Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His A

around three o'clock in the morning, with a stab of foreboding. In the dim light, he noticed that King wasn't in his bed. Worried, he checked the bathroom and the common room, but his friend was nowhere to be found. He thought about calling hotel security. Then he remembered the balcony.

He opened the sliding door and found King there, in his pajamas, leaning over the railing, lost in thought. Even as Abernathy drew near to his side, King didn't seem to register his presence.

Abernathy and King had been together since the beginning--since the Montgomery bus boycott and the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They'd met in 1951 when Abernathy, a native Alabaman and World War II veteran, was a student pursuing a master's degree in sociology. Since then, they'd marched together, tasted tear gas together, gone to jail together. And nearly everywhere they went in their ceaseless travels, they shared the same hotel room. They were inseparable friends--'a team,'¹⁹⁵ as Abernathy put it, 'each of us severely crippled without the other.' But in all those turbulent years, Abernathy had never been so worried about his friend. He feared that King might have received another letter from the FBI,¹⁹⁶ urging him to commit suicide. He worried that suicide was what King vaguely had in mind now, as he leaned out over the balcony.

'Martin,' he said. 'What you doing out here this time of night? What's troubling you?'

King didn't reply at first. He just stood there, arms draped over the railing. He stared and stared at the ocean. 'You see that rock out there?'¹⁹⁷ he finally said.

Abernathy looked over the dark water and saw a huge rock in the bay, waves frothing around it. 'Yeah, I see it,' he said, puzzled.

'How long you think it's been there?' King asked.

'I really don't know. Centuries and centuries. I guess God put it there.'

The waves smashed and hissed. 'You know what I'm thinking about?' King said.

'No, I really don't.' Abernathy's concern was edging into annoyance. 'Tell me.'

'You can't tell me what I'm thinking about, looking at that rock?'

Abernathy only shook his head--he was irritated by this cryptic guessing game.

In the silence, King started singing a hymn. 'Rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.'

Now Abernathy understood. It was the old hymn they'd sung together many times before, a reverie about approaching death, about finding comfort in the final hours. Though he was now thoroughly spooked, Abernathy joined in, and for a time the old friends sang out over the sea breeze of Acapulco:

While I draw this fleeting breath

,

When mine eyes shall close in death

When I soar to worlds unknown

,

See thee on thy judgment throne

,

Rock of ages, cleft for me

,

Let me hide myself in thee

.

13 FACES ARE MY BUSINESS

ONE OF THE self-help books that the Reverend Xavier von Koss recommended to Eric Galt, Psycho-Cybernetics, by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, was a slender paperback with a blazing orange cover. The book claimed to offer 'a new technique for using your subconscious power' by incorporating recent discoveries from the emerging world of computers.

Galt studied Psycho-Cybernetics closely. Throughout this strange little book, Dr. Maltz drew an analogy between the human personality and 'servo-mechanisms' like the electronic computer. He proposed to show how a person could lead a happier, more fulfilled life by following some of the same ruthlessly goal-oriented processes that 'servo-mechanisms' use to accomplish assigned tasks and solve computational problems.

'Your brain and nervous system¹⁹⁸ constitute a goal-striving mechanism which operates automatically,' he wrote. Maltz's basic point was that, much like a computer, the human personality craves a central, organizing goal. Said Maltz: 'The automatic creative mechanism¹⁹⁹ within you can operate in only one way: It must have a target to shoot at.'

The trick to happiness and fulfillment, Maltz argued, is 'to purge all memory of past failures' while developing what he called a 'nostalgia for the future.' All along, one must keep 'the desired end-result constantly in mind,' aggressively seizing every opportunity to move toward it. 'You must go on the offensive,' Maltz stressed, while focusing the mind much like the electronic brain that drives a self-guided weapon. The goal-striving mechanism, he said, 'works very much as a self-aiming torpedo or missile seeks out its target and steers its way to it.'

In Psycho-Cybernetics, Dr. Maltz was fond of quoting a line from Emerson: 'Do the thing and you will have the power.' The goal cannot be some far-off abstraction that one loosely dreams and procrastinates about; it must be a sharp goad for intense activity and applied effort.

'Don't think before you act.²⁰⁰ Act--and correct your actions as you go along,' Maltz advised. 'It is the way all servo-mechanisms must work. A torpedo does not 'think out' all its errors in advance. It must act first--start moving toward its goal--then correct any errors which may occur.'

Oddly, Dr. Maltz was neither a psychologist nor a computer specialist but a plastic surgeon. For years he had cut away on the faces of burn victims, sufferers of congenital birth defects, survivors of traumatic car accidents, and unlucky souls cursed with harelips and cleft palates.

Dr. Maltz loved his work and claimed that the personalities of his patients often changed dramatically after their procedures--they brightened, blossomed, and began to move successfully toward their goals. 'When you change a man's face²⁰¹ you almost invariably change his future,' Maltz wrote. 'A plastic surgeon does not simply alter a man's face. He alters the man's inner self. The incisions frequently cut deep into the psyche.'

ON MARCH 5, perhaps prompted by his reading of Psycho-Cybernetics, Galt visited a prominent plastic surgeon,²⁰² Dr. Russell Hadley, in his medical office on Hollywood Boulevard. A bearish, likable man, and a former medic in World War II, Dr. Hadley now taught on the staff of the USC Medical School. Galt was scheduled to have a rhinoplasty--a nose job.

Galt wanted the tip of his nose sculpted to make it appear less bulbous. When Dr. Hadley asked why, Galt replied that he was an actor seeking cosmetic improvements because he had begun to land some enticing roles in TV commercials. 'I casually told him,'²⁰³ Galt later said, 'that I thought the surgery would enhance my prospects, and the doctor saw nothing out of the ordinary.' Galt had other features he wanted to alter--most notably his prominent ears, which always had been a source of embarrassment to him--but he'd save those procedures for another day. 'The ears,'²⁰⁴ Galt said, 'would have to wait.'

Hadley informed him that the fee for the rhinoplasty procedure was two hundred dollars, and Galt promptly paid in cash. On the medical form, Galt gave his address as 'the St. Francis Hotel' and listed his nearest relative as a 'Carl L. Galt,' of Birmingham, Alabama.