Who Let the Dogs In? (59 page)

It turned out that “officially designated a Communist front” meant some witness of indeterminate reliability had once mentioned the group in front of a congressional committee. It also turned out that John Henry Faulk did sure as a by-God have an intimate supper on the night of April 25, 1946, at the Astor Hotel with a known agent of the Soviet Union. And not just any agent—he dined with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations. The dinner celebrated the first anniversary of the United Nations, and several hundred other people also showed up. Eleanor Roosevelt and Harold Ickes, the former secretary of the interior, were co-chairmen of the event—presumably the “two non-Communists” mentioned in the AWARE bulletin—and Secretary of State Edward Stettinius was the main speaker. Johnny Faulk, fresh up from Texas, never did get to howdy or shake with the big Red, but his career was destroyed anyway.

CBS fired Faulk a few months after the AWARE bulletin came out. “They didn’t want to do it, and felt terrible about it,” Faulk says. He was told that his ratings were slipping and that Arthur Godfrey was being given his time slot on radio. His lawyer, Louis Nizer, later proved in the trial that Faulk’s ratings were going up at the time he was fired. But AWARE operated by putting pressure on advertisers, invoking the threat of a boycott by the American Legion if companies bought time on programs that employed suspected Reds. The system blacklisted, among others, an eight-year-old actress who was to have played Helen Keller in
The Miracle Worker.
AWARE itself was on retainer from the networks to sniff out subversives, so it had financial incentives to keep doing so.

Faulk filed a suit for libel against AWARE in 1956, but it didn’t come to trial for six years, until the spring of 1962. In the meantime, he was out of show business and down to small odd jobs like selling encyclopedias. In his book
The Jury Returns
Louis Nizer wrote of John Faulk’s case:

“One lone man had challenged the monstrously powerful forces of vigilantism cloaked in superpatriotism.

“One lone man with virtually no resources had dragged the defendants into the courts, and although outrageously outnumbered, had withstood starvation and disgrace, and summoned enough strength to battle them into submission.

“One lone man was so naïve in his profound patriotism that he did not conceive of himself as fighting a heroic battle, but simply as doing what any American would do—defy the bully, spit at his pretension, and preserve his faith in his country’s Constitution and principles.”

This is Nizer at his most magniloquent, a style Faulk adores to imitate. In sorry truth, though, the “lone man” wasn’t all that lone. He had the support of family and friends (from Edward R. Murrow to the beloved Texas historian, folklorist, and naturalist J. Frank Dobie), and Nizer was probably the finest trial lawyer in the country. In fact, Johnny Faulk had a wonderful time filing that lawsuit. “It required no courage to fight,” he says, “because I never doubted I would win. I never thought of doing anything else.”

ONE LEGACY
of his seven years on the blacklist is that Faulk almost never publicly criticizes the Soviet Union or communism. He has no use for communists: “I knew a number of ’em on the University of Texas campus back in the thirties, well-intentioned but kind of pitiful people. And off-putting, like all true believers, like anyone who thinks he has The Truth and has no questions, no doubts, just wants to proselytize.” But Faulk also believes that Americans hear so much anti-communist propaganda already there’s no point in adding another scintilla to it. It galls him that to this good day a person is still expected to profess anti-communism as a way of proving his loyalty. “He must manifest it, say it, swear it, and pledge it,” as Nicholas von Hoffman writes in his biography of Roy Cohn, “not once but . . . head covered, hand over heart, in the classroom, the ballpark, at the testimonial dinner.”

During preparation for the trial Nizer kept pushing Faulk for proof that he’d done something actively anti-communist. It was fine that he was such a patriot he’d enlisted in the merchant marine at the start of World War II, then managed to get a job overseas with the Red Cross, and finally finagled his way into the army despite being one-eyed. But what had he done
against
communists? After weeks of listening to Nizer press this issue, Faulk launched into a splendid extemporaneous tale of finding his dear old crippled grandmother one day reading the
Daily Worker.
No sooner had he said, “But Granny, that’s a COMMUNIST newspaper!” than the oil lamp in her tar-paper shack tumped over, setting the place ablaze. Faulk grabbed her wheelchair and started toward the porch and safety, but “as I wheeled her out, I looked down and saw that
Daily Worker
in her lap, realized she was just a COMMUNIST pawn, and was so filled with loathing I turned her chair and pushed the old lady back into the flames!” Nizer listened to this entire faradiddle without expression and then snapped, “We can’t use it.” Nizer had so little humor he introduced into evidence Faulk’s boyhood award for perfect attendance—seventy-two consecutive Sundays—at the Fred Allen Memorial Methodist Church in South Austin. Faulk is not much of a Methodist, but his mother sure was.

SOUTH AUSTIN
was then the city’s black neighborhood, and Johnny’s father was Judge John Henry Faulk Sr., a man of progressive principles, whose hero was Clarence Darrow. The elder Faulk had served as Eugene V. Debs’ state campaign manager in the days when socialists got a sight more votes than Republicans in Texas. As an attorney he had often represented poor black people, so he moved his family to a beautiful old home in South Austin called Green Pastures, now one of the city’s best restaurants, run by Johnny Faulk’s nephew Ken Kooch. Johnny grew up among blacks, and they were his childhood friends.

John Henry Faulk’s great natural gift is an almost freakish aural memory. One day last year, as he walked in South Austin, he began reminiscing about his childhood neighbors. One was an elderly black woman whose only child, a retarded son, had died years earlier. When she got to missing that child too bad she would call to him as though he were still alive, and the neighborhood children made fun of her for it. Suddenly, across a distance of sixty-five years or more, the voice of an old black woman came out of Faulk’s throat, a crackled call of love: “Come on, son. Come on, son. Mama’s waitin’.” The voice hung like a ghost along the dirt lane.

Because the Faulk family had progressive opinions on “colored people” for that time, John Henry did not recognize his own racism until he was at college. He and his mentor, Frank Dobie, so loathed Hitler that they studied his speeches, and it slowly dawned on them that racism could apply to blacks as well as to Jews. Talk about a couple of Texas boys in a quandary—now what to do? They consulted Faulk’s childhood chum Alan Lomax, who had not only gone off to prep school and Harvard but was also the son of John A. Lomax, who had started the folklore collection at the Smithsonian Institution. They felt Lomax was wise in the ways of the great world. He advised that among the intelligentsia the word was pronounced “Negro” rather than “Nigra,” and that this was the sure sign by which black people could tell you weren’t prejudiced against their kind. Johnny Faulk and Frank Dobie sat around solemnly practicing the word—“Kneee-grow, Kneee-grow”—to get it right. Faulk’s gift for mimicry made it easy for him, but poor Dobie, a full generation older and with a Texan accent, had to rehearse for ages.

In order to get a master’s degree in folklore, Faulk traveled around East Texas in the late thirties with a recorder taping what was then called “colored folklore.” In 1941, he was working for his doctorate and teaching at the university when he got a Rosenwald grant to collect more material. “Rural blacks in those days were so isolated. They were too poor to have electricity, so even the radio was unknown to them,” Faulk says now. “Many of their cultural traditions have since been so thoroughly wiped out not even many black people know about them.” These days Faulk rarely does black characters, but one still in his repertoire is the Reverend Tanner Franklin, who preaches a sermon on David and Goliath in the wondrous, ancient sing-preaching of Afro-Americans that is virtually gone. You can hear it now only on old records and in the voice of Johnny Faulk replicating the Reverend Franklin as he sings:

“Go down angel, consume the flood.

Snuff out the sun, turn de moon to blood.

Go down angel, close de door.

Time have been, shan’t be no more.”

FAULK’S YARNS
about Texas frequently have a bizarre flavor. Long before anyone had heard of Lenny Bruce, Johnny Faulk was doing black humor in the form of country stories. Strange deaths, weird funerals, matrons complacently rocking as people go mad around them. It’s possible that Faulk’s career never would have blossomed on television, because what storytellers need above all else is time. It is an art born of leisure, and a story well told can pause for any number of interesting sidetracks. From 1975 to 1981, Faulk was employed on
Hee Haw,
the corn-pone country version of
Laugh-In.
He was the resident cracker-barrel philosopher, commenting on politics in thirty-second skits. (“Why, the trouble with Jerry Ford is, he played center for so long he looks at the world backward and upside down.” HEE-HAW.) Faulk’s humor is not suited to one-liners. The show was pretty awful, but it was steady work, and Faulk delighted in it. In addition to his congenital optimism, he has that show-business habit of thinking everything’s coming up roses—whatever project he’s doing is fabulous, the director is wonderful, he’s met the loveliest people.

His
Hee Haw
fame has been useful to him at some odd points. Although he makes a living as an after-dinner speaker, ever since his trial Faulk has considered his real work educating Americans about the First Amendment, and to that end he donates his time and talent without stint. One day, in March 1979, he got a call from a lawyer representing the pornographer Larry Flynt. Flynt was on trial in Atlanta for obscenity, and his goose was pretty well cooked. Georgians have no use for Yankee pornographers, even those who have been shot, crippled, and brought to Jesus by President Carter’s sister. The judge had turned down almost every expert Flynt’s lawyers had tried to call—scholars from Harvard and Yale. Faulk remembers the attorneys implying they were down to the bottom of the barrel, and if Faulk would come over to Atlanta they’d pay him to testify as an authority on the First Amendment.

Faulk doesn’t take money for testifying about the First Amendment, but he agreed to stop by Atlanta on his way to a
Hee Haw
taping in Nashville. Thinking he should know what he was about to defend, he bought his first copy of Flynt’s
Hustler
magazine at the Houston airport. Slipped off the plain brown wrapper and like to had a stroke. “H’it was a picture of a nekkid lady with her finger stuck up herself and her tongue out like this . . .” Faulk arrived for a conference of the Flynt defense team that opened with the newly born-again defendant insisting they all form a circle, join hands, and pray. Faulk silently addressed the Lord with a strong sense of grievance over being there at all. The lawyers warned Faulk that security at the courthouse was tight, because of the earlier shooting; the Georgia lawmen hated the Flynt team and daily threw them up against the wall, searched them, emptied their briefcases on the ground, and verbally harassed them.

Next morning the defense team headed into the courthouse and met the first line of the law—Georgia State Troopers. “They wore shiny mirror silver sunglasses, big guns on one hip, big billy clubs on the other,” Faulk remembers, “and they were
mean
lookin’.” He braced himself for the search, but the troopers parted before him, whispering as they fell back, “H’it’s John Henry Faulk, from
Hee Haw
! H’it’s John Henry Faulk, from
Hee Haw
!” And the dreaded sheriff’s men, said to be even meaner than the troopers, they, too, turned out to be fans, and, instead of throwing Faulk up against the wall, asked for his autograph. Danged if the judge didn’t watch
Hee Haw,
and the jurors, who beamed at him. Even the prosecutor told the court he was proud to have Mr. Faulk of
Hee Haw
testify in his case.

Faulk started by talking about growing up in South Austin without indoor plumbing. His family had an outhouse and, being on the poor side, never could afford toilet paper, so his mama used to put the Sears, Roebuck catalog out there for that purpose. But being a good Methodist Sunday-school teacher, she always cut out the pages with the corset ads on them, lest the boys get excited in the outhouse. The judge and the jury were chuckling along at this story, and Faulk had already made points about changing community standards.

The prosecutor, no fool, leaped up, shoved a copy of
Hustler
under Faulk’s nose, and roared, “MR. FAULK! Would you have wanted your mother, the Methodist Sunday-school teacher, to have seen THIS?” Sure enough, Faulk reports, there was another nekkid lady with her finger stuck up herself and her tongue hangin’ out. “SHUT YOUR MOUTH, BOY!” he replied. “You want lightin’ to strike this courthouse? God will call it down at the very IDEA of my sainted mother seeing such a thing!” He continued in a far quieter vein. “Of course I would not have wanted my mother to see such a thing. Nor do I want my wife to see it, nor my son. That’s ugly. That’s so ugly. But let me tell you about why the Founding Fathers wrote what they did in our Constitution where it says, ‘Congress shall make no law . . .’ ” Faulk was eloquent in the cause, but notes, “Didn’t do him a damn bit of good. They found his ass good and guilty.”