Shearer show unravels Nixon

Harry Shearer wants you to know the real Richard Nixon.

Not the one-dimensional political trickster, but a more complex character touched with pathos.

Shearer will host an interactive conversation/screening at World Café Live on Monday night of his latest Nixon interpretation, the British TV series Nixon's the One, with a script that re-creates actual audiotaped conversations from the White House.

The six-part series premiered in the United States on YouTube on Tuesday and will continue with new episodes each Tuesday through Dec. 2.

The celebrated improvisational comic actor, who grew up in California, has been impersonating the 37th president since the late 1960s, when he joined the Credibility Gap, a Los Angeles comedy troupe. He portrayed Nixon in those days without using professional-quality makeup, relying on his own muscle to get the face and voice right. (For Nixon's the One, Shearer relies on prosthetics to re-create Nixon's jowls, hair, and brow.)

Shearer also took the same tack in that early portrayal as other comics who poked fun at Nixon.

"Mine was a fairly standard Nixon of the time," says Shearer, 70, whose resumé includes voicing an array of characters on The Simpsons, a place in mockumentary history as a creator, writer, and actor for This is Spinal Tap, collaborations with Christopher Guest on Spinal Tap, For Your Consideration, and A Mighty Wind, and a caustic sketch radio program, Le Show.

"I found his darkness amusing," Shearer says of Nixon. "Still, when you're doing political satire on the guys who have the guns, you're focusing more on the politics than the personality."

He takes a different approach in Nixon's the One. What interests Shearer now isn't past policy wrangling, but Nixon's truly bizarre character.

Shearer chose to do Nixon's the One - despite a schedule that includes touring as bassist/duet partner for wife/singer Judith Owens - after seeing director Ron Howard's 2008 film Frost/Nixon with Frank Langella. It didn't quite square with the Nixon he remembered from growing up in California.

"I saw [Frost/Nixon], loved it, but realized that the fictional Nixon was in danger of becoming this standardized, you-kids-get-off-my-lawn villain," Shearer says. "There was nothing of the unwittingly comic, strangely sad Nixon I knew - the contradictions, the dichotomies."

Shearer builds a head of steam talking about the Nixon who spoke of strength and manly virtues and who attacked people for being soft. "Yet his repertoire of gestures included very, almost dainty, delicate gestures," Shearer says. "His salute when he left office wasn't a clear, crisp military salute. His hand starts at his forehead and becomes a butterfly, fluttering away."

Shearer created the show with the help of historian Stanley Kutler, whose lawsuit forced the National Archives to release the Oval Office tapes from Nixon's secret White House recording system to the public. Together, Kutler and Shearer pored over the tapes and found humor between the lines, material for the subtlety of word and action that is Shearer's strong suit.

Shearer recalls watching Nixon lose the 1962 California gubernatorial race long before becoming the only president to resign the office in 1974, disgraced by his role in Watergate.

"The goofiest thing during that governor's race was his concession speech where he very grandly, very falsely, proclaimed, 'You won't have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore,' " says Shearer. "Before that, I was barely old enough to remember Eisenhower getting ready to kick Nixon off the presidential ticket for allegations of - this will sound quaint - illegal campaign contributions."

It's here that Shearer does Nixon's voice for the infamous "Checkers" speech, filled as it was with the contradictions of brooding bravado and self-pity. "This was the same guy who accused everybody one centimeter to his left of being commie pinkos, so Nixon had both this sentimental streak and this hard-line tough-guy edge," Shearer says. "The two things together were just so comically exaggerated."

Shearer chose to debut his show about the disgraced American president in the United Kingdom rather than the United States because he worried about how the American TV networks would react when he proposed it.

"If I tried to do this show in this country, there'd be a series of meetings that started with, 'Look, we know Nixon didn't like black people, but did he have to hate Jews, too?' American executives would try to rewrite history. My concept was that it had to be real and stay real. I've had experience with things that are supposed to look real."

Rather than argue with U.S. networks, Shearer did Nixon in the U.K. For an episode focusing on the six minutes before Nixon resigned his presidency, Shearer spoke to an engineer with CBS who was there in 1974. "I asked what sort of cameras they used, got the make, model number, found the one guy in Britain who had working models of it, and brought him to our studio," says Shearer. "That's why we did it in London. I thought they'd appreciate the detail."

Can American satirical shows such as Saturday Night Live, where Shearer once worked, handle the kind of subtlety that characterizes Nixon's the One? Shearer says he can't answer that because he doesn't watch American TV satire. "I do Le Show and don't want to be influenced by others' reflections," he says. Instead, Shearer points to his own work and says that what some call subtlety he would call "trusting the audience. Find the funny and don't point at it with arrows."

"Nixon's the One"

New episodes released each Tuesday through Dec. 2 at www.youtube.com

APPEARANCE

Harry Shearer,

"Nixon's the One"

8 p.m. Monday at World Café Live, 3025 Walnut St. Tickets: $18-$20 Information: 215-222-1400 or www.worldcafelive.com EndText