespeare. The “Shakespearean” dimension of Nixon has been discussed to the point of cliché—the usual reference is to Richard III, while Jean-Luc Godard offered the president $500,000 to appear opposite Norman Mailer in his King Lear (1987). Secret Honor’s writers, Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone, however, give us a Nixon who imagines himself Hamlet, even having played the part in a high school theatrical. (“Dr. Birdsell, my dramatic coach in school, always said that I was the most melancholy Dane that he had ever directed.”) As with the Dane, it is never clear where this Nixon’s fantasies end and reality begins—as to if he’s but mad north-northwest, or all the way around the bend.
In Secret Honor Altman summons a creative compassion for Nixon, a man whom he despised politically, though admired perhaps in his barnacle-like tenacity, for Altman, like Nixon, had known tremendous successes and reversals. Like Nixon, Altman perceived himself as an outsider, having struggled to break into Hollywood from the precincts of Kansas City. Having once got in the door, he found himself on the fringes again, and Secret Honor was made in a period that might be considered his “wilderness years”—the term used to refer to Nixon’s time in private law practice following his defeats in the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial race.
Altman was no longer commanding big budgets after the troubled production of Popeye and the drubbing of HealtH (both 1980). He’d sold his studio facility, Lion’s Gate, his home in Malibu Cove, and his BMW. “I feel my time has run out,” he told the New York Times in 1981. “Every studio wants Raiders of the Lost Ark. The movies I want to make are movies the studios don’t want.” Secret Honor belongs to a period when, cast out of Hollywood, Altman was looking toward the stage and television for renewed inspiration. In 1982 he made his New York stage directing debut with 2 by South, two one-acts by new playwright Frank South, and much of his work through the eighties was drawn from theatrical sources, including Sam Shepard and Christopher Durang.
Secret Honor had been written for the stage by Freed and Stone, first directed at the Los Angeles Theatre Center by Robert Harders—billed on the film as associate director—and starring Hall. Altman saw the production in LA and went backstage to propose first taking it to off-Broadway, where he directed its run at the Provincetown Playhouse, then shooting it as a film. The movie would eventually be made on the cheap at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where Altman was a visiting professor, and where he was given a women’s dorm to function as a studio, and access to cheap student labor.
At first Hall turned down
Secret Honor, intimidated by the thickets of text, but then had a decisive flash of insight into how to approach Nixon: “The thing is, the character’s got like six ideas going on all the time, and he can’t sort them out. He’s trying to say a number of things at the same time—many, if not all, that are contradictory.” For research he relied on reading Nixon’s memoirs, not wanting to be hemmed into an impersonation.
Years later he would remember the intimacy of the shoot: “They had a room for [Altman and myself] off the set. It had two single beds, side by side. They would send us off there when they were relighting. Bob and I spent a lot of time there in the semidarkness, talking about the next scene or talking about life in general. It was very helpful to that part of
Secret Honor history. I remember the intimacy of it and the importance of it. One time, one of us was depressed about what had just been shot. There was maybe twenty-four inches between us. One of us reached out to console the other. We held hands. That was pretty unusual.” He recalled, also, the physical toll of the performance: “Altman would do a take. Then he’d say, ‘That’s good. Want to do it again?’ I’d say, ‘I’m pretty tired.’ He’d say, ‘OK, let’s do another one.’ And we did long takes: fifteen, eighteen minutes—which in movies are unbelievable. Then he’d say, ‘You want to do another? Let’s do another.’ I normally weigh about 160 pounds; during the Nixon thing I went down to 127.”
