“Let me tell you about groupies,” Brammer typed into a notebook. “Let me tell you about all the pussy in the world . . . delicious, sunkist, irresistibly-packaged, brand goddam new barely post-pubescent, super-wizard, gloryosky . . . Endlessly, night after limp-membered night . . . none of it at all remotely meaningful, reliant, memorable, touched with grace. Diverting, pleasurable—sure, I suppose. Passes the time.”
This was literary celebrity, in Austin, for Billy Lee Brammer in the early months of 1963. Far from being ostracized by the old Scholz crowd for his portraits of people in The Gay Place, he was lionized. Austin had become his “spiritual property,” according to Larry McMurtry. “Almost everyone seemed to be trying to prove, by the way they lived and talked, that Brammer had based at least one of the novel’s characters on them,” Jay Milner said. The book had drawn an “uncannily accurate picture” of the “way we very often perceived ourselves. We lived and worked in a more or less constant state of exultation and angst, a word I read for the first time in The Gay Place. And when we greeted each other, we said, ‘Haw yew,’ just like Billie Lee’s characters did.”
As much as the old crowd, youngsters and newcomers wanted a piece of Brammer. “Students, journalists, lobbyists and legislators were by nature a transient lot, and their social antics gave Austin a reputation as a night-life playground for those bright irresponsibles who passed through,” wrote Jan Reid. At this time, Brammer was the brightest of the irresponsibles, and he wasn’t just passing through. He belonged to the place. “Austin always seemed to embrace a star of the moment, someone everyone sought to wind up at the same party with . . . In the early and mid-sixties, it was Billie Lee and Willie Morris”—then editor of the Texas Observer—“[that] everybody wanted to hang out with,” Milner said.
What made Brammer a star? The Gay Place “showed a generation of writers they could write novels about Texas, and editors in New York would publish them,” said Bud Shrake, a frequent visitor to Austin. He was working as a sportswriter in Dallas. “The explosion of Texas writing was set off by Billy Lee.” Shrake had met Brammer early in 1961 when Brammer dropped by the newsroom of the Dallas Times Herald to promote The Gay Place. Nadine had come along. “We noticed immediately how cute Nadine was,” Shrake remarked. Back then, “I thought that for a writer from Texas to make any money, [his] novel had to be about John Wayne fighting a whole bunch of Indians . . . Talking to Brammer that day I realized that he had been writing stuff he knew about . . . I thought to myself, ‘Well, it’s a whole new world then.’” Would New York really take Texas seriously? Could Texas finally shed its inferiority complex?
Younger writers—fellow journalists—latched on to Brammer, thinking he could help them sell their manuscripts. “Ah wah, Billie Lee: You suffer an embarrassment of riches,” his old DC pal Larry L. King wrote to him. “You will erect mountains of gold and marble and they will spill into the air untold streams of hot red jello water.” He had been writing a Korean war novel. He pleaded with Brammer to submit it to publishers for him. Brammer found it a “confused work,” but complied with King’s “aggressive persistence,” out of friendship.
And then when the movie director Martin Ritt came to town, along with Paul Newman, to scout locations for the proposed film of The Gay Place, everyone figured Brammer was about to become even more famous. Ritt had commissioned a script from the veteran Hollywood screenwriting team Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. Newman would play Roy Sherwood. Jackie Gleason, fresh from his star turn in The Hustler, would bring Arthur Fenstemaker to life.
But more than these material trappings, “a rare charisma” accounted for Brammer’s appeal, said Jay Milner.
Strange and powerful. His compelling charm had something to do with the fact that he had written that famous book . . . But it was more than that. One friend, Jim Smithum, might have come pretty close to explaining [it] when he said, “Billie Lee is the most reasonable human being I ever knew.” It could be that the crowd so often ended up at Billie Lee’s simply because the lights were always on, but I think not . . . I never heard Billie Lee raise his voice, and he was one of the best listeners I ever encountered. He always appeared deeply interested in what you were saying and knew something about whatever you were talking about.
Additionally:
Innumerable women felt protective of this quiet little man who had written the book that had moved them so and to demonstrate their dedication, they would volunteer to scavenge pills for him. Billie Lee’s favorite scam was that he arranged “this great deal” for the temporary use of a friend’s cabin in the hills [around Austin] and wanted to gather in a month’s supply to go off by himself up there and finish his book. I [was] with him when as many as five women came by his apartment in one afternoon to bestow upon him a stash of cabin-in-the-hills, finish-the-book medication.
“I don’t think Bill ever had an enemy in his whole life,” Robert Benton said. “That’s what makes him so interesting. You’d think that someone embarking on that path of self-destruction after he drifted back to Texas would make at least some enemies along the way, but he never did.”
Finally, it must be said that timing contributed to Brammer’s aura of fascination in early-sixties Austin. His arch storytelling style seemed unique because other writers had not yet exploited Texas’s rich hypocrisies—the bad behavior of its politicians and religious leaders. Demographically, Texas became more urban than rural in 1950. A decade later, this population shift was producing striking cultural changes. Brammer was the most sophisticated, most literary example of a Texas boy from an essentially rural background to adopt an urban lifestyle, to loosen his grip on the culture’s cherished traditions, to explore the latest fashions, gadgets, art, and music.
Barry Shank, an American studies scholar, once remarked that among certain Austin students in the early 1960s, folksinging became a particular “way of marking one’s difference from the student body represented by fraternities, sororities, and football players. Students from small towns in Texas who felt that their lives differed from the conservative meanings traditionally available were attracted to . . . folksinging.” It gave them a “beatnik” or “proto-hippie” status.
John Clay, a local musician friendly with Brammer and Janis Joplin, said many years afterward, “Looking back on the situation, it seems there was a generation gap affecting the early Sixties scene, but not like the one they talk about today. People like Janis and me . . . were rejecting the standards of our own generation.” And they would naturally gravitate to a slightly older fellow following the same path, validating them and encouraging them to experiment still further. Brammer became their guru. Quietly, mostly by example, he led a growing “underground contingent of people—proto-hippies, I don’t know what you want to call them—but there were a lot of people that were becoming more and more weird, student drop-outs, artists, writers, there were quite a few of [them],” said Tary Owens, an old high school friend of Joplin’s who had migrated to Austin with her. Their group determined to make all of life a work of art.
Surveying his surroundings, shortly after meeting Billy Lee Brammer in the spring of 1963, Larry McMurtry said the creative possibilities of a place “fertile with conflict”—when it has reached a “stage of metamorphosis”—could not be underestimated, especially when “rural and soil traditions are competing most desperately with urban traditions—competing for the allegiance of the young.”
Brammer “had a great talent for finding the best, most unusual, out-of-the-way houses and apartments,” Jay Milner said. “He would find one and move in, but [then] . . . he would get evicted for one reason or another—often for too many parties or . . . his odd hours . . . I seldom saw him sleep. He always seemed to be getting ready to do something or was just finishing something. I [used to] drop . . . by his abode as late as 3:00 a.m., and found him brewing up a pot of chili.”
Milner was a newspaperman and fledgling novelist. He tooled about town in a 1949 black Cadillac hearse he had bought at a used car lot in Dallas for seventy-five dollars. He met Brammer at an Austin club one night and soon joined the circle around him, most immediately Fletcher Boone, a struggling sculptor and painter who would later own an Austin restaurant called the Raw Deal (at one point, the restaurant featured signs saying “Billy Lee Eats Here”); Willie Morris; Bud Shrake and his sports-writing pal from Dallas, Gary Cartwright, whose facial features looked somewhat Asian and earned him the nickname “Jap.” Like Brammer, Shrake and Cartwright were dedicated speed users. Amphetamines were “just out in the open in those days,” recalled Cartwright. “Pro football teams literally had buckets of Dexedrine. You just walked by and grabbed a handful and didn’t think anything about it.” Generally, he and Shrake indulged in speed “so we could drink more and drink longer hours,” Cartwright said. As sportswriters, “[we] could hardly avoid offers of free booze. Nearly every luncheon, press conference, or sporting event featured an open bar. Professional teams had hospitality suites. Some p. r. guy was always around to pick up the check.” Jazzed by “heart medicine,” Cartwright and Shrake performed adolescent antics such as prancing around naked at parties and staging silly acrobatics. Shelby Brammer, while acknowledging that her father was responsible for the choices he made—he could be plenty indulgent on his own—believed he became a “mascot of debauchery” for Cartwright, Shrake, and other young writers who sought his approval, plying him with more and more pills. Ultimately, he saw the trouble they were all slipping into. “Depressing,” he wrote, “all these ancient children tossing down . . . stuff with as much single-minded and purposeful desperation and bleary-eyed disregard for their own good as some Third Ave wino.”
Every year, at the close of the legislative session in DC, Willie Morris threw a party at his house in West Austin. He would announce the winners of his annual Neanderthal Awards, given to the dumbest, least effective Texas congressmen. The parties often ended with a drunken Neanderthal trying to impress Morris with his great intelligence: “Shoot fire, Willie, I’ve read Prowst and all them.”
The 1962 bash was memorable for Jay Milner because Brammer was there—this was just a few months before he went adrift in the Atlantic on his way to Helsinki. Brammer was dating a UT undergraduate named Janie, whom he had just met. Late in the evening, Nadine showed up, insisting he drive to her house to babysit the children because she and Eckhardt wanted to go out. Brammer asked Milner to escort Janie home if he didn’t make it back to the party. In fact, Milner took her to his place to listen to records. She passed out on his couch. Later, he learned his friend was very upset that she spent the night with him. He had sat in his car outside Milner’s window, staring up at the light, “imagining lurid scenarios.”
“I called him and we met at Scholz’s,” Milner said. “The misunderstanding was soon dispelled. Billie Lee was much too placid to successfully hold a grudge.”
Still, in the wee morning hours, over bowls of cold chili, stoked by pills, Brammer could slide into amphetamine-laced paranoia and extreme bitterness. “Women are nine-faced bitches,” he typed one night in his notebook of meditations on writing, love, and politics. What set him off was Janie’s accusation that he was the “nosiest man in the world,” hurled at him earlier when she had caught him riffling through her notebook. He had found there copies of his notes on Diana de Vegh’s intimate conversations with Jack Kennedy. Janie harbored literary aspirations; she asked Brammer to edit rough drafts of the short stories she was trying to write. He felt she had genuine talent, but she didn’t work hard enough and she drank too much (her one publication was a letter to the editors of Life magazine, printed when she was a teenager, extolling the virtues of Elvis Presley—“His belting style drives us wild. We have to do something. Kick the seat in front of us or let out a ‘verbal yell’ or something”). Now, after discovering her notebook, he wondered whether she was using him. That was the trouble with groupies. Maybe all she really wanted was to be the “Hemingway doomed bitch-heroine,” he wrote. He warned himself, “[This is] not the kind of love you got to have . . . Also remember you don’t need no more parties. You been there. Nothing really new. Just draggy . . . What you need is a lover, wife and intellectual helpmeet . . . You got problems enough (artistic) without taking on some 20 yr old pearl beer queen who seems [intent] on bitching up both your lives at least twice a week . . . Get your books done!”
The problem was this: all these “dissatisfied married women” were “depressingly easy marks,” even for an “un-cool lump of romantic baggage” like him, he wrote. Then he typed a frank confession: “For crissake be aware of how really spooked you are on this stuff . . . Yr most serious . . . problem is N. angst, N. syndrome; all those open running sore places where once she gave it to you good and continuously . . . You[’ll] never survive another marriage remotely the same as [the] last one.”
He remembered how Nadine had accused him of naïvete whenever he asked her how she could sleep around so much. Friends had told him stories—Nadine bragging she would never divorce him because the setup was “too perfect” for her, having him far away, working to support her while she “stepped out on him.”
He stuck a fresh page into the typewriter. He wrote that most of the women he met seemed irritated that he “might have the presumption . . . or simple human instinctual compulsion to love [his] own children.” Why? At a club one night, a young woman had asked him, “But do you really care for them all that much?”
“How to answer,” he typed:
I couldn’t begin to describe to her the complete sense of despair that would overtake me in ny or wash or atla when I had been separated from them for more than a few weeks and the outlook for ever getting back to them seemed utterly bleak . . . why are [these women] so infuriated by this love? A general distrust and dislike for Men or Man? or a feeling . . . of being challenged in the intensity (or lack of it) they themselves might feel about [their] own children . . . I do know that I am neither all that complicated nor insincerely, melodramatically sentimental . . . I simply love them . . . and I am in distress most of the time I am away from them for any length of time.
He could vow to himself to stay away from parties, but the parties came to him. One night, Milner stopped by with a friend, Malcolm McGregor, a House member from El Paso. Brammer was sitting at his Smith Corona, so the men decided to let him work. Just as they were about to walk out the door, “a gang of revelers from Scholz’s invaded the place,” Milner said. McGregor offered to kick everybody out, but Brammer said it was okay, they would drift away soon. “Shortly after midnight we drove back by Billie Lee’s place just to check. Sure enough, the party was still going strong,” Milner recalled. “We went in and found Billie Lee sitting alone in a corner, on the floor, sipping a Dr Pepper longneck. The clamorous party caroused round him, none of the exhilarated guests paying any attention to their amiable, but silent, host.”
And there was the puzzling paradox of Billy Lee Brammer: he exhibited an essentially passive personality, always letting louder folks take center stage, yet on the strength of his quiet charisma and steady generosity, he was pivotal to his group’s activities, a powerful social catalyst.
“I sat down beside him on the floor,” Milner said. “He nodded, grinning his characteristically sheepish grin, and asked solemnly, ‘Am I this much fun?’”
“I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost,” he wrote one night in his notebook, once everyone had left him alone, sitting on the floor with all his lights up.
“Something in him was letting go,” Ronnie Dugger noticed. On one occasion, he lent Brammer a “book with Love and Lust, or some such, in the title.” Brammer joked that he would return it “as soon as I’ve digested chapters on ‘Alpha-type masochists, downhill phase.’” The loss of his marriage; the emptiness of his affairs; the effect of the drugs; the disappointments in the publishing industry—these developments combined with disillusionment in politics to set him adrift, Dugger believed. He remembered Brammer discussing the economics lessons he had learned from Eliot Janeway. “Gives you a new perspective,” he said. “Lots of money made; lots of money lost; and all of life’s fundamental aspects reduced to [the] question of whether slumps in hogs, cattle, corn, will put a Democrat in the White House. Nobody talks about civil rights except the New York Post.” He had begun his adult life as a mild cynic occasionally capable of making idealistic gestures. Now he told his friends that politicking “caused brain damage.” When Gary Cartwright insisted he had a duty to vote, he replied, “I choose not to choose.”
Yet if Brammer was dissipating, “it was not dissipation in the normal Puritan sense of the word,” said Robert Benton.
I think the easy and superficial thing to say about Bill is that he went on some gigantic slide, or to say that he’s a Texan version of Fitzgerald. I don’t think so. I don’t think Billy went through the sense of torment that Fitzgerald went through. I never knew him when he was not some kind of extraordinary optimist, or wasn’t filled with a kind of hope or generosity toward everyone around him. In some ways, he’s more like a Graham Greene saint figure than a Scott Fitzgerald tragic writer. If you had to find a literary analogy, that would be it.
Said Dorothy Browne, the woman who would soon become his second wife, “It wasn’t ‘letting go’ so much as . . . he didn’t believe in wisdom any longer. He accepted everything. He never moralized or condescended to you, he never made value judgments about things. I don’t think he believed in good and bad. I know he didn’t believe in right and wrong.”
And “he wanted to see where the young were going,” Sidney Brammer added. He recognized that “it was a new day. He experimented—he’d do anything, anything.” He “couldn’t keep up with the culture fast enough. He started speeding all the time, trying to stay up constantly to write about it. But he couldn’t write it, he could only live it until it burned him out.”
“I can see why he took amphetamines,” Dorothy agreed. “He made a desperate attempt to be awake all the time . . . He was really trying to be a think tank, to take in as much external stimuli as he could possibly fit in.” And he loved sharing his knowledge with everyone around him. “He was my graduate school,” Dorothy said.
At about this time, he began to place on the wall wherever he lived a quotation from T. H. White—Merlyn the magician’s advice that the “best thing for being sad” is to “learn something . . . That is the only thing that the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never fear or distrust.”
“Bereft of hope, denied wisdom by the history he was seeing, he reposed on learning as the only way to keep going,” Dugger said.
“It seemed to me that Billy’s enthusiasm had run down,” said Larry McMurtry. “We were both, at the time, in respite of wives and money”—McMurtry’s wife, Jo, had run off with a local poet—“and [we] shared a house on Windsor Road,” along with McMurtry’s baby boy, James. Brammer and McMurtry had both graduated from North Texas State; they had published their first novels in the same year; and McMurtry’s book had just been made into the movie Hud, starring Paul Newman. The writers had much in common. Over kraut at Scholz’s—laughing together at the congressmen brushing caliche off their pant cuffs so that no one would know they had visited the beer garden—McMurtry told Brammer of the year he spent in California studying with Wallace Stegner at Stanford University. There, he met Ken Kesey—a classmate at Stanford. He thought Brammer might like Kesey. They shared a passion for the “new.” Maybe a trip out West would give Brammer some peace so that he could finish his book.
With increasing sympathy, McMurtry saw how wearying Brammer’s life had become. As the “local culture hero,” he was a “natural target for anyone in Austin who was aspiring, frustrated, or bored. The inrush of Wives threatened to wrench the hinges off the door” of the Windsor Street house, he said. Brammer “faced it with the courteous and rather melancholy patience with which he would probably face a buffalo stampede. In the wake of the Wives came a sweaty and verbally diarrhetic mass of bored or bitter professors, broke or bitter politicians, protohippies with beach balls full of laughing gas, and broke-bored-bitter young journalists who looked like they had been using themselves for blotters.”
McMurtry sealed off his part of the house and “left Bill to cope with the crowd as best he could.” Watching Brammer’s escapades, he came to believe that Austin had an unhealthy “fascination with its own pubic hair, and a corresponding uneasy fear that its sexual development might stop just short of adequacy. Groupiness was endemic . . . In such a town the person who is sure of himself is apt to be literally crushed by the surging mobs of the insecure, all rushing to confirm themselves by association.”
Overall, “I didn’t know [Billy Lee] well,” McMurtry explained in a letter to me, “but I knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t going to make it.”
The worst of it: “He wasn’t getting anything back from his writing.” That was clear. “He was working on Fustian Days and I read everything he had. The first hundred pages or so was just wonderful, actually better than most of The Gay Place. You could tell it was written from a genuine impulse, he still had his original momentum going. After that it petered out pretty quickly, so far as its narrative interest. There were maybe another hundred pages, but it was pretty bad. I felt that it was running down already. Billy felt it too, which didn’t help. It just seemed like he was bored with it.”
In reams of rough draft pages, now archived in the Southwest Writers Collection at Texas State University, it appears that the final section of Fustian Days to engage Brammer before he lost touch with the book concerned Arthur Fenstemaker’s brother, Hoot Gibson, based on Sam Houston Johnson: “distinguished drinker, unfrocked charlatan, man-of-the-cloth gone sour then more than sweet again: sweet as can be. Hoot was an unqualified, straight-arrow example absolutely unto his lovely old self.” Had Brammer finished the book, Hoot might have been its biggest hero, rescuing and advancing the late governor’s civil rights legacy. Perhaps Brammer feared that Sam Houston would react to this book as Lyndon had reacted to the last one, and he couldn’t have borne that. Or perhaps Brammer had put too much of himself into Hoot Gibson, a form of wish fulfillment: Hoot, he wrote, had reached such “dazzling heights of sobriety that it had been possible for him actually to function,” to “contemplate such vague, frivolous notions as the larger responsibilities one . . . owed to oneself.”
Late at night, all alone, Brammer hoped to reach that clarifying point of stability, but he couldn’t quite make it. He was still the old Hoot, indulging because, whenever he was high, his “old pals look and feel and behave just a real whole [lot] pruttier than maybe otherwise.” In keeping with his growing disillusionment, Brammer couldn’t muster, anymore, the energy to mine politics as a literary subject: “Fenstemaker . . . was a deceptive old toad in his fashion, but fairly bubbling with good works when appraised next to his gnat’s butt of a successor.” One hears, here, Brammer’s despair at LBJ’s diminishment as well as his judgment of young Jack Kennedy.
Initially, the manuscript pages of Fustian Days arrived in a “very mangled state,” Elizabeth McKee admonished Brammer. She paid a professional typist to redo them. “I think [Houghton Mifflin] would believe that you whipped [the pages] out very casually if I sent it in the same form as what you sent me.” But soon she was singing the novel’s praises. She said she couldn’t wait to read more of it—that is, if he “didn’t leave it with some pretty airline stewardess” on his flight home from Europe. If he would only write more chapters, she was certain she could pry a healthy advance from Houghton Mifflin. Dorothy de Santillana had read the opening scenes and loved them.
Editors called to pitch him publishing opportunities. James H. Silberman at the Dial Press wanted him to ghostwrite a memoir of Speaker Sam Rayburn by LBJ—if they could get LBJ’s permission. When that didn’t happen, Silberman mused, “Your reminiscences about life with the majority leader make me wish that we were talking about a memoir of life with Johnson written by you . . . it would be a wonderful book.”
A Broadway producer tried to pursue a musical with Brammer called Lovebucket, based on a character Brammer envisioned who sounded an awful lot like Diana de Vegh. “I am already a little bit in love” with your character, the producer said.
Brammer never actually worked on any of these projects, but he kept the possibilities afloat, always evolving, hoping he could wrangle money out of people. Very often, he did. Elizabeth McKee began to doubt him. “In case you think our enthusiasm for FD [Fustian Days] is waning—you’re wrong!” she wrote him at one point, subtly sounding an alarm, hoping against hope that he would deliver the goods.
Whenever he failed to squeeze funds from people for projects he proposed, he sought other favors. “As for the drug needs, there’s a new clampdown on New York druggists and we are unable to fill your order, so we won’t be any help to you there,” one publisher wrote to him.
One chilly dawn, after a nightlong party, Milner sat with Brammer on a hillside overlooking Lake Travis. Brammer confessed he didn’t know how to write a novel. The first one had been a series of feature stories pieced together. “He said that sometimes late at night, when he was alone at his typewriter and the pills were kicking in, he believed he could do it again, but in the cold light of day he was afraid he didn’t know how,” Milner recalled. Brammer remembered fearing, “Now they’ll really take it out of my hide, expecting me to repeat it,” when he’d read the first good reviews of The Gay Place.
Most often, in late ’62, early ’63, Brammer told friends that everything he wrote seemed too innocent to him now, the novel a naïve aesthetic form. He feared he couldn’t create more literature, because he knew “too much.”
Knowing too much was Janis Joplin’s problem, too. In the oil-refining Gulf Coast town of Port Arthur, where she grew up, bored, breathing the hellish air, Baptist churches bricked up street corners. But Joplin knew where all the brothels were. And the gambling joints. “When we were in high school, the city was on the one hand very straitlaced. But on the other hand, the town was absolutely wide open. I mean, the hypocrisy just glared,” said Tary Owens.
“A key to [Janis’s] personality was that she could not abide hypocrisy,” David Moriaty, another Joplin friend, said.
Worst of all were the mixed racial attitudes—Love thy brothers and sisters, but don’t let the black ones near your churches or schools. On the high school debate team, “we weren’t allowed to argue the pros and cons of integration,” Owens said. “It was a given that integration was a horrible thing. The argument instead focused on whether you could get federal aid without having to integrate.”
In this clamped-down atmosphere, Joplin found release listening to “race records” on the same border-blasting radio stations that Brammer had tuned to as a kid: 75,000 watts of Odetta, Willie Mae Thornton, and Leadbelly. How come she could listen to this stirring rock and roll at night but not sit next to a black classmate in school the following day? she wanted to know. Joplin’s peers trailed her down the narrow high school halls shouting at her, “Nigger lover!”
In 1962 she made her way to Austin and to Threadgill’s.
In living The Gay Place, Milner said, “We went to Mr. Kenneth Threadgill’s on weeknights.” Mr. Threadgill was the son of a Nazarene minister; he loved nothing more than to bring people together. He could always be “persuaded to sing along with his Jimmy Rodgers jukebox records,” Milner said. He would yodel, do a bit of Hank Williams, dance a little jig, then return to his bartending duties beneath a giant ceiling fan that merely stirred hot air. Four gas pumps sat out front of the bar, from the building’s former filling-station days, a TV antenna (connected to nothing inside) twisted atop the roof—here, Threadgill hosted truck drivers and ranchers who had come to town at night, treating them to country tunes and hootenannies. Threadgill was a serious follower of music; he became curious about the growing folk phenomenon among the nontraditional students in town, the crowd that was getting “more and more weird.” Threadgill observed that despite obvious cultural and generational differences, and the rural-urban divide, the students, ranchers, and truckers all shared a sense of exile from the mainstream, and they all locked on to music as a significant identifier. The songs each group listened to shared basic chordal and rhythmic roots. Brammer had heard these similarities long ago on the radio—so had Joplin—when hillbilly bands played their versions of Deep Ellum blues. Slowly, Threadgill’s “little bar became a haven for folk purists,” Jan Reid said, and one night “a young regular named Julie Paul . . . brought Janis Joplin to meet Mr. Threadgill.” Paul had passed Joplin hitching on the roadside and told her about the bar’s impromptu music nights.
By the time Joplin reached Austin, “she was already neurotic with rejection,” Reid said, “a fallen Church of Christ girl, a homely, overweight victim of the cosmetic fifties . . . She cursed like a sailor, drank anything she could get her hands on, wore no makeup, wore no bra. She apparently wanted just one person, damn it, to notice her. That person was Kenneth Threadgill.”
She teamed up one night with two new friends of hers, a duo called the Waller Creek Boys, Lanny Wiggins, a banjo player, and a harp man, Powell St. John. It was the first of many gigs they would play at the bar. Whenever the older crowd got restless, heckling Joplin during her screechy rendition of “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” Mr. Threadgill shushed them. He let it be known that he considered Joplin to be like a daughter. She voiced the agonies of hell with the passion of a pilgrim who had glimpsed heaven’s gates, he said. He upgraded the bar’s electrical capacities and bought a brand-new microphone for her.
She hung out with the hub of Austin’s misfits at a place affectionately called the Ghetto by its residents, a two-story wreck of barracks-style apartments on Nueces Street, near campus, each renting for thirty-five dollars a month. In the ramshackle structure there were only four actual apartments—maybe five (if you squeezed together hard enough)—but dozens of folks crashed there at any given time, and it was difficult to know who really lived on the premises, a fact not lost on Allen Hamilton, chief of police at the University of Texas, and Lieutenant Burt Gerding of the Austin Police Department, who surveilled the place intensely, suspecting subversive political activity, drug use, and illicit sexual practices. Aside from a few disorganized civil rights marches in front of segregated movie theaters, the Ghetto group was largely apolitical. Drug use? Certainly, though at that time, the head trip of choice was peyote, available legally and cheaply (ten cents a plant) at a nearby store called Hudson’s Cactus Gardens. The Ghetto-ites tended to cut the drug’s bitter taste by mixing it with store-bought molasses, whose sugar content actually counteracted the mescaline. Far more dangerous was the home beer brewing, done in an enclosed stairway; sometimes bottles would overheat and blow up, sending glass shrapnel into the ceiling. Sex—the cops’ major obsession, according to the number of reports filed on it—did occur frequently, in spite of the rotting-kimchee-and-catbox odor permeating the corridors as well as most of the bedrooms, and the unsavory presence of semen-stained mattresses that no one bothered to change. Someone tacked a sign—“Main Ball Room”—on the avocado-green door frame outside the most-used space. In America, it was beginning to be “rumored that women could have orgasms,” said Ramsey Wiggins, a sometimes Ghetto presence.
The evenings were joyous—sitting outside in mild weather beneath stately pecan trees (one dead branch spangled with condoms and beer caps), listening to Janis sing and the Waller Creek Boys blow and strum. Brammer’s attentiveness impressed Joplin, as it did many other women. Together, they shared their childhood pleasures of listening to late-night radio. They enthused over Bobby Dylan’s first album—Brammer introduced her to it. She told him how, in high school, she would drive with a group of guy friends across the Louisiana border and flirt with rednecks in seedy swamp bars, sometimes landing her buddies in brutal fistfights. She could cause as much trouble as Nadine, Brammer saw—except she didn’t have Nadine’s self-assurance.
She laughed when he told her how one day he had left a stash of pills in his bathing trunks and forgotten about them. He went for a swim in Lake Travis. The pills gummed together in one giant ball. Not knowing what to do, he popped the whole thing in his mouth: scum-water cookie dough. It was one of his finest highs, he said.
At the Ghetto, Brammer met Gilbert Shelton, then lead cartoonist at the Texas Ranger, a campus humor rag frequently shut down by authorities for its irreverence and obscenities. Shelton drew Wonder Warthog, a spoof of Superman. Later, he would spearhead the 1960s underground comics explosion. The philosophy of his most famous creation, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, could well have evolved at the Ghetto: “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.”
Brammer met Dave Hickey, an acquaintance of McMurtry’s. Hickey would become a noted art and music critic. He would write the “best sentence ever to appear in The Texas Observer,” McMurtry said—more wisdom from the Ghetto: “Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse from a sow’s ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.”
Beneath the gently swaying pecan trees (a sweeter, more sacred scene than the White House swimming pool, Brammer thought), Brammer came to know Wali Stopher, after whom Austin’s first head shop would be named; Chet Helms; Grover Lewis, his fellow literary refugee from the alleys of Oak Cliff; and a host of skilled musicians who would shortly—with a little help from Billy Lee—lead Austin into punk-edged psychedelia.
Here is a snapshot of Brammer’s work desk soon after he took a job with the Long News Service in Austin, in the spring and summer of 1963, providing articles on Texas politics to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun, and several Texas dailies:
a green paperback entitled Sex-Starved Slut; a sealed can of Betty Crocker cake icing; a Wyamine nasal inhaler [a nasal decongestant used as a stimulant]; a tin of Dexedrine; a two-pack of Twinkies, wrapped in cellophane; a yellow vial of RUSH amyl nitrate . . . three empty green bottles with prescription labels for pills [no one had ever] heard of; a white bottle labeled “Black Mollies”; and an unopened half-pint of Jim Beam.
These details appear in a short story by Tom Walker based on his work experience with Brammer. Eventually, Brammer disappeared from the news service as he had vanished from Janeway’s organization and from Time. Like so many other ambitious young writers, Walker hoped Brammer would help him place his fiction with an agent. Courteously, Brammer made promises he couldn’t possibly keep.
Meanwhile, Larry McMurtry had moved to Houston to take a temporary teaching position at Rice University. Brammer followed him to the city and, “with the use of many blankets, made himself an air-conditioned cubicle in the garage,” McMurtry said.
A week or so later, Brammer drifted back to Austin. Just two years earlier, he had published one of the most critically acclaimed novels ever written by a Texan; publishers continued to call him with offers; he retained journalistic credibility; his community saw him as a hero—and yet, increasingly by choice (or as a result of choices he made), he was living largely like a homeless person. “He was still sort of Establishment, but he was poised to drop completely out of society,” Sidney said.
He found a small apartment. A fellow he had met, Bill Beckman, a freelance cartoonist (later famous for cofounding the East Village Other), became a frequent companion. Beckman created a strip entitled Captain High, in which a superhero with an H on his chest swooped into crime situations, making them infinitely worse. Then: “Enter Enig-Man,” a character based on Brammer. Somberly, Enig-Man would survey the rubble left by Captain High and mutter, “Hm . . .”
One night Beckman took Brammer to a two-story Victorian house near campus, by Scholz’s, at the corner of 18th and Brazos. He said he knew the girls who lived there—UT undergrads. Brammer would like them. One of those girls, Dorothy Browne, a sorority dropout and an English major, was sitting on the living room floor, writing a paper on Tender is the Night for a class on the American novel. “Beckman brought Bill upstairs and said, ‘I want you to meet Bill Brammer.’ And I went, ‘Ah, be still my heart. O English major heart.’ Everybody in town knew who he was,” Dorothy told me. “I think I took the hair rollers out of my hair. And we talked and we talked and he said, ‘What are you doing?’ When I told him he said, ‘You can come on over to my house and I’ll help you write your paper. You can study. You can be at one end of the house and I’ll be at the other end ’cause I stay up all night and write.’ I did go with him that night, and the next morning his landlady came by, and because there was a chick in the house with him all night, she evicted him. So the first night I met him, I got him kicked out of his house. Luckily, the downstairs at our place was for rent. He moved in, and it just started from there.”
The Fitzgerald paper he wrote for her earned a C+ for “poor sentence structure.”
When his children weren’t staying at Bob Eckhardt’s house on stilts, Brammer brought them over. Dorothy and her two roommates “were all such beautiful women,” Sidney remembered. “Shelby and I were just in awe.” The girls played a guessing game: which of the three women would their daddy marry? One weekend, Bud Shrake and Gary Cartwright arrived from Dallas for a visit. “When we walked in [to his place], there were three coeds sleeping in T-shirts and panties on a mattress on his floor,” Cartwright recalled. “Each one was a knockout. ‘Uh, how you doin’, Billy Lee?’ we said. Not too bad, evidently.”
Then Nadine heard he was about to receive $25,000 so that filming could begin on The Gay Place. She took him to court, claiming she had the “right to know how much money he had received for the sale” of the book. “I want every little tiny bit of information I can get to let me know when my children will get what is coming to them,” she told the Austin paper. The legal proceedings ended when Nadine’s lawyer dispatched a sheriff to Elizabeth McKee’s New York office to snatch the check—and the movie never got made. The official explanation was that a change in studio heads scotched the plans. Brammer remained convinced for the rest of his life that Lyndon Johnson blocked the project through his aide Jack Valenti, who had forged strong ties with the Motion Picture Association of America. (Valenti later led the group from 1966 to 2004.)
Brammer used Nadine’s subpoena as an excuse to skip town. He remembered Larry McMurtry’s suggestion that he visit Ken Kesey in California. Kesey had recently moved into a log cabin in the woods outside La Honda (on the San Francisco Peninsula, due west of Cupertino), on Route 84 just across a little drawbridge from a place called the Boots and Saddle Inn. He had strung Christmas lights in the ponderosa pines surrounding the cabin, and he had created a large metallic bird, strung between trees, whose wings people could flap by pulling a rope. He had also constructed on the grounds a human figure out of scrap metal, a man in a Kama Sutra love position. A garden hose wove through his limbs, spraying copiously day and night so that the man appeared to be experiencing a perpetual orgasm.
Here, Brammer met Jerry Garcia and others who had chosen to get “on the bus,” in Kesey’s words, ready to follow the mantra that Timothy Leary would later bestow on the counterculture: turn on, tune in, drop out. The California sunsets painted everyone’s faces a natural Day-Glo orange. In the low evening light, Kesey looked just like the Big Pumpkin—hulking, meaty.
Even for him, Brammer “ran at a pretty high gear” that summer, said the Merry Prankster. The gnome-like Texan gobbled acid. He began to inject speed.
While he was tripping in the woods, Esquire ran a piece announcing “what every American writer of importance is working on at this point in our literary history.” Included with notes on James Baldwin, J. D. Salinger, William Burroughs, and Henry Miller is mention of William Brammer’s “humorous Washington novel,” Fustian Days.
When Brammer returned to Austin in the fall, he threw himself into guru mode more passionately than ever. “He was always giving someone a new book or an obscure magazine piece or a newly released record,” Gary Cartwright said. “I first heard about Bob Dylan and Ken Kesey from Billy Lee.” He would sit downstairs in the big Victorian house, watching three color television sets simultaneously, volume turned high—“just like his old pal Lyndon, staying up for days on end out of sheer visceral concern that he might miss something,” said Paul Cullum, a journalist pal.
“I think he wanted to be the Ken Kesey of Texas,” said Bob Simmons, whose path had crossed Brammer’s at the Ghetto. “He would have been embarrassed by the analogy, probably, but I think if you stepped back and looked at it, that was what he had in mind.”
He had already entered local lore. Now he secured his place in history. The “first vial of blue liquid . . . LSD-25 . . . had arrived in Austin,” wrote the musician and cultural historian Paul Drummond. “Exactly who was the first to introduce it has become a point of issue. Tary Owens amongst others claimed it came via an unexpected source—Billy Lee Brammer.”
Every one of his surviving friends still remembers him walking up to them, at one time or another, saying, “Close your eyes and stick out your tongue.”
“Oh yeah, he was always very generous with his drugs,” Susan Walker told me. Walker would become one of Brammer’s best buddies. “I’m pretty sure he gave Janis her first acid.”