Screening Room (4 page)
Authors: Alan Lightman
Wedding Reception with Ducks
“I remember the wedding … at the Peabody Hotel.”
“No. No. No. A Jewish wedding at the Peabody? That was the reception. Jeanne wanted the wedding in New Orleans, but the Garretsons had no social connections. You didn’t know Dave Garretson very well. Smart as a whip, but without education. He had dropped out of school in the eighth grade to support his family. So the Garretsons drove up to Memphis. Jeanne’s brother, Philip, came too. That was right before he got tossed out of the
famille
for gambling away everything his parents owned, including his father’s car. At the reception Philip coasted from one guest to the next asking for money. On top of that, he was wearing a suit two sizes too small. Everyone was flabbergasted.
“M.A. was in fine form. He had just won some national bridge tournament and was dancing with all of the pretty young women. When he would break in on a young woman and her partner, if the girl hesitated, he would say, ‘Do you want to dance with a boy or a man?’ He paid special attention to Jeanne, his new daughter-in-law. I remember one slow dance in particular.
“Jeanne’s mother forgot to check on the time of the famous Peabody duck procession. We were drinking and dancing in the lounge when the ducks suddenly waddled out of the marble fountain and began marching toward the elevator. Something was wrong with their feeding schedule or toilet training or God knows what because they started crapping all over the floor. We
called the manager, and he called the duck trainer—who was this woman as big as a hippopotamus. She kept drinking our champagne while she was apologizing. She even offered to clean everybody’s shoes, which were a mess, but she wouldn’t touch the ducks. The hotel had paid a fortune for them, she said, and they couldn’t be disturbed from their routine. Jeanne became hysterical. You know how she was. She began breathing heavily and threatening to faint and pleaded with your father to stand up to the manager. Dick politely excused himself and went to the men’s room for an hour.”
Jackie Robinson had just made history by becoming the first black man to play major league baseball. President Harry Truman’s wife, Bess, was named Best Dressed Woman in Public Life by the Fashion Academy of New York, and Al Capone died at age forty-eight of syphilis. Gasoline cost fifteen cents a gallon. The owners of the Pig-N-Whistle and Arcade restaurants in Memphis viciously attacked each other in a parking lot over an allegedly stolen recipe for barbecue sauce.
Dorothy Dix, the syndicated advice columnist, answered a young man who wrote to her that he was desperately in love with a girl suffering from backaches, headaches, and a sore jaw: “
You certainly must be crazy if you are determined to marry the girl, aches and all, and let yourself in for a lifetime of listening to the moans and whines of a complaining wife.”
The movies: the Academy Award for best picture of 1946, announced in March 1947, went to
Best Years of Our Lives
. Best actor was Fredric March, for the same movie, and the award for best actress went to Olivia de Havilland in
To Each His Own
. Other news in the movies was the death of Grace Moore, known as the “Tennessee Nightingale.” Miss Moore got her start in film with
A Lady’s Morals
(1930), one of the first talkies. Twelve-year-old Elvis Presley and his family moved into a four-room home in the black section of Tupelo known as Shake Rag.
My parents honeymooned in Cuba, a popular spot for vacationing Americans at the time. They traveled there by ship. According to a half-told story my mother let slip many years later, something comical happened the first time the bride and groom disrobed in front of each other. A photograph shows my parents walking hand in hand on the avenue in front of a sun-drenched hotel, palm trees in the background, my father bare-chested and uncharacteristically self-confident, my mother wearing a one-piece bathing suit with an anxious smile on her face, as if wondering whether she’d made a mistake.
Some cousins have gone off to other rooms to take naps. Even Lennie has stopped talking and placed an embroidered handkerchief over her face to block the light. Uncle Harry is still telling stories of M.A., some of which I’ve not heard before. In the heat, his voice becomes a flow of warm water, then the buzz of a bee, then the soft rising and falling of my breath as I breathe in and out and my head leans against my chair. A face, a hand, a reddish gold color.
During the war, my father unexpectedly spent a week in Philadelphia while his ship was being repaired at the naval yard there. One evening, he and some fellow naval officers went to a restaurant and stumbled upon M.A. having dinner with a beautiful woman. As it turned out, M.A. was in town for a bridge tournament. Father and son registered a flicker of surprise, quickly disguised. The unwritten code between gentlemen was that they kept quiet about each other’s romantic misbehaviors, even when the injured party was the mother of one of them.
M.A. rose from the table. College wrestling champion moviestar good looks admiral-without-the-stripes business tycoon. All of it conveyed without words. Dad introduced his colleagues to his father. They spent a few moments chatting, M.A.’s date remaining appropriately discreet. Then the young men went off to another table.
“
Your father is really something,” one of the officers said to Dad and slapped him on the back. “What happened to you?”
Time slips and spins in my heat-swollen daze. I am eight years old with M.A. and my grandmother Celia in Miami, where they kept a small house. My grandfather takes me out on his dock to catch crabs. We tie pieces of hot dog on strings weighted with rocks and lower the feast into the water. To my dismay, the crabs eat the hot dogs and skitter away without attaching themselves to the string. After an hour, I am almost in tears. “It doesn’t work.”
“Do you want to catch a crab or not?” says M.A. “Well?”
I can barely talk. “I want to catch a crab,” I sniffle.
“Then keep at it,” says my grandfather.
Finally, a less wily crab holds to my string, and I pull him up to the dock. The crustacean is no larger than my palm. “Congratulations,” booms M.A. “We’ll have him for lunch.”
My grandmother has set the table with lovely china brought down from Memphis. We grill the crab in butter and put a tiny piece on each of our plates, one bite’s worth. “Best crab I’ve ever eaten,” says my grandfather, smiling at me.
Back in Memphis, I hang hot dogs on strings from a stone bench on my grandfather’s vast land and pretend I am fishing for crabs. M.A.’s property on Cherry Road originally sprawled across nearly six acres. Around 1950, he gifted a slice of his land to my father. And there, in M.A.’s shadow, my parents erected their own house and raised me and my three younger brothers.
M.A. at this time was at the height of his powers in business. He had built an empire of sixty-three movie theaters in seven southern states, and his theaters dominated in each of the towns where they operated. Whenever a competing movie house threatened one of M.A.’s, he bought it. “The best defense is an
offense,” he said, claiming the line came from Napoleon, or perhaps Abraham Lincoln. In due course, M.A. bought out his business partners and was now the sole owner of Malco, the M. A. Lightman Company.
Few people dared challenge M.A. Lightman. Except for one man, Lloyd T. Binford. Binford was not the owner of a competing chain of movie theaters. Instead, he was the director of the Memphis Censor Board, which blocked movies it deemed of lascivious character or “
inimical to the public welfare.” Binford ruled against Cecil B. DeMille’s
King of Kings
because the film story differed slightly from the Bible version, and the crucifixion scenes he considered too violent.
A balding man usually seen wearing a three-piece suit and a scowl on his face, Binford was incensed by sexuality, violence, and blasphemy. But what agitated him the most, drawing out his most venomous criticism, was any hint of social equality between blacks and whites. In 1947, in a yellowing paper my father saved, Binford publicly stated that “
the downfall of every ancient civilization is traceable to racial contamination.” That same year, he outlawed the Hal Roach comedy
Curley
because it showed black children and white children playing together. In 1945, he stopped the live musical
Annie Get Your Gun
from playing in Memphis because there were colored people in the cast “
who had too familiar an air about them.” For some films, Binford and his colleagues simply snipped out the offending scenes, leaving odd gaps and splices when the films were viewed by frustrated moviegoers. Singlehandedly, Binford banished such stars as Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and the King Cole Trio from the silver screens of Memphis.
On various occasions my grandfather M.A. would meet Binford at some Downtown restaurant and entreat him not to censor a movie. M.A. hated to grovel. He would come home and spit in the garden to get Binford out of his mouth. But no amount
of begging or groveling worked with Lloyd T. Binford. He had the backing of Memphis political boss E. H. Crump, and he had an undaunted belief in his own judgment of right versus wrong. “M.A. once got so mad at Binford,” says Uncle Harry, “that he threatened to lock the censor’s head in a half nelson—one of the wrestling maneuvers he’d picked up at Vandy. An alert waiter prevented the impending catastrophe by playing at full blast a recording of ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’ ”
It was taken as a given that my father and his older brother, Edward, would work for the family movie business, under M.A.’s direction. Dad got his first job in the business at age twelve, in the summer of 1931. When he came back from Boy Scout camp in June, he sold Coca-Colas out of a washtub in front of the Princess Theater on Main Street. That washtub was the beginning of Malco Theatres’ concession department. Dad drank most of the profits himself.
I can still remember Dad’s small office at the old Malco Theater on Beale, windowless, the sofa covered with stacks of press releases and glossy photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and Cary Grant. You could hear the clickety-clack of Fannie Slepian’s typewriter down the hallway as she diligently typed letters for M.A.
As far as I can tell, Dad joined Malco only because his father insisted. Dad was not a businessman. He was an intellectual, and an artist. During his fifty years in the family business, the only job Dad enjoyed was promotion. During the 1950s and 1960s, my father took pleasure in creating the advertisements, both drawings and text. He also masterminded special events to promote films, such as vaudeville acts complete with costumes and drama. When the theaters were showing an awful film called
Dinosaurus
, in 1960, he and a colleague built a forty-five-foot
dinosaur out of papier-mâché with a voice box that roared and a swishing tail made from a fishing pole.
I remember one particular day in the late 1950s when I went to Dad’s office to retrieve something or other for my mother. There were half a dozen people crammed in there, all talking at once. Evidently Dad was promoting three new films at the same time. An actress from the Memphis Little Theater was reading out loud from a script she had written for a stage show to go with
Horror of Dracula
. A young woman hired from a modeling agency was showing off a dress with a plunging neckline that she was planning to wear in the lobby of the Crosstown theater for the opening of
Gigi
. And a dog trainer was there with his dog, London, who was going to perform at the opening of
The Littlest Hobo
. At that very moment, London was demonstrating tricks, like taking a pen out of my father’s pocket with his teeth.
“Doesn’t Louise look adorable,” said some guy who must have been with the modeling agency. “Louise, walk around for Mr. Lightman.”
“There will be
children
in the theater,” said Watson Davis, a colleague of my father. “What do you think, Dick?”
“Kids can see a little flesh,” the dog trainer said and winked approvingly at Louise.
My father was about to render a verdict when the actress from the Little Theater, who for some reason was occupying Dad’s chair at his desk, began reading from a scene in her script: “I love you. It doesn’t matter to me what you are.”
“It’s too soon for her to say something like that,” said Dad, who had tried his own hand at writing drama in college.
“She’s been overwhelmed, conquered,” said the Little Theater actress. “Remember, this is no ordinary man.”
“But your heroine is an ordinary woman,” said my father. He was in his element. In fact, he had already found a costume that
Dracula could wear for the stage show, a black cape with a red lining, for rent at a little costume shop on South Highland.
“Dick, what about this dress?” said Watson Davis in exasperation. Louise was still parading around the room with her breasts. Then came the sound of explosions. Dad’s office was right next to the balcony of the theater, and apparently a matinee was playing, a war movie, with bombs dropping.