Sunday, September 8–Wednesday September 11, 1935
Sunday nights are “radio nights” in the Dickenses’ flat above Fannie’s hat shop on the Darling courthouse square. Around six, Charlie ties on an apron and makes something to eat, usually an easy soup-and-sandwich supper. Tonight it was grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken noodle soup out of a Campbell’s can, which he and Fannie ate at the little table in front of the kitchen window.
Fannie was full of the news from Warm Springs, where she had been visiting her son. Yes, she thought Jason was stronger; he wasn’t able to walk yet, but he maneuvered his little wheelchair so expertly that he zipped around with very little trouble. No, he wouldn’t be coming for a visit anytime soon. Warm Springs had its own educational program and his school was just about to start. But his rehabilitation supervisor thought he might come to Darling for a visit over the Thanksgiving holiday, so that was something to look forward to.
No, the president hadn’t been at Warm Springs while she was there, but Mrs. Roosevelt and her friend Lorena Hickok had stopped in for dinner one night. They were on a driving tour, visiting CCC camps in the Southeast. Fannie had had a pleasant conversation with both of them and had learned that Mrs. Roosevelt—at the urging of Miss Hickok, an experienced journalist—was planning to start a daily newspaper column. She was calling it “My Day,” which would be syndicated in dozens of newspapers.
“She says it will be a women’s column,” Fannie told Charlie, “but she’ll also write about politics and current affairs.”
“A daily column?” Charlie raised both eyebrows. “That’s an enormous undertaking, on top of everything else she does. My guess: she won’t last the year.”
“I don’t agree,” Fannie said firmly. “She’s committed. And she has plenty of grit. She’ll keep it going, and Lorena will help. I’ve invited both of them to Darling,” she went on. “They can visit Camp Briarwood and Mrs. Roosevelt can give a talk here in Darling on her pet topic, whatever it is at the time.” She sniffed. “And don’t roll your eyes at me, Charles Dickens. If Bessie Bloodworth and Earlynne Biddle can invite Huey Long, I can invite Mrs. Roosevelt. And Miss Hickok, too.”
“Oh, I agree, I agree,” Charlie said hastily. “Far be it from me to tell Lorena Hickok or the First Lady where to go.” He had never met Eleanor Roosevelt, but he knew Lorena from his time on the East Coast, before FDR’s election as governor of New York. She was a fierce journalist with an eye for a good story. She didn’t suffer fools gladly. And she never took no for an answer.*
After supper, the two of them took glasses of wine into the living room, where Charlie turned on the RCA console radio—a Christmas present to both of them last year, bought with some of the extra money Fannie had earned from her latest Lilly Daché collection. Outside, the shadows lengthened. The window was open wide and a soft breeze blew through the screen, stirring the sheer curtains. Fannie was tired from her long drive, so she kicked off her shoes and pulled her feet up under herself on the sofa with her needlework as Charlie settled in his favorite chair with Jonah’s Gourd Vine, a first novel by Zora Neal Hurston, a black folklorist and anthropologist. There had been talk of Miss Hurston making a trip through the South and Charlie wanted a look at her work. He enjoyed what he was reading while the radio played softly in the background.
First in tonight’s programming was the Eddie Cantor Show, sponsored by Pebeco Toothpaste on CBS—a musical variety show with comedy skits, ending with Eddie crooning his closing theme: “I love to spend / Each Sunday with you / As friend to friend / I’m sorry it’s through . . .”
After that came the Manhattan Merry-Go-Round on NBC, which was built on the concept of a wining-and-dining tour of New York nightclubs. The show was filled with currently popular music and a few comic acts by people like Bert Lahr and Jimmy Durante. It featured a catchy theme song: “We’re serving music, songs and laughter / Your happy heart will follow after.”
The Merry-Go-Round was followed by Fannie’s favorite, The Ford Sunday Evening Hour on CBS. The program featured a musical mix of popular ballads, classical favorites, hymns, and even the occasional show tune, played by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra before a live audience in the very grand Orchestra Hall. The Ford commercials were low-key, and it was said that Henry Ford himself chose the music.
For Fannie and Charlie, the evening ended with Walter Winchell’s Jergens Journal, on the Blue Network, ABC. Winchell was a syndicated journalist famous for turning the news into entertainment. His news and commentary program always began with the loud, rapid-fire tapping of a telegraph key, followed by Winchell, in his harsh, staccato voice: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea, let’s go to press!”
Charlie liked Winchell, so he dropped Jonah onto the floor beside his chair and leaned back to listen. Tonight, the journalist began with a colorful description of the speed trials at Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where Malcolm Campbell had just become the first man to drive an automobile over three hundred miles per hour. Then he swung into a more somber story about the four hundred or so veterans who had been lost in the Labor Day hurricane that had devastated the Florida Keys—and about Ernest Hemingway sailing his boat, Pilar, in a futile rescue attempt. Then he was about to go lighter, with a story about Saturday’s Miss America contest, where the new talent show requirement had—
But he broke off in mid-sentence, was silent for a couple of beats, and then fired up his telegraph key again. “FLASH!” he cried excitedly. “FLASH, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Senator Huey P. Long has just been shot by a would-be assassin in the Louisiana state capitol building.”
There was a brief pause, as if Winchell himself didn’t quite believe what he was saying. Then, breathlessly, “I repeat, Mr. and Mrs. North America! Senator Huey Long has been shot by a man in a white suit, just outside the governor’s office in the state capitol building in Baton Rouge! Details are still coming in. You’ve heard it from Walter Winchell first. The Kingfish has been shot!”
• • •
The Kingfish has been shot!
As Sunday turned into Monday, the news swept through Darling. People glued their ears to their radios and listened, spellbound, as the shocking details began to emerge. Long wasn’t dead yet, but he was gravely wounded and it was doubtful that he would survive. He had been shot by Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, a young eye, ear, nose, and throat physician, the son of another physician and the son-in-law of a prominent judge whom the senator had personally targeted for his political views. It was whispered that Long was attempting to discredit his opponent by spreading the rumor that the judge’s family—one of the oldest and most influential in St. Landry Parish—had “coffee blood.” Among the bills Long was attempting to push through was one intended to gerrymander the judge’s district in a way that would make his reelection unlikely.
On both Saturday and Sunday evenings, the senator had gone to the capitol building in Baton Rouge to make sure that the legislature, which was in special session, was going to pass the bills he favored. He took his bodyguards with him, one of whom created quite a ruckus by slapping an elderly congressman.
Dr. Weiss, whose wife Yvonne had recently given birth to a son, was by all accounts a mild-mannered professional man with a strong sense of obligation to his family, his patients, and his city. He had taken Yvonne and the baby to early mass at St. Joseph’s on Sunday morning, then to his in-laws, where they spent the rest of the day. That evening, after the baby was in bed, he took a shower and put on the white suit he’d worn to mass, telling his wife that he “had to go out on a sick call.”
Instead, he drove his Buick to the capitol, parked it in the drive in front of the building, and walked inside. He encountered Senator Long in the hallway outside the governor’s office. It wasn’t clear what happened next, but in the space of a few seconds, the senator had been wounded and Dr. Weiss had died in a hail of bullets fired by Long’s bodyguards. A little later, the doctor’s .32 pistol was found on the floor nearby. Still later, it was reported that there were sixty-one bullet holes in his body, which meant that he was shot at least thirty times.
The senator had fled to his waiting automobile and was driven to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital. At first, his injuries did not appear serious, but his condition worsened by morning. His doctors informed his family and political associates that the surgery performed on him after the shooting had failed to stop his internal hemorrhaging, and that he could not survive additional surgery.
There was nothing more to be done. At 4:06 a.m. on Tuesday, September 10, thirty hours after the shooting, the Kingfish was dead.
When Charlie heard, he just shook his head. “Well,” he said, “at least FDR won’t have to send him to Timbuktu.”
And then he wondered.
• • •
The Kingfish has been shot!
All day Tuesday, all over Darling, people were talking about what had happened over in Baton Rouge. They paused to chat at the post office, stopped one another on the street to ask about the latest news, huddled together in little groups at the courthouse, and dropped in at the Dispatch to share their conclusions with the editor.
All of them had the same thing to say: that they had seen those bodyguards in action out at the baseball field. It was no surprise that several of the senator’s defenders had whipped out their guns and killed the man who shot their boss. In fact, it was argued, they might even have been compelled to that action by what happened right here in Darling just four days before the fatal shooting.
And as far as blame was concerned, yes, the guards had taken the law into their own hands, which they probably shouldn’t have done. By law, the attacker should have been cuffed and hustled off to jail. But no jury in the state of Louisiana would have acquitted him, no matter how family-and-civic-minded his defense lawyer tried to make him appear. He would have been found guilty. He would have faced the hangman. Better that they shot him, Darling folks said. Saved Louisiana the expense and the Weiss family the agony of a trial. Now everybody could get on with their lives.
On the order of Alabama’s Governor Graves, both the US and state flags were lowered to half-staff through the weekend. All of the members of the Darling Share Our Wealth Club, inconsolable, chipped in whatever they could afford and sent a large wreath of calla lilies to Baton Rouge. Huey was a martyr and for the next week, black was the color of the day.
But to many in Louisiana (and to some in Darling), Carl Austin Weiss was a hero, not a murderer. The good doctor had stood up for the rights of the people against a dangerous man who was undermining the principles of democracy. He had the courage to do what many others wanted to do but were too afraid to try.
On Tuesday, Dr. Weiss’ funeral was conducted at St. Joseph’s by Monsignor Gassler, who had said early mass at the same church just the Sunday before. Among the hundreds of mourners were the dean emeritus of the Louisiana State University law school, the district attorney for East Baton Rouge Parish, Congressman J. Y. Sanders Jr., every member of the Baton Rouge Kiwanis Club, and all of the doctor’s patients and the family’s many, many friends. It was, one observer remarked, “the largest funeral of an assassin in American history.”
On Thursday, Huey Long was buried on the capitol grounds, where an estimated 175,000 people crowded onto the lawns, perched in live oak trees, or stood on nearby roofs. They watched silently as the heavy bronze casket was carried down forty-eight steps into a sunken garden. There, Long would lie inside a copper vault inside a concrete crypt.
The LSU band accompanied the coffin, marching in slow-step and playing “Every Man a King”—as a dirge.
• • •
It was on Thursday, about the time the senator was going into that concrete-and-copper crypt, that Virgil McCone called, long distance from Baton Rouge. His voice was high-pitched, thin and reedy. He sounded as if he was barely holding himself together. But he wouldn’t say what was the matter.
“Gotta see you, Charlie,” was all he would say. “I’ll be there quick as I can.”
He must have driven like the very devil, because he was walking into the Dispatch office just as Charlie’s little team was calling it quits for the day. He hadn’t shaved recently, and he looked like he’d been sleeping in his clothes. Charlie took one look at him, opened the bottom drawer of his desk, and pulled out a bottle of Bodeen Pyle’s white lightning. Charlie no longer drank, but he kept it for emergencies.
“Here,” he said, pushing the bottle across the desk. “You look like you need this.”
“You bet I do,” Virgil said. “Thanks.” He closed his eyes and took a healthy swig, then another. He handed the bottle back. “Better take it, before I drown myself.”
“Well, maybe you should,” Charlie said. “Unless you gotta be sober for the next leg of your trip.”
“That’s what I came to talk to you about,” Virgil said.
He reached into the side pocket of his wrinkled suit jacket and held up a fat envelope. “There’s three thousand dollars here, cash. I want to buy into your newspaper, as a partner. You can use the money to get that Campbell Country press you were talking about last week or whatever else you want. Me, all I want is to stay here in Darling and write and do good newspaper work. Maybe get better acquainted with the lady who makes the meatloaf.” He slapped the envelope onto the desk. “Right here, where nobody knows who I am.”
Charlie stared at him. “Hold on a minute, Virgil. I’m not saying no to a partnership, but what about that book you’re working on? The book that starts with Huey Long’s impeachment. Now that he’s dead, it’s going to be a hot property. You need to get it finished and find yourself an agent and—”
Virgil shook his head violently. “Not gonna happen. The book is as dead as Huey. And I can’t do anything under my name. So far as the rest of the world is concerned, I’m somebody else. Haven’t picked out a new name yet, but I will. Soon as I can pull myself together.”
He pushed the envelope across the desk to Charlie. “Take it. I wrote up a simple partnership agreement. It’s in there, with the money. If you want to negotiate on terms, that’s fine. Or if you want your lawyer to draw up the paper, that’s fine, too. I’ll be easy. I just want to get it done.”
Charlie looked down at the envelope. Three thousand dollars. It was close to the amount of the loan he’d hoped to get from Alvin Duffy. Together with Fannie’s investment, it would enable him to turn the Dispatch into the finest little newspaper in Alabama, maybe even in all of the South. And Virgil would bring exactly the kind of journalistic talent he needed to make this happen. But first—
“What the hell is going on here, Virgil? I gotta know what you’re running from.”
Virgil looked over his shoulder. “You don’t want to know.” His voice was taut as a bowstring. “It’s dangerous. It nearly got me killed, I tell you. It could get you killed, too.”
“Virgil,” Charlie said patiently, “I remember the two of us digging into a foxhole in France. That was where we could’ve been killed.” He pushed the envelope back in Virgil’s direction. “Now you tell me what’s going on with you, or I’m booting you and your money out the damn door. You got that, friend?”
It took a few more moments and a few more strong words, but Virgil finally got it. And then, stopping and starting and refueling with a few more pulls at Bodeen’s bottle, he managed to get the story out.
He had been with the rest of the press pool at the Louisiana state capitol on Sunday evening. Since it was the weekend and Huey wasn’t expected to make any news, the group was small, only three or four. Most of the evening, they’d hung out in the gallery of the House chambers, watching Huey twist arms and talk tough down on the floor, telling people what he was going to do to them if they didn’t vote his way. Finally, close to nine o’clock, the senator left, along with a couple of staff and four or five of his bodyguards. The reporters and a camera man trooped wearily behind, Virgil, as it happened, in the front of the pack.
Huey stopped at the governor’s office, which took only a few minutes. He came out and started down the hall, knotted into a tight little group with his bodyguards and a couple of state troopers close around, followed by the reporters. The hall was about twelve feet wide, with marble walls and a marble floor. The group was moving along at a pretty fast clip, with Virgil close behind Joe Messina, who was behind and to the right of Long.
After a dozen paces, the group came face to face with a slender, thin-shouldered man in a white suit. He was wearing round gold-rimmed glasses that gave him the look of an earnest school teacher. The man stepped up to Long and said something to him. Virgil was behind Joe Messina, one of the bodyguards, who was immediately behind and to the right of Long. He couldn’t hear what the man was saying, although he didn’t sound angry.
But all of a sudden, Long put a hand to the guy’s chest to shove him out of the way. As he did, Virgil saw Messina pull his sidearm out of its holster. It hung up, and when he jerked it free, it cocked and fired and hit Long in the back, in the kidney area.
When Messina’s gun went off, the other bodyguards immediately yanked out their guns and began firing at the man in the white suit. Virgil said there were some thirty or forty rounds fired, with bullets whizzing around fast, ricocheting off the walls and the floor. One of them hit Long in the groin.
“Wait a minute,” Charlie said. “I saw the wires. They were reporting that the doctors said he was shot once, in the upper right side, with the bullet exiting in the back.”
“Yeah. That’s what they said, all right,” Virgil replied bleakly. “But it’s not true. That wasn’t an exit wound in the back, it was an entrance wound. He was shot in the back first, then the front.”
And what was more, the man in the white suit was unarmed, Virgil said. When that uncomfortable fact was discovered, one of the state troopers supplied a throw-down weapon, a .25 caliber handgun he had picked up when he helped raid a gambling parlor that afternoon. That gun was replaced with Weiss’ own .32 caliber pistol, which the troopers took from the glove compartment of his automobile, found parked outside the capitol building after the shooting.
“Took from Weiss’ automobile?” Charlie asked, frowning. “How did you learn that?”
“From one of the troopers,” Virgil said. “A guy I’ve known for a while—a poker buddy. He didn’t feel right about what was being done. Blaming Dr. Weiss, I mean, for an accident caused by one of Long’s own bodyguards. He’s the one who told me I’d better make myself scarce.”
“But I don’t—”
“Of course you do,” Virgil said impatiently. “What happened after the shootings was a law-enforcement conspiracy to cover up the accidental death of the senator and the killing of Dr. Weiss. A conspiracy. And anybody who tries to tell the true story is going to be silenced.” He gave Charlie a hard look. “You got that, Charlie?”
“I got it,” Charlie said slowly. “It doesn’t sound . . . safe. To report the true story, I mean. At least, not now.” He paused. “But what about later? Don’t you think it could be told—later?”
“Maybe,” Virgil said. “But that’s not the only story, you know. There’s plenty of other stories out there, waiting to be told.” He nodded at the envelope. “Have I got a job? You gonna take that or not?”
“I’m taking it,” Charlie said, picking up the envelope. “You and I are going to build us a real newspaper, Virgil. And maybe someday you’ll feel like writing the true story about the way the Kingfish died.”
* You can read about Lorena Hickok and Mrs. Roosevelt in Loving Eleanor, Susan Wittig Albert’s standalone biographical novel.