“They don’t mix—art and politics—like Scotch whiskey and Pepsi-Cola they don’t mix,” Brammer wrote. Yet it was not until he leavened his art with politics—or more accurately, with the dynamics of American political culture—that his fiction breathed, that his clever, aimless characters found direction. When Nadine left Washington to return to Austin, she bid good riddance to a world she thought she had discarded. Politics was for suckers, she told her friends; powerful men were lechers and bullies who surrounded themselves with “asses for aides.” Johnson was the worst: “I’m sick of him . . . or his doings,” she wrote Ronnie Dugger, “and his weak little people and all the mangled personalities surrounding him.”
“Nadine is just a bitter fishwife,” Brammer told Dugger. “Pussanully, ah just loves that Lyndon.” Especially after watching Johnson shepherd the civil rights bill through the Senate, Brammer was entranced by the minutiae of the political process. It was all the more remarkable to him that anything got done, precisely because the personalities involved were so “mangled.” Personal weaknesses and political greatness (“Ever’body screws”) were intertwined in endlessly fascinating ways—the stuff of great art, of the Greek tragedies, of Shakespeare.
He wasn’t sure he would ever get the chance to develop—even on a minor scale—a Shakespearian vision. His agent, James Street, was always full of bad news, he wrote Nadine. The Heavy-Honeyed Air met with one rejection after another. It was a “big, grubby manuscript,” Brammer admitted. “I am surprised any publisher was interested [even momentarily]. It is pretty bad, though interesting in stretches.”
“I think now that it would be a mistake to continue to share it until you have had a chance to incorporate . . . revisions,” Street wrote Brammer in mid-January 1958.
Brammer told Nadine it would be damnably tough to discipline himself to stay at the book, but he would try. “People keep feeling sorry for me and asking me to dinner. It is hard to hurt their feelings and say I’d really prefer not to. Have about 60 pages of revision.”
He would sneak into Johnson’s office at night, pop a Dexamyl, and settle over the bulky typewriter at the senator’s solid old desk—Harry Truman’s vice president, Alben Barkley, had once used this desk. From time to time, one of the security guards poked his head through the doorway and offered Brammer a can of beer in exchange for forty winks on Johnson’s couch. “What grim slobs they all are around here,” Brammer wrote Nadine. The senator was the exception: “He made a beautiful speech yesterday to the Democratic Caucus . . . [I] was so inspired.”
Inspired enough to consider again a novel about a politician on a movie set, like the one he had seen in Marfa. But what would the story be? Instead, he attempted a few chapters of a novel about a set of twins, and then he sketched a couple of short stories—none of which interested Street. “I am lost,” Brammer told his wife.
Throughout 1958 and 1959, in one pill-dependent late-night session after another, Brammer wrestled with his visions and drafts, and worked his way toward essential material. That the drafts of the book were typed amid bursts of impassioned letters to his increasingly estranged wife suggests that like the letters, the book was written to keep his marriage together. “Maybe I’ll get the book published; maybe we’ll make a lot of money; perhaps they’ll take me off to jail,” he wrote Nadine.
For her part, “I was having a ball in Austin,” Nadine told me when I interviewed her in Shelby’s house in the winter of 2014. “It was so much fun, and I just didn’t care about Bill anymore. I was done with him.” She laughed. “I blew him away.”
Shelby told me later, “That evening, Nadine sat at the kitchen table, quietly looking through old photographs of Bill. After you left that day, she cried a little.”
He regularly dreamed, in snatches of sleep just before dawn, of driving around Washington while wearing his pajamas, and being stopped by the cops. They always kicked and punched him in these dreams, for no apparent reason. He hesitated to pull rank and tell them he worked for Lyndon Johnson, but then he did and they didn’t care. Worse than the blows they delivered, their indifference and disrespect disturbed him. It didn’t matter how hard he worked. He could never do enough. Then another disturbing thought: if they booked him, whom could he call? His wife wasn’t here. “What does this all mean?” Brammer typed into a journal. “Someday . . . I will be alone and defenseless and inadequate to the moment. The more I will rage the more I will be put down.”
As he worked through humid mornings in his office, writing memos, newsletters, press releases, and radio addresses for the senator, as he flitted in and out of the Robotyper room, the dream’s brutal residue flaked away. Assured by George Reedy that the senator liked his draft of a speech, or invited by Johnson to a party in the country, he felt a rush of renewed energy, aided by another Dexamyl.
In the early months of 1958, he was primed to enjoy Lyndon Johnson as much as he ever had and as much as he ever would. Johnson had fully recovered from his heart attack and from the blunt humiliation of the 1956 presidential race. He was slimmed down, relatively healthy. He was not yet agitated about the coming campaigns of 1960. He had resumed his role as undisputed leader of the Senate. Politically, Texas was still firmly in the control of the Democrats (Barbara Bush recalled, “I can still remember when George and I volunteered to work at the polls during a primary election [in Midland in 1958]. Exactly three people voted Republican that day. The two of us and a man who you could say was a little inebriated and wasn’t sure what he was doing.”) By 1958, Johnson had parlayed his government connections into a cache of great personal wealth, using federally guaranteed cost-plus-profit contracts to acquire land and build on it, using federally licensed broadcast affiliations to expand his radio and TV networks, using federally subsidized equipment—as well as taxpayers’ money—to promote his oil and gas deals. He reveled in his status as a Cold War hawk, whipping up “holy war” hysteria over what was, in Ronnie Dugger’s view, “principally a disagreement [among nations] over how to modernize.”
Full of magnanimity, power, and scotch, he would gather his troops, bellow at them verses from the book of Isaiah—For are not my princes kings (my hard-peckered boys!)—and pack the whole kit and caboodle off to a country retreat. On one such occasion, “LBJ had about sixteen Scotches but did not get drunk and never went to sleep. He talked all the way and was in high spirits,” Brammer reported to Nadine. “He kept talking about me . . . and all I could offer was a sick smile.” He wanted to buy Brammer a car. He wanted to buy him new suits. (Grand favors as forms of indenture.) On another occasion, he talked to his staff “very frankly about religion, about not having any. Everybody got drunk.”
Briefly, Johnson appeared to value Brammer’s political advice. He considered Brammer’s idea that Padre Island be declared a national park, which would protect its pristine shoreline from overdevelopment by oil and gas interests. Ultimately, LBJ failed to pass any such legislation, and the island was not protected until 1962, under a proclamation signed by President Kennedy. Kennedy took credit for the notion, along with Senator Ralph Yarborough.
One weekend in early February, Brammer and other members of the staff accompanied LBJ to an overnight party at the Virginia home of George Brown (where Sidney had nearly drowned in the icy pond). “The Virginia country was beautiful after the snow,” Brammer wrote:
We got there about 5, immediately started drinking, had people waiting on us hand and foot, had a sumptuous meal . . . LBJ waved his arm about the room and said, “Here’s how you forget. You sit here at a big dining table before a crackling fire and carpets three inches thick. Now tell me. Are you very worked up about the suffering in the world at this moment? That’s what you got to watch out for.”
That man!
Johnson’s presence always worked “like a shot of adrenalin” on Brammer. Even if “his personal magic last[ed] just about as long,” something he would say or do would renew Brammer’s faith in his essential goodness—as when Johnson remarked quietly, before the fireplace in Virginia, that his old nemesis Allan Shivers had been a skilled politician but lacked the one necessary ingredient for success: “Didn’t love the people.”
Back in Austin, Nadine failed to escape the political world. She needed extra money, so she went to work in the Capitol, doing clerical tasks. “The Texas legislature is not known for being a great deliberative body, and at that time it was more like one big party,” she said. She was “living it up . . . trying not to think about the future.” The “main concern” of each day was “figuring out where to meet in the evening or which party to attend” with “other young mothers my age who were also in damaged marriages, either waiting for divorce settlements or running from their situations by having affairs.” Brammer’s letters to her during this period often ended with him asking her how a particular soiree turned out, or whether she had sounded muted on the phone because of a hangover (“You weren’t exactly making good sense”).
She met attractive young legislators from all over the state. Already she knew Bob Eckhardt, from the Texas Observer team. Originally from Houston, he had just been elected to the House and was drawing attention as a brilliant legislative craftsman, owing to his lobbying experience and his understanding of political mechanics. Process always trumped ideology, he said. Nadine liked his genial smile, his slightly crooked bow ties, and his habit of not talking down to his two little girls, Rosalind and Orissa. He frequently brought the girls to lunch at Scholz’s. One day, when he went to pay the check, the waitress assured him that a gentleman in the corner, a lobbyist, had taken care of it. Rosalind asked him whether the man was a friend. “Well, not exactly a friend, but he’s interested in some of my legislation,” Eckhardt explained. “Oh Daddy, he made a bribe!” Rosalind replied.
Nadine met Bob Hughes, a state representative from Dallas with a rather anemic voting record, usually in service to oil and gas interests. Hughes was gregarious, funny—and married—and he and Nadine promptly began an affair. “We weren’t discreet,” she admitted. “We partied with my friends, who soon became his friends, spending many afternoons on his boat on Town Lake . . . long good-byes, and wonderful dinners . . . charged with sexual anticipation.”
Mike Levi, an academically trained philosopher and a rancher, opened up his Paleface Ranch to the young political crowd. The group used the grounds as a dance compound, a space for lavish barbecues. Sitting on over eight thousand acres along the Pedernales River, the ranch got its name from the salty-faced Hereford cattle grazing the riverbanks. Sometimes the parties lasted for days. Once, the members of the Modern Jazz Quartet, refused hotel rooms in Austin because they were black, moved into the ranch and played impromptu concerts for the partygoers. “We’d all pack a picnic and take the food out to little boats on the river,” Nadine said. “They had fold-out beds on the boats. The Pedernales has these cliffs around it that are just incredibly tall. We’d pull up on a sand spar, start a fire, and cook steaks. Everyone would get kind of drunk and laugh and carry on. It was a magical time.” Often, she and Bob Hughes slipped away from the steak dinners to watch sunsets, hold hands, and drink white wine on a hardscrabble hilltop.
Brammer learned of Nadine’s indiscretions on visits to Texas to see the children. One weekend, on impulse, he bought a Vespa and rode all three kids around town on it, “in a highly dangerous and illegal manner,” Sidney said. “We loved it!” He called himself their “derelict daddy,” and they couldn’t get enough of him. Worse than hearing about Hughes from his friends was hearing from Sidney how, on some mornings, she would awaken and walk into the living room to find her mother and this man passed out together on the couch.
In her memoir, Nadine underplayed Brammer’s reaction to the affair: “He declared he was going to Dallas to confront the legislator about our behavior,” she wrote. “Upon his return, I asked him how it went. Bill said, ‘He’s terrific. I think I’ll divorce you and marry him.’”
She wrote that Brammer “was having affairs as well” in Washington, but it is clear from the couple’s correspondence that whatever flings he had were glum responses to Nadine’s indifference toward her marriage. Her activities, her flaunting of them in front of the couple’s friends, occasioned sad, sometimes ugly fights whenever Brammer came to Austin. Shelby has vague memories of Nadine making him sleep in some kind of outbuilding behind the backyard. He wrote of arriving in town once and being locked out of the still, darkened house—Nadine off somewhere at a party—and falling asleep on the lawn. The next morning, he tried to pay attention to his children, Sidney crawling on his lap, grumbling about her brother’s “grubby little-boy hands,” staring at his wife, wondering when they had turned into Dick and Nicole Diver, dissolute in paradise. Then he would fly back to DC and send her conciliatory letters:
I haven’t had any revelations—except for the staggering revelation of finally being able to get through the barriers of pride and self-consciousness and really communicate . . . I don’t want you to withdraw from anybody’s glittering world. I don’t want a simpering, sweet-innocent housewife type. There’s no need to stay away from . . . anybody’s parties or to feel you’ve got to be Mrs. Bill Brammer instead of Nadine. I want you to be Nadine—I’ve loved you for your vitality, intelligence, and your rare qualities as a mother. I just want you to respect first yourself and then others. You haven’t been—you’ve been abusing yourself (and others) under the delusion you’re being a “great, happy bird.” The thing is, you are—there’s no point in trying to prove it. When you do try, you’re actually less free and vital than you would be if you just played it straight. What I mean is, that’s not really living “life.” It’s giving vent to the self-destructive impulses that are in everyone, and the result is self-abuse, self-pity: rendering meaningless through mis-use and surfeit any real value freedom and vitality might ultimately have for you. Blah, blah blah . . . words are frauds, and I wish you and the children were here. I want to be strong; I want to be a real goddamned man; and perhaps if we can get this madness even partially resolved I can concentrate less on building up my own faltering reserves and more on bolstering and supplying yours.
He signed his letters “I vant you” and “sex things.” Attempts to “really communicate” fizzled quickly, usually over money—a check he wrote Nadine bounced; his bad teeth got even worse and he had to sell the car in order to pay the dental bill—or tensions flared over an innocent remark from one of his children on the telephone that revealed they didn’t know where their mother was.
He returned to the only thing he knew how to do: “I have worked every night this week on the book,” he wrote Nadine, trusting the novel to be the answer to their problems. But the novel was a problem. The dialogue of his world-weary characters sitting in the Dearly Beloved Beer and Garden Party had improved with each new revision, but still lacked any point. These people were not Scott Fitzgerald’s doomed romantics but rather a klatch of cynical drunks. He hadn’t got the tone right. Too flip. Too flat. He needed a bigger vision (as did his tipsy friends at Scholz’s, he thought). He set the pages aside and concentrated, once more, on the setting of a movie shoot. Politicians and screen stars—the similarities were obvious: the enormous egos, the need for adoration, the artificiality of the surface. What the story might be he still didn’t know, but the models for his characters had been standing squarely in front of him, one of them quoting the book of Isaiah, the other harassing him for money. Critics have always cited Brammer’s sensitivity to Lyndon Johnson as the genius at the heart of The Gay Place; equally as insightful are the portraits of Nadine apportioned among a number of female characters in the book, beginning with the actress Vicki McGown. In her narcissism, her desperate need to dominate men and situations, she is an embodiment of Nadine’s beauty queen persona, the Duchess of Palms, isolated and silver tinted. Nadine’s other qualities, the vitality and intelligence that Brammer so prized, he parceled out in other sections of the story.
He swiftly drafted a version of what became “Country Pleasures,” book three of The Gay Place, featuring an LBJ-like governor on a visit to a Hollywood movie set in a southwestern desert. There, he encounters the larger-than-life Vicki. She is the estranged wife of his press aide, Jay McGown, and the mother of Jay’s daughter. Two volatile personalities grappling for attention in an exotic locale: immediately, the writing pulsed with wild comic imagination. The pain at the center of the McGowns’ marriage balanced the humor.
“I read [it] as it was written, in Billy Lee’s apartment,” said Larry L. King. “He got his energy then from candy bars and hot cherry Jello that he drank in a milk bottle, which was a little strange. He had more raw talent than any of us who came along later. But I thought, by God, if Billy Lee can do it, I’m going to work a little harder at learning my craft.”
Initially, Brammer thought of the movie-story section as a stand-alone novel. In a letter otherwise concerned with debts and the worry that he might have to find a better-paying job, maybe in the Foreign Service (“all I think about is getting home to you and the kiddies”), Brammer told Nadine, “I finished the book Sunday 10 a.m. after working all night Saturday night and into the morning. The Memorial Day weekend gave me a lot of time. I worked all night Thursday night, all night Friday night after sleeping most of the day, and then Saturday night and into Sunday. My last four chapters were colossal. I edited the thing lightly Monday and shipped it off to Street yesterday.”
“This was before the days of [the] widespread use of Xerox machines,” said Brammer’s friend Glen Wilson. “If you wanted a copy of something you could use an Apeco copying machine, but this was costly and time-consuming (you had to run the copies through a bath of developing liquid and then hang them up to dry). Mostly, you simply made a carbon copy. But Bill, in his eagerness to get on with his writing, didn’t take the time to do this, so that his original manuscript was the one and only copy in existence.” Brammer promised to send Nadine a carbon, but he never did, so Wilson may have been right.
The midterm elections distracted him from the anxiety of waiting for his agent’s response to the new pages. Ralph Yarborough was running to keep the Senate seat he had won a year earlier in a special election. The liberals worried that the fix was in against their candidate, but Yarborough squeaked to victory. The only person who never doubted the outcome was LBJ, proving his political acumen once again, Brammer said. Brammer had serious misgivings about Yarborough. The man was probably too ideological to be “worth a damn” as a US senator—Johnson’s view precisely. Such sentiments further distanced Brammer from his pals back in Texas.
Finally, James Street wrote to say he was not excited by the new material. “I am as lost as you about what to do with the book,” he said. “I think the key problem is that the story is just too morbid. Jay deserves better than he receives, and without making him a character with whom the reader can identify, you lose a foil. You must have a healthy background against which you can operate your characters, and that ain’t here.”
“I don’t want to think about it,” Brammer told Nadine. “I couldn’t possibly write it non-morbid with a ‘healthy’ background. I don’t think Street and I are on the same vibrations . . . Anyhow, I am starting another book this week—another short one—just to get my mind off this publishing madness. Idiot agents make me morbid.”
The new short novel would eventually coalesce into book two of The Gay Place, “Room Enough to Caper.” It concerned a junior senator like Ralph Yarborough, trying to win an election against formidable odds (and paralyzing self-doubts). As in “Country Pleasures,” the farce of political hijinks is tempered by the story of a sad marriage. The senator and his unfaithful wife fight over the well-being of their two little girls, and wonder where they went wrong.
Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, published in 1946, was an obvious model for the kind of novel that Brammer hoped to shape. He read and admired the book but found the first-person narration less compelling than the expansive point of view of Tender Is the Night. He was interested in an entire social milieu, not just a coming-of-age story. He absorbed a less well-known political novel, The Caperberry Bush (1954), by a former Houston Post reporter named Jack Guinn. A work of fantasy as well as a study of American politics, The Caperberry Bush tells the story of a truth serum placed in a metropolitan water supply, and the subsequent impact of complete transparency on a political campaign. The unspecified setting seems to be Oklahoma. Brammer liked the indeterminacy. The major importance of Guinn’s novel to Brammer lay in the book’s gleeful skewering of tony folks through lightly fictionalized portraits. In part, The Caperberry Bush was a roman à clef focused on the life of Oveta Culp Hobby, a wealthy and powerful Houstonian with extensive holdings in radio, television, and newspapers. Guinn’s example further emboldened Brammer to use Lyndon Johnson, Nadine, and his friends at Scholz’s as character molds—so much so that when The Gay Place was published, Willie Morris, just back from a stay in Great Britain, took one look at the character Willie England and said to his friend, “Billy Lee, at least Thomas Wolfe changed the names and addresses.”
Ultimately, Brammer’s fictional governor, Arthur “Goddam” Fenstemaker, would not depend solely on Lyndon Johnson. Brammer was intrigued by Huey Long, Sam Rayburn, and Penn Warren’s unforgettable Willie Stark. Life had provided the perfect climax for a political story: the deaths in office of FDR and Texas governor Beauford Jester. Reportedly, Jester had died on a train heading for Houston. “It was common knowledge in Austin newspaper circles that his mistress was on board with him, and that a friend of Jester’s hustled her off the train before the body was removed,” said Brammer’s friend Anita Wukasch. Brammer kept track of these saucy details.
But it was the introduction of Johnson’s personality into the rough scenes he had drafted again and again that finally made the novel gel (that, and Brammer’s courage in exploring, wistfully, the collapse of his marriage). And it was Johnson who continued to dominate his daylight hours following the sleepless nights of work on the book.
“Johnson passed Hawaii last week in an hour and 45 minutes,” Brammer wrote Nadine about the vote on Hawaii’s statehood. “It took 50 years to get it there.” And it had taken his staff’s blood and sweat to prepare the vote. Under Johnson’s brutal routine, staff members came and went, exhausted and traumatized. Brammer’s officemate, Booth Mooney, left for a while. Brammer’s workload doubled (with no increase in pay). Around this time, he became especially close to an eighteen-year-old intern, Michael Janeway, son of the economist Eliot Janeway and his wife, Elizabeth, a journalist and novelist. Michael was a “Holden Caulfield type.” Even so, he was “more mature than most of our contemporaries,” Brammer told Nadine. “You forget he’s so young until you give him a couple of beers and realize you have a sudden drunk on your hands . . . I’ve been kidding him lately that LBJ probably has him picked out as a potential spouse for Lynda Bird, and he saw Lynda the other day and had to go sit down to get over his [frightened] dizzy spell.”
Janeway considered Brammer his tutor in politics. Brammer would sneak him into Johnson’s office at night. Breaking into the bourbon supply, he would refer to the room as a “Turkish whorehouse.” Brammer “mixed an antic sense of humor and appreciation of our employer,” Janeway remembered. “‘Sweet Daddy Grace,’ he sometimes called Johnson in conversation, after the outlandish black evangelist of the 1930s.” The name suggested “Johnson’s extremes, between shrewd political mastery and raw vaudeville, between near paranoia and overbearing exuberance.”
The time was approaching when Johnson would need to organize his presidential campaign if he intended to run in 1960. The prospect made the senator increasingly tense and excited, often “sad-eyed as a spaniel,” Janeway wrote. Johnson swung massively from declaring he had no designs on the White House to making his “usual wild plans about how he’s going to change the world,” Brammer said. “Hope he does it.” Generally, Johnson fumed. Booth Mooney’s biography of him, with which he had been pleased, now seemed to him sinister. Everybody stood against him. He became more snappish at his staff—nobody had thought this possible. Even Brammer’s patience with him frayed, made more ragged by wakeful nights and scads of pills.
He wrote Ronnie Dugger, “I’m stripping my testes 14 hours a day in behalf of LBJ, of whom—to use one of his words—I’m [now] only moderately fond.” Then he launched into a thorough consideration of the man. It is worth quoting at length. This was the Lyndon Johnson Brammer observed as his Gay Place portrait grew clearer:
[I] judge from your editorials [in the Texas Observer] you’re against him personally . . . the doctors are against him because he’s for increasing Social Security benefits, East Texans are against him because he didn’t sign the [southerners’] Manifesto [against desegregation], the Shivercrats are against him because he’s an ADAer [a member of Americans for Democratic Action] and the ADAers are against him because he’s a southern conservative.
My opposition has a more selfish turn (I sold out my principles long ago). He works me too damned hard.
Seriously, I don’t know what to think of him. I’ve got a speech all prepared if he ever asks me (and he has been known to). I’m going to tell him he’s the most incredibly able and well-equipped son of a bitch I’ve ever known. Exact quotes.
He’s a sick man. I don’t want to oversimplify, and I’m not a snap analyst, but it’s rather obvious that the thing that eats on him is a king-sized inferiority complex. He’s got to prove himself, to bowl people over, plow ’em under. He has to keep people off balance; he has to reach the top—even if it’s the presidency. He draws strength from other people’s weakness, and he must have adulation. And, of course, he’s thin-skinned out of all proportion, as witnessed by the blood drawn from your Observer gibes.
He will forever be seeking and never quite finding (in sufficient amounts)—approval. OR, in the father image, a pat on his little horse head . . .
One thing this has done to me. Shattered all my illusions about the men I really cared about. It’s rather shocking to see LBJ snap his fingers (literally) and watch Humphrey or Morse or Jack Kennedy jump (literally). He treats all of ’em—each and every one of ’em—each and every one of the 96—like children. Of course he flatters and badgers and gives them the usual treatment, but, still, there’s that contempt. And perhaps he has to have that.
The newspapermen respect him, but all of them I’m pretty sure are quietly hating his guts. I haven’t handled a news conference yet that there wasn’t some little unpleasantry—you know, being not quite nice or showing just enough disrespect to the men of the press. I’m not saying he ought to be nice because they’re newsmen—but, for God’s sake, because they’re human beings.
Nadine says it’s a case of hormones—and LBJ’s got too many. He just overpowers people with his manhood.
And you find yourself fighting to hold onto your own. You look around and see how he’s spiritually castrating the rest of the people around you and it’s a real battle. I’ve given him no backtalk (in fact he’s been quite nice to me), but I have to concentrate on not jumping and simpering and clicking my heels like the others do when he lets fly a fart.
From the high point of his fascination with Johnson’s skills during the passage of the civil rights bill in the Senate to the grim irritability of Johnson in precampaign mode, Brammer had bottomed out, with “near-fatal disillusion” about politics. On quick visits to Austin to see his children, he would sometimes escort Sidney to the state Capitol and tell her, “Don’t take all this seriously, little girl—this is not something to be impressed by.” Ever afterwards, Sidney said, “I [never] could . . . take it seriously. This indelible kind of attitude that he had given me—‘It’s just 9 to 5, it’s not to keep the system going . . . No politician ever hung the moon.’”
He began to consider leaving LBJ and fleeing DC, a town that, more and more, seemed mentally feeble to him—historically, all the intellectuals, including the political experts (he may have been thinking of the Janeways), gravitated to New York, leaving behind the dregs, he would tell his friends. “So much of what passes for information in this city is not fact at all but simply a warmed-over combination of half-truth, informed gossip, and garbled surface event . . . Living here offers no special advantages for the Truth-Seeker: proximity only serves to give one the dubious sensations and satisfactions of knowing first what may or may not be happening in the halls of the mighty. We here in Washington are, all too often, simply misinformed faster than the folks out in the hinterland,” he typed into a notebook. He wondered whether his servitude in the nation’s capital had given him a “spiritual head cold or terminal angst.”
He saw nothing to look forward to but “another round on the robotyper.” Everyone on the senator’s staff had started to look to him like “Big Brother’s half-sister.”
Part of his growing discomfort had to do with fear: he believed he couldn’t tolerate LBJ’s misery, or the manner in which he would inflict pain on everyone near him, when he failed to receive the presidential nomination in 1960. And Brammer didn’t believe he would receive the nomination. The Democratic Party was still enamored of Adlai Stevenson. “We are witnessing here a phenomenon of pentup [sic] frustrations which, I guess, we must blame old FDR for,” he wrote in his notebook. “Everyone who lived through the R[oosevelt] Era feeling hurt and resentful because FDR wouldn’t do what the New Republic people wanted . . . Well these people are now taking out their need to believe in an Idealistic, Dedicated, Sincere Liberal Leader on dear Adlai. He is perfect for the role . . . idealist, dedicated, sincere, and NICE. Of course he is nothing that FDR was: tough, perceptive, shrewd, brutal (the brutality of a thoroughgoing pro), wholly self-aware and capable of the most profound and far-reaching value judgments at the political levels (judgments which, for all his sensitivity and intelligence, Adlai seems altogether incapable of making).”
In this thumbnail sketch of a “thoroughgoing pro” (everything Stevenson was not), Brammer was naturally listing what he had learned from LBJ—and laying out the defining characteristics of his budding novel’s central figure.
If he did leave Washington, what could he do? In preparation for a possible return to Austin (assuming Nadine would let him back into the house), he accepted a couple of small assignments from the American-Statesman. He profiled a local zoo, posing for a photographer with a bull snake wrapped around his neck. Journalism disgusted him just as much as politics.
He attempted to shake his blues with quick trips, whenever he could slip away from the Robotyper room without falling too far behind. These getaways did little to lift his gloom. “Went to the beach in Delaware over the weekend and zipped myself up in the sleeping bag,” he wrote Ronnie Dugger. “Was . . . accosted by Negro homosexual at 2 a.m. under the boardwalk.”
Finally, then, only writing could offer him “a glorious escape, an overcompensation through esthetic release.” He told Dugger, “The act of creation has not much to do, I’m afraid, with Life itself.” If he wasn’t writing, he was “out of [his] mind.” If the writing was perking along, he tended to exhibit social “neuroticism.” He read the letters of Flaubert, which sent him back to Madame Bovary, to the measured tone and loving detail required to elevate what seems a trivial life into an existence worth assessing. He read Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter. “Greene in these two books is fooling around with real Art, and there is much of engagement and sacrifice and near-fatal disillusion in them,” he wrote Dugger. “The first page of ‘The Power and the Glory,’ with its dusty buzzards flapping over a Mexican village, is about the most tremendous beginning of any novel in the English language outside the first page of ‘A Farewell to Arms.’”
He read the book of Isaiah and the Song of Solomon, as much to tune his ear to the subtle rhythms infusing LBJ’s speech as for the language and imagery. He copied into his notebooks phrases from the Bible:
It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the honor of kings to search out a matter.
Let her breasts satisfy thee at all times and be thou ravished always by her love . . .
You have played the harlot with many lovers; and would you return to me?
Mischiefs of whoredom!
deliver me from out of the land of the wicked, redeem me from the grasp of the ruthless.
Of that last line, he typed, “My own epigraph.”
He also stayed current with the literature on Dexamyl and Benzedrine. A Harvard psychiatrist named Abraham Myerson, whose research had been funded by the Smith, Kline and French pharmaceutical company, claimed that depression was caused by the “suppression of natural drives to action,” and therefore amphetamines, capable of adjusting the hormonal balance in the central nervous system, were the ideal therapy. Myerson’s findings were available not only in medical journals, but also in full-page ads in mainstream magazines. In one ad, a grinning man, hands on hips in a supremely confident pose, blots out a gray image of his own sad face, as if his former unactive self were fading fast beneath the penetrating power of Benzedrine. Accompanying the picture is a comment from Dr. Myerson: “If the individual is depressed or anhedonic . . . you can change his attitude . . . by physical means just as surely as you can change his digestion by distressing thought.” In another Smith, Kline and French ad, a smiling, aproned housewife cheerfully vacuums her floor while tentacles spread from her body like the arms of an octopus—a force field of happiness and energy. The accompanying text asserts, “Just one ‘Dexamyl’ Spansule, taken in the morning, provides daylong therapeutic effect. And mood elevation is usually apparent within 30 to 60 minutes.” The millions of ad dollars worked. Enough amphetamines were sold to dose every US citizen at least forty-three times a year.
Brammer had no trouble getting doctors to prescribe the pills for him—physicians were just as swayed as anyone else by the money and the advertising campaigns, not to mention pharmaceutical lobbyists. Doctors believed amphetamines were generally beneficial for anyone, whether or not they had serious medical complaints. Through his friends in Texas, Brammer also had easy access to products from Mexico. Always ahead of the curve, he was already familiar with the rapidly developing, specialized vocabulary of “speed,” long before that or any related terms became widespread: bennies, benzies, beauties, lidpopper lightning, skyrockets, sparkle-plenties. Sitting in Senator Johnson’s office at night, he would put on a Paul Desmond record, pop a “Christmas tree” (a green-and-red Dexamyl), and hear the words of his novel, the lovely, flowing sentences, the music of his brain, brighten with electric clarity. His heart galloped. His breathing intensified, and his concentration blocked out everything but the page trembling in the typewriter in front of him. The paper expanded and filled the room, along with his unlimited confidence that he was producing the finest literature his country had ever seen.
And damn, if he didn’t convince his agent this might be true. So what if he wasn’t quite on the same “vibrations” as James Street? Brammer would shimmer enough for the two of them. He convinced Street not to give up on the evolving manuscript. The agent agreed to send it to Houghton Mifflin. Brammer had begun to believe his chances for publication were running out, so the waiting period when he knew that an editor was reading his manuscript felt more wretched than ever. He wandered aimlessly each day after the formal close of business in the Senate Office Building—from the Botanical Gardens to the National Gallery to the Smithsonian. He often spent hours in a penny arcade. “No word from the publisher, which is probably [the] reason I have been so unsatisfied all week,” he wrote Nadine. “Thinking of taking up marijuana.”
Finally, he heard from a Mrs. G. D. de Santillana at “Houston Muffin.” She apologized for being slow in turning to his pages, but it was a busy season. She was “getting ready” to read soon. “You are being redundant when you refer to yourself as the ‘perfect neurotic author,’” she told Brammer. “Just say author and I know all.”
He tempered his anxiety with pills. He stayed busy by writing speeches for LBJ (“I am still feeding him stuff—some of it pretty good,” he wrote Nadine) as well as forty new pages of a story about Governor Fenstemaker trying to get a junior senator elected to Congress. He titled the novella “If Ever Any Beauty.” “It is pretty good and I am amazed at how I continue to gush,” he told Nadine, hoping she would be impressed enough by his progress to let go of Bob Hughes and recommit to the marriage. “Gad! Your nymph-like romps at the Levi hole are unimaginably remote to me,” he wrote her at one point. “Think I’m getting impotent. It’s not that I’m being a prick but I’m suffering from corns, piles, heart murmur, mal de mer, weltschmertz, and LBJ-itis. Do you continue tranquil?”
To Ronnie Dugger he confessed his fears about his writing: “I am ‘facile’ enough, God protect me, but the intellect behind the prose is weak. Not inferior—just weak. Like a muscle never used enough, a little atrophied.”
One early morning, just before dawn, on his way back to his apartment from the office, he walked into a tree and blackened his eye. His body was feeling just as weak as his mind. But on April 27, 1959, Mrs. de Santillana wrote, “We are very excited [by your manuscript] . . . I’m very excited to get something in the works on which we can give you the confidence of a contract.” Two months later, she reported, “I have just finished IF EVER ANY BEAUTY . . . It is wonderful reading, it has swing and glitter and pace . . . In the fall we must get together. And talk about Arthur Fenstemaker, who is rapidly becoming my great American hero.”
“I’m still not convinced” about the quality of the novel, Brammer wrote “Nudeena” in mid-July after visiting the Houghton Mifflin offices on Park Square in Boston, but the editors’ assistants and publicity people he had met assured him the work was very fine. The publisher had offered him a General Royalty Contract on June 22 for an “omnibus volume containing three short novels: ‘The Gay Place,’ ‘If Ever Any Beauty,’ and an untitled third related novel,” all three “loosely tied together by the attractive, obliquely presented Governor Fenstemaker. It’s a terrific idea, or so I think,” de Santillana had told him. He received $750 on signing; on receipt of the final version of “If Ever Any Beauty,” he would receive $250 more, $250 on receipt of a synopsis of the “third related novel,” and a final $250 for the novel itself. He felt “goofily, placidly, statically happy,” he told Nadine. “It must have been the rum. Mixed with dexamyl.” He walked for hours, alone, along the banks of the Charles River. “It was all nearly as good and strange and tropical as two days in Istanbul,” he said.
He wrote to friends: break out the casks of Amontillado!
On August 6, Anne Barrett, Mrs. de Santillana’s editorial assistant, told Brammer the latest version of “If Ever Any Beauty” was “a little slow in getting off the ground, but the dialogue is good and Governor Fenstemaker contributes his usual magic touch as soon as he comes on the stage.” The trouble, she said, was too many characters. It was hard to focus on any one story line.
Within two weeks, he had sent her new pages that “picked up [the story] enormously,” she said. “This is partly because of Governor Fenstemaker, an absolutely wonderful man,” but also because Brammer had sharpened the other characters, made them less passive. “I think you are on the right track,” Barrett wrote. “We are all agog to read [more].”
Nadine, the reader who counted most with him, did not respond to the book’s prospects with the same level of enthusiasm. Mostly, she wanted to know how quickly he would receive the rest of the money. His initial happiness evaporated. His depressions were exacerbated by the down periods following speed runs. “My feeling this week is no feeling, or rather the absence of feeling,” he wrote Nadine. “Probably as a result of being so high for so long . . . And all the reasons were so shitty superficial, or ephemeral, or something . . . [I have] performed well for LBJ. There was a staff meeting called that I hadn’t known about and I was included and they could hardly shut me up. LB [sic] was impressed, but I can’t, at this point, remember a single thing I said.”
In November, Nadine filed for divorce. She had gotten tired of Bob Hughes—it was obvious he would never leave his wife for her—but she wanted her independence from Brammer. Devastated, he wrote her parents, “I love her desperately (or perhaps the memory of her) . . . [but] I’ll have to be rather frank . . . Nadine is beautiful and intelligent and loves her children. But she is also vain, arrogant, self-indulgent and self-destructive—and this last quality involves not only herself but the children she loves and her husband . . . She has hurt herself terribly in Austin.”
He explained that word of her misconduct had reached him all year long in Washington: “Senator Johnson was even aware of it, and made it known to me that he thought I ought to do something about it.” He railed against his old pals at Scholz’s: “She has had at one time or another as corrupt and ruinous a circle of friends as any in my experience. Even the ostensibly ‘good’ ones get a kind of vicarious thrill from following Nadine’s adventures and even encourage her in some of them.” He was left with a dilemma: “I now find myself in a position of having to decide whether to play dead as I have for nine years or fight the [divorce] suit.” He said his heart was broken: “She has done an awful violence to her children and pretty well crippled me career-wise as a consequence.”