South Toward Home

by Julia Reed

  Less than a month later, he was reelected with 60 percent of the vote, and that seemed to be that until lust reared its relentless head again, along with not just a little greed and that most dangerous of all sins, chutzpah. Having accompanied Foxe to Boston, where she gave a performance at the Pilgrim Theatre, he joined her onstage mid-act and then gave a post-show interview in which he referred to her as “my little old Argentine hillbilly.” He was also heard to mumble, “This won’t ruin me; nothing can ruin me.” It did, of course. Before the year was out, he’d been forced out of his job on Ways and Means and left the House altogether in 1976.

  But greed works both ways, there are exceptions to every rule, and apparently, on earth at least, sin is negotiable. Bear with me here. In 1991, I had the distinct pleasure of covering Edwin Edwards’s bid for an unprecedented fourth term as Louisiana’s governor, an experience that remains some of the most fun I’ve ever had on or off the job. Edwards was famous for uttering a more colorful version of Mills’s “nothing can ruin me” when he said that to get in trouble with the voters of his state he’d have to be found in bed “with a dead girl or a live boy.” He was also a walking, talking exhibit of pretty much everything that gets the billboard people going. A big fan of cash, he checked into his favorite Las Vegas hotels (under the alias T. Wong) carrying suitcases full of the stuff, and as a young congressman he accepted a “friendship” token of $10,000 and a mink coat for his first wife from Tongsun Park of Koreagate fame.

  During one of his two trials for racketeering and bribery (the first ended in a mistrial; in the second he was acquitted), he rode a donkey to the courthouse as part of a joke about the U.S. Attorney kissing his ass. On the campaign that I covered, Edwards (also known as the Silver Zipper) was accompanied by a twenty-six-year-old nursing student named Candy Picou (“At my age a man wants either a nurse or a beautiful young girlfriend. I have combined the two”). When his opponent in the runoff turned out to be the former Klansman David Duke (a sinner of a different sort), he told voters that the two had only one thing in common: “We’re both wizards under the sheets.” And when he won in the second biggest landslide in Louisiana history (he’d also set the record for the first), he became the first Southern governor to issue an executive order protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folks from discrimination in governmental services, employment, and contracts.

  Far more brazenly, he dismissed the Resurrection as make-believe and, during a speech at the Gridiron Club of Alexandria, one of the most conservative and heavily Protestant pockets of the state, mocked the Crucifixion with a lipstick and ketchup stigmata. When I later accompanied him to an appearance at one of the city’s largest Pentecostal churches, I was astonished to find an enormous crowd and a whole roster of effusive preachers. When I asked one of them how he squared support of Edwards with his views, the man provided me with what became a stock answer among the clergy: “Well, he doesn’t drink or smoke.” More to the point, as governor, Edwards had provided this particular church with a waiver enabling the congregation to get around a law requiring the installation of an expensive sprinkler system.

  In the end, Edwards was right—it wasn’t the voters who got him, it was the feds, who take a slightly less nuanced view of sin. They also really, really dislike losing. After decades of trying and failing to convict Edwards of something—anything—they spent a whole bunch of money and gave a whole bunch of bad guys immunity in order to nail him on the charge of accepting bribes in exchange for riverboat casino licenses. Even though he wasn’t even governor anymore, he was sentenced to a decade in prison. The lesson here is that a U.S. Attorney with a vendetta and endless pockets of our tax dollars at work is far more terrifying than the devil himself. But even prison did not manage to dim the former governor’s lustful ways. Not long after his release in 2011, he married—at eighty-three—his third wife, Trina, a former prison pen pal fifty-two years his junior.

  In 2013, the couple had a son, Eli, and a year later Edwards ran for his old seat in Congress. Although he didn’t win, he made the runoff and attracted lots of the old adoring crowds. The women said they admired his honesty—if he gambled, he was up-front about it, after all, and if he stole, he stole from fat cats and not the taxpayers. The men, both covetous and lusty, mostly ogled the very hot Trina. Which brings us back to the subject of the flaming billboard and a story from my time covering fashion rather than politics.

  It was 1992, a year after Edwards’s fourth win and a week after Bill Clinton’s first as president, and I’d been dispatched to Paris, where I attended a Chanel fashion show that featured a parade of models wearing nothing below the waist but skirts made of clear inner tubes, the kind little kids swim in. Such was (and is) the power of Chanel’s designer Karl Lagerfeld, the show ushered in a couple of seasons of transparent clothing. But that wasn’t what I remember most about the event, at which my companions included my then Vogue colleague André Leon Talley and his friend, a Hollywood producer who, like me, had been raised in the Mississippi Delta. As usual, after the show the fashion press and assorted hangers-on pushed backstage for pronouncements from the master: “Karl, Karl, what does it all mean?” Sunglasses firmly in place, Lagerfeld uttered a single sentence: “Poossy is in.” While everyone else dutifully digested this information, our Mississippi pal felt the need to put things in perspective. A sophisticated fellow, he wore custom Versace suits and had a lovely car and driver, but he grew up in a place where people didn’t say that kind of stuff and definitely not about fashion. “Damn,” he roared. “I never knew it went out.” Indeed. Lust, it seems, is a trend for the ages—one that no amount of hair-raising highway art will likely curb.

  Good Country, Bad Behavior

  In 2012 and 2013, almost four months to the day apart, two people who had a profound influence on my life died: Jean Harris, eighty-nine, my headmistress at Virginia’s Madeira School who was referred to derisively as Integrity Jean; and George Jones, eighty-one, who was, well, George Jones and referred to good-naturedly as No-Show Jones and the Possum. Jones’s song “He Stopped Loving Her Today” is arguably the best country music recording ever made, and the sausage sold under his name was so good I wrote a New York Times column about it. (The inclusion of a recipe for sausage balls, a Deep South cocktail party stalwart Jones had never heard of, prompted the following outbursts from the man himself: “I’ve got the sausage and I’ve got the balls—“ha!” and, “Say, Mama, they’re burning up my sausage.… Don’t worry about your sausage, son, you better worry about your balls.”) But despite the countless hours of entertainment (both musical and comical) I’ve derived from Jones, Harris’s influence was rather more dramatic: Had she not murdered Herman Tarnower, her longtime lover and author of the wildly successful The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, I might not have had a career.

  This, in a—sort of—nutshell, is what happened: During my junior year at Madeira, the almost entirely all-male board decided with typical wisdom to replace our brilliant but decidedly masculine headmistress (who went on to become town supervisor of Shelter Island, New York) with Jean Harris, even though her most recent job had been manager of sales at a Manhattan-based company that sold cleaning contracts to office buildings, and when I later interviewed a former board member at a previous school where she’d been head, he blamed her for its ultimate demise. When she was introduced on the hockey field during the spring Fathers’ Weekend (in a bow to the number of divorced parents, the traditional Parents’ Weekend had been split in two), I took one look at her, turned to my father, and said, “One day they are going to come get that woman in a truck.”

  My father, like most of the rest of the assembled dads, had already pronounced her “attractive” in her knockoff Chanel suit, and mumbled something about my dislike of authority (which is not exactly true—I just prefer it when the people nominally in charge of my well-being possess some modicum of sanity). At any rate, the following year proved my instincts right. She walked through campus head down, yanki
ng at her hair; once, at a “relaxed” meeting at her house, she sat with us on the floor and pulled up huge clumps of carpet. We had no way of knowing that she was taking the methamphetamine Desoxyn (along with Valium, Percodan, Nembutal, and other goodies revealed to have been in her medicine cabinet), or that she was in the grips of an increasingly desperate obsession with the famous Dr. Tarnower.

  Whereas her predecessor didn’t much care what we did as long as we worked our asses off academically, Harris clearly had more literal goals in that department. She put the entire school on what turned out to be the Scarsdale Diet, she hammered incessantly at our general lack of ladylikeness, and twice in her yearbook letter to our graduating class, she underlined the importance of a “stout heart.” No wonder—in a scenario familiar to country music fans everywhere, it turns out that she was being eclipsed in Tarnower’s affections by his younger, blonder office assistant, a woman whom the high-minded Harris derided in a letter to her lover as “tasteless,” “ignorant,” “cutesie,” and, for good measure, “a slut.” It was the latter’s frilly negligee and pink curlers that Harris spotted in Tarnower’s bathroom on that night in 1980 when she pumped three bullets into his chest from several feet away, an occurrence she forever termed a “tragic accident.”

  By then I was a sophomore at Georgetown and a part-time library assistant/phone answerer at Newsweek’s Washington bureau, a job I’d gotten via Madeira’s ingenious cocurriculum program, in which the students are bused off to D.C.-area internships once a week. On the morning after Harris shot Tarnower, the bureau chief woke me up with an order to get out to my old school. When I asked him why on earth, he barked, “You idiot, your headmistress just shot the diet doctor.”

  Looking back, I realize I had none of the usual reactions. Instead, I threw on clothes, jumped in the car, made my way past the guards (with whom I’d made sure to be on extraordinarily good terms during my slightly shady school tenure), and got the scoop on all that had transpired before Harris drove off campus armed with a gun. On the way back, I stopped at a pay phone to make an especially fulfilling “I told you so” call to my father (even the truck part was right—deliciously, Harris had been transported from the crime scene in an old-fashioned paddy wagon). Then I typed up my notes, filed my story to New York, and got my first-ever byline. I was nineteen and only the tiniest bit sorry that the good doctor had given his life in service to my future as a journalist.

  It has been during that career that I’ve had the privilege of meeting many a country music great, including Jones, largely through my friend Susan Nadler, to whom Jones referred to with affection as “my little Jew” and who was also part owner of his record company. Susan has worked with everyone from Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson to Tammy Wynette (Jones’s third wife and singing partner) and is herself no stranger to crime. She once did time in a Mexican jail, an experience immortalized in a memoir called The Butterfly Convention, and she wrote another fine book, Good Girls Gone Bad, in which Harris could easily have been a chapter. Anyway, just before Jones died, he sent Susan a letter promising her a spot next to Johnny Paycheck in his private group of cemetery plots, and while we were cracking up over that, um, generous offer, among other evidence of Jones’s decidedly off-kilter but weirdly sweet nature, it occurred to me that Jean and George had more in common than might initially be apparent.

  Harris was born in an affluent suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, while Jones was born in an area outside of Beaumont, Texas, known as the Big Thicket. Harris went to Smith College and graduated magna cum laude; Jones went to Jasper, Texas, where he played and sang on KTXJ radio. Which is why it is always instructive to go deeper. For one thing, the emotional use of a firearm landed them both in a lot of trouble. Jones shot up an untold amount of hotel rooms, some houses, the floor of one of his tour buses, and the car of his good buddy Peanut Montgomery, for which he got slapped with an attempted murder charge that was later dropped. And while the only room we know for sure Harris shot up was her boyfriend’s Scarsdale bedroom, it turned out to be enough, since it landed her in a women’s prison for twelve years.

  Then, of course, there was the fondness for drugs (Jones preferred cocaine and whiskey over Harris’s pills) and the resulting paranoia. Jones was variously convinced that monsters were crawling in his car or that he’d been targeted by the mob, and he was once carted off in a straitjacket. For her part, Harris accused her rival of subjecting her to all sorts of indignities, including cutting up her clothes—though Harris herself had cut up a needlepoint rug made by yet another woman whom the doc had earlier dated, and mailed the pieces back to her in a shoebox. When it came to tortuous love affairs, Jones, not surprisingly, took a more direct approach—on the night he took Tammy away from her then husband, he simply turned over a dining room table and shot the lamp.

  It was always said of Jones that he was such an astonishingly moving interpreter of country songs because he’d lived most of their content, but plenty of Jones’s titles (if not the exact lyrics) could have been applied to Harris’s tawdry saga. “She Thinks I Still Care,” “Why Baby Why,” and, of course, “He Stopped Loving Her Today” come immediately to mind.

  Harris wrote that she found redemption (even though she never actually admitted guilt—she was, she said instead, an “instrument” in Tarnower’s death) by campaigning for a nursery for the children of fellow inmates. That’s nice, but I’ll take Jones’s 100-plus albums and unmistakable voice filled with that aching vulnerability and full-on heart—qualities the jury could never locate in Harris, who wore fur-collared coats and an air of superiority to court every day.

  With heart also comes humor, and the all-important ability to laugh at oneself. During our first interview, I had to confess to Jones that I’d run over one of the newly installed lights in his driveway. “That’s okay,” he shot back, “I’m partial to guardrails myself.” It was a hilarious afternoon (before he even agreed to return home from his daily lunch at Subway, he had to be reassured I wasn’t a Yankee), punctuated by the Jones magic. At one point he broke into a spine-tingling a cappella version of Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” It’s not a bad epitaph for both Harris and Jones—for the former, one leaning toward the bitterly ironic, and for the latter, entirely fitting. Those close to Jones say he never completely let go of the torch he carried for Wynette, and he certainly held on to his deep love for “true” country and his sainted fourth wife, Nancy, who is credited with keeping him—mostly—straight, and who will be buried beside him.

  Hollywood on the Delta

  In 2014 at the second annual Delta Hot Tamale Festival in Greenville, Mississippi, there was a kickoff party for the visiting writers and chefs at what we locals refer to as the Baby Doll House. The party, designed and catered by my friends Amanda and Carl Cottingham, was stunning, as was the setting. Guests arrived just as the sinking sun had turned the sky a gorgeous fuchsia and an enormous harvest moon was on the rise. The house, a majestic three-story Greek Revival, appeared like an apparition in the middle of hundreds of acres of cotton and soybeans. Eden Brent dazzled with her trademark rollicking blues piano from the front porch, and two bars flanked the entrance.

  It was a really, really good party, but for a lot of the guests who made the trek to Benoit, the tiny Mississippi Delta town along the river where the house is located, the history of the place was as alluring as the shindig. Completed in 1861 by Judge J. C. Burrus, the home was spared destruction by the Yankees thanks to the fact that the commander of the Union troops in the area had befriended the judge while at the University of Virginia. During the war, it became a makeshift hospital for hundreds of Confederate troops; after Lee’s surrender, General Jubal Early hid out there before being secretly transported across the Mississippi by his host.

  Most tantalizing, though, was the fact that it served as the location for the 1956 film Baby Doll, a mashup of two Tennessee Williams one-act plays, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and The Long Stay Cut Short, that starred Karl Malden, Carroll
Baker, and Eli Wallach in his very first film role. The movie was billed as “Elia Kazan’s production of Tennessee Williams’ boldest story,” with the “boldest” part driven home by its poster, featuring the twenty-five-year-old Baker (in the title role) wearing what is now universally known as a “baby doll” nightgown, curled up in a crib, and rather provocatively sucking her thumb.

  Since Benoit is only twenty miles from my hometown of Greenville, I’d heard the stories all my life. The cast and crew had camped out for months on end at the Greenville Hotel downtown and dined out almost nightly at Doe’s Eat Place. Malden, who played Archie Lee Meighan, Baby Doll’s frustrated husband, went deer hunting with my best friend’s grandfather Jesse Brent, while Eades Hogue, the uncle of another close friend, was cast in the role of town marshal. My father, a habitué of a “tonk” called Mink’s, frequently spotted Williams among the crowd there, and on a particularly frigid day, he and a friend slipped onto the set to watch Malden jump out of the house with a gun in pursuit of his nemesis, Wallach. “It was cold as hell and he had to do it five or six times in a row. I said, ‘Man, this movie stuff is tough.’” (Though the story was set in summer, the movie was filmed during a cold snap so brutal that the actors had to suck on ice cubes to keep their breath from showing.)