Climbing the Greasy Pole

By Gerald Clarke

Disraeli, PBS, beginning June 1,9p.m. E.D.T.

Did Benjamin Disraeli really exist, or was he the figment of somebody's imagination? He was a dandy at a time when people were wearing black. He was a romantic in a prosaic age. He wrote best-selling novels while everyone around him was writing political tracts. Most important of all, he was by birth a Jew in an era when practicing Jews were legally barred from entering the British Parliament. Yet he was twice Prime Minister, a favorite of Queen Victoria's and a dominant figure in British politics for almost four decades. He is, in sum, a man who still dazzles and fascinates.

This four-part Masterpiece Theater series captures some of that elusive charm and appeal. It begins just after the young Disraeli (Ian McShane) has returned from an extended trip through the Middle East. His fiction has made him a celebrity, and he is pursued by the hostesses of society as ardently as he is by his creditors. The women win out and, as they were to do throughout his life, inspire and uplift him. To escape the moneylenders, however, he marries a rich widow twelve years his senior--and immediately falls in love with her. Often silly and foolish, but kind and loyal, his Mary Anne (Mary Peach) becomes, after politics, the passion of his life. "Dizzy married me for my money," she says late in life, "but I think if he had to do it again, he'd do it for love." She was right: Disraeli, that most cynical of all politicians, was also the most romantic of all men.

"I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole," he said when he became Prime Minister, and this series is a capsule history of that slippery ascent. He was able to enter politics only because his father had fought with his synagogue and had had his children baptized as Christians. Disraeli's enemies never forgot his origin, however, and when he was finally elected to Parliament, he was hooted down when he tried to speak. "The time will come when you will hear me," he responded. It was a prediction he made come true through force of will and intellect. Inch by inch he pulled himself up to Downing Street, from which height he outrageously flattered Queen Victoria (Rosemary Leach). But, true to his romantic temperament, he probably believed most of what he said. "I would dare to offer you my heart," he tells her, "but Your Majesty had it long ago."

It was the kind of story that Disraeli the novelist could have written, and perhaps in his own way did. In this version it seems curiously bloodless, however. The women, particularly Peach and Leach, are splendid, and McShane is adequate. The problem is with the producers: there is too much story packed into too little time. One second Disraeli is out of office; the next second he is in--and then out again. Disraeli is dizzying indeed. The confusion has been added to by the show's American editors, who have cut approximately half an hour from the four episodes to fit PBS's absurdly rigid time slot. Love for Lydia, which was also on Masterpiece Theater, took twelve episodes --and threatened to stretch on through infinity. Disraeli takes only four. The viewer feels cheated and wants more, much more. -- Gerald Clarke

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