Sutherland: Pushing Peace on MGM's Time

DONALD Sutherland's twenty-ninth floor suite at the Sheraton Boston Hotel feels like a hothouse-its windows are fogged up with steam and the air inside is heavy and stale. Half empty wine glasses are scattered about the plastic and gold, French streamlined tables, and a portable cart, crowded with dirty dishes and the remains of a lunch, dominates the center of the room. It is four o'clock on a February afternoon.

Sutherland enters silently through the bedroom door. He has just changed out of a dark, pin-striped suit and into a pair of brown, flaired tweeds and a black jersey. He introduces himself in a warm, quiet, almost inaudible voice.

He sinks onto the cluttered couch of gold brocade, dropping a leather jacket on the floor beside him. He squints. His cold, blue eyes do battle with the yellow afternoon sun that streams through the foggy windows before him. He stretches, his tall, slim body, stretching in the warmth like a lithe, tense cat. His beard is cropped close, ash-blond, almost grey in the translucent light, and blends, quite unostentatiously, with his shaggily trimmed hair. His eyebrows-enormous tensile spans that arch across his brow-seem to be all that is holding him together, so much so that you forget for the moment that Sutherland struck it big playing M* A* S* H's supercool, supercalm surgeon. Hawkeye, and remember instead Sutherland as Joanna's dying English aristocrat.

But then, without warning, Sutherland himself begins the interview. "What's NSA doing on your campus?" he asks. "Is anyone working on the People's Peace Treaty?"

What? You've read somewhere that Sutherland's been active in pushing a number of radical causes out on the Coast, but this . . . well, let's say it's not the opener you expected, not even from one of the seventies' new stars on a promotion tour for his latest film.

BUT THEN, as Sutherland quickly explains, as far as he's concerned pushing MGM's Paul Mazurky-directed Alex in Wonderland, is just an excuse for him to voice his support for the Peace Treaty and his disgust with the war. So while his two-day visit to Boston includes a day-long round of interviews, tapings and television appearances, it primarily centers on a fund-raising cocktail party with Noam Chomsky speaking against the war and Sutherland reading passages from Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Get Your Gun, the money raised going to support various drives to bring the People's Peace Treaty before the American electorate.

And is the MGM lion accepting all this without a whimper or white? you ask. Sutherland gestures towards the press agent. "Ask him," he says. (And naturally the press agent smiles, shakes his head in agreement, immediately directs the conversation back towards Sutherland.) "So long as I occasionally talk about Ale?." Sutherland adds.

But the conversation continues to ignore the movie, the press agent's nervous presence notwithstanding.

Sutherland talks of the Peace Treaty, of the Detroit Winter Soldier investigations, of the racism and chauvinism (that's how he uses the word, just plain chauvinism ) tied up in the American conduct of the war.

"The Treaty must be used as a basis for informing, leafletting and converting people to opposition of the war," he says, and then pauses, looks down, tries to collect his thoughts. You know he's deadly tired. (For as you walk in he's saying to the press agent, "You mean those last guys weren't from a radio? That's why I thought I had to e-nun-ciate into their tape recorder. I wanted to be sure they'd get the stuff.") While he also seems to be sincerely troubled-as he repeats his case for the 11th time that day.

As he talks, the words themselves begin to stir up whatever energy in him remains. "We must confront the present government. It must respect our wishes. It must cease and desist from protecting capitalism."

AND THEN the energy as suddenly disappears, and he is left stranded on an empty phrase. He glances, uncomfortably, across the room. "Do you want a glass of wine" he asks the photographer. When she answers no, he smiles and tries to cajole. "Won't you just hold it in your hand?"

Then Sutherland asks you to exchange seats. Your back is to the light-memories of so many espionage movies leap to mind-and he can't catch your reactions. Exchange seats.

Sutherland has just finished a film for Warner's called Klute in which he co-stars with Jane Fonda, who plays a prostitute. (Currently, he has also joined Fonda and a number of other entertainers in expressing their willingness to entertain Gl's on American bases-as a counter to the Hope-Raye junkets to Asia.) And he's also completed a cameo appearance in he screen adaptation of Trumbo's Johnny. With associations like that it's only natural to ask how Hollywood views his political involvement.

"I've never had to deal with anyone who didn't have some sympathy or respect for what I do," he claims. "Sure, anyone over 40 out there has a difficult time, remembering as they do memories of the past. People have come to our house and have said they would like to come to one of my wife's meetings about the Panthers, but they just can't. They've come to the back door to lay bread on us. Legitimately too. The McCarthyism of the fifties is part of our reality. We live in terms of it.

"BUT what I believe in is not a threat to most of them. It's no going to happen for 300 years! I'm talking about the idea of Ralph Nader. And the idea of ending capitalism. And the idea of saving the environment. And the idea of the government admitting the truth." His voice, that energy, it's at it again.

Then why boher, you ask, if 300 years-

"Why not," Sutherland interrupts. Somewhat angrily, too. "I mean I hope it's going to get better before then. That's the point of the Peace Treaty. It's a positive platform that can get us together. It's an opportunity to gather a lot of fresh opposition to the war. It could be dynamite."

But dynamite and evolutionary change don't seem all that synonymous to you, so you let that end of the conversation drop.

You're a Canadian citizen, you say. Why not just let America go to hell?

Sutherland doesn't even understand the question. "I'm here as a visitor," he says, "but I wish I were a citizen, oh, if I were a citizen . . . ." And the energy has returned and focussed and just longs to break out. "You know, if I were a citizen, I think the whole fact of my paranoia would just work itself out.

"Just as I finished M* A* S* H, my wife was arrested [on charges involving her support of the Panthers] and now I can't go out of the country, because we have no passport. I had spinal meningitis then. My head was really freaked out. Wasn't at all together.

"THAT'S when I met Mazurky." And, at last, the conversation has reached the movie and you can just feel the press agent breathing again as he wipes away accumulated sweat in relief.

"Making Alex was the best working experience I've ever had," Sutherland continues. But then he yawns, even though you know it must be the exhaustion that is setting in. "A film is satisfying to me when its reality represents something I see in the world. Films should provide a kind of information, illumination, and avast amount of entertainment. A lot of films today are just not true.

"No, I don't think in terms of making a personal statement or any of those other ego-trips," he answers in response to your question. "But I do like to participate in films that I feel really should get made."

"You know," he confides, "I play Jesus Christ in Johnny Get Your Gun. I'd like to pursu?e that. Pontecorvo may do a film of The Passover Plot in which I would play Christ. We hope to break the barriers of religious tradition. Show Christ as a political genius. After all, politics emanates out of ourselves.

"If the government as a political enterprise ceases to represent us, it must be removed. Christ had this thing of brotherly love. That's the essence of what the radical parties are now pursuing.

"Of course, it will be difficult to make Christ real," he admits. "There's this story-it may only be apocryphal-but they say that when George Stevens was directing John Wayne as the Roman centurion in King of Kings, Wayne had this line, 'He truly is the Son of God.' After he muffed it a few times, Stevens told him to say it with awe. So, the next take, Wayne says, ' Aw, he truly is the Son of God.'" Sutherland is suddenly off on this wonderful imitation of John Wayne and all at once J you realize how much of himself the man is repressed and set aside to give his political message prominence. For, just as quickly, Sutherland's smile disappears and, again, there he is brooding, gathering up the strength to attack another issue.

And so, as you get up to leave, you try to apologize for playing devil's advocate. But Sutherland appears equally uncomfortable when confronted with your encouragement.

"Yeah, well, I believe the stuff," he says. "That's all that matters."

As you quit the suite, happily to discover the cooler air of the corridor outside, you look back to see Sutherland's six feet four inches silhouetted against the weak sun that now washes through the window. It's after five. But for a flight back home, his day is finished. And you can sympathize with his exhaustion. Because, you think, even if you consider his politics even more confused than you figure your own, at least he's doing something. And, well, maybe if one of the side effects of this war has been to make someone like Donald Sutherland more than just an actor , well then maybe, even amidst the prevailing evil, one finds planted the seedlings of our victory.