San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Re-creating the White House
In Episode 1 of Showtime’s “The First Lady,” which premiered April 17, Michelle Obama (Viola Davis), whose husband has just been elected president, is getting a tour of the White House’s private quarters from outgoing first lady Laura Bush (Kathleen Garrett).
“I’m not going to lie to you, it will never seem normal,” Bush says as she walks Obama past the porcelains and paintings in the Center Hall. “But you will find a way to make it comfortable.”
The 10 episodes of “The First Lady” chronicle how three very different presidential spouses — Obama, Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson) — dealt with being political wives while raising families, putting forth their own agendas and trying to maintain their sense of self. They also had to decorate the upstairs White House family living spaces and work on leaving their mark on the public rooms, a living museum of America’s history. The series takes you into the private quarters, where dogs sit on sofas and first ladies get their hair done. And you’ll get to see one first lady dance on a conference table in the West Wing.
Many different White House sets were imagined for this series. In the Obamas’ White House bedroom, you’ll see Barack Obama (O-T Fagbenle) stretched out on their four-poster bed having a beer while chatting with Michelle about the day’s events. Franklin D. Roosevelt (Kiefer Sutherland) rolls his wheelchair into the Oval Office to have a sticky conversation with Eleanor by a large globe and his cluttered desk. Susan Ford (Dakota Fanning) and Betty Ford debate the idea of holding Susan’s high school prom at the White House in Susan’s 1970s teenage White House bedroom filled with splashy floral prints and a brass bed.
Tony Fanning (along with Todd Fjelsted) was a production designer behind “The First Lady.” Fanning worked with hundreds of people to replicate White House rooms dating from 1905 to 2017. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
How did you do your research?
I have done the White House a number of times, and I have a full-time researcher. I was involved with “The West Wing” and for a time doing the movie “Lincoln” and also “Thirteen Days.” I am a White House history buff. Our researcher is in touch with the White House Historical Association quite often, and we also got information from the National Archives and all the presidential libraries. I have a number of books on the White House and the two-volume William Seale book on the history of the White House. You can access a lot of the measurements and materials. It’s so well-documented. It’s not like we’re designing it, but we’re kind of replicating what existed.
How did you re-create the Fords’ 1974 state dinner for King Hussein of Jordan, and why didn’t you show more White House parties?
We had to avoid some of the larger, more glamorous events because of COVID. For that Ford state dinner, the scenes in the East Room were augmented (meaning people were added to the scene later), because we could not fill it up. There are photos of that dinner at the Ford library. We did the best we could to make it look as authentic as possible. I don’t think the china was an absolute replica. We couldn’t really get into the minute detail of that. The flower arrangements with the carnations were trying to evoke that period.
Where did you find the furnishings, and what was the hardest piece to source?
Our biggest challenge was how fast the schedule was and getting all of the materials needed to do all of the sets. It was filmed in Cinelease Studios’ Three Ring Studio in Covington, Ga., about 40 miles from downtown Atlanta, which meant a lot of driving. We shopped at estate sales, antique stores and flea markets all over Georgia and neighboring states. For Eleanor, it was easier for us to shop out of New England and truck it into Georgia. We brought in rentals from Los Angeles prop houses in shipping containers. Among the biggest challenges were floor coverings, lighting and drapery. Getting fabrics during COVID was a nerveracking task, and a lot of choices needed to be adjusted because of delays in shipping. At first, we set up our own drapery shop, but we had to turn out so much that we needed to outsource to local vendors.
How did you do the exterior shots of the White House itself?
The outside White House shots, driving up and going in and out of doors were filmed at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, where he built a small-scale reproduction of the White House on his studio back lot, and it’s shootable on all four sides. Anything you see of them arriving in a motorcade or walking into the White House was filmed there.
Does Eleanor’s secret room that is just off her own White House bedroom really exist? Did her confidante, Lorena “Hick” Hickok, really sleep there? Eleanor’s secret room does not exist in the way it is shown. We took dramatic license with that. There are secret passages that were used for the purposes she described. But where Hick actually stayed is a room that was about that size, it just was not connected to Eleanor’s room. It was across the hall. Eleanor fixed it up for her. The Roosevelts had a very progressive marriage. Each had their own romantic attachments living there. Lucy Mercer (Eleanor’s onetime social secretary with whom FDR had a longstanding relationship) had her own room up there, too.
Did you get to talk to any of the first families for the show? None of the first families were involved. There was initial contact with Michelle Obama that Viola made, but that was very limited. I did not talk to Michael Smith (the Obamas’ White House decorator), but my set decorator did. A lot of what you see in the residence, such as the fabrics, furniture and wall coverings, we could get reproductions of. We used photographs from Smith’s book. I was excited to recreate those rooms; they were some of the most elegant interiors in the series, both beautiful and tasteful.
For all the presidents, we used furniture that would be close to what they had or that had the same feeling. Their public lives at the White House are very welldocumented. A photographer is around almost all the time, and you get a lot of information from those photographs about how the rooms were set up.
Was the Roosevelt White House the most difficult to document, because it dates to the 1930s and 1940s?
After looking at research, we had to come to terms with the fact that the Roosevelts lived with a lot of clutter. We had to streamline a lot of it and made choices to keep it to a more presidential level, like for the other first ladies. What was interesting is that the photos were all in black and white. You can read descriptions of what the colors may have been, but we took liberties to glamorize a little bit and bring more character to it. We tried not to make it too glamorous. Eleanor Roosevelt was not much of a decorator and didn’t care for that aspect of the White House much. She very much liked having all of her photos and personal items around her.