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

“If you’ll name that boy after me, I’ll give him a heifer calf and he’ll have a whole herd by the time he’s twenty-one,” Johnson told Nadine.

Before she made her condition public, she had considered an abortion. Brammer knew the child wasn’t his, but he told her he wanted to stay married. He would raise the child as his own. He would try to rein in his spending. He would finish his novel and get a fat publishing contract, and they would be okay.

Berger repeated his offer to take Nadine to Detroit, but “in her usual freewheeling style, she was moving on—from him and ultimately Billy Lee,” said Shelby Brammer.

When Brammer made another swing south with the senator, Nadine saw an opportunity to ignore his wishes and terminate the pregnancy, but he “arrived home before I could get an abortion,” she said. Now, unavoidably, she faced the prospect of being a broke mother of three. She wanted to be near her parents. She wanted not to wake to another cold gray Washington morning. She wanted the sunny, expansive skies of Texas. She talked Brammer into finding a rental house in Austin—Austin would be a much better place to raise the children. Though a long-distance relationship would be hard on them both, he could come to Texas when Congress was in recess and they could work on their marriage, she told him. He found a boxy little two-story place with a screened porch and a big backyard, tucked among rangy oaks on Austin’s Enfield Road. He called the neighborhood “Coonass Gothic.” To him, the location’s best selling point was its late-night radio reception: the Mexican border stations came through crisply in that part of town, along with San Antonio’s WOAI, playing Bob Wills round the clock.

Fighting waves of morning sickness, Nadine wrote a polite letter of resignation to LBJ. He told her well, all right, he would only allow family considerations to take her away from him. He made her promise to come see him soon. Brammer moved into a dank basement room in the Betty Alden Inn, near the Senate Office Building. He rarely spent time there, preferring to catnap at night in his office.

“How do you like our bizarre house?” he wrote Nadine in April 1957, in care of her neighbors, once she had taken the girls to Austin. “Think the kids will love it. When I get there I must do something about the lights in the huge living room . . . You also better get a mail box up so I can start sending my letters there.”

His cheery attempt at domesticity left Nadine cold. She had learned from old friends that while in Austin looking for a house, he attended several wild parties. “Your sojourn here was obviously a real nightmarish, drunken interval,” she wrote back. “Am sending your brown shoes [that you forgot].” She was terribly sick in the mornings. Her letters to Brammer complained that her pals were not helping her fix the house as much as they had promised they would. She was overwhelmed with the pregnancy and care of the girls.

“I have no memories of Nadine and Billy Lee being together,” Shelby said. “He’s in DC and she’s fed up.” Her first clear memory is of Easter that year—an incident vividly recounted in The Gay Place. He came for a visit; one evening, when Nadine and the girls were out of the house, he discovered, in the refrigerator, several dyed eggs. “He [decided] he would hide them all in the backyard, in the deeper growth beyond the swings and the sandpile,” he wrote in the novel. “Then he would wait for the children and they would wander outside together and hunt for the eggs. When every one was found they would take turns hiding them all over again. He would stay close to them and they would talk; he would tell them a story, spin out a parable on what it was all about, improvise, make a speech. Surely he could think of something—anything—to say to his own lovely children.” The following morning, he awoke to Nadine shouting at the girls. They complained that the eggs were gone and that they wanted more. Nadine accused them of eating them all or of burying them somewhere. She refused to go to the store again. Quietly, Brammer suggested, “Perhaps . . . one of those big Easter rabbits came downstairs last night and hid them for the girls. Have they been in the backyard yet?” Sidney and Shelby ran outside, whooping merrily, “Rab-buts!” “Sorry,” Brammer said sheepishly to Nadine.

Early in the mornings, he would snuggle in bed with the girls to watch television cartoons. “His favorite was Tom Terrific,” Shelby said. “He was a lot of fun, like a playmate. He liked kids. Maybe it’s because he was so much of a kid himself. He’d hang out for a while and then he’d be gone: ‘See you next time.’ I just assumed that was the way things were.”

On another occasion that spring, “he drove up in a black Fiat convertible and the children just went crazy,” Nadine said. “I don’t know where he got it. It was just to dazzle the children. He was one of these guys who thought one big gesture could make up for lots of neglect. And it sort of worked.”

Perhaps he was feeling a little more flush now. At the beginning of the year, Ralph Yarborough entered a special US Senate race to fill a vacant post—Price Daniel had resigned from the Senate after winning the governorship. Yarborough offered Brammer a top press relations spot in his campaign. Johnson learned that his “boy” was about to be lured away. He flew down to the ranch with him, grabbed a bottle of scotch, and drove him in a Jeep into the dusty mesquite-tangled fields, there to apply the Johnson Treatment. Brammer knew that with “favored lady visitors,” a “livestock tour” of the ranch was a favorite LBJ tactic. One of Johnson’s secretaries told him the senator had once “recklessly wheeled” her about in the Jeep “until, pausing at a pen enclosing a couple of Democratic donkeys, [Johnson] honked his jeep horn and watched with enormous satisfaction as the Jack mounted the Jenny. ‘Ain’t that somethin’?’ he inquired with eye-rolling innuendo. ‘They show off that way ever’ goddam time!’”

Now Brammer was the one being courted. He didn’t need much persuading. Yarborough was the Texas liberals’ commander in chief, but Brammer had become disgusted with their inflexibility, and he didn’t care for Yarborough personally. Still, he was happy to drink the senator’s scotch. Yarborough had offered Brammer a steady salary and an almost unlimited PR budget. Billie Sol Estes, a wheeler-dealer in West Texas agricultural affairs, would help finance radio broadcasts; in the past, he had made his private plane available to Yarborough for statewide campaign appearances. Johnson knew all about Billie Sol, he said. (In just a few years, scandals involving Estes and Bobby Baker would seriously threaten Johnson’s political career.) You don’t want to get involved with such men, he told Brammer. Stick with me. He offered a $700 raise, “the biggest raise that LBJ has ever given anyone at one time,” Nadine wrote to her parents, impressed in spite of her anger at her husband. “Obviously, he thinks a lot of Bill.”

But the extra money and the attempts to salvage the marriage didn’t ease Brammer’s misery. “Life is hideous here [in Washington],” he wrote Nadine. “I am eating nothing but pizza and . . . hamburgers . . . It’s just dull here and I hate it . . . Damned lousy weekend in which I walked the streets and wished for you and the girls.” Occasionally, he tried to tweak Nadine’s jealousy: “[At a party] I got alternately charming, tight, more articulate than usual, drunk, drunker, hideously drunk, ravenous toward all the women, sick in the bathroom, and my sober sweet self again in the course of the evening.” The good news: he had time to read and write. Just a few pages in, Lolita seemed like a “classic,” he said. He said he had written several new pages of his novel: “I am amazing. It is pretty good so far.”

On May 24, 1957, Nadine gave birth to a boy. The couple named him Willie, after their friend Willie Morris. Almost immediately, Nadine decided she “needed a break from child-rearing”; she asked Brammer to stay in Austin with the children while she flew to DC to help LBJ with some press matters normally dispatched by her husband. She “passed a pleasant weekend in Johnson’s Washington home,” along with his secretary Mary Margaret Wiley, she said. “Lady Bird was not there. The Senator tended to business between Scotches and gossiping and trying to get his two young companions to see things his way . . . [We] defended our liberal friends. Lyndon couldn’t let it rest.” (How could she have named her baby Willie? he asked). He ranted about the Texas Observer. He bemoaned the fact that his only chance to become president lay in winning northeastern liberals by supporting a civil rights bill, in which case he’d lose the South. He was trapped in an impossible bind. Most accounts of Johnson during this period depict him as morosely depressed, uglier than usual toward his staff after his failed White House bid. But that weekend, he “kept his hands to himself, seeming . . . relaxed,” Nadine said. “I felt warmly toward him.” Clearly, he relished the company of young women.

Nadine decided she could not, would not, live without an active social life, children or no children. Upon her return to Austin, she hired a young Mexican-Irish live-in nanny to mind the kids. That summer, “I went out with my friends” almost every night, she said. “When Bill was home, we partied together.” (“You are invited to an ORGY at 2210 Enfield Road,” he addressed one invitation. “The guest list is restricted: girls girls girls! boys boys boys! This will be a really bad party”—a line from Tender is the Night—“All the wrong people are invited.”) “When Lyndon was at the ranch, we spent weekends out there, including the children,” Nadine said. “Zephyr Wright . . . churned out popovers . . . Lyndon soaked up the attention while Lady Bird saw to it that everyone had a drink and was comfortable.” From time to time, Nadine saw Johnson slip upstairs to one of the second-story bedrooms with one young lady or another.

By the end of the summer, Brammer was telling Nadine, only half in jest, “Let’s sneak away to Mexico and never come back.” She insisted she would stay in Austin—it was the best environment for the kids (though they saw very little of her)—and he had to return to DC and a secure salary. On his brief visits that fall with the children, “he was always snooping into everything I had,” Nadine said. “Well, I gave him really good reason to. I started seeing guys, and that was fun, and I just didn’t care about Bill anymore, because he had been such a screw-up. I really enjoyed Austin. We were wild and woolly.” One weekend, the Headliners Club, where the lobbyists drank, threw a bash. To Brammer’s dismay, if not to his surprise, Nadine worked hard to seduce the CBS newsman Eric Sevareid, a visiting guest—“I groupied him,” she said. Later, Sevareid would only say he had had a most enjoyable time after the gala, but he needed to go into training before accepting the hospitality of Texans: “It was the most strenuous fun I have had in ages.”

Brammer’s letters to Nadine that autumn lament the time he missed spending with her and the kids: “It is all mixed up . . . Austin sounds gorgeous . . . would like to have been there for the party [you mentioned].” All he was doing, he said, was writing his book. “People are dull and so am I.”