The Wallace Tapes

As Cornelia Wallace tells it in C'nelia, her highly personal portrayal of life with Alabama Governor George Wallace, their marriage was warm and close, both emotionally and physically. They shared baths together, sometimes "hugged and kissed and cried and sobbed," and were intimate even after his gunshot wounds made conventional sexual relations impossible. She tells how she once shooed the security men out of George's hospital room as he recuperated; she locked the door "and returned to the arms of my waiting husband." Afterward, "his wheelchair had a new wiggle in its roll--and I had a new bounce in my walk." She fondly recalls the day when George "told me how very much he loved me and that he couldn't have made it without me."

That cozy portrait was shattered last week with the revelation that a recording device had been discovered in the telephone between the beds of Cornelia and George in their master bedroom. Also, 200 five-minute tape recordings had been found by security officers in a safe used by Cornelia in the Governor's mansion in Montgomery. Though lie-detector tests were being administered by state police to members of the mansion's staff, apparently in an effort to find out who had leaked word of the taping, Wallace refused to say that Cornelia had planned the bugging. "This happened in my bedroom between me and my wife," he said at a press conference. "What happens between me and my wife, as long as it doesn't affect the state of Alabama or my service as Governor, remains the business of me and my wife."

Still, the relationship between George and Cornelia could directly affect Alabama politics. Wallace is barred by state law from running for re-election in 1978. Cornelia is considered a possible prospect to try to succeed him, just as Wallace's first wife, Lurleen, followed him as Governor in 1967 (she died of cancer 17 months after taking office). If the taping episode indicates a wide rift between the Wallaces, Cornelia would be seriously damaged politically; without George's all-out support, she could hardly hope to win. But Wallace promised last week that if Cornelia does run, he "would be as strong for her as I was for my first wife."

Marital Difficulties. That leaves the motivation for the taping a mystery. Although there have been rumors that the two were having marital difficulties, there has been only one credible explanation for what Cornelia might have wanted to learn about George's telephone conversations. Claiming it had "highly reliable sources," the Montgomery Advertiser reported that Cornelia did institute the taping, but only after she learned that George had placed her under some kind of surveillance. According to the Advertiser, Cornelia heard her husband make "disparaging remarks" about her on the tapes and consulted a lawyer about a divorce. When Wallace learned of the bugging, he too, according to the paper, considered a divorce.

Clearly, neither George nor Cornelia was about to clear up the many unanswered questions. Unlike the former holder of the century's most famous tapes, Wallace was apparently determined not to be embarrassed by anything on the recordings. The tapes, he revealed, "are no longer in existence."

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