Hellhound on His Trail

by Hampton Sides

  Instead, the headlines that morning were reserved for Memphis's most famous citizen--Elvis Presley--whose wife, Priscilla, had given birth183 to a six-pound fifteen-ounce baby girl at Baptist Hospital less than an hour after Walker and Cole met their deaths. The Presleys' daughter had dark hair and blue eyes, and they'd named her Lisa Marie. For the rush to the hospital that morning, Elvis had orchestrated an elaborate caravan at Graceland, complete with a decoy vehicle to throw off reporters. Dressed in a pale blue suit and blue turtleneck, Elvis greeted well-wishers at the hospital while Priscilla rested--then blazed off again in a convoy of Lincolns and Cadillacs.

  "I am so lucky,184 and my little girl is so lucky," Elvis said. "But what about all the babies born who don't have anything?"

  JUST OVER A week later, on February 12, thirteen hundred employees from the city's sanitation, sewer, and drainage departments went on strike. Though the deaths of Walker and Cole provided the catalyst, the strike organizers had a long list of grievances that went well beyond the immediate question of safety. They wanted better pay, better hours, the right to organize, a procedure for resolving disputes. They wanted to be recognized as working professionals--and not as boys. Theirs was a labor dispute with unmistakable racial overtones, since almost all the sanitation and sewer workers were black.

  February was an inauspicious time to begin a garbage strike; conventional wisdom had it that a work stoppage should occur in the summer, when the refuse would rot faster and produce an unholy stench. But the strike preyed on an old dread lodged deeply within the civic memory: Ever since the yellow-fever epidemic of 1878--which was then thought to have been spawned by putrescent garbage heaped in open cesspools--the city had been extremely attentive to public cleanliness.

  From the start, the city refused to acknowledge the garbagemen's cause, or even their union's existence. Soon a few scabs were brought in, but they couldn't keep pace, and the garbage began to pile up all around the city. Municipal employees could not go on strike, Memphis's mayor, Henry Loeb, insisted. "This you can't do,"185 he told them. "You are breaking the law. I suggest you go back to work."

  Henry Loeb III was a garrulous,186 square-jawed man, six feet four, who had commanded a PT boat in the Mediterranean during World War II. He came from a family of millionaires who owned laundries, barbecue restaurants, and various real estate concerns. His wife, Mary, the daughter of a prominent cotton family, was Queen of the Cotton Carnival in 1950. It couldn't be said that Loeb was a racist--certainly not in the raw, Bull Connor sense--and he was by no means a typical cracker politician. For one thing, he'd been schooled in the East, at Phillips Andover and Brown; for another, he was Jewish, a biographical quirk that made him unfit for the Memphis Country Club (even though he'd recently converted to Christianity and joined his wife's Episcopal church).

  Like many white business leaders in the South, Mayor Loeb approached the entwined subjects of labor and race with a paternalism reminiscent of the plantation. Although always outwardly courteous to blacks, he called them "nigras"187 despite his best efforts, and he seemed to believe that his fair city, having avoided the messy troubles of Little Rock, Birmingham, and Montgomery, didn't have a race problem. During an earlier term as mayor, Loeb had presided over the integration of the city's public establishments, schools, and restaurants without incident. Reinforced by that mostly positive experience, Loeb's position was that black folks in Memphis were content--and would remain so, as long as Northern agitators didn't come down and stir things up.

  This was a prevalent attitude among white Memphians, in fact, an attitude perhaps best summed up by a popular cartoon that ran in the Commercial Appeal every morning. The creation of a Memphis editorial cartoonist named J. P. Alley, Hambone's Meditations featured the homespun wisdom of a lovably dim-witted black man, a kind of idiot savant. The grammatically challenged Hambone would say things like: "Don' make no diff'unce whut kin' o' face you's got, hit look mo' bettuh smilin'!!"

  The garbage workers didn't seem so different from Hambone; many of them were older men who talked and carried themselves not unlike the cartoon character. They were "the world's least likely revolutionaries,"188 the journalist Garry Wills said at the time. Unschooled in the ways of protest, they were lowly Delta "blue-gums," as some whites still called them--men who scratched where they didn't itch and laughed at things that weren't funny. Yet these men were playing fiercely against type. They refused to listen to the mayor, and they would not go back to work. Instead, they were out there each day, marching down Main Street, past glowering police and unsympathetic merchants, on the way to city hall to lay their grievances before the massuh.

  Mayor Loeb, stubborn as John Wayne, didn't see what was coming--even after it had arrived. Memphis, which had been run for generations by the well-oiled machine of an all-powerful political boss named E. H. Crump, was an orderly, quiet, and well-mannered town of leafy parkways and beautiful cul-de-sacs. Crump had died in 1954, but his punctilious spirit lived on. Affairs were supposed to run smoothly, and people were supposed to be nice. It was not only discourteous to honk your horn in Memphis; it was illegal. "This is not New York,"189 Loeb told the strikers. "Nobody can break the law. You are putting my back up against a wall, and I am not going to budge."

  The nominal leader of the strike was a blunt, overweight former garbage worker named T. O. Jones, a firebrand whose considerable courage did not quite make up for his lack of savvy or experience. Eventually, the sanitation workers attracted more sophisticated national leadership in the form of labor representatives from the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The real moral force behind the strike, however, proved to be a local Memphis minister, a cerebral man who happened to be a legendary tactician of the civil rights movement. His name was James Lawson.

  An old friend of Martin Luther King's, Lawson had studied the tenets190 of civil disobedience while living in India, had played a crucial role in leading the successful Nashville sit-ins of 1960, and had traveled to Vietnam on an early peace-seeking mission. Lawson saw the sanitation strike not merely as a labor dispute but also as a civil rights crusade, and soon he made his influence felt. "You are human beings,"191 he told the striking workers. "You deserve dignity. You aren't a slave--you're a man."

  One day a few weeks after the start of the strike, the garbage workers began carrying a placard whose slogan, echoing Lawson's words, neatly summed up their fight. The slogan caught on in Memphis, and then around the nation. It said: I AM A MAN.

  12 ON THE BALCONY

  THROUGH THE MONTH of February 1968, as Martin Luther King stepped up his travels around the country to promote the Poor People's Campaign, it became clear to everyone close to him that he desperately needed a vacation. His doctor said so, and so did Coretta. Friends and colleagues noticed the bags under his eyes, the despair in his voice, the worry on his face. He nursed ever-deepening doubts about himself and the direction of the movement. His insomnia worsened. In speeches and sermons, he touched increasingly on morbid themes. He even made the SCLC draft new bylaws declaring that his closest friend and right-hand man, Ralph Abernathy, would succeed him should anything happen to him. King, clearly, was about to snap.

  Finally his staff prevailed. It was time for their leader to head for somewhere sunny. Abernathy would go with him. Their usual habit, this season of the year, was to spend a week in Jamaica. This time, though, King had a different idea: they would fly to Acapulco.

  They left the first week of March. On the initial flight, to Dallas, King fell into an argument192 with a segregationist white man from North Carolina. Ordinarily, King never engaged in pointless one-on-one jousts, but something about the man ignited his temper. Uncharacteristically aggressive in pressing his points, King talked about the Poor People's Campaign as an alternative to riots this summer. The argument predictably went nowhere, but when they landed in Dallas, the segregationist wished King good luck in Washington, saying, "It may be the last chance for your brand of non-violence."
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  On the ramp, Abernathy questioned King about the argument. Why do you even bother with those guys? he said. You know you can't convince them.

  "I don't play with them anymore,193 Ralph," King said testily. "I don't care who it offends."

  In the Dallas airport, King and Abernathy stopped off in a men's clothing shop. When he noticed Abernathy admiring a collection of fine neckties, King lapsed into an effusively generous mood. "Here, take this," he said, handing Abernathy his American Express card. "Buy one for me, and four or five for yourself, whatever you want." He set off down the terminal to place a call at a pay phone while Abernathy bought nearly fifty dollars' worth of ties.

  They landed in Acapulco that afternoon and checked in to a suite at the El Presidente Hotel with a balcony that looked out over Condesa Beach and the brilliant blue Pacific. King and Abernathy spent the day watching the famous cliff divers and then ducking into the shops of La Costera. King remained in a sentimental and ultra-generous mood, one that Abernathy found sweet but strange. Anything that met Abernathy's fancy, King tried to buy.

  After a long day, they collapsed in their suite. Abernathy woke up in the dead of night,194 around three o'clock in the morning, with a stab of foreboding. In the dim light, he noticed that King wasn't in his bed. Worried, he checked the bathroom and the common room, but his friend was nowhere to be found. He thought about calling hotel security. Then he remembered the balcony.

  He opened the sliding door and found King there, in his pajamas, leaning over the railing, lost in thought. Even as Abernathy drew near to his side, King didn't seem to register his presence.

  Abernathy and King had been together since the beginning--since the Montgomery bus boycott and the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They'd met in 1951 when Abernathy, a native Alabaman and World War II veteran, was a student pursuing a master's degree in sociology. Since then, they'd marched together, tasted tear gas together, gone to jail together. And nearly everywhere they went in their ceaseless travels, they shared the same hotel room. They were inseparable friends--"a team,"195 as Abernathy put it, "each of us severely crippled without the other." But in all those turbulent years, Abernathy had never been so worried about his friend. He feared that King might have received another letter from the FBI,196 urging him to commit suicide. He worried that suicide was what King vaguely had in mind now, as he leaned out over the balcony.

  "Martin," he said. "What you doing out here this time of night? What's troubling you?"

  King didn't reply at first. He just stood there, arms draped over the railing. He stared and stared at the ocean. "You see that rock out there?"197 he finally said.

  Abernathy looked over the dark water and saw a huge rock in the bay, waves frothing around it. "Yeah, I see it," he said, puzzled.

  "How long you think it's been there?" King asked.

  "I really don't know. Centuries and centuries. I guess God put it there."

  The waves smashed and hissed. "You know what I'm thinking about?" King said.

  "No, I really don't." Abernathy's concern was edging into annoyance. "Tell me."

  "You can't tell me what I'm thinking about, looking at that rock?"

  Abernathy only shook his head--he was irritated by this cryptic guessing game.

  In the silence, King started singing a hymn. "Rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee."

  Now Abernathy understood. It was the old hymn they'd sung together many times before, a reverie about approaching death, about finding comfort in the final hours. Though he was now thoroughly spooked, Abernathy joined in, and for a time the old friends sang out over the sea breeze of Acapulco:

  While I draw this fleeting breath,

  When mine eyes shall close in death

  When I soar to worlds unknown,

  See thee on thy judgment throne,

  Rock of ages, cleft for me,

  Let me hide myself in thee.

  13 FACES ARE MY BUSINESS

  ONE OF THE self-help books that the Reverend Xavier von Koss recommended to Eric Galt, Psycho-Cybernetics, by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, was a slender paperback with a blazing orange cover. The book claimed to offer "a new technique for using your subconscious power" by incorporating recent discoveries from the emerging world of computers.

  Galt studied Psycho-Cybernetics closely. Throughout this strange little book, Dr. Maltz drew an analogy between the human personality and "servo-mechanisms" like the electronic computer. He proposed to show how a person could lead a happier, more fulfilled life by following some of the same ruthlessly goal-oriented processes that "servo-mechanisms" use to accomplish assigned tasks and solve computational problems.

  "Your brain and nervous system198 constitute a goal-striving mechanism which operates automatically," he wrote. Maltz's basic point was that, much like a computer, the human personality craves a central, organizing goal. Said Maltz: "The automatic creative mechanism199 within you can operate in only one way: It must have a target to shoot at."

  The trick to happiness and fulfillment, Maltz argued, is "to purge all memory of past failures" while developing what he called a "nostalgia for the future." All along, one must keep "the desired end-result constantly in mind," aggressively seizing every opportunity to move toward it. "You must go on the offensive," Maltz stressed, while focusing the mind much like the electronic brain that drives a self-guided weapon. The goal-striving mechanism, he said, "works very much as a self-aiming torpedo or missile seeks out its target and steers its way to it."

  In Psycho-Cybernetics, Dr. Maltz was fond of quoting a line from Emerson: "Do the thing and you will have the power." The goal cannot be some far-off abstraction that one loosely dreams and procrastinates about; it must be a sharp goad for intense activity and applied effort.

  "Don't think before you act.200 Act--and correct your actions as you go along," Maltz advised. "It is the way all servo-mechanisms must work. A torpedo does not 'think out' all its errors in advance. It must act first--start moving toward its goal--then correct any errors which may occur."

  Oddly, Dr. Maltz was neither a psychologist nor a computer specialist but a plastic surgeon. For years he had cut away on the faces of burn victims, sufferers of congenital birth defects, survivors of traumatic car accidents, and unlucky souls cursed with harelips and cleft palates.

  Dr. Maltz loved his work and claimed that the personalities of his patients often changed dramatically after their procedures--they brightened, blossomed, and began to move successfully toward their goals. "When you change a man's face201 you almost invariably change his future," Maltz wrote. "A plastic surgeon does not simply alter a man's face. He alters the man's inner self. The incisions frequently cut deep into the psyche."

  ON MARCH 5, perhaps prompted by his reading of Psycho-Cybernetics, Galt visited a prominent plastic surgeon,202 Dr. Russell Hadley, in his medical office on Hollywood Boulevard. A bearish, likable man, and a former medic in World War II, Dr. Hadley now taught on the staff of the USC Medical School. Galt was scheduled to have a rhinoplasty--a nose job.

  Galt wanted the tip of his nose sculpted to make it appear less bulbous. When Dr. Hadley asked why, Galt replied that he was an actor seeking cosmetic improvements because he had begun to land some enticing roles in TV commercials. "I casually told him,"203 Galt later said, "that I thought the surgery would enhance my prospects, and the doctor saw nothing out of the ordinary." Galt had other features he wanted to alter--most notably his prominent ears, which always had been a source of embarrassment to him--but he'd save those procedures for another day. "The ears,"204 Galt said, "would have to wait."

  Hadley informed him that the fee for the rhinoplasty procedure was two hundred dollars, and Galt promptly paid in cash. On the medical form, Galt gave his address as "the St. Francis Hotel" and listed his nearest relative as a "Carl L. Galt," of Birmingham, Alabama.

  As he customarily did, Dr. Hadley snapped a "before" picture of Galt, which he planned to compare with an "after" picture h
e would take once the patient's scars were fully healed. Then Hadley, donning a mask and surgical gown, put Galt under local anesthesia, packed his nostrils with gauze and cocaine strips, and, with his fine scalpels and suctioning tools at the ready, performed the rhinoplasty in a small operating room adjacent to his office. The procedure took about an hour. After suturing the incisions and bandaging the abraded flesh, Dr. Hadley sent Galt on his way.

  The operation had gone flawlessly, but Galt was not quite satisfied. Back home at the St. Francis, he ripped off his bandages. Standing in front of a mirror, Galt resolved to improve on things. He pressed and shaped the inflamed cartilage of his nose, bending it slightly to the right. This little exercise in self-manipulation must have smarted terribly, but Galt, wincing through the pain, was determined to accentuate the work that Hadley had done. Then Galt retaped his nose, as he later put it, "in a position205 that would apply more pressure to the end of my nose," in the hope that it would "heal in a more Roman, aquiline fashion."

  Galt met the doctor for a follow-up appointment on March 7 to have the nasal pack removed, and then again on March 11, when Dr. Hadley undid the stitches. The doctor noted that the wounds were "healing well."

  The patient was scheduled for one last appointment several weeks later--a checkup in which he was supposed to pose for the "after" photo--but Eric Galt never returned to the offices of Dr. Russell Hadley.

  Although Galt had spent several long hours in his close care--and Hadley prided himself on rarely forgetting a face--the details of his patient's visage would soon vanish from his memory. "I'm a fairly observant person,"206 Hadley later said. "Faces are my business. But what amazes me is that, try as I might, I cannot remember anything at all about Eric S. Galt."