It must have been a strange, but wonderful, relationship, at least at the begnning. John Mitchell, a successful New York lawyer and Martha Mitchell, a feisty, rowdy blonde from Arkansas who fell into deep lust – and maybe love, too – the first time they met, in 1953, when both were married to other people. Four years later, they divorced their spouses, she in August and he in December. She obviously got custody of the pink Princess telephone.
And 11 days after John became single, they married.
That’s the background for "Martha Mitchell Calling," a bright, mostly entertaining play by Jodi Rothe, which opened on Friday at the Gaslight Theater as a the final 2008-09 production of the St. Louis Actors Studio. Glynis Bell and James Anthony are the principals, and the play will run through May 31.
John Mitchell not only left his wife, he also left his party, becoming a Republican at the urging of the blonde bombshell. He eventually met Richard Nixon, too, and after helping Nixon run a successful presidential campaign, he was named attorney general. Martha, chided by Pat Nixon for showing too much cleavage at a luncheon for the Cabinet, was not amused by the Republican antics, and her sense of outrage grew. So did her ability to eavesdrop on her husband’s phone calls and her knowledge of the phone numbers of a variety of reporters, led by Helen Thomas, the UPI reporter who is the dean of White House correspondents.
Martha developed a drinking problem, but she never lost her love for the telephone – "I’d rather give up gin than my pink Princess," she says at one point. Her sense of right and wrong was heightened by her time on the phone, and she also learned to do splendid imitations of some of John’s callers; her interpretations of both Nixons was right on, though her Henry Kissinger sounds a little like Jay Leno’s Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"If it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d be no Watergate," Nixon said later, and he may have been right.
Jodi Rothe’s play is strong in the first act, but it lessens in the second, partly because we know so much more about what happened, partly because the video clips work poorly in the theater. We all know what happened. so there is less drama, and putting the second scene after the intermission confuses the time frame and interrupts the dramatic flow. Bell is excellent as Martha and Anthony gets full power from his limited role. Lana Pepper directs stylishly.
At the Gaslight Theatre, through May 31.
-Joe