He realized this was much more radical than anything he had ever attempted before; it would be a tough sell at any time, but especially in wartime. He understood that the project he was undertaking lacked the logistical and moral clarity of the old days of the civil rights movement, when the evils seemed so manifest, and when the nation seemed more easily swayed by his ferocious eloquence. Instead of asking for something that was already guaranteed in the Constitution, he was now asking the country to dig deep into its coffers to solve one of humanity's most ancient and intractable problems. "It didn't cost the nation32 one penny to integrate lunch counters," King said. "It didn't cost the nation one penny to guarantee the right to vote. But now, we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars--and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power."
Nonetheless, King insisted that the SCLC forge ahead with the campaign, this epic camp-in. "I'm on fire33 about this thing," he told his staff in Frogmore. "We've got to go for broke this time."
MOST OF KING'S aides were not "on fire" with the idea, however. They thought the Poor People's Campaign sounded quixotic from the start--and worse, that it reflected their leader's troubled state of mind.
By the fall of 1967, Martin Luther King had become stressed to the breaking point. At age thirty-eight, he had been doing civil rights work, nonstop, for twelve years. His life was not his own. His punishing schedule, his late nights and endless traveling--what his aides called his "War on Sleep"--had taken a toll. He was smoking and drinking too much, gaining weight, downing sleeping pills that seemed to have no effect. He received death threats almost daily. His marriage was crumbling. His criticism of the Vietnam War had lost him nearly all his key allies in Washington. Increasingly, he was viewed as a once-great leader past his prime.
Certainly he was no longer welcome at the White House. Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson had made history together--collaborating on the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965--but now Johnson wouldn't even talk to King. The president viewed him as a traitor, once calling him "that nigger preacher."
Though still widely revered, King had slipped in stature, even among his own people. That year, for the first time in a decade, King didn't make the Gallup Poll's "Ten Most Popular Americans" list. His base of support had been slowly eroding for several years. In 1965, when he showed up in Los Angeles during the Watts riots, black folks booed him on the streets. His vision of nonviolent protest was losing purchase in the ghettos. Many young people called him "Da Lawd" and dismissed him as an out-of-touch Southern preacher, square and behind the times. The black-power movement, led by young radicals like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, was in the ascendancy. King seemed in constant danger of being outflanked.
At times he thought about quitting the movement altogether. Why should he keep going? He'd done and suffered enough. Ever since 1955, when he reluctantly agreed to become the spokesman of the Montgomery bus boycott, history had seized him and wouldn't let go. His bravery was staggering. He'd been jailed eighteen times. His house had been fire-bombed. He'd been stabbed by a deranged black woman, punched in the face by a Nazi, and struck in the head with a rock. He'd marched all over the country, in the face of tear gas, police dogs, cattle prods, and water cannons. No one knew how many times he'd been burned in effigy. And everywhere he went, the FBI was on his tail, watching, listening.
Sometimes he dreamed about following a simpler life as a full-time pastor, or an academic, or an author. Other times he talked about taking a vow of poverty, giving up his few belongings, and spending a year abroad. At the very least, he knew he should go on a brief sabbatical,34 get away from the movement and collect his thoughts. "I'm tired of all this traveling35 I have to do," he told his church congregation in Atlanta. "I'm killing myself and killing my health. I'm tired now." Living under the daily threat of death, he said, "I feel discouraged36 every now and then and feel my work's in vain. But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again."
IN THE END, King couldn't extricate himself if he tried. The movement was, literally, his life. He had no choice but to take the struggle to its next logical phase.
As he saw it, the central issue had shifted from the purely racial to the economic. King likened the situation to a lifelong prisoner who is released from jail after the warden discovers that the man was falsely accused all along. "Go ahead, you're free now," the jailer says. But the prisoner has no job skills, no prospects, and the jailer doesn't think to give him money for the bus fare into town.
The Poor People's Campaign, then, would address the lengthened shadow of slavery, the economic shadow. King prevailed over his skeptical staff. The SCLC would devote the intervening months to organizing the great campaign.
King returned home to Atlanta buoyed by his decision at Frogmore. On December 4, he gave a press conference. "The Southern Christian Leadership Conference37 will lead waves of the nation's poor and disinherited to Washington next spring," he announced to a somewhat perplexed national media. "We don't know what will happen," he said. "They may try to run us out. They did it with the Bonus Marchers years ago, you remember."
King was the first to admit that his plan was risky. But not to act, he said, "represents moral irresponsibility.38 We were told when we went into Birmingham that Congress wouldn't move. We were told the same thing when we went to Selma. We have found throughout our experience that timid supplication for justice will not solve the problem. We have got to confront the power structure massively."
He was anxious to get started on what would be the most sweeping project of his career. "This," he said, "is a kind of last, desperate demand39 for the nation to respond to nonviolence."
3 THE MONTH OF THE IGUANA
ON AN EMPTY40 beach outside of Puerto Vallarta, brushed by the sibilance of Colima palms, Eric Galt aimed his camera at the young Mexican woman stretched across the sand. Fussing with his new Polaroid 220 Land camera, he tried to find the right plays of light, tried to frame a shot like the ones he'd seen in the pinup magazines.
It was a warm tropical day in November 1967. Through his viewfinder, Galt could see the waves tunneling in from the Pacific. At his back, the foothills climbed steeply toward a jungle of orchids and bromeliads, its canopy swarming with parrots.
The monsoon season had ended, and the atmosphere had taken on a new crispness, so that Galt could see across the Bahia de Banderas, the second-largest bay in North America, to the shaggy headlands of Punta de Mita far to the north. Along the great scallop of shoreline were scores of secret beaches like this one, some of them reachable only by boat, hidden places where tourists could linger all day and fry like wild Calibans in the sun.
The beach that Galt had found was so secluded that his model, a local girl named Manuela Medrano, had little cause to feel self-conscious; save for the ubiquitous fishing pangas bobbing in the distance, the photographer and his subject had the place all to themselves.
At one point, Galt told Manuela to climb behind the wheel of his Mustang, put her feet on the dashboard, and hike up her skirt. She giggled and smiled, but she was happy to oblige him, and he began to photograph her from different angles. Such exhibitionism was nothing out of the ordinary for her; though she was only twenty-three years old, Manuela had long worked in a brothel called the Casa Susana--Puerto Vallarta's largest--where she was considered one of the marquee attractions.
Galt played with the instant camera some more, coaching Manuela on her poses. He'd snap a shot, remove the exposed film, and watch the image resolve before his eyes.
A pale, nervous man in his late thirties with a lanky build, Galt knew nothing about the art or business of photography, but he was eager to learn. For some time, he'd been toying with the idea of getting into the porn industry, X-rated films as well as girlie magazines. It was one of several business schemes swimming in his head. He imagined that one day he would manage a stable of talent, with publishing connections, distribution
connections, connections to buy off the law. He was ambitious and willing to work hard. He knew that if he ever hoped to become a player, he would first have to master all his new equipment.
Through a mail-order catalog, he had recently bought a Kodak Super 841 movie camera, a Kodak Dual projector and splicing machine, a twenty-foot remote-control cable, and various accessories. He also looked into purchasing sound stripers, a sound projector, and an automatic cine printer to run off copies of the films he eventually hoped to make. He read Modern Photography magazine. He procured sex manuals and sex toys. He studied the smut magazines to learn what looks were selling and noted that publishers particularly liked to have pictures set in exotic foreign locales--like secluded beaches in the tropics.
But when Galt examined his Polaroids of Manuela, he was cross with himself. The images didn't grab him; they were flat and uninteresting. Perhaps he was beginning to fear he had no talent behind the camera. Manuela could see the frustration on his face. Visibly upset,42 he took the Polaroids and tore them all up.
ERIC STARVO GALT had ridden into Puerto Vallarta on Highway 200 three weeks earlier. On that afternoon--Thursday, October 19--he checked in to the Hotel Rio at the end of the cobblestoned main drag and just a block from the beach. The Rio was a modest but respectable enough place43 with white stucco walls, iron-lace balustrades, and a roof of Spanish tiles. For about four bucks a night, he secured a second-floor room that overlooked the river Cuale, where fishermen would string nets across the brackish water and fry their catch in the shade of the rubber trees that lined the musky banks.
The hotel management didn't know what to make of this mysterious new guest. Galt was a fidgety gringo who wore shades and mumbled when he spoke. His two-door Mustang hardtop was a 1966 model with mud-splattered whitewall tires and Alabama license plates. Galt told the front desk he was a "publisher's assistant,"44 but he told others around town that he was a writer on vacation. He kept a manual typewriter in his room, and he sometimes stayed up late at night pecking away at the keys while listening to a pocket transistor radio.
Galt found the scenery around Puerto Vallarta "idyllic"45 and soon grew so fond of the life there that he considered settling down permanently. Before coming to Puerto Vallarta, he had spent most of 1967 on the move--St. Louis, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, then Birmingham, Alabama. He wasted a few days in Acapulco but found that he hated the place--it was overdeveloped and touristy, he thought, and "everybody there wanted46 money, money, money." Puerto Vallarta, on the other hand, was still a ragged paradise--bathwater ocean, blood orange sunsets, wild lagoons prowled by crocodiles. Frigate birds and pelicans flapped in the skies. Humpback whales, having migrated here to breed in warm waters, could sometimes be seen spouting in the bay. The steep hillsides flickered with butterflies, and every morning a thousand roosters announced the day. The people around P.V. seemed poor but happy, living outside, eating outside, sleeping on rooftop pallets beneath the stars. Everything about the place was relaxed, especially the dress code, which succinctly boiled down to a popular local aphorism: "Men, wear pants. Women, look beautiful."
Not long after he arrived in Puerto Vallarta, Galt began a regular nocturnal routine of visiting the cathouses. There was one particularly cheap place where a customer could climb a ladder to a stack of cubicles, each occupied by a prostitute. He'd dive into one of these little matchboxes and have a quick-and-dirty for a few pesos, with the moans of the other lovemakers seeping through the paper-thin walls. It resulted in a kind of erotic feedback loop47: each noisy couple going at it, while simultaneously hearing all the other noisy couples, created an exquisite cacophony that Galt found titillating.
Later Galt began frequenting48 the slightly classier Casa Susana. In the downstairs receiving room, which also served as a bar and cantina, the whores sat on metal chairs lined along the dingy walls. Small translucent lizards clung to the ceiling and cheeped in the shadows between their mosquitoey meals. A grinning bartender with atrocious teeth kept the booze flowing while customers sat around tables or danced to Broadway tunes playing on a decrepit jukebox. Rustic, easygoing, a bit down-at-the-heels, Casa Susana was a community gathering place of sorts; lots of locals went there just for the spectacle, and it was not uncommon for squealing children, or even squealing pigs, to scamper through the downstairs rooms.
Something about Manuela Aguirre Medrano caught Galt's eye. She was slightly plump, but she was young, with a broad smile and dreamer's eyes the color of rich chocolate. She introduced herself as Irma--her professional name, it turned out, lifted from the French stage show Irma la Douce, which Billy Wilder had recently turned into a Hollywood film starring a chartreuse-stockinged young Shirley MacLaine as a popular Paris prostitute.
Galt took Manuela upstairs and had his way with her for the equivalent of about eight dollars. He returned a few nights later and requested her again. Gradually they struck up a friendship. Galt would sit with her through the night at a table in the Casa Susana cantina, drinking screwdrivers. Manuela spoke almost no English, and he almost no Spanish, so they whiled away the hours with caveman gestures and awkward smiles.
Sometimes they would go out together during the day and drive around Puerto Vallarta in his Mustang, fishtailing on the muddy roads. Having grown up in a town with only a few relics and sputtering jalopies, a town where most men drove only burros, Manuela had never seen such a fancy car, let alone ridden in one, and she felt like a queen as he squired her about the ciudad.
On several occasions they drove the twelve miles down to the beach at the little village of Mismaloya, where four years earlier John Huston had filmed The Night of the Iguana. Eric and Manuela liked to sit and drink cervezas under a palm tree in a secluded cove not far from the Iguana set, which was still largely intact. The great bay was spread before them, and in the foreground dolphins could often be seen playing around a chain of three cave-riddled rock islands, known as Los Arcos.
Huston's movie--"One man ... three women ... one night," went the desperate poster tagline--starred Richard Burton as a defrocked priest and Ava Gardner as the randy owner of a cheap seaside hotel not unlike the one where Galt was staying. During the filming, dozens of paparazzi descended on Puerto Vallarta to cover the combustible mix of personalities, including the playwright Tennessee Williams (on whose play the film was based), yet the world media were primarily interested in the torrid affair that Burton was then pursuing with Elizabeth Taylor. Although both were married to other people at the time, Burton invited Taylor down to Puerto Vallarta to be with him during the filming. He ensconced her in a house across the street from his and then built a pink "love bridge" to connect the two residences.
Their romance was considered such an international scandale that even Vatican officials weighed in, accusing Taylor of "erotic vagrancy." Iguana's box-office success, combined with its accompaniment of behind-the-scenes press, cemented Puerto Vallarta's reputation as a place of louche living and sultry intrigue--and got the first wave of gringos coming.
In 1966, the writer Ken Kesey, on the lam from the FBI after faking his own suicide following a series of drug busts, had come to hide out in Puerto Vallarta and its shaggy environs. Now, a year later, Eric Galt was part of the exodus. He'd first read about Puerto Vallarta in one of the many magazine articles that covered the making of Huston's movie. During his nearly monthlong stay in Mexico, he lived an expatriate life of sloth and debauchery quite true to the spirit of Huston's film. In between his drinks and his whoring, he was (or was pretending to be) an author, a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker; he was developing a kind of recombinant personality, sifting and sampling the lifestyles he'd read and heard about.
Like the doomed iguana in the story, Galt appeared to be a creature who'd come to the end of his rope. Manuela found him strange. He complained of headaches,49 stomach problems, and other maladies. He was introverted, distracted, perpetually tired. He rarely tipped50 and never laughed. He was paranoid of the cops, always looking over his shoulder. Un
der the seat of his car, he carried a loaded Liberty Chief .38 snub-nosed revolver, which he called his "equalizer."51 He claimed to have served twenty years in the U.S. Army. He made trips into the hills52 from time to time, apparently to buy marijuana.
For someone who hung out in grimy whorehouses, he was a surprisingly meticulous dresser and a person of tidy habits. He took lunch nearly every day at 3:00 p.m. at the same place, the Discotheque Cafe, where he always ordered the same thing--a hamburger and a Pepsi. Galt was keen on learning Spanish and toted an English-Spanish phrase book nearly everywhere he went. He was equally keen on learning the steps of local Mexican dances;53 though Manuela tried to teach him what she knew, his clumsy feet never got the hang of it.
Yet for all his oddities, Galt was nice to her, Manuela had to admit. They walked the Malecon together, soaking up the colorful street life--the Day of the Dead curios, the vendors selling mangoes on a stick, the weird beaded figurines of the peyote-loving Huichol Indians who lived back in the Sierra Madre. Several times, when he'd been drinking, he asked Manuela to marry him (she politely refused). He even went out and looked at a piece of property to buy--a local man proposed to barter his land for Galt's Mustang. "I seriously considered the trade,"54 Galt later said. "Mexico's an earthy place. I got to like Puerto Vallarta so much, I was thinking I could throw up a lean-to and retire."
ONE EVENING AT the Casa Susana, Manuela Medrano glimpsed another side of Eric Galt that gave her pause. He entered the cantina around nine that night--a Monday--and took a seat next to her at a table, as was their usual routine. They sat and drank and tried to listen to the jukebox, but a few tables over, six American revelers were making a racket--apparently, they'd just come in off a yacht. Two of them were white, and four were black.