What Happened to Bill Allain

This story has some adult content and language.

A few weeks ago, I had a late supper with Brother Lewis at Bravo. Bravo is one of the swankiest restaurants in town, built on the site of what had been the swankiest restaurant in Mississippi. I can remember a friend lamenting that “some asshole bought Sundancer and wants to serve pizza.”

“I like pizza,” I said. Since then, the Bravo crowd has been a slightly more civilized version of the Tico’s crowd. The pizza’s good too.

Sitting outside, we began talking about what we always talk about. We talked about Mississippi. Tom doesn’t live here anymore, but his dad does. His dad is an actual legend. As often happens, Mississippi couldn’t hold fully half of the Lewis family. That happens here a lot. Sometimes, Mississippi can’t keep any of the next generation.

The young couple next to us had a three-year-old who kept visiting our table to try to decide whether she wanted to sit with me or not. Every time my conversation with Tom turned to somebody who used to be governor or somebody who used to be senator, this young couple’s ears would pick up, and they’d start paying more attention to these two old dudes than to their adventurous three-year-old. “Who the hell are those guys?” I get that a lot.

Toward the end of his career, Tony Curtis toyed with the idea of going full Errol Flynn and just not giving a fuck anymore. It’s said that the producers of “The Tonight Show” began considering blacklisting him because they never knew what he would say. The times when he did say what he wanted to were pretty legendary. His daughter seems to have inherited that trait. I love her for it.

It’s only been the last ten years since the press began even hinting at the stories surrounding Nancy Reagan, the former Nancy Davis. With Reagan running as the very first “family values” candidate, the press never whispered any of the stories about his wife, even though they were pretty well known, and even though she was older, there were plenty of people left alive who would verify them, including Curtis.

Dutch Reagan, for his part, had an almost boyish trust of people. You could see it in his testimony about Oliver North. If he had ever heard the stories about his wife, I doubt he would have believed them. It was she who led him from a strong Democrat to becoming a strong Republican. In the years ahead, she would navigate his life through Alzheimer’s.

Until the nineties, the press generally considered the sexual proclivities of politicians nigh-on untouchable. Seventeen years earlier, not one of them dared write anything about the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe, even though it was pretty obvious. When you could finally get your hands on a copy of “Hollywood Babylon”, Kenneth Anger had left Nancy Davis out of it.

William “Bill” Allain was the fifty-ninth Governor of Mississippi. He served in the years between William “Bill” Winter and Ray Mabus. It was a time of sinking Dixiecrats and a rising New Democrat and New Republican. In those days, the Governor of Mississippi couldn’t succeed themselves, so once you were elected, you had four years to do whatever you were gonna do. It was a relic of the 1890 Mississippi constitution, intended to limit the influence of the constitutionally guaranteed black vote. Like Winter before and Mabus after, Allain ran on the promise to deliver a new constitution. He didn’t.

Allain ran against Mike Sturdivant and Evelyn Gandy in the Democratic Primary and Leon Bramlett in the general election. Even though I was too young to matter, I was pulling for Gandy. I thought the world of Mike Sturdivant, and this might be the first time I’ve admitted to working against him.

In most of Mississippi, Republicans were known as idea men, and any number of them would have been remarkably good governors. Jackson Republicans were different. They were more about “Look how much money I have” than they were about “I have a better idea for Mississippi.” I’ve never published that sentence before. I could elaborate, but I won’t.

In the moonlight at Bravo, Brother Lewis invoked the name of Bill Allain. If there were ever anybody I could talk to about what I know with regards to Bill Allain, it’d be Tom Lewis, but with ears listening that I didn’t know, I decided it’d have to wait for another night.

Allain was light years ahead of Bramlet in early polls. There had never been a Republican Governor of Mississippi. There were men who believed the time had come. One of them recorded an interview with a black transvestite prostitute swearing they had a long relationship with Allain, who paid them for sex.

Bramlet ran as the family values candidate, even though he had three step-children from a previous marriage. Allain had never married. Bramlet was the primary financial backer and one of the founders of Lee Academy in Clarksdale. Some would say he poisoned the well-heeled Jackson Republicans against Gil Carmichael. Eventually, Carmichael decided that his own party was working against him.

I’m probably butchering the description of Allain’s accusor. Transvestite was the word used at the time. I never knew them, and I honestly don’t know what they would be called in today’s parlance. At first, the press refused to print the story. Three Jackson Republicans pushed it harder and pulled in whatever chips they had with the Clarion Ledger, and the story eventually ran.

Allain was far enough ahead that even accusations of race-mixing homosexuality couldn’t prevent his election as governor. A lot has been written about converting Mississippi from a yellow-dog Democrat State to a red-dog Republican state. Some men were honorable and honest about pushing their party agenda forward, and some men weren’t. I can’t say how much the attack on Bill Allain did to bring about the election of Mississippi’s first Republican Governor eight years later, but it clearly had an impact.

Stories about sexual dalliance almost never made it to the printed page, that is, with the exception of avowed or alleged homosexuals. One of the first Republican Congressmen from Mississippi was Jon Hinson, from Tylertown. Although it was covered up, Hinson was arrested for exposing himself to an undercover policeman at the Iwo Jima monument. In the days before it was legal or acceptable for gay men to meet in public, stories about clandestine “gay meeting places” were common. In Jackson, it was Smith Park downtown.

No one ever said that outing Bill Allain was retribution for the outing of Jon Hinson, but a lot of people thought it. Even though I was young, it didn’t escape my notice that nobody ever said anything when a married candidate cheated on his wife, which was very, very common. There were guys who had an entirely separate family in Jackson that they saw when the legislature was in session, and their family back home knew nothing about it, but stories about that were untouchable, both by the press and other candidates. That is, until Kirk Fordice left the very popular First Lady alone in the Governor’s Mansion, and Burt Case caught him getting the mail at his girlfriend’s house in Madison.

It’s probably true that I judge Kirk Fordice differently for cheating on his wife because I didn’t like him, and I adored Pat. That’s just something I’m gonna have to live with.

For a while, Jackson and the Jackson press seemed to feast on salacious stories about gay lovers and crime. Five years before the Allain scandal, the murder of Frank Haines was cover-to-cover in the Jackson Papers. Even though Haines had good relations with other writers in Jackson, none of the egregious details or charges against him brought out by the defense were kept out of the papers. Attorneys for Larry Bullock seemingly sought a lighter sentence for Bullock, who bludgeoned Haines to death, because they believed Haines was a “promiscuous homosexual” and had people testify to the same.

I don’t know how much of the defense of Bullock worked to lessen his sentence, but every word of it was printed in the Jackson Daily News. Bullock himself would be murdered in prison.

I wouldn’t say that I knew Bill Allain. I met him. After his governorship, Allain retired to a fairly inactive private practice and soon began losing his eyesight to glaucoma. In a strange twist of fate, there is an entire genre of blind Mississippi lawmakers. Bill Allain denied any allegations of homosexuality until his death. I won’t speculate on whether he was or was not, but I knew men of his generation who told me privately they were but could never publicly say they were. That there were men who could never tell the world what they were is something I consider one of many particular sins of my generation and the ones before it.

Bill Allain happened right in the middle of what I call the golden age of Mississippi politics when there were two very active and successful parties. There were good men and evil men on both sides, but the good men usually won out. We came very close to electing Mississippi’s first woman Governor.

Men in Jackson set out to ruin a man because they believed he was a race-mixer and a homosexual. That’s hard for me to digest, even though I knew them, certainly much better than I knew Bill Allain. Saying it was retribution for Hinson makes it a little better, but not much. I know of more gay Mississippi politicians than you can imagine, but I never mention it because they never mentioned it. I believe people are allowed privacy in their sexuality if they wish it. I do believe we’re less than a generation away from the first openly gay president, but we’ll have to see about that.

Bill Allain died in Jackson in 2013 of pneumonia. He was nearly totally blind, and much of Mississippi had forgotten he was ever governor. I can’t say that I’ve done him justice in this story, and I’ve left an awful lot out. I think he should be remembered, though. He was a king of the Golden Age.

** Correction: Allain had been married, but was divorced going into the race.