- [Male Narrator] Stay tuned to Mississippi Educational Television for a  Southern   Expressions special,   An Evening With Willie Morris.

This  Southern Expressions   Special was made possible in part by a grant from Northpark Mall, providing options for shopping in Central Mississippi.

(pleasant string music) (gentle music) - Hi everybody, I'm Gene Edwards.

It is a pretty daunting menu, the list of conversation possibilities with Willie Morris: Yazoo to New York days,  My Dog Skip to the darkest hours of Mississippi's racist past, American Legion baseball to Rhodes Scholar, Ole Miss to the Big Cave.

He is the author of two of the finest autobiographies of American life ever written and the biographer of one of the world's finest dogs.

He was the daring and the uncompromising editor of Harper's and his courage and imagination changed forever journalism in this country.

For those of us who try to tell the stories of other people's lives and fortunes, it is all about his integrity.

In the preface to  North Toward   Home, Edwin Yoder wrote, "The layers of his life are "like the rings of an ancient tree trunk.

"They tell a story of growth "And it is a growth of integrity.

"The integrity of seeing life steadily "and seeing it whole.

"And yet, he can still dance the Memphis Shuffle "in the Delta moonlight."

And that is what we have come to do tonight.

Ladies and gentlemen, Willie Morris.

(applauding) - How are you?

- Glad to have you here.

There's a microphone right here.

If you'll just clip it on.

Say hello to these people.

(applauding) - Right here?

- Let's put it on your tie there.

- Okay, this tie cost me 100 dollars.

- That is a very nice tie.

- Part of my donation to Mississippi ETV.

(laughs) - That and you get an umbrella.

- That's right.

(laughs) Which someone on Bourbon Street in New Orleans the other day, during a rainstorm, JoAnne and I contributed to your drive this time and this guy offered me $500 for that Mississippi ETV umbrella and I held out for a thousand.

(laughing) - There was a time in your life when $500 would've seemed pretty good.

- Would've lasted forever.

- If it hadn't been writing, you might've been a disc jockey.

- Well, I started out in Yazoo City as a teenager and, may I give my call letters?

- [Gene] Would you please?

- 'Cause this show's gonna go out all through the South.

I'd say "This is radio station WAZF, 1230 on your dial, "gateway to the Delta, "with studios high atop "the Taylor Roberts Feed and Seed Store."

We were on the second floor, a vantage point.

- Those were great days though.

- Great days, I remember one night I was playing Beethoven and some fella called me up, I think was called Darkness on the Delta and said if you don't take that Beethoven off and start playing some Elvis, I'm gonna come down and wreck your joint.

(laughing) So I played "You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog" real quick.

- You know, you never met Elvis, did you?

- No, and I'm sorry I didn't because Elvis and I were almost exactly the same age.

And he was about a month younger than I and we were from different sorts of Mississippi backgrounds, but I wish I'd have known Elvis because when I was running  Harper's Magazine, I'd love to have gotten Elvis up there and gotten someone like Alfred A. Knopf to give a party for Elvis.

They'd still be talkin' about that.

I love Elvis.

- We have lots of people who have come to be with us tonight and they have questions for you.

What's your question?

Stand up here.

- Why do you like to visit cemeteries?

- John Kuykendall is there.

He's a Delta man.

Cemeteries for me are repositories of history.

I grew up in the Yazoo City cemetery and I've written a lot about cemeteries.

I've never been intimidated by graveyards.

When we were growing up in Yazoo City, we'd have picnics there.

I'd hide behind the old magnolia tree with my buddies like Henjie and Bubba, Billy Rhodes and Big Boy and Muttonhead and we'd watch funerals from afar in a sort of hush and kind of sensed, we wouldn't have said it at the time, the passing of the generations and the juxtaposition of life and death on this little old planet that swirls that way at the edge of the universe.

And of course, there was the witch of Yazoo who burned down the town.

And I go there every time I can.

I take my Yankee friends there and scare the heck out of 'em.

So cemeteries, far from intimidating me, have, in a very funny way, been an affirmation of life.

I remember a great quote of Thornton Wilder about the dead, "We should not grieve forever "about the dead, but give them gratitude."

It's the passing of time and the generations which I think most Southern writers are very much attune to.

- You had a question for Willie.

- Yes, was there any one point in your life where you knew, absolutely knew, that you would become a writer?

- Oh Lord.

My father, Rae Morris, after whom my beloved son, David Rae Morris, is named gave me a little secondhand Smith Corona portable typewriter when I was 12-years-old for Christmas.

I don't know why my father gave me that because I didn't know at that age that I'd be a writer and of course, he didn't either, but he knew I loved sports and that I would be writing about sports, which I did for the   Yazoo City Herald at the age of 12 on that little Smith Corona, covering games, baseball games, like Yazoo City versus Belzoni, or Yazoo City versus Satartia and I did my first byline piece on the front page of the  Yazoo Herald.

And the next week I ran into Mr. Normant Senior in the Carr's Drug Store on Main Street and he said, "Willie, we still want you to write "for the sports stories, but next time, "two things: don't quote Keats'  Ode on a Grecian Urn "and next time, would you please provide us "with the final score?"

which I neglected to do so.

But that little Smith Corona, when I really did start writing, served me well when I was editor of the   Yazoo High Flashlight, writing about school spirit and later, editor-in-chief of the greatest student newspaper in America,   The Daily Texan at the University of Texas, and on up through life.

And I changed typewriters since then and I'll write it with a quill pen sorta.

But that little Smith Corona, the words I wrote on it about sports and about other things caused some pain and a lot of thinking and memories, but I'm sure glad Daddy gave it to me.

- I suppose that typewriter probably woulda made the trip to New York if newer or better things hadn't come along?

- Well, it probably would have.

I found that little typewriter recently in an old attic in a box.

It's all rusty and derelict, but it still has echoes in it, Gene.

- 1967, New York City, that was really the moment, wasn't it?

What was it about those people who said that they would have that much trust in a young kid?

Youngest ever editor of Harper's.

- Those were very exciting days.

And I wouldn't take as a writer or as a human being, I would take nothing in the world for that tenure in New York.

The 1960s, as we all know, incredibly turbulent.

We often thought that our whole civilization was falling apart.

But we brought together a group of the finest writers in this country.

- Somebody said your editorial room was like the Coliseum with the lions and no Christians.

- I think Bill Moyers said that.

- [Gene] Did he say that?

- Bill Moyers was one of our writers.

We had Mailer and Styron and Robert Penn Warren and David Halberstam, right on down the list, but I was very proud of that period.

We had our offices on Park Avenue.

We had a wonderful old filing cabinet, which went back to 1850 where, Harper's oldest magazine in the country, with individual cards on stories, the contributors.

And I'd look up under C for Sam Clements and R for Theodore Roosevelt, D for Theodore Dreiser, D for Emily Dickinson.

It occurred to me one rainy day I was working up there, that in my office on the walls were the framed posters of Mark Twain's articles and stories in Harper's.

And I had a sort of lagniappe, as they say in New Orleans, that if I had been editor back then, I would've been a friend of Mark Twain's.

And he's here tonight, he just came up from Belzoni.

- But what was it that made you decide to take the chances to change it?

Because it was a fairly safe magazine when you took the helm.

- I felt it had to change because the whole context of the nation was changing so drastically in the '60s.

I had the most profound hunch that the oldest magazine in the country had to reflect what was happening in the larger society.

And the only way to do that was to encourage the best writing of the day from the most daring and honest writers.

Novelists between books, journalists, and all the rest.

We had to do this.

It was, I felt it was incumbent on it, upon us to do it.

As I say, I'm very, very proud of those days.

- What was the turning point?

What was the issue?

Was it Mailer or was it the-- - Well we went off, we ran about 40,000 words from William Styron's  The   Confession of Nat Turner, which was sort of our Declaration of Independence.

This was in '66.

But then if we got Mailer to do, we titled it "On the Steps of the Pentagon," which in book form was called  Armies of the Night from Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach."

It was about the famous Vietnam demonstration in Washington D.C. And it's the greatest thing Mailer ever did.

He won the Pulitzer in book form and it was the longest magazine article ever published and it I think it would still hold the record, which is 90,000 words.

The previous one was John Hersey's "Hiroshima" in  The New Yorker, but that one caught some attention.

And funny, we got a lot of cancellations on that, but 90% of the cancellations were not over Mailer's absolutely adamant stand against the quagmire in Vietnam, but over the uses of the language.

- [Gene] Really?

- Yeah.

It was a watershed moment on the uses of the language in magazines.

- Was that the one that he wrote at your house?

- He wrote some of it at my house and I kicked him out because then we went up to Cape Cod when he was finishing it.

I remember calling my managing editor Robert Kotlowitz, we were pressing a deadline, and Bob said, "What you got, Willie?"

I said, "Bob we got 90,000 good words."

And he said, "That's great.

"Should we run it in three or four installments?"

I said, "Let's run it all at once."

And there was a silence on the other end.

And he said, "Why not?"

And it captured the country.

- We have one of your other acquaintances from New York City, from those days.

Winston Groom, are you on the phone with us?

- Uh oh, I'm in trouble.

- [Winston] Hey, you doggone sure are.

(laughing) - This is the guy who wrote the novel  Forrest Gump and I'm the first man who read that novel.

- And you were the first.

And Winston, if it hadn't been for Willie, what would've happened to   Forrest Gump?

- [Winston] Well, I'm not sure.

You see, I always send Willie a uncorrected copy of all my books.

And Willie, very generously, reads these things.

Now, he very rarely, if ever, has a comment about, in   Forrest Gump, he had no comment except toward the end, he wrote one statement.

He thought I should've made Forrest Gump a midget.

(laughing) - Total lie.

- [Winston] Well I assume we here tell lies and I did not take this great advice and so you saw what happened.

But what I'd like to do here is read to you something that I fished out of my files.

On the occasion of Willie's, I think it was his 18th birthday or something.

- 14th, I believe.

- [Winston] 14th, perhaps.

- 60th I believe.

- [Winston] When they had one of these similar roasts and they tried Willie in one of these kangaroo courts.

And so what I had written here is a deposition by myself and it goes this way.

"Come now, witness Forrest Gump, "sound of body and mind, more or less, "and present this testimony to this august court.

"Let me say this.

"Being Willis Morris is no box of chocolates.

"Some folks like to say that stuff like "'Stupid is and stupid does' is good "but in Morris's case, it's more like "'stupid is as stupid looks.'"

Which about sums it all up.

- What I can say about Groom, I'm still looking for my 20% finder's fee for giving you my suggestions on the book  Forrest Gump, Winston, because you live over in Mobile and I've always wanted to buy Mobile Bay.

(laughing) - Folks, a round of applause please for Winston Groom.

We have a whole group of youngsters who have come out this evening.

And a whole lot of 'em, Willie, had questions for you.

- It's good to see young people here.

- Was the witch's incident true?

- Absolutely true.

- And if you'd like to go along on the next trip, he'd-- - Well, William Faulkner once said, what is your name now?

What's your name?

- Matthew Higgins.

- Matthew, William Faulkner once said that he was the world's oldest living sixth grader.

Well, I'm the world's oldest living fifth grader.

And the Witch of Yazoo story is totally true and I stand by it.

- Very good.

What's your question?

- Who was your very first role model?

- My very first role model.

Gosh, that's interesting.

I think my daddy maybe.

He was a hard workin' man.

Was a bookkeeper in the Goya Wholesale Grocery in Yazoo City and he didn't read many books, but he was a courageous man and he taught me baseball.

He taught me how to play baseball and he bought me the best dog I ever had, my boyhood, Skip.

We went out in the old Delta woods huntin' squirrels.

And he was a soft-spoken man.

He didn't really talk all that much.

But I think he gave me example of a very quiet and contained character.

And to keep your eyes and ears open.

And to always try to be true and loyal to the people you care for.

And to always love dogs and baseball.

Good advice.

Very good.

- Your acquaintanceship with Skip was a wonderful chapter or so in  North Toward Home and then became its own book in the last year or so and it's been enormously popular.

Were you surprised by that?

- Enormously successful.

It's right on the cusp of the National Bestseller List.

It's been number five for weeks on  The Boston Globe.

It hadn't hit the   New York Times yet.

But we have a Hollywood option on it, Gene.

We really do.

And they're lookin' now for a dog who can bark with a Southern accent.

(laughing) But I wrote that,  My Dog Skip, I'm glad I wrote it.

It's the only book I ever wrote that I enjoyed writing because my previous one was  New York Days, which took me three years to write, very difficult to write.

My wife JoAnne Prichard locked me in our basement for three years to do it and I called it my dungeon.

But   My Dog S was full of affection and love because Skip was an only dog and I was an only child.

- [Gene] There ever gonna be another Skip?

- Never be another Skip, no.

People will ask me for years.

I had a wonderful black lab who was a yankee dog who was the mayor of Bridgehampton, Long Island that I brought down here to live and he started eatin' collard greens.

He died.

We buried him up close to William Faulkner in St. Peter's Cemetery in Oxford and we had an Episcopal service for him and had almost kill me.

And people kept askin' me, "Will you get another dog?"

I said, "No, I'll get another wife first."

(laughing) So I got JoAnne, God bless her.

(laughing) - I wanted to finish up on the   New York Days for a minute.

You were talking about the Norman Mailer article that was so much the beginning of it.

Mailer was also the end of it, wasn't he?

- Well, it was called "Prisoner of Sex," which caused a lot of trouble with our owners.

Gosh, so many stories about that time.

Mailer and I had a very interesting professional relationship and we were friends.

And I called him up once, I said, "Norman, I got another idea for you."

He said, "Morris, I'm workin' on this book, "I don't wanna do any more magazine writings for a while, "but I'll meet you at Spats Restaurant tomorrow."

We had about three or four bloody Marys and Mailer said, "Willie, I know what your idea is."

And I said, "Well, what is my idea?"

He said, "The Women's Liberation Movement "and how I view it and the context of the times."

And I said, "That's my idea."

He said, "Okay, I'll do it."

And it was highly controversial, very vivid and colorful, but again, I'm glad we published it.

- But it caused you to make a trip to Minneapolis?

- That's right, a trip to Minneapolis, which no one in the world should ever go to in the wintertime.

Not even to see Garrison Keillor in St. Paul.

So we had a little trouble with our ownership.

- [Gene] And they said?

- What?

- [Gene] And they said?

- They said they didn't like what we were doing.

- I'm gonna drag you through this here.

- Ben Bradlee, my friend Ben Bradlee, who for years was the great editor of  The Washington Post, was comin' out with his memoirs and I saw him on Charlie Rose recently.

And it was a good question, Charlie said, "Ben, what is the most important thing or attribute "for a great newspaper or a great magazine?"

And without hesitation, Ben Bradlee said, "Your owner.

"You have to have vibes with your ownership, "otherwise you're dead."

- [Gene] And you quit.

- I quit.

Moved out to Eastern Long Island, very quiet, private days.

In a driving snowstorm, I pulled out about three books out of my bookshelf, Falkner's  Go Down Moses, a book by a guy named Melville called  Moby Dick, and  Huckleberry Finn.

And I sat down and I wrote my little children's tale,   Good Old Boy, having absolutely no idea the effect that children's book would have on American kids.

I just had no idea it would.

And I was alone out there with my dog Pete.

Now I just get hundreds of letters on that children's book.

- What was it in your heart that said write a children's book?

I mean, you had other things on your mind.

You'd been dealing with the Vietnam War and women's lib and all those other issues and all of a sudden a children's book comes out.

- Because I believe in childhood.

I believe in my heart that the child truly is the father of the man.

And that it was a release for me to write this wonderful little story that it only took me about six weeks to write it.

And I also had to get the Witch out of my system.

The Witch of Yazoo had been causing me Freudian nightmares and I was going to have to exorcize the Witch.

All witches must be exorcized.

And I not only exorcized her, I exercised her.

And so that's the genesis of that little book.

- Did you exorcize anything else along the way?

- Well, I wrote a crazy book, a novel called   The Last of the Southern Girls.

And it only got one good review from Jonathan Yardley in  The New Republic, who's later been with   The Washington Post.

But we had a Hollywood option on that one, too with Faye Dunaway; it didn't come through.

But I was a little nuts when I wrote that book.

But as such things go in America, that book made me more money than any book I ever wrote except for the Old Testament and  War and Peace.

(laughing) - Willie, I wanna know how your experiences as an editor at Harper's have affected your writing.

- This is Harry DeCell Kuykendall here, my dear old friend from the Delta, who taught me high school algebra in Yazoo City High School.

She and my wife JoAnne Prichard wrote the History of Yazoo County.

I loved Harriet a lot more then than I did algebra.

I think that's a very good question because I've always felt that a writer is a very private calling.

You spend the best hours of your day essentially alone.

But a writer, himself or herself, must be his own best, or most stringent, editor.

Even if you've got a truly editor like I do now, Bob Loomis at Random House, may be the best in the business.

But the writer himself must be his own most astringent editor, cuttin' things out, tryin' to realize the nonsense that you've written and how to deal with it and this was reinforced for me, this feeling, as a writer working as an editor with other writers and trying to convince them of that and helping them with that.

I also discovered, as an editor, that the easiest people to work with were the best writers.

I mean, the really best writers wanted editorial suggestions, they met deadlines, they were interested in what their editor had to say.

As a generalization, this did not happen with a lot of other writers.

But the best writers were the easiest people to work with.

- Was it Ole Miss that brought you back to Mississippi?

- Well, I think it was something more than that.

I had been living up East for almost 20 years and I had a feeling I had to come home.

All of my people were dying.

I was going to funerals in Methodist churches and hearing "Abide With Me" much too much.

I figured I was gonna have to come home sooner or later.

I had a neighbor up on East Long Island, Truman Capote, Bobby Bansaloon, he once commented and said, "All Southerners come home sooner or later, "even if in a box."

And I was kinda reluctant to wait that long, but I was the Writer in Residence at Ole Miss.

Can I read the first paragraph of the last chapter of  New York Days, which I titled, "South Toward Home," which may partially answer that question.

"All that was a long way from where I now lived.

"As it does, the world took a couple of turns.

"In 1980, I returned to my native ground "out of blood and belonging "as others among my fellow American writers had.

"For in this civilization still, "there are injunctions which sometimes tell you "it is best to be getting on back before it is too late.

"The writer's vocation, Flaubert said, "is perhaps comparable to love of one's native land.

"And there are moments as I age "that I feel I should never have left it, "but stayed with it in all its cruelties, fears, and hopes.

"If it is true that a writer's world is shaped "by the experience of childhood and adolescence, "then returning at long last "to the scenes of those experiences, "remembering them anew and living "among their changing heartbeats "gives him something he could easily otherwise lose, "a physical relationship to the significant events "of his own past."

So certainly Ole Miss was a catalyst for me in returning home and they couldn't have been nicer to me.

It was my first reentry, sorta, back home.

But here I am.

- You told me that was one of the hardest chapters that you've ever written.

- That's the hardest I ever wrote.

JoAnne, as I say, had me locked up in that basement and I was knockin', goin' "Let me out, let me out!"

We had cats then.

My cat Spit McGee, I'm convinced the Lord, I know the Lord is a Methodist, by the way.

I married an Episcopalian, but the Lord is a Methodist.

Spit McGee, my cat, he has a golden eye and a brown eye, is the reincarnation of my dog Skip that the Lord sent back here to make sure that Ol' Willie's doin' okay.

- So it's you and the cats in the basement finishing up.

We missed the whole move to Jackson there somewhere.

- Oh yeah, I came down to Jackson.

JoAnne Prichard, whom I've known for years and years, is the Executive Editor of the University Press of Mississippi, which I truly do think, is per capita, the finest university press in the country.

(applauding) JoAnne had been pursuing me for years.

And she figured the only way she could get me was to sign me up to do a book for her,   which we called Homecomings and so I moved on down to Jackson.

I figured that I had to live in the town of my birth and memories of my childhood summers here and often seeing one of my true heroines, Eudora Welty, who lives over in Belhaven.

We love seeing Eudora.

Eudora coulda been the grande dame of American letters, but that was so opposite to her quintessential composition.

I met Eudora for the first time when I was eight years old.

She knew my grandmother and my eccentric great-aunts, who lived on North Jefferson across from what I call the Old Jitney, Jitney number 14.

And Eudora recently reminded me that my grant-aunts Maggie and Susie and my grandmother used the Jitney as their own private pantry.

They'd cross North Jefferson eight times a day to get a lettuce or a muskmelon, but mainly to gossip.

And my great-aunt introduced me to Eudora when I was eight.

She was at the vegetable counter and Aunt Maggie and I were, she was about 80, Aunt Maggie.

We were leavin' and Aunt Maggie whispered in my ear and said, "Son, she writes them stories her own self."

(laughing) And I think she does.

- So you finally convince JoAnne that you should get married.

- [Willie] That I was available, yes.

- Did you buy her a fancy wedding ring?

- Oh gosh.

I gave her a $100 bill.

We were getting married on a Friday in our backyard with our reception at Hal and Mal's and I said, "I'll give you a $100 bill."

And we went to that jeweler on Lakeland and I wouldn't even go in.

In my defense, it was a crisp, new $100 bill.

She went in and she bought this thing and the guy didn't even charge her sales tax.

He said, "I know you're marryin' that crazy writer.

"I ain't even gonna charge tax."

- [Gene] She change your life?

- Oh she changed my life.

You know, love that kind of late in life, what is the Sinatra song?

The second time around?

I was divorced for about 18 years so this was a long second time around.

If it's a good marriage, it involves all the great things in life, which is a reasonable stability, love, writin' books, goin' to ball games, havin' dogs and cats and friends, and being together.

For years, I didn't believe in marriage, but I certainly do now.

JoAnne is from Indianola, Mississippi, of fine finesse and beauty and I think she's made me more productive as a writer.

I know she has.

- And you dress better.

- And I wear matching socks now.

- So you're sitting in a hotel room, no, you're sitting in a bar at the Eola Hotel in Natchez, Mississippi and a little kid comes to you and says, "Are you Willie?"

- Oh yeah.

Gene and I kinda been collaborators for years, talkin' like this.

I love this guy.

They're shooting, the Disney people are shooting   Good Old Boy in Natchez and the director wanted me to come down and kinda coach the young Hollywood actors and actresses on the Southern accent.

So I'm down there, it's about 182 degrees and they're still out shooting and I'm in the bar of the hotel and just thinkin' about things.

And I feel this tug on my arm and this about 11-year-old kid, cute little kid with a blue baseball cap.

And in a Southern California tongue he says, "Are you Willie?"

I said, "Yes."

He said, "Where you been, Willie?

"We've been expecting you for three days."

I said, "Well, who are you?"

He said, "I'm Willie."

So this was a little boy who was playing me and watching some of those scenes of the wonderful kid from L.A. playing me and the other Hollywood kids playing my chums and professional actors and actresses playing my long-dead mother and father, grandmother, granddaddy, and great-aunts, and Maureen O'Sullivan playing my great-aunt Susie, Richard Farnsworth playing my granddaddy, and a dog from Staten Island, who got paid more than anybody else in the cast because he could bark with a Southern accent, playing my dog Skip, watching was like ghosts in the sunlight, watching these scenes.

Deja vus of the most stunning kind.

But, you know, in very funny ways, gratifying.

I'm a great believer in the power of film.

And a lot of American writers have been.

Some have been put off by it.

I believe in the power of film.

We got a wonderful film that's gonna be takin' place here in Jackson.

- We're gonna go to that in just a minute, but we have somebody on the line who is also a pretty-much believer in the power of film.

Hi, John Grisham.

- [John] Hello.

- How are you?

- John who?

(laughing) - [John] Hello, Willie, how are you?

- Hello, John.

- [Gene] It's payback time.

- When I'm gettin' my 15% finders' fee?

- [John] Well, I haven't seen you in a week or so.

- Well, we were up in Oxford last week.

- [John] The check's in the mail, Willie.

- Oh good.

- [John] It'll be there shortly.

- I wanna buy Memphis.

- [John] Had a good time last week doin' readings and celebrating Dr. Khayat's investiture.

- John was reading from his latest book, which is gonna be out next month.

And we had Barrie Hannah, Josephine Haxton, John Grisham, Larry Brown, and it was investing Robert Khayat as chancellor.

We had fun, John.

- [John] It was a lot of fun.

And we read at the Coliseum, where we drew, I guess, about 300 people, which for a bunch of writers, that's not bad.

- I thought I counted 2000.

(laughing) - [John] Willie, I knew I was gonna be callin' you tonight and I was gettin' kinda homesick.

I'm here in Virginia, out from Charlottesville, and after bein' there in Oxford last week, I was really homesick.

And so I thought what we'd do tonight, I'd get the kids, and it's kinda cool here, so we built the fire, probably the last fire of the year.

I read your book  My Dog   Skip a few months ago and thoroughly enjoyed it and I thought perhaps, my dogs might enjoy it too and so we got the kids around the fire and we got our three dogs, Yogi, the lab, Wally, the West Highland Terrier, and Boomer, our Jack Russell Terrier, and we got 'em all still and-- - John, are you reading   My Dog Skip out loud to Yogi, Boomer, and-- - [John] No, no, no, I'm not reading it.

We have it on books on tape.

(laughing) So we were doing the audio version of  My Dog Skip and Willie, I hate to tell you, but the dogs fell asleep.

- Uh-oh.

Well, I hope your kids didn't, John.

- [John] The kids love it.

The kid loves it.

- And I hope Renee didn't fall asleep.

- Renee has enjoyed the book.

The book has been enjoyed by people from coast to coast.

I've read stories about those signings where you bring in all the stray dogs and get 'em all adopted out.

- That's happened.

- [John] I know two people who were injured in the dog fight at Square Books when you were up there signing it.

- Well, John, a big Saint Bernard, it was the only hazard we had, came up and knocked me over.

A serious dogfight broke out and that Saint Bernard knocked me over and a eight-foot high stack of your latest book.

But I was honored.

- [John] I heard he urinated on my book.

What I heard.

- No, that was Barry Hannah.

- [John] Oh, that was Barry.

(laughing) - John Grisham, it is always a pleasure to talk with you.

- [Willie] Thanks, John.

- [John] You guys have fun.

- Hey John, go after that house on the back of the nickel now.

You're in Charlottesville and give our deferences to Mrs. Jefferson.

- [John] Say hi to JoAnne, see you guys later, Willie.

- Okay, thanks, John.

- [John] Take care, bye-bye.

See you, Gene.

- John Grisham, ladies and gentlemen.

(applauding) - You never know.

- [Willie] Never know.

- You never know.

You and I had the eerie experience of sitting in a courthouse couple of summers ago, up in the press area, at the very back of the courtroom.

- [Willie] We were there.

- We were sittin' side by side and talking about how strange it was to watch Byron De La Beckwith being tried again for the murder of Medgar Evers.

- One of the most extraordinary events.

I did a magazine piece on this.

My friend Homer Best, the lawyer for the Sheriff's Department.

Sheriff MacMillan, was in charge of very tight security and makin' sure that the writers were happy.

Writers are often not happy and Homer was there.

He was an exuberant presence, but I had never covered an event, really, that dramatic.

I've been in a lot of dramatic moments as a writer and as a journalist.

Talk about deja vus of the most intense kind.

- [Gene] You could almost see the characters from 20 years before walking down there.

- [Willie] This was the 1960s intruding before our very eyes in the Hinds County Courthouse on the 1990s.

Beckwith had two hung juries, of course, in the early '60s.

And my dear friend, Bobby DeLaughter, the talented young Assistant D.A., along with Ed Peters, the D.A.

But Bobby, of course, did most of the work with some of the old investigators coming back.

And this trial came up 30 years later.

And I'd never seen anything like it, sitting in that press gallery, seeing people out of my own past was just a stunning, stunning story.

We were up there together talking about it.

- We really were.

And that was the eeriest thing.

You could almost see Ross Barnett makin' his way back into that room again and all those-- - And shaking hands with the defendant in 1964 before the jury.

- All those things that we had all read about because you were overseas when that happened, weren't you?

Or were you-- - I was in New York, in New York with the Medgar Evers assassination and the Neshoba killings.

I was out of the state.

- And so now what has happened as a result of that experience?

- I think this is going to be one of the truly memorable American movies.

My old pal, Fred Zollo, whom I've known for years, happened to be in town, in Jackson, the night of the verdict, when Beckwith was convicted after 30 years.

We talked about it.

And Fred is one of our distinguished producers.

His latest film is  Quiz Show.

Before that,  The Paper.

He did  Mississippi Burning a few years back.

He got together with Rob Reiner, who has got to be the most resourceful and brilliant director, movie director, on the American scene today.

His latest was   The American President.

But of course,  Stand By Me, one of his early ones, which speaks so much to me, a coming-of-age movie, and  A Few Good Men and   When Harry Met Sally, so many wonderful credits.

So Fred sold Rob Reiner and Castle Rock Entertainment on this movie and it is comin' to fruitition and it is about to be filmed here in Jackson, Natchez, and out in Hollywood.

- And your role is?

- Well, I've been the consultant.

- Helping out?

- Consultant, helping out.

- I understand you're also the driver to dinner.

- That's right, and also they use my house, JoAnne's and my house on Brookdale to party here and there and to play my mother's Steinway baby grand and that's the most important role of all.

- Did you really take Rob Reiner and Fred Zollo to Lusco's?

And did you have the pompano or the beef?

- Earlier, Fred and Lewis Colick, who wrote the great screenplay for this, and Bobby DeLaughter and his lovely wife Peggy DeLaughter, we went up to Doe's Eat Place in Greenville, listening to some of Bobby DeLaughter's story.

Bobby is being played by Alec Baldwin, the great actor.

And I noticed that Bobby DeLaughter, after 24 years, has shaved his mustache to look like Alec Baldwin.

(laughing) Beckwith is being played by James Woods.

Wow, what a role there.

And Myrlie Evers is being played by Whoopi Goldberg.

But a marvelous screenplay.

But yes we did take Rob Reiner to Lusco's.

And he saw the outside of Lusco's, said, "Willie, where are you taking me?"

I said, "My wife JoAnne and I come here "four or five times a year just to have dinner."

He said, "That's good enough."

So we got in one of those banquettes and people still remember Rob as playing Meathead in  All in the Family and comin' in for his autograph.

But, you know that button you push for service, we had Hollywood in Lusco's.

And we wanna take Rob Reiner also to Doe's Eat Place.

- He sent a message for you, if I can find it.

He is in rehearsal for the show, but sent a message.

"Willie Morris is the greatest raconteur in Mississippi, "but you'd best catch him after 10 at night "after the Southern Comfort's had a chance to kick in."

- Well, that's when the raconteuring gets even more intense.

- Bobby DeLaughter, stand up here.

Give him a round of applause.

And you did shave your mustache.

- I did, sure did.

- Well tell us about this experience.

- Well it was a very unique experience, one that I'll never forget.

But I have a question for Willie in regard to the upcoming movie.

I know what it's meant to me legally and personally and I would like to ask Mr. Morris what he sees because I don't think there's anyone in Mississippi that knows the heart and soul of this state as Willie Morris does and I would like to ask him, Willie, what do you see for Mississippi as a whole as a result of this film?

- Bobby, I find it a very positive thing.

A highly upbeat portrait of our complicated and beloved Mississippi in the 1990s.

Sure, it has all those horrendous complexities that you know, we had in the '50s and the '60s, a lot of bad things happened, yes we all know, but I think the substance of this movie is very, very positive.

The changes which have taken place in our society in the last generation or more are gonna be central to this movie.

And one of the most important aspects of that, my dear friend Bobby, is you.

It took great bravery and resourcefulness for you to do this.

I'm glad you shaved off your mustache so that you can look like Alec Baldwin.

And that Peggy is a wonderful character in it.

Because y'all had really just got married doin' your investigations in the early '90s.

So within the context of say, Fred's early film,   Mississippi Burning, and now this one, I think all Mississippians and all Americans are gonna be very moved by this Zollo/Reiner movie.

It is a story of great complexity, but of truth.

As William Faulkner said, "The human heart in conflict with itself."

It is a love story.

Bobby, you and Peggy.

Also, Myrlie and Medgar Evers.

Medgar Evers had a great love for this state and he said, "If I'm gonna go to heaven or hell, "I'm gonna go from Jackson."

And so I'm proud of Fred Zollo and Rob and Charlie Harrington, the locations manager, who's been livin' here for four months and has fallen in love with this crazy state.

Haven't you, Charlie?

We've taken him to Yazoo City on picnics.

This is a first class group of movie people.

I'm very sanguine about this movie, not only as reflecting the real strengths of our state, but also I think could be a work of art.

- [Gene] You have a question?

- Well, a little bit of a story.

- [Willie] Here's the senator.

- Willie, my flu kept me from going up to Kentucky for the board meeting, but it couldn't keep me from coming out here tonight.

I wanna tell a little Willie Morris story.

Speaking of Southern Comfort, Gene, I had the great pleasure of being invited to one of Willie Morris's infamous coffees.

And Jim Dollarhide and I were invited over one night and it was pretty late when we got there.

And somehow we got on the subject of politics and this is long before I ran for office, but Willie came upon this notion that "John, John you must run for Secretary of State."

And I said, "Willie, wait a minute now."

"No, no, let me get my checkbook."

And so he was my first campaign contributor.

- $10,000.

- It was a good sum of money.

He comes back and he writes out this check and he writes out this note and he seals it up and he hands it to me and I said, "No, Willie, no."

He said, "No, John, take it, take it."

So I finally took it and stuck it in my pocket and Jim and I, we're drivin' on about three o'clock that morning and he said, "Well, what was in that note he gave you?"

I said, "I don't know."

So we opened it up and it was this sizable check.

It said, "John," in Churchill's voice, "you must run.

"Mississippi needs you.

"Signed, Willie."

Of course, the next day, JoAnne called me and said, "John, by no means do you cash that check."

(laughing) - One question.

- Willie, I wanna commend you for the courage that you have mustered up to speak out and to speak truth about the state and about the country and about the notion and the whole status of civil rights.

I first commend you for that, but also to ask at one point did you realize you had to speak out, that you couldn't be silent any longer?

- When I started reading Hodding Carter, Big Hodding Carter's journalism, and the works of William Faulkner.

Thanks, Senator for that.

Really, when I was at the University of Texas, I believe and observing my beloved Mississippi from that perspective of Texas.

I guess I discovered somewhere along the way, when I was about 19 or 20, 21, in my own heart that a society like Mississippi, which I'm so deeply rooted, and you are.

I'm a 6th generation Mississippian.

My great-great-uncle (mumbles) was the first territorial governor and all this.

I'm tryin' to titillate the D.A.R., but my heart is deep in this society.

That Mississippi succeeds or fails on the basis of the most elemental thing and that is whites and blacks living together, not only in peace, but in civility and in terms of great progress and touching human hearts.

I truly believe that the black and white people of this state are brothers and sisters, fellow Americans, and fellow human beings.

And that blacks in Mississippi, often been in this country of America longer than a lot of white people.

And that we're in it together.

We must succeed or fail.

We must love each other and remain friends and get our children to feel this too.

I'm very proud of you, Senator.

You keep that check.

It'll go through that bank someday.

(laughing) - When JoAnne has you down behind the dungeon doors these days, what are you working on?

What do we have to look forward to?

- Oh gosh.

She'll let me out now.

For 10 minutes.

I just did, recently, I'm kinda proud of this, the introductory essay to the Official Games and Souvenir Program of the '96 Centennial Olympics.

It's gonna be, they're printing up about four million copies and it's going out on Internet.

I didn't know what Internet was 'til three months ago and they told me.

I've done that, but I'm gettin' back to work on a novel, it's been kind of obsessing me for years called the  Chimes at Midnight   from Henry the Fourth, Part Two, set in Oxford, England in the late 1950s.

I've been foolin' around with that for a long time and I figure I better get back to it.

I hope I do, I hope-- - I wanna ask you about this gentleman and his participation in one little piece of writing that you did.

Stand up here John Evanson.

- [Willie] John Evanson.

- In one little piece of writing that you did that has turned out to be remarkably successful and again, I'll never forget standing there, the opening night of Little League season when Willie read the prayer.

How long did it take you to talk him into writing that?

- [John] What, six months, six years?

- [Willie] No, 'bout three years, I think, John.

- [John] I just kept askin' him over and over and over again.

- [Gene] You said, what we need's a prayer.

- We need a prayer, need a prayer to open baseball season.

Finally bugged Willie enough and he called me one night about midnight and he said, "I've got it, I've got it."

Showed up on my desk the next day and it was truly wonderful.

I've got just a question: who's gonna win the World Series this year, Willie?

- I think this is gonna be the year for the Braves again.

(laughing) - Safe answer, safe answer, safe answer.

- But we dedicated that prayer for the opening of the Little League season, Barry Mozer, great illustrator and I, to our dear friend, John Evans, Lemuria Bookstore, represents the best bookstores in the country and Southerners are reading books.

And, glad you got me to do that prayer, Johnny.

Also, his son Austin is one of the best young third-basemans in the area.

I'm his agent.

- Willie, did all the stories in  Good Old Boy really happen?

- Zach, they really did happen.

In fact, some of them were so vivid, some of the real stories that happened were so vivid, I had to tone 'em down.

But it was all there.

Mark Twain once said, someone asked Mark Twain, was everything true in his early books and he said, "Yes, sometimes you have "to lie to tell the truth."

But it's not really lying per se.

It's the imagination of the heart that embellishes true events from the past that really make them live.

So, Zach, I will assure you, everything in   Good Old Boy is true.

You can tell your grandchildren that too.

- There's so much Mississippi history in your head.

You told me a story not very long ago about a prisoner-of-war camp that you visited in Misissippi, in Clinton, Misissippi.

I had no idea that-- - You know, there were thousands of German POWs in Mississippi during World War Two.

- And why did you go there, you were just a child?

- I would come over and spend my summers here in Jackson.

And my dog Skip would come with me.

My grandfather personally worked in the potato chip place downtown and we'd eat potato chips all day.

And we would take these forays, we'd take the old number two bus and go all the way out to Clinton because his friend owned a chicken farm next to the German POW camp.

They had about five German generals there.

That was the Afrikorps, Rommel, the great surrender to Montgomery, and Patton in 1943.

They had these generals and I was talkin', I had my dog, to this German sergeant, I think from Munich.

And he said my dog reminded him of his dog in Bavaria and he threw across the fence to us in Clinton, Mississippi two of the most prized commodities in Mississippi in World War Two, Carnation milk, canned Carnation milk.

I took those back to my grandmother Mamie and she cried with delight.

In return, I threw over to him two prized items, black market items from the war in World War Two: bubble gum.

But you had German POW camps all through the Delta.

- Didn't they escape?

- [Willie] One of 'em tried.

- What happened?

- Well, the problem with 'em, they didn't have anywhere to go.

I mean, where were they gonna go, to Arkansas?

Maybe to Mexico.

But one of 'em tried to escape from a camp in the Delta and he got on a Greyhound bus, I think, goin' to Memphis.

He had civilian clothes and he didn't know the terrible social mores at the time.

He went in the back of the bus and sat with our black brethren and they caught him.

- [Gene] He was tryin' to be inconspicuous.

- He was an Aryan.

- This is the fella that Willie's been talkin' about a lot tonight.

This is Fred Zollo, ladies and gentlemen.

(applauding) - I feel the same as DeLaughter.

It's unusual to get applause.

- You have a question for Willie?

- Oh, I have so many questions for Willie.

- It's your only chance.

- I have so many questions for Willie, but actually I really would like to make a comment, actually.

'Cause I think Willie isn't just a Mississippi resource, he's a natural and national resource.

He's like a spring of ideas and brilliant thoughts and poems and sweet words.

He's inspired me before and the last time we were here making a movie.

The reason this film exists and works and becomes something special is because of Willie.

He inspired us to make it and that's why we're here now.

I love this man.

To paraphrase Tennessee Williams, "Blow out your candles, Laura, "the sky is lit with lightning."

Willie has the lit the literary world with lightning and we hope the cinematic world now with lightning.

He's just a very special, special man and I think it's time to erect that statue, Willie.

- God bless you, thank you.

(applauding) - We'll put the statue up there by the cemetery at Yazoo or would you like it up in front of Lusco's or where would you like it?

In front of the?

- Could I have four?

- You could have four.

- One in front of Hal and Mal's, one at Lemuria Bookstore, one at the witch's grave, and maybe one at Doe's Eat Place in Greenville or the Mayflower Cafe.

I don't know.

Thanks, Fred, for that.

One of the great moviemakers.

This movie is gonna be something, I think.

- Willie Morris, thank you.

We're glad you're home.

- Thank you.

Thank all of you for being here.

(gentle music and applauding) - [Male Narrator] This   Southern Expressions special is made possible in part by a grant from Northpark Mall, providing options for shopping in Central Mississippi.