Irreverent Alabama journalist spent disastrous five months in the US Senate
‘Ihave a penchant for being irreverent,’’ Maryon Allen said in the interview that may have ended her political career. ‘‘I learned one thing in politics. The hardest thing to do is to keep your mouth shut. I never have before.’’
In 1978, Allen, who has died aged 92, was named by Alabama governor George Wallace to succeed her husband, Democrat Senator James Allen, after he died in office. During her five-month tenure, she was known as a tart-tongued gadfly, a storyteller of epic proportions and an disengaged legislator with the worst absentee record in Senate history.
Still, she seemed safely on her way to winning a
Maryon Allen special election later that year until she gave an interview to
Washington Post reporter Sally
Quinn, in which she offered views on politics, abortion and southern femininity that stirred up the folks back home and led to her electoral downfall.
Allen, whose first name was pronounced ‘‘Mary on,’’ as if it were two words, met her husband in 1964, when she was a journalist for the Birmingham News, and he was Alabama’s lieutenant governor under Wallace. They married that year, and in 1968 James Allen was elected to the United States Senate.
He was known as a conservative with an expert knowledge of senatorial rules, which he used to delay legislation with which he disagreed, most notably treaties to turn over US control of the Panama Canal to Panama. He died of a heart attack in June 1978, with his wife cradling him in her arms.
Wallace then appointed Allen to her husband’s seat, with a special election scheduled later in the year.
‘‘George took a big breath,’’ Allen later wrote in the Washington Post, ‘‘and said, ‘Course you know and understand, Maryon, that I’m going to be running, don’t you?’ Long silence, for Maryon didn’t say anything. ‘Maryon, you do understand that, don’t you?’ Once again Maryon was mum. ‘Maryon, you’re there, aren’t you?’ This time I answered, ‘Yes, George, I’m here.’
‘‘ ‘Well, what you got to say?’ ’’
‘‘ ‘Nothing, George.’ ’’
By her silence, Allen made it clear that she would not allow Wallace effectively to keep the Senate seat for himself.
Before the September primary leading up to the special election, Allen was the subject of a 5300-word profile by Quinn, who quoted her on a variety of subjects.
On her political models: ‘‘My heroes in life were Winston Churchill, Adlai Stevenson, Jack Kennedy and Jim Allen. Now that Jim Allen is dead, I don’t have any heroes any more.’’
On Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative opponent of women’s rights: ‘‘She’s supposed to be so feminine and all. Well, she’s about as feminine as a sidewalk drill.’’
On abortion: ‘‘I feel it is such a personal issue for women . . . I wouldn’t want anyone to dictate to me their religious beliefs or the right of my own body. I feel very strongly about that. I hope that’s an honest answer.’’
Alabamians were perhaps more aghast when she mentioned that she had been in a hotel room, wearing her nightgown, when two workers appeared to wash the windows.
‘‘Always looking for votes, I just said, ‘Y’all come on in and have some coffee,’ ’’ she said. ‘‘We had a good ole time, but if Jim Allen had ever found out I was having coffee with two window washers in my nightgown he would have killed me . . . Can you just see the head of the Alabama Baptist church if he heard that story?’’
The interview became a leading issue in the campaign – along with Allen’s stated enjoyment of white wine, or ‘‘giggle juice’’, and her refusal to debate with her opponents, which she attributed to bad campaign advice.
‘‘I was made out to be the most irreverent, sarcastic, profane, constituent-hating, votercontemptuous, late-husband-despising, naughty-merry-widow whore lady who ever drove up the road to Washington, DC,’’ she later wrote in the Post.
She failed to reach the 50 per cent threshold needed to win the primary outright, then lost in a runoff to Donald Stewart, who went on to win the special election.
As a senator, she was perhaps best known for supporting a bill that would have allowed states to rescind their previous ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The measure failed, as did the ERA itself.
During her five months as a senator, Allen missed 155 of 356 roll-call votes in part because she was campaigning. Her absentee rate of 43.5 per cent has never been equalled.
In 1979, Allen wrote a long, freewheeling article for the Post about her brief political career. She described entering her late husband’s Capitol Hill office, only to find his chief of staff talking on the phone and smoking a cigar, with his feet on the desk.
‘‘He kept talking, and I kept standing and looking,’’ she wrote. ‘‘Finally, the message began to drill through to him that I did not consider myself a guest in my own office, and I certainly as hell did not consider him the new owner of the desk and chair.’’
She also didn’t disguise her contempt for Wallace, Alabama’s four-term segregationist governor and a onetime presidential aspirant: ‘‘George Wallace relishes power as few people on this earth ever have,’’ she said. ‘‘I have wondered in fear and awe what this little swaggering, power-hungry gamecock would do if he ever really had power. Real power.’’
Maryon Pittman was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and moved with her family to Birmingham a year later. Her father ran a Caterpillar tractor dealership, and her mother was a homemaker.
Survivors include three children from her first marriage; two stepchildren; and several grandchildren. – Washington Post
‘‘I was made out to be the most irreverent, sarcastic, profane, constituent-hating, voter-contemptuous, latehusband-despising, naughtymerry-widow whore lady who ever drove up the road to Washington, DC.’’