THE ROOSEVELTS: Twelve years on, did the series change, or did I?

 

After hugely enjoying the first few episodes, I did finally watch the end of the 2013 PBS series, The Roosevelts, and oh it was hard going. Very well done, but tedious in places, and sort of depressing due to the heavy subject matter and what happened to all of them. Both TR and FDR died at around age 60, completely used up physically and mentally, and it was hard to watch. 

I never liked FDR and saw him as pretentious and superficial, and Eleanor, though you’re supposed to admire her, has an “ADMIRE ME” sign on her, and her querulous voice and matronly print dresses and constant, Roosevelt-esque smiling just irritated me. (They all had a smile that never seemed to leave their faces, replicated a generation or so later by the Kennedys, with their piano keys always on show). Meryl Streep did a parody of her, a Rich Little impression rather than an interpretation.

The first six hours (SIX HOURS!) were the best, and should have been a separate docuseries on TR. It would have been superb as a freestanding series, but it ranged too far and got bogged down. It was as if something changed halfway through, as if other people dominated the research, or the clips, or whatever. Changing horses mid-stream, as TR would no doubt put it.

So it was a bit of a trudge, but it was still better-made than almost any other doc series I've ever seen. I’m still interested in TR, and now have two other books that I hope don’t rip him apart or make him – incredibly! – DULL. The biographer I didn’t like (Brands) was used a lot in the doc, which surprised me and made me wonder if he also wrote other books about them. Maybe he liked FDR, and admired Eleanor as you are required to.

I suppose they helped save the world, etc., but there was every bit as much corruption and deception then, only done as a matter of course. TR  hated it and was the only one who attempted to flush it out of the bushes. The rest of them went along with it because there was something in it for them - maybe, in fact, everything. 

But it remains to be seen if I can get through 2 more long(ish) books about TR, if he even remotely resembles the figure I like so much. Like, for being a badass, a paradox, a historical anomaly, etc. And fierce! I loved the grin with bared teeth, the "Bully!" and "Dee-lighted" (which were not even metioned in the Brands!), and I also liked his tenderness with his wives, children, etc. though one son killed himself and one died in wartime. 

So. Now I have a long-awaited biography of Toulouse-Lautrec, but it’s challenging in a whole different way, SO detailed I wonder why on earth it all needs to be there. Surely the author can say “his mother took him to one health spa after another, with no results”, rather than recounting EVERY single health spa, EVERY useless treatment, etc. But it is interesting to see how positive he was, how almost sprightly, a satirist who wrote funny, pointed letters with tiny ink drawings in the margins, and arrogant in a way that was still kind of endearing.  And I see virtually no self-pity in a man who had every reason to  live in a state of despair. 

This contrasts wildly with Jose Ferrer's portrayal of  a lonely, cynical, embittered genius in Moulin Rouge (which, by the way, I love, and not just for Jose Ferrer's voice which is the sexiest thing I have ever heard!) He was criticized for walking with shoes on his knees, but facially he was pretty close. But who knew about the rest of him?

It was never a mystery what he looked like. There are actually a lot of photos of Lautrec, mostly in weird costumes - clowns, Arab sheiks, women (he loved drag). The pictures are charmingly droll, sort of like walking cartoons or caricatures, and he knew this and even traded on it. He ultimately destroyed himself, of course, but sheer physical and mental pain may have been behind it, burdened with a body that never did work due to what amounted to generations of incest. 

I believe the Roosevelts, with their habit of marrying cousins, suffered the same thing – bluebloods who “married in” with unknown consequences, including mental illness, alcoholism, and early death. Eleanor was not under remotely that kind of strain, and lived into her 70s, but as a figure loved by the whole world, she did not need to actually do anything, just make appearances and shake hands with the right people, and stand there and receive ovations and cheers. She was a nice old lady, homely, dowdy, hesitant in speech, which made her somehow approachable, but she was no more a figure of the people than the other Roosevelts, who were all wealthy, snobbish aristocrats who stooped to save the world. 

I never thought I'd see this again!!

 

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History

(Click on the link to watch!) I was astonished and deeee-lighted to find this entire series on Internet Archive! There are only fragments of it on YouTube, and a confusing array of chopped-up pieces on Dailymotion, so this was buried treasure, unearthed at last.  I LOVED this series when I first saw it on PBS in 2014 (it's yet another Ken Burns masterpiece), but it was never shown again. It is fourteen hours long, the most ambitious thing Burns has ever done, and by far the best. And it never seems too long or tedious - in fact, I didn't want it to end.

So what do I love about it? Everything. From the superb gallery of  photos and archival film clips, to the meticulous research, to just the right amount of commentary from the inevitable historians, and - most of all - to the superb narration, there is not a false note in it anywhere.

Bad narration, which is nearly universal on YouTube now (most of it AI-generated) is the bane of my existence, but in this case, the main narrator, not to mention the dead-ringer, right-on voices of Teddy, FDR and Eleanor (the last voiced by no less than Meryl Streep!) are so note-perfect that it's no surprise the music is sensitively chosen and utterly appropriate as well. I begin weeping when they feature Aaron Copland at his most tender and majestic, the heroic Richard Strauss (Death and Transfiguration, which is now my theme song), and sublime quotes from Stephen Foster.

It all works. But what was most gratifying to me was watching the first part again, and far from having my usual reaction to something I used to love and now can't fathom, I think I loved it all the more.  I've started reading more about the Roosevelt dynasty, but none of it is more poetic and hard-hitting than this series, which I honestly thought I would never see again.

Comes at a time when I am still feeling pretty rotten at times. Having supposedly dodged the bullet with my surgery, now I am not so sure. "Things" are showing up in my x-rays and blood tests, and I am more than concerned. I will be seeing a hemotologist, which made no sense until I finally clicked with the fact that I had to have a blood  transfusion in the hospital (why?). And I also might be seeing a nephrologist, a kidney specialist, because my poor old ageing kidneys might be out of whack as well. In the hospital, they found a spot on my lung which terrified me, though the followup x-ray seems to have indicated it was resolved. But my doctor is not so sure. So, more tests, more specialists, more trips to the lab.

I am trying to convince myself, and sometimes I even seem to believe it, that the surgery fixed everything and I am now back to full and vibrant health. But once they gut you like that, you're never quite the same, and I feel it almost every day.

I don't want to overshare online, but it gets lonely sometimes, and this blog is supposed to be more personal than, say, Facebook or YouTube (which I am now "off" in many ways, just fed up and not wanting to keep feeding something nobody watches anyway). I feel the same about the blog: I do post links on Facebook sometimes, but I am not sure why I bother.  I am convinced nobody really reads them. They are, however, there for my own reference, so that is something.

Something, but I am not sure what.

So when I find something as superb as this series, whole and complete, and in magnificent HD, it geos a long way (though not far enougth)  to make me feel this is all worthwhile. But I had a thought at the grocery store today, when I could not lift a five-pound bag of sugar into the cart: the natural limits of a human lifespan used to be "threescore and ten" - and by that reckoning, I'm already one year over the limit.