Screening Room (18 page)

I remember my first speech course with Mr. Crain. For the first three or four months of the course, he did nothing but attempt to teach us how to pronounce words as northerners do. “You beasts will never make it to the stage talking like southern rednecks,” he said. He spent hours trying to exterminate our flat
I
and replace it with the high-toned and taut
I
heard in other parts of the United States of America. We had to hold our mouths open, as in a doctor’s office, while he prodded our tongues and the soft tissues of our throats with a Popsicle stick to show us which parts of our oral anatomy must be brought into play to correct the defective sounds. The southern
I
is a lazy exhalation of air and can be accomplished with a slack jaw, no movement of the tongue, and, in fact, no effort at all—almost like an unconscious sigh or a tiny gasp when turning over during a night’s sleep. By contrast, the
I
uttered by a northerner is a high-calorie proposition requiring the lower jaw and tongue to be jerked back while air is somehow forced in reverse along the bottom of the mouth, deflected against the throat, and finally launched forward along the roof of the mouth. That, at any rate, is how it feels to a young person raised on the gentler movements of the South.
Even to this day, after Mr. Crain’s training and after inhabiting the upper parts of the country for more than forty years, I must brace myself to come forth with a northern
I
. There were numerous other sounds Mr. Crain taught us to stifle, and others we had to manufacture from scratch. We incorrectly pronounced
sure
like
shoo-ah, barley
like
bawly, pen
like
pin, ruined
like
roined
.

Although Mr. Crain never said it, the strong message we got from him was that we spoke like heathens from some primitive tribe. This message was reinforced when I attended summer school at Northwestern University in Illinois after my junior year of high school. All the other students, from places like New York and Boston and Chicago, thought that my speech was highly entertaining and had me repeat phrases as if begging the circus clown to slip on the banana peel one more time. Furthermore, these students had polish. They seemed to know everything. When they talked about what universities they were applying to, they mentioned Princeton, Stanford, University of Chicago, MIT. No one said a peep about Vanderbilt or Rice or Ole Miss or Louisiana State University. I decided that for college I would go north, where people spoke proper English.

I was probably one of Mr. Crain’s less-promising students, but I liked him so much that I wanted to be involved with his theatrical productions, so I volunteered to work backstage. Working backstage in the theater is very much like working in the projection booth of a movie theater. I loved making things happen onstage, in front of the audience, from my hidden perch behind the curtains. The high point of my backstage career, as I remember it, was rewiring a telephone so that I could make it ring onstage by pressing a button backstage. In previous high school plays, the onstage phone had been a dummy, and the ring actually came from backstage.

During my last year of high school, Mr. Crain told me that I had to have a “taste” of life onstage, so he gave me the part
of Lachie in
The Hasty Heart
. (The play had been made into a movie, starring Patricia Neal, Richard Todd, and Ronald Reagan.) It’s set in a convalescent ward of a British hospital at the end of World War II. Lachie is an arrogant Scottish sergeant who is unaware that he has only a few weeks to live. During the course of the play, Lachie falls in love with the ward nurse. In one scene, Lachie and the nurse kiss. I had little experience with kissing at this point of my life, and under no circumstances did I want to kiss someone in front of an audience. I asked Mr. Crain if that scene could be omitted, and he looked at me as if I had asked to burn the complete works of Shakespeare. Rehearsal after rehearsal, in front of the full cast, I had to kiss this particular girl in my high school class who, I am sure, dreaded the intimate encounters as much as I did. Following Mr. Crain’s suggestions, I tried to imagine that this was the woman of my dreams, that I had wanted to kiss her for years, that this was the last kiss I would ever have in my life, but all I could think of was a couple hundred people watching me naked on the stage. I am certain that this kissing scene in
The Hasty Heart
retarded my romantic development. For a number of years afterward, every time I got to the point of the first kiss with a potential paramour, I would feel the eyes of an audience watching and be unable to go through with it.

When I visited Mr. Crain on trips home, he would ask me about my career and nod approvingly, but I think that what he most approved of was the destruction and extermination of my flat Southern
I
s and my
bawley
s and the rest. I had also learned to speed up my delivery, as northerners seemed to associate slow speech with slow thinking. “Don’t stay in Memphis too long,” he would say, “or you’ll start talking like people here again.” I once asked Mr. Crain why he himself hung around Memphis. Why didn’t he move to New York or Chicago, where they had great theater? “It’s too cold up there,” he answered. “You need
the heat to keep the blood circulating.” Apparently, you could speak properly and be cold-blooded, or speak like a redneck but have warm blood. My own theory is that Mr. Crain didn’t move to the North because he couldn’t exterminate his own twangy southern accent.

Mr. Crain’s most successful pupil was the actress Kathy Bates, who was in my high school graduating class. Undoubtedly, Kathy has conquered her southern
I
s. Yet some of her greatest cinematic roles have been as southern ladies, where she was required to unlearn some of what Gene Crain taught her. The way I look at it, Kathy is a southerner pretending to be a northerner pretending to be a southerner. All things are possible in the movies.

Tennessee has the shape of a parallelogram. It is the most geometrical of all American states, not counting the dull squares of Colorado and Wyoming. Falling in the southwest corner of this parallelogram is the city of Memphis. Go a bit west, and you come to Arkansas. A bit south, Mississippi. It is said that all roads in the Mid-South lead to Memphis. On a map, Memphis looks like the hub of a wheel, with spokes moving out in all directions. Highway 76 streaks to the northeast, Highway 78 to the southeast, Highway 55 to the north and south, Highway 40 to the west.

In 1890, when a new constitution in Mississippi disenfranchised the black population there, Negroes began moving north to Memphis. They came in jury-rigged boats up the river, they came in horse-drawn carts along old Highway 78, and they came by rail on the Illinois Central. As a result of this migration, the black population of Memphis swelled to forty percent. The new arrivals were gleefully regarded by white politicians as a giant voting bloc for sale. They paid the prohibitive poll tax of $2 per person, equivalent to about $50 today, and then bribed the “dumb jigaboos” with watermelon, barbecue, and a new drink called Coca-Cola.

The fellow who perfected this quid pro quo was Edward Hull Crump, a ninth-grade dropout from Holly Springs, Mississippi. The son of a Confederate officer, Crump was a large man of
considerable height, with a mop of red hair that slowly turned white but remained in abundance. He sported natty clothes with two-tone shoes, a handkerchief gushing from his blazer pocket, and a custom-made oversize top hat, and he never strolled the streets of Memphis without one of his elegant walking sticks. After marrying the daughter of a wealthy Memphis family and using her funds to set himself up in business, Crump decided that he wanted to see how far he could stretch his legs. First, he got himself on the Board of Fire and Police Commissioners. From that position, he began making friends in the right places, including the owners of the six hundred saloons in Memphis.

In 1910, at age thirty-five, Crump was elected mayor. For the next forty years, first as mayor, then as United States congressman, and then as private citizen, he controlled Memphis and much of Tennessee with the absolute power of a Russian czar.
People called him “Boss Crump.” Through his man Lloyd T. Binford, Crump controlled which movies M.A. could play in his theaters. Under Crump’s rule, Memphis ran smoothly. Garbage was collected, fires were extinguished, roads were built, brothels were closed. A terrible public speaker, Boss Crump preferred to work behind the scenes, making calls to the commissioners, ward bosses, saloon keepers, police chiefs, and wealthy citizens from a gold-plated telephone in his office.

(
photo credit 33.1
)

In 1934, when
upstart Edward Ward Carmak ran against Crump’s candidate for the U.S. Senate, Carmak’s car was wrecked and his teeth knocked out by unidentified assailants. When a pharmacist refused to round up Crump votes in his district, the Boss had city policemen stand outside his store and interrogate every entering customer. Chemist Walter Wallace made the mistake of writing a letter to the
Memphis Press-Scimitar
in late 1946 protesting Crump’s plan to extend censorship from movies to books. The next day, Wallace was fired from his job. Crump sent his own letter to the newspaper, suggesting that Wallace favored “
unbridled circulation of obscene and licentious books.” In other letters to the
Press-Scimitar
, Crump called one opponent a “
mangy bubonic rat” and another a “low, filthy scoundrel, pervert, degenerate.” When the
prominent Negro leader Robert R. Church became too independent of the Crump machine in the late 1930s, the Boss had his property confiscated and the man driven out of town. Black professionals objected. Crump responded by picking up his telephone and warning a staffer at the influential black paper the
Memphis Sentinel:
“
You have a bunch of niggers teaching social equality, stirring up social hatred. I am not going to stand for it. I’ve dealt with niggers all my life and I know how to treat them.”

Even now, more than a half century after Crump’s passing, one cannot escape the Boss. An eight-foot statue of Edward Hull Crump smiles grandly upon pedestrians in Overton Park. Memphians
drive to work on Crump Boulevard. And for many years the largest sports complex in town was Crump Stadium.

It is near noon, the hottest time of the day, when I walk into the Center City Commission, the six-story white stone building that was once headquarters of the E. H. Crump Insurance Company. From a room in this building, the Boss ruled his kingdom. A receptionist appears surprised and confused at my request and finally says, yes, she thinks she knows where Mr. Crump’s old office was. She leads me up a narrow back stairway to a condemned area of the building on the third floor. Here, with no air-conditioning or open windows, the heat hugs my body like thick animal fur. Immediately, I begin sweating and coughing. The air smells of dust and turpentine, and fallen plaster crunches under my feet. Electrical wires protrude from jagged holes in the walls. There are three empty rooms. The outer room, opening to the hallway, must have been where Crump’s anxious subjects waited to see him. I walk through to a middle room, which most likely housed Crump’s secretary. Then, the inner room, Crump’s personal office, empty for the last fifty-five years. I am alone in his little Pentagon. Wiping away the dust on the walls, I discover rich mahogany panels. One window faces south along Main Street and the muscular commercial buildings of Downtown. Another looks west along Adams Street, capturing a slice of the great Mississippi River. I imagine a two-sided desk, a huge man with white hair, a gold-plated telephone.

My father once met Mr. Crump in this office. It was around 1950. For some reason no one remembers, my grandfather M.A. had acquired a small café across the street from his palatial Malco Theater. It was called the Stagedoor, and it served sandwiches and cold drinks. M.A. assigned the task of running the café to my father. Dad would rather have been ordered to stand up in a packed auditorium and jitterbug than to manage a restaurant. In avoidance, he spent days in the Malco basement making papier-mâché
gorillas to promote horror movies, or he stayed at his home on Cherry to design advertisements. Some days he just disappeared from his office without bothering to turn off the radio or take his hat off the rack, and no one knew where he was hiding.

What little profit the Stagedoor made came from two pinball machines. One day, a rough-looking man walked into the café and recommended that the establishment replace its two pinball machines with his machines and begin paying him for the license. When Dad politely declined, the man asked him what kind of fire insurance he had, didn’t wait for a reply, and left. All difficulties of this kind were routinely referred to the Boss. My father called Mr. Crump’s secretary for an appointment. An assistant would call him back, said the secretary. No assistant called. My father again tried to make an appointment. A few weeks went by. Finally, my father was telephoned by the secretary and instructed to appear in Mr. Crump’s office at nine the next morning. Dad waited in the outer room until ten, then was ushered in to see the Boss. “Aren’t you M.A.’s boy?” said Mr. Crump.