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By JERRY TALLMER It was—and is—a big red photo album, one that played an enormous role in the thoughts of a 7-year-old girl growing up, like her cousin before her, in Chicago.
The same Janet Rosenberg Jagan who in 1997, following the death of the man she’d been married to for 54 years, was herself voted in as president of the nation that had long since attained independence and changed its name to Guyana—the first American-born woman (white Jewish woman, in a seething Hindu-Moslem-Christian black-brown potpourri) to be elected president of any country anywhere. “Janet went to Guyana when she was 23 and my mother was 13,” says Suzanne Wasserman, whose clean, compact, informative 50-minute documentary film “Thunder In Guyana” gets screened tomorrow [Thurs, June 12] at 6:30 p.m. in the “Independents Night” series at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater. Janet Rosenberg’s family was just as appalled as Cheddi Jagan’s East Indian parents at the elopement of this daughter, this son. “Janet’s father, my great-uncle Charlie,” says Ms. Wasserman, “threatened to shoot Cheddi on sight. My great-grandmother had a stroke.” To them, he was black. The film shows Janet Jagan now, in her thoughtful, level-headed 80s, still speaking in the flat broad tones of Chicago as she’s interviewed by her cousin Suzanne, and—through stills and archival footage—the Janet Rosenberg in her teens and 20s who swam, rode horses, took flying lessons, had plenty of boyfriends, didn’t give a damn, and whose stunning face and figure might remind a moviegoer of, oh, Paulette Goddard… just as Janet and Cheddi Jagan’s grown daughter Nadira might remind a playgoer of, oh, Marissa Tomei. “As soon as Janet got to Guyana, the newspapers there started writing about her—this white woman who was dentist, Cheddi Jagan’s wife, and office assistant. Back in Chicago,” says filmmaker Wasserman, “my mother started saving all the Guyana clippings. She kept everything in this red album—letters, telegrams, photographs, newspaper articles—and all of it fired my imagination. “I would look through that album and see headlines like ‘CHICAGO GIRL STORM CENTER OF GUYANA,’ or ‘CHICAGO GIRL SECOND EVA PERON.’ I was fascinated. I knew I wanted to do something about it someday. Not that it would be a film, but something. And I think it’s also why I became a historian.” Suzanne Wasserman, who has a BA in History from the University of Wisconsin, an MA and a Ph.D in history from NYU, is now in her third year as assistant director of the Gotham Center for New York City History, which is at the CUNY Graduate Center, within walking distance of her and her lawyer husband’s (and their 15-year-old son’s) apartment in Stuyvesant Town. This is the first movie she’s ever made. “Cheddi died of a heart attack in March 1997. When I found out in July 1997 that Janet was going to run for president, I called her up and said I’d like to come down to Guyana and write something. None of her family had ever been down there, and she was reluctant for me to come. Didn’t want the responsibility of worrying about the safety of a 40-year-old American cousin. “Meantime I’d sent a query to the New York Times Magazine, and they said yes, they’d pay my fare and then see if they’d like to run the story. So I had a little money and I had a press pass, and at the very last instant I thought: What if there’s a film here? “Someone had hooked me up with Debra Granik, an NYU graduate student in film. She was enthusiastic, and had her own equipment. I paid her airfare and we shared a hotel room; also with us in that room was my sister Nadine, 10 years younger than me, to help out on the project. “In Guyana there is a long history of racial conflict and violence during elections. At the last minute, I got scared and wasn’t going to go. Nadine said: ‘If you don’t go, I’m going anyway.’ She shamed me into going.” Nadine Wasserman obviously has a lot in common with Janet Rosenberg Jagan. “I was lucky,” says Ms. Wasserman, “because I was with somebody [Debra Granik] who had already made a film. She knew what she was doing, how to shoot from a variety of angles, how not to interrupt the person you’re interviewing. She kept kicking me under the table and telling me to shut up. “I didn’t expect to even talk to Janet [who was midst-campaign]. The day after we arrived Janet called up and told me where she’d be. For the next 10 days we followed her around everywhere. She’s a remarkable woman. At rallies she would sit there eight hours. I couldn’t do it. She has the joie de vivre, the energy that make people very productive and a relationship of 54 years, which most people can’t say today. “She’s always been a lightning rod. People still insult her, even today. The old untruth that she [born Janet Rosenberg] was related to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg still gets repeated to this day, even in the Washington Post. Yes, really. When I interviewed her, Janet declared: ‘If I was related to the Rosenbergs, I would say it. I wouldn’t be ashamed.’” The New York Times Magazine never did print Suzanne Wasserman’s story, but it did pay a kill fee. Back in the States, she ran down wonderful (and costly) archival footage. “Thunder in Guyana” then had the benefit of “a real professional editor, Amanda Zinoman/” The total budget came to $125,000, around a fifth of that in time (two years) and money put in by its director. The film premiered last month at Proctor’s, a huge old 1926 movie palace in Schenectady, New York, where there’s a considerable Guyanese community. The “Independents Night” that screens it tomorrow at the Walter Reade under the joint aegis of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and IFP/New York, is, as it happens, appropriately named. There aren’t an awful lot of nice Jewish girls out of Chicago who are more independent than Janet Rosenberg Jagan. |
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The girl was Suzanne Wasserman. The older cousin she idolized from a distance was Janet Rosenberg Jagan, a flashing beauty who in 1943 had left home and country behind her to marry Northwestern University dental student Cheddi Jagan and go down to spend the rest of her life with him in the tiny colony that Cheddi had come from, the British Guiana which ten years later would elect him prime minister and her, his wife, deputy speaker of Parliament. 
