“Someone has to be pretty fascinating, pretty enigmatic, pretty Nixonian to keep one fascinated for 28 3/4 hours.”
So says Sir David Frost about President Nixon in this CNN article (with accompanying video clip). Frost also discusses his visit to San Clemente with Caroline Cushing:
“For 20 minutes at his house … my girlfriend and I saw a carefree Nixon,” [Frost] recalled. “For this 20 minutes, the curtain just lifted,” and Nixon showed them a guest room where Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev stayed, brought out caviar he’d been sent by the Shah of Iran and asked for a Henry Kissinger impression. “He was really carefree for 20 minutes, and then, just towards the end … the screen came across again.”
Readers who saw Frost/Nixon, onstage and on screen, will recall that this visit is portrayed in both play and film, minus the impression of Dr. Kissinger, which, from the way this paragraph is phrased, appears to be something that RN asked either Sir David or Ms. Cushing to do. (A woman imitating Dr. Kissinger? This may sound improbable to younger readers, but believe me, in the 1970s it would sometimes happen if a party lasted long enough.)
The article also refers to the use of RN’s “I’m saying when the president does it, that means it is not illegal” line in the film. Here I need to make a correction. In two previous posts I said that Peter Morgan’s play used the line in the context in which it was spoken in the actual interviews, during a discussion of the “Huston plan,” and that the film inserted it into a discussion of the events after the Watergate break-in. I’ve since checked my copy of the play as it was published by Faber in 2006 and found that the play used the line just as the film does.