Few figures loom as large in the history of 20th Century American culture as artist Georgia O`Keeffe and her mercurial photographer-impresario husband, Alfred Stieglitz.
O`Keeffe`s spare paintings of fecund flowers, stark night skyscrapers and still desert spaces have become icons for our age, and Stieglitz`s contributions as a virtual father to modern art in this country are just as monumental.
Yet, as living, breathing, loving and quarreling human beings-intellects as emotional and vulnerable as they were creative and visionary-they have largely eluded us. We remember her mostly by the intense, almost spectral spirituality of his unforgettable photographs of her.
For years, much-honored actress Jane Alexander (”The Great White Hope,” ”Eleanor and Franklin,” ”Shadowlands”) has longed to change all that-to bring this starry pair to life on the screen.
This summer, Alexander has finally succeeded.
The result of her efforts, a 90-minute drama called ”A Marriage: Georgia O`Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz,” airs at 8 p.m. Wednesday on PBS` ”American Playhouse” (WTTW-Ch. 11), with Alexander playing O`Keeffe and the versatile Christopher Plummer as the mustachioed Stieglitz.
”I`m absolutely delighted with it,” Alexander said.
It was a long and often frustrating journey for the actress, who some years ago became a producer in her own right to overcome what she condemns as a paucity of strong roles for women in film.
Her first intention was to make a full-length feature movie about O`Keeffe, but she was unable to raise the necessary financial backing. Her husband, Ed Sherin, then suggested she try a less-ambitious public television production, and ”American Playhouse” agreed.
Initially, Scandinavian actor Max von Sydow was to play Stieglitz, but he had to drop out because of scheduling conflicts. Martin Landau was then lined up, but he backed out to do a movie.
Plummer, a Canadian-born Shakespearean and character actor who became a major star with ”The Sound of Music,” was a last-minute but serendipitous find.
”Christopher loved it; he`s wonderful in it,” Alexander said. ”He is Stieglitz.”
”I certainly didn`t do it for the money,” said Plummer, noted for his roguish sense of humor. ”But I loved working with Jane. Jane Alexander was born to play Georgia O`Keeffe.”
Layers of character
A patriarch to young American artists in the early part of the century, Stieglitz was every bit the towering genius and bombastic impresario portrayed with such gusto by Plummer in ”A Marriage.” But, as the actor and the script (by Julian Barry) also bring out, his brooding image cloaked a man of many facets.
He was overbearing and egotistical, yet immensely generous, fiercely loyal and easily hurt.
He was impishly humorous and compulsively loquacious, and, as one arts scholar recently noted, probably would have his own TV talk show today.
A New Jersey-born German-American with decidedly Old Country ways, Stieglitz was also something of a feminist`s nightmare: a philanderer who caused O`Keeffe what was perhaps the greatest trauma of her life by commanding her to abort the baby she was carrying and yearned to bring to birth, complaining that a child would disrupt his muse.
Yet he loved her passionately, leaving a wife and family for her and drawing up a sweetly eccentric contract that, despite their long absences from each other, bound them together ”until death.”
Alexander`s O`Keeffe, based on years of fascination and obsessive research, is an earthy, girlish, sensual and very Midwestern woman (she came from the farm country of Wisconsin).
”Georgia O`Keeffe was an extremely important figure to me and I think to most young women of my generation,” said Alexander, 52. ”I always wanted to do a story about her-about two artists who lived together and loved each other, and what the consequences on their art would be.”
She finally got a chance to meet O`Keeffe in 1980, when Alexander was visiting New Mexico. She was told that the artist, then 93, would not see her, but the day she was to leave, O`Keeffe`s young male companion, Juan Hamilton, telephoned and said Alexander could come over and have ”one hour.”
”One hour stretched to three hours,” Alexander recalled. ”It was wonderful. We had a couple of beers and she laughed a lot. People don`t realize the girlish component of women when they get older. I try to bring out that she had a great sense of humor.”
Breathing space
”A Marriage” was videotaped in just two weeks in a New York TV studio. The cramped studio sets give the show something of the feel of early live TV dramas as seen on the Philco Playhouse and Hallmark series.
”We were forever making the wrong entrances,” Plummer said. ”Once, when I couldn`t find the right door, I came in through the fireplace.”
But the claustrophobic feeling this engenders is just right for the story. The crowding of New York, Stieglitz`s domineering ways and his suffocatingly large and close-knit family are what drove O`Keeffe to her long sojourns in New Mexico, where she moved permanently after Stieglitz, 24 years her senior, died in 1946.
In one amusing scene, Stieglitz, the consummate New Yorker, rails hyperbolically at her complaint that he is disdainful of America west of the Hudson.
”What do you mean?” he thunders. ”I was born west of the Hudson! As soon as I was old enough, I put together a raft and escaped.”
At a quite different moment, O`Keeffe and a leathery old cowhand guide are on the roof of an abandoned pueblo, from which she gazes at a distant mountain for the first time. She describes a vision in which she at last finds that ”I am complete.” With that line, the small TV screen becomes spacious indeed.
There`s a large supporting cast for this compact drama. It`s a little annoying that figures of such artistic stature as Ansel Adams, Paul Strand and Marsden Hartley appear so fleetingly in cameo without explanatory introduction, but most viewers probably won`t notice or mind.
There was serendipity for Alexander in this show in another sense. Just as they used O`Keeffe-like copies of paintings instead of priceless originals in the sets, they could not incorporate actual photographs of the real O`Keeffe and Stieglitz. Instead, a photographer achieved verisimilitude by taking Stieglitz-like photos of Alexander and Plummer.
His prints of her, which bear an extraordinary resemblance to the artist, now hang proudly in Alexander`s house.
