By Dave Shiflett (Bloomberg) – Louisa May Alcott was a cougar? Well, maybe sorta, once. So we learn in “Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind ‘Little Women,’” which airs on PBS Dec. 28 at 9 p.m. New York time. The widely-unknown life of the legendarily upright American author includes a few other surprises, at least for readers who assume Alcott went through life without a racy thought or perhaps even a belch. Billed as the “first film biography” of the author of “Little Women” (1868) and other tales of moral rectitude, the show stars Elizabeth Marvel as LMA and Jane Alexander in a smaller role as her first biographer, Ednah Dow Cheney, who glorified Alcott as “the children’s friend.” Yet the film, utilizing latter scholarly revelations, says Alcott wrote a prodigious amount of pulp fiction under the pen name A.M. Barnard that featured drug addicts, cross dressers and killers. It also turns out she was not always a big fan of the juvenile fiction for which she is so well known. Marvel plays a wry, attractive and engaging Alcott who often addresses the camera with pithy sayings taken from her own writings or firsthand accounts of conversations. She was no desperate housewife -- “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe,” she quips -- though she enjoyed a short-term relationship with younger Polish lad, according to the film. “We had a fine time for a fortnight,” Alcott observes, though whether or not they ascended to the hayloft is not known. More interesting, to me at least, is her relationship with her father, Bronson Alcott, a transcendentalist pal of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He is portrayed with massive sideburns and propensities for dramatic melancholy and letting the womenfolk do most of the heavy lifting. After a harrowing stint at the utopian Fruitlands community the family moved dozens of times, including into one of the worst slums in Boston. Dad could talk up a storm but put few beans in the pot, which forced Louisa May to work as a seamstress, laundress, teacher, and wood-splitter: a “true Cinderella” as she puts it. She developed suicidal thoughts though would eventually find her way as a writer. She delivers a line that should have put a permanent wince on her father’s face: “Though an Alcott I can support myself,” especially when “Little Women” and its sequels, including “Good Wives” (1869) and “Little Men”(1871) set the cash registers ringing. Yet her better-known works did not thrill her, at least artistically. “I don’t enjoy writing moral pap for the young,” she notes, but “do it because it pays well.” The world’s hack writers may have found a new heroine. Director Nancy Porter and writer Harriet Reisen also show Alcott as sharing her father’s commitment to progressive causes (other than full female employment), for which she made greater sacrifice. “I was an abolitionist at age of three,” she says and during the Civil War worked at a Union hospital in Washington, D.C. There she contracted typhoid fever, which was treated with a drug called calomel, which contains mercury. She believed mercury permanently undermined her health, though the film speculates that she may have suffered from bi-polar disorder and lupus. She comes across as very modern, and like many writers knew the art of self-medication, favoring opium and hashish, though she also took in a niece and cared for her father, who was eventually struck down, according to the film, while working on a sonnet about immortality. He died March 4, 1888 and she died two days later, possibly after suffering a stroke. One assumes her estate picked up both sets of funeral expenses, and that this film will resurrect interest in a writer who is yet another person we thought we knew, but really didn’t.
