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I remembered setting my VCR to tape "George Wallace" when it premiered on TNT in 1997. Unfortunately it didn't tape correctly so I never got to see it. When I learned of Cornelia's death I went to Netflix and found that it was available so I quickly put it at the top of my list.
Watching it turned out to be a big disappointment, not because the movie didn't accomplish its main purpose to tell the story of George Wallace, but because the portrayal of Cornelia was so distorted that I couldn't recognize her, there being nothing about Jolie's performance that reflected the person I had known only a few years before the events portrayed.
I had just finished Cornelia's book "C'nelia" which was so true to her that I felt as if I was listening to her telling the story, her soft, kind, unassuming manner as she reveal her failures along with her successes.
She was nothing like the "Cornelia" of Angelina, a woman with a rather loud and obnoxious stereotypical southern accent in place of Cornelia's very refined speech patterns, a flighty, rather empty headed, gold-digging, sex-obsessed woman out to take advantage of the governor as opposed to the woman I knew who knew how to make everyone comfortable, a vindictive woman trying to set a trap for her helpless, wheelchair bound, husband by taping his phone calls.
If the movie were being made today, I believe that Terri Hatcher who plays Susan Meyer on "Desperate Housewives" would be the perfect actress to play Cornelia, especially if she played her as Susan Meyer. Susan is a beautiful woman who has a mixture of self-confidence and doubt who is not afraid to try to move ahead but who never does so in a blatant manner.
I never met George Wallace, Lurleen Wallace, or Big Jim Folsom, Cornelia's uncle and two times governor of Alabama. But I've read a lot about them and saw George Wallace many times on TV. I could easily believe Gary Sinese, Mare Winningham, and Joe Don Baker in those roles. Surely neither Frankenheimer nor Jolie read Cornelia's book or, if they did, a decision was made to sex her up to add entertainment value.
There movie played fast and loose with a lot of the facts. I had no problem with the made-up character of Archie, the black prison inmate who was assigned to the governor's mansion and who stayed with Wallace to the end. (I have read that there was a black man who took care of him in his final days.)
But some of the other fudging was more disconcerting. For example, George is shown seeing Cornelia for the first time in 1955 at the governor's mansion when her uncle became governor for the second time. The little girl who played Cornelia in that scene looked all of about 10 whereas Cornelia during that period was around 16. It turns out that the scene actually took place in 1947 when Big Jim won his first term as governor.
At the scene of the rally at which George was shot, Cornelia is shown on the stage singing and very much out front whereas in real life she was off to the side and hadn't even been introduced to the crowd. She was talking to a woman who had come to see Wallace. What I objected to here was the attempt to show that Cornelia was something of singer and very involved with her husband's campaign. In fact, George almost left Alabama without her that morning because she was running a little slower than he thought she should be. Her real activities on that day were much more interested than the made-up activities of the movies. The movie made her look as if she was a pushy, out-front person when, in fact, while she knew how to be out front, she certainly wasn't pushy.
The scene in the hotel at the Democratic national convention in Miami where she tries to take George's mind off his horrible physical state by making sexy maneuvers around his wheelchair, revealing his pent-up sexual feelings since the time of the shooting, and resulting in George falling out of the wheelchair seems to have been based on a night several weeks before the convention when Cornelia wanted to get him out of the hospital and spend some time alone with him. The book clearly hinted of a pent-up sexual desire but her description of the outcome was quite discreet and apparently satisfying to both of them. In the movie, she seemed to be putting her sexual desires before his well-being.
The movie suggested several times that Cornelia may have been getting cozy with one of the state troopers assigned to protect her and would lead us to believe that this is what led to George's jealousy and to Cornelia's taping of his phone calls, the taping which certainly did happen.
But I know from my time with her and from her book that she considered marriage to be very important and, from the book, that she seemed to be giving everything she had to try to make the best of the very difficult situation that resulted from the shooting. In her book she tells about turning down an invitation by Phil Everly for a trip to New York when she was still single because there wouldn't be a chaperon. Cornelia was a devoted Christian and tried to live by Christian principles.
What to me was the most distorted scene was the movie's depiction of how George and Cornelia got together, supposedly meeting on a boat around which Cornelia had been water skiing, and which gave them impression that Cornelia was pursuing him in a very sexually orient way, was completely wrong. Cornelia certainly was a professional water skier and she certainly was interested in maybe becoming Mrs. George Wallace but the courtship took place over a series of visits to George's house by Cornelia in which they talked a lot about things they had in common.
The movie episode concerning the tapes Cornelia secretly made of George's phone calls absolutely ignores what seems to be a widely accepted notion that the tapes contained sexually oriented conversations that Wallace had with other women. When Wallace sued for divorce in 1978 more than a year after the tape incident, Cornelia had hoped the tapes would help her get a reasonable settlement, after all she wasn't the one who wanted the divorce. She learned in court that the tapes had been destroyed and fainted knowing that there was no way she could make her case, ending up with a paltry $75,000.
In 1981 George married a young singer, who had been on some of the tapes, and who he divorced in 1987.
Toward the end of his life in September of 1998, less than a year after the movie, he reportedly ask Cornelia to remarry him to "make things right" but her sons objected and she turned down his offer.
To paraphrase the late Lloyd Bentsen, renowned senator and vice presidential candidate on the Dukakis ticket, "Angelina, you're no Cornelia". |
