MARGUERITE. Miss Eula wants her money, Delray, or she wants the Sunnyside back. But she says you can have one more month to catch up.
DELRAY. The money has run out. There is no more money, and no prospects. I am defaulting. Tell her I accept foreclosure. I relinquish all claims.
MARGUERITE. Tell her what?
DELRAY. (Takes ring of keys from belt) Here. Give her these. Tell her the New Moon didn’t work out.
Marguerite goes out with keys. The hotel lights flicker and flare up. The television set resumes its murmur.
MRS. VETCH. The lights are back! Will you look! Miss Eula returns and the lights come on again! Don’t tell me that’s an accident! It’s the miracle of the lights at the Sunnyside Hotel!
MR. NIBLIS. (Takes off Avalon cap. Rolls another cigarette) I don’t know about that. A reprieve anyway.
MR. MINGO. Executive clemency, Mr. Niblis. And not to be scorned. A brief reprieve is all anybody ever had.
MRS. VETCH. It’s a little period of grace! That’s what we’ve been granted! Let us make the most of it!
MR. MINGO. Is the game still on, Delray?
DELRAY. (Glances up at television screen) Yes. Or another one.
MR. MINGO. Maybe you could find out the—
Delray unplugs the television set.
MR. MINGO. —the score.
FERN. (Places hat on Mr. Palfrey’s head) Ready? Don’t forget your flashlight now. Garland will be here any minute.
MR. PALFREY. You should have told him to stop off at NAPA and pick up a new solenoid.
LENORE. But what about the Special Value Package?
FERN. Are you still going on about that? After all you’ve heard here about Dr. Mole and his devilish machines that are sucking all the juices out of our retired people?
LENORE. I wasn’t talking to you.
FERN. Who have worked so hard all their lives?
LENORE. I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to Daddy. So what do I tell Boyce about Avalon, Daddy?
MR. PALFREY. Tell him I’d rather live in a crawdad hole, Lenore. Tell Boyce to mind his own business for a change and leave other people’s dogs alone. Come here, Tonya, and give Granddaddy some sugar.
Marguerite bursts through the doorway.
MARGUERITE. He’s up! Mr. Ramp is up! (She holds the front door open with one foot) Get ready! Here they come! No, wait! Miss Eula is tucking Mr. Ramp’s shirt-tail in! Now she’s taken his arm! She’s got all her keys in the other hand!
MRS. VETCH. How does she look, Marguerite? Is she radiant?
MARGUERITE. Little gray curls are hanging off her head! She’s wearing her galoshes! Her cheeks are rosy! Mr. Ramp’s face is red, too!
MR. MINGO. Already they’re beginning to look alike!
MRS. VETCH. Oh, I wish we had some—well, no, orange blossoms are out of the question! But something! Some pale pink roses for her! Or even a handful of daisies!
MARGUERITE. Here they come, everybody! Here they are! Mr. and Mrs. Ramp!
Marguerite begins to clap her hands. Mr. Niblis touches cigarette to his Avalon balloon and pops it. He and the others—except for Delray, who is holding his head—join Marguerite in ragged applause. Before Miss Eula and Mr. Ramp enter,
The curtain falls.
Epilogue
INTERVIEW
Gazette Project Interview with Charles Portis
The Gazette Project, undertaken by the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, collected interviews with staff members from the last fifty years of the Arkansas Gazette, which was founded in 1819 and whose assets were taken over by the rival Arkansas Democrat in 1991 after a bitter newspaper war. The Gazette, under the leadership of Harry Ashmore, won two Pulitzer Prizes in 1958 for its editorials on and news coverage of the integration crisis at Little Rock Central High School.
This interview was conducted in Little Rock by Roy Reed, a reporter who had worked with Portis at the Gazette and who went on to a career at the New York Times and as a journalism professor in Fayetteville. Reed, author of a biography of former Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, a collection of essays (Looking for Hogeye) and most recently a memoir titled Beware of Limbo Dancers, edited a book of the interviews, Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2009. This is the full transcript of the interview that was excerpted there.
ROY REED: All right. This is Charles Portis with Roy Reed, May 31, 2001. Just to back up what’s on this piece of paper here, we have your permission to record this interview and turn it over to the University, is that right?
CHARLES PORTIS: Yes, yes.
REED: What led you to go to work at the Gazette? What were you doing before?
PORTIS: I got out of college in May of 1958 and went to work for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, where I stayed for the rest of that year. But I really wanted to work for Harry Ashmore’s Gazette, so I came over to Little Rock one weekend and asked Mr. Nelson about a job. He gave me a job.
REED: What I’m doing is writing down all the names that are mentioned, so the transcriber can get them right.
PORTIS: Yes, A. R. Nelson, the managing editor. I think he used initials because his name was Arla. I was on the night police beat for a while and then became a general assignment reporter. This was January or February of 1959. The tail-end of all that desegregation business at Central High. The schools were still closed that year.
REED: In 1959?
PORTIS: Yes.
REED: What kind of stories did you cover on general assignment?
PORTIS: Well, a lot of Citizens Council meetings—Amis Guthridge, Jim Johnson. The pro-segregationist people. And meetings of the other side—Daisy Bates, Everett Tucker. But there were other things, as well. Life went on. State Fair stories. Murders, ice storms.
REED: Amis Guthridge. He represented that cast of characters?
PORTIS: To me, he did, yes. He was always available. A lot of people on that side refused to talk to the Gazette, but Amis didn’t mind. He would talk freely and at great length.
REED: Were you at my house at a party one night when Pat Owens got drunk and called Amis Guthridge on the phone?
PORTIS: Probably. Pat was a great one for that. At some point in the evening he would go for the telephone.
REED: How did they go? What kind of…?
PORTIS: Well, you know, put-ons. Pretending to be some earnest but slightly insane person with some questions to ask. Spinning it out. Pretending not to understand the meaning of simple words. The game being not to laugh and to keep the other party on the line as long as possible.
REED: Owens would enjoy putting on the persona of a revivalist preacher.
PORTIS: Yes, but we turned the tables on him once. Do you remember a guy on the copy desk named Don—something or other?
REED: Yes.
PORTIS: Out of California, I think. A heavy drinker. He slept on Pat’s couch a lot when he couldn’t remember where he lived. Anyway, he left, went back to California or Oregon. Then Jim Bailey and I wrote a letter to Pat, purporting to come from Don, saying he had married a woman with three or four kids, and they were making their way back across the country, in an old car, staying with friends along the way. That they were now in Beaumont, Texas, getting the car repaired, and were looking forward to a good long stay in Little Rock, at Pat’s house. We arranged to have the letter mailed in Beaumont. I think Paul Johnson knew someone there. We let Pat sweat it out for a week or so, after he got the letter. Waiting for Don.
REED: That guy, Don. I think I can see his face.
PORTIS: He squinted up at you through glasses. He would come sidling up to you in a spooky way and say, “What’s your read on De Gaulle?” A smart guy, good at his work, but a little strange, in some California way.
REED: Was he the model for the guy in Dog of the South?
PORTIS: Oh, no. I hadn’t thought of Don in years. Until you mentioned Pat.
REED: I had it in my mind that it was a particular copy editor.
> PORTIS: Oh, no.
REED: Well, I’ve been telling people for years that it was this Don what’s-his-name. Whatever became of Don?
PORTIS: Who knows. One of those copy desk drifters. They could always get work. The good ones. Like Deacon. He once showed me four W-2 slips—representing jobs at four different newspapers in one calendar year. What about Pat? Is he still in Montana?
REED: He’s still in Montana. He had that awful stroke years ago, and it kind of changed him.
PORTIS: The last I heard, he was writing some sex book. It sounded…I don’t know…
REED: Yes, I read it.
PORTIS: I never saw a copy.
REED: Did you ever hear him talk about his politics growing up in Montana? You know, he identified with all those old lefties.
PORTIS: Yes, the Wobblies, the IWW. I knew he came out of that school.
REED: Then he ended up at the Detroit Free Press. He was the labor reporter up there for a long time. Knew all those guys. Who were some of the other people in the Gazette newsroom at that time?
PORTIS: Well, you, of course, and Bill Lewis, Ken Parker, Charlie Allbright, Matilda Tuohey. I remember asking Matilda, when Pat came to work there, if she would like to meet him. She said no, not just yet. Maybe in three or four months, if he still happened to be there. Otherwise, the introduction would have been all for nothing, wasted, on a transient.
REED: What was it about Matilda? She had that tough air about her.
PORTIS: Yes, maybe from being the only female in the newsroom.
REED: Later on, I found out that she would befriend young reporters. Take them home with her and give them cookies and things.
PORTIS: I’ve heard that. I don’t think Pat got any cookies. I did know she was a devout Catholic, for all her gruff manner. And she was a great promoter of the Strunk and White writer’s manual, which was big at the time. E. B. White telling us to cut out all our blather.
REED: Frank Peters? You remember him?
PORTIS: Yes, the best educated person on the staff. Ashmore included. You went to Frank if you wanted to know who Plotinus was. But for broad worldly knowledge you went to Leland DuVall. Leland could explain to you in detail just how a certain banking swindle is worked. Or the workings of some intricate piece of farm machinery. You couldn’t stump him.
REED: What happened to Frank?
PORTIS: Well, he left the Gazette to become editor of the Rome Daily American, an English-language paper there. It seems to me that he succeeded Ray Moseley in that job.
REED: Yes, he did.
PORTIS: I was already in New York, and I remember seeing Frank off there on a west side pier. He was taking a ship to Europe. And later he was the music critic—is that right?—for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I believe he won a Pulitzer Prize for his work there.
REED: I think that’s right. You mentioned Bill Lewis. What do you remember about him?
PORTIS: Bill and Pat were the most productive reporters on the paper. They could cover anything—get the stuff and bring it in quickly, with a minimum of fuss and grumbling. Not that they were alike in any other way.
REED: A very fast writer.
PORTIS: Yes, and always solid stuff. Just the kind of reporter that editors are always looking for.
REED: Ken Parker—I guess he was state editor at that time.
PORTIS: Yes, he and Pat Carrithers ran the state desk. And they didn’t get along very well. I liked them both, but things were always a little tense over there. One morning, early, they had a big blow-up.
REED: I never knew about that.
PORTIS: Yes.
REED: I guess it was before I got to work. Charlie Allbright—did you take over the “Our Town” column from him?
PORTIS: Yes. Charlie went to work for—Winthrop Rockefeller, I think—and Mr. Nelson gave me the job. I thought I would do it well, but I could never—I don’t know—get into a stride. Clumsy, half-baked stuff. It was a grind. I had to do five of those things each week, plus a long Sunday piece—an expanded feature story with pictures. And when you find yourself trying to fill space, you’re in trouble.
REED: Do you remember any particular columns you did?
PORTIS: No. Bits and pieces. All that is mostly a blank. Well, I do remember a Sunday piece on a big cock-fighting meet in Garland County. Pat Carrithers and I drove down there. All these high-rollers in dusty Cadillacs with Texas and Louisiana plates. With their fighting chickens. Flashing their thick wads of cash.
REED: Let me remind you of one column. You had a friend, you said, whose hobby was collecting old Christmas cards, and that he’d appreciate it if you could mail them to him. Do you remember that?
PORTIS: [Laughs] No.
REED: Where did you live then?
PORTIS: Out on 21st or 22nd Street, off Main, near the old VA Hospital. We had to double up then, on what we were paid. There were four of us in a little furnished house—Jack Meriwether, me, Ronnie Farrar and a guy named—Hawkins, I think it was. The house of abandoned neckties. Jack was an assistant city manager, and Ronnie was a reporter for the Democrat. I don’t know what Hawkins did. I’m not sure we even knew who Hawkins was, but he slept there and paid his share of the rent. Our landlord was John Yancey, the much-decorated Marine, one of Colonel Carlson’s Raiders. He owned a liquor store nearby, on Roosevelt Road. We made a point of paying our rent on time. One look at Yancey and armed robbers fled the store. Or at least one did. I asked John about the holdup guy, and he said, “Well, his sporting blood turned to horse piss, that’s all.” Some previous tenant of that house had left a lot of very wide and garish neckties hanging in a closet. I like to think he had turned his back forever on 21st Street and his old life of wide ties. I wore one to work one day—a big orange tie with a horse’s head on it, with rhinestone eyes. Mr. Nelson came over and said, “I don’t know, Buddy, that tie—don’t you think—I mean, meeting the public—A tie like that…”
REED: But we did wear coats and ties.
PORTIS: Oh, yes, such as they were. There was something about that in the style book at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. Those little booklets, you know, telling you how things were done there—spelling quirks, that sort of thing. At the beginning of this one there was a general edict that went something like this: “The employees of The Commercial Appeal will dress and conduct themselves as ladies and gentlemen at all times.” Well, yes, a good policy, all very Southern, I approved, but it was hard to dress as a gentleman on $57 a week. Even then.
REED: Newsrooms look different now. I mean the people.
PORTIS: Yes, they’re pretty sad places. Quiet, lifeless. No big Underwood typewriters clacking away. No milling about, no chatting, no laughing, no smoking. That old loose, collegial air is long gone from the newsrooms. “A locker room air,” I suppose, would be the negative description. We wore coats and ties, and the reporters now wear jeans, and yet they’re the grim ones. This isn’t to say we were loose in our work.
REED: That’s exactly right. Something’s been lost.
PORTIS: But our coats and ties and trousers didn’t always match.
REED: Now that thing about the Christmas cards—I don’t mean to wear that out, but it seems to me you got more than one column out of it.
PORTIS: I probably milked everything.
REED: Poor Meriwether ended up getting hundreds of those cards in the mail. I ran into him a few months after that and asked how he felt about it. He said, “Indignant.” But I guess he was a good sport about it, and it was actually the kind of thing Meriwether would have done if he had been writing the column.
PORTIS: Yes, that sounds more like something in Meriwether’s line than mine. A bad influence.
REED: You mentioned Ray Moseley a while ago. What kind of guy was he?
PORTIS: Well, he was leaving the Gazette just as I came, so it was hello and goodbye. There had been some scrap in the office. Ray and someone came to blows.
REED: Tom Swint.
PORTIS: Yes. But I never
really knew Ray. I did run into him again somewhere—New York, maybe. I think he’s been with the Chicago Tribune for some time now.
REED: Yes, he’s their London guy. What about Bill Shelton? What do you remember about him?
PORTIS: Well, his integrity. Seeing to it that we got things right, in big matters and small. No slack. No excuses. He communicated with notes, you remember. He didn’t like talking. He would type out a note and put it in your mailbox—those little pigeon holes across from the city desk. Something he could have spoken to you in three or four seconds.
REED: Was he a teacher in regards to language and news reporting, that sort of thing?
PORTIS: Yes, but not in any systematic way, as I recall. He would deal with your errors as they came up. I used the word “afterwards” in a story once, and he lopped off the “s,” saying it was unnecessary. I still prefer the “s,” but he was usually right. I don’t remember any—program of instruction. It was assumed that you knew your job, more or less.
REED: I didn’t realize till twenty or thirty years later, but it was Bill Shelton who taught me sequence of tenses. Does that ring a bell with you?
PORTIS: No, I don’t remember getting into that.
REED: He was very strict on sequence of verb tenses.
PORTIS: “…to care for him who shall have borne the battle…” Lincoln’s nice use of the future perfect tense.
REED: Turns out there was an exact way to do it, and Shelton knew what it was. How long were you at the Gazette?
PORTIS: A little under two years.
REED: You mentioned something about notes from Shelton, and it reminded me of the bulletin board. Do you remember any of the notes that appeared there?
PORTIS: Yes, those fake announcements and directives. Well, I don’t remember any specific ones. Office humor. Some were pretty good.
REED: I think your brother Richard was behind some of that. When he came to the paper later.
PORTIS: I’m sure he was.
REED: Bob Douglas remembers Richard as being one of the best copy editors he had there.