Wallace

by Marshall Frady

  That brief little trauma thus dispelled and disposed of, Wallace married Cornelia two weeks before the inauguration.

  In his book, George Jr. offers, “I'll tell you what I think of Cornelia. I admire Cornelia… How do I feel about my father having remarried? Well, that's what Daddy wanted, so if be wanted it, of course I wanted it.” In the months afterward, as Wallace began campaigning in the 1972 Democratic primaries, he seemed to have somewhere suddenly come by an uncommonly subdued and modulated manner-a new and strangely urbane composure. Instead of his customary sheeny beetle-black suits and starched stubby collars, he began appearing metamorphosed into natty pastel mod togs with soft collars and wide knit ties. The effect was a bit improbable-like that of a pluggy rusty-knuckled little pool-hall bookie abruptly adorning himself in the raiment of a television weatherman. And all of it was generally regarded as the handiwork of Cornelia. Recalls one Alabama journalist, “Damn if she didn't manage somehow to lend him some approximation for the first time in his life of what passes for tone down here.” It seemed, on the whole, a rare and felicitous symbiosis. In Cornelia, he now had a wife who, if anything, was a surpassingly public creature.

  Then, young George discloses with a rather deliberate and matter-of-fact evenness, “one night in May-'-'May, mild May of pale dreaming sun on the back patio, four years now since that soft and sweetly-flushed May evening when she died'- while we were campaigning in Maryland, I dreamed that my father was shot. In my dream, he was shot in the throat and died.”

  When, only several days later, it happened almost like that, George Jr. quotes his sister-in another one of those peculiar interviews with others about himself-as remembering, “You were even calm on the plane … you're so calm all the time.”

  A constant blind gap in vision between pleasant assumptions and the gutteral actualities may run through the memoir of George Wallace Jr., and that is more than understandable. But it has largely been that same polite disparity in apprehension- that reality-gap-magnified to a continental popular dimension that Wallace's campaigns have always operated on. They have, in a sense, proceeded on that most ominous of all disruptions and divisions in American society, beyond even race-the increasing dissolution between language and meaning in the conduct of the nation's life. During a television interview in 1967 at the governor's mansion, Wallace leaned back in a maroon velvet setee when the camera lights were turned off to change film, and confided now to the network correspondent, with whom he'd just been discussing on camera the problems of inequality in black schools and neighborhoods, “Of course, it don't really have anything to do with the buildings or the environment or anything like that, like we were talking about there. You and I both know why Nigra schools and communities are inferior, but it's not something we gonna talk about before the public. You know what I mean, but neither one of us is gonna say it out loud.” And after the television crew had departed, he squatted for a moment on a step midway up the sweeping red-carpeted stairway of the mansion, absently scouring under his fingernails with a penknife while he mused to an aide, “ 'Course, they were asking me all that stuff about the UN and what my policies would be there. 'Course, the UN's just a cannibal club. But I couldn't be going and saying that on teevee, you know.”

  During his 1968 and 1972 national campaigns, to journalists close to Wallace there began to be a hallucinatory quality about the inconclusiveness of the speculation elsewhere on the question of Wallace's racism. Indeed, that Wallace and his strategists managed even to accomplish any serious discussion on the point was one of their more remarkable feats. Wallace has always thrived, in an inverse way, on being misfocused by the national press-from his earliest advent, when he was dismissed as a caricature of Southern redneck boobery. Where he has always flourished has been in that shadowy hiatus between his pose and the true operative realities. Then, sometime after 1968, he contrived to invest himself with a measure of deaconlike soberness and gravity and circumspection which, in time, along with his mounting national import, somehow made any thought of directly and strenuously broaching the subject of his racism seem like a breach of good taste-a bit like, for that matter, now approaching the matter of his infirmities tends to disconcert gentlemanly sensibilities. But his very genesis, of course, his inception was in the racial conflict in the South during the Sixties, the white backfire to the Black awakening in America was the primal essential energy which uttered and sustained him, and as the rancor in Alabama began to amplify-as Wallace had all along expected-over the rest of the country, Wallace's career and ambitions amplified accordingly. As his national fortunes gained magnitude, he scrupulously maintained a gap between the reality of his private persuasions on race and his public appearance of abstraction and ambivalence on the matter. But as that Alabama political sage predicted in 1967, “You just watch him in the years ahead. He can use all the other issues- law and order, running your own schools, protecting property rights-and never mention race. But people will still know he's tellin” em, 'A nigger's trying to get your job, trying to move into your neighborhood.' What Wallace is doing is talking to them in a kind of shorthand, a kind of code.”

  Churlish it always is to invoke the offenses of anyone's past. But if nothing else, it would be the sheer degree, the natural glandular elemental vigor, of Wallace's racism through all those years that would tend to belie the general suspicion now that, since Maryland, he has mutated from all that to a detached amicability.

  It was, of course, a demolition that could not have been more devastatingly plotted-a fundamentally sabotaging vandalism to have befallen a man of Wallace's particular political vitalities. In his energy, in his popular effect, there was above all else the musk and voltage of a headlong, churning, physicality. Inert, he seems as robbed of his essential and definitive force as a boat hulk sunk in sand. Wallace and his retainers have professed to take heart and new purpose from the triumphs of Franklin Roosevelt. But Wallace differs critically from Roosevelt in that, in every respect save mere dull still-appended matter, he does not exist below his middle: the half of him below his belt buckle is blank, void. Even when sitting, as Cornelia has told friends, he has the sensation that he's floating on air, has even then difficulty keeping balance.

  For a personality and presence made up so much finally of streetcorner strut and swagger, the simple abiding haunting humiliation now that his condition is being bantered about in all those poolrooms and barbershops and taxi stands would constitute one of its most unbearable ordeals. This particular torment of indignity alone, according to reports, tends to plunge Wallace periodically into some of his blackest and most baroque broodings, bristling ill-tempers of suspicion. Writer Paul Hem-phill, himself the son of a Birmingham truckdriver, recently passed some months in Montgomery foraging for a not uncivil biography of Wallace, which included several genial sessions with Wallace on trips and at the capitol-until, abruptly, he found all accustomed doors inexplicably clapped shut to him. Wallace even refused to answer his puzzled inquiries as to why. It was only later that he learned Wallace had complained to several of his aides, “Somebody told me this fella's going around town asking questions about my wife's sex life.”

  Indeed, an endless profusion of arabesque and iridescent rumors ceaselessly shimmer and sift about Alabama these days on that count. Cornelia has become, in the common fancy, something like a honeysuckled Lady Brett Ashley. But by all the best indications, ever since she was glimpsed by the Southern delegate gravely delivering Wallace into that room in Miami Beach almost three years ago, she has managed to maintain that pose of exalted and ethereal Roman widowhood, that transcendent air of fragile gallantry. For anyone other than Cornelia, actually, it would provide the supreme beatification, in a sense, of traditional Southern womenhood, and she seems to be sustaining it with fair intrepidness herself so far. Even so, as one Montgomery political broker asserts, Wallace “watches her like a goddam hawk”-to the point, even, of unobtrusively having her telephone bills reviewed.

  A veteran Wallace obse
rver recently declared, not without admiration, “His political life has been like that of a goddam snapping turtle-just no way hardly to stop him. Think how long he's been around. Think how many others are gone. But he's still here, still occupying our attention and alarm and jokes and fascination. He's simply got the survivability of a snapping turtle-you can find one of those critters on the side of the road, been hit by a truck, his shell all mangled and busted apart and he's missin' two legs, and you try to finish 'im off hacking at him with a tiretool or ax or something. He'll lie there a second, and then be damn if he won't snap at you again and then start movin' on off-they just don't quit.” But even though he managed to somehow scrimmage his way out of near-obliteration and back into life again, it appears that, this time, he has not been able to bring it off completely. Over the course of a day, he will range back and forth from the sodden sepulchral inertness of a mummy to abrupt crackling animation-actually change visibly, as if glimmering physically back and forth between two different creatures. He can, in fact, rally himself now and then to those old angry energies, clangoring apocalyptic helter-skelter incantations like those he would deliver in hotel rooms and the back seats of cars during the Sixties-“It's gonna be like the Thirties if it gets worse. People get more incensed about social problems during bad economic times than they do when their stomachs are full. And therefore to those who say, 'Wallace's issues are gone,' well, my issue was the tax system-those issues of interference in local domestic affairs, law and order, all those things are going to be accentuated if you have an economic situation. And there comes along a group of so-called pseudoin-tellectuals writing these textbooks … that feeling of our West Virginians, and I don't condone violence to solve problems, but you just remember that that is a festering sore underneath people in this country-about law and order, can't go walk on the street without some mother-and courts turnin' people loose who shoot and kill and steal.… They gettin' sick of it. When the average man gets good and mad as a mass, that's when he's going to wind up helping straighten the country out in the proper manner…” One incorrigible Wallace cynic insists, “Who the hell says there's anything about pain and affliction and being an invalid that automatically sweetens the disposition? Some of the meanest people I've ever met in my life have been invalids in wheelchairs.” And in fact, Wallace of late has begun to grumpily fume about all the benign conjectures in the press about his apparent racial gentlings, as if in a growing irritable uneasiness with the approval of old antagonists for his supposed penitence, protesting to one journalist recently, “Now, they've distorted things about Wallace has changed…” Referring to his widely celebrated appearance at the convocation of black mayors in Tuskegee sometime ago, he snapped, “Mayor Johnny Ford of Tuskegee knows that I was invited for two days before and that he made numerous calls and that I did not drop in unexpectedly.”

  If Wallace has, in fact, mellowed at all since the mayhem performed on him in that shopping center in Maryland in 1972, it would only seem to be in the sense that he has simply dimmed-has lost that final flaring incandescent edge and definition of his old fury and manic urgency. As one Alabama editor reports, “Even when he comes to life, there remains a certain lifelessness about it. In his gesturing, in his voice, even if he's blaring, there's still some inner deadness, some emptiness. It's as if he's only going through the motions of who he used to be.” Wallace himself doggedly insists in interviews, “I've never been in a period of depression. I may have been, uh-nervous a time or two in the hospital, but there's never been any of that depression yawl writin' about all the time.” But for all that, visitors report that he has a certain drab and elegiac air clinging to him like a faint lasting dankness, “a kind of pervasive mournfulness.”

  Most uncannily, though, the word from the most intimate and respected sources is that, during his private moments now, Wallace has come to be ambushed increasingly by uncertainty and remorse about his past-some undefined, unarticulated, but stunning angst of dread and woe and guilt. “There's simply no question about it,” declares one of those sources. “It's the most uncharacteristic thing you could imagine in the man. But it's there. It's happening to him.” Whether it arises from contemplations at last of the bloody disarray he has left behind him through his political progression, whether it comes from more personal recognition (one odd thing, many have noted, is that almost never does he refer to Lurleen now by simple familiar first name alone, merely with such fleeting and detached mentions as “my wife once” or, at the most, “Governor Lurleen Wallace back then”), all he will mutter at such stricken moments is the haunted possibility that what has befallen him “I might have brought on myself. I may have brought it all on myself.”

  Now, that wildcat and slightly tatty political insurgency which Wallace mustered forth in the Sixties-a homemade Rube-Goldberg contraption of peeves and rancors and abject faith which he singlehandedly with nothing but his own dauntless audacity willed and labored into being out of nowhere into at last a formidable relevance and reality-has in a sense taken on a life of its own, its own complex organizational machineries and volition, to which Wallace, of course, is still indispensable. But it's as if at the moment his long solitary enterprise was finally and massively realized, he faded. And one has a feeling now that he has become somehow subtly captured in the dynamic of his creation.

  In a session with him in May of 1975, one journalist who has tracked Wallace now many moons finally blurted, “You're really gonna run again, aren't you? What in the world do you want to do that for?”

  Wallace mumbled, “Well, you know, you get to going here, and-” and it suddenly seemed that he was for once laboring now to actually enunciate and define the almost metaphysical thrall that was keeping him in it, as much to himself as to the journalist “-there's all that organization there, and all that money, you know, and all those letters, you have all those people out there, been believing in you all these years, made sacrifices and all, and they want, they want you-”

  “Yeah,” said the journalist, “but it's almost as if, I mean I sort of get the feeling almost that you don't even want to-”

  “Naw, naw,” Wallace barked, “naw, it's just that sometimes people who get involved in a movement, you know, sometimes you have to do more than maybe you expected when you got into the movement back there in the first place…”

  The imposing engines and equipages of that movement now-the vast mail-order solicitations, the bulletins and circulars and “delegate-liaison task forces”-are a sophistication it has simply gained by accretion over the long course since those primeval years when Wallace was capable of eagerly calculating his national financial strategies with hasty offhand scribbles of a ball-point pen on the back of a stray envelope. It has simply been a long and, by now, almost epic political revival meeting which, since its garish and dumpy and improbable beginning back in the early Sixties, has never really paused or ceased, with all organization improvised along the way of its popular expansion to manage and maintain it. The phenomenon preceded its apparatuses. But for all its awesome machinery now, it yet remains a rump operation, still outside the pale of the conventional political estate and respectability: a political version of Glenn Turner Enterprises. And it remains devoid of any conspicuous and dominant figures beyond Wallace-merely plumbing and technicians: Charles Snider, national campaign director, a homegrown Montgomery chap with the aluminal precisions and glib, earnest, clapper sheens of a Pontiac showroom salesman; press secretary Billie Joe Camp, a primly efficient clerk whose manner of communication and explanation is reminiscent of Pentagon press briefings during Vietnam; Joe Azbell, the amply bulking and savvy national public-relations Marlin. It is a movement which has no true existence in itself as an ideology, or even a coalition of interests: it consists finally of a single figure, the myth of a single presence. Should he vanish, the immense organizational edifice that has accumulated around him would only linger on, at the most, as a kind of memorial foundation, continuing a commerce in Wallace wristwatches, re
cords of his speeches, Wallace souvenir sofa-pillows.

  Since Maryland, it has become in fact utterly the case that all of his life is politics. Indeed, all along he had possessed a quality something like that flat, implacable, metallic, almost impersonal ferocity of Faulkner's Popeye-finally curiously sub-stanceless, never once, as George Wills has noted, having uttered a single phrase or concept that has lingered in the national memory like Huey Long's “Share the Wealth” and “Every Man a King.” He has been, instead, only sheer noise and heat and motion. And now he has become the political Popeye perfected, like him now in the last sense too. If it was already true before Maryland that Wallace had no existence and no reality outside of his political lusts and glees-the ultimate political creature- then he has at last, in a way, completely atrophied into that absorption. There is quite literally no life left for him now but that. (Receiving a delegation of touring Russians recently, he eagerly fastened on a cinema actress among them-a tall, lithe, luminously lovely girl-and clung tightly to her hand as he kept effusing to her on how beautiful she seemed to him: “He just wouldn't let her hand go,” recalls someone who was there. “He kept burbling to her on and on and hanging on to her hand. He was like a little eight-year-old boy.”) Static, halved now, yet he must keep running. The governorship has become a cul-de-sac: he cannot run again for that. All that is left for him now is 1976. And that, in all probability, will be all-his last time, ever.

  He had always been somewhat listless and diffident when it came to the business of actually administering the offices he has so obsessively pursued all his life. But now it's as if he can barely nudge forth the spirit even for a pretense of presiding as governor over the daily governmental maintainance of the state. One indication of his final abstraction beyond those concerns is that, of the few bills he vetoed in the legislature in 1975, most of them were introduced by his own floor leaders, who, after the vetoes, then promptly engineered the efforts to override. In the past, such temerity would have tempted quick political effacement at Wallace's hand. But he seemed hardly to notice. It was recently reported that House and Senate leaders summoned once with an air of emergency to Wallace's office to try parsing out a resolution of a critical legislative impasse, suddenly realized after floundering loudly among themselves for awhile that Wallace had barely spoken a syllable, and glanced over to see him sitting across the chamber gazing out of the window over the capitol lawn, absently munching on a Baby Ruth candy bar.