Gaslit Series: Who Was Martha Mitchell? The True Story Of The Socialite Behind Gaslit
From April 24, one of the most anticipated titles of 2022 is available on StarzPlay: Gaslit by Robbie Pickering. The miniseries brings to the screens the first season of Slow Burn, the eight-part podcast by journalist Leon Neyfakh who reconstructs the history of Watergate from an unusual point of view: that of Martha Mitchell, the woman who played a central role in unmasking the scandal.
Martha was the wife of John N. Mitchell, the United States Attorney General and trusted man of Richard Nixon, who became the head of the CRP, the President’s Re-election Committee in 1972. Julia Roberts plays her, while Sean Penn is Mitchell, Shea Whigham the former FBI agent and “mind” of Watergate G. Gordon Liddy, Dan Stevens the White House counsel John Dean and Betty Gilpin his wife Mo. But who really was Martha Mitchell and why has her story been so long unknown before now? Let’s find out together.
Gaslit Series: Who Was Martha Mitchell and Why She Was So Famous?
Martha Elizabeth Beall is a controversial and well-known figure in the United States for her public releases and television appearances. Born in 1918 and raised in a modest Arkansas family, she graduated from the University of Miami and as a young man she dreams of becoming an actress. After World War II she moves to Washington, where she meets her first husband Clyde Jennings Jr., an honorably discharged army officer who has become a traveling salesman. The two move to Rye, New York and have a son, Jay, but in 1957 they separate: Clyde is too often away from home and the couple breaks out. Just four months after the divorce, Martha marries John Mitchell, struck, as she puts it in her autobiography, “by her sweetness and her intelligence”.
Mitchell was a leading attorney in Manhattan at the time. In 1961 the two have a daughter, Marty, and attend the “high life” of the Big Apple. In 1966 John met Richard Nixon and had an immediate feeling: as soon as Nixon was elected President in 1968, Mitchell became attorney general. It is then that Martha’s ascent begins: the lady is a glamorous and passionate anti-communist socialite she dresses in fashion and organizes memorable parties. But she too is one of her who “talks too much”: she confides in a frank and sincere way with her friends who are chroniclers of her, so much so that she is nicknamed “The Mouth of the South”, the “mouth of the South”.
In 1969, Mrs. Mitchell leapt to the headlines because in a television interview she candidly admitted that Washington’s pacifist march reminds her husband of the Bolshevik revolution. Martha loves whiskey and when she drinks one glass too much she lets herself go into unspeakable backstories and uncomfortable gossip about the world of politics. In 1970 the New York Times called her “the most talked about woman in Washington”. You even get the cover of Time and a poll reveals that it is known by 76% of Americans. In July 1971 she refuses to bow to Queen Elizabeth because “American citizens should not genuflect to foreign monarchs”. Her popularity skyrockets because she frequently appears on television on the Laugh-In show.
Martha “The Mouth” and The Watergate Scandal
Even before Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who raise the scandal with their investigation reconstructed by Alan J. Pakula in the unsurpassed All the President’s Men , Martha Mitchell is considered by many to be the cause and the first true responsible for Richard Nixon’s resignation . In 1972 the President officially re-nominated himself to the White House: he is sure to repeat the success obtained in 1968, despite the unpopularity linked to the opening to China in an anti-Soviet key and to the persistence of the war in Vietnam. John Mitchell continues to follow him: he resigns from the position of attorney general to lead the CRP, the Nixon Re-election Committee. But on the night of June 17, 1972, something strange happens.
Five men, all collaborators of the President, are arrested in the Watergate complex in Washington: they tried to steal documents from the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. The security guard pinched them while they’re setting up a bug in those offices. They are not just “anti-communists” as they call themselves. Yet that real espionage operation would only be discovered two years later. On that day, the Mitchells are on vacation with other Republican government officials in Newport Beach to participate in a series of fundraisers. John receives the news of Watergate and immediately leaves for the capital, leaving his wife in California and putting FBI agent Steve King alongside her as bodyguard. Her husband’s goal is clear: Martha absolutely must keep her mouth shut. King must stop her from reading the papers and especially from calling her friends.
Two days later, on June 19, Martha manages to get a copy of the Los Angeles Times and reads some shocking news: James McCord Jr, her daughter’s chauffeur and former CIA agent hired by her husband as the Committee’s director of security, was arrested by the police. He is one of the five Watergate burglars. Suspicious of the inconsistencies between what you read in the newspapers and the official version coming from Washington, Martha picks up the phone and calls her friend Helen Thomas, a trusted reporter for United Press International.
Martha is a river in flood: she complains about the “dirty tricks” of the election campaign and promises to leave John. As she is spilling the beans, King hears her. He has received a specific assignment: he breaks into the room, unplugs the phone and locks it in his hotel room. Di lei. Thomas tries to call back but there is nothing to do: Martha is unreachable. A few hours later it is John who recontacts the reporter, explaining that his wife is “indisposed” but assuring that Martha is fine and everything is going well between them, it’s just that Martha “gets a little angry about politics”.
Since that day, there has been no news of Mitchell. John had her sedated by a doctor: everything is “settled”. It is Marcia Kramer, a crime reporter for the New York Daily News, who manages to track down Martha and arrange a meeting with her at Rye’s Westchester Country Club. As Mrs. Mitchell arrives, the reporter notices bruises and marks of violence on her arms. Just a few questions and Martha says it all: the imprisonment in the Newport Beach hotel and the attempts to escape from the balcony, the anomalous raid on the Watergate and the direct involvement of the Republican leaders. When the interview comes out, Nixon and his henchmen don’t sit idle: they unleash a huge mud machine at Martha.
They let newspapers and televisions know that Mitchell is not well, she is a mentally ill alcoholic mythomaniac who goes wild and invents anything to get a modicum of visibility. Propaganda works. Martha is sent for rehab at a Connecticut psychiatric institution and is dumped by everyone: friends, family, neighbors. She only believes her son Jay. On November 7, 1972, the vote was finally taken Nixon’s victory was overwhelming. The incumbent president gets 60% and gathers 570 electors against only 17 of his opponents, the Democrat George McGovern.
In 1973, the trial for the break-in at Watergate begins and the twist arrives: McCord declares that he acted for political reasons, on the orders of the leaders of the Republican party and confirms that Nixon and his men fear Martha’s frankness. She was kidnapped to prevent her from knowing what was going on and from talking about it in public.
Martha initially calls reporters to exonerate her husband. She is sure they made him a scapegoat. She tries to defend him at any cost, but she doesn’t understand that John is anything but a stranger to the facts, quite the contrary. When she realizes her husband’s direct involvement, she sheds the burden of what she has had to endure: she makes it clear that the Senate hearings are “tried and not spontaneous” and that “everyone is tired of Watergate”.
It is the beginning of the end for Mitchell and Nixon. The President resigned on August 9, 1974, to anticipate the impeachment. On January 1, 1975, Mitchell is convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and conspiracy to involve him in Watergate. His sentence is 19 months in federal prison. “If it hadn’t been for Martha Mitchell, there wouldn’t have been Watergate,” Nixon said in his famous 1977 interview with David Frost. Meanwhile, in September 1973, Martha and John divorced.
In early 1975, Martha suffered from multiple myeloma. A person close to her defines her as “desperately ill, without money and without friends”. The only one to take care of her is Jay, who has since become a researcher on the Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security. Martha’s health conditions plummet and she ends up in a coma: the now ex Mrs. Mitchell dies on May 31, 1976 at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York. She is 57 years old. At her funeral there is a cushion of flowers that reads ” Martha was right “: “Martha was right”.
“Martha was for many a brazen and pompous woman – writes Myra MacPherson in the Washington Post -, but for others she was a heroine who attacked the liberal permissiveness that had brought the country into chaos”. The story reconstructed by Gaslit is part of that forgotten history, far from what has come down to our days thanks to the seventy-nine front page articles in the Post and the investigations by Woodward and Bernstein. Pickering and director Matt Ross’s (Captain Fantastic‘ s) goal is to analyze the human side behind a “conservative cheerleader” like Martha, a woman “really punk albeit for horrible things”. Incredible but equally true is what happened in 2017: Steve King, Martha Mitchell’s jailer, was rehabilitated and chosen by President Donald Trump as US ambassador to the Czech Republic.
