Last night, I saw Steven Spielberg’s Oscar contender, Lincoln, which I found to be surprisingly entertaining. It focuses mostly on the political maneuvering Lincoln had to do in order to get the 13th amendment—the one banning slavery—ratified in the House of Representatives.
I don’t mean to ruin anything for you here, but it passes.
Lincoln himself is played by the formidable Daniel Day Lewis, who you know spent months preparing for the role by doing method acting. “What would you like for breakfast this morning, sir?” A waitress would ask him at a restaurant.
“Well, m’am,” he would say in a clipped American accent. “Do you mind if I tell you a story about a boy I once knew in Missouri who ate his first and final breakfast before killing a man accidentally with his one-eyed horse?”
“He’s famous, right?” the waitress whispered to her co-worker once she finally the order. “He was in that movie about the Irish retard with the deformed foot, am I wrong?”
He played Lincoln well, basically like he was a 6’4” tall Bill Clinton with a trimmed beard and a bad knee. Until I saw the movie, I had no idea that Lincoln was so charismatic. I always thought he was like a fucking sober Sally who did things missionary style and made really boring speeches.
I also never knew that Mary Todd Lincoln, his wife, was widely considered to be batshit crazy. In the movie, needless to say, she’s played by Sally Field.
Lincoln met Mary Todd in Springfield, Illinois, where they were both spring chickens in the social scene. Todd was from a wealthy, slave-owning family in Kentucky. Her father, who had been married twice, had sixteen children, of which she was the fourth. Many of her brothers fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War.
Big Abe was just your average farmer boy turned lawyer, trying to make his way in the world. If we’re being honest here, he was also a little funny looking. Tall, gangly, large-nosed. If he had looked a bit more like Daniel Day Lewis, and less like himself, he might have ended up with a little Georgia peach, or a society girl from Philadelphia.
Instead, he landed himself a squat little border state girl.
Mary Todd was no looker. But if rumor has it right, she was a fucking riot. Famous for her big personality—a fierce temper and a quick wit—she was a shrew at public events, and a fucking cougar next to a chamber pot. In the movie, she says to Lincoln, “All everyone will remember of me was that I was crazy and that I ruined your happiness.”
To which he said back—this part didn’t make it into the movie—”Nevermind, my lady, the sex is fantastic.”
Because everyone knows the crazier a woman is, the better in bed, am I wrong?
Nothing much has been written about Mary and Abe’s sex life—until now—but they must have done it a fair amount, a least at the beginning. Over the course of their marriage, Mary gave birth to four sons—Rob, Eddie, Willie and Tad—only one of whom lived to bury both of his parents. That son was Rob, who was left to deal with his mother’s mood swings and terrible “migraines” once his father was assassinated, and his other brothers died of mysterious illnesses.
In the White House, Mary Todd had been scorned for spending too much money re-decorating. Her excessive spending and famously irrational behavior has led many doctors, post-humously, to diagnose her with bi-polar disorder.
In Chicago, where she traveled to live with Rob after they both left the White House, she walked around with $56,000 of government bonds sewn in her petticoats. She complained of “wandering Jews” stealing her pocketbook. She smelt a non-existent fire in her house, and almost jumped out the window to escape from it. “That’s it, you’re going to the mental institution!” Rob, her son, finally said after the incident. It’s a threat his father, big Abe, had shouted many times in the past, but never acted upon.
Unfortunately for Mary, Rob had never had a sweet taste of his mother’s “sweet wild loins.” He got her committed, and didn’t speak to her again until shortly before her death.
Mary Todd Lincoln was buried next to her husband. “You again?” he said when he saw her in Purgatory. Abe was slated to go straight to heaven, but was blocked from ascent by Sir Thomas More. For what reason, no one knows.
“I’m going to fucking kill you,” Mary said to him. “You fucking left me on Earth, you selfish piece of shit, with hardly any money.”
“You know what, go fuck yourself,” Lincoln said, and turned back to his conversation with Robespierre.
“Fuck you too!” she screamed, grabbing his arm with her tiny monkey hands.
Ten minutes later, and they were in one of purgatory’s many waiting station bathrooms, making so much noise that they cleared out all the other stalls.
In other words, the sex life of Abraham Lincoln was the sort that made strangers in motels very envious, but the people closest to him roll his eyes, and say, “Oy vey.” Impossible to bear, but even more impossible to abandon.