Well, it was no “The King’s Speech.” Whatever you make of the recent film “Hyde Park on Hudson” — and most of the reviews haven’t made much — it is an intimate movie that risks to explore a fascinating subject, shining a spotlight on a character who dwells mainly in the shadows of history. This character is Margaret Suckley (known as Daisy), Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cousin and fellow Hudson Valley aristocrat, whose relationship with the president may or may not have been a romantic one.
All great characters must have a worthy backdrop, and in this regard the film’s Daisy, played by Laura Linney, has been shortchanged. The real Daisy lived at Wilderstein, a 35-room Queen Anne-style house overlooking the Hudson River in Rhinebeck, N.Y., on grounds designed by Calvert Vaux. She was the third generation of Suckleys to live in the house since 1852, and she remained there as it reached a remarkable state of eccentric but cheerful decay. (Daisy died in 1991, six months shy of her 100th birthday.)
Wilderstein today has been restored, spiffed up and is open to the public. I would prefer to visit the house on a winter afternoon, and have tea with the creature who brought F.D.R. some of his greatest moments of personal happiness. (I’m talking about his dog Fala, of course, Daisy’s gift to the president the year after the events depicted in the film.) The amazing photographs shown here were taken close to the end in 1988. It’s not Grey Gardens — there’s no madness — but more like a palace in Havana from which the original owner never had to flee. A real aristocrat is at home whether the damask is fraying or fresh. As Daisy herself would cheerfully point out to visitors, the last coat of paint applied to Wilderstein was in 1910.
After Daisy’s death a battered suitcase was discovered under her bed containing what can only be described as startlingly intimate correspondence between the president and herself. Thus we have the book that inspired the play that brought us the movie, which purports to be about the visit of George VI and Queen Elizabeth to F.D.R.’s family home in 1939 but is really, as its opening narration by Linney as Daisy concludes, about “a time — not so long ago — when there were still secrets.”
Wilderstein Historic Site, 330 Morton Road, Rhinebeck, N.Y.; (845) 876-4818; wilderstein.org.