The Broken Road

by Peggy Wallace Kennedy

  The New York Times, reporting on my wedding, stated: “It was, as one observer of Southern society noted, ‘probably the most lavish social affair in the Cradle of the Confederacy in its long and illustrious history of colorful social events’ … But it was readily apparent that it was far more than a social event. In fact, quite a few of the 8,000 invited guests likened it to the recent marriage of Princess Anne, and if royalty were measured by political achievement the comparison would not [be] too farfetched.”

  After Mark and I returned from our honeymoon in Mexico City, Daddy called us over to the mansion. “Now sugah, make sure you write everybody a thank-you note, you hear?” Daddy said, referring to all the thousands of people who had given us a wedding gift. We spent the better part of the first six months of our married life writing to Dear So-and-So and thanking them for the lovely silver platters, china plates, assorted tablecloths, linen napkins, two vacuum cleaners, and a bronzed camellia, among many other gifts.

  “We can pass these things down to our daughters one day,” I said.

  Years later, Mark would reply, “Do you really think our two sons will want all this stuff?

  On June 4, 1974, less than six months after the wedding, Daddy received 65 percent of the votes cast in the Democratic primary and carried all of Alabama’s sixty-seven counties in the process. (He had finally managed to change the succession law.) In the November general election, his vote percentage increased to 84 percent with 497,000 total votes cast for Wallace and 88,000 for his opponent. His 1974 wins, in both the primary and the general election, would be the largest margin of victory in his entire career.

  On January 20, 1975, Mark and I attended the fourth inauguration of a Wallace on the steps of the capitol. It was sunny with a brisk north wind. With no parade or governor’s ball to follow, the inauguration ceremony itself would take center stage. Daddy and Cornelia sat together at the front of the stage.

  A woman sitting next to Ruby leaned toward her. “What is Cornelia wearing?” she asked.

  “Well,” Ruby replied, “that hat is called a tam, and that sash is held on with something called a kilt pin, and the pattern in that material is like a signal that a Wallace is coming.”

  “Well, it’s very lovely and stylish,” the woman replied.

  Ruby turned and looked at her. “Honey, it’s not about looking good. That getup means that the Wallace clan is back.”

  The woman paused. “Would that be with a c or a k?” she asked.

  21

  In Tents

  There are people who will stand up with you, but how many will stand up for you?

  —Peggy Wallace Kennedy

  When Mark promised to love me and cherish me “’til death do us part,” I had no reason to doubt him, I just didn’t believe him. My lack of faith was not because of something someone told me, it was the way I always had felt about Daddy. I never knew which Daddy was on the other side of the knob when I knocked on the door. Would he love me less or love me more? “That’s just the way he is,” Mama would say.

  That was not the way I wanted my life to be with Mark. I wanted to stand on solid ground rather than on shifting sand.

  My life had been a matter of surviving. I was usually focused on the moment. There was no need to assume responsibility for my own life. Decisions had always been made for me, which in turn absolved me of the consequences of making bad decisions. And then came Mark. If the marriage didn’t work out, it would be my fault, which terrified me.

  In Mark’s family, his voice had always mattered, and he assumed it had been the same for me. When he refused to make decisions for me out of what he saw as my obligation to claim myself, it enraged me over what I saw as his desire to see me fail. He wanted me to be independent not only for myself but for him as well, so that he could breathe and have a life of his own. My desire to have Mark all to myself—after living a life of having no one just for me—suffocated him, and soon there was a wall between us. At the same time, it seemed that I could not live without him and he could not live with me. And we were both so young.

  In August 1974, we moved to Birmingham. Mark went to law school and worked part-time in a congressional field office. I taught special education in the Birmingham school system. Very few people in our apartment complex knew who we were, but then neither did we! It was a difficult time for both of us.

  Following Mark’s law school graduation, we returned to Montgomery in the spring of 1977 and bought a small house not far from the Governor’s Mansion. While Mark was looking for a job, I sanded and painted the floors, washed our clothes in the basement of the mansion, and tried to avoid Cornelia. By that time, her relationship with my father had devolved.

  The very thing I had found so appealing when I first met Mark—his disconnection from the life of politics and power—proved to be a significant hurdle in the well-connected community of old-line law firms in Alabama’s capitol. In 1977, a trial lawyer was a lawyer who tried cases in a courthouse; if there was a class action lawsuit it was either filed by the government or filed by someone who was suing the government, and most times the courthouse snack bar and grill was where cases got settled. For the most part, the practice of law in Montgomery was about civility and pedigree. Connections mattered, and having a Confederate general sitting on even a twig of a branch on the family tree was a mighty fine thing.

  Mark was the son-in-law of a lame-duck governor who would be riding into the sunset in less than sixteen months, and the son of a church secretary and an insurance salesman from Greenville, Alabama. The cum laude ribbon attached to his law school diploma didn’t get him past the law firm lobby.

  To make matters worse, there was a tawdry scandal brewing in the Governor’s Mansion that had become public. On September 7, the Washington Post published an article headlined MRS. WALLACE MOVES OUT OF THE MANSION: “A dark-haired mystery woman went around Montgomery at night, distributing photocopies of a divorce petition to newspapers, TV, and radio stations. One local TV reporter received a call from a woman who instructed him to go to a supermarket to the produce section and look beneath a pile of bell peppers. And there, among the peppers, was a petition for divorce.”

  The dark-haired woman was Cornelia, and the masthead of the petition read “In the Matter of Cornelia Wallace v. George Corley Wallace.” It was going to be a bad run for the House of Wallace, and Montgomery law firms were taking sides.

  In late September our phone rang. The call was for Mark. He was not at home. I took a message.

  “You had a call from a Mary Owens,” I said as Mark walked into the house. “John DeCarlo wants to meet with you. I have his number.”

  “Who is John DeCarlo?” We were both mystified.

  It turned out that in February 1968, John DeCarlo, an attorney from Birmingham, had taken a leave of absence from the State Banking Department and joined Daddy’s 1968 presidential campaign. It was he and two other Wallace appointees who were tasked with getting the American Independent Party on the ballot in all fifty states. Though naysayers had called it “Mission Impossible,” DeCarlo and his team managed to organize thousands of volunteers who in turn collected 2,717,338 signatures. Later, during Daddy’s 1972 presidential race, DeCarlo worked as an organizer and served as Daddy’s attorney as well. On July 7, 1972, Daddy had appointed John DeCarlo to a seat on the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals.

  Mark returned DeCarlo’s phone call the following morning. After a meeting several days later, Judge DeCarlo hired Mark as his staff attorney. DeCarlo and his secretary, Mary Owens, would play pivotal roles in Mark’s career and in our lives.

  In late summer of 1976, Daddy discovered that Cornelia, with the aid of a Folsom relative, had wiretapped his bedside telephone. Concealed wires were run through the bedroom wall and connected to a recording system hidden in the bottom cabinet of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase on the other side of their bedroom wall. The telephone by his bed had become his lifeline, for it replaced the roadways to the corners of the state and everyth
ing in between.

  Daddy was famous for calling people all hours of the night. There were times when the answering party would hang up after commenting something akin to “Yeah, and I am Bear Bryant.” His calls were about politics, business, encouragement for others, and most often for simple reassurances from friends and strangers who he had not been forgotten. But then there were the conversations with women, which in Cornelia’s opinion were less than appropriate.

  In Cornelia’s mind, there were people who were plotting against her. She was the co-captain of the USS Alabama Ship of State, and more than just a few of the deck officers who needed to walk the plank. While her politically disconnected confidantes may have agreed with her view, the salty dogs of the USS Wallace did not. There would be no mutiny as long as they were sitting in the crow’s nest.

  After directing the mansion secretary, Millie Gallagher, and the rest of the staff to leave the premises and sending the mansion servants to their living quarters on the grounds, Daddy’s personal security team began searching the second floor. After the recording device was removed, the search for the tapes themselves ultimately led them to a safe hidden away in the back of an upstairs closet. A stack of recordings was found inside. The tapes were removed, placed in a canvas bag, weighted down, and later that day thrown into the Alabama River.

  A few days later, on September 8, 1976, Daddy held a news conference. “It was a purely domestic matter,” he said. “There was no politics involved at all. No one has been hurt, no one has been harmed.”

  The following day, both he and Cornelia hosted a large reception for Rosalynn Carter at the mansion. It was a political event. Jimmy Carter was running for president at the time and Carter wanted Daddy’s endorsement. Although there was little conversation between them, they were at least in the same room.

  “I guess Cornelia’s not going anywhere,” one of the attendees remarked to a friend.

  “Well,” her friend replied, “if I did that to my husband, he would have thrown the cat and me out of the house. Let’s go hug the governor’s neck. He needs some tender loving care from somebody.”

  It was difficult for me to understand how Daddy and Cornelia could get past what I saw as Cornelia’s betrayal. For the most part, Mark and I stayed away.

  “Let the smoke clear,” Mark suggested.

  “Why would Daddy want her to stay after all of this?”

  “Maybe they didn’t get all of the tapes.” A year later, on September 6, 1977, the day after Labor Day, Mark and I drove through the mansion gates around three P.M. We were returning from a long weekend at the Beach Mansion. A small blue van was parked at the back door.

  “There’s Cornelia,” Mark said as Cornelia walked past the van. “Do you want to say hello?”

  “Of course,” I replied.

  Cornelia never looked our way as she continued toward a waiting car just in front of us.

  “I guess she didn’t see us,” I remarked as she was driven away. “We’ll catch her next time.”

  There was no next time. That was the last time I saw Cornelia. She moved out of the mansion and out of our lives. Cornelia and Daddy were divorced four months later, on January 4, 1978. Thirty-one years later, Cornelia died at the age of sixty-nine.

  In spite of all the drama, Cornelia and Mark and I had been close. She was with Daddy during the darkest period of his life. But she never really did understand how the Wallace network operated.

  As Daddy’s wife and Alabama’s First Lady, Cornelia thought she should come first, over all the others. In hindsight, perhaps I should have warned her, though I doubt she would have listened. There was too much to lose for the Wallace insiders if Cornelia had the power of the last word. Daddy didn’t make the rules. He was too busy for that. He was the gate rather than the gatekeeper, and that made all the difference.

  22

  Testify, Brother Wallace!

  In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.

  —Thurgood Marshall

  It was during this period that Daddy repented for his past actions with both words and deeds. He made outspoken declarations of his changed heart. His own suffering had contributed to the evolution of his thinking. He had come full circle, returning to the man he had been in Clayton as a young judge.

  In 1979, at the Dexter Avenue Church where Dr. Martin Luther King had been the pastor and led the Montgomery bus boycott, Daddy made an unannounced Sunday visit. He was pushed up the aisle in his wheelchair to the front of the church. He spoke to the African American congregation: “I have learned what suffering means. I think I can understand something of the pain black people have come to endure. I know I contributed to that pain and I can only ask for forgiveness.” And by and large, the African Americans in that church believed that he was sincere. They deeply believed in the power of forgiveness. It was one of the prime tenets of their faith. They respected his courage for coming into their midst and “testifying”—speaking from his heart and speaking the truth. When you testify, you say something important that comes from your heart and soul. And that’s what Daddy did.

  He would go on in the election to overwhelm his opponents in large part with African American support. It was African American voters who gave him one last chance to serve.

  Some people may question whether Daddy’s change of heart was sincere. I can say without a doubt that Daddy’s testifying wasn’t just talk. During his last term in office, beginning in January 1983, Daddy would appoint 160 African American Alabamians to state boards and agencies and double the number of black voter registrars in Alabama’s sixty-seven counties. This was extraordinary, not just for Alabama but nationally. Daddy had done what he could to disenfranchise and even destroy the black community, and he believed that God struck him down for what he had done. He began to come to terms with the suffering he had caused others. There was a connection in his mind between his journey to redemption through suffering and African Americans’ journey to freedom through suffering.

  The author Stephan Lesher, in his 1994 book, George Wallace: American Populist, wrote about Daddy’s changed heart as he came to “a humanity too often lacking in his actions; alone and crippled, forced to introspection for the first time in his life, he realized that though he had purported to be the champion of the poor and the helpless he had trampled on the poorest and most helpless of his constituents—the blacks.”

  I felt in him again the kind of father I once knew, the man who believed he could love us and still fulfill his lifelong dream of being governor of Alabama in 1958. The beauty and power of compassion had been revealed to him.

  Nineteen seventy-nine also marked another important development in Daddy’s life. In the late summer of that year, Daddy’s limousine pulled into our driveway. One of his security men came to the door and rang the doorbell. There was a woman standing behind him.

  “Who is that woman?” I whispered as the guard’s companion, a platinum blonde woman in a very tight black sundress, followed my directions to the powder room.

  “Well, let’s just say she’s your daddy’s girlfriend,” he replied. “I know, don’t say it. But you have met her before. You just don’t recognize her.”

  “How could I forget her?”

  “Check out the lipstick when she comes back.”

  “Lisa Taylor!” I exclaimed when she reappeared. “So good to see you again. I loved that hot pink shade of lipstick you wore back in 1968, and here it comes again.”

  I chattered over my shoulder as I led the way. “Are the Mona Lisa Singers still on the road? Still playing the tambourine? Is Daddy coming in?”

  However, the two questions that kept bouncing on the tip of my tongue but were afraid to jump were “What are you doing here?” and “Would you care for a modesty shawl to throw around that skintight sundress you have on?”

  Lisa and Daddy had been close acquaintances for well over a decade. During the 1968 campaign, she and another female friend of Daddy’s often pla
yed hopscotch up and down the aisle of his campaign plane, jumping from seat to seat toward the jackpot that was sitting in the front row with his feet propped up on the cabin wall.

  Later, Lisa moved to Montgomery, taught school, and bided her time. Her love and long wait for Daddy paid off when, on September 9, 1981, Lisa and Daddy were married in the backseat of Daddy’s Lincoln Town Car as it sat parked on the side of a country road in Autauga County, Alabama. Perhaps it was the limited seating that prevented me from being invited, much less having an opportunity to catch the wedding bouquet of, no doubt, pink roses.

  Following the ceremony, Lisa was dropped off at the airport, boarded a private jet, and flew to Palm Beach, leaving behind a brief but touching press statement. “I just love the man.” Following her foray to Palm Beach, the new Mrs. Wallace traveled to her hometown of Jasper, Alabama. It was more than a year before Lisa moved from Jasper to Montgomery. As Mamaw would have said, “She’s a few bricks short of a full load.” They may have visited each other and they probably talked on the phone, but it was bizarre—she just disappeared.

  Whether Daddy’s last term in office was good for the state is up to history. And whether Daddy’s marriage to Lisa Taylor was good for him was a subject for debate.

  On January 18, 1983, Mark and I took our almost five-year-old son, Leigh, to his grandfather’s last inauguration. We hoped that even at his young age, he would one day remember the occasion or find himself in photos taken that day. Mark was about to take a picture of Leigh and me standing in front of the bust of Mama that sat in the capitol rotunda. Before the flash went off, one of the capitol tour guides who had been greeting and giving tours since before Mama died walked up beside me. “Stay there,” Mark said. “Let me get a picture of all three of you.”

  “Give me a hug,” she said. “Your little one looks like his granddaddy. Got that Wallace dimple going on.”