Playing with the Facts

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

The frontier between truth and fiction used to be a well-lit border, and anyone caught trying to cross it was severely punished. No longer. So many others are now romping in what used to be the press's own domain--contemporary history and the lives of current public figures--that it's hard to tell the truth without a score card, and no one is providing one.

ABC's 12 1/2-hour-long serial, Washington: Behind Closed Doors, is a fine example: it was called fiction (which helps avoid libel suits), but since it was loosely "based" on a novel by John Ehrlichman, who went from the White House to the jailhouse, part of the fun was seeing how he got even with his Washington colleagues. At least Washington stuck fairly close to its characters' recognizable attributes, unlike most of the schlocky bestselling novels of recent years that trade on the public's understanding that they are really about Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Onassis or Howard Hughes The viciousness of this double understanding in these novels is in the way real people can be assigned cheaply torrid love lives with little chance of legal redress.

Television, however, in its new fondness for "docu-dramas," is subject to special danger of another sort. People who go to a moviehouse expect to see fiction and accept the conventions of historical drama: no one is much worse off if everyone's image of Disraeli is George Arliss or if Gregory Peck romanticizes the legend of Douglas MacArthur. But, as a number of psychologists have pointed out, the television screen provides most people with their visual knowledge of real events, such as President Kennedy's assassination, so that truth and show-biz demands are bound to get mixed up when two networks (ABC and CBS) morbidly return to the scene of the crime this fall and mimic its actuality, with docudramas on Lee Harvey Oswald. Because people are more apt to spot a poor job of makeup than a perversion of the facts, historians worry about television's lopsided history lessons. Last year's Truman at Potsdam made out that his primary motive in dropping the A-bomb on Japan was not to end the war. In Truman's "own" words: "It is not Japan I'm trying to scare, but Russia."

Nobody really minds that Tolstoy put words in Napoleon's mouth long after the event; it is the use of this technique for contemporaries, or the recent dead, that raises problems. Now that Herman Wouk is converting his bestseller The Winds of War into a television series, he was asked by Daniel Schorr about the propriety of giving to actors impersonating Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin words that the real figures never uttered. "You have touched a very live nerve," Wouk replied. "I don't know if anyone has the answer." But some try to answer: one successful scriptwriter, David Rintels, when criticized for one of his scripts, protested, "I stuck to the record, except in intimate scenes where there was no record." You don't have to be O.J. Simpson to drive through such a hole. Networks, too, get pretty fatuous when they defend their truth bending. When a committee of scientists objected to the way the networks played up and glorified pseudo science in shows like NBC's Bermuda Triangle special, a network spokesman explained that it was put on by its entertainment division and had not been labeled an NBC News special! Was the viewer supposed to note the omission?

Novelists have been poaching on real life for some time and Truman Capote didn't invent a new genre, but only gave it a name, when he called his reportorial In Cold Blood a "nonfiction novel." Alex Haley called Roots a work of "faction," blending fact and fiction, but the distinction wasn't made all that clear on TV, embarrassing Haley deeply. Far more tricky legally is Robert Coover's new novel about the Rosenbergs, The Public Burning, where real-name living people (including Richard Nixon) are put into wildly improbable situations. If suits occur, it's not at all clear that the courts will give a novel the protection they give the press, against suits for libelous statements or invasion of privacy.

Presumably, novelists turned to fiction in the first place as an imaginative way to conjure up reality, for, as the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer says, "The facts are always less than what really happened." But many novelists now find truth not only stranger than fiction but easier to write; it takes less effort to embellish a character the reader already knows than to create a new character in the round.

Heightened truth, symbolic truth, fictional truth--all these new terms can be pretty upsetting to those who want the plain, unvarnished truth. But truth has its own complexity. Even in the most straight-arrow precincts of journalism--in newspaper city rooms, newsmagazine offices and television newsrooms, where facts are regarded as the inviolable raw material--it is recognized that facts don't speak for themselves. Note how all the professionals refer to their own necessary pattycaking of an event into narrative shape giving it emphasis and a beginning, middle and end, as a story.

There ought to be a truth-in-labeling law to separate truth and fiction. But who could write it, and who would pass it? Since there won't be any such law, everybody concerned--and TV docu-dramatists most of all--should be held more accountable for fat content and fact content, properly labeled.

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