First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  The last lynching in Hope had been in the 1920s, when a black man accused of raping a white woman was tied to a rope and dragged down Main Street behind a horse and then hanged from an oak tree. But the race issue still defined Hope, as it did most southern communities. Tension between blacks and whites had increased in the months after the war. Some white G.I.s were upset to come home and find black men working in the factories, making decent wages and holding jobs that the whites felt belonged to them. Black veterans came home to find that they were still denied their civil rights and had to live in houses that lacked indoor plumb-ing, confined to several blocks in the fourth ward on the northeast side of town in a sector known to whites as “Colored Town.” Most of the black women in the fourth ward crossed the railroad tracks to work as cleaning ladies and nannies for the white families. There was a black-owned funeral parlor and hotel, but the grocery store on the edge of the black neighborhood was run by a white proprietor: Eldridge Cassidy.

  His days as the iceman had ended a few years earlier, cut short by bronchial problems. He gave up his ice truck reluctantly, and searched for another job that suited his personality. He worked at a liquor store for a few years during the war until Hempstead County voted to go dry, then borrowed some money and opened the grocery on Hazel Street across from Rose Hill Cemetery. The store was one of the most integrated establishments in Hope, with black and white customers who bought the same canned goods from one counter and sodas from the ice box, along with illegal whiskey from a cabinet below the register. It was through credit that Eldridge Cassidy got the money for the store, and he was equally free with credit for his customers—and reluctant to collect. If the store was not a profitable proposition, it served a function that he cared about more, offering a place away from home where he could see people and tell stories and boast about his grandson Billy.

  Mammaw, Pappaw, Virginia, and Billy lived together in the house on Hervey Street for less than a year before Virginia left for New Orleans, alone, to train at Charity Hospital as a nurse anesthetist. It was the only occupation that interested her. She never liked just being a nurse, following the orders of imperious male doctors, and she certainly did not like following in her mother’s footsteps as a practical nurse in Hope. She told her friends that it was difficult for her to leave her baby son for months at a time. But she had decided that learning anesthesia would allow her to make more money to support him. And she was eager to get away from her mother, who acted as if she were in charge of Billy anyway and was longing to care for him. And she loved New Orleans, a city that she had got to know during her nursing school days. Virginia left in the fall of 1947, when Billy was one, and was gone for most of the next two years. One of his earliest memories, Bill would say decades later, was visiting his mother in New Orleans, then getting back on the train with Mammaw and looking out the window and seeing his mother on her knees, crying, as she waved goodbye.

  Edith kept him occupied in Hope. When he was two, she began preparing homemade flash cards with letters and numbers on them and taught him the rudiments of reading while he sat in his high chair. It was not, he would say later, “like John Stuart Mill reading Milton at age five or anything like that—but it was reading.” She dressed him in knickers and fine pin-striped outfits. She introduced him to church at age three, enrolling him in the Sunbeam program at First Baptist. Often, when she was busy, Eldridge would take Billy over to the country store, where he would play with little black kids from the neighborhood. Billy came to respect Edith, but it was Pappaw who won his heart, “the kindest person” he ever knew. Yet it was gentle old Pappaw who unintentionally brought another man into Billy’s life, someone with a decidedly different manner and temperament, a free-wheeling sharpie from Hot Springs named Roger Clinton who ran a car dealership in town and on the side occasionally supplied the Cassidy grocery store with bootleg whiskey.

  Virginia had met Clinton at her father’s store before she left Hope, and saw him occasionally in New Orleans or during her trips home, which he usually paid for. She knew nothing about him except that he ran the Buick agency in Hope, that he came from Hot Springs, and that he lived up to his nickname, “Dude.” He loved to drink and gamble and have a good time. He was a natty dresser, his face splashed with cologne, who always went to work “looking like he was freshly out of the bathtub.” Virginia was unaware when they began dating that Clinton had a wife and two stepsons back in Hot Springs. She did not know that when his wife, Ina Mae Murphy Clinton, filed for divorce in August 1948, she charged in court papers that he had abused her, once taking her pump shoes and smashing her in the face, leaving her with a black eye and a bloody scalp. She did not know that he was not as adept with money as he seemed to be, that he was often bailed out of financial scrapes by one of his older brothers, Raymond, who owned the successful Buick dealership in Hot Springs and had set Roger up in business in Hope.

  She did discover, soon enough, that he was a philanderer, once busting into his apartment on Elm Street across from the Episcopal church manse after being tipped off by a friend that he had been entertaining a stewardess there. She found the room empty but strewn with lingerie, which she took outside and hung on the clothesline. Still, she decided to marry Roger Clinton, to the dismay of her family.

  “I’m fixin’ to marry Roger Clinton,” she told her favorite uncle, Edith’s brother Buddy Grisham. Grisham later remembered the rest of the conversation this way: “I told her, ‘No,’—I said, ‘You’re not fixin’ to do that.’ Roger was in the Buick business, so I said, ‘You’re fixin’ to marry a bunch of Buick cars!’ She could have a new car to drive whenever she wanted—these women give in to that… I told her she’d have hell from then on.” According to Virginia’s later recollections, her mother threatened to seek custody of Billy and even consulted a lawyer about how she could do it. The custody threat never made it into court, but it did divide the family more than ever. When Virginia Blythe became Virginia Clinton on June 19, 1950, her parents and her four-year-old son were not at the ceremony.

  Billy lived with his mother and Roger Clinton in a boxy one-story wooden house at the corner of Thirteenth Street and South Walker, in a neighborhood bustling with young families. Mosley the welder lived nearby, and Smith the grocer and Osteen the bank clerk and Polk the lumberman and Taylor the car salesman, along with Williams, the retired railroadman next door. Hope was in the midst of its postwar boom. Young couples were having children, settling down to jobs, finding their way back to church in a revivalist mood, happy to be alive. The little family at 321 Thirteenth Street did not seem out of the ordinary. The husband ran the Roger Clinton Buick Company at 207 East Third Street. The wife worked as a nurse anesthetist. The little boy loved to wear his Hopalong Cassidy outfit with black pants, black coat and hat, and a T-shirt with the cowboy star’s picture on it. He went to kindergarten with Donna Taylor, the neighbor girl who kissed him behind a tree one day, and with Mack McLarty, the son of the other auto dealer in town, the rich one, and Georgie Wright, the son of a doctor. He was a talkative, sensitive, chubby little boy. The only blue jeans that fit him at the waist were so long that he had to roll them up halfway to his knees.

  Billy would “light up” when he was around other children, Donna Taylor later recalled. “Some people like to be with other children. He was like that. He was always right there. Almost obnoxious. He was in the center of everything. One time we were scuffling around in my house and he kicked out the glass of a cabinet.” Another time, while he was jumping rope during recess at school, Billy caught his cowboy boot in the rope and fell and broke his leg. The other children gathered around their bawling classmate and chanted: “Billy’s a sissy! Billy’s a sissy!” He was in a cast for weeks. His playmates noticed that he liked the attention the cast brought him.

  By first grade Billy Blythe was known as Billy Clinton, though his name was still officially William Jefferson Blythe III. He called Roger Clinton “Daddy,” but Roger Clinton did not legally adopt the boy and rarely
spent time with him. Roger usually had had several drinks by the time Billy saw him at night. Roger was gone a lot, and when he was home, he often sat alone in a room or argued with Virginia. One night Virginia dressed Billy up to take him to the hospital in Hope to visit her maternal grandmother, who was dying. Roger did not want them to leave. When she said she was going anyway, he hauled out a gun and fired a shot over her head into the wall. Virginia went across the street to the Taylors’ and called the police. Billy slept at a neighbor’s house. Roger spent the night in jail.

  • • •

  IN September 1952, Roger Clinton sold the Buick agency to Sid Rogers. A few months later he moved his family to Hot Springs, an hour up the road. They spent several uneasy months living on a farm on the edge of town, as Roger made a halfhearted effort to change his way of life. Virginia hated the farm, she later said, and especially disliked the thought of Billy being out there alone with Roger while she was working miles away at the hospital in Hot Springs. By the next summer they had settled into a comfortable two-story frame house high on a ridge above Park Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares in Hot Springs. Virginia thought that Roger had bought the house with money from selling his car agency. In fact, it belonged to big brother Raymond. Roger had left the Hope car dealership in financial disrepair and had gambled away the money he had got for it. His brother was helping him start over again.

  The house at 1011 Park Avenue was nestled between two worlds. The backyard and long rear gravel driveway led back to Circle Drive, with spacious brick homes and graceful lawns shaded with oaks and magnolias, where the lawyers and city officials lived. The front windows looked across to the pine-covered North Mountain of Hot Springs National Park, and the tiered front lawn led down to the avenue of middle American carefree vacation glitz, starting with the swimming pool at the Plaza Motel next door, followed by the Settle Inn, the Lynwood, the Parkway, the Wheatley, the Town House, the Tower, and the Ina Motel. A half-mile down, the string of motels was interrupted by the neocolonial red brick and white column sterility of Park Place Baptist Church, then resumed with the Bell-air, the Cottage, the Swan Song, and the Park Avenue, ending with the exotic Vapors nightclub, a former drive-in turned into a Vegas-style crystal palace, replete with bar, casino, and roll-out stage offering big-name enter-tainers like Tony Bennett and Liberace.

  A left turn past the Vapors led down to the center of town, with the Arlington Hotel standing gaudy sentinel over bathhouse row. The baths’ restorative waters gave the town its name. Most Hot Springs residents knew the baths in order running down from the Arlington along Central Avenue: Superior, Hale, Maurice, Fordyce, Quapaw, Ozark, Buckstaff, and Lamar.

  Hope was flat and understated; Hot Springs was all hills and excess. While every town has its juxtaposition of virtue and sin, in Hope and most other southern communities it was well beneath the surface. In Hot Springs, more of it was out in the open. The biggest illegal yet blatantly obvious gambling operation in the South flourished side by side with dozens of churches, some of them funded with gambling money. It was poetic to be born in Hope, but it meant more to grow up in Hot Springs. Hot Springs was a vaporous city of ancient corruption mingling with purely American idealism.

  The Clintons had arrived in Hot Springs in 1919 from Dardanelle, a small town along the Arkansas River about forty miles to the north. They were drawn by the restorative waters sought by Roger’s ailing mother, EuIa Cornwell Clinton. The four Clinton boys, Raymond, Roy, Robert, and Roger, and their sister Ilaree, grew up in the city during the heyday of gambling and prostitution, both controlled by gangsters and protected by city officials. At the end of each month, officers rounded up the prostitutes and marched them over to the courthouse, where they paid five-dollar fines and went back to business. The telephone operators in town had the whorehouse numbers memorized. The gamblers, it was said, had to bribe a string of thirteen public officials from Hot Springs to Little Rock, the state capital. When the Clinton boys were teenagers, they took note of the gangsters who came to town as other boys might pay attention to baseball stars. Al Capone had a corner suite on the fourth floor of the Arlington, looking across Central Avenue to the Southern Club gambling house. He sat on a chartreuse couch and kept a machine gun in the closet. Raymond and Roger were especially impressed by the way Capone walked down the street with his hat tipped down, shielded by two bodyguards in front, two behind, and two on each side.

  From late Prohibition days through World War II, the town was run by a colorful little dictator named Leo P. McLaughlin who wore spats and a lapel carnation and paraded down Central Avenue in a buggy pulled by his show horses, Scotch and Soda. His theory of politics, as once described by his partner in power, Judge Verne Ledgerwood, was: You rub my back and I’ll rub yours. His definition of integrity was summarized in what he once said about his police chief: “He was honest. He did exactly what we told him to do.” McLaughlin was eventually deposed by a band of reform-minded World War II veterans, but they turned out to be more interested in a share of the power than true reform, and soon made their peace with a new generation of gamblers.

  Raymond Clinton, originally one of the reformers, rose to affluence as a Buick dealer who sold cars to the gamblers and politicians, and had a fine house on Knollwood Drive out on Lake Hamilton, one of the three artificial lakes that surrounded the city. Roy Clinton, who ran a feed store and antique shop, was less of a political operator than Raymond, yet he was the one who entered politics, serving in the Arkansas legislature for two terms in the early 1950s. Roger Clinton was more drawn to whiskey and gambling and nightlife. He spent much of his time drinking and playing around with two of his running buddies, Van Hampton Lyell, who operated the Coca-Cola plant, and Gabe Crawford, who ran a drugstore chain and developed a shopping center. For a time, Crawford was married to Roger’s niece. When he was drunk, he would beat her. Drinking and wife abuse seemed to be part of the culture of Hot Springs in those days, according to Judy Ellsworth, whose husband later became mayor. The city, Ellsworth said, was “full of a lot of angry, repressed women” who had been mistreated by their husbands. The men “got away with anything they wanted to. They had no respect for women. They all had mistresses. They all beat their wives. It was the tradition of this city. The men had a way of compartmentalizing their lives. Honesty was never a trait with them. It was never-never-land.”

  Virginia was not immune to those troubles. She struggled with her roust-about husband and with some doctors in town who did not like dealing with a female professional. But she had a duality in her own nature that led her to find the flashy side of Hot Springs irresistible. She enjoyed the shows at the Vapors, liked to drink and gamble at the Belvedere Country Club, and became a regular at Oaklawn race track. She drove around town with the top down on her Buick convertible, and made dozens of close friends, women and men. Billy spent much of his time under the care of an older white woman named Mrs. Walters. At night, he would hear his parents fighting. Daddy, as he called Roger, drank too much. And Mother would make Daddy go into fits of jealous rage because, he said, she was too friendly with other men. As a nurse anesthetist, Virginia’s hours were irreg-ular: she could be called out for an operation at any time of day or night. But even with her job and her hobbies drawing so much of her time, the psychological center of her life seemed to be her son Billy. She talked constantly about how bright he was and what a promising future he had. She made it clear that she expected him to achieve.

  Billy tried to carve out a separate life in Hot Springs. He spent two years in a Catholic grade school and raised his hand in class so much that one of the nuns gave him a C for being a busybody. In 1955, when he was eight, he dressed himself in a suit on Sunday mornings and walked alone the half-mile down Park Avenue to Park Place Baptist Church, carrying his old leatherbound Bible. Mrs. Walters, his nanny, who was more religious than his mother or daddy, told him that he might be a minister like Billy Graham some day. It seemed to the pastor, Reverend Dexter Blevins, that Billy was ther
e “every time the door opened.” Even though his parents were not churchgoers, Clinton said later, he was a believer and felt the need to be there every Sunday. He thought it was important “to try to be a good person.”

  When he switched to public school for the start of fourth grade, Billy walked up the side of the hill to Ramble School with his new best friend David Leopoulos, and within days he seemed to be running the place. An expression that he had brought with him—“Hot dog!”—became part of the Ramble lexicon. He stuck out his big right hand and introduced himself to everyone in the school as Billy Clinton. None of his friends knew that his name was Billy Blythe and that Roger Clinton was not his father. “He just took over the school,” recalled Ronnie Cecil, whose parents ran a hamburger stand on Park Avenue. “He didn’t mean to, but he just took the place over.” Cecil and Leopoulos quickly learned that Billy was the smartest kid in the class, and that he could help them, sometimes unwittingly. When they were given simple yes-no tests, Billy knew the answers and he would write them out in capital letters—Y-E-S or N-O—pressing his pencil down so loudly on the crisp paper that Cecil could hear and copy his friend’s responses, all of which were correct.