If Fawn Brodie wrote Hemings into the story of Jefferson's life in a way that had never before been done, Barbara Chase-Riboud, in her 1979 book, Sally Hemings: A Novel, treated Hemings herself as the subject, giving flesh, blood, and psychology, where the historical record could only say she was "mighty ne'er white." Chase-Riboud also offered the first fully-realized portrait of the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings, with all of the psychological complexity and texture of relations between any two people who felt passionately for one another. Chase-Riboud even dared to imagine the first sexual contact between the two:I have memories of the Hemings-Jefferson "relationship" moving from controversy to fact in The Discourse. I have a very vague memory - which was why I was looking - of some representative of the denial side of things being incensed with rage on PBS's Newshour some similar program.I bent forward and pressed a kiss on the trembling hands that encompassed mine, and the contact of my lips with his flesh was so violent I lost all memory of what came afterward. . . At once he left me, surveying me from above with the yes of a man afraid of heights scanning a valley from a tower. Then his body tensed and rushed toward me as if he ahd found a way to break his fall. Thus did Thomas Jefferson give himself into my keeping.Chase-Riboud relied heavily on Brodie's biography, and other academic sources, blending historical documents into her historical fiction. Like Brodie, Chase-Riboud may have most offended Jeffersonians simply by being popular--her novel became a best-seller. When CBS announced plans to adapt the book for a television mini-series, the Jefferson "establishment," an informal coalition of eminent historians, descendants, and Monticello staff, rallied as never before to make sure the mini-series never aired. Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone advised the CBS President Robert A. Daley that he should "abandon" a series based on "a tawdry and unverifiable story." Malone added:If you do go ahead with the project, I would urge you to make it absolutely clear that you are presenting fiction. . . I do this not only on my own account, but in behalf of all persons who are concerned with the preservation and presentation of the history of our country.Later in January of 1979, historian Merrill Peterson followed up on Malone's letters, writing the CBS Chairman William Paley to reconsider lending his network's good name to "vulgar sensationalism masquerading as history." By February of 1979, Malone had gone public with his concernes, telling a Washington Post reporter: "Scandal and sex can be exploited to great financial advantage. The public will always believe the story. You can never get it back. You can never stop it." By December of 1979, plans for the mini-series were dead. Virginius Dabney, a Jefferson descendant and vocal critic of the Brodie biography and the Chase-Riboud novel wrote to Malone to say CBS "had lost all enthusiasm" for the story. "Enough damage has been done by Brodie and Chase-Riboud without TV," Dabney added. Though Dabney congratulated Malone for his role in killing the mini-series, Malone expressed regret that the matter had attracted so much publicity and worried that this would might not be the last effort to popularize the Hemings story: "We must keep our fingers crossed. Eternal vigilance will be necessary."
I don't know if that hazy memory is precisely correct, but that the Jefferson fan club was throwing everything at suppressing this is certainly true.
...(sorry, link added)