Mamaw’s bitterness about Mama’s death had given way to acceptance of the circumstances of our lives. Mamaw and Mr. Henry were too exhausted to look over their shoulder and wonder why.
A Secret Service agent was waiting for me as I drove up to the front of my dorm. Because of my frequent travel with Daddy’s campaign, Daddy requested that an agent be assigned to me through the November election. I still remember what it felt like to watch mothers and daughters climb out of cars while fathers opened trunks filled with suitcases of clothes and boxes of keepsakes and mementos. Although I did the best I could, my dorm room lacked the cheeriness of a mother’s touch. There were no packing boxes to arrive later, no curtains on the windows, only the eager faces of new friends stopping by to ask if my daddy was really George Wallace.
Eventually, my dormmates grew weary of my perpetual sadness when there was just so much to be happy about being away from home, not to mention the glamorous life I was leading. Driving a new Ford Mustang with a handsome Secret Service agent following behind, picture-taking and interviews, and boarding private planes on the weekends to campaign with a famous father was just more than anyone could ever dream of. But this hollow glamour and pretentious rigmarole just made me miss my mama more. I would have traded it all in a heartbeat for the sound of her voice and her warm embrace.
Dr. Hogarth and his administration viewed me as a feather in his cap amid the pervasive racist culture of MSCW, but in the eyes of many African American students, I stood as a living, breathing symbol of American apartheid.
In the fall of 1968, I was neither white nor black. The color of my skin was Wallace.
17
Things Just Change
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
—Norman Cousins
While Daddy may have been disappointed at the outcome of his 1968 presidential campaign, there was no doubt in the minds of political pundits that George Wallace was a man to be reckoned with.
The American Independent Party and George Wallace hit a home run with white middle-class voters, and so it seemed time for the Democratic and Republican parties, or at least for the one that wanted to win, to make a sharp right turn not just in the South but all across the country before the next national election.
Daddy returned to Alabama with legions of angry American voters in his pocket and an Alabama electorate whose Southern pride had been inflamed. To many Alabamians, Daddy’s success across the nation was not just about him—it was about the Southern culture of disaffection: the “those other folks think they are better than us” mentality. Daddy was a symbol of “We showed them, now, didn’t we.”
But in Alabama, a man’s word was still his bond, and Daddy’s promise to Governor Brewer not to run against him in 1970 was going to be hard to break, even for the most ardent Wallace supporters. Governor Brewer was popular among both white and black Alabamians and had gained the respect and allegiance of more than a few of Daddy’s advisers, county coordinators, and local politicians who still believed “a promise is a promise.”
Four years out of politics was not something Daddy could abide, though. The notion of having more time to spend with his family, take vacations, join the PTA, or settle down and practice law no doubt made his knees buckle. He had either been campaigning for something or dreaming about it for his entire life.
To him, running for governor again was less about breaking a promise than about “Albert Brewer should have known better in the first place. He caught me at a weak moment, out of my mind with grief.” Daddy could justify anything. This tendency assuaged whatever pangs of conscience he may have had at the schoolhouse door and his role around the incidents on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Reneging on a promise to Albert Brewer would not even come close to the moral flexibility he demonstrated on other occasions.
Daddy wanted his job back. While it may have been difficult for his former employees, friends, and supporters who had taken him at his word and signed on with the Brewer campaign to decide what they should do, it was not difficult for him. He wanted what he wanted, and he was going to get it.
By the fall of 1969, the Wallace loyalists were energized, finding vacant buildings on county courthouse squares, looking for flatbed trailers, and rigging up sound trucks for the coming campaign. The fact that there were “Wallace traitors” lurking around merely fired up the engines of the second generation of Wallace supporters. There was no way they were going to take the picture of Governor George and Lurleen off the wall, much less turn redcoat on them. Albert Brewer may have been doing a good job, but he was no “fightin’ little judge.” Nevertheless, the Brewer coalition of industrialists and businesspeople, middle- and upper-class whites, and African Americans was formidable. And then there was Richard Nixon.
In early 1970, the White House was seeing polls showing that in a three-man presidential race in 1972 between Nixon, Humphrey, and the Independent candidate Wallace, Nixon held a 54 percent advantage. Without Wallace running as an Independent, Nixon climbed to 76 percent. Projections indicated that once Wallace announced, the American Independent Party would gain momentum and the president’s numbers would fall on the short side of 50 percent. George Wallace could be a great threat to Nixon’s legacy—that is, if Daddy was reelected governor in 1970.
On March 10, 1970, Postmaster General Winton Blount, one of the wealthiest men in Alabama, traveled to the White House to meet with President Nixon and his aide John Ehrlichman to discuss the Alabama primary election. According to the polls, Brewer was up by nineteen points, and the Washington Post reported that the Wallace numbers were sinking with working-class whites.
If Daddy lost the Democratic primary, his whole campaign infrastructure would collapse along with his national reputation. Daddy might still own the Cadillac, but the wheels and engine would be gone. And when that happened, the most significant risk to Nixon’s being elected to a second term would be eliminated.
Several days later, one of Nixon’s attorneys removed $100,000 in hundred-dollar bills from a Nixon-controlled safe-deposit box at a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and carried it to the lobby of the Sherry-Netherland hotel near Central Park. Following the exchange of a coded message, he handed the money to a Brewer representative and walked out. Nixon authorized two additional drops, an additional $200,000 at the Sherry-Netherland and $100,000 at the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills—all in all, $400,000 in crisp hundred-dollar bills to the Brewer campaign.
In addition, Nixon directed the IRS to comb through every tax return, bank record, sales slip, and property record of Daddy’s and the dealings between Daddy and Uncle Gerald. In early April, the IRS report was leaked to the Washington Post, and on April 13, Jack Anderson’s “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column, which was syndicated in more than three hundred newspapers, alleged that Uncle Gerald and others were being investigated by the IRS for illegal kickbacks and violations of campaign financing laws. With only three weeks to go before the primary election, Anderson’s article reappeared in most of the Alabama daily newspapers.
The information appeared to be devastating. But Daddy proclaimed that the Brewer campaign had ganged up with the Washington hotshots to swing the election Brewer’s way, as if Alabama voters were too ignorant to make up their own minds. Daddy rolled through the Alabama countryside with stops at every crossroad, courthouse, and café he could find. Finally, it was something to build on, even as his poll numbers had continued to slide.
On May 5, election day, Governor Brewer led the pack of candidates in the Democratic primary. Daddy’s onslaught of accusations and declarations gave him enough traction to come in second with a vote spread of twelve thousand. With the Wallace vote and the cumulative votes of the other five candidates, Brewer was the clear front-runner, but he failed to gain a majority of the total votes. There was going to be a runoff.
Being a student of the electoral history of Alabama, Daddy was aware that there had never been a
second-place candidate in a Democratic primary who had gone on to win a runoff. While he had enjoyed making many historic moments, some better than others, in his lifetime, Daddy became convinced that fate had finally found him.
Daddy checked into a motel in Birmingham, locked the door, pulled down the shades, turned out the light, and took to the bed. His life was over. He had been denied the one thing he loved the most—winning. Of course, he loved his children on sunny days, but the voters pulled the wrong rabbit out of the hat and his children should be as upset as he was about their doomed existence.
Uncle Gerald, along with a close friend from Clayton, Jere Beasley, who was facing a runoff in the lieutenant governor’s race that same year, was shocked at Daddy’s condition when they entered his lights-out-and-curtains-drawn motel room. After their encouragement and sympathy failed to gain a foothold and “What about your family?” had no effect, shaming him with a dose of “You owe it to all those people who worked day and night to get you this far” at least got the pillow off his head.
By the time they got to the outskirts of Birmingham, Daddy’s heartbreak had become “Albert Brewer has no idea what is about to hit him.” Burning ashes from his lit cigar rushed through his rolled-down window as, reinvigorated, he plunged back into the throng.
The 1970 primary runoff, a testament to Daddy’s “comeback kid” luck, will go down as the most virulent and hate-filled election in the history of Alabama, and up to that time in America. The Wallace faithful fanned out to beat bushes and shake trees in every county, registering more than thirty thousand new voters over the course of one and a half weeks. Cars full of volunteers followed trucks full of Wallace yard signs and staked them out on main roads, county roads, and dirt roads.
Seeing the devastating effect of the battalions of automobiles loaned out to the Wallace campaign, filled with signs, smear sheets, and spiteful people speeding along gravel roads and blacktops like an army of foraging locusts, the Brewer campaign approached the owner of a large automobile dealership, where most of the Wallace campaign cars were coming from, and offered to pay $100,000 if he would call the cars in. The offer was declined.
As for the IRS investigation of the Wallaces, it was abandoned in January 1972, one day before Daddy’s announcement that he would run for president as a Democrat. His decision came with no advance warning. Uncle Gerald attributed Daddy’s startling and sudden decision to abandon the American Independent Party to an agreement between Daddy and President Nixon. In exchange for ending all federal investigations of the Wallaces, Daddy would run as a Democrat—a deal that Uncle Gerald would have benefited from.
Thousands of American Independent Party members across the United States were gearing up and recruiting local and statewide candidates in their home states to run on the ticket with George Wallace. They had no forewarning. Many became disillusioned, while others moved forward alone.
Daddy won the Democratic primary runoff and would go on to easily win the general election in November. We were going to live again in the Governor’s Mansion on South Perry Street.
Daddy made history with his 1970 win. On January 4, 1971, he married Cornelia Snively, the niece of one of Alabama’s most colorful governors, Wallace friend “Big” Jim Folsom, at a Presbyterian church not far from the Governor’s Mansion. I was happy for them. The thought of having Cornelia living in the mansion was exciting.
Although Uncle Gerald and other Wallace insiders had suggested to Cornelia that she marry Daddy after his inauguration, she would have no part of it. She was going to be Alabama’s newest First Lady as soon as Daddy said, “So help me, God,” on his inaugural day. That was Cornelia’s first mistake on the road to her undoing. There had never been a spot in the Wallace Machine for the kind of engaged First Lady that Cornelia wanted to be.
Cornelia was a powerful presence—the kind of woman that people turn their heads to stare at when she walks into a room. She was strong-willed, aggressive, and had a penchant for drama. She was lovely and charismatic: tanned skin, dark hair worn like Loretta Lynn’s, straight and combed back in front, cascading curls in back, and beautiful, flashing eyes.
Cornelia made a strong impression, but it paled beside that of her mother, Ruby. Ruby and her husband, Dr. Austin, lived in a stately but somewhat run-down house not far from the Governor’s Mansion on the edge of Old Cloverdale, one of Montgomery’s most prestigious neighborhoods.
I could not believe what I was seeing when we first went to their house for dinner. They had returned from a medical convention only a few hours before we arrived, and it was apparent that neither of them had time to freshen up—much less sober up. Dr. Austin had lost his shoes and Ruby’s green satin cocktail dress had a large rip on the right shoulder, as did one of her matching lime-green fishnet stockings.
“Well, hell. We came up the hard way,” Ruby said, explaining her dishevelment. “Hard drinking, hard partying, and hard living.”
The elegantly dressed Cornelia navigated the treacherous waters of Ruby’s unpredictable behavior with as much dignity as she could muster. Daddy, for a change, seemed to be without words. I sat there trying not to stare.
“See this bell?” Ruby picked up a small crystal bell from beside her plate. “Cornelia tells me I can’t just yell back to the kitchen when we run out of something. I got to ring this damn bell.”
Holding the bell over her head, Ruby began to wave it back and forth as if she was about to throw it across the room. Ruby’s maid, with a look of exasperation on her face, came through the kitchen’s swinging door.
“Well, hell,” Ruby announced. “It works!”
In Cornelia Wallace’s mind, the marriage between the House of Folsom and the House of Wallace was going to usher in a new golden age in the Heart of Dixie.
Me and Daddy at my twenty-first birthday party, January 24, 1971.
On January 24, three days after the inauguration, Daddy and Cornelia hosted their first private event at the mansion. The dining room was decorated with bouquets of carnations and sterling silver candelabra from the battleship USS Alabama that ran the length of the dark mahogany table. Following dinner, Daddy stood and proposed a toast to me on the occasion of my twenty-first birthday. Daddy and I stood on the grand staircase in the entry hall for photos. Looking up, I could see the door to Mama’s bedroom and the sofa where we once sat. I was back in the place where we once lived, but it would never again be home. Perhaps, I thought, I could still find happiness there—I knew without a doubt that that’s what Mama would have wanted.
18
Buckle My Shoes
Love is big. Love can hold anger, love can hold pain, love can even hold hatred. It’s all about love.
—Alice Walker
Cornelia offered a fresh start to our newly minted First Family. She was the opposite of the adage “Women should be seen but not heard.” Although Daddy’s territorial inner circle worried that she would have too much influence on his politics, at first, at least, she showed no interest in policy matters and began fussing with his appearance and wardrobe. His natty black suits, white short-sleeved cotton shirts, and pencil-thin ties became polyester blends of rainbow colors and paisley. While the fashion of the seventies was not one of the best moments in American couture, Daddy’s makeover made him well dressed for the times.
Cornelia soon became a woman of influence, not necessarily in the public’s eye, but in Daddy’s mind. But rather than creating alliances with the Wallace old hats, she challenged them and on occasion countermanded them. Cornelia’s affinity for whispering in Daddy’s ear on matters of politics was deemed treasonous by his cronies and no doubt by a large number of Daddy’s female admirers who would gladly have given much more than their eyeteeth had he chosen them.
While Mama may have offered advice, she posed no threat to the Wallace brain trust, and when she became governor, they became her brain trust. “This new wife is certainly no Lurleen” became a common thread of conversation around the coffee pots and water coolers
in the governor’s office.
Cornelia was ambitious and saw herself as an equal partner in Daddy’s destiny. She was proud to be called the “Jackie Kennedy of the rednecks.” Daddy’s inner circle viewed Cornelia as a threat, and Cornelia viewed them as a threat to her stature as Daddy’s wife. The old-time crowd of Wallace lieutenants, moneymakers, and confidants assumed they had an open invitation to drop by the mansion “at will.” Cornelia quickly disabused them of this notion. They learned that Governor Big Jim Folsom’s open invitation of “Y’all Come” had not been passed down to his niece. While Daddy ran the state, Cornelia was going to run their ample social life. The state buzzed with “I told you so’s” following an early 1973 broadcast of the Dick Cavett show live from the Governor’s Mansion. Even Dick Cavett looked startled when Cornelia batted her eyes, smiled, and said, “I like to travel so fast they had to put a governor on me.” That was Cornelia in a nutshell.
Following Daddy’s inauguration, I moved into the guesthouse at the rear of the mansion. It provided me with privacy but was less than twenty feet from the kitchen door. A parking pad separated the two buildings. During the week, I drove a daily commute of one hour each way to Troy State University, where I was majoring in special education.
Me as Alabama's Cherry Blossom Princess in Washington D.C.'s Cherry Blossom Festival, April 8, 1972.
I wanted to be close to Daddy and enjoyed Cornelia’s company. Her strong-willed nature and claims to be always right (including her absolute conviction that there were UFOs circling the planet) was a small price to pay for her usual good humor and mostly good intentions. Cornelia was a breath of fresh air that seemed to chase away the ghosts of heartache that lived at the core of our family.
Big Ruby was a frequent visitor to the mansion. While Ruby was unpredictable when she was sober, she was predictably out of control when she was on a binge. She was generally a crowd pleaser at local bars and nefarious hangouts, but she had been banned from one establishment after being escorted there by a pet monkey that began throwing items at other bar patrons. Following their removal, the contrite bar owner phoned Daddy. “Governor, I hate that you had to send someone over here to take care of this situation. Ruby is really good for business, and she has always been welcome. But the monkey has got to go.”
The Broken Road Page 13