Wallace

by Marshall Frady

  Snow was scattered over the ground and under dark spruce and cedars, and the day was as bright and cold as crystal. Getting out before the Greenbrier Inn, a monumental white hotel with that particular wooden-lattice and potted-palm elegance of those huge resort hotels built during the twenties for the croquet-and-rocking-chair leisure of the very rich, Wallace immediately found himself enswarmed by a pack of reporters. Adams stood off to one side, smiling. It never failed to surprise and elate Wallace and his people to discover themselves the center of eager attention amid impressive surroundings, to draw such dizzying interest from strangers, and particularly the out-of-state press. They still don't seem quite able to believe it, and Wallace himself regards it all with a mild happy wonder, with an air of “Look at this, look what I done set off even here, and didn't even know it.” Going on into the hotel, Wallace waved to a delegation of state troopers standing to one side of the glass doors, calling to them, “And I'm for the police, too.” They all grinned and saluted him smartly. (One of them told him the next morning, after driving him back to his plane, “I'll be seeing you in Washington…”)

  At that morning's executive session, Adams settled himself in a chair behind Wallace's place at the conference table and looked around at the collection of other governors. He then leaned toward a reporter beside him and murmured, “That man over there, now, he looks familiar. Who is he?” The reporter said, “That's Robert McNair of Carolina.” Adams paused. “Carolina?” “Yeah,” the reporter said. Adams paused again. “Is that North or South Carolina he's governor of?” “South,” he was told. “Oh,” he said. “That's right. I remember now.” He slept through most of the session, slumped low in his chair, a small baggy dandruffy man with cheek propped on fist. Once he emitted a snore. He was awakened a few times by Wallace to go fetch a cigar. When a gavel ended the session, he abruptly stood up-perhaps a bit too quickly for whatever appearances he was guarding-and looked around blinking, his trousers drooping low under his paunch, a mild and almost sly little smile on his face. He then followed Wallace's party into the inn's spacious and chandeliered dining room, where Wallace, after he had seated himself, looked around him and pronounced, “You know, this is a real swan-e place.” The waiter brought menus so large that Wallace immediately disappeared behind his, only his little hands visible at its edges. There was a long period of perusing the French and Italian dishes, and then Wallace's voice came from his menu, “Adams, you a college president now, you spose to be able to read this menu. What's it say?”

  For the duration of the conference, Wallace kept pretty much to himself. Retreating back to his suite immediately after that afternoon's session, relaxed in his sitting room, he inquired of Adams-who had found a bowl of fruit and was now systematically ransacking it, perched on the edge of a chair with a newspaper spread on the rug at his feet to catch the orange peels and seeds (when the table was being cleared at lunch, he had lunged to retrieve an unfinished hunk of cornbread from his plate as it was being removed)-“Adams, what's everybody spose to do before supper? They got some kind of something goin' on down in the ballroom, don't they?” Adams spat a seed, hunched far over the newspaper with his elbows on his knees, and mum bled thickly, “Yeah, guvnuh, I think it's a honorary reception.” “Well, what they gonna be doin', they not gonna be doin' anything but just standin' around and drinkin', are they? I don't see no need to go down there for that.” Adams nodded, peeling off more orange peel with his pocket knife. “That's about all, guvnuh, I'd say-just standing around and talking.” “Well,” said Wallace, “I don't particularly care for that; we'll just wait up here till time for supper.”

  Presently there was a knock at the door, and a bodyguard admitted a radio reporter with a tape recorder, who knelt by Wallace's chair for a short interview. When it was over, Wallace told the reporter, motioning toward Adams, “Hell, this fella here just did finish the sixth grade, and I appointed him president of one of our colleges down there in Alabama. That just goes to show you, in Alabama we don't discriminate for any reason- race, creed, color, religion, or ignorance.” When the reporter was gone, Adams muttered to Wallace, “Guvnuh, now you got to stop running me down in front of folks. You just got to quit talking about me that kinda way.” Wallace grunted, “Aw, hell, Adams. You turnin' into one of them sensitive college presidents?”

  They finally left the suite and headed for the dining room. In the elevator going down, a blonde glowing woman in a white stole, a jeweled necklace glimmering at her throat, reached forward after an exchange of greetings and brushed dandruff from Wallace's shoulders-he seemed somehow to invoke such solicitude in most females, perhaps because of his boyishness. He thanked her warmly. Getting out of the elevator, he advised Adams, “You could use a few swipes there, too, Adams.” Then, with his small party gathered around him in the hall, he plotted that they would simply stroll through the ballroom, where the reception was still under way, to get to the dining room. “I think we'll just walk on through here, boys,” he murmured conspiratorially. When he entered the ballroom he was, of course, instantly waylaid-much to his delight. It was twenty minutes later before he finally settled himself at a table in the dining room, and he had collected three newsmen to have supper with him. He inquired of them, “Guess you fellas figger I'm a bad buggah, don't you?” They laughed. “Yeah, lots of folks think I'm a bad buggah. They think I'm a hate-monger. But I ain't no hate-monger-shit, life's too short for that. You can't waste it hatin' folks.” After supper, while all the other governors were off in rooms talking together, Wallace lingered in the lobby with the newsmen, one hand hooked in his pants pocket by the thumb while a cigar smoldered between two stubby fingers, his other hand fingering his tie knot or running up and down his shirt under his coat lapel. “You boys shoulda been with us up there in Kenosha, Wisconsin, back yonder in sixty-four. That was the most rambunctious crowd I ever talked to. I never seen folks that much for us. I mean, you'd just open your mouth to try and say something, 'Ah-' and they'd be up outta those seats cheerin' and stompin'-”

  He finally returned to his suite, sitting for a while in his shirtsleeves chatting with Adams. “Yeah, when we get to Washington, we gonna make Watson head of atomic energy. He's gonna look after atomic energy for us…” He suddenly demanded of Adams, “You been in those sessions down there, I don't think any of those fellas sound more intelligent than I do, do they? That Romney, for instance-he don't sound all that intelligent. They all just ordinary men, like you and me. Hell…”

  The evening abruptly dissolved into yawns. Wallace started stripping off his tie and unfastening his cuffs, and the small party scattered to their separate bedrooms. Barely thirty seconds after closing the door to his own room, Adams was in bed, his shirt and trousers drooping from a chair, the covers pulled up under his chin-already beginning to snore.

  The next morning Adams, attired in shorts and undershirt, ventured into Wallace's bedroom to wake him and managed to get no more than a muffled grumble. When breakfast was wheeled into Adams' room, Adams went back into Wallace's bedroom and said, “Guvnuh, they've brought in the breakfast- it's ready and waiting in there.” There was a silence, and then a thick, querulous, “Ready in whur?” “In my room in there.” “Adams, you didn't wake me up. You not doin' your job, Adams.” Adams made a thin soft protest, “Guvnuh, I did, I did, I came in here at eight-thirty and woke you up, you just don't remember, you went on right back to sleep.” There was another long silence. “You spose to see that I'm awake, Adams. What time is it?” Adams told him, and returned to the room where the breakfast tray was waiting. A minute or so later, Wallace clumped in from his bedroom, wearing his shoes under his rumpled pajamas, his hair askew and spiky and gluey. He tried to flatten it back with his hand as he sat down, and his first utterance after emerging from the transitory oblivion of sleep, even before he had tasted of his Spanish melon and coffee and toast and fried eggs, was, “Yessuh, sho sounded like a bunch of Southern guvnuhs down there yesterday, talkin' all about protectin' state sover
eignty and all. I thought for a minute I was right back home…”

  His political isolation became virtually absolute. After Lester Maddox of Georgia-the only politician of any imaginable consequence who could have been considered a Wallace ally-began hinting he might stay within the Democratic fold in 1968, Wallace snorted, “Hell, he didn't even think he was gonna show over there in that guvnuh's race, didn't even have any idea he was even close. Then all of a sudden, he wakes up one mornin' and he's in the runoff, and he thinks, 'Why, goddamn! I could win this thing. I could actually be guvnuh of Georgia! So he gets all excited and starts tryin' to make everybody he can think of happy, snatchin' at anybody, makin' all these accommodations and stuff. Hell, it was funny. What's wrong with Lester, he just ain't got no character….” Actually, he had already begun evidencing a particular aversion to any politician identifying with him too intimately; he tended to lose respect for anyone who became too enraptured with him.

  In fact, says one old friend, “It's almost got to where he don't trust anybody outside his own flesh.” His deafness, a condition left from his war service, was growing more serious, and this dimming of hearing, some speculate, would only deepen his fanaticism, his isolation, his estrangement from communication and all it involves-logic, compromise, the efficacy of words and the vitality of reason-and increase his reliance on passion and the visceral values.

  After Lurleen delivered a speech in the spring of 1967 promising massive resistance to federal integration guidelines, Wallace toyed with the idea of assembling a kind of state-wide vigilante posse of some one hundred thousand volunteers, “so when the troops come, we'll have a few folks waitin' for 'em.” This was a trifle raw even for his advisers, one of whom reports, “I told him, 'Guvnuh, I think it would be a mistake, you bound to draw in a few real hairy ones with a crowd of folks like that.' But then I told him it seemed like everything he'd done so far had turned out right no matter what everybody else had said at the time, that he always seemed to do the right thing. So I just didn't know what to advise him.” There was a danger that he would begin to entertain such notions about the genius of his instincts and perceptions-the final hubris of the demagogue.

  At the same time, he seemed secretly to relish moving about among rumors of his own imminent martyrdom. For a long time, the only picture under the glass on Wallace's desk was a photograph taken of himself and President Kennedy, their arms around each other, when they met briefly at Huntsville before the University of Alabama crisis. When Kennedy was assassinated, according to a newsman close to Wallace, “it really bugged George. He sat there in his office and didn't move from in front of that television set through the whole thing. He kept wondering if he ought to go to the funeral, and he finally wound up flying to Washington to pay his respects to the family. But it kept bugging him. He started being conscious of the fact that he might go the same way.” He would tell his friends, “If they gonna kill me, they gonna kill me.” But it was not resignation; rather, it seemed a kind of titillation at the prospect of assuming the ultimate heroic pose in not only his but the Southern sensibility: impalement, crucifixion.

  He came increasingly to crave the casual company of his old cronies-Ralph Adams, Oscar Harper, Glenn Curlee. When they were not available, he would seize upon anyone who was even remotely congenial and would listen to him. “He ain't gonna be alone,” said Glenn Curlee. “He'll stay in that office till ten at night just to have folks around him to talk to. He ain't gonna be by himself till he dies, I reckon.”

  Not long after Lurleen's election, he kept a pair of out-of-state visitors in his office all through an afternoon and into dusk, with a hush gradually settling over the rest of the capitol, the coming of night outside marked merely by a subtle change in the light in the curtained room. Secretaries and aides looked in to tell him they were leaving for the day, but he barely glanced at them-he kept on talking to his visitors, occasionally standing to lift a silver water pitcher from a tray of glasses near him, gulping straight from the pitcher and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. About eight o'clock he said, “You fellas want to come and get a bite to eat with me?” Wrapping himself in his overcoat, he made a brief but clamorous stop in the bathroom just off his office, and then he and his two visitors stepped out into the sharp black winter night. “Let's go on down to Turk's,” Wallace told his bodyguard. “I reckon he's still open.” On the way, one of the visitors asked Wallace what he most wanted to do if he were elected President. “What would I do if I got elected? Goddamn, I haven't even thought about that. Wouldn't it be sumpum if I were to win this thing…”

  It was a bleak and dingily lit little cafe, nearly deserted, sitting in the somewhat seedier half of Montgomery's downtown, indistinguishable from the thousands of night diners one finds everywhere near bus stations and police stations. Wallace settled himself in a booth and ordered a hamburger steak, which, when it was presented to him, he promptly drowned in ketchup. The bodyguard sat by himself at a table over by the door, and when one of the visitors asked why the bodyguard was with them, Wallace muttered, “Don't worry, he's used to settin' alone.” He quickly disposed of his steak and ordered coffee, which he drank with a spoon as he chatted on. “Yeah, when we went up to Washington for LBJ's inaugural parade, there were more folks to come by our booth out there along the street than came by the booth of any other governor. There was just a few at first, and then the folks really started swarmin' over when they saw everybody was shakin' hands with the bugguhman. A lot of folks found out I wasn't a bugguhman at all. I even had a request once from that Commie magazine out in California, Ramparts; they wanted to send somebody to see me. We told 'em no. They didn't want to write a story about anybody, they just wanted to be able to say they had interviewed that cat…” While he was talking, a heavy man in a rayon jacket with a day's growth of beard on his sallow ashy face approached the booth and produced a “Wallace for President” bumper sticker, informing Wallace that orders for the stickers were coming in from all over the country to the newsstand he operated. Wallace, grinning and chewing on his napkin, fingered the sticker for a moment. It was black with red lettering, and Wallace chuckled, “You know, I just don't like anything that's got black in it.” He took the bumper sticker anyway and told the man, “I'm gonna put it on my car. Might as well get this whole thing started, I guess.”

  He took his visitors on with him to the governor's mansion, sitting in the dark car talking to them for some twenty minutes. “No, I don't remember fightin' too much outside the ring. 'Bout the only time I guess I got in a fight was when I was in high school. I'd gone up to Birmingham for a boxin' tournament, and two or three of us were walking to the auditorium where we were gonna box that night when we saw two or three of these white boys pickin' on this little colored boy. We moved in. There was all kinda shovin' and pushin' and grabbin', and I sprained my hand. But we stopped them ruffians from pickin' on that li'l nigguh boy. I went on and boxed that night and broke my hand. I lost the fight to Aaron Franklin of Tuscaloosa. My thumb broke slap in two and my hand got as big as my head. They had to put it in a cast.” He was waxing steadily warmer and more convivial. “Well, you boys come on in, heunh? It's a big ole house, but I'm livin' like I always have. I've always had about the same. I don't have any thousand-dollar chairs, but I don't feel sorry for myself.”

  The shelves in the downstairs rooms were spare of books, and those that were spotted around were mostly furnished by the state library. All the paintings on the walls were on loan from the state Archives and History Department.

  Four years after the Wallaces moved in with only their clothes, the house still seemed as impersonal and anonymous as a hotel. Only in Wallace's bedroom were there signs of more than a tentative and fleeting occupancy: cigar boxes and humidors were scattered over tables and bureau tops and window ledges, and a stack of books sat on a table on Wallace's side of the bed-an odd assortment like the collection in his office: Lee's Lieutenants and The Terrible Swift Sword, Vietnam Doctor, something called God and
the Devil, another tome entitled As Lincoln Wanted It, and a curious 1904 novel with yellowed crackly pages called The Bondage of the Free, which, according to its title page, is “a romance treating of the disenfranchisement of the Negro and including a scathing arraignment of the White House.” For a long while there was also a crumpled-up “Wallace for President” bumper sticker on the bedside table. Hanging on the wall facing the bed, so that it is one of the first things Wallace saw when he sat up every morning, was a framed photograph of Wallace and President Johnson inscribed, “With warm regards, Lyndon B. Johnson,” with Johnson looking down on Wallace and his huge hand engulfing Wallace's, Wallace himself looking away from the President with that faintly awkward and captured expression seen so often on the faces of those he clings to himself while not campaigning.

  He sat in the back study downstairs with his visitors until almost midnight-his chair pulled over to the couch where they were sitting, his tiny feet propped up on the coffee table, and his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his coat tightly buttoned across his paunch, with ashes flaking over his lap from a cigarette pinched squintingly in the exact center of his mouth-and recounted with spasmodic, breathless, panting, delicious little snickers and sniggerings how during college and his Army service he had toyed with Yankees and innocent sophisticates by playing a dim-witted hillbilly. “We used to tell the girls in the sororities about how much whiskey we could drink, how we were just poor country folks. We took out these little girls from New Orleans once, and we had this pint jar filled with water with a corn-cob stopper we'd dipped in whiskey. We told 'em it was moonshine and let 'em smell the stopper. Then I turned the jar up and drank about half that water. It scared 'em to death. They couldn't get over how I could drink all that moonshine and still drive. When I was in the Army at Denver, I had this buddy from Mississippi, and we decided we'd give the girls out there some experience with some hillbillies. There was a bunch of girls workin' at the PX, and me and my buddy went in and asked 'em for a can of Brewton's snuff. They asked us what our fathers did, and I told 'em my daddy was in the penitentiary for makin' whiskey. They smiled and got all giggly-those gals had found 'em some real live hillbillies. I asked 'em, 'How'd you like to go sparkin'?' They agreed to go to a motion picture-a hundred thousand soldiers out there they wouldn't give a date to. They were so gullible. We walked in the theater, and I asked 'em, 'Where's the men's bathroom?' Like I couldn't read, you know. There was a Socialist League out there in Denver, had a girl with them named Kathryn Renfroe-a beautiful girl. She decided she'd make a study of us hillbillies. We let her study on us a little bit.” He repeatedly tapped his cigarette in the general vicinity of an ashtray on the floor, a compulsive, quick, vigorous flicking, sometimes half-dislodging the coal so that sparks showered down over his coat when he stabbed it back in his mouth and he would have to pause for a moment of urgent slapping and whisking with one hand. “Those fellas in the barracks from New Yoke and Chicago, we'd been studyin' about the sun and heat and goin' up in airships, and these fellas were tryin' to tell me and my buddy how it was colder up on top of a mountain than in a valley. We'd say, 'Ain't the sun just a great big ball of fhar?' They'd say, 'Yes, but-' and we'd say, 'And the closer you get to a ball of fhar, the hotter it gets, ain't that right?' They'd get all mad and red in the face. 'Yes. I mean, no-” Don't tell me a mountain ain't closer to the sun than a valley,' I'd say. And they'd try to tell us about these elevated trains in Chicago, and we told 'em, 'Ain't no trains that run up over the ground. We ain't so country we don't know there ain't no trains runnin' along on tracks held up in the air with sticks. We ain't that country.' Man, their jewglur veins would pop out. They'd run out and get folks from Wyoming and Idaho and bring 'em in there to tell us about them trains. One fella told me, dammit, he was gonna send off and get a picture of those elevated trains to show me. I told him, 'Yeah. I know. A trick picture.' And they kept tryin' to explain to me about that sun business. A lot of those boys thought you were just ignorant 'cause you came from the South. Got to where they'd jump up outta their bunks every time me and this fella from Mississippi opened our mouths. All we had to do was just start to say something. We'd see how fast we could make a fella come up out of his bunk. 'By God, that ain't so!'-” He lowered his head and shook it like a baffled taunted bull, his arms waving, his fingers lashing. “They almost wanted to fight. Then, when I got that attack of meningitis and like to died, I heard folks talkin' about how meningitis could affect your mind. So after I got out, I'd pass these boys from New Yoke and Chicago in the hall, and 'bout the time I'd come up aside 'em, I'd do this little shuffle, you know, and kind of jerk my head at 'em. They'd jump clear over against the wall. We'd be eatin' in the dining hall, and I could feel them all watchin' me outta the corner of their eyes. So after a while I'd start talkin' crazy in a little low quiet voice, start sharpenin' this kitchen knife”-he made a slow steady motion like a barber stropping a razor “-and I'd tell 'em Roy Acuff was comin' to see me one of these nights. 'And if he don't come,' I'd say, 'I'm gonna come see a few of yawl when you're asleep.' I'd keep on sharpenin' that knife, lookin' at 'em, you know, and givin' a little jerk of my head ever once and a while-” He demonstrated, snapping his head sideways, like a Siamese dancer with a bad crick in the neck. “They'd give a little start, like somebody had goosed them under the table, but they'd keep on eatin'. Sometime, after we had all sat down at the table, I'd just start up singin' Wabash Cannonball They'd wait a minute with their forks halfway to their mouths and stare at me, but I wouldn't look at any of 'em, I'd just rare back and cut loose with that Wabash Cannonball, so you could hear it all over the dining room. Then I'd stop and peer at them fellas down the table, all of 'em kinda leanin' over and lookin' at me, and I'd start sharpenin' that knife again and tell 'em, 'Ole Roy better get here tomorrow.' They finally hunted up the psychiatrist and told him about me. They had the guards watchin' me before long. The psychiatrist came down the hall one afternoon with one of those little rubber hammers, you know, that they use to tap you on the knee. He just walked real easy down the hall toward me, and then he kind of leaned against the wall and tapped that hammer in the palm of his hand and asked me, real casuallike, 'How you feelin'?' His voice was real light and high, you know-'How you feelin'? You havin' antagonisms?' So I told him”-Wallace ducked his head and whispered behind his hand- “Everything's fine, if Roy ever gets here.' He told me, 'Well, we put in a call for him, but-' I told him, 'Well, I sho appreciate that. You know, all these other fellas, they against me. They're crazy.' He said, 'Unh-hunh,' and nodded and walked off. After a while, I got to thinkin' about it, and realized things were gettin' a little serious. Folks were puttin' chairs up against their doors. I finally went to the psychiatrist and told him I'd just been foolin'. He just nodded and said, 'Unh-hunh' again, and then asked me if I was havin' antagonisms. It took me some time to convince him I'd just been playin'…”