South Toward Home

by Julia Reed

  Kazan and his wife stayed at the house of Hodding Carter II, the editor of the local Delta Democrat-Times who’d won a Pulitzer ten years earlier for editorials championing racial tolerance. After a raucous Thanksgiving feast at the Carters’ home, their teenage son Philip was enlisted to drive Baker back to the hotel. “She was trying to draw me out and asked me what kind of car I’d like to have one day,” he remembers. “I was so tongue-tied, I finally spluttered ‘a Buick.’ It was the most uncool reaction I could’ve had.”

  Philip’s nephew Hodding Carter IV was one of the featured authors at the tamale party, and we both realized that while we’d heard all the lore surrounding the movie, we’d never actually watched it. So I did. And man, no wonder people persist in thinking of us Delta folk as decadent. When the film came out, Time described it as “just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited.” Francis Cardinal Spellman pronounced it “evil in concept” and “certain to exert an immoral and corrupting influence upon those who see it.”

  For those who have not been so corrupted, allow me to recap: The witless, down-on-his-luck Archie Lee marries the seventeen-year-old Baby Doll but promises her dying father he won’t consummate the marriage—or indeed, lay a hand on her—until her twentieth birthday. As the big day approaches, a rival owner of a more modern cotton gin, the Sicilian Silva Vacarro (Wallach), has usurped all of Archie’s business, the Ideal Pay As You Go Plan Furniture Company arrives to repossess all five sets of furniture in the house, and Baby Doll threatens to leave (one of the stipulations of the marriage agreement is that the house be fully furnished). Archie Lee retaliates by burning down Vacarro’s gin, and Vacarro proceeds to try to seduce Baby Doll—not for sex necessarily, but so that she’ll sign an affidavit confirming Archie Lee’s guilt.

  You sort of have to see it to figure out what got the good cardinal so bent out of shape. The movie opens with a hot and bothered Malden watching Baker through a hole in the wall of the adjoining room. Wallach, who says Baby Doll is his favorite of all his films, spends more time in the crib than Baker. Baby Doll drinks Cokes for breakfast and all but makes love to an ice cream cone as poor Archie Lee laments, “There’s no torture on earth to equal the torture which a cold woman inflicts on a man.”

  Despite its outrageous components, the movie is actually not campy at all, but pretty great, and all manner of really smart people are obsessed with it. Not long ago, I interviewed John Mellencamp, rocker, painter, occasional actor, and, as it happens, avid old-movie buff, about something else entirely, but before the conversation was over, we’d somehow gotten onto the film. Impressively, Mellencamp can quote whole chunks of dialogue, including one in which Vacarro comforts Baby Doll about the fact that she never made it past fourth grade: “I don’t think you need to worry about your failure at long division. I mean, after all, you got through short division, and short division is all that a lady ought to be called on to cope with.”

  Clearly, Time and Cardinal Spellman did not have much of a sense of humor, but neither did countless others, including the Legion of Decency, which denounced the film with a C rating (for condemned). One of the critics who managed to suss out its more “sardonic” qualities was the New York Times’s Bosley Crowther, who declared that given the nature of the folks involved they’d be “unendurable” shaped by a less talented pen. “Williams has written his trashy, vicious people so that they are clinically interesting. And Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Mildred Dunnock and Eli Wallach have acted them, under Mr. Kazan’s superb direction, so that they nigh corrode the screen.” But it’s the house that comes off best: “Mr. Kazan’s pictorial compositions, got in stark black-and-white and framed for the most part against the background of an old Mississippi mansion, are by far the most artful, and respectable, feature of Baby Doll.”

  My father, whose memory is usually infallible, insists that Kazan returned to Greenville a year later with his daughter to have her presented at the Delta Debutante Ball. None of the ladies on the Society’s current board can find evidence confirming that rather unlikely turn of events, but in a weird way, it would have been fitting. After all, the debs, done up in all those big white dresses covered with loads of embroidery and lace, look a lot like dolls, and are meant to be as virginal as Baker. Also, for years, my parents and our friends the McGees referred to the annual presentation as the Baby Tot Ball, a moniker inspired by the McGees’ babysitter Mary Bell, who kept Anne and Elizabeth McGee and me when the grown-ups attended the annual event and who misheard the real name as they went out the door. Everyone decided Mary Bell’s version was far more fitting, and my father subsequently immortalized it as a verb, as in we’re going “babytotting.”

  It turns out that Williams, who spent a lot of time in New Orleans, could have been inspired by a whole group of grown women there who dressed as baby dolls. In 1912, like the rest of the city, the red-light district was divided along racial lines and there was a rivalry between the two groups of prostitutes. When the black women heard that their white counterparts were going to mask and parade during Mardi Gras, they decided to outdo them, according to Kim Vaz, a dean at Louisiana’s Xavier University who has written a book on the subject. “They said, ‘Let’s just be baby dolls because that’s what the men call us,’” Vaz recounts, adding that their outfits consisted of short satin skirts with bloomers.

  I’m happy to report that things in the world of baby dolls have come full circle. A few years ago, a New Orleans choreographer resurrected the Baby Doll maskers, and now they march in the Zulu parade. And the Baby Doll House, which sat fallow for decades and lost its facade in a 2001 tornado, was beautifully restored two years ago by the heirs of Judge Burrus, including my friend Eustace Winn, who rents it out for parties like the one during the tamale fest. Perhaps someone will throw an appropriate fete during the coming season for one of the Delta’s lovely debs, aka Baby Tots. It’s just too bad that Baker’s crib is long gone from the premises.

  When the Sun Don’t Shine

  Years ago, a friend gave me a baseball cap emblazoned with the phrase “American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God.” I love that cap. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it in this space before because it sums up how I feel about my native region. Most of the time. There are, alas, some queasy moments, those dread occasions when the shenanigans of some of our inhabitants make me feel as though I might have been born under a bad sign—or flag, as it were. The third week of Jimmy Fallon’s triumphant debut as host of The Tonight Show was just such a time.

  It had been a pretty good week so far. New Orleans was in the midst of Mardi Gras celebrations and I’d had the honor of being selected Honorary Muse in the very cool Muses parade, for which I’d made a lovely headdress out of a leopard print bra from Walmart, a purple-satin-and-crystal Manolo Blahnik shoe buckle, and a handful of ostrich feathers. I got to ride in a gigantic red shoe while two very nice crimson-wigged minions handed me beads and bracelets and cups and glittered shoes to throw to the thousands of pumped-up parade goers lining St. Charles Avenue. As anyone who has done it will tell you, it’s the closest the rest of us will ever get to being Bruce Springsteen. So I was still in a giddy mood the following evening after some parade watching of my own.

  That’s when it happened. I was enjoying a civilized nightcap with my good friend Elizabeth McGee Cordes when her sister Anne came hollering down the stairs from the guest room where she was bunking. She dragged us back up to the TV on which she had recorded the last bits of Fallon’s monologue, which turned out to be a Trifecta of the Embarrassing South: Honey Boo Boo’s Mama June discussing her sex life with her older daughter, the confused Pumpkin (“Wham bam what?”); the Mississippi coroner who pronounced a live man dead and sent him—in a zipped-up body bag—to the funeral home; and Paula Deen, who declared her comeback at a Miami food festival by mounting and riding Food Network chef Robert Irvine, who was on all fours on the stage.

  Our initial collective reaction was not unlik
e that of Fallon, who knew he’d hit such gold that he just stood there speechless and wide-eyed for a full beat. After the astonishing clip of Paula’s ride, he did manage to quip that “even Mama June was like, ‘Ew.’” But let’s take it from the top. I had heard of Honey Boo Boo, of course, but had carefully avoided actually watching the show, which I was shocked to discover is broadcast on TLC. For obvious reasons the network no longer refers to itself as The Learning Channel, but you could make the case that the exploits of this particular bunch demonstrate to the rest of the country what is meant by Peckerwood Mayhem, a terrifyingly apt term coined by my buddy the Thacker Mountain Radio host Jim Dees. Mere words really cannot do justice to the clip Fallon showed, but then words apparently are a problem on the show generally. As Fallon pointed out, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo uses subtitles even though it is broadcast in English (sort of).

  Then came the second bit, which hit a tad too close to home for the McGee girls and me, since it occurred in our home state, Mississippi, in a town, Lexington, that is not all that far from our own. Since Fallon didn’t get into the details of the premature death pronouncement, we immediately Googled the story and came across a trove of information, the kind you really can’t make up. Fallon really sort of wasted an opportunity by not devoting his entire monologue to the story of how Walter Williams, a farmer and family man who was admittedly very sick, ended up at Porter and Sons on the embalming table.

  First, there’s the fact that Holmes County turns out to have the lowest life expectancy rate, among both men and women, of any county in the entire United States—a fact, we conjectured, that might be explained by the coroner’s apparent knack for declaring live people dead. Second, this same coroner shares a first name, Dexter, with cable television’s most beloved serial killer—a pleasing irony, really, unless you happened to be Mr. Williams. This particular Dexter (last name Howard), like all coroners in Mississippi, is an elected official. He also does not happen to be in possession of a medical degree. When he felt for a pulse and couldn’t find one, he shipped poor Mr. Williams, who later said he’d been taking a nap, off to the mortuary, where the owner, Byron Porter, said he was a couple of minutes away (“no more than that”) from the embalming needle. Then his legs began to move. “We noticed his legs … like kicking,” the coroner told local news channel WAPT. “He also began to do a little breathing.” Mr. Porter was a bit more succinct: “He was not dead, long story short,” he said, noting that at that point it was unanimously decided that they would not inject him with embalming fluid.

  Under the circumstances, the family of Mr. Williams, who has since passed away for sure, has been remarkably gracious, expressing gratitude for the extra time with their loved one as well as for the outpouring of public support after the news broke. When asked what happened, the coroner opined that Williams’s pacemaker might have stopped working for a bit or that it was just a flat-out miracle. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Either way, as Anne herself opined, the whole episode gives new urgency to the saying “shake a leg.”

  Finally, we come to Paula, the gift that keeps on giving. She’d already been on my mind that week because one of the more hilarious and spot-on Muses floats had been devoted to the brouhaha that got her booted off the Food Network in the summer of 2013. The parade this year was all about fashion (“Off the Rack and Ready to Wear You Out”), and the Paula float was the fittingly titled “Separates.” Riders wore white wigs with headpieces made of red lips swallowing a stick of butter (a suggestive image not unlike the Rolling Stones’ Hot Licks logo first used on the album cover for Sticky Fingers), while the sides of the float itself were decorated with images of white meat, white beans, blond brownies, Aryan 100% White Sugar, and a quote reading, “Y’all, in the South, we don’t mix and match.”

  The Muses parade is one of the few that still carry on the long and welcome tradition of Mardi Gras satire, and plenty of folks, including then Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, who rated an “Insincere Sucker” float, got equal treatment. I know Paula still has legions of fans, and I’m sure those who saw the float objected to it, but I mean … seriously. I will confess up front to my own classism when it comes to Paula, because those weird blue contacts and that cloying accent and all those diamond rings on her fingers while she’s kneading dough got on my nerves long before she—well, pick a transgression. But it must be said that she is not her own best advocate. At the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, she did a demo on the Today show during which she made so many raunchy jokes about “chicken balls,” the name of the dish she was cooking, that Al Roker finally said, “Set your watches; that’s where it all went wrong.” Nah, I’m pretty sure that had happened the day before when she hopped onto Irvine’s back and shouted, “Giddy up, I’m back in the saddle.”

  At first the clips from Fallon’s monologue put me in mind of the scene in The Last Picture Show in which the late great Ben Johnson tells Timothy Bottoms, “I’ve been around that trashy behavior all my life. I’m gettin’ tired of puttin’ up with it.” But then I was reminded that pretty much everybody puts up with it at one point or another. A few nights after the fateful Fallon show, Jimmy Kimmel hosted Toronto’s crack-smoking, hard-drinking, seemingly insane mayor Rob Ford, who also had a bad moment in Florida, where he was charged with marijuana possession and DUI. Ford’s over-the-top antics, which involve racist, homophobic, and misogynistic outbursts far too lengthy to go into here, are enough to give even Mama June pause. Apparently, Peckerwood Mayhem knows no boundaries.

  Part Five

  Fun

  Hell on Wheels

  My 1978 Toyota Celica was not my first car, but it was the car, the one that defined (indeed, made possible) my late teens and early twenties. Black and sporty with a sunroof and a speedometer that hit 120 in no time flat, it was a gift from my parents when I graduated from boarding school. My very nice mother drove it up from Greenville, Mississippi, to McLean, Virginia, just so my friend Courtney and I could drive it back—the first of countless badly planned and/or thoroughly ill-advised road trips that car would make (to New Orleans to see the Rolling Stones, to Maine to see a dangerous man with whom I was briefly but madly in love, to Detroit for the convention that nominated Reagan). Eight years later, I sold it in Orlando, Florida, where I worked at the newspaper. The man at the Toyota lot I brought it to first barely took a look before steering me to a scrap dealer who gave me sixty-five dollars, way more than I actually thought I’d get. My sweet Celica had been far kinder to me than I ever was to it.

  Though I was seventeen when I got it, there had already been plenty of significant automobiles in my life. There was my Nashville grandfather’s Thunderbird, complete with an engraved plaque (“Made especially for G. Daniel Brooks…”) I thought was the height of cool, and my grandmother’s charcoal Cadillac Fleetwood, the enormous trunk of which was always filled with country hams and caramel cakes and dozens of gold-wrapped presents when it pulled into our driveway every other Christmas. One of my very first crushes drove a rust Gran Torino with a yellow flame down the side (I later shifted my allegiance to the owner of a rather more tasteful Torino in baby blue), while my first great love owned a very handy yellow Volkswagen Bus.

  My parents’ autos were decidedly less memorable, due mainly to my father’s notorious cheapness and an ego whose robust health has never been tied to cars. My mother received one of the nicer station wagons of my childhood, a glittery blue Impala, when its previous owner, who had worked for my father, dropped dead of a heart attack. Such was its relative newness that Mama was inspired to take my cousin and me on a road trip out West, but the car’s looks were deceiving. We spent whole days touring the garages of Tyler, Texas, and Flagstaff, Arizona.

  When I turned fifteen (then the driving age in Mississippi), my father bought me a navy 1967 Mustang for four hundred dollars. In my first year of ownership I’m sure I put at least fifty thousand miles on that car without ever leaving the Mississippi Delta. It had a convertible top, the requisite ei
ght-track tape player, and a metal ashtray so deep it could (and did) hold a carton of Marlboro Red cigarette butts at a time. During my senior year of high school, Daddy sold it (with my favorite silver earrings and a bottle of contraband whiskey still in the glove compartment), and I was so mad I ceased to speak to him for a month. But then he made up for it with the brand-new Celica, such a phenomenally unlikely choice that it still baffles me.

  What I did not get was any instruction on the care and feeding of an automobile. I didn’t have any idea, for example, that you were supposed to change the oil—or what that even meant. I found out seven years and well over a hundred thousand miles later when the Celica died at the drive-through window of a Winter Park, Florida, Steak ’n Shake. The man at the Shell station across the street took a long look at the engine and an even longer look at me. “Ma’am,” he said, “if this car were a child, you’d be in jail.” But then he got it running again and off I went. By that time, the floorboards were no longer level because whole layers of lichen—I swear—had grown underneath the carpet. Apparently, within my first few months of ownership, Toyota had sent out a notice informing buyers of a tiny malfunction involving the rubber seal of the trunk that I’d either missed or ignored. This meant that every time it rained, the water would run off into a sort of narrow trough that directed it to the floors of the passenger sides of the front and back seats, where it sat for so long things finally began to grow. It took six or seven years, but one day I noticed something slimy protruding from the carpet, and when I tried to pick it up I realized it was attached to a hard bed lurking beneath.