Who is the greatest First Lady?
The role of first lady of the United States is an anachronism, a throwback to a time when a good wife stayed at home in the shadow of her husband and kept her mouth shut. Hillary Clinton tried to break the mould, leading the White House’s health care task force when Bill Clinton became president. The blowback was so severe that every first lady since has learned a cautionary lesson: stick to warm and fuzzy maternal causes, decorate the White House at Christmas, don’t let them know you’ve got a mind of your own.
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The current First Lady, Dr Jill Biden, continues to teach, but her public presence is defined by traditional agendas, primarily helping military families. Michelle Obama’s programme to prevent childhood obesity, as safe and maternal as causes get, was still attacked by Barack Obama’s political opponents. No loving wife wants to harm her husband politically, but that may cost a spouse her own identity. It certainly limits her goals. Is being first lady a gift or a curse?
Those dilemmas are at the heart of the sometimes eye-opening, often disappointing series The First Lady, which dramatises how three notable presidential wives tried to escape the role’s cookie-cutter expectations. Occasionally they succeeded.
Just as The Crown imagines the private lives and conversations of the Royal Family, The First Lady fictionalises these wives’ behind-the-scenes choices, but with less bite and with clunky dialogue. Eleanor Roosevelt, played with poise and depth by Gillian Anderson, had a radio broadcast, a newspaper column and a political identity of her own, advocating for women’s equality and civil rights. She brought the first lady’s role into the 20th Century, only for it to recede after her tenure. Betty Ford used her own breast cancer diagnosis to raise awareness of the disease while in the White House and later founded a now-famous Betty Ford Center for drug and alcohol treatment in California after her own recovery. Michelle Pfeiffer gives a remarkable performance as Ford, capturing her wit, strength and vulnerability. But in a misbegotten storyline, Viola Davis turns Michelle Obama into a cartoon. In a one-note performance – fierce – she pushes the idea of an idealistic woman so far over the top that, improbably, Michelle seems to be her husband’s conscience.
The series begins with scenes of the women having their official portraits painted, a blunt signal that it is aiming to go behind the images. The three stories are juxtaposed throughout the 10 episodes, each capturing the heroines at similar points in their lives. One looks back at them as young women, played by different actresses, with the most surprising strand showing the younger Betty Ford (Kristine Froseth) studying dance with Martha Graham and divorcing her abusive first husband. Another finds them as their husbands are about to take office, and so on through to their post-White House years.
Eleanor Roosevelt has been a US icon for nearly a century, and the story of her marriage to Franklin Delano Roosevelt comes filtered through layers of history. Eleanor’s accomplishments, from the Depression into World War Two and beyond, are treated matter-of-factly here, as if checking off a list. Among the lesser-known acts depicted, she pressured her husband to get visas for war refugees, and held press conferences for women reporters only, at a time when women reporters were scarce.
But the series works best when delving into Eleanor’s fragile emotions. Anderson displays wrenching disappointment and a shattered sense of self when Eleanor discovers love letters to Franklin (Kiefer Sutherland) from her own secretary, Lucy Mercer (Maria Dizzia). Years later, when Eleanor begins an affair with the journalist Lorena Hickock (Lily Rabe), Anderson reveals how deeply important it is for Eleanor to feel loved after so many years of loneliness and insecurity. Hickock encourages Eleanor to continue to have her own voice. “You have an audience, your audience, your [newspaper] columns and the most powerful man in the country. Use it.” It’s a leaden bit of dialogue, but a shrewd guide to the way political spouses can turn the limelight to their advantage.
Gillian Anderson plays Eleanor Roosevelt (Credit: Showtime)
Susanne Bier (The Night Manager, The Undoing) directs the entire series and gives each heroine’s story a subtly different look. The Roosevelt sections have the burnished glow of a period piece. The Obama years are crisp and vivid, like looking out of a window. The Ford sections have a pastel, 1970s colour palette.
Betty Ford, in the most dynamic of the stories, is presented as flawed but entirely sympathetic. Turning her personal tragedies into valuable public health issues, she may have made a difference in more American lives than any other first lady in history. With cringeworthy foreshadowing, the first instalment catches her mixing a cocktail at home, months before Gerald Ford (Aaron Eckhart) becomes Richard Nixon’s vice president. Over the years prescription pills for a pinched nerve add to her problems. But her strength comes through when, shortly after her husband becomes president, she insists on making her cancer diagnosis public, urging women to get mammograms at a time when cancer was often a word merely whispered.
In the White House, she fights for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, and tangles with Donald Rumsfeld (Derek Cecil), Ford’s chief of staff and Dick Cheney (Rhys Wakefield), Rumsfeld’s deputy, who try to keep her on the side lines. Pfeiffer’s looks in reaction to them are scathing. And when Betty’s family stages an intervention after the White House years, there is raw hurt on her face.
Then there are the Obama sections. Oof. Davis scrunches up her face and contorts her mouth so often it becomes a distracting attempt at impersonation. The series depicts Michelle Obama’s career as a lawyer and an administrator doing community outreach at a Chicago hospital. But the show’s answer to the big question – what does a Princeton and Harvard-educated woman do when she’s asked to live in her husband’s shadow? – is to have the first lady hector the president on issues like gay rights and even race. You’d hardly know that Barack Obama (O-T Fagbenle) is a pretty intelligent, idealistic guy himself.
This Michelle tends to her White House kitchen garden, as she did in real life. Behind the scenes the fictional Michelle is constantly going into battle, with her husband’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel (Michael Aronov), and later with Hillary Clinton (Kate Burton), when Michelle is asked to campaign for her in 2020. Clinton appears briefly not as a model for a post-first lady career, but as a punching bag. Michelle angrily confronts Clinton face to face about things she said about her then-opponent, Barack, in the 2008 presidential campaign. This seems meant to make Michelle appear principled and tough-minded, but instead it makes her look politically naive and petulant.
The concept for the series is to have more seasons with different first ladies, and there are many less than obvious possibilities. In the early 19th Century, Dolly Madison was a famous hostess who helped President James Madison by bringing politicians of all parties to the White House. Rosalynn Carter, now 94, sat in on cabinet meetings and by all accounts was an important advisor to Jimmy Carter. Influence is not quite the same as power, though, a fact the show, in its determination to make a case for the first ladies, doesn’t always acknowledge. The real Michelle Obama has. As she wrote in her 2018 memoir, Becoming: “Tradition called for me to provide a gentle kind of light, flattering the president with my devotion, flattering the nation primarily by not challenging it.” She learned, though, how to use her platform to ‘”direct the American gaze” to her causes. If only the series were as smart as that.
The First Lady premieres in the US on Showtime on 17 April.
★★★☆☆
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