Hearing Miss Martie describe the scene is poignant. She and her biological mother hug and kiss. “We looked each other over pretty good. I loved her instantly.” A renewed relationship begins that day, and Beth even winds up living with Martie in the final months of her life. “She wasn’t motherly. She was more sisterly. That’s the way I felt toward her. She’d never been my mother.”
They share stories. The past is rehashed.
In another cruel twist, Beth reveals that she looked for her lost daughter for years, then finally gave up. TCHS told her that her daughter had died. “After she was told that, she was so sorry she gave me up,” Martie says. “I had a hundred questions I would have liked to ask her, but she was very reluctant. She never would talk about it as much as I wanted.”
Beth is especially unforthcoming about Martie’s biological father. All she will reveal is that she met the guy and fell for him. “She was fifteen…and him being a man…well, I think that’s enough said.” Miss Martie couches this fact in the language of a proper Southern lady.
She chose not to look for her father, but through her life she has seen men and wondered, “ ‘Could that be my daddy?’ That’s something else I used to think as I walked down the street. ‘Is that my brother?’ ‘Is that my sister?’ ” She is sad when she learns that she has no siblings. Neither her adoptive mother nor her birth mother ever had other children.
Like so many TCHS adoptees, she is an only child.
Her adoptive mother dies in 2003, although Martie is fortunate to have had a phone conversation with her shortly beforehand. “I was always glad I had that last talk with her,” she says. Martie’s first husband, Hugh, and her birth mother both die in 2004. She remarries, and then this husband also passes away. Her tone becomes quietly reflective as she discusses this. “I’ve lost two husbands, two mothers, my car, my independence, my health…but I’ve gained a lot.”
She has made friends at the retirement center and hears from her children regularly. They pop in and tell her about their lives, and motherly love radiates from her as she talks about them. The difference in the way she feels about her children and her emotions surrounding her upbringing are stark. “I wouldn’t have given one of mine up. I’m very proud of my children…very, very proud.” She smiles a little sheepishly. “Maybe too proud.”
Martie has clearly thought a great deal about her adoption, repeatedly asking a question for nearly eight decades, a question echoed by so many other TCHS adoptees: “Even though I understand why she gave me away—I don’t blame her—but I don’t see how she could do it. I’ve never come to terms with it, even now. It hurts to know she gave me up. How could anyone give away their baby?”
THE WHY AND HOW
On my way to the retirement home parking lot after visiting with Miss Martie, I pass two residents enjoying a conversation near the front door. A walker gets away from one and rolls downhill. I retrieve it, wondering about the stories of these two women’s lives. I learned long ago that everyone has a story, and that we need to listen to more of them.
I sit in my car for a moment, reflecting on precious Miss Martie. Despite her birth mother’s painful decision those long years ago, Miss Martie forged a loving family of her own. She moved forward with determination. I wish she were able to join us in Memphis for the reunion. Other adoptees would love meeting her and would understand what she has lived through. Together they could wrestle with the how of TCHS adoptions.
How does someone choose to prey on the most vulnerable? Go against all the instincts we have to protect children and market them like products? How does a community turn a blind eye?
How does a birth mother survive relinquishing a daughter she’s raised for two years? And then survive being told that her daughter has died?
Those are questions no interview can fully answer.
Before I can put the car into reverse, my cell phone rings, and I see Miss Martie’s number. When I answer, she tells me that she hopes we will stay in touch. “I enjoyed our afternoon very much,” she says, “and I don’t want to lose you.”
I don’t want to lose you either, Miss Martie.
And I know I won’t.
We never lose those whose stories remain with us.
* * *
—
On the interstate drive back into Nashville, I crank up the air-conditioning. As I enter the city, I ponder how many people here in the state’s capital have some connection to Georgia Tann’s scandal. From adoptees to parents to lawmakers and bureaucrats, the numbers touched by TCHS seem enormous.
But my next interview is the day after tomorrow, outside either of these influential cities. I’ll be back in the car for more Tennessee back-road travels, and I’m fairly certain that this adoptee will say that his life was also improved by his TCHS adoption.
At the moment, though, I’m anticipating Mexican food with two granddaughters and vow to hug them extra tightly.
CHAPTER 9
A HOLLYWOOD LIFE
“They looked at some kids and chose me.”
WHEN THE TEENAGE GIRL ARRIVES at the Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers in West Tennessee, she has not been told exactly what awaits. That the moment her baby comes, she is expected to sign it away.
On her sixteenth birthday, April 20, 1940, she labors to bring a tiny boy into the world. He has her red hair.
Georgia Tann visits personally for an interview, but the girl is intransigent. In no uncertain terms, Tann informs her that it will be better if she voluntarily gives her baby up for adoption. Like many young, unwed mothers who deal with the powerful Tann, the girl struggles with the decision. Unlike most of the others, she finds the courage to refuse to sign the paperwork.
She won’t surrender her child.
It doesn’t matter. The baby is taken anyway, as regularly happened in this day and age, the decision not left to a vulnerable unwed teen, particularly when Tann was involved. The newborn son becomes a ward of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and is put up for adoption.
The young mother is allowed to remain at the unwed mothers’ home for only a month. From there, she is sent to the Chattanooga Home for Wayward Women.
A place that will become, for her, a type of prison.
Stephen
STEPHEN SMILEY BURNETTE, AGE SEVENTY-EIGHT when I meet him, is a cowboy reared in Hollywood, where Tann was a regular visitor in his childhood home. He grows up calling her “Memphis Tann.” His adoptive father is the late Smiley Burnette, a famous cowboy actor, songwriter, and singer who made people laugh with his homespun humor and had many roles in Westerns and on television shows such as Petticoat Junction. Smiley was also the sidekick of Gene Autry, one of the most famous singing cowboys of all time and a pioneer in country music.
Stephen and his three siblings are among a substantial number of Southern babies sent to famous people in California, one of Tann’s specialties. Smiley’s traveling shows take him in and out of Memphis early in his career, and when his wife, Dallas, learns that she cannot have children, they choose two daughters and two sons from TCHS. They give each of the boys the middle name Smiley.
My trail to Stephen reminds me of tracking down leads in my days as a cub reporter. Journalism skills, some of them honed in a town not far from where I eventually find him, help me out. The Burnette adoptions are not a secret—a family photo appeared in a Memphis newspaper back in the day—but I learn about them from a TCHS adoptee who lives in Utah; he mentions that his parents were neighbors of the Burnettes in California and that Smiley connected his folks to Tann.
Adopted by famous cowboy actor and singer Smiley Burnette, Stephen calls Georgia Tann “Memphis Tann” during her numerous visits to his childhood home. Smiley’s real name is shown on Stephen’s birth certificate.
The names of many 1930s and 1940s movie and music stars may not mean much to me, but I do remember Smiley. My paren
ts grew up in rural Arkansas in his era, and they loved his down-to-earth humor. He appeared as the train engineer in Petticoat Junction, one of my favorite shows when I was a girl. I even had a coloring book of the Hooterville gang—the type of item now sold online as a collectible. I tell myself that finding Stephen will be easy enough because he, his daughter, and a friend have lovingly maintained a Smiley website. They have not, though, kept up with their email response form—they got too many silly questions, Stephen tells me later.
But a mention I find on the Internet suggests that he lives in a small town in Tennessee—only twenty-five miles from my in-laws and a pair of our grandchildren. That would mean Stephen has returned to the land of his birth. I turn to the old faithful White Pages, which I scarcely use anymore, and find a Burnette. No one, however, picks up the phone to unrecognized callers these days. I suppose I can leave a message.
I punch in the numbers.
When Stephen answers, it takes me a moment to collect myself. “Are you…” My words sound awkward as I assure him that I am not a telemarketer.
“Yes…”
Well, then.
He is gracious as our conversation continues, in spite of suffering from a bad cold. He volunteers information I do not know about Tann. He even calls me back a couple of times to ask if I’ve been in touch with this person or that. He asks me to give his regards to old Hollywood friends if I reach them. Stephen is an intriguing mix of gruff and polite. “You’re going to find out a few things,” he says. “This is a long story.”
I broach the subject of doing an in-person interview with him. He will have just had shoulder surgery the week before the TCHS reunion and does not seem to give the gathering any thought. But he is open to a visit while I am in the area. He is gregarious, even amenable to more phone chats. If he’s around, he says, he’ll answer and talk. As for scheduling an in-person interview? “You can do it anytime you want. I’m show business.”
He offers up directions to his home with the insistence of a parent who wants to make sure I get there—and who does not trust GPS. Exit here, not there. Left at the second stop. I can’t keep from smiling at his insistence and rely on my notepad, rather than my maps app.
He also puts me in touch with his actress daughter, Elizabeth Burnette, who has a long-running role on Grey’s Anatomy. A smart, compassionate woman who is protective of her father, she vets me online after my initial call to him, including checking my website and Facebook page. After I talk with Stephen on the phone, she generously telephones me and speaks with love about her family, particularly her father. “I think he’s an awesome person,” she says with warmth.
* * *
—
I’M SO NERVOUS THAT I’ll get lost out in the country that I am sweating by the time I arrive at the house where Stephen lives. In my defense, it is hot and humid in Tennessee in June, and there is road work at the turn to his place, which delays me for ten minutes. I have the idea that you do not want to keep Mr. Burnette waiting.
He welcomes me to the house he has shared for years with his cat, Smoky, and a couple who have been longtime friends and are the ultimate Smiley fans and collectors. Lush blue hydrangeas are in splendid bloom beyond the den window. There’s a cornfield next door. His father and the Green Acres crew, from another of Smiley’s shows, would feel at home out here.
Stepping into the house is like walking into a Smiley Burnette museum, memorabilia at every turn. From a replica of Smiley’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to framed movie stills, the presence of Stephen’s adoptive father dominates. The items are soon woven into the conversation and offer a glimpse into another world, another way of life.
Stephen settles into his tale with the panache of a true Hollywood storyteller, but he carries himself more like a Tennessee farmer. He is dressed in blue work pants and a chambray Western shirt with snaps. On his feet he wears leather moccasins. He usually dons a cowboy hat, though indoors today his head is bare. He’s recovering from his surgery, and it would be an understatement to say that he is not the most tolerant patient. He fidgets with the sling and grouses about it to his friend who sits nearby. She fusses gently.
Stephen Smiley Burnette shows off the collection of his father’s memorabilia at his home in West Tennessee. Smiley and his wife, Dallas, adopt two boys and two girls from Georgia Tann. Both sons are given the middle name Smiley.
“Smiley came by Memphis on a tour. He loved Memphis,” Stephen says. “He felt it should be the country music center of the state of Tennessee.” From there the conversation moves to Dallas and Smiley’s visit to TCHS, and Stephen’s voice sounds matter-of-fact when he says, “They looked at some kids and chose me.”
An actor and stuntman who seems still to long for that work, he has a big personality and, like all Tann adoptees I meet, a packet of paperwork to present. The memories he shares with me give a glimpse at the kind of life many people fantasize about.
If not for his Tann adoption, that life would never have been his.
* * *
—
SMILEY AND DALLAS ADOPT the baby boy when he is three and a half months old.
His adoption is never hidden. “I have always known,” Stephen says. “So have the other three…Everyone knew it. Dad didn’t want to be blackmailed, so he told everyone right up front.”
His adoptive father becomes friends with Tann, who goes on to visit their home in Studio City, California. “She liked my dad because he was in Memphis a lot,” Stephen says. That connection leads to Stephen often encountering her during his boyhood in California. “I’ve known Memphis Tann since forever. She used to come out and visit. She was delivering babies to other homes. It wasn’t just a one-time thing.”
Dallas and Smiley, good-hearted, trusting people, believed deeply in Tann’s efforts to connect children with families; they did not know about her questionable adoption schemes until the scandal broke. Sometimes she would spend the night with them and fly back out of Burbank. One time when she came, she had delivered a couple of kids to neighbors on the same street, Stephen recalls. “Some people up the block got a good one,” he says. “They adopted a second one who didn’t work out and sent him back.”
This is one of the complaints long held against Tann—that she did not properly check homes and, as a result, the children were often set up to fail. Parents were permitted to return a child, like a piece of clothing that did not fit. Stephen, though, thinks more highly of her than most, as did his adoptive parents. “She didn’t sell babies, per se,” he says. “She would take three or four children to California, billing each family for the flight, hotel, and money for the comfort, health, and safety of the child.”
Some see that as selling children, charging multiple times for the same flight and other expenses. Stephen doesn’t share that opinion. “Nobody paid to get a baby…I can tell you how it was done. If you sent one welfare worker to California and charged a welfare worker times five, they said that was paying for the baby. It wasn’t. It was just smart.”
Whatever question I ask Stephen about the charges against Tann, he deflects with the certainty that overall she did a good thing for children. He feels strongly that she helped in a time when people—particularly unwed mothers—could not afford to keep their kids. “She did a whole lot for people in World War II,” he says. “Think about it—there would have been a lot of kids turned out.” And he does not believe she was taking money, although records and reports say she lived extravagantly on what she made through the orphanage, maintaining a luxurious home in the city, a limousine and chauffeur, a plantation farm outside Memphis, and a beach cottage for recreation. “Georgia Tann meant no harm,” he tells me as we talk. “She was putting all her money back in the home.”
He does, though, mention that “she was in very well with the mayor of Memphis.” Her connections with that mayor, Boss Crump,
allowed Tann to run her orphanage the way she wanted. But the good and evil of Georgia Tann adoptions are inextricably intertwined, as Stephen’s perspective shows. It’s a strange dichotomy that in many cases she crushed lives, while in other cases, she changed lives for the better. Stephen, who grew up in a happy home, clearly fits in the latter category.
The contrast between the life he might have had and the one he wound up with is a truth that has defined his life. Anybody who grew up with a Cadillac and a chauffeur was better off than a poor child in Tennessee, he points out. The Burnette home, on three-quarters of an acre, had a pool, workshop, blacksmith shop, and paint shop. “I grew up with advantages that a child in those days would have died for…I had all those things available to me.”
Although his adoptive father might be more well known, young Stephen adores his adoptive mother, too. Eleven years older than Smiley, Dallas is warm, loving, and caring. She is not in show business but travels with Smiley in the early years.
Between ages seven and fourteen, Stephen is practically raised by an African American housekeeper, a circumstance echoed by others adopted into families with money. “She was kind of the person who grew me up…She was my go-to person. If I needed something or permission to do something, I would go to her when my parents were gone.” He becomes emotional as he recalls another maid and driver being hauled off to a Japanese internment camp. “I remember them jerking them away from me.”
His father does shows on the road to augment his film and TV income, and Stephen starts young in the family business. “I have one recollection at about four years old, going on the stage with Dad. Mom was offstage. Dad was proud of the fact that he had children,” he tells me as he sits reminiscing in the comfortable den with the morning light filtering in. His cat wanders over to check me out, then to rub up against Stephen.
Before and After Page 11
