LETTERS TO JACKIE: THE FILM SEPTEMBER 17, 2013 PAGE 1

Transcription

1 PAGE 1 TOM PUTNAM: So before I introduce our moderator, Liz Walker, I wanted to just allow us all to do two important recognitions. First, let's have the film's director and the primary creative genius, Bill Couturié, stand and take a bow. [applause] And second, I wanted to thank the American Film Institute and especially the Executive Producer of Letters to Jackie, Christy Cashman, not only for supporting this film, but also for helping us this evening to simulcast this entire event to over 50 theatres across the country. So Ms. Cashman, could you please stand so we can recognize you. [applause] And now I'll turn the program over to Liz Walker, our moderator. LIZ WALKER: Thank you very much. Thank you. I must say that, first of all, thank you all for your contribution to this powerful piece of work. I have to do a disclaimer. I was in the 7 th grade. We're all thinking where we were, because we all remember. I was in the 7 th grade in Little Rock, Arkansas in a very hard place, in a desegregated school in the midst of a war. And when President Kennedy was killed, I just walked out of my classroom and went home. I don't think I ever forgave this country for that, quite frankly. And it was only in watching your film that I realized that we all shared this pain that for me was very personal, as I saw it. I know that must seem so odd, but as a child, I thought that was just my pain, and then I shut it down. So in the midst of the pain of this film, I thank you for the hope that's there. [applause] My first question is to both Ellen, for the research and pulling all these letters together and the book, and Bill: What drew you to this project? I'll start with you, Ellen. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Well, I often tell this story that I came down to the Kennedy Library to do research on another book and I stumbled across this collection of letters. I had wanted to try to do a project that kind of peeled back the layers and went back to the moment of the early 1960s to recover a sense of what John F. Kennedy and his Presidency had meant to the American

2 PAGE 2 people. I remembered the condolence letters; I remember seeing Mrs. Kennedy on television I was just 11 years old thanking the country for this outpouring. I asked the archivists here if they had any letters. They did. And from the moment that I opened the first box and the first file folder, I realized that I had stumbled across a truly extraordinary collection of material that was deeply revealing. I felt as if I was looking at the beating heart of the country. I read more and became all the more convinced that the letters should be brought to light. LIZ WALKER: Absolutely. And Bill? BILL COUTURIÉ: You know, Liz, it's funny. I was raised in Southern California and I was just a little white surfer boy. But our stories are so similar, because I was a freshman in high school. It was in a conservative part of Southern California. I was in PE, wrestling. When the news came over the PA, like half the boys in the PE class cheered which was shocking to me. We were kids, we were surfers and stuff. Politics hadn't really raised its head in my mind. When those guys cheered, I said, I guess I must be a Democrat. [laughter] So that was when I knew. I mean, it literally changed my life. So when I saw Ellen's book, I was so moved by it that I felt that there was a movie there. LIZ WALKER: You had all of these letters. My god, you had 800,000 letters? How did it get down to ELLEN FITZPATRICK: I actually restricted myself to 15,000. [laughter] Those were the letters from Americans that had survived several different things that had cut the collection down by the time it arrived at the Kennedy Library. But it was interesting to read them. Out of the 15,000, something like I think I took digital photographs of 3,000, and from those I sort of got it down to around 500. And I knew my editor wasn't going to publish a multi-volume study here, so from there I think I got it down to about 210.

3 PAGE 3 What was interesting was that when Bill and I first met and had lunch and we were talking about the film and what he wanted to do, he had settled on some of the same letters that I would have picked -- not all, but some of the same. It was interesting to see that meeting of the minds. LIZ WALKER: Before I put the names of the guests tonight together with the film, the letters that touched me most are these three letters. And that's the absolute truth. Gabrielle, your statement that John F. Kennedy gave us this irrevocable sense of hope, I think it was something like that. Just tell me, was this a letter that took a long time to write? GABRIELLE GIDEON: No, it was instantaneous. It was my reflection on a fair and just man that was leading our country to greater equality. I'm an immigrant, an escapee of Nazi Germany. I grew up in Shanghai, and America had become my home. I lost my dad in 1959, and the aspirations of President Kennedy were my aspirations for myself and for my new country. LIZ WALKER: It's just so moving, so moving. I think your mic is all right. Did you think that this would get all the way to this point now? Did you think that Mrs. Kennedy would actually see the letter? Did it matter? Was it that personal for you? GABRIELLE GIDEON: I'm not sure that it mattered. It mattered that I wrote what I felt. It was the first time I had done that, and I have not done it since. And there were many times that I have wanted to. LIZ WALKER: Really. GABRIELLE GIDEON: Yes. LIZ WALKER: Janis, your letter was so clear: "I know how it is to suffer. Mrs. Kennedy, if you would sing this song" [laughter] It was just so specific. Tell me how you got there.

4 PAGE 4 JANIS HIRSCH: At the time, I had broken my hip. Now you break your hip and you're on Dancing with the Stars the next night. I broke my hip and I was in one of those giant casts, and so there was a lot of time that I was alone. My mother had my sister and my father to take care of, and so I was alone. And I used to listen to a lot of musicals. When I was in the hospital as a little kid having surgery, my mother and I would read plays out loud. I'd listen on the record player, I'd listen to musicals. Because visiting hours were two hours long, and my mother had to go back to New Jersey. So they got me through a lot. And I just thought, okay, you've got a lot to go through there, do this. Listen to Damn Yankees. [laughter] How she didn't get on the train, go to New Jersey, punch me in the face as hard as she could and then go back and continue mourning, I'll never know. [laughter] LIZ WALKER: Tell us where you were. JANIS HIRSCH: I was actually in the hospital when I heard. Then the day I came home from the hospital, everybody was watching television. I think it was the day before the President's funeral. And so I was sorely put out that the entire neighborhood wasn't out watching me. I just moved in, and my parents moved a little black-and-white TV in the bedroom and I watched it from there. LIZ WALKER: All these years you look back and you see a letter, and you think about JANIS HIRSCH: Oh, my god. LIZ WALKER: You see your letter and you think about what happened then. Tell me what went through your mind when you saw the film. JANIS HIRSCH: To connect with my 13-year-old self, first of all I was appalled that I was such a bad speller and still am; that I had the gall to say, "When you're blue, listen to musicals." But to connect with it You want to help somebody. It's a kid. When you're crying and your

5 PAGE 5 child is there and they give you their blankie because they think that's what's going to help them, that's what I connected with. As a parent, I connected with me as a kid. LIZ WALKER: Patricia, you used a letter that President Kennedy sent to you, quoted, when your husband was lost. So again, to think about that, to put the depth of that into a letter to Mrs. Kennedy, tell me about the process. Where were you when you heard? PATRICIA KELLEHER: I was in Washington, DC when I heard about Jack Kennedy being assassinated. But I think my reason for writing to her were two: When I was a student, I went with a group to interview Jack Kennedy in his Senate office; he was running for President. So that was my introduction to politics, and, of course, he was my candidate and we all campaigned for him. But I think what I recognized in him at that time and during his Presidency was his optimism and hope. And it wasn't based on any naiveté, it was based on his own struggle with life, the challenges that he had in losing siblings, being in the war, and some of his own health issues. I think the second reason was when I saw Mrs. Kennedy's face on TV, that stricken, stunned face, that was me for those seven months after the death of my husband. LIZ WALKER: It was the intimacy of all the letters that gets to us. It's not just saying I'm sorry; it's really coming from our hearts as a people. Bill, the other thing that really touched me was this video I hadn't seen. I consider myself knowing all things Kennedy, but I hadn't seen a lot of this video ever before. BILL COUTURIÉ: It's right here in this building. LIZ WALKER: Really. BILL COUTURIÉ: Well, a lot of it is. The home movies certainly are here. Something that attracted me to the letters is that there's this sense of how we stereotype people and put them in

6 PAGE 6 their little niches and in reading the letters, you find that that really doesn't work because people turn out to be individuals and turn out to have their own feelings. I mean, I love the letters that you think you know what this guy is going to say, and then he says something completely different, like Chris's letter, George T. Davis. Now, here's a guy from the South. You expect him to be prejudiced and George Wallace-like and, in fact, he was totally different. Is that what attracted you to it, Chris? CHRIS COOPER: Well, I was going to say, I was particularly pleased that you asked me to look at these two letters, because BILL COUTURIÉ: That was a no-brainer, of course. CHRIS COOPER: because they very much mirrored my life. Some of it's a little embarrassing, but there were ethnic slurs in my family. There were racist attitudes. And thank goodness, I was in 6 th grade, 11 years old when the President was assassinated, but I remember specifically in 2 nd grade, at seven years old, one day in class I said to myself, looking over the classroom with Italians, Jews, Catholics, and I asked myself, "Are the things I'm hearing from these adults in my community that I live with, are they true?" And I came to the conclusion that they weren't. They were wrong. Kennedy helped me realize that I was right. LIZ WALKER: So when you were reading this letter from George Davis, who has changed his mind and who is not the man that he started being, and you as a child changed your mind, how emotional was that for you? CHRIS COOPER: Well, I mean, that's part of the business. This is what I do as an actor. I'm looking for this kind of material [laughter], if there's a parallel in this character, this George T. Davis. And what an actor has to bring to anything are only three things as far as I'm concerned:

7 PAGE 7 his imagination, his own life experience, and research. Yes, this letter, these two letters of George Davis, I felt a kinship with. I felt many things that he had felt. BILL COUTURIÉ: In the film business, it's not meant sacrilegiously at all, but we all tend to be very superstitious because things can either go well or bad, and they do both. We refer to the movie god. On days when things go well, we say the movie god smiled down on us, and then there are those other days which we won't talk about. But happening to send the George T. Davis letter to Chris and having that connection there, which of course I had no clue, I just said I think Chris will be great. Then it turns out there was this bond and he brought so much to it. That's a day the movie god smiled down on the movie. So thank you, Chris. LIZ WALKER: Ellen, in the book you talk about the idea of taking all of these hundreds of thousands of letters and having to put some order there, so that they could be put up. Tell us a little bit about how they did that. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Well, that was interesting because the very first day that I came to the Library and began my work in the archives and that's a moment to just pause and say this is really the most wonderful place to do research with a very dedicated team of archivists. I think Bill found this to be so in his work on the film. So that was a great gift, to have this kind of assistance, particularly when I was running up every ten minutes and grabbing one of them and saying, "You have to come over here and read this letter. This is unbelievable," and they're busy working with thousands of documents. And it became to clear to me that they didn't appreciate the interruptions, but I just couldn't help myself. So by the time I left the Library on that very first day, I already knew what the structure of the book would be. It was clear that a certain number of letters were talking about November 22 nd and where they were, how they heard the news, and how they reacted. Then another set of letters seemed to be more about reflections on the society itself, the nature of our problems as a country,

8 PAGE 8 their thoughts about the Presidency, their thoughts about John F. Kennedy's leadership some positive and some negative. The third category that they sort of roughly fell into were letters about grief and loss. These were, after all, condolence letters. Most people, it turns out -- at least in this setting -- had tried to use their own experience with grief and loss to comfort Mrs. Kennedy. They told their own stories of losses they had sustained them and how they came to grips with those losses. So the structure was very, very simple. The ordering of the letters within it was more complicated. LIZ WALKER: Was it difficult for you and I'll ask the two of you because you had so many different kinds of letters and choices was it difficult in choosing, or did you just kind of go to this because this felt like the right one. Bill? BILL COUTURIÉ: Well, when you do what I do, you've got to go with your gut. So a lot of it was just, "I like that." There wasn't a whole lot of conscious thought, which is good because if you'd really debated it, I'd still be in there trying to figure it out. The other thing, though, is I wanted to tell a story with a chronology and a beginning, middle and end. I knew that if the whole movie was about Kennedy's assassination, we'd all have to open a vein. So I was trying to find letters that talked about things from his Presidency. The other thing is you talked about hope. I was really trying to figure out is there a story in here that's just not so dark that people are going to hate the movie. I didn't go into the movie or into the start of the movie expecting it to have anything in particular to do with civil rights. And then I kept finding these letters that talked about civil rights. Then I found Merlene Snider's letter. Here's this poor woman who's literally the wife of a coalminer in West Virginia, with no education to speak of, who wrote what I consider to be this brilliant letter where she actually put it right on paper: "He died so that his bills could live." That's sort of that light-bulb-over-your-head moment when I said, Oh, my god, there is some hope in this story. Because it's true, Kennedy had dragged his feet on civil rights, as we all

9 PAGE 9 know, because Bobby and the brain trust said, "We can't win this, we're going to lose the Southern Democrats, so let's put this off until the second term and then we'll deal with it." Even though he had campaigned with the civil rights platform, or at least part of the platform, and he had tried to get the Civil Rights Act passed and he had failed. So to have him die, to have the guy who becomes President be LBJ, who was the master manipulator of the men and women of Congress -- although not many women in those days -- and then for him to get it passed in seven months, largely using Kennedy's death as a wedge to drive it in there, to me, was hopeful. I think what inspired me about Kennedy when I was a kid was he had hope for the future. Remember, you see in the movie, we were in the middle of the Cold War. I mean, I remember not fire drills, but nuclear bomb drills, where they would take us out of class, put us on a bus, and send us home so we could die with Mom and Dad. I lived in this fancy part of town where our school was. I was the last bus stop and I was 45 minutes from school, and they said it's going to come in 20. [laughter] And I said, "I'm not going to die on a damn school bus." So we were young and very wet behind the ears. Some of us boys and girls said, "Let's stay here and make out." [laughter] So that was my plan. ELLEN FITZPATRICK: Always the better solution! BILL COUTURIÉ: I was 13, so it was on my mind. [laughter] But my point is that it was a time when we were scared. Remember the "Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye, Duck and cover? [laughter] Here was a guy that came along that gave me hope that maybe I'll live to be a grownup. So I loved the guy. I was thrilled when I found this way that I felt with some Because again, it's not me saying this, but the people who wrote letters 50 years ago saying this. So I was happy about that.

10 PAGE 10 LIZ WALKER: I just remember going through that phase in my life; I don't remember having the sex life that you had. [laughter] I remember being angry. BILL COUTURIÉ: I was thinking of a sex life; I wasn't actually having one. [laughter] LIZ WALKER: But there was just struggle. Everywhere you looked, you were part of it. That was my life growing up. And to see myself fit in to this world of people who were going somehow was what gave me hope. How about the three of you? Looking at yourself fitting in to the way Bill has kind of structured this, looking back on that time, is there a surprise for you, that it was as awesome as it was? Any reactions to being a part of this whole thing? JANIS HIRSCH: He was young. She was beautiful. They were both babies. They had little kids who looked like the kids in my neighborhood if the kids in my neighborhood looked like that. So you identified. He was real. He was more real than a TV Dad. I believed in him more than I believed in Ward Cleaver and June with her pearls. Jackie was cool. She had the pony named Macaroni for her daughter. How great is that? I was too young to know what politically was really going on in the country. I knew the bad things and they weren't letting black kids go to school. But that really didn't sink in as much as just seeing he'd be a fun Dad. LIZ WALKER: The loss of innocence, I think, for so many. For all of us there was this loss of innocence. Maybe not for you, Patricia. PATRICIA KELLEHER: Well, I think what I got from the book and from the documentary was there was a transference of hope, and it was collective in the letters. It was a compassionate community of people that I think are still very much a part of our culture. Maybe we it these days, but in our day you wrote it with pen and paper.

11 PAGE 11 But also, there was that sense of -- and maybe that's from the poem, Wordsworth I think, "We take strength in what remains behind." That's what I felt in the letters and the documentary, that there was strength left behind. And maybe for us, Kennedy was that symbol. Or for me, he was that symbol of hope. So we still have it. LIZ WALKER: You're still hopeful. PATRICIA KELLEHER: It's still there. LIZ WALKER: It's still there? PATRICIA KELLEHER: Yeah. LIZ WALKER: Even though something in all of us died, as one of the letters said, then I think, if nothing more than in a sense -- which is a lot -- the hope is still there? PATRICIA KELLEHER: The hope is still there. To me, he was symbolic of that because his own life experience, he suffered the loss of his siblings. He was in a war. He must have seen terrible things. Yet, he exuded this optimism, that it's about the future. Let us look that way. LIZ WALKER: Any thoughts, Gabrielle, on that? GABRIELLE GIDEON: Well, my thought is of one of hope, that he represented hope. When I see the film and I think of our country today, what would he feel that 50 years later we have an African American Presidential family that represents a Kennedy-ish culture. BILL COUTURIÉ: One of the things that I was very much aware of when I was studying the letters is the degree to which that era parallels today. We have a young President, beautiful wife, two beautiful kids. Half the country loves them, half the country hates them. The incredible

12 PAGE 12 partisanship going on. Yet, still, there's this sense of hope that we can somehow pull together as a country and remember that there's more things that tie us together than tear us apart. So I certainly was aware of those parallel things going on. I was hoping that, again, if we can look back on this tragedy and come back out of it with hope, that maybe we can look at our current tragic situation and find a way out of this mess. GABRIELLE GIDEON: At the end of the day, really, our hope is in the American people. And that always comes back to us, that our people are wonderful and special, and that is what gives our country hope. LIZ WALKER: Chris, do you have any thoughts on that? CHRIS COOPER: Sure. I remain in my 11-year-old head with the memories. I think there was an instance in the documentary here where I did feel it at the time. I'm looking at the inauguration and there's previous President Eisenhower, and there was age in that man and what he had been through. And I did get a sense a new generation was going to lead this country. Just a beautiful couple, and I felt hope and I felt proud. I felt proud. BILL COUTURIÉ: One other thing that's very apparent from the letters is Kennedy fought in World War II. Obviously, he came home, he got married, he had kids, he went to work. His work was far different than most of ours, but it was astounding reading the letters the degree to which common Americans felt a kinship with him. I think that is shown in the letters. They're so intimate, they're so familiar with Jackie and talking about him that people felt like they knew them. They felt like they were experiencing this as well, which is the Henry Gonzales letter, the Mexican American. Again, that was the perfect letter that crystallized what Americans felt so far as the kinship they had with the President. Again, to talk about my thing with the movie god, everything in this film is actual footage from the period. There's not one frame of reenactment. However, when I got this letter comparing the two families and I knew I had this great footage of Kennedy home movies, I said, Okay, I'm

13 PAGE 13 going to have to make fake home movies that makes this parallel clear. Henry died a long time ago and so I called his daughter and one of the questions I always ask people, as they well know, Do you have any photographs? Would you loan them to us, please? And then the one that I always ask but they always said no is, And do you by any chance have any home movies? And Tara, his daughter said, "Oh, Dad was an amateur cinematographer. We've got boxes of home movies." [laughter] And I went, thank you! Then they came and lo and behold, they were I mean, that is divine intervention, I'm telling you, folks. Not just the fact he had home movies, but they were exactly the same as the Kennedy home movies. I was a happy camper that day. [laughter] LIZ WALKER: Well, I think, as I said, this has been cathartic for me personally. I am a little low key, just because I have to absorb it all. Thank you for this unique look at history, my friend. Thank you all for your contributions to our country and to our own healing, and we can look ahead with hope. Thank you for being here. [applause] THE END