Film, book resurrect flamboyant politician

BATON ROUGE, La. -- For his first meeting with presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, Huey P. Long dressed in his flamboyant Kingfish mode: plaid suit, purple shirt and pink necktie.\nDuring lunch, Roosevelt's mother gazed down the table at the United States senator in the garish outfit.\nShe whispered: "Who is that awful man?"\nSeventy years after his assassination, one of America's most infamous politicians still triggers strong curiosity.\nIn a movie opening Friday, Sean Penn stars as a charismatic Southern politician, modeled after Long rising fast and dying young. A new biography reveals that when he was killed Long faced probable federal indictments on tax charges. \nLouisiana's capital city is in the midst of an ongoing fixation with Long: two permanent museum exhibits, a freshly cleaned, life-sized statue on the Capitol lawn and a new downtown restaurant dubbed Kingfish -- the nickname Long gave himself.\nPenn says Long's story remains relevant because Long tried to help the Louisiana poor endure the Great Depression.\n"The amount of hope he gave people then and continues to today ... it's probably the most timely aspect of this story: his finding a way to make people feel recognized," Penn says.\nCorruption and autocracy are also part of Long's legacy. Suspicions are rife in Congress and elsewhere that Long-style graft continues to blossom in Louisiana, a state now receiving billions in federal relief money after last year's hurricanes.\n"There is a crying need to resurrect Huey and to apply his story to today's Louisiana politics," said Richard D. White Jr., author of "Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long," released earlier this year. "We're getting a huge amount of money, and I'm not very sanguine about our ability to handle it."\nThe story of the Kingfish has already been used as fodder for fiction, biography and film. It was the basis of the Robert Penn Warren novel, "All the King's Men," winner of a 1947 Pulitzer Prize. Warren's book became an Academy Award-winning movie in 1949, starring Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge.\nThis year's remake stars Penn, Anthony Hopkins and Kate Winslet.\nWhite says his new biography is intended as an update of "Huey Long," T. Harry Williams' hefty 1970 Pulitzer Prize-winner: "A book that is fun to read but still scholarly done, that's not 900 pages, that gets across Huey Long, this menace to democracy"