The Pallisers: In the Trollope Topiary

Move over, Mary Hartman, and make way for a real lady. Her name is Glencora Palliser--Lady Glencora Palliser. She just may be the most entrancing TV character of the '70s--as quickwitted as Rhoda, as attractive as Mary Tyler Moore, as sexy as any of Charlie's Angels. And where did this superlative creature spring from? Why, from the prolific pen of Anthony Trollope, the very prototype of the long-stemmed Victorian novelist.

Lady Glencora, played by a dazzling Susan Hampshire, is the dominating character of The Pallisers, a 22-part British-made series based on Trollope's political novels; it begins next Monday, Jan. 31 (9 p.m. E.S.T.), on PBS. Hampshire is only one of many reasons to watch The Pallisers. In the grand tradition of The Forsyte Saga and Upstairs, Downstairs, the series is elegant, historical soap opera, complete with duels, lecherous dukes, love lost and found, intrigue in the Houses of Parliament, exquisitely smart costumes and roman tic settings amid the topiary.

When The Pallisers was shown on the BBC in 1974, it proved powerfully addictive. On the nights it was aired, dinners were rescheduled and telephones went unanswered. Critics initially complained that Scriptwriter Simon Raven had tweaked Trollope's beard and had taken too many liberties with his novels. One called The Pallisers "a kind of comic historical waxworks." Almost all eventually fell under its spell, however, agreeing that the series was one of the few that could actually tie viewers to the set week after week. The program has also been shown in the U.S. on Home Box Office, providing HBO with a surprise hit.

Victorian Equation. The first episode opens in the early 1860s at the Duke of Omnium's annual garden party. Glencora M'Cluskie, an orphaned heiress, alarms her aunts by flirting with Burgo Fitzgerald, a young dissolute whom Trollope describes as the handsomest man in all England. The aunts thereupon pick up their skirts and march up to the old duke to present him with an inescapable fact: they have an eligible niece, while he has an eligible nephew--his heir, the aspiring politician Plantagenet Palliser. The duke sees the merit of the equation and gives his nephew a quick lesson in marital arithmetic. When Palliser demurs that he and Glencora do not love each other, the duke, with impeccable Victorian logic, retorts: "Love? We are talking about marriage."

From that simple situation--an impossible but inevitable marriage--unfolds The Pallisers' intricate plot. Glencora sparkles with good spirits and impetuosity. Plantagenet, admirably played by Philip Latham, has a manner so arid that he seems to exhale dust, like an overloaded vacuum cleaner, every time he speaks. Gradually, however, they grow--and grow believably --into love. Glencora gives up any notion of running away with the scoundrel Burgo Fitzgerald. Plantagenet, for his part, relinquishes his dream of becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer so that he can take her to the Continent. Eventually, however, he does become Chancellor, then Prime Minister, and inherits his dukedom; Glencora becomes a celebrated hostess and the

Duchess of Omnium. Along the way, their lives intertwine with--among a hundred or so others--a headstrong early feminist, Alice Vavasor, and her rascally cousin George; a young radical M.P. from Ireland, Phineas Finn; and a mistreated wife, Lady Laura Kennedy, who flees from her cruel husband, a rich Scottish baron.

Trollope took six volumes and about 4,400 leisurely pages to tell the story. In dramatizing it, Raven has indeed taken considerable, but for the most part justifiable license with the material. Several subplots and some vivid characters have been eliminated entirely. Some important new scenes have been added--Glencora and Plantagenet are already married, for example, when Trollope begins the Palliser novels--and dialogue has been modernized. "I could seldom transcribe Trollope's text for more than two speeches at a time," says Raven. "I had to invent and deploy my own 'Trollopese.' "

Talking about her love for Burgo, for instance, Trollope's Glencora says: "They told me he would ill-use me, and desert me--perhaps beat me. I do not believe it; but even though that should have been so, I regret it. It is better to have a false husband than to be a false wife." Raven's Glencora is less long-winded. "I would rather be beaten by Burgo Fitzgerald," she says, "than kissed by any other man." Perhaps Raven's greatest liberty, however, has been his emphasis on the Pallisers, particularly Glencora, among the novels' myriad families and alliances. Explains Raven: "The heroine of a television series must never be less than prominent."

Sweat and Gibber. Raven, 49, is also a writer of mysteries and high-class potboilers (Friends in Low Places) that dwell on sex and intrigue among the upper classes. But he has been a dedicated Trollopian since his undergraduate days at Cambridge. Nevertheless, he spent six months "sweating and gibbering" before he found the right blueprint for the series, which he suggested. He would throw out Trollope's character A as boring and superfluous --only to watch her turn up 700 pages later as someone essential to the denouement. Character B would be discarded, then put quickly back when it was obvious that B was the motivation behind C, who was so important that he could not conceivably be strong-armed into oblivion. "It was the same trouble with everyone I tried to get rid of," Raven complains. "They all kept pushing themselves back in again for seemingly ungainsayable reasons."

Susan Hampshire added her own dimension to Glencora. "I never forgave her for allowing herself to marry a man without love," she says, "and I never came to terms with her for that reason. So I took a slight license, and I warmed up the relationship between them." Despite previous Emmy Award-winning roles in other series--as Fleur Forsyte, Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair and Sarah Churchill in The First Churchills --Hampshire, 34, was still only the third candidate for Glencora. Pauline Collins, the saucy under-houseparlormaid Sarah of Upstairs, Downstairs, demanded more money than the producers wanted to pay, and Hayley Mills, the second choice, had just had a baby and felt she lacked energy for such a demanding role.

Susan Hampshire was an inspired choice. She moves so naturally and effortlessly through the role that it is hard to believe that she probably worked harder than anyone else in the cast. A childhood victim of dyslexia, she still has great difficulty reading. Such a long and involved screenplay was nothing less than agony. "It takes me ten times as long as everyone else to get it right," she says. "When they're blocking out the movements, I'm still struggling with the script." Her efforts have paid off. The series has enabled Hampshire to get prime parts in the theater, her first love. She is concluding a West End run in Somerset Maugham's The Circle.

The Pallisers has been good for Trollope as well. When it was shown in Britain, the program started a Trollope boomlet, and it may do the same thing in the U.S. An early American admirer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, once wrote that Trollope's novels had "the strength of beef and the inspiration of ale." After a steady diet of TV gruel, Americans may find The Pallisers nutritious fare indeed.

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