Who Let the Dogs In?
Page 38
Faulk doesn’t take money for testifying about the First Amendment, but he agreed to stop by Atlanta on his way to a Hee Haw taping in Nashville. Thinking he should know what he was about to defend, he bought his first copy of Flynt’s Hustler magazine at the Houston airport. Slipped off the plain brown wrapper and like to had a stroke. “H’it was a picture of a nekkid lady with her finger stuck up herself and her tongue out like this . . .” Faulk arrived for a conference of the Flynt defense team that opened with the newly born-again defendant insisting they all form a circle, join hands, and pray. Faulk silently addressed the Lord with a strong sense of grievance over being there at all. The lawyers warned Faulk that security at the courthouse was tight, because of the earlier shooting; the Georgia lawmen hated the Flynt team and daily threw them up against the wall, searched them, emptied their briefcases on the ground, and verbally harassed them.
Next morning the defense team headed into the courthouse and met the first line of the law—Georgia State Troopers. “They wore shiny mirror silver sunglasses, big guns on one hip, big billy clubs on the other,” Faulk remembers, “and they were mean lookin’.” He braced himself for the search, but the troopers parted before him, whispering as they fell back, “H’it’s John Henry Faulk, from Hee Haw! H’it’s John Henry Faulk, from Hee Haw!” And the dreaded sheriff’s men, said to be even meaner than the troopers, they, too, turned out to be fans, and, instead of throwing Faulk up against the wall, asked for his autograph. Danged if the judge didn’t watch Hee Haw, and the jurors, who beamed at him. Even the prosecutor told the court he was proud to have Mr. Faulk of Hee Haw testify in his case.
Faulk started by talking about growing up in South Austin without indoor plumbing. His family had an outhouse and, being on the poor side, never could afford toilet paper, so his mama used to put the Sears, Roebuck catalog out there for that purpose. But being a good Methodist Sunday-school teacher, she always cut out the pages with the corset ads on them, lest the boys get excited in the outhouse. The judge and the jury were chuckling along at this story, and Faulk had already made points about changing community standards.
The prosecutor, no fool, leaped up, shoved a copy of Hustler under Faulk’s nose, and roared, “MR. FAULK! Would you have wanted your mother, the Methodist Sunday-school teacher, to have seen THIS?” Sure enough, Faulk reports, there was another nekkid lady with her finger stuck up herself and her tongue hangin’ out. “SHUT YOUR MOUTH, BOY!” he replied. “You want lightin’ to strike this courthouse? God will call it down at the very IDEA of my sainted mother seeing such a thing!” He continued in a far quieter vein. “Of course I would not have wanted my mother to see such a thing. Nor do I want my wife to see it, nor my son. That’s ugly. That’s so ugly. But let me tell you about why the Founding Fathers wrote what they did in our Constitution where it says, ‘Congress shall make no law . . .’ ” Faulk was eloquent in the cause, but notes, “Didn’t do him a damn bit of good. They found his ass good and guilty.”
FAULK HAS recently recovered from cancer. Although he admits that having cancer nearly scared him to death, he also loves being the center of attention and reveled in all the concern. Doctors in Houston managed to rid him of a lemon-size tumor in the middle of his head solely by using radiation. His salivary glands were damaged in the process, and that makes his stage work more difficult, but he appears to have regained most of his energy. Right now he’s working on a one-man show he already tried successfully in Houston last year. The play, called Deep in the Heart, involves a collection of Faulk’s characters all placed loosely in some mythical Texas town, and will be in New York this fall under the direction of Albert Marre, who did Man of La Mancha, among other productions. It will be the first time Faulk has performed in New York since he was blacklisted. He is so excited he practically dances when he talks about it: He has the capacity for delight of an eight-year-old at Christmas.
No tragedy here, no life destroyed by McCarthyism. He has a close family—three sisters and a brother—and Faulk family gatherings tend to look like county conventions. He had messed up two marriages before he met Elizabeth Peake, a British nurse, in 1964, and struck it lucky. They have one son, Yohann, who is nineteen. Faulk claims he is “the only kid ever born on Medicare.” Among Liz Faulk’s outstanding qualities is her immense common sense, a commodity for which her husband is not noted—imagine Maggie Thatcher with a heart. She keeps track of his schedule, his money, and his health, while he wanders around blithely being funny about politics and serious about the Constitution. What fun, what joy, thinks he, and wades once more into the battle. It infuriates him to see this country betray its best, basic principles, and he sometimes concludes that most of his fellow citizens are nincompoops. But Faulk is always confident that the genius of the Founders will triumph in the end. He speaks of them with a reverence, love, and depth of knowledge all the flag-waving patriots down to the VFW Hall recognize and respect.
Summer 1998
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MOLLY IVINS began her career in journalism as the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. In 1970, she became co-editor of The Texas Observer, which afforded her frequent fits of hysterical laughter while covering the Texas Legislature.
In 1976, Ivins joined The New York Times as a political reporter. The next year she was named Rocky Mountain bureau chief, chiefly because there was no one else in the bureau. In 1982, she returned once more to Texas, which may indicate a masochistic streak, and has had plenty to write about ever since. Her column is syndicated in more than three hundred newspapers, and her freelance work has appeared in Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Harper’s, and other publications. Her first book, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Her books with Lou Dubose on George W. Bush, Shrub and Bushwhacked, were national bestsellers.
A three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, she counts as her two greatest honors that the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after her and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M.
Also by Molly Ivins
Bushwhacked: Life in
George W. Bush’s America
(with Lou Dubose)
Shrub: The Short but Happy
Political Life of George W. Bush
(with Lou Dubose)
You Got to Dance with
Them What Brung You:
Politics in the Clinton Years
Nothin’ but Good Times Ahead
Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?
Copyright © 2004 by Molly Ivins
Illustrations copyright © 2004 by Steve Brodner
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The essays in this work have appeared in Molly Ivins’ syndicated column as well as The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Playboy, The Progressive, and Wigwag. In addition, some of the essays appeared in the following collections of Molly Ivins’ works, all published by Random House, Inc.: Molly Ivins Can’t Say That Can She? (1991), Nothin’ but Good Times Ahead (1993), and You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You (1998).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication data is available.
eISBN 1-58836-435-6
Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com
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