Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (10 page)

Of course, this turned out to be the first of twenty feature-film roles for me, as well as numerous television roles and commercials. The decision to take one of the least remunerative and longest-shot cases I’d ever had led to one of the most interesting chapters of my life. It’s like I opened the door to what I thought was the courthouse and walked into Disneyland.

Maybe it wasn’t so outlandish for me to think I could play different characters. After all, I’d grown up with a pretty rich assortment of them in Lawrenceburg, starting with my own family. And speaking of family, parents should be mindful that when they tell a kid he or she can do anything they set their mind to, as I was told. The kid might just believe it, whether the parent does or not. So tell them. This was very much on my mind a few years ago when they had a little ceremony for me in Lawrenceburg and had me leave my autograph and foot- and handprints in wet cement in front of the old Crockett Theater, where I had spent so much time in my youth. (One old-timer said he wasn’t surprised to learn that my feet were in concrete but he never thought it would be for an occasion such as this.)

In an additional irony, it was my brother Ken, eight years
younger, who turned out to be the real actor. Well trained, he has appeared on stage in numerous professional productions. Most remarkable of all, after I told him I was going to be in the movies and his knowing that previously I had no interest or preparation, he was still speaking to me.

But anyway, Johnny, I’m terribly sorry about that movie star club thing.

D
URING MY EIGHTH-GRADE YEAR
, we moved to Nashville. Dad wanted to try his hand at selling cars for a dealership in the big city. We rented the smallest house in a nice neighborhood, close to a church Mom and Dad had selected. I enrolled at the Glendale Public School, one of the best in the area. The governor’s son and a bank president’s sons were in my class. I was undoubtedly the only kid in the eighth grade who didn’t have a suit or know how to dance. I most definitely did not make up for my deficiencies with academic achievement. They were studying a different kind of math. Of course, for me any kind of math would have been different—ever since I learned my multiplication tables, I sort of rested on my laurels—but out of embarrassment I struggled and tried harder. Dad said to me, “I told you, son, if you want any help from me you are going to have to stay in the seventh grade.” As usual, Dad’s humor contained an element of truth.

To top off the year, I couldn’t make the softball team and got turned down when I finally mustered up the courage to ask a girl out on what would have been my first date. Other than that, it was a great year. Actually, it didn’t work out too well for any of us. Dad, whose business had always depended on his personal relationships built over many years, was pretty much of a lost ball in the high weeds in the Nashville car market. And my little brother, Ken, came down with rheumatic fever. If all of this seems like the makings of a bad country song, it seemed that way to us, too. As for me, something clearly drastic had to be done. I was going to have to either really buckle down and shape up or leave town. Thankfully, we left town. We moved back to Lawrenceburg. Mom had to clean up two new houses within one year. But Lawrenceburg never looked so good.

Back in Lawrenceburg, what with my big-city experience and greater understanding of the ways of the world, I was upgraded to a more responsible position. I got to clean up old cars at Dad’s lot, which he’d moved up the road on Highway 43 North, toward Nashville. He took an old bus, put it on a concrete foundation, and made it into an office at the back of a 150-foot by 150-foot lot, which was big enough to hold twenty cars or so. This time, Dad went into partnership with his brother, Mitch, who was three years younger than Dad, with movie-star looks and dark wavy hair. Having inherited the Thompson gene of avoidance of salaried employment and guaranteed paychecks, he too chose to become a “car
man”—and was a good one. Quick with a joke and a laugh, he was what could euphemistically be called a “free spirit.” After his divorce he “ran pretty hard” for a few years, with more than a passing familiarity with women, drink, and automobile wrecks—sometimes all at once. More than once he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. One night the police shot through the windshield of his car, mistaking him for a handsome outlaw famous in Tennessee at the time. At least, that was Mitch’s story.

Some of my earliest memories are of Dad and Mitch sitting around after dinner laughing and talking about their exploits while growing up. Mitch’s personality, even as a kid, was aptly demonstrated by a story Dad used to love to tell. One day a young Mitch was teasing some old man who was about out of it. Dad chastised him: “Mitch, cut it out. That old man is almost ninety years old.” “I don’t care,” Mitch said, grinning. “I could whip him if he was a hundred.” Dad saved his hide more than once. He dearly loved Mitch even as their personal lives as adults took different paths. Mom liked Mitch, but needless to say she was not impressed by some of his habits and exploits, even though he eventually settled down. But one thing everybody agreed on: Mitchell Thompson paid his debts. In Lawrenceburg, if you paid your debts, folks would cut you some slack. Even your sister-in-law.

They had a third partner—a fellow by the name of Half Durrett, an old friend of the family. They named their place
Rebel Motors and had a grand opening with balloons and banners. When the local radio guy from WDXE came by to sell them some advertising time, Mitch had a great idea for a radio commercial: “Don’t Be a Son of a B——, Trade with Half, Fletch, and Mitch.” That provided laughs for several days before an ad that was a little more conventional was settled on.

I think that Tennessee in August was the time and place the phrase “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” was born. With my shirt off, and with sweat pouring off of me like water, I’d clean up the cars on the lot that had been bought or traded for. Then, after sweeping them out, I’d spray down the cars with a hose and wash them. Then I would go inside the “office,” stand in front of the air conditioner, and listen to a little country music and the deep and complex existential messages that the songs conveyed. There was the Everly Brothers’ drive-in-movie classic lyrics “Wake up, Little Susie, wake up … We fell asleep, our goose is cooked, our reputation is shot,” or Webb Pierce singing, “You say that you loved me, but I know it’s a lie, so tell me why, baby, why.” How could a fellow listen to that and not have a deeper understanding of life?

I can still remember the lyrics to dozens of those songs (learned while other kids wasted their time on things like algebra)—possibly because I heard them so often, but maybe because the theme was usually about hard living, drinking, and boy-girl stuff, none of which I had had any experience
with but which seemed to permeate the atmosphere of my little Southern town in the 1950s. Someone once said that the perfect country song would be something like this: “I lost my job and was drinking the day my mama got out of prison, ’cause my woman just left me when my car broke down after I had run over her best dog. Then my luck turned bad.”

I liked working at the car lot. The pay wasn’t much and the work was uninspiring, but you couldn’t beat the cultural side benefits.

It was a banner day for me when Half took in an old motorbike as part of a trade-in. The contraption looked like someone literally had taken an old bicycle and put a motor and rigging on it, but to me it gleamed like a new Harley-Davidson. I annoyed Half about it—very subtly, of course—until finally he just gave it to me. I was shocked; Half was going to be out $10 or $15, I thought. There was a little problem with my cycle: It had no brakes. I don’t mean that it had bad brakes or brakes in need of repair: It had
no
brakes.

I did not see this as a problem. Brakes were a luxury I saw no particular need for. I would simply learn to anticipate when I was going to need to slow down (a talent I could have used later in life). When I came to a traffic light, for instance, I figured I would let up on the gas, and when I slowed down enough, I’d just drag my feet until I stopped. Miraculously, with no license, no helmet, and obviously no clue, I rode that motorcycle without incident for about a
year. What got me off the bike wasn’t a run-in with the law or another inanimate object, like a wall; it was a few of my slightly older buddies and an occasional girl whizzing by me in their cars, laughing. It occurred to me that I was not being looked upon as especially cool. This, of course, could not be tolerated.

Although I had been around them all my life, I was never interested in cars the way many of my buddies were. I was never a gearhead; I always looked at them as something to get you someplace, without a lot of romance connected with it. Dad never taught me anything about them, and I never really asked. I figured later that he probably thought he was doing me a favor and he probably had other things on his mind. Observing him on the lot doing business was interesting. There was no fancy filing system inside that bus on the blocks of an office, no computerized inventory. Dad was able to keep track in his head of what he had “in” a car, and often that car was on the lot as the result of several other trades. He had to know the answer in order to calculate his profit when he priced the car for sale.

Amid the jokes and the occasional flurry of activity, life on the lot for me was mostly unrelenting monotony with long stretches of absolutely nothing to do. For all of his outgoing personality, Dad could be very quiet and self-contained. He would walk the lot or look out the window, lost in his own thoughts, seemingly almost sad. Dad was an interesting guy in a lot of ways. His handwriting was beautiful.
Also, after I was grown, Ma Thompson showed me a picture that Dad had drawn as a young boy. It was a drawing of cowboys sitting around a campfire, and it looked almost professional. I hadn’t known that he could draw. In addition, he had a beautiful bass voice and sang not only in church but in informal quartets at funerals. I sometimes wondered what he was thinking about, although it never occurred to me to ask because I knew it would never have occurred to him to answer. I assumed it was part of being an adult. My opinion hasn’t changed much about that. What I was witnessing, of course, was just a man making a living. Possibly hardwired to be a little melancholy, he was playing out an age-old process. Doing the only thing he knew, without the benefit of a formal education or assistance from family or government; without a pension plan or health insurance, knowing that his family depended on prospective customers deciding to pull off of Highway 43 onto his car lot and what kind of mood they were in. But he knew that he was better off than his parents had been and that almost everybody he knew was pretty much in the same boat. And at least he always had a chance at having a really good year, as he judged it. He had some of those good years, and I never heard him express any misgivings, doubts, or regrets about anything.

As for me, I didn’t like the feel of this glimpse into the world of earning a living. I am sure it probably showed in my work habits. I am just as sure that Dad would have been surprised to know that about forty years later, down the road on
Highway 43 within sight of his lot, there would be a sign that read “Welcome to Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, Home of Fred Thompson.”

But it’s funny how so often life comes full circle. In politics they say that sincerity is very important. Once you are able to fake that, the rest of it is easy. But even more important than sincerity is authenticity, and authenticity can’t be faked. Over thirty-five years after my car-lot days, I decided to run for the U.S. Senate. I had never run for public office before, and I knew that I would be going up against a fourteen-year veteran of the House of Representatives—a Rhodes scholar whose father had been governor of Tennessee. He also would have a good head start on me in fund-raising. Nevertheless, I had simply become fed up with standing on the sidelines complaining about the government, and I decided it was time to put up or shut up. Of course, being a political neophyte, it turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. For several months I was getting nowhere and lagging in the polls. My campaign had rented a fancy van with all the latest equipment and put me in the back of it in a suit and tie as we traveled from stop to stop. It wasn’t fun.