“Charming, reckless, crazy Billy”: this was Grover Lewis’s first (and enduring) impression of Brammer when the men met in the early 1960s; the personality traits he listed were already prominent when Brammer left home in 1947, initially to enroll at the University of Texas in Austin as a journalism major and then, following a round of poor grades, to attend North Texas State Teachers College in Denton, north of Dallas. Brammer was admitted on an athletic scholarship. Immediately, he went to work writing for the Campus Chat, the school newspaper, covering sports, reviewing books and local music, and lampooning the gaudy social events of fraternities. A considerable portion of Brammer’s charm came from his gently self-deprecating manner. Despite this, and his wavy brown hair and brown eyes, he had trouble getting dates. Servicemen returning from the war, wearing spiffy uniforms and exhibiting an air of youthful world-weariness, wooed and won most of the girls on campus. Brammer tried to distinguish himself by becoming a swimming champ. He strained so hard at the sport that he required a hernia operation in the summer of 1948.
He lived with two roommates just off campus in a tiny prefab apartment. The place was always cluttered with empty beer bottles, bottles of Coke, candy bar wrappers, and overflowing ashtrays after evenings spent with friends listening to Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theatre on the radio. In a couple of years, the boys would buy a television set. Berle would move his show to the small screen and become the world’s first TV celebrity. More and more in the evenings, the radio sat silent in a dark corner of the apartment.
Denton was a “somnolent backwater,” said Grover Lewis, who attended North Texas State a few years after Brammer did, along with another promising young writer, Larry McMurtry. The school was a “kind of gulag operation in the boondocks, a mélange of ugly buildings surrounded by greasy eating joints.” Lewis recalled the campus fishpond: the “pool and its canopy of trees was a small, wilting patch of sylvan green the administration had not yet figured out how to pave or put to loftier use.” In 1947, the classrooms were already feeling the chilly edge of the approaching tide of McCarthyism. By and large, the tweedy teachers did not encourage intellectual freedom. Rewards were promptly dispensed for rote answers to predictable academic questions. The school was “freighted toward business and education degrees,” and “you could be judged violently nonconformist just by liking jazz,” Lewis said.
Brammer had arrived on campus attuned to Stan Kenton, from his brother’s love of the saxophone (as well as to the bluesman Big Bill Broonzy and the doo-wop singers he had heard on his parents’ radio night after night), but it was his “interest in jazz and be-bop at North Texas that was the beginning of his interest in live music and musicians as real people one could get to know from your own town, and it was all a part of his growing sophistication and hipness about things in general,” said Sidney Brammer. North Texas “had a famously innovative music department”—especially for a “backwater”—“and Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman, and Jimmy Giuffre were there just before and/or during Bill’s time.”
His immersion in live music, in addition to the time he spent swimming and diving, weakened his already frail commitment to classroom work. A report card dated June 6, 1948, shows that he flunked a course called “Elementary Math of Finance” (a warning his future wives could have used) and received Ds and C-pluses in everything else, except for a B in a “Bible as literature” course, “The Life and Letters of Paul.” His journalistic assignments absorbed his hours. He wrote pieces on Jim Crow, the poll tax, and Joe McCarthy. The editors of the town paper, the Denton Record-Chronicle, had noticed his articles in the Campus Chat and invited him to join their sports beat, his first professional activity. He sent his clippings home to his mother, who saved them carefully in a box in a closet, next to boxes full of stock certificates—H. L. had begun investing, modestly, in the economic uptick after the war—and memorabilia from her other children. Jim was studying physics at Texas A&M; the atomic bomb, credited with ending the war, had sparked his interest in alternative energies. And Rosa had married a man she met while working as a secretary at the San Marcos air base. Unlike her baby brother, she developed a good business sense and was an expert at tallying finances. Soon, she and her new husband would purchase properties in South Dallas, motels and a service station. He would manage them, and she would keep the books. They bought a small apartment complex in Oak Cliff just a few blocks from the house where Lee Harvey Oswald lived during the last months of his life.
In 1948, the number of clippings Brammer sent his mother nearly tripled. Among other events he covered that year, Lyndon Johnson announced his second run—after an unsuccessful attempt in 1941—for the US Senate, and the Campus Chat sent Brammer to profile his North Texas campaign appearance. It was Brammer’s most exciting assignment to date. He remembered his father’s stories about the young congressman and the Rural Electrification Act. He recalled the radio speech about the poor. He had been intrigued (and appalled) when Johnson, announcing his bid for the Senate seat, said, “At Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb exploded . . . a new era was born—the Atomic Age. The power that ended the world’s greatest war within forty-eight hours became ours to use, either to Christianize the world or pulverize it.”
“All his life Billy could remember with perfect clarity the first time he saw Lyndon Johnson,” Al Reinert said. “Johnson was barnstorming by helicopter that year—he was the first politician to use one”:
[Johnson’s] queer new machine came churning in just above the rally, noisy and fascinating, circling many more times than was necessary, Johnson leaning from the window and whooping, gesticulating, waving a big white Stetson, which he sailed out into the crowd as the helicopter abruptly sank to a jarring landing. Johnson emerged almost instantly, grinning broadly, tall and lanky, looking for all the world like Jimmy Stewart, and he strode toward the podium followed by a University of Texas all-American football star whom he curtly instructed to fetch his hat. Then, grasping the microphone with both hands, his legs quivering with nervous energy, he loosed an incredible torrent of promises and platitudes that somewhere included (as Billy recalled it) a brave defense of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe.
Reinert believed that “Johnson . . . won a piece of Billy’s heart that day and he owned it for the rest of both of their lives.”
The trick with the Stetson, ordering a big athletic boy to “fetch” it, was perfectly in keeping with Johnson’s controlling, insecure personality as well as with the image of the Texas Democratic Party. Brammer grasped this, later, when he researched Johnson’s background. The party projected “populist-cowboy conservatism,” a codified set of views whose emphasis on fierce independence, loyalty, and tradition was calculated to appeal to patriotic white men, on the ranch and in the city. It was an image captured in performance by the lone hillbilly singer at a county fair and by the Stetson-wearing LBJ in his whirlybird.
To his surprise, Brammer discovered that the Republican Party had always been largely irrelevant in Texas. The Democrats had kept firm control, especially since passing a poll tax in 1903, making it difficult for voters, particularly poor voters, to register unless they planned to vote Democratic. The Republicans, first organized in Texas in 1867 and associated with the abolition of slavery, were predominantly African American in the party’s beginning; years of disenfranchisement followed. Former Republican gubernatorial candidate Rentfro B. Creager once said, “What’s best for Texas is for every state in the union to have a two-party system and for Texas to be a one-party state. When you have a one-party state, your men stay in [the United States] Congress longer and build up seniority.” All battles between conservative and liberal viewpoints played out internally among the Democrats, though in truth, Brammer saw, the few liberals in the group barely got a voice.
Johnson, hovering in the sky above cotton farmers, waving his cowboy hat, wasn’t playing a role just to solidify his party’s image. “About my background, you might say Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy,” he said. To Ronnie Dugger, who, as the editor of the Texas Observer, would shortly employ Brammer to report on Texas politics, LBJ was “a wild Christian, a woman-ridden outlaw, completely mixed from the day of his birth in the slave-owning whites’ honor-ridden South, the Indian-fighting range-riders’ West, and the state that gloried in itself as if it were still a nation.” More immediately, said Bob Sherrill, a Texas newswriter, Johnson was “a trifling, undirected, boozing redneck” as a young man, “no better or worse than most others turned out by the wretched rural Texas schools of the day.”
If Johnson seemed destined for politics, in spite of his aimlessness, it was because his father had engaged in public service. “He was trying to better humanity. He didn’t have too much to show you for it,” Johnson said bitterly years later. Because the elder Johnson let the family down, scoring few political victories, drinking heavily, and losing a lot of money, LBJ came to associate “political idealism with defeat, poverty, and failure,” Dugger mused. “[If] you stand by your principles . . . you don’t succeed,” Johnson insisted. Politics is a ruthless game of give-and-take and self-promotion. He drew his strength from his stolid mother, a quietly pragmatic woman. “There is no force that exerts the power over me that [you] do,” he wrote her once. Her influence on him remained singular all his life, though their closeness withered; years later, as a US senator, he directed Brammer and others on his staff to write notes to his mother and sign his name to them.
He first moved to Washington, DC, in 1931 as an aide to Texas congressman Dick Kleberg, a first cousin of Bob Eckhardt’s. Kleberg called himself a “Boll-Weevil” Democrat, a southern conservative staunchly opposed to desegregation. His work habits were slack, and he became better known as a playboy and cockfighting enthusiast than as a congressman. LBJ took advantage of his laziness and assumed control of his DC office. Setting a killing pace for his staff, a routine Brammer would become all too familiar with, Johnson dictated as many as 320 letters a day. “I’m crazy about my work,” he wrote a friend soon after settling in Washington. “Have a Very efficient Stenographer—Jew girl about 28 who was formerly Sec. to several prom. Congressmen . . . All in all I’ll have three assistants.”
Johnson signed Kleberg’s name to the letters he composed, but already he was scheming to advance his career and his political agenda. Earlier, as a student at Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos, he had learned to appreciate the power of written communication, despite his distrust of intellectuals and writers. He edited and wrote for the campus newspaper, shaping the campus in his image. Then, working briefly as a teacher of Mexican American students in the poverty-blasted South Texas town of Cotulla, his “dream began of an America . . . where race, religion, language, and color didn’t count against you,” he said. Though he would never make his father’s mistake, draping principle like a millstone around his neck, that didn’t mean he lacked vision. And it certainly didn’t mean he didn’t have a plan.
In 1937 he was elected to Congress on a platform of Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt! His 1941 bid for a Senate seat was thwarted by Governor W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a one-man circus whose Senate campaign consisted of “the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule,” hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of radio ads, the hillbilly music of the Light Crust Doughboys, and donations collected in flour barrels from his successful mill business. He would exhort the crowds at his rallies to “Please pass the biscuits, Pappy!” His election was ensured when the Texas beer industry organized to send him to Washington—if he was no longer the governor, he couldn’t stop sales of alcohol on Texas army posts. Last-minute votes came pouring in for him, mysteriously, from counties in East and South Texas controlled by unscrupulous political bosses. Johnson staffers knew their man had probably violated federal campaign finance laws, but in the long run, Pappy was a better cheater. “Next time, sit on the ballot boxes,” FDR advised Johnson. Johnson swore, “I’ll tell you this: if I ever get in another close election, I’m not going to lose it!”
The war stalled his ambitions, but he managed to use the fighting as publicity material in his personal story: as a congressional observer on a B-26, he witnessed some air-to-air combat and was awarded a Silver Star. A Roosevelt aide described the episode as LBJ’s “politically essential plunge into the Pacific,” which polished his military bona fides and secured his status as an American hero. David Halberstam referred to Johnson’s medal as “one of the least deserved but most often displayed Silver Stars in American military history.”
Meanwhile, events were stirring in Southeast Asia that would bear somber consequences for Johnson’s political career, the US social contract, and Brammer’s life in the coming years. In 1945, the Vietnamese nationalist rebel Ho Chi Minh began battling French colonial control of his country. Though America tried to avoid the skirmish, US leaders saw an opportunity to keep Europe secure in the aftermath of the world war. America wanted West Germany to remain economically strong, while the French feared a resurgent German state. In exchange for French support of increased West German steel production, the United States committed $2.3 billion to arm French troops in Indochina. Harry Truman had put his heavy stamp on the as-yet-unrealized Lyndon Johnson presidency.
Johnson’s opponent in the 1948 Senate race was a rough old rancher and canny politician, former governor Coke Stevenson. Johnson knew he couldn’t authentically out-cowpoke the old fellow, so he took a page from Pappy’s playbook and ran a circus campaign, using Lady Bird’s Austin radio station to record a series of ads that swamped the airwaves, employing country singers and cheerleaders to appear at his rallies, and hiring a chopper as his primary means of transport. While Stevenson invited photographers to watch him clear brush on his ranch, or snap him driving patiently around the state, using his one-armed nephew as his chauffeur, Johnson was tossing his Stetson from the skies. His biggest fear was that the rotor blades would slice up a couple of kids at a rally and finish his career.
In keeping with his promise not to lose another close election, this time he lined up his own unscrupulous political boss, George Parr of Duval County, who controlled much of South Texas’s Mexican American vote through coercion, enticement, and intimidation. At the last minute, ballot box 13 in Alice, Texas, previously uncounted, gave Johnson a statewide margin of eighty-seven votes, propelling him toward the Senate and earning him the nickname “Landslide Lyndon.”
“I was beaten by a stuffed ballot box and I can prove it!” Stevenson yelled at reporters. In High Noon fashion, he strode, coatless, into Alice one day, headed for the bank where the ballot box rested in a vault. He was accompanied by Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, one of the lawmen who had ambushed Bonnie and Clyde. At the bank entrance, Hamer, flashing the pistol in his holster, frightened Parr’s heavily armed guards into stepping aside. No matter. Though a quick glimpse of the voting lists convinced Stevenson and his men that irregularities abounded—names of dead people, duplicated names, penciled-in additions, dozens of signatures all in the same hand—the men were not allowed to copy any information. They could prove nothing later. Eventually, the box 13 mystery ballots disappeared.
That the showy politician who had won a piece of Billy Brammer’s heart wasn’t perfect didn’t bother Brammer overmuch. “Billy . . . was not so naïve as to think that politics, especially Texas politics, was as decorous and principled as people were accustomed to pretending,” Al Reinert said. “On the contrary Johnson’s impressive [box 13] majorities merely underlined the deeper mystery of the man’s phenomenal vitality.” Brammer kept his eye on the freshman senator. When Governor Beauford Jester died unexpectedly in office in 1949, and Allan Shivers took over, Brammer saw how Johnson courted the conservative “Shivercrats” back home even as he continued to espouse New Deal policies in Washington. Everyone wanted to know where Lyndon really stood on the issues. Brammer grasped that Johnson stood for himself, though his outrageous drive suggested he was guided by some profound personal vision. The precise nature of Johnson’s contradictions would come to vex Brammer, but contradiction itself he well understood. He had heard it in that very first radio address he had listened to nearly ten years earlier, when Johnson bemoaned the plight of the poor. “A regional rhetoric is more than a way of talking, it has a content,” Ronnie Dugger once said. “Southern American experience is embedded in the southern literary rhetoric—nostalgia for gallantry and the splendor of returning cavalry officers; defeat; bitterness; revenge; personal racial guilt; a melancholy. The Western rhetoric, though, is lit up by the new hope and adventure of the frontier, the spirit of conquest, a man’s pride in taking a risk, in offhand daring.” Like Johnson, Brammer had “received his being” in the “rocky fracture of the great American state that is both South and West.” They shared a regional rhetoric and a conviction that in contradiction, politics found its core. Principle or the search for perfection would get you nowhere—lost in the dark thickets of South Texas. It was in the dirt and shame of acting, and in honestly examining your acts, that politics found its direction and its opportunities for incrementally bettering the world. Standing in an Oak Cliff alley and throwing rotten tomatoes at black boys to win the approval of your friends, all the while knowing that what you were doing was awful and that you damn well better find a way to avoid this situation in the future: that was politics.
Brammer’s editor at the Campus Chat was a quiet boy named Bruce Henderson, from McAllen, on the Texas-Mexico border near the international bridge to Reynosa, where Doc Brinkley sold his goat glands on the air. Before enrolling in school, Henderson had worked as a dust pilot, swooping low in a Piper Cub over the cotton fields and citrus groves of the Rio Grande Valley, spraying crops. Sometimes, in buzzing the fields, he would dip under the electric wires strung by Texas Power and Light. Brammer loved his daredevil flying stories and his descriptions of the lazy palm trees and fertile wet fields of the valley, where the Rio Grande emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. One day, early in 1950, Henderson told Brammer that a friend of his from McAllen, a young woman majoring in art, had enrolled at North Texas State and that Brammer might like to meet her. Henderson knew his pal had just lost a girl he had been dating to an Olympic diver from Dallas. To his friend from McAllen, Henderson described Brammer as “an intellectual and an athlete.”
Nadine Cannon was a dark-haired beauty, short and petite. When she arrived at North Texas State, she still wore the pink angora sweaters she had adopted as a uniform in high school to match the ideal feminine model presented in Frank Sinatra’s song lyrics, but she had cut her hair short, like Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls. She began to buy earrings and Mexican shoes. For a Christmas issue of the school newspaper, Henderson snapped a picture of her wearing a metallic-blue bathing suit and smiling up at a fraternity boy, clearly delighted by the gift of this gorgeous girl.
In her memoir, Duchess of Palms, Nadine wrote that her first impression of Brammer, when Henderson introduced them in the Campus Chat office, was underwhelming: “[He] looked to me like a Dallas hood, or a pachuco from the Valley. He had a ducktail haircut, blue suede shoes, and a slouchy walk. He wore his collar turned up.” Brammer could sit as still as a doll and nothing about him engaged Nadine “until he spoke.” Right away, she learned how witty he was, funny and curious—well read and knowledgeable about politics. He tossed off S. J. Perelman zingers. Before they parted that day, she realized, “I had never met anyone like Billy Lee Brammer.”
Initially, their meetings always included Henderson. The three of them would get together for Mexican food, to fantasize about living in Europe and sitting in sidewalk cafés. They would make fun of the fraternities and sororities on campus, though all of them had pledged. Eventually, Brammer and Nadine started hanging out at his apartment alone, drinking Pernod or Cointreau and Tom Collins mix, smoking cigarettes, listening to Bolero. It was a period when hatred of communists dominated American politics; in 1950, students at North Texas State were forced to pledge a loyalty oath to the United States. The young couple considered themselves too sophisticated for that sort of knee-jerk nonsense—they were ahead of their peers in their awareness of music and art. “We were copacetic,” Nadine told me, largely because they both loved to dance. They would attend performances by the North Texas State Laboratory Jazz Band and by R&B bands from Ft. Worth, Deep Ellum, and Houston in clubs in the seedier parts of Denton. “If you look at photos of Bill and Nadine (before North Texas and after) you can see that they both made physical transformations from the general World War Two big band dance couple look to a much more hipster look one would associate with smoky jazz clubs and east coast sophistication,” their daughter Sidney said. “Nadine kept cutting her hair very short, Bill lost his jocky look and went for thin ties and khakis instead of letter sweaters and jeans/overalls.”
Many years later, Nadine insisted she was a “very straight girl” when she first met Brammer. He was the daring, rebellious one: “Everyone loved Bill; he was charming, witty, gentle, and nonthreatening . . . Men liked him because he could talk sports and was athletic, intelligent, and naughty. Women liked him because he asked questions about their lives and actually listened when they answered—and because he was naughty,” she wrote. But the more Brammer got to know her, the more he learned about her past, and he realized that a “restlessness . . . simmered just under [her] sweet persona: the picante.” She was “straight” only in projecting a proper middle-class façade in public. Brammer kept trying to loosen her up. “One night he told me that I needed to speak all the words I was avoiding,” she recalled. “He said, ‘I want you to yell “shit” as loud as you can yell it, so you can understand what I’m telling you.’ We drove around the square in Denton, with me hollering ‘shit!’ as loud as I could.”
Nadine decided, “We were just bizarre enough for each other,” but her wildness, her fierceness, far exceeded his. Her childhood had been tough. She barely knew her father, a musician named Leslie Wells. Before Nadine was born, he played organ scores for silent films in Oklahoma City. He joined the Orpheum Circuit, a national booking agency for vaudeville shows and movies. In grand old theaters built along the North Canadian River, in plush auditoriums with soft gas lighting, he wore a white tuxedo and raced his fingers across the Wurlitzer’s keys. He had the same reckless love of art that Brammer would exhibit. Despite the surface glitz, life was hard; the musicians’ union often struck for higher wages. Oklahoma City became known as a difficult place to book shows. Finally, the talkies put prematurely embittered men like Leslie Wells out of business.
His wife, Nadine Ellen Thompson, a theater manager in the city, knew a friend who owned a farm in the Rio Grande Valley. The friend invited the couple to come work the land. Their little girl, named after her mother, was born in a McAllen farmhouse on January 20, 1931. Working in the fields did not suit Leslie Wells. Soon, he became drunk and abusive. His wife left him, taking her kids—Nadine and her older brother, Leslie—and went to work as a waitress in a bar. Nadine’s father fled the valley, leaving her only a large black-and-white photograph of him wearing a black tux, seated in front of an organ. She spent hours dreaming over the picture, trying to reconcile the man’s warm glamour with the silent anger his name provoked in her mother.
Two Mexican women fed Nadine and her brother while their mother worked at the bar each day. Finally, Nadine’s grandmother Rose moved to McAllen from the Texas Panhandle to tend the kids. She was a quiet, powerful woman, proud of her independence. She walked two miles every morning, rain or shine. Nadine admired her steady strength—learned, Rose said, entirely on her own: she had never had any use for men.
Just before Nadine entered first grade, her mother married a gentle forty-year-old bachelor, a policeman named Noah Cannon. Though lacking the glamour of the man in the tux, he radiated comfort and calm. With a pencil-thin mustache, he looked like Clark Gable gone to fat. Nadine loved the stiff blue uniform he put on every morning to go to work, with its shiny cap and silver badge. When she grew a little older, more aware, she would fret whenever he left the house. Once, he had had to kill a prisoner in the front seat of his patrol car when the man went for his gun. Frequently, he had to bust up gang fights between Mexicans and whites in the tiny town of Pharr, where he became the chief of police.
When Nadine reached the cusp of puberty, her brother, always a sullen, disruptive kid, tried to molest her sexually. “[He had] a desire to harm me. He was jealous of my friends, my grades, and my mother’s obvious delight [in me] . . . I began to truly hate him,” Nadine said. “I escaped his advances only because he was physically small and not very smart.” Frightened, ashamed, she didn’t tell her mother or Daddy Noah. For a while, she became wary around boys, but she also kept an eye on her mom: ever since remarrying, Big Nadine had done everything she could to please her man, dressing prettily, cooking pork roasts and Parker House rolls on her big kitchen range. Nadine understood that this was a better routine than waitressing in a bar. “Success, I concluded, meant finding the right provider,” she said, even if boys were not to be trusted. Her insight grew messier when she experienced her “first sexual feelings watching Gene Autry sing by the campfire.” Male bodies could excite as well as frighten: a mighty confusing state of affairs. The Autry movie played at the Queen Theatre, which her mother now managed for extra money. Maybe Nadine’s grandma was right—men weren’t any use, really. They didn’t guarantee success.
Still, by the “time I was thirteen, I was boy-crazy, running around with my girlfriends, flirting with the cutest, nicest boys, and feeling insecure about whether or not they liked me,” Nadine wrote. “Dicky Harris gave me my first kiss, planting it on my forehead as we danced at the Fox Hole,” a recreation hall whose crowning glory was a jukebox featuring “One O’Clock Jump.” “When boys started giving me valentines, Christmas gifts, etc., I wondered why . . . I felt unaffected by it until, after noticing the envy of my girlfriends, I realized that my effect on boys was a form of power . . . I learned to juggle the endless stream of men and somehow, in my confused way, I felt I had to be absolutely wonderful for each and all.”
Sailors and fliers home from the war, stationed at Moore Field Air Force Base, gave Nadine plenty of attention, though she refused to date them. By the time she got to high school, she and her friends, including Bruce Henderson, would drive regularly to Reynosa to spend long evenings at nightclubs and restaurants, where they could drink zombies, hurricanes—“all kinds of weird stuff,” Nadine said—no matter how young they were, and where they would jitterbug and rumba until their high heels broke. In addition to the drinks, the kids could easily—and cheaply—obtain five-milligram tablets of Benzedrine. Promoted, on and off the black market, as antidepressants and weight loss aids, the pills would perk them up and keep them dancing, according to the young war veterans they met in the clubs; the vets had learned of the pills’ stimulating effects when the air force dispensed them to bomber pilots flying long runs.
“Always, on the way home from the Monte Carlo Club, someone would have to get out of the car to throw up,” Nadine said. “My mother and I had a parrot on the screened porch of our house. My dates would kiss me good night and the parrot would whistle and scare them half to death.
“Guys loved me. I had several boyfriends. One would be for dancing. One would be for something else.” In her memoir, she wrote, “I managed to avoid real sex no matter how much tequila I drank, until curiosity and competitiveness with my girlfriends got the best of me. I had my first [encounter] with a boy to whom I was sexually attracted, but it was messy and painful, not what I had expected. I didn’t want to go out with him again.”
At seventeen, she was “chosen Duchess of Palms by audience applause at the Palace Theater,” she wrote. “This meant I was to represent McAllen in the annual Citrus Fiesta, a Valley-wide celebration of the citrus industry. My picture was in the newspapers, and the Chamber of Commerce gave me one hundred dollars for a gown of my choice, which was palm green, of course . . . I loved being Miss Hot Shit.”
Soon enough, she realized there was nothing but a downward spiral if she stayed in the valley. Unless she got out, marriage and Parker House rolls were all she could anticipate. She lasted three days in a local business college, a little longer at a nearby junior college, and then, after saving money from a job at a McAllen drugstore, she enrolled at North Texas State.
Bill Brammer was not as traditionally handsome as some of the boys she had danced with in Reynosa, but “his whole effect was very sensual and attractive to women,” she said, and he was the first young man to stimulate her mind. Almost immediately, “he seemed to be more certain than I was that [our] union was meant to be,” she said. She wasn’t convinced until Easter vacation. She had driven with friends from Denton to McAllen to visit her family. At the end of the week, on the way back to school, she and her buddies were cruising in an open Oldsmobile convertible, speeding, “passing cars on the wrong side of the road, beer cans flying out of the car, when someone said, ‘Hey, was that Bill Brammer in that Chevy that just went by?’”
Nadine ordered her friends to turn around. Brammer had stopped by the side of the road. She got out of the car. “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked him.
“Driving you back to school,” he said. He had come hundreds of miles just to see her.
Nadine waved good-bye to her friends. He cranked up “Rag Mop” on the radio, and they sped away.
A few days later, on April 20, 1950, about four months after they had met, they eloped to Lewisville, Texas, interrupted a one-legged judge’s game of dominoes, and asked him to marry them. Across the street from the judge’s house, a Pentecostal revival tent had been erected in a vacant lot. While the couple said their vows, the Holy Rollers chanted and clapped and a loud little boy shouted his spiritual testimony. Brammer was one day shy of twenty-one. Nadine was nineteen. The young lovers didn’t really know what they were getting into, she admitted later: “We just wanted to keep having a good time, keep going on with our educations. Do what we were doing.” Living together “in sin” wasn’t an option in 1950s Denton. Marriage had the practical benefit of keeping Brammer from the draft. It kept Nadine from returning to the valley. “My mother didn’t like Bill. She lost five pounds the week I married,” she told me. “She really wanted me to marry the mayor’s son. But it was my hometown and I just thought, ‘Yuck.’ I was up for something different.”
In her memoir, she wrote of the great ambivalence she felt after consenting to wed: “Call it impulse, intuition . . . whatever it was, our decision to marry was not rational.”
To me, sixty-five years later, she said simply, “We were stupid.”
Back in Denton, Brammer and Nadine found a small apartment and resumed their course work. Somehow, they imagined that his part-time job as a sportswriter for the Denton-Record Chronicle would keep them afloat. That first semester, borne by the energy of their optimism and the commitment they had sworn to each other, they both made the dean’s list for the first time. Because they were both photogenic, they appeared in a university publication touting the journalism program—“What Makes a Top Newsman?”—Brammer copyediting pages with Nadine gazing over his shoulder.
She fixed tacos almost every night—all she knew how to cook. Between classes and stringing for the paper, Brammer survived on Dr Peppers and candy bars. The pages flying out of his typewriter were smeared with chocolate and x-ed out sentences. “His copy was messy, but it was always good,” Nadine said.
She introduced him to Benzedrine tablets. Amphetamines were readily available in American drugstores, sold as diet pills, as was Dexamyl, a combination of an amphetamine and a barbiturate, recommended for mental and emotional distress. In 1947, the American Medical Association had approved amphetamines for weight loss. By 1949, Smith, Kline and French in Philadelphia, among other pharmaceutical laboratories, was manufacturing well over fifty-five million tablets a year and racking up annual sales of over $7.3 million. “Everyone had their stash of diet pills . . . swallowed them with their orange juice,” said Jay Milner, who would become a friend of Brammer’s:
On-the-go, up-and-coming executives of all persuasions popped them to keep up with the competition. It wasn’t speed; they were only Diet Pills. It was like you were the only one who knew they gave you an edge. Distinguished believers in the Hippocratic oath got ever richer and richer dispensing prescriptions for the little boogers, and there was no warning on the label. Stealing pills from each other’s medicine cabinets became a common compulsion. Merely a misdemeanor. It wasn’t against the law to buy or sell these pills then. Nobody had mentioned the danger. Flip-outs were blamed on other things—like a fundamental weakness of character. Most people claimed they could take them or leave them. Others found they could not.
Brammer was grateful to Nadine for alerting him to the drugs’ amazing effects. “I used [them] to cram for tests—stay up all night and forget everything as soon as I took the exam. But Bill liked [them]. I mean, he really liked [them],” Nadine said. He said the pills helped him with his writing. He could type for hours, nonstop. He wanted to devote more time to his desk, not just for his sports columns but also for his literary ideas. In the last two years, Norman Mailer had published The Naked and the Dead, J. D. Salinger had come out with The Catcher in the Rye. It was an exciting period for the American novel, and Brammer was eager to test his imagination. He gave Nadine all of Fitzgerald’s books to read. She absorbed them with intense concentration. She believed her young husband could become a famous author and support them with his talent.
Visits with Brammer’s parents led to the first domestic trouble. She adored H. L. and Kate. Sweet people. Unlike her mother, they were delighted with the marriage. But the degree to which they indulged her husband alarmed her. “His mother would cry when Bill came home because he was her baby boy,” she recalled. H. L. refused him nothing. He lent the couple money. He “gave Bill a car that he had used in his work. It was a Chevy in mint condition. Bill could hardly wait to trade it in on something nicer, but more expensive to maintain, a Pontiac of some kind. At the time I didn’t have the maturity to question this, so he kept on doing it.” Within just a few months, she learned that he “was entirely unable to manage money. He spent foolishly—compulsively. He bought things on credit; life became a constant search for money to pay off what he had already bought.” In the next six years, he would purchase nine cars, “everything from a Morris Minor to a Jaguar to a Plymouth station wagon.”
Toward the end of 1950, attempting to address Nadine’s debt fears, Brammer decided to apply for the Aviation Cadet Training Program. His brother had told him military pay might provide a nice supplement to their future income. It could create a “more pleasant life for us,” Brammer told his bride, besides which, “I’m sure I’ll be stunning in a uniform. Particularly a hat. I always look good in a hat.” His only worry was getting shipped overseas. He didn’t think he was cut out for “electronic countermeasures,” but, he assured Nadine, “there are also openings in psychological warfare and foreign propaganda—more along my lines.” On December 10, he took a physical at Carswell Air Force Base in Ft. Worth. He passed, despite a touch of asthma and the presence of seven cavities in his teeth. Four cavities was the air force’s upper limit, but Brammer talked the doctor into fudging the report. By February 7, 1951, he had lost his chance to be considered for Officer Candidate School. He scored 171 points on an exam requiring a minimum of 255. He discarded his dream of flight.
He cast about for other ways to be solvent. The Caller-Times, a newspaper in Corpus Christi, on the southern Texas coast, was looking for a sportswriter. He applied for the post and got it. He had helped Nadine pass her reporting courses, and she had gotten him through Spanish. All that remained for him to graduate was to take a correspondence course on the Bible. He received his diploma in the mail at the small apartment he had found in Corpus Christi.
His boss at the Caller-Times was a friendly workaholic named Roy Terrell, who would soon move east to write for Henry Luce’s fledgling Sports Illustrated magazine. Eventually, he would become its editor and a conduit for Texas writers hankering to work in New York. The story went that Luce, cofounder of Time, attended his first baseball game when a friend took him to the World Series between the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Luce was the son of missionaries, and he had been raised in China. The cheering crowds astonished him. “What’s this all about?” he said to his friend. “It’s sports, Henry. Americans love sports,” his buddy replied. “Maybe we ought to do something about it,” Luce said. Initially, Sports Illustrated floundered, covering dreary dog shows, yacht races, and polo. But then a new editor, Andrew Laguerre, brought in a posse of Texas cowboy-scribes. Laguerre was a Frenchman with an instinctive understanding of American populism, and the link between Hollywood westerns and sports narratives. The Texans “had a touch of irony,” said the Houston journalist Thomas Fensch. They carried chips on their shoulders, and a “we’re-better-at-this-than-anybody-else attitude.” Laguerre hired Terrell, Dan Jenkins, and Bud Shrake, the last two from the Ft. Worth Press; both eventually became Brammer’s great pals. In 1951, at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, under Roy Terrell’s guidance, Brammer got a taste of the driving professionalism that would transform the New York magazine world.
It wasn’t all work in Corpus Christi. Once the deadlines had been met for the day, Caller-Times sportswriters and photo editors gathered with Terrell at the Oso Pier, a long wooden walkway at the remote southern end of Ocean Drive, featuring a bait house and a small amusement center. They would drink Schlitz and Falstaff beers and eat boiled crab. They would shoot pool and pick fried shrimp out of paper sacks. It cost twenty-five cents to fish off the edge of the pier with a cane pole, a nickel to cool your throat with a Coke. Brammer would join the group late in the day, perching on Pearl beer crates to drink and tell jokes, to sniff the salt air. It was strictly a boys’ club. Sometimes marine science profs from Corpus Christi College or Texas A&I, in nearby Kingsville, would join the journalists. Photographs of the time show young ladies wearing tight white shorts and cotton shirts tied at the midriff mingling with the group, fishing and flirting with the men.
Nadine, kept from these festivities like all the other wives, knew no one in town. She would shop for the same old beef and cheese each day, fix tacos at night, drive out to Padre Island to read in the sun. From the first, she hated Corpus Christi—a blinding impression of too much blue, too much open flatness, too many sun-baked tennis courts. She feared it was a physical manifestation of the landscape of her marriage. Later, she remembered thinking, “What a ghost town.”