Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,24

these flourishes could be traced directly back to the Colonel. “He saved me,” Thomas later said of Sanders. It was a secular psalm uttered by hundreds of others, farm-road and whistle-stop chefs whose lives and ambitions and properties had been tied up in the perilous work and Sisyphean trials of making a business stick. Then the Colonel appeared in their doorway, looking like a cross between Mark Twain and Santa Claus, with his original recipe.

The media-consuming public took to the Colonel with the same wonderment that everyone else seemed to. Having finally achieved success in his sixties after so much grief, Sanders next managed unfathomable fame in his seventies, looking the part of a zany, old-fashioned Appalachian chicken genius in commercials, B movies, and on Lawrence Welk. He excelled because he had a sharp wit and keenly understood that he was a novelty act, the same spectacle maker who, forty years earlier, had ambled local fairs in a Michelin bib suit. He couldn’t be media trained or controlled or ironed flat, but still knew to exaggerate the folksy hayseed in him whenever he went on the air. “He was as much at home in front of a national TV audience as he would have been back in Corbin with a two-dollar dinner customer,” his lawyer John Brown, Jr., later said. In other words, the Colonel was a ham who served chicken. He was the perfect embodiment of out-of-time gentility with his black Kentucky string tie, his carved canes, ladled-on accent, and homespun aphorisms, as well as his old-school collection of lapel pins that affiliated him with the Rotarians and the Shriners and the Masons.

Sanders would enter mainstream popular culture at one of those peculiar moments when Americans were susceptible to the dangerous allure of hearkening back—his grandfatherly visage appearing during commercial breaks from news coverage of missile crises and war in Southeast Asia and footage of police dogs, burning draft cards, and fire hoses. Here was the Colonel in black and white, here was his chicken—being demoed on live television and available by the bucket for families to share, brought to you by Geritol and a wink from our simpler agrarian past. Here was the Colonel making his first national guest spot on What’s My Line? on a Sunday in 1963, six days after John Kennedy’s funeral.

Sanders became famous, a bona fide cultural commodity. His archives at the KFC headquarters in Louisville are stocked with pictures of him with everyone from fellow chicken aficionado Alice Cooper to Jerry Lewis and Ginger Rogers. There he is, the onetime 1930s everyman, the gun-toting gas station operator of Hell’s Half-Acre, so improbably, posing in Red Square in Moscow, astride a camel in Egypt, smiling beside Dionne Warwick, shaking hands with Henry Kissinger and Zsa Zsa Gabor, receiving the Horatio Alger Award. There he is, in a portrait painted by Norman Rockwell, chief iconographer of Americana in the century of its greatest might. According to KFC, an independent survey in 1976 found him to be the second-most-recognizable celebrity in the world behind his fellow Kentuckian Muhammad Ali.*

That a cook could become world-famous for his or her chicken augured the same thing that all those advertising spends, live demos, quick slogans, and high ratings did: the arrival of American big business in its postwar iteration. Like many other entrepreneurs of his era, after gritting through countless jobs, surviving endless trials, and riding the unforgiving waves of American industry to success, Sanders would be swallowed up by the burgeoning corporate state. In 1964, a coterie of businessmen led by Sanders’s lawyer and future Kentucky governor John Y. Brown, Jr., easily convinced the seventy-four-year-old Sanders, who was overwhelmed and overextended by his empire making, to sell the licensing rights to Kentucky Fried Chicken for $2 million.

With the stroke of a pen, Sanders would turn from lifelong hustler to a ceremonial figurehead. It would prove to be a terrible deal for Sanders, financially and spiritually. The quaint mom-and-pop phase of Kentucky Fried Chicken—like much of fast food and American industry—was headed the way of heavily standardized, stand-alone stores and franchise agreements instead of handshake deals. National ad campaigns and calculated, bottom-line adjustments to the Colonel’s sacred recipes would be imposed. But Sanders didn’t know any of that yet. All too fittingly, the Colonel turned the sale into a public pageant. Somehow, he got himself booked on the Tonight show, where Sanders appeared before Johnny Carson, alongside a plexiglass coffin said to contain his $2 million in singles.

From his