Jackson's campaign accused Adams of having pimped a servant girl out to the Czar of Russia while Adams served as minister to that country. It was also claimed that the incumbent used public funds to stock the presidential residence with gambling devices (in reality, a chess set and a pool table). Jackson, for his part, was slammed as an unscrupulous slave trader (a charge not without merit), but the most vociferous denunciation concerned his wife, Rachel.
When the two were married in 1791, they did not know that her divorce from first husband Lewis Robards had not been finalized. After two years of this illegal marriage, Rachel obtained the divorce and they married again. But the incident plagued them throughout their lives, resurfacing as a full-fledged scandal during the campaign. As one Adams camp pamphlet put it to voters: "Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest office of this free and Christian land?" Jackson always maintained that the brutal attacks on the character of a woman known for her honesty and kindness contributed to her ill health and her death in December 1828, shortly after the election but before his inauguration.
The President's Lady purports to tell this story, and does it fairly well, at least in Hollywood terms. Rachel may not have been the rough backwoods type she was often painted to be. She was also likely not quite the looker she is here, personified by Susan Hayward. (Beulah Bondi may have come closer in her Oscar-nominated performance in The Gorgeous Hussy, 1936.) For his part, co-star Charlton Heston manages to have the long, angular granite face we associate with Jackson, a president who has been portrayed on screen by actors as diverse as Lionel Barrymore, Brian Donlevy, Jack Palance, and Kris Kristofferson.
According to an August 30, 1951, report in the Hollywood Reporter, Twentieth Century-Fox purchased the rights to Irving Stone's novel while it was still in galley proofs, the author already having proven himself in the same subject area with his story and screenplay about First Lady Dolly Madison, Magnificent Doll (1946). Producer Sol Siegel, according to the news item, hoped to star Olivia de Havilland and Gregory Peck. Hayward and Heston, however, were hot names of the moment. She had three of her five Academy Award nominations under her belt by the time this film was released and enjoyed her pick of roles after a string of hits. Heston still had his best years ahead of him, but notable roles in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and the romantic melodrama Ruby Gentry (1952) boosted his rising star. Second billed to Hayward here, he would be top-billed for almost all of his pictures to follow this.
Studio publicity at the time claimed that Andrew Jackson IV was an extra in the election rally scene, but that has never been confirmed.
According to an October 1952 news item in the Hollywood Reporter, some sequences were shot on location at the studio's ranch near Calabasas, California.
The film received Academy Award nominations for its black-and-white art direction-set decoration and costume design, but reviews were generally tepid. The New York Times noted that "history plays a curious second fiddle to love's old sweet song" and called Henry Levin's direction "unimaginative." Hayward won Photoplay magazine's Gold Medal Award for her performance.
Heston played Jackson again a few months later in a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast of the story, co-starring Joan Fontaine (De Havilland's sister), and in the Paramount adventure drama The Buccaneer (1958).
Stone's novel was adapted by John Patrick, an Oscar nominee for the original story of the noir thriller The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). Stone's novels also provided the basis for the Vincent Van Gogh bio Lust for Life (1956) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), in which Heston portrayed Michelangelo.
Director: Henry Levin
Producer: Sol C. Siegel
Screenplay: John Patrick, based on the novel by Irving Stone
Cinematography: Leo Tover
Editing: William B. Murphy
Art Direction: Leland Fuller, Lyle R. Wheeler
Music: Alfred Newman
Cast: Susan Hayward (Rachel), Charlton Heston (Andrew Jackson), John McIntire (John Overton), Fay Bainter (Mrs. Donleson), Whitfield Connor (Lewis Robards)
By Rob Nixon
