Wallace

by Marshall Frady

  If there remains no life for him now but the 1976 campaign, at the same time that movement is still made up of those old swarming angry electricities of his which created it, that image of what he used to be. So it's as if, whatever his own soft unfocusings from the savage glare of that image since that afternoon in Maryland, whatever the secret harrowings and groanings of his soul now in solitude, he must continue to publicly perform that simulation and mime of his prior self from now on if the movement is to live, if he is to live. There is then no release from his past. He must reenact himself forever.

  It's as if, then, he has come now, like Lurleen, to serve himself as the icon of the movement he accomplished-still criti cal to its existence, with it too being all his breath and being now, but also strangely apart from it now even as, like Lurleen, he must perform as its token: an empty and vague effigy of himself before that final blast of violence, kept most of the time in studiously designed seclusion, unglimpsed by the general eye and so in a way already beginning to vanish into impalpable legend, dressed and tended and trundled about like a doll, produced only for those carefully selected and programmed occasions where he conjures forth imitations of his old cocky waggish eye-glinting fury, but giving one the impression now that when the crowd scatters and the last lingering echoes ring away in a hush, he will be wheeled off, slumped and blank, and stored to wait for the next appearance.

  He sits now in his wheelchair on the patio in back of the mansion in the mild pale dreaming sun.

  Cornelia sits beside him.

  EPILOGUE

  1996

  Almost four years having passed since that quick clatter of shots in the shopping center in Maryland, Cornelia had finally accepted that her splendid dream of their windy public stardom together was irretrievably lost. That perverse marauding of fate she had borne for as long as she could, but for all her bravely effusive pretenses otherwise, their life had become quite as dead and null as Wallace's lower body. And now, it was as if their original entrancement with each other ended in a kind of prolonged, fitfully spuming disintegration of the passion, or at least the excitement, that they had once felt.

  State troopers began bringing Wallace reports that Cornelia was engaging in clandestine caperings with assorted gallants. And while he had arranged that her phone bills be quietly scrutinized, she had begun taping his phone calls from the governor's mansion, not trusting that, despite his infirmity, he was not still left with enough of his old impulses unextinguished to be making furtive calls to prior consorts, if only to rouse garlicky memories from his rampantly hale past. Wallace aides eventually happened on a cache of these tapes stacked in a safe in the basement of the mansion. At Wallace's instant directive, they dumped the tapes into a plastic garbage bag, drove a good distance out of Montgomery, and dropped the bag into the Alabama River.

  Still, Cornelia stalwartly refused to leave the mansion, and she and Wallace remained in a bristlingly tense, torturously ritualized mutual occupancy there for another year. It was not until the summer of 1977 that she at last conceded and moved out. A divorce was effected the following January-on what would have been their seventh anniversary (also precisely as long as her first marriage had lasted). That, however, was not the conclusion of the matter for her. She continued to send up periodic flares of notification that she and Wallace were about to be reunited. She would, without any warning, abruptly show up back at the mansion and course with an operatic storming through its rooms. It was a siege, frantic and raging, that was like the last ragged semblance of any possible intimacy left to her. Finally, after one such impromptu raid by her on the mansion, Wallace had her forcibly ejected, and he stipulated that she was never again to be admitted through the gates onto its grounds. Then, with word that Wallace might be approaching yet another marriage, Cornelia issued a public call for prayer by Alabama's citizens to avert that gruesome prospect. She still had a hearty, darkly lustrous beauty of an almost Junoesque power, but she was, in fact, now wheeling into a full Folsom-scale dementia. In 1981 she was arrested for making off with someone's pickup truck, after which her mother, Big Ruby, assuming for public witness a mien of heavily tragic graveness, had her committed to a mental clinic. When Cornelia was released, still in a somewhat precarious condition, she had no other place to go but back to live with her mother.

  In the meantime, Wallace had indeed married yet once more, this time to a woman thirty years younger than he. Back in 1968, Lisa Taylor, then nineteen, had sung in a vibrant ringing duet with her sister in the festive, hot-smacking romp and bawl of Wallace's rallies, during which she had been stricken with an adoration of him, the jaunty pounce and swarm of his vitality then, that, she later professed, she had carried secretly within her ever since. She had waited through all the ensuing years-a marriage of her own, an eventual divorce-and then, shortly after Wallace's divorce from Cornelia, she had called him and proposed on the phone that she become his wife: she would now take even this vague and wasted remnant of him. She kept up her gentle urgings until he agreed, and she therewith transferred herself, with her six-year-old son, into Wallace's Montgomery home. But after Wallace was elected to his fourth term as governor, Lisa, a buxom, sweet, simple-natured woman, found herself if anything more dismayed than Lurleen had been by the furors and glares of public life that Wallace still could not bring himself to surrender. Before the completion of his term, she had moved with her son, whom she described as “miserable,” out of the mansion, and a divorce shortly followed.

  Now he was virtually alone.

  All this had taken place after Wallace had bestirred himself one last time, in 1976, to make a presidential run. But it turned out to be a rather woebegone affair. He found himself quickly short-circuited in the primaries by a man who had, actually, much patterned himself after Wallace's own political manner. Jimmy Carter-after failing in his first try for the governorship of Georgia in 1966 as a genially polite liberal nonetheless too far astray, he realized, from the popular temper of the state-had then sedulously taken on, for his second effort in 1970, Wallace's more ruffian populist deportments, styling himself “just a redneck farmer from south Georgia” and assailing his urbanely moderate opponent, Atlanta attorney and former governor Carl Sanders, as “Cufflinks Carl” of “the Atlanta bigwigs.” Carter even affected Wallace's political aesthetic of a dowdy drabness in his campaign advertising. But it was a seediness not only of style, but of such Wallace-fried sentiments as “restoring local institutions to local control” and preserving the “quality” of state schools against “obstacles brought about by integration, court rulings …”

  Once winning that election, though, Carter transmuted back into a pleasantly sensible and earnest embodiment of the Born-Again South, openly embracing the moral legacy of Martin Luther King-even if he arrived at that admirable advent through Wallace's earthier political physics. In his national extension, then, Carter continued to prosper from Wallace's predecession, most tellingly from Wallace's disclosure of a vast new populist possibility outside all the processes of the country's customary power estate. At the same time, the seriousness of Wallace's past presidential ventures had largely dispelled the long-lingering sense of the preclusive eccentricity of Southern inflections in a presidential candidate. In fact, Carter now gained an extra edge of winsome significance by simple comparison with Wallace, coming out of the same musky climes with the same sort of drawl, but appearing by contrast so strikingly more decent and goodwilled a creature. Finally, as an alternative to the mischief Wallace still seemed to bode approaching the 1976 Democratic primaries, Carter, at that point regarded as an otherwise marginal contender who'd simply been an obscure Southern governor, came by an early critical importance: the other candidates agreed to leave the field to him in the strategic Florida primary so he could attend to dispatching Wallace there, that hobgoblin who'd been harrying the party's presidential primaries for the past twelve years.

  But the truth was, Wallace by now had become only a spectre of who he once was, and hi
s 1976 campaign would prove to be like the last thin flare of a lightbulb before going out forever. Once, in Pensacola, two Alabama state troopers were hoisting him aboard his small plane when one of them stumbled, spilling Wallace out of his wheelchair, with the other trooper toppling on him-a ghastly mishap that happened to occur before news cameras. A Wallace aide later declared, “When they dropped him down there in the Panhandle, it was over for us.” In any case, Carter duly defeated Wallace in Florida and went on to finish him off conclusively in the North Carolina primary. In this manner did Wallace largely engender Carter's presidential fortunes. But it also brought to a bleary end Wallace's last national assertion.

  He repaired for a time to a post provided him on the faculty at the Birmingham campus of the University of Alabama, where he lectured intermittently. In 1982 he was elected to his fourth term as governor of Alabama, for what was like a final honorary performance. As it happened, against his Republican opponent in the general election, a pistol-toting and floridly ultrarightist millionaire, Wallace drew the almost unanimous black vote. That last term turned out to be more or less a replay, absent the racial fevers, of his political lifetime's post-New Deal, Folsomite obsessions for “heppin' folks”: increased funding for schools, for mental care facilities. In that sense, he was to go out much as he had originally come in, almost forty years earlier, as a spindly young hot-gospel populist state legislator. But then that, too, was over.

  With the passage of the years, he receded gutteringly from the national mind. He lapsed steadily deeper into deafness, with recurrent health crises, several brushes with death. “I'm in a lot of pain all the time,” he told Michael Riley of Time in 1992. “I just got over a bad kidney infection. That's what we die with, kidney failure.” But even as he dimmed away from the general consciousness in his isolation in Montgomery, certain djinns of him in assorted forms periodically stirred forth in the land, all of them, in whatever otherwise distinctly mixed ways, direct descendants of the freelance populist phenomenon he had once improvised: after Carter, Jesse Jackson, who twice dropped by for amicable visits with him, Wallace peering up at Jackson's high loom over him and mumbling, “I 'predate you comin' to see me. You haven't forgotten me… I'd like you to pray for me,” with Jackson patting Wallace's arm as he conducted a prayer for God's “mercy and healing power” to descend upon him; following Jackson then, there were the insurgent candidacies of Ross Perot and later Pat Buchanan.

  To be sure, whatever Wallace's own repentances on the matter, the great endemic American malaise of racial estrangement had hardly passed out of the national life. After Klan leader David Duke came close to winning the Louisiana governorship in 1991, deterred only by the massive black voter registration that Jackson had mobilized there, Wallace was asked by Time's Riley-Riley writing the question on a slip of paper due to Wallace's deafness-if he regarded Duke as a menace: with a brief glower at the question, Wallace grumped, “I don't talk about him much,” wadding up the paper and flinging it away. As for history's judgment of him, Wallace barked, “I don't worry about what anybody thinks when I leave this world. Which won't be long.”

  As it finally worked out, with Cornelia gone, with his third wife, Lisa, gone, with his children grown, about the only personal human company left to Wallace now were his two black attendants, Bernard Adams and Eddie Holcey, on whom Wallace had come to depend with the abject helplessness of a small child for the simple elemental needs of getting through his days. He interrupted his 1992 interview with Time's Riley to call Holcey into his office and engaged him in a short banter, in his old fond fashion, for benefit of the reporter.

  “We love each other, don't we, Eddie? We've been to funerals together. We went to a funeral not too long ago, didn't we? He knows I don't hate black folks.”

  “You don't hate me,” Holcey dutifully affirmed.

  “He voted for me, too,” Wallace apprised the reporter. “His wife did, too. We've been good close friends. And when I die, he's gonna be one of my pallbearers.”

  Perhaps more remarkable than that prospective scenario, though, was back in 1979, while Wallace was in a hiatus between his third and last governorships, when Eddie Holcey had wheeled him into an evening service at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the sanctuary from which Martin Luther King had begun that epic American moral struggle against which Wallace had originally pitted himself to gain his own political annunciation. Now, some twenty-five years later, before the astonished gapes of the congregation, Wallace from the front of the church called out from his wheelchair, in a faltering croak, “I have learned what suffering means. In a way that was impossible before I was shot, I think I can understand something of the pain that black people have had to endure.” His voice thickening, he went on, “I know that I contributed to that pain. I can only ask yawl for forgiveness” Unable to continue, he motioned to Holcey, who began wheeling him back up the aisle. But at that moment, a lone voice rose from the choir behind him, beginning to sing:

  A-maz-zing grace, how sweet the sound…

  Immediately, other voices gathered after it, swelling over the church, …I once was lost but now am found…

  And as Wallace proceeded on up the aisle, tears welling in his eyes, people in the pews beside him reached out to touch him, under the roll and sweep of singing, …Was blind, but now I see.

  Then others were standing to reach for his hands, to pat his shoulder, in what was suddenly like an improbable reflection of Wallace's exuberant forgings through all the thronged folk at his rallies in the past. Only now it was these black church-people rising in the pews around him and reaching to reassure him who had become in the end, despite his old rancors and clamors, the folk of his redemption in whom he had found a capacity for not only absolution but actual compassion that passed all commonplace understanding, they murmuring to him as they took his fumbling hands, “Uhm-humh, awright now … God bless you, now,” as the massed choiring surged on over the sanctuary:

  'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear

  And grace my fears relieved…

  George Corley Wallace, Jr. died in Montgomery on September 13, 1998. He was 79.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A native South Carolinian, MARSHALL FRADY has been a journalist for over twenty-five years, writing principally on political figures and racial and social tensions in the American culture, first as a correspondent for News-week, then for Life, Harper's, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, The Sunday Times (London), The Atlantic Monthly, and most recently for The New Yorker. In the 1980s he was chief writer and correspondent for ABC News Closeup and a correspondent for Nightline. He is the author of the acclaimed biographies Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness and Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson. He is currently at work on a novel.