The Nation: Cornelia: Determined to Make Do

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HER dark eyes misty but her soft voice carefully controlled, Cornelia Wallace courageously faced television cameras shortly after the shooting of her husband. She proclaimed his determination to recover: "He didn't earn the title of the 'Fighting Little Judge' for nothing." She had passed the word that the Governor would continue to campaign "in a wheelchair if necessary," and that in the meantime she was willing to carry on for him on the campaign trail. Those who know Cornelia Wallace well are confident that her special blend of charm and toughness would make her a highly effective substitute.

The political role would be a new one for Cornelia. Since their marriage 16 months ago, she has mainly preferred just to walk on with George, wave to the crowd and be there at day's end to provide what she has called "the emotional response" that he needs when he gets so "very lonely" while traveling. Cornelia, who is 33 (19 years younger than her husband), is smart, ambitious for both him and herself and experienced in the ways of politics. Although she sees herself more as "a Huck Finn" than "a Southern belle," her favorite fictional heroine is Scarlett O'Hara. "You saw what she did with that lumber company," Cornelia recently recalled. "When she had to, she took over that business and made a success of it. She made do for herself." In the face of her husband's probably permanent paralysis, Mrs. Wallace is determined to "make do" for him.

Cornelia first met Wallace at a party in the Alabama Governor's mansion when her uncle James ("Kissin' Jim") Folsom was a party-loving Governor and she was only eight years old. "My two little cousins and I were peeping down the stairs in our nightgowns and the Wallaces saw us. They walked up the stairs and talked to us and held us." At the time, Wallace, a state legislator, was married to his first wife, Lurleen, who died of cancer in 1968 after succeeding him as Governor in the same mansion.

A country girl actually raised in a log cabin in Elba, Ala. ("We used to go fishing for mud fish in the Pea River —that's what it was called"), Cornelia heard constant talk of politics from her twice-widowed mother, Ruby Folsom Ellis Austin,* who served as official hostess for her brother before he remarried. Cornelia's father, Charles G. Ellis, a civil engineer, died in 1960. At Montgomery's Methodist Huntingdon College and Florida's Rollins College, Cornelia studied voice and piano. Then she slipped into what she calls "my little hillbilly jag." She sang and played guitar, toured Australia and Hawaii with Country Singer Roy Acuff, and wrote and performed two recorded songs for MGM: It's No Summer Love and Baby with the Barefoot Feet.

Her tawny good looks and shapely legs (she is 5 ft. 6 in., one inch shorter than George) carried her to the semifinals of a Miss Alabama contest before she became the star of the Cypress Gardens water ski show in Florida —and married John Snively III, a millionaire whose family at one time owned the Gardens. After seven years of marriage and two sons, Jim and Josh, the Snivelys were divorced in 1969.