[music playing] [laughter] What's funny?

I don't know you.

Who's that boy there?

I ain't never set eyes on him.

Neither have I.

Hey there, youngster.

Where you from, and what are you doing around here?

You'd better answer him.

You gonna answer me?

Who are 'ya?

Who are 'ya?

[music playing] I'm triple Sagittarius, I have a very healthy liver, I have never drunk cheap spirits, I have excellent digestion, I can't do gloom and doom.

It's not in me.

He just drew you up out of humdrum reality that brings everybody down into this fantasy world.

And it was wonderful.

I don't know that he ever had a job of any kind.

Eugene didn't have a bank account.

Sing a little, dance a little, take a little shorthand He did what he had to do to survive.

He was definitely a freeloader.

I think he lived on opportunities over the whole life.

There were people who considered him a fraud, a fake, a moocher, all of those things.

There were other people who considered him a genius.

His distinctiveness and his humor, I think that most of his friends would have said he was kind of a flower of our culture.

Well he was kind-- Oh, kindest man I've ever-- --if he liked you.

If he didn't like you, he was your enemy.

--if he didn't like you, you didn't come in his door.

Oh!

With Eugene you weren't just anybody anymore.

You weren't just a normal average Joe.

You were somebody.

I never met anyone who enjoyed living moment to moment as much as Eugene.

Oh, what a party animal he was!

He truly was a magical person.

He could create excitement about most anything.

Eugene created Mobile as a literary haven if you will.

Down in Mobile they're all crazy, because the Gulf Coast is the kingdom of monkeys, a land of clowns, ghosts, and musicians.

And Mobile is sweet lunacy's county seat.

I can tell you that's the truth.

I know.

You never knew what he was going to do.

That's actually part of his charm, and part of his problem, too, in a way, because he loved to embarrass people.

I deal with the holy southern trinity-- the difference between what people think, what they say, and what they do.

[music playing] I think it was the very night I moved to Mobile that a friend of mine said you've got to meet this character.

He lived in Europe for 30 years.

He was in a bunch of Fellini films.

You're going to love him.

As soon as I walked through the door, he just came right up to me and said, "Darling, tell me everything about yourself!"

The majority of Mobilians thought he had totally fabricated his life, that what he told about his life was made up completely.

He always advised me that I needed to develop a mystique, that I was too open.

I could never get Eugene to address his past.

Every time he told it it changed a little bit.

I came to realize that that was exactly the way Eugene remembered it that day.

He called himself Dr. Willoughby, and he had-- "Sebastian Willoughby."

And he had gold business cards printed.

That was something to hide behind if he chose to do it.

We were never really clear what the Willoughby Institute was.

We assume some sort of cultural or artistic enterprise with a 501(c)(3) status, but I doubt that that was the case in actuality.

But in his own mind it was an active enterprise for everything that was good and true.

Letting the oak trees live, not giving way to the bulldozer, and the chain stores, and chain restaurants, but maintaining a distinctive way of life.

I had just found out that the first book I did, which was with a black midwife named Onnie Lee Logan, was going to be published.

And Eugene kept saying, "Now darling, you had such a success with this project, you've got to get started on your next one!"

Hi.

I'm Don Noble.

We'd been shooting literary interview shows for a couple years.

This guy had a story.

He had the Aleutian Islands, he had Paris, he had Rome.

And so we knew the next day we were going to do a full half hour with just Eugene.

You and Truman Capote were at least acquainted, even when you were a teenager.

Oh, before that.

Before that.

We both belonged to what was called The Sunshine Club.

[music playing] If you belonged to The Sunshine Club, you got free matinees at the Saenger at 11:00 in the morning.

And years later we met in Paris.

I hadn't seen him in something like 25 or 30 years.

And he said, "Eugene, Eugene, what was the name of that film with the forest fire and the Indian shooting those arrows at the hero as he falls over the waterfall?"

And I said, that was George O'Brien in The Michigan Kid.

People kept coming up to me and saying, "Do you think Eugene is actually going to tell you the truth?"

And I said, I hope not.

I don't want the facts.

I want the stories.

[music playing] I was raised more or less European since three grandparents were European.

Everyone helps my uncle, so they start early in the morning, they pick up the grapes, and after that they have a big party at my uncle's house celebrating the harvest.

[music playing] My grandfather, Francis Xaver Walter left Sinsheim probably to escape being drafted.

And he and a friend walked from Sinsheim to Hamburg, because he didn't have any money.

This house belonged to Ferdinand Walter and his wife.

It's in one line to Eugene Walter.

And here in 1878, Franz Walter, immigrated to his uncle Meinhart Eber.

[singing in german] I guess I had like a perspective.

[music playing] Mobile born and raised, in fact, born downtown.

"I learned to walk to run away from home."

What he was running away from, as I was growing up, I had no idea.

And he walked over to my grandmother's house and stayed there.

I don't think my uncle was a very good father, because of his gambling, and drinking, or whatever his problems were.

And certainly my aunt was not capable of raising Eugene because of her mental problems.

Your childhood seems to have been a lot happier than two of your contemporaries.

One is Walker Percy, and one is Truman Capote, all raised in unconventional and scattered, if you like, households.

Well I don't think my household was scattered.

I think the creatures were scattered.

I know that Eugene is putting his spin on those facts.

He never talked in terms of a miserable childhood.

Quite the contrary, he talked in terms of loving the life that he experienced in his grandmother's cottage.

[music playing] I've always thought that his grandmother was the one that gave him a taste for flowers, and cooking, and everything else like that.

So many of the people that I sat with were my grandmother's contemporaries.

Some of them were ancient creatures, all of them using stories.

[music playing] The hostess, who is Mrs.

Warden, begins to tell what happened at this party.

Everything fitted in.

She made everything blue and yellow, including Bessie herself, silk print.

"I made it," said Miss Grenier.

"It was ochre and teal."

Everything went together, continued Mrs.

Warden.

Everything.

She went to Three Georges and had mints made in blue and yellow.

Then she went to Smith's Bakery and ordered cupcakes made in two ways, yellow ones with blue icing, and blue ones with yellow icing.

"She's bigoted," said Miss Grenier.

This is a watercolor that Eugene did in 1935, when he was 14 years old.

To me, this is a picture of old downtown Mobile.

It's summer, it's the heat, and Eugene always thought that Mobile and New Orleans were like cities in the Mediterranean.

Even though Mobile was a small city, it was very much a real city in the 1940s and before that.

It was an all night city.

It was a wide open city.

It had a certain amount of sin.

[music playing] When my grandmother died, my father took my grandfather in to live with him.

Eugene needed a place to live too.

And my mother later told me that he wanted to come to Mon Louis Island and live with us, and my father said no.

Now why he said no, I don't know.

And he lived on the street, I guess.

He lived at other people's out of the goodness of other people's hearts.

I think he lived in the Haunted Bookshop for a while.

Just kind of a hand-to-mouth existence.

Until he met Mr. Gayfer.

[music playing] He was always wild about the theater.

And the little theater at that time was very, very active.

And Hammond Gayfer and all those people.

And every time they had anything going on, Eugene was sitting right in the back, and Mr. Gayfer couldn't help but notice him.

So he sort of took him in, and he lived with Hammond down at the river.

[music playing] Everybody knew Mr. Hammond.

He had a beautiful home on Dog River where Eugene stayed.

And he had a chauffeur always, and a big Packard limousine.

And his lovely house had been designed so that the raised dining room at the end -- the traditional waterfront house had a dog trot through the center -- and the back of the dog trot was raised, and it was a dining room over the garage, and that was his stage, you see, and he had the kitchen on one side, and the pantry or something on the other.

And he would have little plays there in the house.

If Eugene didn't want to go to school, he didn't go to school.

And if he wanted to stay home and work on his puppet theater, he got to do that.

And he still lived his life that way when he died.

He lived his life on his own terms.

That's the spin he wanted to give the story of his childhood, that he loved his childhood, because it was so different from the conventional, typical American childhood which puts you in a straitjacket.

Then Mr. Gayfer suddenly died, and Eugene was left penniless again.

He joined a CCC camp and went to work in Mississippi, and since he had artistic skills, he was a sign painter.

And as a favor painted some man's coffin for his daughter.

And it was such a beautiful thing that people started bringing coffins from all over for Eugene to paint.

[music playing] They could look at a piece of woods, and they'd say, well, yeah, a dear passed this morning.

It's going to rain at 3:00 this afternoon.

There's muskrats in there.

They had a rain god.

They'd say, "Come on down, Raymond!"

[boom] [boom] At some point you got drafted and went to the Aleutian Islands?

They said, you've won a big grade on your intelligence test, so you can go down this list and see if there's something you'd like to study, like chemical warfare, bomb making.

When I saw cryptography I said, "Yay!

Edgar Allen Poe's The Gold-Bug.

Keep it literary!"

The cryptography school was in New York.

[bell ringing] Tallulah Bankhead happened to be performing up there, and of course she was an Alabama girl, and Eugene took it upon himself to try and arrange a meeting with her to introduce himself as an Alabama boy.

As the story goes they had an interesting conversation and shared a few Alabama tales.

And as a memento of their discussion, she gave him a few of her .

.

"womanly hairs" to remember her by.

The place that he was stationed was so deserted, and so off the map, literally, that they had a lot of freedom.

[music playing] How can Eugene have enjoyed the army?

But he did.

[music playing] I was in the Southwest Pacific, and we used to correspond.

He could send me some ice, and I could send him some palm trees.

He had a pet reindeer.

They had delivered cases and cases of Fig Newtons to his unit, more Fig Newtons than anybody could possibly want or eat, so he raised a reindeer on Fig Newtons.

That's a sentence for you, right?

"He raised a reindeer on Fig Newtons."

You're never going to hear that again in your whole life.

He had visited the Chaucer Head Bookshop in New York, and then struck up a correspondence throughout the war, because he was ordering books.

And he said that was a lifeline for him.

After the war, they wrote him and said, "You sound so interested in books.

You'd be perfect as a clerk in the bookshop.

Why don't you come to New York?"

[music playing] When he got to New York, he met people just as Eugene always meets people.

The poets and the writers that he wanted to meet, he managed to meet.

So they were sitting around talking late one night, I imagine, thinking all of these boys and girls from the provinces who have come to the big city, they're not really seeing what they should be seeing in New York, because it's August.

So why don't we create a "happening" for them.

I mean, this is the hallmark of Eugene's life.

Let's make something happen.

They had this whole production figured out.

It wasn't something that they planned in coordination with the Museum of Modern Art.

They just stationed themselves in the courtyard one hot August afternoon, and typically of Eugene, mainly it involved costumes, sequins, and glitter!

And this gibberish language that he had concocted.

Everybody just went into action, spreading their sequins, throwing their glitter, coming down and sitting at the table and speaking in their nonsense language, and so that everybody who was in the museum at that time just started drifting out into the courtyard.

And before you knew it, there was a big audience.

A photographer and a reporter came out, saying, "What's going on, what's happening?"

Apparently Eugene just spoke in his gibberish nonsense language to the reporter.

He had a huge body of Alabama and southern people flowing through his 10th street apartment.

And you had to climb a chair to get in the raised wash tub to take a shower.

It was not unlike what his quarters were in Paris.

He wrote me from New York and said, I just don't know what to do.

I don't know what to settle on.

But I realize I've got to pick something, or narrow all the things I like to do.

I've got to narrow them down to one.

He had befriended an older man who got him a job in the New York Public Library-- that was it-- in the receiving department of books given to the library.

And the story was, there was one pile for the public library and one pile for Eugene Walter that never did get into the bureaucracy.

He said people advised him to stick to writing, to go on and make it the main thing.

And so he said, I think I'll do that.

From the beginning Eugene wasn't really happy in New York.

And on top of that, it had always been his ambition, as far as Eugene has ambitions, it had always been his ambition to go to Europe.

He admits that he lived on unemployment for a while, odd jobs here and there, and saving money.

And finally got passage on an ice cream freighter, a freight ship that was carrying ice cream mix to Europe.

[music playing] He enrolled in classes at the Sorbonne through the GI bill.

Like a lot of self educated people, he could focus.

He wanted to be fluent in French, and he was.

Right away, again, Eugene started meeting people.

My wife and I were on our honeymoon in Paris, and he got us tickets to Jacques Fath, one of the then ranking couturier names in Paris.

Eugene had befriended one of Jacques Fath's models.

Across the street was a pub.

There was Richard Wright, the famous black author.

He was over there with his typewriter sitting.

Very, very heady.

[music playing] Eventually he met Marguerite Caetani.

Princess Caetani was an American, and a first cousin of T.S.

Eliot.

And her editor, for Botteghe Oscure, and for her other literary activities and so forth was Eugene.

Botteghe Oscure was the principle literary thing involving Americans in English, although it was multilingual.

And then it was through her that he met George Plimpton, and all the other members of what became The Paris Review.

She said money I cannot give you, but I can give you Eugene.

Eugene said it was like George and the other Ivy Leaguers were fishing for salmon and came up with a big catfish.

He had just barely finished high school.

They sort of gave him his diploma in Mobile, as Eugene tells it, because they had to.

He was already on the program.

[music playing] When I left for Paris I entered a contest, the Lippincott contest.

And I forgot about it totally, because I had not completed it.

What I had finished I entered.

And then one day I got this cablegram saying, well you've won the Lippincott fiction prize.

Congratulations.

That famous English bookstore-- it's been there forever and still is-- in the window here where Eugene's books stacked six feet high, quite a high water mark for Eugene in Paris.

It's a beautiful book.

A young man trying to find himself, and coming to Mobile, to the Baroque South, as Eugene called it.

The description of the dinner party with the thunderstorm, it was just unforgettable.

And maybe kind of foreshadowing his whole sense of occasion, and gathering people, and creating a magical scene.

It was beautiful, yeah.

I just couldn't take the "gloom doom" Southern novel.

Not for me.

Gloom and doom on the old plantation.

Gloom and doom in the swamps.

Gloom and doom in the prison.

Gloom and doom in the city hall.

I just couldn't do gloom and doom.

I couldn't do it.

[music playing] The French publisher who was interested in me, he thought, first of all, that The Untidy Pilgrim could not be translated because of the verbal humor.

And then he thought that it was a little too sweet for the French taste.

And he said, why do you write us a French novel?

So I said, of course.

All you have to do is ask.

I said, sign the contract.

Give me an advance.

I'll do it.

Send a car.

Take me to lunch.

Three martinis.

George Plimpton's birthday party was held by one of his followers, and we were Eugene's guests in Paris at the time.

And so we were included in the party.

The first issue was being planned, and they had all these submissions, but George said, we realized everything in this is about death.

And we need something that's a little more humorous.

And Eugene said, well I think I have a story that you might like.

[music playing] "In the country along the Gulf Coast in the summer, the period of time between the setting sun and total black night is full of sweet mysteries, and has the effect of making the world with all its traffic stop dead still.

The minute the sun slips out of sight, a hush grows.

Plants and trees visibly relax.

One smells strongly and suddenly the scent of green grass, of dust, the fecund richness of ditches and ponds.

Under the oak trees, the lightning bugs commence their play.

Dogs and even children are briefly awed.

One feels that all the genii of the ancient world who wait on the mind's back porch could easily, if they chose, break the screen door and run in barefoot, stealthy, but gleeful.

They did like his story, "Troubadour," and published it.

So that solidified everything, and Eugene just started working with them from that point forward.

[music playing] Walter's editorial duties for the princess took him to Rome.

He was actually getting paid by Princess Caetani.

And so when she said I really need you more in Rome than in Paris, he had to move.

[church bells ringing] As late as 1958, you still had the impact of World War II.

There were buildings that were shot up still that hadn't been fixed.

There were sheep driven through the streets every morning going to a park to graze, and mostly bicycles.

Rome was bubbling with enthusiasm.

They cleaned up the buildings, everybody was happy.

Eugene Walter and I both had had a Sewanee Review fellowship in poetry.

So did James Dickey.

Eugene was famous for writing poems about monkeys.

The time that I saw his work, it was only about monkeys.

If you look at the Monkey Poems, "The Fireworks at Versailles," the imagery, it's just ecstatic.

It's joyful, almost like visionary.

He considered that his greatest work.

A version of Hamlet to be played by monkeys was written by Eugene.

The monkey was his animal.

It had the same sort of personality that Eugene saw in himself.

Eugene always referred to Isak Dinesen as The Queen of the Northern Monkeys.

I was having lunch with a friend of mine, Walter Clemens, and Eugene was at the other table with the Baroness Blixen.

She was, well, magnificent looking.

I think she weighed about a fast 80 pounds.

And she had a hat with a veil with dots all over it, and she would lift the veil up and smoke.

And very heavily made up.

She looked a little like Dracula.

[music playing] There wasn't much nightlife in Rome in those days.

What happened is about 20 people would go out for supper, at some trattoria and make a three hour dinner out of it.

Eugene said, we're going to have dessert up at my place-- a tiny little house.

You had to walk about 100 steps to get to it.

No road.

And it was very tiny, and it was just chock full of monkeys under glass, and then the four or five cats running around, and the table was round and had 16 tablecloths on it.

What he had was some jello that you stirred up into a kind of pudding.

He said, this stuff is so good.

He'd say "We're not going to have lights tonight, because it's just more romantic."

Well they turned off his lights is what the hell they did.

But Eugene made it into an epic.

I mean it became lovely.

"I love this cheap wine I found."

"I could give you some fancy dessert," he said, "but anybody could do that."

So instead he would put a candle in front of each person and give you a marshmallow and a wire coat hanger.

[music playing] Eugene met Fellini through Ginny Becker.

They would put on marionette productions, and they gave parties together that Fellini was invited to.

Fellini loved marionettes.

Fellini, I think of as one of the principal poets and artists of our time.

Fellini had been enthralled with the marionettes, but also with the party, and with Ginny Becker and Eugene Walter, as well, to the point he wanted Eugene and Ginny Becker to be in La Dolce Vita, the film, just playing themselves.

Eugene said he was busy working on the 10th anniversary edition of Botteghe Oscure and he absolutely could not give up the time.

So Fellini modeled a scene on that party, and according to Eugene, there is a character in that party scene who was modeled on Eugene's personality.

".

.

Spheres that give delight."

[thunder] One of the most traumatic events of Eugene's life was his breakup with Princess Caetani.

[music playing] She gave lovely parties, and Eugene did those-- they're not called puppets.

I have to remember the-- marionette shows.

God forbid you call them puppets.

And they were elaborate.

I mean really elaborate.

They had the stage, and the proscenium, and the set.

He was doing a large part of the editorial, as well as clerical work on the magazine, plus he was the one who would go sit with her in the Palazzo Caetani because she was terrified of thunderstorms.

[thunder] From the get go, according to Eugene, he was receiving a lot of bad mouthing from certain friends of the princess, in particular Giorgio Bassani.

[music playing] Bassani supposedly had been the princess's right hand man before Eugene supplanted him.

Bassani was always working against Eugene, always bad mouthing Eugene to the princess, telling the princess that he was in all these nightclubs every night boozing it up.

He had become involved in the film world at that point.

And that he had all these low life friends.

She was of an old New England family.

And one day he received a message from her that his services were no longer required.

And this was a traumatic breakup.

Eugene loved her.

He saw what he was doing as very important work, and what she was doing as a really important contribution to literature.

But Eugene was very philosophical about turning points like this in his life.

And he said this was life telling me that that chapter was over.

And it was time for me to begin another one.

[music playing] When Fellini was making preparations for 8 1/2, he again wanted Eugene to appear in the movie, and this time Eugene was very available.

Did you see La Dolce Vita?

What a bore.

How can you sit still for three hours?

I did.

In fact I think the film business, the whole film industry in Rome, was perfect for him.

The great collaborative enterprise where you're with 50 people all day long.

Eugene speaks Italian just the way he did, I have to say.

Which Italians thought was kind of classy.

8 1/2 seems to have led to other films.

He's great on screen.

That viper, Patricia.

The minute she heard about your thing, that, ugh, unrecognizable body, she rushed over there to look at it.

If she can prove it's Hanna, she rakes in $100,000 from the insurance company, and that's that.

[laughing] [laughing] Walter found himself on both sides of the camera during the golden age of the Italian cinema.

Fellini needed someone to translate his scripts to send to American investors, producers, distributors.

Somehow I got into the Rizzi brothers, and then Zeffirelli, and I translated about 500 Italian film scripts.

And I loved it.

I loved it.

It paid well.

I opened the windows and just threw the money out.

I'm sure that when Eugene was making a lot of money he was still broke.

Nobody had ever told me if you leave money in the bank it takes interest.

That's a field of knowledge unknown to me.

I had a 17 room apartment on two floors, and I gave wonderful parties.

I mean Eugene had dinner party after dinner party.

God knows where he got okra.

In that Muriel Spark piece that was in the New York Times magazine, she opens the story about her years in Rome by saying that all roads led to Rome, but when in Rome all roads led to Eugene Walter.

Eugene knew everybody.

And he made it his business to know everybody.

Everybody knew Eugene.

Judy Garland he said he met because he knew her husband at the time, who had a bit part in 8 1/2.

She wanted this party thrown for her, and Eugene obliged, and he said it was the biggest party of his career.

He gathered all the luminaries he knew in Rome at that time.

Fellini, and Zeffirelli, and all sorts of people.

But she had flown back to London and wasn't at her own party.

And the real punchline is that nobody even noticed.

[music playing] Interviewer: Why did you leave Rome where you were so happy and come back to Mobile?

I was there 17 years, and I saw the life of old Rome, and the beginning of a new Rome, which I didn't really like.

And then I was in a street fight.

I had gone to get mushrooms at the mushroom shop, and a policeman raising his billy club to a demonstrator knocked out my front tooth.

And I thought, I wonder what it's like in Mobile.

It must be so peaceful.

I think that a lot of those reasons were financial.

I think he was tired of living in Rome.

I have no doubt that he always wanted to come home and back to Mobile, and that he knew that he would someday come home.

Well what he told me was, "Darling, I have never left Mobile."

I don't think he was doing quite so much film work anymore.

Life in Rome reached a point where it was no longer tenable on a daily basis.

There was an Exodus around that time.

And it was like Moses.

Eugene just came to that realization that that period was ending.

[music playing] I met Eugene at a plant sale.

He had a little table, and he was selling books.

We struck up a conversation, and I soon found out that I had been recruited as one of his chauffeurs.

[music playing] My wife had been in school with Eugene.

And we saw him at some place and offered him a ride down to the Athelston Club.

I being a member told Eugene that he could sign my name to any chit he wanted to, but I didn't realize he could sign so many.

In 1986 the state of Alabama started an artificial reef program.

They designated a large area out in the Gulf of Mexico that anybody that wanted to could take reef material out, dump it.

This is the one that has the automobile tires.

[music playing] He asked me if I could help him find a house.

As it turned out, Eugene wasn't asking me to find him a real estate agent.

What Eugene was asking for was would I buy him a house to live in, or would I supply him a house to live in, because he didn't have any money.

My friend Nell Burks, she got one of the steamship lines to gave him free passage.

Betty McGowin was a wealthy heiress.

She picked up on Eugene's plight and bought a house, a cottage for him on what jokingly used to be called Grand Boulevard Street.

I was at lunch in a restaurant and I heard this man talking at the next table.

And it just kind of clicked that that must be Eugene Walter, just the stories he was telling, and what he was talking about.

He started writing for us.

I remember I tried to talk to him about money.

He said, "Oh, gentlemen never discuss money.

You just pay me what you think you can."

It happened in Mobile when he came back from Europe the same as it happened in Rome.

He created a good time in his wake, in his force field.

And so people were just drawn to it.

When you were alone with Eugene, or even standing with him talking at a party, it's the line from Fitzgerald, it's the line from Gatsby.

He focused on you.

You were the most interesting person in the world.

You had his full attention.

I had never met Eugene.

Eugene had certainly never met me.

And he said to me, he said, oh darling, I know exactly who you are.

I'm so sorry I didn't recognize you.

You've changed your hair.

And I was 12 years old.

He was such a character, he kind of scared me a little bit.

Because I was really shy, and he was so flamboyant.

He read one of my favorite poems, "The Good Luck Jockstrap."

And then he sang his song about cholesterol, and I was instantly charmed and captivated.

(SINGING) I love you, and you love me.

Cholesterol, cholesterol.

Without you, Darling, where would I be?

He worked for WHIL for about six years.

And I worked with him there doing weekly radio commentaries.

It was pretty much whatever he wanted to talk about, and often he chose to talk about the Mobile of his youth, most of which, unfortunately, was gone.

But he would evoke it really beautifully.

[music playing] Quotes from Southerners: "Anyone with a lick of sense knows you can't make good barbecue and comply with the health code."

"General Sherman may have started the process, but General Electric with its air conditioning is going to finish it.

The South will become little more than the happy hunting grounds of the Holiday Inn."

Eugene was a connoisseur of his city, and an advocate of the genuine and the real.

It was the old Catholic city, the multicultural city.

The sort of the slightly decayed southern port, its architecture, its cuisine, its music, traditions like Mardi Gras were all important to him, because they grew out of experience and history.

[music playing] Eugene was a master of make believe, and certainly Mardi Gras is all about make believe.

[music playing] What we have here is Joe Cain and one of his merry widows standing in front of a wagon seat.

And of course, Cain rode in this wagon at the end of the War between the States to re-instigate Mardi Gras in Mobile.

Now when Cain died, he was survived by his widow.

But also present at the cemetery were at least six other women in black.

They for years carry bouquets on the anniversary of his death and put them in Church Street graveyard.

What's so special about Joe, anyway?

[laughing] You really want us to tell you, Darling?

A joke long going around down here asks why southern women don't like group sex.

Give up?

Too many thank you notes!

How have you found Mobile?

It must be much changed from when you left.

Well I didn't recognize anything.

And some of my exact contemporaries are ancient, decrepit, senile creatures.

I find that I like more and more to be with younger and younger people.

When we went to lunch one day, on our way out Eugene was taking a lot of time at the cash register, flirting with this-- I don't know.

She must have been 19 years old, this cashier.

We got out in the parking lot Eugene said, "Oh, I just get a lot of electricity from that girl."

I said, what are you talking about, Eugene?

He said, "Oh, if we could get the peroxide out of her hair and get her to stop eating chocolate bars she could be President of the United States!"

I remember thinking later, this is the magic of Eugene.

He cultivated those people that he needed to survive.

And I don't mean that to sound like those people meant nothing to him, because they did.

I mean he cared about those people, and they cared about him.

But that was how he survived.

It was really interesting to see how he would convert somebody to do what he wanted to do -- wanted them to do.

And not only did he not have a car, he didn't have a driver's license.

And he relied on other people to get him around.

And I happened to be that person who did so on Thursdays.

[laughing] I'd take him to the post office, and I'd take him to the bank, and I'd take him to the Delchamps grocery store, and inevitably the corner liquor store, we had to stop there.

And different places where he had his-- Hi, John.

Hi, Judy.

--his books and artwork on sale, and we would replenish their supplies.

And he'd count all his books and paintings to see if anybody owed him for a book or a painting.

He always insisted on using this old Underwood typewriter.

And it always needed a spare this, or a spare that.

He lived in the old Cox Deasy house for a while after coming back to Mobile from Europe.

But the place on Grand Boulevard was where he lived when I knew Eugene.

It wasn't very big, but it was big enough for all of his books and clutter.

We would wind up at a restaurant, and more often than not, that was the Dew Drop Inn on Old Shell Road.

People make a big fuss about his chicken salad, and he was known for his chicken salad, both preparing it and eating it.

But he loved his pork chops at lunchtime at the Dew Drop Inn.

He had by this time he'd become a champion foodie.

Really my favorite book of Eugene's is American Cooking Southern Style.

It really captures that sense of enthusiasm and love of food that he shared with everyone.

In Paris he befriended Alice B. Toklas.

She lived right down the street, and that's where he became sort of interested in cook books.

He truly understood so much about food, and so much about how Southern food has made Southerners who they are.

He had my wife and me to lunch or dinner there.

And he had gone out and cut some grass on the side of the road somewhere.

Absolutely inedible.

There were lots of things growing in the back yard.

Many of those things nobody had any idea what they were except him.

He loved restaurants.

He loved food.

He never had a dime, so the big treat was always to take Eugene to some restaurant.

If the restaurant had the gall to put ground black pepper on the table, he would call the waiter and have it removed.

He's pull up the edge of the tablecloth and get under the table and bark.

Was it like a "roo roo," or was it an "arf?"

And he would turn and bark all the way to the table and sit down.

And we would order dinner, have a quiet dinner, and then leave, and he would bark on his way out.

It was like a little Italian comedy "Eugene at Dinner."

He had his lines, and the waiter had his lines, and everybody knew what was going on.

"Roo roo, roo roo roo roo."

He could go anywhere, but he was apt to misbehave, as a good poet should.

And so hosts and hostesses, I think, tended to be very careful about him showing up.

You know, we might have had 10 people coming for a sit down dinner, and he would not give any other guests a moment of conversation.

As well he should.

He had the best stories.

He did what it took to make people love him.

And whether that was putting on a show at somebody else's dinner party, or doing some sort of grand gesture, he was going to do that.

I always think, what am I doing to combat dailiness when I get up every morning.

So some days I feed the squirrels dates to see their reaction.

So you'd sit in Eugene's little living room and look into the dining room.

And on the dining room table there'd be, say, four plates, and cats lying on each plate.

Eugene would just shoo them off very gently, and then on your plate there would be cat hairs.

And you would have to take your napkin and wipe the cat hairs off.

Well my wife really hated that.

"Down in Mobile they're all crazy, because Mobile is the kingdom of monkeys and sweet lunacy's county seat."

I think Eugene made an art form out of "crazy."

He didn't mean deranged in that sense at all.

He meant fun, and joyful, and creating fun.

The role that I think was perhaps most important was his inspiration to young artists, particularly people from families that might not understand or appreciate their son or daughter's interest in the arts, or poetry, or literature.

Eugene was full of encouragement for all folks who wanted to get involved in either writing or the visual arts.

And it didn't really matter whether or not they were kindergarten kids, or whether or not they were retired folks who wanted to get things down in writing while they still had a chance, or anyone in between.

But I think toward the end of his life, when it became apparent that he really in his lifetime wasn't going to be remembered for the many, many things that he had done in a way like Capote or Harper Lee, that I think he was a little sad.

He wasn't bitter.

There really was no bitterness in Eugene.

I often think of Henry David Thoreau's expression with Eugene.

Thoreau said "My life has been the poem I could have writ, but I could not both live and utter it."

So Eugene's life was his art, I think.

That crazy business in the Aleutian Islands with the pet reindeer.

My god!

Whoever heard of such a story?

Eugene and the happening at the art museum in New York.

Eugene with the Paris Review.

Eugene with Botteghe Oscure in Rome.

I mean, everything Eugene did was fun.

So yeah, sure, why not?

I'll buy it.

His life was his number one art form.

He didn't talk about is family a lot, growing up, and he didn't talk about any romantic encounters in his past.

Eugene's relationships with people were filled with much more strife than his relationships with animals.

I think it was difficult for people to have a long extended relationship with him.

And I certainly think that would be in the sense of a romantic relationship, which I am totally unaware that he ever had.

A lot of people wanted to know if I was going to ask Eugene about his sex life.

And I said, absolutely not.

The Eugene I knew was not someone who ever spoke about his sex life.

And what I wanted to capture was the Eugene that I knew, and the Eugene that everybody knew.

Just as he had his "cat free room" in his house that the cats didn't go in, there were lots of rooms in Eugene that his friends didn't go in.

I think Eugene was so hurt from his early childhood, the only way Eugene was able to survive was to develop this personality that everyone would like and enjoy being around.

We asked him, if he wanted we'd take him to New Orleans if he'd wanted to see if he could find his mother.

And he said "No."

I mean, Eugene didn't want anything to do with his mother, and didn't even want to see her.

He didn't even want to know if she was alive or dead.

He didn't care.

With Gene, you didn't talk about any bad family issues.

You could talk about good ones all you wanted to, and how wonderful people were.

But he would cut you off like that.

I mean, nobody knew the real Eugene.

He was something different to everybody.

He made me believe that he had had an idyllic childhood, and a wonderful youth.

He never shared the sadness of the reality of his life, that he had lived in the doorway of the gas company, or in the costume shop above Murphy's Theater.

And I just see it as such a beautiful thing that he didn't burden anybody with it.

He turned it into magic for us.

The last time he had dinner here was when Katherine Clark was working on completing Milking the Moon.

When Katherine and her husband went to pick up Eugene, he didn't come to the door.

So they had to get the paramedics to break in and get him up off the floor.

But when Katherine asked him if he wanted to still come to dinner, he said, well of course.

I had to practically carry him up the steps.

But he pulled himself together, and was utterly as charming as I've ever seen him.

He was getting weaker and weaker.

I did not know he was dying.

At that time I didn't have so much experience with that.

Now since then I do.

I thought he would be around a few more years.

We would laugh and cut up, and he wouldn't eat.

He would always take the food home in a box and say that he would save it for when he was hungry.

I had no clue that he couldn't eat.

He always said that when times were rough he filled the bathtub with Jim Beam and swam to safety.

But I think that it had that opposite effect, too, that he drank to the level that it was harder and harder to get up in the morning.

[music playing] I heard he had fallen into a coma.

Again, he had fallen on the bathroom floor and been taken to the hospital this time.

The doctor said, well do you think he's rational?

And everybody said, oh, yeah, he's rational.

And he said, well I asked him if he was allergic to anything, and he said Fob James.

He passed away pretty quickly.

And It was a terrible shock.

That life force, it just seemed impossible that it could happen that quickly.

There should be these lingering scenes of Eugene laying out his literary heritage, doling it out.

It's impossible for me to imagine, though I would hope it could be so, that an autodidact like that could survive.

And not only survive, but thrive in a community with no visible means of support, simply by being a delightful persona, well versed in the arts, sort of a perfect companion.

I just can't imagine a figure like that.

[music playing] We were in the hospital, in the hall, and Eugene's two cousins came, and they said oh gosh, I guess we'll just bury him out on the back 40.

No way.

The next week all I remember is being on the telephone constantly, constantly, trying to find a suit of clothes for him to wear, trying to find a casket for him.

We said, well the problem is, Mr. Walter doesn't have any money.

Called Jocko and he said, we'll do something, Beppie.

Don't worry about it, now.

And they said, "Oh that wouldn't-- that wouldn't be a problem.

Let us show you some caskets."

And David said, brother, look over there.

Those things really look cheap.

They're just made out of plywood.

He said, "Well those are for cremation.

The bottoms would come out, perhaps.

And you wouldn't want that to happen."

David said, well I could reinforce them.

Because it took us so long to get everything together, they kept calling and saying, are you going to come get him?

They said, do you want a hearse to bring the body down?

And Dave said, no, I've got a truck.

I don't need a hearse.

[music playing] David pulled up in front of the Masonic hall, and so there were little tables around, and this great circle of chairs.

But most people were just milling around.

And that afternoon when I was thinking about it, I thought, what can we do to kind of jazz things up?

And I thought.

.

.

[music playing] The funeral was at the cathedral right over there.

I'd never seen Eugene walk into a church for a service, so it seemed odd to attend a church service at his death.

I just decided not to go.

He would make very irreverent jokes about the Church and this and that, and yet at the same time that's where it should have been.

It needed to be in the cathedral, and with the archbishop no less, and his miter.

That was very much in the spirit of Eugene.

[music playing] So many people had come in, and friends and contacts that he had had from who knows where, and who knows what part of his previous history.

[music playing] The cathedral was full, and I went out of the cathedral, and stood in the Cathedral Square, and turned around and looked back.

And to see all that mob of people coming out, wave after wave.

And as soon as they came off the portico and were hit by the rain, their umbrellas would open.

It was like mushrooms popping up, or something.

The most beautiful image, and then everybody got in line for the jazz funeral and the march to Church Street cemetery.

It was a great occasion.

Mobile sent him off right.

[music playing] "The Socrates Monkey Seen Dancing in Mid-air, Amid Sun, Moon, Stars, and Field Flowers."

In sheer delight of drawing mortal breath, I take such fierce ungovernable pride that I shall poke my rosy tongue at death so He may anger, and you hear I died.

Do not believe it, Loves.

For that round sun, though caught in harness, never could explain such coils of mischief life as through me run.

Nor could that sly moon when she horns again.

I prize much magic in my mimic hand, by which I had dizzify the day and night.

Now see, stars frolic at my waved command.

Sun, field stars, moon, sky stars, all plots of light for me will sport.

Oh, I am monstrous proud this life to live, this joy to laugh out loud.

[music playing] "Fireworks at Versailles."

I'll celebrate all wayward things from man's mind born.

The private elves of disrespect no less than unicorn.

All encorcelling, all things thought, will blaze their role from ricket summer house, which proves more strong than capital.

The numbered and the cubbyholed can but expire at these illogic sorceries of logic floral fire.

Oh pray for leaves on fresh swept paths.

Cobwebs on thorn.

And homage paid to bindweed bloom, bindweed no less than corn.

Inquire of the health of leprechauns, distribute clothes, let music be presumptual in all green groves.

Rechristen care with his true name of small obscene.

Sing antic odes for dandelions enspangling the green.

[music playing] So let sweet hurlyburly blaze.

Musettes then sound that fire can freeze.

Naught can amaze, the commonplace only, wound, and only the ditto, wound.

[music playing] It's just to give people one moment out of their dailiness.

I combat dailiness.

[music playing]