Despite such gentle and vagrant demurrals, he seems a young man who has succeeded in extinguishing in himself any true dark briny blurts of anger or resentment or desperation- any heats whatever, in fact. He has remained, for the most part, sedulously deferential-to the point of even having dutifully agreed to perform his music, that single “intimate, highly personal” creation of his in which “alone do I find my freedom,” amid the brawling blusters of his father's rallies. At one of them, he mentions, “we found that over half the people who had pushed their way to the front were against Dad… For my part, to know that I had to go out and play to that kind of audience was pretty disheartening.”
Wallace does concede in his foreword, “My son George has had a somewhat difficult time.” No negligible reason why, as George Jr. himself suggests, is that “I can't recall my dad ever explaining why he couldn't spend more time with me… He's never given me a lot of father-and-son advice… Sometimes I would wonder why he couldn't at least stay home more.” George Jr. quotes one of his sisters as recalling that the only emotion their father seemed to possess was “getting just nervous.”
But George Jr. even essays industrious apologias for that particular obliviousness of his father's. “George Wallace may not have been able to spend as much time with his family as some men do,” he insists, “but he made every moment with us count… His career was very important to him… Thinking back, I can see how politically ambitious he was. But I don't think a son could admire a father more than I do, really, and I always have.” There lurks, though, a certain strange and vaguely impersonal distance finally in all his admirations, as if he is remarking on someone not so much his father as a figure, a familiar stranger, in hectic commotion beyond a soundproof press booth window on the far stage of an auditorium. “He seemed to give off an energy and a warmth of personality,” he reports, “that spoke their own clear message to everyone near him, myself included.” He even approaches his account of his father's shooting through the narrative of a bodyguard who, as young George oddly introduces the event, “recently told me the traumatic details of what it was like to be shot with George Wallace.” Much of his testimonial, in fact, unfolds through the curious device of George Jr. engaging in rather mincingly reverent conversations with his own family and acquaintances about his father-at one remove, as it were:
I noted, “A lot of people don't realize how compassionate he is.”
“And thoughtful,” Colonel Dothard added. “It's unusual, with the position he's been in all these years, to be so thoughtful and compassionate.”
“I think the reason he's so popular is that people sense he's sincere,” young George then quotes himself as rejoining.
In fact, it's as if the only moment of any true intimacy between them came one afternoon when George Jr. almost drowned in the surf off the Gulf shores: “I thought; 'This is what Dad said it was like when he lay on the ground after he'd been shot-when he waited for everything to fade away and death to come.' I had never felt so close to him as I did at that moment.” Even in that instance, it was months apart, they were miles apart, but it was only in the last loneliness of that weightless void that he was ever able to approach and almost find his father, to know him for an instant.
One of the few times Wallace ever paused at home with his family was Christmas, but even then, it would be Lurleen who would wake the children in the early dawn-“She liked to see our expressions when we opened our gifts and take pictures of us”-while Wallace himself remained in bed, lounging rumpled and bleary, ruffling through the newspaper, until midmorning. Inevitably, George Jr. came to be far closer to his mother than his father, and he declares now, “Her loss is the greatest tragedy I have ever known… When she was alive, there was just a magic feeling throughout the mansion.” She was like her son- a surpassingly private and unassertive soul. George Jr. cherishes a single memory of a night in the mansion when “Dad and Mother danced in my room … It was a beautiful moment that I'll never forget.”
But in 1965 at least, Lurleen suddenly came to occupy the full urgent center of Wallace's attention and interests. During the second campaign, in the fall, George Jr. quotes one of her bodyguards then as recalling that returning to her motel in the evenings, “she could barely walk up the stairs.…” But whatever Oedipean rages might have dimly stirred then or since in young George, he has kept diligently pent and subdued. In what is probably his ultimate deference, his ultimate exercise of muted politeness and good manners, he manages to remain blandly oblivious to the barbarities implicit through his systematic recital of how his mother continued to serve on through her last haggard months after her election: “After finishing the cobalt treatments the first of November, Mother drove back to Montgomery with Juanita Halstead. She wanted very much to make that beautiful drive through the South, knowing it might be her last…. That same month she was strong enough to join Dad for appearances in California, where he was signing up voters for his American Independent Party… At Christmastime, she was feeling the dreaded pains again, this time in her lower right side… On January third, the doctors confirmed the worst: she had another cancer, this time a small pelvic tumor.… Somehow Mother managed to make an appearance at the opening of the American Independent Party's Wallace-for-President headquarters in Houston on January eleven. But when the pain grew too bad at the beginning of February, Mother was admitted to the hospital…” Her last days were passed reposing in a wheelchair in a mild pale dreaming spring sun on a patio in back of the mansion-a quiet, still, dwindled figure, a small wraithy spectre bundled in shawls, now managing only to stir momentarily to scratchily sign the papers that Wallace continued to bring to her from the governor's office. On a soft and sweetly flushed May evening, about thirty minutes after midnight, she expired-Wallace glancing up from her slight form in the bed and snapping to the doctor, “Is she gone?”
It had been her last small personal wish, earnestly expressed to friends and her minister, for at least the privacy of a closed casket. But Wallace, after some mulling, decided to present her now to the public one last time, lying in state in the rotunda of the capitol building in Montgomery for viewing by the general populace. George Jr. offers the explanation, “It took a very painful kind of emotional courage for him to go against my mother's wishes in a very private matter … and hope that she would have understood.” One veteran Wallace observer says, “She probably already understood it, knew what would actually happen, even while she was making those last attempts to arrange for it to be otherwise.” On the way to the capitol for a family service before the throngs were admitted, George Jr. recalls, “I held my dad's hand in the car on the way up to the Capitol and back, and I would squeeze it to keep from crying. He managed to keep his emotions in. He was very quiet that day…” And after her family had collected around her for that last short devotional, “we left her,” as George Jr. puts it, “to the people of Alabama”-and there commenced an approximate evocation of those pageantries of martyrdom that had become by then part of the nation's mythic life, as the multitudes began surging through in a dense murmurous procession (and that was the last young George saw of his mother) that shuffled on through a day and night past her meager, inert, composed remains.
Over the following weeks, George Jr. quotes his sister as reflecting, “With you and little Lee and me at home with Daddy, I had to play Mother. Daddy was so heartbroken that he really couldn't play any role at all… I think his politics probably was the best cure for that. It got him back into the swing of things.” After the passage of a decorous interval, then, Wallace pitched on toward the 1968 campaign.
There ensued, of course, that brief burlesque little bit of gaudi-ness with a bobbly glitter-haired sprite, the local Dodge girl on Indianapolis television commercials, named Janeen Welch-Wilbur Mills's more recent and famous embarrassment having always been a vulnerability endemic if not compulsive in the whole species, excepting not even Wallace. But that short lapse into giddiness was promptly concluded when, after being qui
etly smuggled into Wallace's entourage for awhile, Janeen made the mistake of beginning to advertise it about that she and Wallace were soon to be married. She instantly disappeared back into the obscurity of Indianapolis's piano bars and motel lounges.
Some months later, in 1970, a correspondent for a large Northern newspaper, on one of his sojourns through Alabama, somewhat circuitously wound up one fine blue spring night at a large and fairly gusty party at Montgomery's country club. As the evening swam on, he found himself dancing, again and again, with a tall and luxuriously shimmering brunette with a kind of darkling glamour of glad and vivid expectancy about her. “The two of us happened to be the only unattached souls at the party. And I mean, she was smokey-one damn smokey woman. We had a lot of drinks. We had a lot of dances. It began to get goddam humid, I must say. I was starting to feel awfully smarmy…” When the party at last began spilling apart, in the general tumble outside toward cars he remembers burbling to her, “Why don't you just come on with me,” just as he realized someone was lightly but insistently tugging at his coat-sleeve, and turned to see an acquaintance deeply versed in the more delicate personal physics at play in the capitol's inner chambers, who softly and soberly admonished him, “Fella, don't do that. You'll pay for it later on.” It gave him, he recalls, a sudden and unaccountable chill, and mumbling some parting pleasantry he hastily bumbled on off alone to his car.
It was another one of those ironic circle-closings in Wallace's life-inlappings not all that surprising, perhaps, since Alabama itself really amounts to a kind of expansive village, a state-sized small town. Cornelia Ellis Snively was the niece of Big Jim Folsom-that huge, baggy, galumphing, calliope-hearted, populist Big Daddy out of the wire-grass of south Alabama, whose most feverish and hot-eyed protege, back during Folsom's first governorship in the late Forties, had been George Wallace himself, who later was to savage him with the intensity of a wolverine. During one of Folsom's Breughelian parties at the mansion, Cornelia-then only seven, and living there with her mother, Folsom's sister-slipped out of bed and perched herself in her nightgown at the top of the grand stairway to watch the festiveness through the banister railings; below her, a trim quiet lady with a pale fresh blonde prettiness noticed her, and with a grin of delight came up the stairs to kiss her, followed somewhat reluctantly and laggingly by her short, wiry, nervous husband, a young legislator named George Corley Wallace.
Cornelia eventually turned out a woman also given to her uncle's extravagance of strapping gustos-baton-twirling, strenuously playing the saxophone in high school, managing to place runner-up in the Miss Alabama pageant, even touring for a while as a singer and guitarist in a troupe with Roy Acuff, tarrying for a year in New York to study voice under Gian Carlo Menotti and dramatic arts at the Neighborhood Playhouse, finally performing as a water skier at Cypress Gardens, that presenting more or less the climactic image of what her life had become, windily skimming and spanking over whisking bright spangles of water, unfurling about her plumes of silvery dazzle, executing a blithe and solitary ballet on nothing but spray and speed, to sibilant patterings of applause from spectators along the shore. A pedigreed young princeling from Winter Haven married her there. It lasted a full seven years. With that, with two small sons now, she returned to Montgomery.
It was not quite two years after Lurleen's passing that Wallace, even as he was moving into yet another campaign for governor, began dropping by the house of an old friend who resided next door to Cornelia's mother. Cornelia often drifted over. Now in her thirties, she was a rangy, lavish, generously apportioned woman with a certain autumnal gaze of dark hazel languor, just a vague shade away from a classic Nefertitian beauty. Most of all, she had about her, still, that unflagging and almost rowdy robustness of all the Folsoms, including her mother, a redoubtable and uncontainably ebullient lady known about Alabama as Big Ruby. It was like a kind of clan personality with the Folsoms-a large, rollicking, barging lustiness that was finally alien and slightly disconcerting to Wallace's more measured, dry, tight, fierce urgencies, and which since has afforded him more than once pinched pangs of alarm and discomfort. It wasn't long after Wallace and Cornelia began discreetly keeping regular company that Mizz Ruby, as she prefers to be called, began to happily blare about town, “My daughter's shacking up with George Wallace!” Mizz Ruby had by this point arrived at a quick sensible peace with the past-as she explained it, “I said, 'Well, I'll tell you. George defeated James, and I just said, Hell with it If you can't beat 'em, join em. Because I believe in keeping the governorship in the family.'” Cornelia herself was capable, as once when she was aiding in a suburban cancer-detection drive, of whooping across a shopping-center mall to a friend she spied, “Honey, c'mon over here and get yourself a pap smear, now!” Her mother is fond of distributing it about that Cornelia was conceived one sweetly memorable night after she and her first husband sat entranced watching Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald warbling “Indian Love Call.” Having barreled now through two husbands, both expired, and a long subsequent succession of assorted casual squires, she was having a spirited time recently at a Montgomery nightclub with her current consort, a snappy if somewhat well-seasoned gentleman whom she instructs visiting journalists to refer to as “Mizz Ruby's boyfriend,” when she was suddenly whacked across her imposing nose by a glass slung at her by an inexplicably exercised lady nearby, whom Mizz Ruby is now vigorously suing: “I haven't been right since,” she announces. “It has impaired my thought attempts.”
Together, Cornelia and her mother strike one as yet two more figures in that singular series of rambunctious variations on Magnolia Ladyhood, like Zelda and Tallulah, which seem to keep being produced by Alabama over the years. Mizz Ruby recently informed one interviewer, “Five women in this town divorced their husbands to marry George Wallace. But George is smart. He married a woman with class, with background- a beautiful woman. My daughter is a reflection of me. Nobody can dictate to Cornelia. Cornelia's strong as hell. George has got all he can handle with Cornelia. The only difference in Cornelia and me is that I set my mind to help other people. Cornelia sets her mind to help Cornelia.”
According to Mizz Ruby, “it was not a courtship for a long time.” Even so, as one Montgomery insider describes it, “he went about it as if he were choosing a cabinet officer”-for a short while, ceaselessly calling friends and even local newsmen at their office down the street as if trying to gather together first a congenial consensus, fretfully inquiring, “Well, what do you think about her? What you hear from other folks, they said anything? Yeah, but what you think the effect might be, you know, with folks around the state, what they'll think about her…” Finally, one friend (who later entreated in recounting the call, “I sure hope you'll give me another name like Mosley or something if you use this”) gently interjected, “Oh-you ever heard of anything called love, governor?” There was a considerable pause. Then Wallace muttered, “Sheeeutt, Mosley.”
It was during this time that Wallace suddenly and unexpectedly found himself pitched into one of the most desparate cat fights of his political life. In the first heat of the Democratic primary that year for the gubernatorial nomination, the random imp of capriciousness always lurking in all political assumptions left him startlingly outdistanced by the man who had succeeded to the governorship after Lurleen's demise-a temperate, easy-mannered, immaculately groomed and circumspect figure named Albert Brewer. Almost instantly, without a blink, as if by sheer brute instinct-already, in fact, as he was watching the returns in his Montgomery home that night, lunging to the television screen and tapping at figures and barking, “Goddam nigguhs, that's the nigguh vote, every one of 'em, that's all it is”-he reverted to that elemental recourse by which he had always managed to finally survive and prevail when in most critical duress, resorting again to the old, tawdry, rude clamors of the Fifties which had delivered him then into the governorship against Folsom, by once more, the next morning after his stunning shortfall, conjuring forth the Black Peril, couched this time
as “the bloc vote,” and thereby loosed one of the most lurid and raucous racist campaigns within the memory of the state. It was, in a way, like a curious lapse back in time, a historical deja vu into which Wallace labored to transport all of Alabama. Among the means used for that was the distribution of a clumsily faked photo of Brewer in convivial fellowship with Elijah Muhammad, along with rumors that Brewer's wife and daughters (Brewer himself, among his other eminent respectabilities, being a Sunday-school teacher) had frolicked at some interracial nudist retreat. As it turned out, Alabama was all too readily responsive to being spirited back into those old deliriums. Brewer was handily dispatched in the runoff. Immediately afterward, at the first query from a newsman about his gas-house-gang racist offensive, Wallace simply and serenely dismissed the suggestion that there was any hint of such tones in his campaign.
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