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blasphemy. But what agitated him the most, drawing out his most venomous criticism, was any hint of social equality between blacks and whites. In 1947, in a yellowing paper my father saved, Binford publicly stated that “the downfall of every ancient civilization is traceable to racial contamination.” That same year, he outlawed the Hal Roach comedy
Curley
because it showed black children and white children playing together. In 1945, he stopped the live musical
Annie Get Your Gun
from playing in Memphis because there were colored people in the cast “who had too familiar an air about them.” For some films, Binford and his colleagues simply snipped out the offending scenes, leaving odd gaps and splices when the films were viewed by frustrated moviegoers. Singlehandedly, Binford banished such stars as Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and the King Cole Trio from the silver screens of Memphis.
    On various occasions my grandfather M.A. would meet Binford at some Downtown restaurant and entreat him not to censor a movie. M.A. hated to grovel. He would come home and spit in the garden to get Binford out of his mouth. But no amountof begging or groveling worked with Lloyd T. Binford. He had the backing of Memphis political boss E. H. Crump, and he had an undaunted belief in his own judgment of right versus wrong. “M.A. once got so mad at Binford,” says Uncle Harry, “that he threatened to lock the censor’s head in a half nelson—one of the wrestling maneuvers he’d picked up at Vandy. An alert waiter prevented the impending catastrophe by playing at full blast a recording of ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’ ”

Show Business
    It was taken as a given that my father and his older brother, Edward, would work for the family movie business, under M.A.’s direction. Dad got his first job in the business at age twelve, in the summer of 1931. When he came back from Boy Scout camp in June, he sold Coca-Colas out of a washtub in front of the Princess Theater on Main Street. That washtub was the beginning of Malco Theatres’ concession department. Dad drank most of the profits himself.
    I can still remember Dad’s small office at the old Malco Theater on Beale, windowless, the sofa covered with stacks of press releases and glossy photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and Cary Grant. You could hear the clickety-clack of Fannie Slepian’s typewriter down the hallway as she diligently typed letters for M.A.
    As far as I can tell, Dad joined Malco only because his father insisted. Dad was not a businessman. He was an intellectual, and an artist. During his fifty years in the family business, the only job Dad enjoyed was promotion. During the 1950s and 1960s, my father took pleasure in creating the advertisements, both drawings and text. He also masterminded special events to promote films, such as vaudeville acts complete with costumes and drama. When the theaters were showing an awful film called
Dinosaurus
, in 1960, he and a colleague built a forty-five-footdinosaur out of papier-mâché with a voice box that roared and a swishing tail made from a fishing pole.
    I remember one particular day in the late 1950s when I went to Dad’s office to retrieve something or other for my mother. There were half a dozen people crammed in there, all talking at once. Evidently Dad was promoting three new films at the same time. An actress from the Memphis Little Theater was reading out loud from a script she had written for a stage show to go with
Horror of Dracula
. A young woman hired from a modeling agency was showing off a dress with a plunging neckline that she was planning to wear in the lobby of the Crosstown theater for the opening of
Gigi
. And a dog trainer was there with his dog, London, who was going to perform at the opening of
The Littlest Hobo
. At that very moment, London was demonstrating tricks, like taking a pen out of my father’s pocket with his teeth.
    “Doesn’t Louise look