Stories and Histories

Given the presence of a reality television star in the current White House, publishers have found a lot of traction in some remembrances of the actor who worked there 35 or so years ago. Former press aide Mark Weinberg joins the crowd with one of the more interesting views in Movie Nights With the Reagans. His memoir covers the Reagan White House practice of watching movies together on Fridays or Saturdays (sometimes both) when the president and his wife were staying at Camp David on the weekend.

Weinberg selects several movies that the First Couple and their staff members watched over the course of Reagan's two terms. Some of them were contemporary movies, such as Ferris Beuller's Day Off or Ghostbusters. Some were classics from the Reagans' own days in Hollywood, like the role of George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All-American that gave Reagan his longtime nickname of the Gipper. Or the only movie which featured them both, Hellcats of the Navy. Reagan himself chose the movies that the group watched, and if there was some informal discussion afterwards often helped serve as a resource for people who didn't know much about the technical details of how a movie gets made.

Each chapter relates a particular movie to some aspect of Reagan's presidency, the national mood or some current event high in the public awareness during the 1980s. Nancy Reagan was known for her campaign against illegal drug use, substance abuse being something both she and the president had seen firsthand during their Hollywood days. Both Reagans were irritated by what they saw as the unnecessary casual marijuana use in 9 to 5 and it firmed her resolve in that campaign.

Weinberg wrote a memoir rather than a biographical or historical sketch; he probably didn't take notes of the post-movie discussions and so can't really relay what would probably have been some of the most interesting material surrounding the Camp David "movie club." But Movie Nights offers a fun few hours of nostalgia in remembering the world when some of today's "classics" were first released and some of the events that surrounded them. It also spurs a sense of melancholy for a time when even a Hollywood establishment that was in almost lockstep opposed to a president and his policies could honor him as "one of their own" at a televised gala fundraiser for a hospital. Or two men with such different ideas could remain friends and show support for one another as well as Reagan did when he invited Warren Beatty to screen Reds at the White House. Try selling that script today.

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On first hearing, the idea that the character of Don Diego de la Vega, or Zorro, was inspired by a 17th century Irishman would seem to be on the level of Ensign Chekov claming that Russia invented everything. But it's actually true. Zorro creator Johnston McCulley was inspired to write his serial novel The Curse of Capistrano after reading a book called Memories of an Imposter: William Lamport. That book was a translation of the 1872 work Memorias de un Impostor: Don Guillén de Lampart.

Gerard Ronan's 2004 The Irish Zorro sets out to cover the Lamport story and explain just how a Wexford-born minor nobleman wound up in Mexico to begin with, let alone serve as the inspiration for one of the great swashbuckling heroes of the pulp era. But it runs into some of the same problems that earlier works on Lamport faced and adds a couple of its own.

Lamport died after lengthy imprisonment by the Spanish Inquisition in Mexico City. He had been accused of inciting rebellion among the native tribes, black and mixed-race people living in the Spanish possession of Mexico. Records of his trial, as well as his own prison writings, are fairly complete. Also reasonably-well attested is the record of his time in the Spanish military and at Spain's court. During the 17th century, their shared Catholicism made Spain and Ireland frequent allies in different European conflicts, and Lamport was in one of three Irish regiments who fought for Spain against Swedish forces in the Spanish Netherlands. Lamport's birth to a family of Irish merchants seems to be documented as well.

But the story becomes a lot murkier in between, though, as the only source available is his own account of his early years, written while he was in prison. That's not a problem by itself, but the details could stand some corroboration. Lamport claimed to have been arrested in London for distributing Catholic pamphlets as a boy, then escaped and spent two years sailing with pirates before entering Spain and enrolling in one of the many colegios that country provided for its Irish friends.

Ronan accepts Lamport's account more or less at face value, which would also not be that much of a problem except that he offers no footnotes or endnotes. In his foreward he claims that the search he undertook to learn the details of Lamport's life involved such a complicated network of documents that footnoting them would have doubled the size of the book. There's no reason to doubt him. But The Irish Zorro sports a florid style and packs more than a few other folks stories into its second half, perhaps to make up for the fact that almost the last third of Lamport's life was spent imprisoned and thus narratively somewhat static. Either way, the book really needs the footnotes to make it useful.

Lamport's role in his attempted revolt is interesting, and the constitutional monarchy he envisioned that would replace the Spanish king and enfranchise the native-born folk of Mexico was well ahead of its time for that region of the world. It seemed to incorporate some of the same ideas developed by John Locke and owed a lot to the limited idea of royal power that governed England. Examining those writings and the political philosophy behind them might have made an interesting journal article or historical monograph, but The Irish Zorro tries to pad its story out and take some rather outsized claims of its subject at face value, seriously weakening its own value in the process.