Growing Up King (26 page)

Danny said, “A biography or a film can be done by anybody about anybody.”

“True,” I said, “but if you use that person’s copyrighted materials, like speeches and the like, then you’ve got to get permission.
That’s the law.” They were trying to say, “We don’t know how much we’re using.”

I asked, “How are you doing a movie about Martin Luther King and not using his speeches? Unless you do it like
JFK.
”

As soon as I said that, I thought, “Of course that’s what they’re thinking of doing.” Like
JFK.
That was not the kind of film we were hoping for, where Martin Luther King would be just the backdrop rather than the main
character.

At that time, we were torn. If we were going to do a conspiracy film, Oliver would probably be the best person, yet that’s
not where our heads were. We were still hoping to attract the director and writer who would agree with our vision of a biopic.
It turns out we were in more of a predicament than we knew. Somebody was taking the baby away from us. Do we sit back and
just let our baby go? Or do we go with the child to make sure that it’s nurtured, cared for? We chose the latter. Better to
embrace Oliver Stone and try to cultivate him than to be hands-off and just see what he comes up with. So we developed a relationship
with Danny, and started meeting again with Oliver. The last time I met with him was in early 1998.

I asked him straight out, “What type of film are you trying to do?”

He said, “I really want to do a story about the man, not the assassination story.”

That surprised me. I’m sure it showed on my face that I was happy to hear it. I’m not a duplicitous character. The way I feel
shows on my face. Later I was questioning myself: “Does Oliver really have that in mind, or is he just trying to cool me out?
He is a brilliant filmmaker-screenwriter, wrote
Midnight Express,
wrote
Scarface, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon
…”

That’s when I thought, “Uh-oh.”

It was the Vietnam War thing! That’s what had gotten him. That was the recurring theme in his films—working out his own conflict
over his and America’s participation in the Vietnam War!

Stone’s very close to Vietnam. That’s his hook. That’s what made it powerful for him. Daddy came out against the Vietnam War
at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, in his speech called “A Time to Break Silence,” one year to the day before he was murdered.
That’s what Oliver saw. I don’t know if he saw that the media had essentially muffled Daddy after that, which was the only
reason he had considered running on a third-party presidential ticket with Dr. Benjamin Spock—so that he would be covered
in the media, so that peace and Poor People’s campaigns would have to get coverage.

To get started, Oliver had brought in a screenwriter named Kario Salem. We were still kind of skeptical. We didn’t know where
Salem was coming from. We met with him, we did the interviews, and never really saw a script, so I can’t tell you till this
day where he was coming from. I know Salem went to Memphis and did research, which made me more uneasy.

My sense was Oliver was going to doctor or rewrite this script—it was going to be his thing in the end. I’d been hearing he
was obsessed with depicting Daddy in terms of womanizing. I went to him and said, “What’s your position on depicting my father
in this light?” Oliver said, “Your dad was really something.” I said, “I don’t believe it’s true. Who are you hearing this
from?”

Oliver was saying there was good evidence, in Ralph Abernathy’s book and from a woman who’d claimed she was sexually involved
with my father the night before he was killed. I said, “I talked to Reverend Hosea Williams, who was there, about the incident;
he told me it didn’t happen.”

This whole thing about the FBI files being sealed for fifty years, these records of my father—if the FBI really had something
concrete, it would have leaked out long before now. The tape that my mother received from J. Edgar Hoover was not all that
concrete. Mother says you can’t tell what is on that tape, or who is on that tape—there were a bunch of people she could not
identify—and we were also told that J. Edgar Hoover had his FBI agents fabricate incidents. Mother till this day still claims
that was not my father on the tape.

What I was trying to say to Oliver Stone was, “Whatever you do, make sure you’re basing it on facts, not innuendo.” Stone
said, “Maybe I’m too close to it. Let’s go talk to the writer, Kario, and Danny.” We met with them; now, Stone could have
been pulling my chain, but he was saying, “Look, you all make the call. If after you do your research, you come up with something
different, I’m open.” What I didn’t want Stone to do was become obsessed with the perceived flaws both real and imagined of
my father; it would be a tragic mistake for him to do a movie focusing solely on the perceived and unproven fallibilities
of a great man.

But in the end Oliver couldn’t find another figure, a majority figure, within my father’s story for the audiences to latch
on to. With
JFK,
he’d made a protagonist of Jim Garrison, the district attorney in Louisiana—a public figure who has a revelation, goes after
“them,” whoever “them” is, that were responsible for the assassination. There isn’t that kind of figure in my father’s story.
One of Ray’s attorneys whom I hadn’t met then, William Pepper, provided an interesting twist of a character. In my opinion,
he became a lot like the Jim Garrison figure in
JFK,
but the reason it’s hard to put him in that light is because he had a vested interest as Ray’s defense counsel. People have
a hard time with his story; they feel he’s biased, or slanted toward defending his client, similar to Johnnie Cochran’s situation
with O. J. Simpson. I believe that any defense counsel is going to be viewed as being biased just for doing his job. Catch-22.
I can relate. Stone was drawn to Pepper; Ixtlan, his production company, optioned Pepper’s book
Orders to Kill.
It was a mystery, why Oliver was so interested in doing this film. Warner Bros. put it on the back burner. No matter how
big you get in Hollywood, you’re never bigger than your last film’s grosses.
Nixon
didn’t do so well commercially.

My sense was that Stone was still grappling with it. He wanted to do the conspiracy/assassination movie, based on Daddy’s
coming out against the Vietnam War. I was in over my head here.

History says lone assassins rarely use rifles. A list of lone demented assassins is long and quite depressing, and shows the
use of pistols, ear-close: Lincoln, Gandhi, Oswald, RFK, Wallace, Reagan, Lennon, Tupac, Biggie, Versace. Medgar Evers was
shot in the back with a rifle by Byron De La Beckwith in 1963, but from relatively short range. Vernon Jordan was wounded
by long-distance rifle fire; he survived. And one more. JFK. You can see why Oliver Stone would be on this.

My father, at Harlem’s Riverside Church, on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis, had
said, “It is an evil war. We’re bombing too many rice fields, running too many peasant humble people out of the villages.
It’s time for America to come on home from Vietnam.” That had to cut into Stone’s soul.

Five years later: “Oliver sees the mid-’60s and the transformation [King] was going through,” said Steven Rivers, then a Stone
publicist. “It’s not a whodunit, a birth-to-death biopic, or documentary; it may take years for this movie to come about,
if it comes about. But if it does, it’s about how toward the end of his life, Dr. King became a leader of the peace movement,
how he was perceived by his enemies as an increasing threat.”

“Oliver can’t afford to do it wrong,” Phil Jones said. “Even if he wanted to be capricious, he can’t. He has more to lose
than we do.” Because of this long-term back-and-forth with Oliver Stone, I thought more about the assassination, and James
Earl Ray. The working title of Stone’s ill-fated production:
Memphis.
I found myself thinking more about Memphis. What had happened there? Not so much in terms of a movie, but for my own life,
and the lives of my two sisters and my brother. Maybe we had not been able to move on because we were stuck there.

“It would be a film about Dr. King’s life,” said Steven Rivers. “It’s not a whodunit—though Oliver supports reopening the
investigation and a view there’s more to learn.” Maybe one day Stone’s
Memphis
—which would have portrayed our father’s emergence as a peace leader dead set against the Vietnam War who was killed by the
same interests who killed Stone’s JFK—will get made by somebody else. Maybe not. Daddy went to Memphis to help striking sanitation
workers and to support efforts to integrate schools and stores, not to protest the Vietnam War. Time passed. A film option
we’d given Stone expired in the year 2000. Now my hope is that at some point during my mother’s lifetime, a movie on my father
will be done.

In the early ’90s, I traveled to Memphis, though not for a movie or to investigate my father’s murder. It was arranged through
Juanita Moore, executive director of the National Civil Rights Museum. The whole movie thing was in stasis—really off the
radar screen. Michelle Clark Jenkins was leaving the King Estate soon, but she took this trip with me. While in Memphis, Ms.
Moore thought it would be a good idea to meet with her girlfriend who worked at Graceland. So we also met and visited there
while in the city.

We toured the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum is housed in the old Lorraine Motel, south of downtown. Michelle and
Juanita took the tour with me. There were other people on the tour; among those, a few recognized me; some recoiled; some,
after saying hello, let me have space. When I started out on the tour, I was unaware of a wonderful feature that didn’t hit
me until the end. The way the exhibit was structured, you started out dealing with the history of African Americans, through
the Civil Rights Movement. As you move forward in history, the exhibit elevates you: you literally go up as you walk through,
you rise step by step; it’s almost like you’re going to the mountaintop. I didn’t have a somber or nervous feeling. Then I
got upstairs, second-floor balcony, outside Room 306.

From here, you could see the supposed path of the bullet. It was traced by visible laser-pointer light. At that time, I didn’t
know what I know now, so I didn’t question it; yet the rooming house, window, bullet, pathway, the music they were playing,
church music, and the background—it all suddenly seemed morbid. I could feel a cold sweat, and blood rising in my neck—where
my father took the fatal shot. I thought of a song, played in the documentary
Montgomery to Memphis,
by Nina Simone, “The King of Love Is Dead.” As the documentary ends, during his funeral procession, with the wagon, the mule
pulling the casket, that song is playing. It was all jumbled up in my head: What is film, what is real, what is re-creation,
when was this music laid in? When I think of my father’s death, all of that is what comes to mind; I have mixed emotions—there
was always a reluctance for my family to focus on the death. Even the King Center, in Mother’s mind, was to be a living memorial.
We were approached years before, when the Lorraine Motel was still boarded up, about becoming involved with the National Civil
Rights Museum. D’Army Bailey, a judge in Memphis, first chair of the museum foundation, came to Atlanta to entreat us. Mother
had problems with it at the time. But it was all so distant. Now I was here. On the very spot.

And then… the laser-pointer blue light hit me.

The beam of blue-green light hit me in the chest. I stepped forward. It rode up toward my neck, to my throat. My heart beat
faster. My hands clenched into fists.

… Unhhhh… I almost felt it, I tell you… and it changed me. Epiphany is a Christian festival commemorating the showing of Jesus
to the Wise Men, celebrated January 6; or it is the appearance of a superhuman or supernatural being. In a strange way, I
was feeling an epiphany.

We left the museum without a word. I wanted to leave the city of Memphis. We caught a plane soon thereafter, but it wasn’t
soon enough. It was like I was in a strange land, and after that tour, it was like I felt unwelcome, foreign, even though
everybody was nice enough. I felt now there was something unresolved in me about Memphis. There was this tragedy that had
occurred in this city that I didn’t quite understand. This was the place where Daddy was killed. It wasn’t about a movie,
money, or a conspiracy. It was about facing what happened to our lives. I had to know about Memphis— about our father’s murder.
About me. And about us.

M
any people do not realize that the “I Have a Dream” refrain of my father’s most famous speech was spoken extemporaneously.
He had prepared his remarks but, moved by the passion of the crowd before him and the tremendous significance of that day
in August 1963, his mind soared and led him to those immortal words.

Soon after the speech was delivered, 20th Century Fox Records distributed a recording of the speech without his permission.
The recording was important because many people then, as now, had not heard the speech in its entirety. My father sued the
record company to stop their distribution of the record on the grounds of copyright infringement and won. Guided by his trusted
advisers, he had been copyrighting his writings and speeches since he published his first book in the 1950s as a way of ensuring
that the integrity of his message could be vigorously protected. He had also been represented by a New York literary agent
since that first book. Daddy understood that the more important and controversial he became, the more vulnerable he would
be to exploitation. Later, he in fact gave Berry Gordy and Motown the right to distribute “I Have a Dream” as well as other
speeches, believing they would be in safe hands. As evidence that my father’s faith was well placed, Mr. Gordy eventually
gave these masters back to my family when I was installed as head of the King Center in 1989.