Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [123]
Jimmy had received an invitation as well but he decided that he would stay home and watch it on television with his buddies down at the VFW hall. And he was glad he did because it turned out to be the TV event of the year. The entire Oatman gang showed up, including Chester, dressed in formalwear for the occasion, and they all sat on the platform behind Betty Raye. During the ceremony Minnie kept waving her big white handkerchief at everyone in the crowd and the whole time Hamm was being sworn in Chester was in camera range, shooting his eyebrows up and down at people in the front row. It was a live show and somehow the wrong button got pushed and the audience at home heard the director in the booth screaming through the headsets, “Get that #$%&*@! dummy out of there!”
Other than that it went fine.
On the morning of November 5, to her secret horror, Betty Raye had awakened and been told she was now married to the governor of the state of Missouri. She was not alone in her shock. A lot of other people had also been horrified to wake up and realize that some unknown ex–agriculture commissioner was now their new governor. But on the first day of his administration Hamm did an admirable and also a smart thing. His first phone call was to Peter Wheeler, to offer him a position in his administration. Which Wheeler graciously declined, as Hamm knew he would. Next he called Wendell Hewitt, another man he had defeated in the primary, and asked him if he would consider the office of state attorney general. Hewitt said yes. It was a good move. Even though Wendell Hewitt had been caught in a motel with a blonde, he was still a popular man with the people.
The second thing he did was to save the taxpayers a lot of money. As part of his “Get Rid of the Pests in the Pantry” program, he announced he was eliminating all the paid staff at the governor’s mansion and replacing all the cooks, maids, gardeners, and so on with inmates, trustees from the state prison, and from now on all the vegetables used at the state dinners would come from the garden he was putting in at the back of the mansion and all the eggs and milk from their own livestock.
And if anything could be said for Hamm, it was that he was loyal. His third order of business was to pay back all of those who had helped him. He brought in about twenty old friends and gave each of them an office. Everybody got something. Le Roy Oatman and the Missouri Plowboys were named “state musicians” and were hired to play for all the functions at the governor’s mansion during his administration. Rodney Tillman was appointed his press secretary and Seymour Gravel, another old army buddy down on his luck, was named public safety director and was to serve as his personal bodyguard. These appointments came as a slight surprise but, more important, everyone wondered just how Cecil Figgs would fit into the new administration. They were curious. Figgs was not a politician. What could he possibly want from Hamm?
A few weeks later they found out. A very unhappy Rodney came into Wendell’s office with the bad news. “He’s just appointed Cecil ‘chief of protocol of the state.’ ”
“What? There’s no such thing as chief of protocol for the state of Missouri.”
“There is now. He’s giving him the office across the hall.”
Wendell shook his head in disgust. “Jesus Christ . . . things are bad enough with all these bozos he’s brought in that don’t know what they’re doing. Now we’re going to have Cecil Figgs fluttering around here for the next four years.”
In Kansas City Earl Finley sat in a room in the back of Democratic headquarters with ten other worried men, chewing on his cigar, his pig eyes darting back and forth.
“Well, boys,” he said, “we now have a tractor salesman, an ex–gospel singer, a fairy mortician, and a drunk sitting up in the governor’s mansion. Now, just how in the hell are we going to get them out?”
The Real First Lady
PEOPLE MAY HAVE wondered why Cecil Figgs, who was so successful in the mortuary and floral business