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The People. The police tried to get the Governor to leave the car for an interview with three examining doctors. He refused, insisted that the doctors could talk to him in the car. As aides went off to get the doctors, Earl moaned over and over, "Goddam, all because of a woman, all because of a woman." The doctors came, spoke to Earl through the open car window. Plaintively, he begged them to let him go on to his farm, but the doctors refused. At last the two detectives eased into the car, firmly helped him out, led him to another automobile with two other officers. As they drove off, the crowd pushed back, waving. "Goodbye, Governor!" they called. "So long, Earl."
Heading east, Ole Earl simmered down, began chattering away with his small talk again, somehow confident that he was being returned to New Orleans. As the police car sped through town after town, Louisianians, who had heard the news on the radio, lined the streets to wave and shout greetings, and Ole Earl waved back. ("Don't you believe that old boy doesn't have the people with "him," said one cop later. "The way they lined up waiting for him to pass was something to see.")
Soon the car passed Madisonville, and
Earl Long looked out the window at a sign: MANDEVILLE, LA., 8 MILES. "Why, that's an asylum," said the Governor. "I hope you all aren't bringing me there." Sadly, Thompson told him. Earl, his hollow face bristled with a two-day beard, his eyes tired, fell silent. Inside the gates of the Southeast Louisiana Hospital in Mandeville, Thompson stopped the car. The Governor got out. Acting Hospital Director Dr. Charles Belcher came over to shake the Governor's hand. "I'm Dr. Belcher, Governor," he said politely. Snapped Earl: "The hell you are—you were Dr. Belcher." As the doctors took him to his room, Earl Long still insisted fervently that everybody else was crazy, that he was still Governor, still very much the boss.
Until he could be legally adjudged incompetent, or else impeached, Long was indeed officially the Governor. In Baton Rouge, turmoil mounted as top officials tried to straighten the tangled reins of government. Lieutenant Governor Lether Frazar took over the gubernatorial duties only hesitantly, "until I learn something else." Long's longtime enemy, Secretary of State Wade Martin Jr., cannily announced that Frazar's assumption of Long's job was illegal; Long's enemies hoped that the Governor would be kept locked up for the duration of his term, so that Earl would be unable to make a comeback by resigning and running for election this fall (under law he may not succeed himself). But Attorney General Jack Gremillion nipped Martin's claim quickly, declared that Frazar was legally the acting Governor until Long could resume his duties. Blanche Long, so bitterly denounced as a conspirator by her own husband, quietly fled the spotlight's glare. So did Russell Long, Earl's 40-year-old nephew—himself at odds with his uncle—who also has his eyes set on the next gubernatorial election.
Oblivious to all the confusion about him, Ole Earl Long stalked his rooms at the mental hospital, called for lawyers to help set him free. The doctors called it paranoiac schizophrenia and started plans for treatment.