Movie Palaces

how malcom white saved jackson and other stories

At the last Millsaps performing arts awards dinner, I saw that somebody named Cavicchi won an award. I asked my boy Sam if she belonged to Damien. He said, “Duh, how many Cavicchis are there in Mississippi?” I sought her out. Her hair gave her away.

“I love your dad and stepmom!”. I said after introducing myself. “They're, uh, out of town,” she said. I’m used to people looking at me like I'm crazy.

I did the same with Jack Sewell once. He's the most beautiful man ever to attend Millsaps College. (Sorry, David Coffee.)

“How much do you remember about your grandfather?”

“Not a lot. I was really little.”

“He was a legend!”

I wanted to tell him all the things Charles Sewell did, but he had places to go. His girlfriend is the niece of a woman who was something like the fifth most beautiful woman who ever went to Millsaps. No, I won't say who the other four were. If you know, you know. Maria.

Her aunt won all the awards, including the Founders Day Medal. She was a collector. Beauty and brains, if you gave her a gun, she'd be a James Bond villain, or companion. Her Grandfather came to Mississippi after the Iranian revolution. Everybody has a story. Some are more interesting than others.

I'm used to these young people looking at me like I'm nuts. I must seem like such a strange, broken thing. The truth is, if we've shared the same sky, crossed the same paths, drank the same (sometimes broken) waters, eaten from the same plates, heard the same music, loved the same people, had the same dreams, learned from the same masters, they become a part of me, and strange as it seems, I've become a part of them, even if we've never met.

Since I came back to the world, I've picked up again a practice I once did every year. I learned the name of every Millsaps freshman and a little about their story. Sometimes they're the child or grandchild of someone I love or loved. Sometimes they're the first in their family to go to college, although that's getting more rare. They're all powerful and beautiful beyond belief. They share my spirit.

Downtown Jackson once had several movie Palaces. I say “palaces,” I've seen the Palaces in Los Angeles and New York. Sid Grauman made one based on Chinese architecture and another on Egyptian architecture. Both cultures had a huge impact on the Art Deco movement. So did the Maya and the Aztec, but I guess he grew weary of building Palaces.

Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theater is where they premiered King Kong in 1933, with my beloved Fay Wray. One day, my phone rang.

“May I speak to Boyd Campbell?”

“This is he.” Old women have called me before. I'm kind to them. Often, they want to talk about my uncle or grandmother.

“Hello, Boyd, this is Fay Wray.”

I had to sit down. If you want to know the whole story, you'll have to read my other stories. She was remarkably kind. She loved Eudora Welty. We had a common friendship with Ray Harryhausen and his wife. Whatever happened to Fay Wray? She lived in Manhattan, in the shadow of the Empire State Building.

The Jackson movie Palaces were less ornate and visited by less famous people. Jackson had a problem. It was utterly segregated. Colored folks couldn't see movies there. Mexicans, nor Chinese, either. Jackson's multicultural past is richer than you can imagine, but it can be unpleasant.

Still, we had them. There was the Paramount and the Majestic. Down the street was the Pix, now the Capri. The last to be built, and the last to stop showing movies downtown, was The Lamar, oddly enough, built on Lamar Street. It had three stories, a balcony, the main floor, and the basement, which often flooded from the temperamental town creek. Next door was Hollywood Candy and Ice Cream. They made their own rock candy. It changed names a few times. You can make rock candy at home. All you need is a string and time.

The Neon marquee wasn't that ornate by Jackson's standards. Think of the Mayflower and the original animated fish design on The Elite. Neon fell out of favor. It was considered gaudy. Fascists. Neon is amazing. Inside, The Lamar was beautiful. Lush carpets, art deco everything, especially concessions and the ticket booth.

Marie Hull painted a seascape on the wall leading up to the balcony. I've been begging people for photos. No luck. Not yet. In a lot of places, the balcony was so that colored folks could see a movie. They put a fake balcony on the Capri, pretending it was the “colored only” entrance for the movie “The Help”. No such thing ever existed in Jackson. We were hardliners, especially this close to Capitol Street. The balcony was for teenagers to steal kisses in the dark.

By the time I was old enough to know anything, the Lamar had the contract to show Disney movies. Even though studios couldn't own movie theaters, this sort of arrangement was still possible.

When my brother Jimmy was four, they took him to see Toby Tyler at The Lamar. When it got to the scene where the chimp started shooting up the place, Jimmy got excited and broke free from my mother and my cousin Libby, screeching around the theatre. He became a chimpanzee.

I shouldn't make fun. When his father and I took Jack Cooke to see his first movie, “The Phantom Menace,” he was literally sitting between us when we suddenly noticed a nekkid child running in front of the screen. Children in my family are slippery. The Lamar had the last crying room in Jackson. When my mom took me to see the rerelease of “Dumbo,” my sister and Lee Kroeze watched the movie from there. Once one started crying, the other joined in. It was probably the pink elephants on parade. Luckily, I didn’t cry too.

The movie Palace for Jacksonians who descended from imported African slaves was The Alamo, built and owned by a man who had several white theatres. Legend has it. He had an unconventional scheme. He would start the same movie at the Alamo as one of his white-only theatres, but an hour later. He had an employee with a reliable car who would run the reels as they finished at the white theatre over to the Alamo to be projected there, then back before the next showing at the white theatre. If the movie rental companies knew, they didn't care. He had several theatres and a jewelry store.

Eventually, you couldn't sell movie tickets downtown anymore. Both the Lamar and the Alamo closed. Everybody wanted to see movies in the suburbs. Some swell new theatres opened. Several in West and south Jackson, the Deville in North East Jackson, with its giant screen where I saw Star Wars, Rocky, Logan's Run, Godzilla vs the Smog Monster, and the Janus films re-release of the 1933 King Kong.

Eventually, Meadow Brook Cinema Six opened and ran them all out of business. A guy from New Orleans rented the Capri and started showing the best of seventies porn chic. It was a scandal. He made money, though.

The Alamo was mothballed until some enterprising young men saw something in the disco movement. The most famous disco in America was Studio 54 in New York. It had been a movie theater too. The Lamar movie Palace was reopened as the Lamar Disco Palace. Jackson was very trendy.

A fella named Malcom White was making a name for himself in the live music business, not as a musician, but as a booking agent. He knew who was good and what would sell here. He became associated with the legendary second floor of the George Street Grocery. It was actually legendary.

Every sixteen-year-old girl in Jackson invested in a fake ID so they could get into the Lamar. It wasn't a huge stretch. The drinking age was eighteen. There was a girl at my school who was part Choctaw. Her exotic looks caught everyone's eye. She left a trail of broken hearts behind her. An early bloomer, she looked twenty-seven when she was fifteen. She lived at The Lamar.

One night, when she made her way back to her car, parked near the railroad (the Lamar was that popular), a young fella with a pistol jumped out demanding her purse. For his efforts, he won twenty dollars and a lipstick, a perfume, a fake ID, and two unopened tampons. Congratulations.

He made a mistake. Her father was in law enforcement. He soon found himself the guest of Sheriff Malcom McMillan at the Hinds County penal farm. Some people thought Sheriff McMillan was the devil, but only a few. Most people thought he was a saint and a Christian. I considered him a friend and a fellow trodder of the boards, a thespian.

The sheriff taught him to grow vegetables and talked to him about Jesus. The biggest secret in Mississippi was that the food at the penal farm was damn good, owing to the fact that they grew their own vegetables and got sausages from Hinds Junior College butchering department.

Years later, I saw the same woman at the gym at the downtown YMCA. She was dripping with jewelry, even though she was working out, courtesy of about five husbands. She asked me to teach her how to do squats.

“Honey. I’ve known you a long time. I know what you're doing.”

We laughed and had coffee to catch up on ten years of gossip. Her father died young. So did mine. It's tough in Mississippi. I wasn’t added to the trail of broken men left behind her.

Things happened, and the Lamar disco palace began to struggle. Leland Speed and some guys had an idea for that lot. Charles Sewell worked out the financing. When I go downtown, I know who built what and who worked out the deal. Sewell wasn't an investor; he was a deal maker, one of the best. He's responsible for his share of the Jackson skyline.

The Lamar guys turned their sights on the old Fruit Jobber warehouse on Commerce Street. Things, and things, and things happened, and the White brothers saved the day. Goodbye, new Lamar, hello Hal and Mals. Hal handled the food. Malcom brought in some of the best bands to ever play this part of Mississippi.

Inside was neon, salvaged from the Lamar Disco Palace. One of Frank Frascona’s boys talked some guys into sponsoring an Elvis float in the Rose Bowl Parade, and his botanically laced sunglasses hung from the ceiling. Frank's real name was something like Xavier, but that's too exotic for Mississippi, so he became Frank. He was one of the last wildcat oilmen, and one of the best. The oil companies drove them to Extinction. Shame that. I liked them.

At first, I was a regular; some of the most exciting people in Mississippi went to Hal and Mals. Young writers like Willie Morris could be seen there. Even miss Eudora. Eventually, the world started to weigh down on me. I quit going out for music and started going out for booze. I found places where I could drink alone. In the corner, in the dark.

I took a wife. She thought I'd make her rich. Once I figured that out, I lost any desire for anything related to making money. She never read a thing I wrote or attended any play I was involved in. My mother didn't either, but that was because I was too afraid to know what she might think to invite her. My wife was invited. She just didn't care to go.

Malcom invented the famous Mal’s St Patrick's Day parade. I was in the first one because Inez Birthfield told me to. I was renting some space downtown, but I was losing heart. A loveless marriage was probably my fate from the start.

Because I wasn't paying attention, I drove downtown on the day of the parade and parked. A man with Rankin County plates blocked me in and left a fully loaded poopy diaper on my hood. In those days, if you knew a cop, it wasn’t hard to find somebody’s information from their tag. I didn’t want to bother them, though, so I called Hal and Mals. A woman answered.

She listened to my utterly undeserved rant about how she had to be a better citizen, and this was a disgrace. Finally, I jumped the curb and went home. Later, I regretted it. I went to lunch and left her a big tip. I don’t know if she ever connected that it was the same crazy man who yelled at her on the phone, but I did.

I began to lose interest in good food and started eating most of my meals in my truck. At Sonic, I could eat all the corn dogs with unchristian amounts of mustard and tater tots I wanted, drink and smoke whatever I wanted, and listen to Puccini and the Golden Gate Quartet, as often as I wanted, without anyone saying “ew, what’s that?” I grew quite large. I didn’t care.

Soon, I found myself without a wife. So sad. Without a mother, a father, or a brother, but oddly not without a father-in-law. Unexpected kindness and quiet miracles kept me alive.

Morgan LaFay had to trick Merlin into entering the Crystal Cave. I needed no tricks. I entered willingly. I grew tired of the world. Jackson was dying. Whatever progress Mississippi once made, it was becoming divided again. The children of God grew wicked and wanton. Millsaps wasn’t without leadership, but was without vision. I needed to go away.

For ten years, I remained separate from the world, and attacked anybody I thought was doing evil on the internet. You see, my spirit was not dead. I can be evil if I think you’re hurting innocent people.

My sister helped me come back, although the prospect somewhat overwhelmed her. I blinked in the sunlight. So much had changed.

One day, I learned that one of my favorite theater kids had married a young chef I’d heard about. Malcom White said he was tired (but he sure doesn’t act like it), so they bought Hal and Mals. They’re doing remarkable things with it, like hosting the Millsaps Performing Arts award dinner.

The Mayflower has a sharp new chef, too. The Sun and Sand will soon have a remarkable chef and will be serving breakfast again. One of the sharpest women I know took over the Downtown Jackson Partners. Fondren and Belhaven are among the most exciting places in Mississippi. The Capri now shows perfectly clean movies, like The Fantastic Four. You can have pizza and beer with your movie. What kinda heaven is that?

You see, it’s really hard to kill the righteous. I’m grateful for that, and if you’ve read this, I’m grateful for you.