There are people who will stand up with you, but how many will stand up for you?
—Peggy Wallace Kennedy
When Mark promised to love me and cherish me “’til death do us part,” I had no reason to doubt him, I just didn’t believe him. My lack of faith was not because of something someone told me, it was the way I always had felt about Daddy. I never knew which Daddy was on the other side of the knob when I knocked on the door. Would he love me less or love me more? “That’s just the way he is,” Mama would say.
That was not the way I wanted my life to be with Mark. I wanted to stand on solid ground rather than on shifting sand.
My life had been a matter of surviving. I was usually focused on the moment. There was no need to assume responsibility for my own life. Decisions had always been made for me, which in turn absolved me of the consequences of making bad decisions. And then came Mark. If the marriage didn’t work out, it would be my fault, which terrified me.
In Mark’s family, his voice had always mattered, and he assumed it had been the same for me. When he refused to make decisions for me out of what he saw as my obligation to claim myself, it enraged me over what I saw as his desire to see me fail. He wanted me to be independent not only for myself but for him as well, so that he could breathe and have a life of his own. My desire to have Mark all to myself—after living a life of having no one just for me—suffocated him, and soon there was a wall between us. At the same time, it seemed that I could not live without him and he could not live with me. And we were both so young.
In August 1974, we moved to Birmingham. Mark went to law school and worked part-time in a congressional field office. I taught special education in the Birmingham school system. Very few people in our apartment complex knew who we were, but then neither did we! It was a difficult time for both of us.
Following Mark’s law school graduation, we returned to Montgomery in the spring of 1977 and bought a small house not far from the Governor’s Mansion. While Mark was looking for a job, I sanded and painted the floors, washed our clothes in the basement of the mansion, and tried to avoid Cornelia. By that time, her relationship with my father had devolved.
The very thing I had found so appealing when I first met Mark—his disconnection from the life of politics and power—proved to be a significant hurdle in the well-connected community of old-line law firms in Alabama’s capitol. In 1977, a trial lawyer was a lawyer who tried cases in a courthouse; if there was a class action lawsuit it was either filed by the government or filed by someone who was suing the government, and most times the courthouse snack bar and grill was where cases got settled. For the most part, the practice of law in Montgomery was about civility and pedigree. Connections mattered, and having a Confederate general sitting on even a twig of a branch on the family tree was a mighty fine thing.
Mark was the son-in-law of a lame-duck governor who would be riding into the sunset in less than sixteen months, and the son of a church secretary and an insurance salesman from Greenville, Alabama. The cum laude ribbon attached to his law school diploma didn’t get him past the law firm lobby.
To make matters worse, there was a tawdry scandal brewing in the Governor’s Mansion that had become public. On September 7, the Washington Post published an article headlined MRS. WALLACE MOVES OUT OF THE MANSION: “A dark-haired mystery woman went around Montgomery at night, distributing photocopies of a divorce petition to newspapers, TV, and radio stations. One local TV reporter received a call from a woman who instructed him to go to a supermarket to the produce section and look beneath a pile of bell peppers. And there, among the peppers, was a petition for divorce.”
The dark-haired woman was Cornelia, and the masthead of the petition read “In the Matter of Cornelia Wallace v. George Corley Wallace.” It was going to be a bad run for the House of Wallace, and Montgomery law firms were taking sides.
In late September our phone rang. The call was for Mark. He was not at home. I took a message.
“You had a call from a Mary Owens,” I said as Mark walked into the house. “John DeCarlo wants to meet with you. I have his number.”
“Who is John DeCarlo?” We were both mystified.
It turned out that in February 1968, John DeCarlo, an attorney from Birmingham, had taken a leave of absence from the State Banking Department and joined Daddy’s 1968 presidential campaign. It was he and two other Wallace appointees who were tasked with getting the American Independent Party on the ballot in all fifty states. Though naysayers had called it “Mission Impossible,” DeCarlo and his team managed to organize thousands of volunteers who in turn collected 2,717,338 signatures. Later, during Daddy’s 1972 presidential race, DeCarlo worked as an organizer and served as Daddy’s attorney as well. On July 7, 1972, Daddy had appointed John DeCarlo to a seat on the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals.
Mark returned DeCarlo’s phone call the following morning. After a meeting several days later, Judge DeCarlo hired Mark as his staff attorney. DeCarlo and his secretary, Mary Owens, would play pivotal roles in Mark’s career and in our lives.
In late summer of 1976, Daddy discovered that Cornelia, with the aid of a Folsom relative, had wiretapped his bedside telephone. Concealed wires were run through the bedroom wall and connected to a recording system hidden in the bottom cabinet of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase on the other side of their bedroom wall. The telephone by his bed had become his lifeline, for it replaced the roadways to the corners of the state and everything in between.
Daddy was famous for calling people all hours of the night. There were times when the answering party would hang up after commenting something akin to “Yeah, and I am Bear Bryant.” His calls were about politics, business, encouragement for others, and most often for simple reassurances from friends and strangers who he had not been forgotten. But then there were the conversations with women, which in Cornelia’s opinion were less than appropriate.
In Cornelia’s mind, there were people who were plotting against her. She was the co-captain of the USS Alabama Ship of State, and more than just a few of the deck officers who needed to walk the plank. While her politically disconnected confidantes may have agreed with her view, the salty dogs of the USS Wallace did not. There would be no mutiny as long as they were sitting in the crow’s nest.
After directing the mansion secretary, Millie Gallagher, and the rest of the staff to leave the premises and sending the mansion servants to their living quarters on the grounds, Daddy’s personal security team began searching the second floor. After the recording device was removed, the search for the tapes themselves ultimately led them to a safe hidden away in the back of an upstairs closet. A stack of recordings was found inside. The tapes were removed, placed in a canvas bag, weighted down, and later that day thrown into the Alabama River.
A few days later, on September 8, 1976, Daddy held a news conference. “It was a purely domestic matter,” he said. “There was no politics involved at all. No one has been hurt, no one has been harmed.”
The following day, both he and Cornelia hosted a large reception for Rosalynn Carter at the mansion. It was a political event. Jimmy Carter was running for president at the time and Carter wanted Daddy’s endorsement. Although there was little conversation between them, they were at least in the same room.
“I guess Cornelia’s not going anywhere,” one of the attendees remarked to a friend.
“Well,” her friend replied, “if I did that to my husband, he would have thrown the cat and me out of the house. Let’s go hug the governor’s neck. He needs some tender loving care from somebody.”
It was difficult for me to understand how Daddy and Cornelia could get past what I saw as Cornelia’s betrayal. For the most part, Mark and I stayed away.
“Let the smoke clear,” Mark suggested.
“Why would Daddy want her to stay after all of this?”
“Maybe they didn’t get all of the tapes.” A year later, on September 6, 1977, the day after Labor Day, Mark and I drove through the mansion gates around three P.M. We were returning from a long weekend at the Beach Mansion. A small blue van was parked at the back door.
“There’s Cornelia,” Mark said as Cornelia walked past the van. “Do you want to say hello?”
“Of course,” I replied.
Cornelia never looked our way as she continued toward a waiting car just in front of us.
“I guess she didn’t see us,” I remarked as she was driven away. “We’ll catch her next time.”
There was no next time. That was the last time I saw Cornelia. She moved out of the mansion and out of our lives. Cornelia and Daddy were divorced four months later, on January 4, 1978. Thirty-one years later, Cornelia died at the age of sixty-nine.
In spite of all the drama, Cornelia and Mark and I had been close. She was with Daddy during the darkest period of his life. But she never really did understand how the Wallace network operated.
As Daddy’s wife and Alabama’s First Lady, Cornelia thought she should come first, over all the others. In hindsight, perhaps I should have warned her, though I doubt she would have listened. There was too much to lose for the Wallace insiders if Cornelia had the power of the last word. Daddy didn’t make the rules. He was too busy for that. He was the gate rather than the gatekeeper, and that made all the difference.