posted 09-08-2006 12:29 PM               

Annie Glenn: Great American Wife of a Great American Hero. That's a simple, historically accurate statement. But you get artists like Tom Wolfe and Philip Kaufmann involved in depicting her, and all sorts of perils ensue.

First, what Wolfe got right: his description of Annie's stammer was spot on. It has been a while since I've read the Wolfe passages on Annie, but I remember reading them without objecting to any particular detail or conclusion.

If you keep in mind Wolfe's intellectual preoccupations with archetypal Americans (the grim and moralistic Calvinist, for example), you can sometimes see him forcing complex individuals, like John Glenn, in to these rather rigid categories. It pleases Wolfe to do this, as he has favorite themes and characters — the American man in a hypercompetitive, status-seeking endeavor: test pilots, astronauts, Wall Street strivers, etc. He is not, as a rule, much interested in women, except perhaps in how he can use them to develop his theme about the tribal behaviors of status-seeking Americans.

Kaufmann's movie version of Annie gets several things wrong. First, he cast Deschanel's ethereally lovely wife in the role (Caleb Deschanel was the cinematographer for the film; he and his wife also produced Zooey Deschanel, if memory serves).

I can't think of a single movie wife that even vaguely resembles the real women they portrayed. But Annie least of all.

Anyway, physically, the movie Annie is completely wrong, with all that romantically long dark hair and palest skin and moon face and autistic-sounding mumbles passing for language. Annie was an athlete — a trim mesomorph. And she wore her thick, wavy black hair short in a "DA" (or duck's ass).

The LBJ scene, where the VP wants access to Annie after another scrubbed launch, gets Annie wrong too. She had no difficulty conveying her wishes, and no difficulty at all in getting her way. Did John support her decision? Yes. But not in the rather silly way this scene plays out in the film.