From The Vault: I Knew Deep Throat - The Kenner Star 2005

    The revelation that a guy named Mark Felt was the mysterious Deep Throat of the Watergate scandal was not as big a deal to me as it might have been to a lot of other people. Over the years I, frankly, have had very little interest in who he was because I had already met Deep Throat. No, not Mark Felt. I met the real Deep Throat: Hal Holbrook.


    It was Mr. Holbrook who played Mr. Throat in the movie All The President’s Men. On screen, you never really saw his face in the full light, he was mostly in the shadows of an underground parking garage. He didn’t have a very big speaking part. Most of the time he was saying, “Follow the money.”  However, he was just as instrumental in bringing down Richard Nixon as were Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
    It’s not for playing Mark Felt that Hal Holbrook made his...uh..Mark. It was the other Mark that defines Holbrook’s career. Even though Hal has appeared in hundreds of movies and TV shows, including a couple of well done sit-coms, he will be remembered for playing Mark Twain. Actually Holbrook didn’t so much portray Mark Twain as he channeled him. His portrayal of the greatest American writer of the 19th century is uncanny if not downright spooky, in spite of the fact that no one knows what Twain sounded like.
    In 1985 Holbrook brought his one man show, “Mark Twain Tonight,” to the Saenger Theatre, and gave me my one and only chance to see him in a stage performance he had been doing since the mid Fifties. He did not disappoint. His performance was designed to re-enact the lectures that Twain actually gave all over the world in sold out theaters. Toward the end of his life, Twain was forced to go on the road one more time to pay off his debts. At one time, Twain was judged to be the most famous person in the world.
    The day of his show at the Saenger, Hal and his wife, actress Dixie Carter, welcomed me to their suite at the Pontchartrain Hotel for a radio interview. Although I had interviewed many “stars,”  I was a little nervous as I had been a Holbrook-as-Twain fan for years. There have been many times over the years  when I was disappointed because the object of my hero worship turned out to be a jerk. Such was not the case with Hal and Dixie; they could not have been nicer. In fact Dixie wanted to know where she could get her ears pierced in New Orleans, so I put her on  the phone with my very surprised wife, who was a Dixie Carter fan from the days when she played on the soap opera The Edge of Night.(She later starred in Designing Women for several years.) Holbrook was also nice enough to continue a correspondence with me for a couple of years after our interview.
    For the past few years I’ve been trying to re-establish contact with him because I have a dream. In 1967 CBS produced a TV special of “Mark Twain Tonight,” but those tapes, which are owned by Hal, are not in such great shape, and not available on VHS or DVD.  My dream is to fly Hal in to do two performances of “MTT”to be recorded for PBS. The shows would be done at Rivertown Repertory Theatre in Kenner. Segments of the performance would be done on board a riverboat on the Mississippi, and they would be interspersed throughout the TV production. “Mark Twain Tonight in New Orleans,” would not only give our area a little more publicity, but would preserve Hal Holbrook’s recreation of Mark Twain for digital posterity.
    The only problem with all of this is that Holbrook uses only the words Mark Twain actually used in his books or in newspaper quotes. Would it not be delicious if we could have Twain’s thoughts and comments on Richard Nixon, not to mention... Deep Throat.

            For a taste of Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Tonight, click here.