Lady Bird, as Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson was better known, is a nickname that conjures the frivolous and fanciful, but the fiftysomething woman from east Texas who emerges in Dawn Porter’s elegant documentary The Lady Bird Diaries was a paragon of substance. She was also a documentarian in her own right, chronicling her time in the White House over 123 hours of audio recordings that were released after her death in 2007.
Apart from the footage of wildflowers that Porter shot on the Johnson family ranch in Texas, the film entirely relies on archival audio and video recordings from the time of Lyndon B Johnson’s presidency, from the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy to 1969. Building on an ABC News podcast, Porter’s work is a visually mesmerizing collage of mid-century America and one of its most fascinating characters.
“[Being a first lady] is traditionally a feminine thing. It’s usually about children and reading and food gardens,” Porter said. “And those things are worthy.” Johnson, though, occupied herself with more than rose gardens. She was a shadow politician, serving as the president’s adviser as well as his tutor, even giving her husband grades on his speeches as we hear in one recording. “I don’t think there were a lot of A-pluses,” Porter said. “I think there was always room for improvement.”
The Johnsons’ high expectations for each other mirrored the intensity of their devotion. “In a lot of ways, it’s a love story,” Porter said. “I think some of the best marriages are where each person thinks the other person is the smartest and most capable person. Her daughters confirmed that when I met them. They said, ‘Daddy thought Mother was the smartest person he’d ever met.’”
Finding archival footage featuring her film’s subject was a bit of a treasure hunt, as scant material was catalogued with her name. “When we started and put in the words ‘Lady Bird Johnson’, very little came back,” the director said. Porter had better luck when she searched by the date and the names of other people who had been on the scenes of Johnson’s recounting. “She’s not noted in the description of the footage, and yet she’s right there in the middle of all of these events,” Porter said. “And I think that’s the story for a lot of women.”
Johnson’s recordings brim with intimacy, and include material on her anxieties about her husband’s mental and physical wellbeing as well as her own apprehensions about living in the public eye. She also chronicled her work life, from campaigning for her husband’s second term to her environmental and anti-poverty efforts. She was the first president’s wife to hire her own staff, which was presided over by Liz Carpenter, a fellow Texan. (Carpenter’s teenage son, who liked to record himself singing, owned the tape recorder that Johnson used.)
Porter’s film paints Johnson’s work on the “beautification” of Washington DC as more than an act of aesthetic improvement. “She was going into some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the District of Columbia, which are primarily Black neighborhoods, and she was making the connection that kids need outdoor space, they need playgrounds, they need calm, beautiful places. She wasn’t just planting flowers.” The film touches on a few controversies, including the time when the singer Eartha Kitt publicly chastised Johnson at a luncheon, sounding off on the Johnson administration’s handling of the Vietnam war. But the point of view is unwaveringly Johnson’s. “This is not a tell-all movie,” Porter said. “What I wanted to do is add her perspective to what was happening.
“She really was documenting this history in her tapes, and she was so accurate,” Porter said. “I’ve done a lot of films where people will tell me a story, and then we’ll go back and look at the archive and it’s similar, but memory is imperfect.” Lady Bird’s version of events, however, shared an uncanny precision backed up by the trove of film.
Porter’s next two projects are about a reporter who embedded with the New York police department and ended up proving the innocence of a handful of wrongfully convicted inmates, as well as a film on the musician Luther Vandross, who died in 2005. While some documentarians like the immediacy of shadowing living subjects, Porter said that working with pre-existing footage guarantees an added layer of authenticity. “They’re not being interviewed for your movie so they’re not performing for you in any way,” she said. “The footage is very honest.”
The choice not to interview anybody for Lady Bird came naturally, and it’s unlikely viewers will mind the absence of talking heads. “I wanted it to be her story. And also make the point that she’s there, she’s everywhere,” Porter said. “You just have to look for her, and then you’ll find her.”
The Lady Bird Diaries is now available on Hulu in the US
