by Molly Ivins
When it came their turn, the Libertarians huddled together and decided to send up their oldest living member. He shuffled to the mike, gray hair thin on top, a face marked with age spots and old skin cancers, one eye useless long since. He spoke with a courtly Southern accent. “Members of the Plan Commission, Reverend Weaver, Citizens Against, ladies and gentlemen. My name is John Henry Faulk. I am seventy-four years old. I was born and raised in South Austin, not a quarter of a mile from where that pornography theater stands today. I think y’all know that there was a lot of masturbation in South Austin before there was ever a pornography theater there.” Even the Citizens Against laughed, and the First was saved for another day.
Thirty years ago John Henry Faulk destroyed the blacklisting system that had terrified the entertainment industry during the McCarthy era. His was one of the most spectacular show trials of that sorry time; he won the largest libel award that had yet been granted in the United States ($3.5 million) and was honored up to his eyebrows by freedom lovers everywhere. Then he went back to Texas—broke, his career still ruined—never saw any of the money, and learned you can’t eat honor. This is the story of John Henry Faulk’s life since Louis Nizer won out over Roy Cohn in their courtroom battle about whether the man called the Will Rogers of his generation was actually a communist.
BEEN SO long since Texas freedom fighters couldn’t count on Johnny Faulk almost no one can remember the time. He is a folklorist and humorist by profession, a storyteller, and a scholar of the Constitution. He’s also a good man to have around when guerrilla tactics are called for.
Back in 1975, there was an unholy uproar in the state over another preacher, Brother Lester Roloff of Corpus Christi, since gone to glory. Brother Roloff ran a home for “wayward girls” without a state license; claimed he didn’t need permission from the State of Texas to beat the Devil out of those girls and the Lord into them. At one point the state was forced to throw him into the slammer for contempt of court, and this caused his followers to swear vengeance on every godless politician and every godless licensing law in Texas.
Safe in Austin was State Senator Ron Clower of Garland, a cheerful fellow who followed the old legislative precept “Vote conservative, party liberal.” Clower had done a substantial amount of beer-drinking, river-running, and good-timin’ with a crowd of Austin liberals, of whom Johnny Faulk is one. Vast was the surprise of the senator’s friends when an item appeared in the papers saying Clower had introduced a tiny amendment to exempt Brother Roloff from state supervision. It was felt he should have known better.
The day of the hearing on his amendment, Clower’s office received a call from a Reverend Billy Joe Bridges of Lovelady, leader of the White Christian Children’s Army, a full-immersion, foot-washing fundamentalist sect headed toward Austin to help Brother Clower hold off the forces of Satan. “We’re bringin’ three busloads of children. Red-white-and-blue buses,” crooned Bridges. “We’ll take those Christian children right up into the Senate gallery, and they’ll float little paper airplanes with the words of Jesus written on them onto the Senate floor. We’ll be the Christian Children’s Air Force for the day, you see. Heh, heh.”
Clower had been hoping to avoid publicity on this misbegotten amendment, but Cactus Pryor, a television newsman at KLBJ in Austin, called to say he’d heard the White Christian Children’s Army was coming and the station wanted to have its cameras on the Capitol steps to catch the “charge.” Could Senator Clower’s office tell him what time the buses were expected? “Oh God, television!” groaned Clower. The liberal Texas Observer called: “We’ve just received a press release from some outfit called the White Christian Children’s Army. What the hell is going on?”
“They’ve put out a press release!” screamed Clower’s aide.
Came a call from Belton, the voice low and threatening. “This is Officer Joe Don Billups with the Department of Public Safety. We’ve just stopped three red-white-and-blue buses for speeding. They said your office could explain.”
Clower, no idiot, took only a few more hours to realize it was all a put-on. The culprits never confessed, but a few months later, when Johnny Faulk received a call at 3 A.M. from the Democratic Telethon to verify his pledge of $500,000, Senator Clower was the chief suspect.
IN THE ugly, angry time of “Lyndon’s War” against the Communist Vietnamese, which all good Texans felt called upon to support, John Henry Faulk was making a slim living as an after-dinner speaker—and, for that matter, after-lunch—in front of such prestigious and high-paying organizations as the Grimes County Taxpayers Association and the Madisonville Kiwanis. He was never fool enough to come out against the war. But he would recount conversations he’d had with his cousin Ed Snodgrass, an old geezer so retrograde he has a sign over his mantelpiece that says, ROBERT E. LEE MIGHT HAVE GIVE UP, BUT I AIN’T. Cousin Ed would get to fussin’ about all the dirty, long-haired peaceniks. “Don’t you believe in the right to dissent, Cousin Ed?” Faulk would ask.
“Dissent? Oh hell yes, I believe in dissent. H’it’s in the Constitution. What I can’t stand is all this criticism. Criticize, criticize, criticize. Why can’t they leave ol’ Lyndon alone and let him fight his war in peace? Lookit this war. We send our best boys over there, in broad daylight, in million-dollar airplanes, wearin’ pressed uniforms, to bomb them Veetnamese, and what do they do? Come out at night. On their bicycles. Wearin’ pyjamas. Not even Christian. I tell you what, if we wasn’t bombin’ ’em, they would not be able to bomb theirselves. If they don’t like what we’re doing for ’em, they ought to go back where they come from.” Johnny Faulk could get laughs out of Republicans with this routine, and no one ever got mad at him. They did, however, go away with the notion that there was something, well, ludicrous about the war.
“I never attack people for what they think,” explains Faulk. “That’s crucial. If I want to say something I know will stir folks up, I make one of my characters say it. Then I disagree with my character, chide him for being foolish.” Which is why the man accused of being a Red is now asked to speak everywhere in Texas.
JOHNNY FAULK got branded a communist when he ran for union office in New York in 1955. At the time, Faulk remembers, “I was choppin’ in the tall cotton.” He was starring in his own five-day-a-week network radio show on CBS, called Johnny’s Front Porch, and also appearing twice weekly on television on two panel quiz programs and in a variety of other slots as a guest panelist or guest host. Faulk ran as part of an anti-blacklisting slate for the board of AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. Other members of the ticket included the CBS News reporter Charles Collingwood and the performers Orson Bean, Faye Emerson, Garry Moore, and Janice Rule. The anti-blacklisters won twenty-seven of the thirty-five seats on the board. A month after the new officers took over, AWARE, Inc.—“An Organization to Combat the Communist Conspiracy in Entertainment-Communications”—issued this bulletin about the group: “The term ‘blacklisting’ is losing its plain meaning and becoming a Communist jargon-term for hard opposition to the exposure of Communism.” The newsletter then presented a number of allegations against Faulk. He once appeared on a program with Paul Robeson. He helped the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948. He sent second-anniversary greetings to a record company that sold “people’s folk songs.” Item No. 4 said, “A program dated April 25, 1946, named ‘John Faulk’ as a scheduled entertainer (with identified Communist Earl Robinson and two non-Communists) under the auspices of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (officially designated a Communist front, and predecessor of the Progressive Citizens of America).”
It turned out that “officially designated a Communist front” meant some witness of indeterminate reliability had once mentioned the group in front of a congressional committee. It also turned out that John Henry Faulk did sure as a by-God have an intimate supper on the night of April 25, 1946, at the Astor Hotel with a known agent of the Soviet Union. And not just any agent—he dined with A
ndrei Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations. The dinner celebrated the first anniversary of the United Nations, and several hundred other people also showed up. Eleanor Roosevelt and Harold Ickes, the former secretary of the interior, were co-chairmen of the event—presumably the “two non-Communists” mentioned in the AWARE bulletin—and Secretary of State Edward Stettinius was the main speaker. Johnny Faulk, fresh up from Texas, never did get to howdy or shake with the big Red, but his career was destroyed anyway.
CBS fired Faulk a few months after the AWARE bulletin came out. “They didn’t want to do it, and felt terrible about it,” Faulk says. He was told that his ratings were slipping and that Arthur Godfrey was being given his time slot on radio. His lawyer, Louis Nizer, later proved in the trial that Faulk’s ratings were going up at the time he was fired. But AWARE operated by putting pressure on advertisers, invoking the threat of a boycott by the American Legion if companies bought time on programs that employed suspected Reds. The system blacklisted, among others, an eight-year-old actress who was to have played Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. AWARE itself was on retainer from the networks to sniff out subversives, so it had financial incentives to keep doing so.
Faulk filed a suit for libel against AWARE in 1956, but it didn’t come to trial for six years, until the spring of 1962. In the meantime, he was out of show business and down to small odd jobs like selling encyclopedias. In his book The Jury Returns Louis Nizer wrote of John Faulk’s case:
“One lone man had challenged the monstrously powerful forces of vigilantism cloaked in superpatriotism.
“One lone man with virtually no resources had dragged the defendants into the courts, and although outrageously outnumbered, had withstood starvation and disgrace, and summoned enough strength to battle them into submission.
“One lone man was so naïve in his profound patriotism that he did not conceive of himself as fighting a heroic battle, but simply as doing what any American would do—defy the bully, spit at his pretension, and preserve his faith in his country’s Constitution and principles.”
This is Nizer at his most magniloquent, a style Faulk adores to imitate. In sorry truth, though, the “lone man” wasn’t all that lone. He had the support of family and friends (from Edward R. Murrow to the beloved Texas historian, folklorist, and naturalist J. Frank Dobie), and Nizer was probably the finest trial lawyer in the country. In fact, Johnny Faulk had a wonderful time filing that lawsuit. “It required no courage to fight,” he says, “because I never doubted I would win. I never thought of doing anything else.”
ONE LEGACY of his seven years on the blacklist is that Faulk almost never publicly criticizes the Soviet Union or communism. He has no use for communists: “I knew a number of ’em on the University of Texas campus back in the thirties, well-intentioned but kind of pitiful people. And off-putting, like all true believers, like anyone who thinks he has The Truth and has no questions, no doubts, just wants to proselytize.” But Faulk also believes that Americans hear so much anti-communist propaganda already there’s no point in adding another scintilla to it. It galls him that to this good day a person is still expected to profess anti-communism as a way of proving his loyalty. “He must manifest it, say it, swear it, and pledge it,” as Nicholas von Hoffman writes in his biography of Roy Cohn, “not once but . . . head covered, hand over heart, in the classroom, the ballpark, at the testimonial dinner.”
During preparation for the trial Nizer kept pushing Faulk for proof that he’d done something actively anti-communist. It was fine that he was such a patriot he’d enlisted in the merchant marine at the start of World War II, then managed to get a job overseas with the Red Cross, and finally finagled his way into the army despite being one-eyed. But what had he done against communists? After weeks of listening to Nizer press this issue, Faulk launched into a splendid extemporaneous tale of finding his dear old crippled grandmother one day reading the Daily Worker. No sooner had he said, “But Granny, that’s a COMMUNIST newspaper!” than the oil lamp in her tar-paper shack tumped over, setting the place ablaze. Faulk grabbed her wheelchair and started toward the porch and safety, but “as I wheeled her out, I looked down and saw that Daily Worker in her lap, realized she was just a COMMUNIST pawn, and was so filled with loathing I turned her chair and pushed the old lady back into the flames!” Nizer listened to this entire faradiddle without expression and then snapped, “We can’t use it.” Nizer had so little humor he introduced into evidence Faulk’s boyhood award for perfect attendance—seventy-two consecutive Sundays—at the Fred Allen Memorial Methodist Church in South Austin. Faulk is not much of a Methodist, but his mother sure was.
SOUTH AUSTIN was then the city’s black neighborhood, and Johnny’s father was Judge John Henry Faulk Sr., a man of progressive principles, whose hero was Clarence Darrow. The elder Faulk had served as Eugene V. Debs’ state campaign manager in the days when socialists got a sight more votes than Republicans in Texas. As an attorney he had often represented poor black people, so he moved his family to a beautiful old home in South Austin called Green Pastures, now one of the city’s best restaurants, run by Johnny Faulk’s nephew Ken Kooch. Johnny grew up among blacks, and they were his childhood friends.
John Henry Faulk’s great natural gift is an almost freakish aural memory. One day last year, as he walked in South Austin, he began reminiscing about his childhood neighbors. One was an elderly black woman whose only child, a retarded son, had died years earlier. When she got to missing that child too bad she would call to him as though he were still alive, and the neighborhood children made fun of her for it. Suddenly, across a distance of sixty-five years or more, the voice of an old black woman came out of Faulk’s throat, a crackled call of love: “Come on, son. Come on, son. Mama’s waitin’.” The voice hung like a ghost along the dirt lane.
Because the Faulk family had progressive opinions on “colored people” for that time, John Henry did not recognize his own racism until he was at college. He and his mentor, Frank Dobie, so loathed Hitler that they studied his speeches, and it slowly dawned on them that racism could apply to blacks as well as to Jews. Talk about a couple of Texas boys in a quandary—now what to do? They consulted Faulk’s childhood chum Alan Lomax, who had not only gone off to prep school and Harvard but was also the son of John A. Lomax, who had started the folklore collection at the Smithsonian Institution. They felt Lomax was wise in the ways of the great world. He advised that among the intelligentsia the word was pronounced “Negro” rather than “Nigra,” and that this was the sure sign by which black people could tell you weren’t prejudiced against their kind. Johnny Faulk and Frank Dobie sat around solemnly practicing the word—“Kneee-grow, Kneee-grow”—to get it right. Faulk’s gift for mimicry made it easy for him, but poor Dobie, a full generation older and with a Texan accent, had to rehearse for ages.
In order to get a master’s degree in folklore, Faulk traveled around East Texas in the late thirties with a recorder taping what was then called “colored folklore.” In 1941, he was working for his doctorate and teaching at the university when he got a Rosenwald grant to collect more material. “Rural blacks in those days were so isolated. They were too poor to have electricity, so even the radio was unknown to them,” Faulk says now. “Many of their cultural traditions have since been so thoroughly wiped out not even many black people know about them.” These days Faulk rarely does black characters, but one still in his repertoire is the Reverend Tanner Franklin, who preaches a sermon on David and Goliath in the wondrous, ancient sing-preaching of Afro-Americans that is virtually gone. You can hear it now only on old records and in the voice of Johnny Faulk replicating the Reverend Franklin as he sings:
“Go down angel, consume the flood.
Snuff out the sun, turn de moon to blood.
Go down angel, close de door.
Time have been, shan’t be no more.”
FAULK’S YARNS about Texas frequently have a bizarre flavor. Long before anyone had heard of Lenny Bruce, Joh
nny Faulk was doing black humor in the form of country stories. Strange deaths, weird funerals, matrons complacently rocking as people go mad around them. It’s possible that Faulk’s career never would have blossomed on television, because what storytellers need above all else is time. It is an art born of leisure, and a story well told can pause for any number of interesting sidetracks. From 1975 to 1981, Faulk was employed on Hee Haw, the corn-pone country version of Laugh-In. He was the resident cracker-barrel philosopher, commenting on politics in thirty-second skits. (“Why, the trouble with Jerry Ford is, he played center for so long he looks at the world backward and upside down.” HEE-HAW.) Faulk’s humor is not suited to one-liners. The show was pretty awful, but it was steady work, and Faulk delighted in it. In addition to his congenital optimism, he has that show-business habit of thinking everything’s coming up roses—whatever project he’s doing is fabulous, the director is wonderful, he’s met the loveliest people.
His Hee Haw fame has been useful to him at some odd points. Although he makes a living as an after-dinner speaker, ever since his trial Faulk has considered his real work educating Americans about the First Amendment, and to that end he donates his time and talent without stint. One day, in March 1979, he got a call from a lawyer representing the pornographer Larry Flynt. Flynt was on trial in Atlanta for obscenity, and his goose was pretty well cooked. Georgians have no use for Yankee pornographers, even those who have been shot, crippled, and brought to Jesus by President Carter’s sister. The judge had turned down almost every expert Flynt’s lawyers had tried to call—scholars from Harvard and Yale. Faulk remembers the attorneys implying they were down to the bottom of the barrel, and if Faulk would come over to Atlanta they’d pay him to testify as an authority on the First Amendment.