Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society

Issue after dogged issue, Dugger exposed and Brammer mocked. The pressure to include political commentary prevented each Brammer piece from becoming fully realized on its own—not quite story, not quite play, not quite essay. These were opinion pieces gussied up as satires. Brammer wanted to be S. J. Perelman. The Observer needed him to be I. F. Stone.

Finally, he left the American-Statesman and backed his Observer work with his name:

There is a certain intimidating circumstance concerned with putting words down on paper. The words, if you’re sober that day, are liable to fall into sentences and from these may fall an opinion or two.

And then along comes some spoilsport who holds your stuff up to the light and finds it a bit roseate.

All things are relative, though, particularly opinions adjudged as pink.

Looking around at this “hysterical, No-Think” moment in American history, encouraged by Dugger’s example, he had girded himself for direct battle with what he termed “our own mid-century Inquisition—[with] everyone [acting] . . . torpid and uncomplaining in the clutch of the Peckerwood and the Ignoranti.”

He continued to write satires, but now he also engaged in gumshoe reporting, investigating official abuses, the backroom shenanigans of lobbyists, and Texas’s political temperature. Always, he looked for the quirky detail, an image to crystallize the absurd hypocrisies underlying social behaviors. “A Department of Public Safety narcotics agent who admitted he kicked a Latin American service station attendant who was lying on the ground was found not guilty of depriving the attendant of his civil rights,” Brammer reported. The narcotics agent, W. F. Hendricks, had forced the service station attendant, Abraham Maldonado Calderon, to strip to his underwear and drop to the ground. “Hendricks said he kicked Calderon ‘three or four times on the leg . . . in order to search Calderon . . . not to deprive him of any rights,’” Brammer wrote, noting that Calderon had suffered four broken ribs.

In a profile of a San Antonio police officer suspended for participating in white supremacist activities, Brammer quoted the fellow’s lengthy anticommunist diatribe, delivered while the man’s little boy came flying through the room shooting a water pistol, shouting, “Communist, Communist, Communist.”

In another instance, Brammer coaxed an interview subject to indict himself unwittingly with his own statements. “We’ve got everything under control here,” an East Texas newspaper editor bragged to him. “I led the fight . . . There’s not going to be any mixin’ of nigger and white children in East Texas for a long, long time.” The “fight” he had led was an organized series of physical threats against community members who had asked the local school board to uphold Brown v. Board of Education.

In an article on the state treasurer, deliciously named Jesse James, Brammer raised questions about the use of public money and mentioned, in passing, “old Jesse’s private sideline, a motel on a nearby lake.” And in a piece on the public relations “huckster” Phil Fox, who had helped Allan Shivers smear both Homer Rainey and Ralph Yarborough, Brammer referred to an incident in which Texas House member Barefoot Sanders was denounced as a communist by one of his opponents. On the spot, Sanders challenged the fellow to a fistfight—a scene replayed as high farce in book two of The Gay Place.

The May 23, 1955, issue of the Texas Observer carried Brammer’s short story “The Green Board,” about a freshman member of the Texas House. The man had landed “in trouble” with his colleagues for not cozying up to lobbyists. He remembered the innocent days when he had arrived “in the Capitol with a white Stetson, a string tie, and some gaudy cowboy boots with a silhouette of the three counties he represented emblazoned across the front of them.” Four months later, the “string ties and Stetsons had disappeared, and so had the $25 a day. And so has my virginity, he thought. He wasn’t quite so naïve now. He knew, now, what was going on down here, and he didn’t like it much.” The story showed a vast improvement over “Fight Team!” After rereading Tender Is the Night, Brammer learned to balance scene setting with his characters’ interior voices. “The Green Board” predicted the matter and atmosphere of The Gay Place as well as the jaundice that would shade Brammer’s already dark view of politics. “He had lived pretty high the first month,” he wrote. “He’d brought the wife and kids down, and the $700 monthly from the State had seemed like a lot at the time. Now, the family was back home and he had been sending them money. Almost all of his last $350 check had gone that way.” If these circumstances echoed his own present affairs—the money woes and frequent separations from Nadine and the girls—the next sentences would stand as a cold prophecy of his future, his embodiment of Fitzgerald’s character Dick Diver, eroding spiritually, vanishing little by little: “At first he had lived in a rather sumptuous suite in one of the nicer hotels. Later he switched to a second-rate hostelry, and now he was in a rooming house near the Capitol.”

“He was a very special person,” Nadine would say of him later. “[But] Billy Lee never developed an adult ego state. He was my playmate—we always had fun. As long as he didn’t have to be an adult, be responsible, he was so much fun to live with.” But now with two little girls, the need for steady income, and the constant attentions of attractive men at places like Scholz’s, Nadine was not always fully present, even when she shared Brammer’s bed. More often than not, she spent weeks with her mother in McAllen, leaving him in the disorderly, dirty house. To fill his time, he began to rough out a novel about a group of Austin malcontents. He welcomed long nights in the cramped Observer office. Perhaps his humorous, self-critical editorial “A Fragile Subject,” declaring “sex” the Observer’s “missing ingredient . . . whether from sheer ennui or just plain boyish modesty,” was a cri de coeur.

The Observer’s other missing elements were art and cultural criticism, a paucity that Brammer sought to remedy with a column called “The Texas Mind.” In one issue, he profiled the Dallas journalist Paul Crume, a “slightly sad-eyed and ungainly fellow” whose prose has a “glitter to it that distinguishes him from the hundreds of hackers who daily fill the Texas prints.” This, in spite of the fact that Crume “has never done what major writers like to call ‘major writing,’” Brammer wrote. Clearly, the thrust of his column was to urge Texans toward greater ambitions. He sounded deeply aggrieved when offering reasons why so many talents in the state had failed to deliver on their promise. “Perhaps it is the novel form that intimidates people like Crume,” he wrote. “They prefer the essay, but there is no easy avenue to its recognition—particularly when it appears in so short-lived a medium as a daily newspaper.”

In few other nonacademic Texas publications of the time were people writing at this level of seriousness about the state’s literary prospects. In speaking of the terrors of the novel form, Brammer was of course talking to himself, trying to pluck up his courage.

“Billy was the first genuine, practicing literary man I ever knew,” said Willie Morris, then the editor of the Daily Texan and a Scholz habitué, quaffing foamy pitchers with Brammer after dispatching his late-night deadlines. “We talked often . . . about the books I should be reading . . . He cared passionately about literature and had confidence in his own writing. [He said] good writing endured beyond the momentary fashions, and to read, read, read.” Brammer and Dugger admired the principled stands that Morris took at the Texan. He excoriated the governor’s support of “interposition”—that is, defiance of Brown. And when the UT Board of Regents pressured Morris to stop printing pieces critical of the state’s oil-depletion allowance, he ran blank spaces on the page where editorials should have appeared.

The beer garden gave Brammer company when otherwise he faced an empty house; the people there made him feel part of a cause larger than himself—though he had never been, and never would be, a foot soldier for causes. Nadine told her parents she and Brammer considered themselves more liberal than Lyndon Johnson, but not as liberal as the Scholz crowd, Ronnie Dugger, or the rest of the Observer team. More to the point, Brammer’s piece on Paul Crume revealed directions better suited to his abilities than muckraking, and a restlessness to try them. He admired principled stands, but he was beginning to see that his talent lay in sly observations—leaving the judgments to others. Dugger ran comments from social activists to the effect that “we speak of the [Texas] slums, we shake our heads, and yet how skillful we are in resisting the full truth about ourselves!” In the same issue of the Observer, Brammer praised Crume’s writing philosophy: “[My] column is not for or against anything. We are the innocent bystander, the one that always gets shot. We have a horror of positive opinions.”

Dugger’s opinion of Lyndon Johnson was hardening. In preparation for the 1956 elections, and a possible run for the presidency, Johnson was marshaling the rules of the US Senate as his personal tools, using his position as majority leader to give the appearance of empowering colleagues while in fact subordinating their goodwill—and their votes—to his cause. His top administrative assistant, Walter Jenkins, recalled hearing LBJ, behind his closed office door, rehearsing scenarios of conversations with senators, playing both parts—himself cajoling, the other man resisting or agreeing. Johnson would act out the stories’ variations until he had locked up the narrative tight, ending always in his favor. To Jenkins, these little dramas were hilarious—like Brammer’s satirical one-act in the pages of the Observer. But Johnson understood the power of story, of shaping an image, of cause and effect.

He told different tales to northerners and southerners in the Senate. He helped Hubert Humphrey and other northern liberals pass a public housing bill while he insisted to his southern colleagues that he agreed with them—public housing was “socialism.” Off the floor, away from debate, he guided Humphrey in lining up the necessary votes while he convinced the southerners that voting against certain amendments to the bill would weaken its overall effect.

Meanwhile, to secure his home-state support, he maneuvered to place on the Democratic National Committee, as Texas’s representative, Lieutenant Governor Ben Ramsey, a “reactionary and racist . . . who presided as the dictator over the Texas Senate to the purring pleasure, protection, and profit of every corporate fat cat in the state, the oilmen most of all,” Dugger said. It was imperative that the Observer catalogue and oppose every twitch of Lyndon’s little finger. But Dugger couldn’t raise his associate’s ire. Brammer’s attention had wandered elsewhere. He had learned that Warner Bros. was set to film Giant, the screen adaptation of Edna Ferber’s overheated oil novel, in the tiny West Texas town of Marfa, near the Mexican border. The movie would star Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean. Brammer seized on the news of its production as an opportunity to reread Ferber’s novel and to pen for the Observer another thoughtful overview of Texas’s literary promise. Ferber’s book was “richly-conceived and rottenly written,” he wrote. “Instead of portraying Texans as proud, primitive, super-patriots obsessed with sheer bigness and magnitude, which many of us are, she made us out as oil-rich robber barons and feudal lords, buffoons and mountebanks, which, it is hoped, few of us are.” He concluded that the “people who make up the state of mind that is Texas” tended to be more urban than rural now, neither excessively wealthy nor exceedingly poor, but rather middle-class folk often transplanted from other parts of the country. “Miss Ferber failed to sense this,” Brammer wrote. “Perhaps the next novelist will.”

While Dugger worried that “Americans were about to be trapped in the history that Lyndon Johnson would make,” Brammer decided the Observer should send a reporter—him—to the film set in Marfa.

“He asked me to go with him—in that damn station wagon he’d traded the Nash for,” Nadine said. “I had no interest. I’d been to Marfa.”

Named for the family servant in The Brothers Karamazov, the novel the railway overseer’s wife was reading when her train paused in West Texas in 1881, Marfa was situated barely tight against the wind in a sometimes grassy desert sixty miles north of Mexico, near the Dead Horse Mountains and the cone of an ancient volcano. It consisted mostly of cattle ranches and warehouses built as prisoner-of-war barracks during World War II. The first thing Brammer noticed, pulling into town on a sunny June afternoon, was that the “townspeople [hadn’t] changed much” under the Hollywood onslaught, but the crew from Burbank had “attempted to dress like Texans.” “The women have been wearing such things as denims and stoles and stetsons [sic] and four-inch wedgies. One lady was even seen wearing riding pants and a turban,” Brammer wrote. He said the men tended toward “khakis and dress shirts and French cuffs” as well as “Jungle Jim ‘safari’ helmets”: “It’s something like seeing a mob of zoot-suited drugstore cowboys.”

Warner Bros. had leased several “mesquite-studded and stunted ranches” for the movie shoot. “Some miles out from town, south on Highway 67, there looms large on the horizon a macabre structure which should remain for years a curiosity for West Texas cattle and cowpokes. Sticking starkly out of the prairies is a three-storied Victorian mansion, all gingerbread and lightning rods, rococo and utterly inelegant,” Brammer reported in the second of two articles on the movie, in the July 4, 1955, issue of the Observer. The house was “a sham,” he said, “built in California, in prefabricated units, the simulated stone façade being plaster on wood and metal, and shipped to Texas by flatcar”: “It’s here that the crowds foregather, here and down the road a piece, to watch [director] George Stevens and several hundred slightly parboiled Californians labor in the Texas sun. It’s as if a vast, traveling circus has broken down in the midst of this desolation and set up shop for some kind of performance. There are tents and trucks and trailers and tractors, buses and vintage cars and a great, milling mob of carpenters, technicians, cosmetologists, and even an occasional moom-pitchure star.”

The gabbling activity and the equipment reminded him of the Texas Power and Light construction camps he had stayed in as a boy with his father. The two of them had, in fact, camped near here once, on a line project, by an old silver mine that was now the site of a ghost town. He liked the frenetic, temporary feel of movie lots: long black cables strewn across dry hummocks of gravel and sand. He liked the desert’s edge-of-the-world atmosphere. But what really caught his fancy was the unintentional surrealism of Hollywood’s daily business. Tumbleweeds were too scarce, here, for the director’s taste, so the studio had trucked in some from California. If the wind didn’t blow on the days the director needed it to, the crew would manufacture gales with blowers. The local range grass wasn’t green enough for the cameras, “so the moviemen simply sprayed on a green vegetable dye. It looks real pretty,” Brammer wrote.

His “dispatches from Marfa are . . . the most sophisticated writing of any Texas journalist at the time,” Steven L. Davis wrote. Brammer focused very little on the larger-than-life celebrities. Elizabeth Taylor was “every bit as pretty as she seems in the movies and bearing up well in the Texas sun, although she seems a bit slim in the shanks, a trifle weak in the pasterns.” James Dean seemed at home in the desert: “A kind of fuzzy-cheeked Marlon Brando . . . blend[ing] into the scenery . . . He looks like he’s been rolling in it, in fact. He’s what you’d call a dusty-colored fellow.” Instead, Brammer highlighted the social—implicitly political—differences between West Texas and Hollywood, between the hardworking ranchers and the California mythmakers. The movie’s fake mansion was erected “on the Worth Evans ranch,” he noted. “Mr. Evans wouldn’t even have made it as a bit player in the Ferber novel. He only has 35,000 acres.”

By the time he returned to Austin, he was already imagining a novel, or part of one, set on a movie shoot in far West Texas. Earlier in the year, Governor Shivers had made a cameo appearance in a Paramount production called Lucy Gallant, starring Jane Wyman. Brammer began to speculate on intersections between politics and Hollywood, candidates, actors, and directors. Eventually, details from his Marfa reporting, such as the fake Victorian mansion, looming on the horizon “like a great landlocked whale,” the dyed green grass, and the trucks full of tumbleweeds, would make it into The Gay Place. Says one of the characters, explaining how set technicians planned to prepare the tumbleweed scene, “It don’t tumble. Even when there’s a good wind. It just don’t tumble. So they brought out some big blowers—big ’lectric fans—to make the tumbleweed tumble when they shoot the moom pitcher.”

Still ecstatic over what he’d seen in the desert, Brammer was not in a particularly receptive mood when an anxious Dugger showed him a lengthy Newsweek article calling LBJ “THE TEXAN WHO IS JOLTING WASHINGTON.” Dugger hoped to recruit Brammer back into battle. He said he thought “the FBI or ‘The Lobby’ or some other ubiquitous, indefinable Dark Force of Reaction was engaged in tapping his and my and the Observer’s telephone lines,” Brammer recalled. “Perhaps they were being tapped—I’ve always hoped they were. There’s been precious little intrigue in my life, and . . . I’m inclined to welcome a really first-rate gang of spies and trenchcoat-flapping saboteurs.”

But before the two editors could schedule upcoming assignments or work out their growing differences about the Observer’s focus, their world wobbled on its axis. The news came in early July. Lyndon Johnson had suffered a massive heart attack.