It was an uneasy color combination, like an orange tie on a pink shirt. A chubby man, he had ginger hair, and tight skin that was the color of a sunburn coming on. As for the eight bodyguards he brought with him, they seemed in New York an absurd affectation didn’t he know we had cops? And who would bother to shoot him anyway It is hard to put yourself across as a buffoon and a potential martyr at the same time, and Huey did not convince us in either role. Then, talking in the shadow of the new Empire State Building, he would brag about the thirty-four-story Capitol he had built in Baton Rouge. He would boast of free schoolbooks, which we had had in New York since before he was born, and good roads, which ditto. It was the same with his few remarks intended to be serious. He has a different audience each time, like an old vaudeville comic, and Huey just hadn’t realized that when a gag gets national circulation it’s spoiled. In Louisiana, a stump speaker still tells the same joke at every stop on a five-speech afternoon. He was from a country that had not yet entered the era of mass communications. New York reporters couldn’t figure out how he expected to get space with the same gag every time he came to town, but now I think I understand.
It was a routine he had made nationally famous in 1930, when, as Governor of Louisiana, he so received the official call of the commander of a German cruiser visiting New Orleans, causing the Weimar Republic to make diplomatic representations. Both times, he received me in his pajamas, lying on top of his bed and scratching himself. The city desk showed what it thought of him by sending me instead of a regular political reporter the idea was that he might say something funny but certainly nothing important. During the early thirties, as a feature writer for a New York evening paper, I interviewed him twice-once at the brand-new Waldorf and once at the brand-new Hotel New Yorker. That, I suppose, is why for twenty-five years I underrated Huey Pierce Long. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has beer trucked up from Texas-stale and unprofitable.
They lose flavor with every hundred yards they get from the patch. Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly.
Photograph by Grey Villet / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty
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