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Bill Murray is FDR in 'Hyde Park on Hudson'

In one of the most famous photographs that doesn't exist, the king and queen of England -- hosted by the president and first lady of the United States -- are eating hot dogs alfresco at the Roosevelt estate in upstate Hyde Park. It's a shot many people think they know. And that never actually existed.

"Photographers were not allowed at the picnic," said playwright Richard Nelson, although his screenplay for "Hyde Park on Hudson" -- which stars Bill Murray as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Olivia Williams as Eleanor and Laura Linney as presidential mistress Daisy Stuckley -- portrays the 1939 moment in a riot of news photographers' flashbulbs. In their fictionalized picture, King George VI (Samuel West) is wolfing down a wiener -- and demonstrating a taste for democratic dining. "We added that for dramatic effect," Nelson said, "in order to show just how important a moment this was."

"Hyde Park on Hudson," directed by Roger Michell, which opens in Manhattan Dec. 7, is the story of two love affairs -- the one between England and America, and the one between FDR and his distant cousin Daisy. The political story concerns Roosevelt's genius at public relations -- softening U.S. sentiment toward the coming war via something as simple as a hot dog. Sexual relations are something else again: The long-buried affair with Daisy was uncovered only years afterward, suggesting that perhaps people who actually write diaries expect them, eventually, to be read.

"Of course they do," said Linney, whose Daisy wears boxy, '30s-era fashions and has a reticence appropriate to a woman most people never even noticed. "She lived to be almost 100 years old, and that material spent decades under her bed. Some pages were destroyed and some pages were torn out of the diary, but she left them there under her bed, and she never mentioned any of it."

What she liked about Daisy, Linney said, was her sense of privacy. "She had the relationship. It was hers. It didn't have to go any further than that."

Where's the proof?

That the proof of the Stuckley-Roosevelt alliance is based largely on the Daisy diaries may make it seem circumstantial, but the circumstances are considerable: The only two photographs of FDR in his wheelchair were both taken by Stuckley. When the presidential library opened in Hyde Park, its first employee was Stuckley. She wasn't Franklin's only extramarital lover. She's not even his only lover in the movie.

"There's a line from Virginia Woolf," said Nelson, "that says when you talk about sex, you can't really say you know the truth. But you can explain the conclusions you came to."

Nelson's conclusions took the diaries into consideration, as well as what's generally accepted, historically, as the Roosevelt story: That Franklin's affair, years before his presidency, with his wife Eleanor's secretary, Lucy Mercer, nearly blew up their marriage; and that Eleanor agreed to stay if he never saw Mercer -- or anyone else -- again. "We know he broke that promise many times," Nelson said. "Lucy Mercer was at every inaugural. Missy LeHand, his secretary , became like a wife to him when Roosevelt got polio. She lived with him in the South. There are a number of references from people who remember seeing her on his lap."

Living with Eleanor

Although not the center of the film, perhaps the most fascinating character in "Hyde Park on Hudson" is Eleanor Roosevelt, who was a pioneering figure in women's rights, civil rights and human rights, and who Williams describes as having tolerated a domestic arrangement most people would find intolerable.

"The first 10 years, they lived in her mother-in-law's house," said Williams, whose portrayal mixes sadness with a certain sense of mischief. "Their children were very likely conceived with the mother-in-law in the adjoining room. [Eleanor] made him promise never to see that other woman again, but he did. She refused to ever have sex with him after that day.

"I don't want to label FDR with that complicated a version of events," she added, "but the way they chose to live with each other seems unbearable. And the answer is that through some extraordinary sense of duty, they forged an incredibly powerful political partnership."

One of Williams' better-known roles was opposite Murray in Wes Anderson's 1998 "Rushmore," which won the actor a number of critics awards and in some ways established his serious acting bona fides. "He needs to be taken seriously as a great actor," Williams said, as if Murray needed defending. "He's not mucking about. Of all the people on the set, he was the one who had the most at stake and was working the hardest on his role. Which was amazing."

Linney agreed. "He's never done anything quite like this, and I'm sure he was appropriately terrified," she said. "Anybody would be -- anybody who is sane. Taking FDR on is enough to make anybody quake in their boots."

She said it was obvious that the role was important to him -- not so important that he didn't horse around. "We did a lot of car stuff," she said, referring to scenes in which FDR and Daisy motor about the Hyde Park countryside -- which was actually played by the English countryside.

"Every once in a while, he'd floor the antique car and take off with me," she said. "Moments like that, you can either get nervous and upset, or go with it. I just decided to go with it. And those are the moments I'll remember more than anything, the unique experience of being kidnapped by Bill Murray."

Actors with FDR drive

BY JOHN ANDERSON, Special to Newsday

Many, MANY actors have impersonated Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- 32nd president of the United States, fifth cousin of the 26th president of the United States, usually ranked alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as the one of the greatest presidents and one who led his country through a Great Depression and a world war without anyone mentioning his wheelchair. No one's ever given FDR quite the portrayal Bill Murray does, presidential car sex having previously been deemed, shall we say, a bit much. But here are some of the more prominent, among scores of on-screen FDRs and their vehicles.

SUNRISE AT CAMPOBELLO (1960) -- Ralph Bellamy ("Trading Places," "His Girl Friday") delivered what was long considered the definitive Roosevelt, having created the role on Broadway in Dore Schary's play, which tells the story of Roosevelt after he contracts polio at age 39. Bellamy played FDR again, in TV's "The Winds of War" (1983) and then again in "War and Remembrance" (1989).

ELEANOR AND FRANKLIN: THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS (1977) -- Edward Herrmann, a natural FDR, was coming off the debacle of TV's "Beacon Hill" when the adventurous Daniel Petrie ("Sybil," "Rocket Gibraltar") directed this three-hour TV extravaganza, likely salvaging Herrmann's career. Jane Alexander starred as Eleanor. (Herrmann appeared as FDR again in John Huston's 1982 version of the musical "Annie").

PEARL HARBOR (2001) -- There's something weird about a right-winger like Jon Voight having played the founding father of the New Deal, but such was the case in Michael Bay's spectacular, about which the less said the better.

WARM SPRINGS (2005) -- Kenneth Branagh, another actor with a resemblance to Roosevelt, put it to use in this TV movie that co-starred Cynthia Nixon and was directed by Joseph Sargent. Mostly, "Warm Springs" covered the same territory as "Sunrise at Campobello."

REEFER MADNESS: THE MOVIE MUSICAL (2005) -- You'd have to be high to believe Alan Cumming as FDR, in this quasi-remake of a notorious anti-pot movie that was released during Roosevelt's first term in office.

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