Teaching the Pig to Dance Read online

  Sounds a little harsh perhaps, but in this day of mega-churches and attempts by the Left and the Right to involve their churches in activities far removed from the original role of the church, it still has resonance for that boy who shined those pews with his Sunday pants while he (mostly) watched the clock many years ago.

  THERE ARE FEW THINGS more heartwarming to a man than his memories of that special dog he had growing up. Romping through the fields together, playing catch, hunting birds—best pals. My fondest recollection of my dog is nothing like that. Don’t get me wrong, my dog and I had our joyous moments, as well as melancholy ones. However, when I think of him, the thought is often accompanied not by just a smile but by a laugh. And, as was so often the case, it is based on something my dad did to the utter chagrin of my sainted mother.

  The story starts with a car trade. Dad was getting close to a deal when he focused on the dog sitting in the backseat. “It’s a deal if you throw in the dog,” he said. “Done,” the man replied. So I had a new dog. His name was Pooch. Obviously, his original owner had put a lot of thought into naming the dog, and it seemed to suit him fine. He was a pooch and looked like a pooch. He was a pretty big dog and looked to be part hound, long and lanky, and part bulldog, with kind of a squished-up face but with long ears and a tongue that almost hit the ground. He was white with large black spots, and he was a beautiful sight as he loped along.

  At the time, Dad was a salesman at Caperton Chevrolet and was doing pretty well. He built a house on Caperton Avenue, which was the street that the boss lived on, although at the other end of the street in a much larger house. As always, our circumstances reflected the vicissitudes of the economy and the car business, and this was a little more upscale than the houses we usually had. We bought a TV but we had no air-conditioning, so on hot summer nights we would put the TV in the window and watch it through the screen as we sat in the yard. In other words, we were thoroughly enjoying our new neighborhood. Little did we know that scandal was about to upset it all.

  One summer day, Dad was painting our metal lawn chairs in the front yard. Painting them a bright yellow. Pooch was irritating him by being especially frisky, running around the yard and occasionally brushing up against the chair that Dad was painting. Pooch had just made a pass by the chair and Dad, with his brush dripping with paint, reflexively took a swipe at Pooch with the brush. He missed him—well, most of him; he actually swiped Pooch from behind and right between his legs. Specifically, he painted Pooch’s more than ample testicles a bright yellow. Pooch jogged off oblivious and happy, his newly luminous endowments swinging from side to side. Pooch always had the run of the neighborhood. Normally you could see him coming, but now you could really see him going from about a half mile away. My mother was apoplectic. First it was “What in the world is wrong with Pooch?”—thinking he had contracted some deadly disease. Then, when she was informed what had happened, it was “Fletcher, you have got to catch that dog.”

  “Yeah, and then what?” he replied.

  Good question. He did not want to be the one to try to apply the paint remover. There was only one thing for Mom to do. Since Pooch was well known in the neighborhood as “the Thompson dog,” she would not show her face until “that stuff wore off.”

  I, of course, thought it was the neatest thing to have everybody talking about my dog. Dad acted like he was chagrined just like Mom, but later I wondered if the paintbrush incident had really been an accident. All I know is that a few years later, when the movie came out about a boy and his dog named “Old Yeller,” it had a special meaning for me.

  FOR ME, A GREAT DAY was getting to go to what we called “the show”—that is, the Crockett Theater (down the street from the Crockett Gas Station, across from the Crockett Beauty Salon, and on the way to the Crockett State Park). Built when I was eight or nine years old, it was the most impressive structure in town—a huge, shadowy palace with large ovals along the walls concealing indirect purple lighting, muted and surreal. There was a large curtain drawn across the giant screen, enhancing the anticipation as to what lay behind it. It was a place of wonder, a spark to any imagination, and the home of heroes where good and evil were unambiguous.

  Good guys looked and dressed the part, were strong, brave, took up for the little guy, won against all odds, and apparently never had to make a living. Any little boy who didn’t want to grow up to be like Roy Rogers or Gene Autry would have been cause for serious concern by his parents. At twenty cents to get in and a nickel for popcorn, it was the ultimate entertainment for me until I was grown. There, I lived in a state of suspended disbelief for as long as I possibly could, knowing that what was playing out on the screen before me was make-believe but resisting the acceptance of that fact until I absolutely had to go home. I wanted it to be real. Tarzan, the cavalry, and the occasional adult adventure that I would see with my parents took me to places I wanted to go to and usually made me feel good about myself. The impact that these radio-singers-turned-cowboy-actors made on me was profound.

  Many years later, when I was in the United States Senate and attending a hearing, we were talking about how violence in the movies and television had increased over the years. I made a passing reference to growing up with Gene and Roy and watching them shoot a lot of bad guys. Soon I received a long letter from a Gene Autry–related organization taking umbrage and expressing outrage over my statement. They pointed out that Gene always shot the gun at the bad guy’s hand. He never actually shot anybody. I stood corrected.

  In those days, movies were perhaps the most significant common denominator in American society. If you walked into a bank almost anywhere in America, there was one thing you could almost always count on that would be shared by the bank president and the custodian: They grew up watching the same movies. At least for a while in our society, it helped to promote social cohesion—a common understanding as to what was just and unjust, good and evil. We all had the same examples of heroism and villainy.

  I know it’s probably hard to believe, but as a preteen in Lawrenceburg I was not exactly focused on the social significance of the cinema; I just wanted to go see “the show.” But mind you, it had to be the right kind of movie. In other words, for my buddies and me it had to meet certain standards. It had to involve either guns, horses, or a jungle. It never occurred to us that our movie heroes were “actors” (nor to a lot of movie critics, I’ll bet). Acting was for sissies. No self-respecting guy who wanted the approval of his peers would be caught dead onstage in a school play with a bunch of girls. Decidedly uncool. It was much better to sit back and make fun of the guys who did.

  Each of us expressed our strength and independence by doing and thinking exactly as our buddies did. I broke from the pack only once—when I let a teacher talk me into playing Joseph in a Christmas play. I stood in one place with my trusty staff, sweating like a horse under heavy garb and a scratchy beard, for the entire duration of the play. I had no lines, of course. And I had to do rehearsals for that! After that experience, I returned to the herd and kept my record clean from there on out. Movies were fun, but “playacting” was not an appropriate activity for a real man. In fact, this finely honed sense of what was and was not acceptable in the area of movie fandom led me to an act of retribution that would make the Taliban proud.

  It seems that all it takes to bring out a streak of meanness in an otherwise pretty good kid is a little encouragement and the opportunity to feel powerful and superior, even if it’s for the briefest of times. If he is in fact a “pretty good kid,” he’ll feel guilty about it even half a century later. Thus, my episode with my next-door neighbor, Johnny.

  I should have known that it would end in no good. The potential for violence was just too great. I was developing a powerful, if not lethal, right cross. It was a perfect complement to my left jab, which could cut a man’s face to ribbons. I was developing into a boxing machine. I knew all of this because of the punishment I was doling out to an old Navy duffel bag filled with sawdust. Dad, r
emember, had wanted to be a boxer when he was a kid. I watched the Friday-night fights with him on TV and listened on a crackling radio when the likes of Rocky Marciano and Jake LaMotta fought for championships. He subscribed to Ring Magazine, and I would take old ones and cut out pictures of the fighters in action and stage my own fights on the kitchen table. I begged Dad for a set of boxing gloves, and sure enough, one Christmas under the tree I found two sets of boxing gloves and the homemade “heavy boxing bag.”

  After working on the bag enough to persuade myself that I was on my way to the big time, some of my buddies and I formed a “boxing club” in my garage, where I hung the bag and made space for a boxing “ring.” However, I had a problem—a pretty basic one. These boxing skills that I was developing in my own mind were encased in a rather pudgy, slow, eleven-year-old body. I never fully appreciated the significance of the fact that the punching bag was stationary and didn’t hit back. When inviting kids over to box, I didn’t take the precaution of making sure that they were slower and fatter than I was. After a few jabs and fancy footwork, our sessions would turn into wild swinging melees in which we would occasionally connect with each other’s head. It wasn’t at all like it was on TV. And it could hurt like the dickens.

  Nevertheless, we were all full of … whatever the precursor to testosterone is and still enjoyed mauling one another from time to time. All of which leads up to my neighbor Johnny. No, we didn’t beat up Johnny. It’s just that while we were perfecting our manly art, with decidedly mixed results, I became more and more resentful of the activity that was going on next door. Johnny had started a “movie star club,” for Pete’s sake! Johnny never had been on solid ground with me. I guess he was a nice enough guy, a skinny, pimply-faced kid like most of the rest of us. But his dad held a position that was well known to all of us kids—a position of prestige that caused us to be envious of Johnny. Even worse, Johnny was not hesitant to brag about it. His dad took the tickets at the door at the Crockett Theater.

  I assumed that this meant Johnny had total access to all the movies. Even worse, he probably knew a lot of the movie stars. There were hints that drove us nuts. To us he was clearly using insider influence to get the pictures of the stars that he flaunted on the walls of his clubhouse, which was basically a little open shed in his backyard. To me his was a very sissy enterprise, at best. I was crazy about the cowboy and war movies, but none of the heroes from those films were on his wall. He actually had a lot of pictures of girls hanging up there. He even had girls in his club! What a dweeb, I thought. There was only one thing a macho, red-blooded, courageous boy could do—sneak over there in the dead of night, while nobody was looking, and tear the place up—which is what a buddy and I did. We tore some of the pictures in half (I didn’t know at the time you could get them in magazines), turned over the crates they used for chairs, and mixed things around.

  Of course, I began to feel bad as soon as my buddy went home—a confusing mix of conscience and a real fear of retribution from my folks. I was still hiding under the covers the next morning when I heard howls of anguish coming from across the yard. But that dreaded knock on my door never came. I assumed they had no idea who would do such a thing. Naturally, having gotten away with it, I felt even worse.

  I think my little “Lord of the Flies” episode had a lasting effect on me. As an older kid and as an adult, I’ve had little tolerance for bullies either in the school yard or in my law practice. Nothing has given me more satisfaction than to be big enough or, as a lawyer, to have the ability to step up on occasion for the little guy who was being picked on by a governor or a state attorney general, for example. In all likelihood, I’ve been trying to make up for what I did to Johnny.

  Also, I didn’t miss the irony when my picture appeared many years later in a movie magazine that published an article about a movie I was in. I could envision somewhere a middle-aged Johnny ripping it to shreds.

  All I can say to Johnny and my buddies back in school is, guys, if you’re reading this, I really didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to be an actor or be in the movies. It just kind of happened with no planning on my part. You know, just like it used to be with me growing up. How did it happen? Well, I’ve asked myself that question more than once—like the time I was in Durango, Mexico, many years after the incident with Johnny.

  I HAD FORGOTTEN how hard it was to handle those big truck tires. Man, they were heavy. We hadn’t had to deal with many of those around Dad’s car lot, although I had made the acquaintance of a few during informal “strong boy” competitions at the Gulf Service Station on Cyclone Corner—Lawrenceburg’s main intersection.

  I had picked an unlikely place to become reunited with one of these babies. My tire and I were standing and waiting in an improvised hallway. The walls extended up only about eight feet. Above that was a makeshift roof at about twelve feet, leaving a gap of about four feet for the cold wind to blow through. It was 1988, and I was in the countryside outside of Durango, Mexico. If you were to see it, you could imagine a locale hospitable to drug traffickers or those coyotes who smuggle people over the border to the United States. But there I was, and feeling a good deal of pressure, although no drug deal was involved. That said, I couldn’t help asking myself, “Is this an appropriate place for a respected barrister to be?”

  On cue I straightened the coat of my military uniform and rolled my truck tire down the hallway, bursting through the double doors at the other end. Sitting behind a desk, also in a military uniform and looking shocked, was legendary actor Paul Newman. It was the first take of our scene together on the set of Fat Man and Little Boy, the story of the making of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the 1940s. Warner Brothers had re-created Los Alamos there on the barren Mexican landscape. Paul Newman and I were both playing U.S. Army generals. I played his boss, but for some reason Newman had the lead role.

  I had already learned a valuable Hollywood lesson during the casting of this movie. The lead character in the real-life drama of making the A-bomb was a man by the name of Leslie Groves. He would also be the main character in the movie. The casting director had called my agent and described Groves as a large man, balding, who smoked cigars. They thought I might be just right for the part. They wanted to cast someone who actually looked like Groves. I felt the part fit me to a tee and was looking forward to my first leading role. After a while, the casting director called back and said that although they wanted me to play another part in the movie, the part of Leslie Groves had gone to another actor. My agent asked who had gotten the part. The answer was Paul Newman. The moral of that story was that if you can get Paul Newman, you get Paul Newman—presumably even if the part calls for the wearing of high heels and a hula skirt.

  So I crashed my big truck tire through the double doors. The script called for me to be very angry and yelling loudly. I proceeded to berate Paul Newman while he sat there and looked at me with those famous baby blues. I had to concentrate like the devil to keep from thinking, “Geez, this is Paul Newman. I am cussing out Paul Newman.”

  Actually, the thought that did penetrate my consciousness was “How the devil did I wind up here?” The answer? In a quintessentially American way … I filed a lawsuit.

  My client was a young woman by the name of Marie Ragghianti. While practicing law, I had seen many takeoffs on the theme of a woman done wrong by a man, but this one was going to be very different. The man was the governor of Tennessee, my old “friend” Ray Blanton, who had trounced my candidate, John T. Williams, when I made my political debut as Williams’s campaign manager in 1968, one year out of law school. Blanton was also the guy Howard Baker beat in 1972 when I was Baker’s campaign manager for Middle Tennessee. So I was one-and-one against “Sugar Ray” and felt that I knew him pretty well.

  Before getting elected governor he had been a nondescript, hard-drinking rural congressman. He was said to be able to pick up a young pig by the ears and tell you exactly how old the pig was. Naturally, it was thought, a fellow like t
hat ought to be in Congress. Lately, my main gripe against him was that he and his buddies were giving rednecks a bad name with their “country boys coming to town” shenanigans since they had taken over the governor’s office. As it turned out, I had underestimated him.

  Marie had spent a good part of 1973 in a sickbed recuperating from an illness. She had watched all of the Watergate hearings and took note of the young lawyer with the sideburns and funny suits and the fact that he was a fellow Tennessean. She thought to herself that if she ever needed a lawyer, this might be a good guy to have on her side. In June of 1978, when she walked into my office, that day had come. A few months before, she had been appointed by Ray Blanton to be chairman of the Pardons and Parole Board of Tennessee. A loyal Democrat, she had worked on his election bid and had become friends with a couple of his campaign people. However, when she called to make the appointment to see me, I vaguely recalled that the media had indicated that she had had a falling-out with the governor recently over her job performance. There turned out to be a lot more to it than that. She told me that the governor’s legal counsel and others in the governor’s office had become increasingly involved in the operation of the board. They would make “recommendations” as to who should be paroled from prison. They also wanted favorable recommendations from the board for pardons that the governor wanted to dole out. And the other board members were going along with the administration regardless of the merits of the individual cases. What’s more, the governor’s boys were applying pressure on behalf of some very unlikely jailbirds.

  Soon after Marie became chairperson, she learned that the governor’s legal counsel had scheduled a clemency hearing for an inmate by the name of Rose Lee Cooper because “her children needed her.” Rose by any other name would still be a bad girl. Blanton had never exactly been known for his racial sensitivity, having supported George Wallace for president, but here we had a black, inner-city woman from Memphis who had a long history of drug dealing and prostitution. The local district attorney had told Marie that Rose had national drug connections. As the probation report delicately put it when Rose was arrested, she was concealing cocaine “between her legs.” Not a likely candidate for clemency, one might think. Marie voted against her, and the other two board members nervously followed Marie’s lead. It was the first time the governor’s office had ever been rejected.