Sex and Politics
It's been going on since the Ice Age of the Republic, when Thomas Jefferson laid siege to what was gallantly assumed to be Dolly Madison's virtue.
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Another tragi-comic escapade involved a legislator seen scurrying half-dressed from an apartment development, a pistol-brandishing stranger in close pursuit. Sporting a car with reassuring State Official license tags, the House member leapt inside, spilled out his perfunctory good-ole-boy introductions, and, indicating his predicament, begged for an emergency rescue ride to the Austin Hotel. On the way he went on to explain that an otherwise perfectly-realized evening's dalliance had been nightmarishly terminated at the young lady's digs when the fellow with the pistol had burst in.
Happy to have escaped with skin intact, he was nonetheless concerned about a $1,500 watch left behind, a birthday gift from his wife. Sometime later, a package was delivered to his hotel room: the watch, now smashed beyond recognition, was dutifully returned with a note of regret from the lady. Her estranged husband, the intruder, had discovered it back at the apartment and had set upon it with vengeful bootheels.
Some other recent downhome State House adventures, variously wretched and excessive, exotic and commonplace, ungermane and to-the-point:
A senior House member, slightly past his prime but well within his pique, was motoring into deep East Texas one weekend, bound for hearth and home district and feeling fine indeed—filled with that incomparable sense of grandeur and complacency which derives from having proved oneself, stylishly and beyond question, within sub-cultures vital to self-esteem: peer-groupers and pair-bonders. He had won the respect of his fellow House members: he had then won more than that from at least one of their dishier camp-followers.
Now he was heading home for some perfunctory romancing of his own, legitimized Little Woman and their outsized constituency, when—bummed-out intrusion—he was overtaken by flashing red lights of the DPS. Before he could even produce credentials as legislative high-roller, the patrolman addressed him by name, blew his cover and then his mind. The Officer was passing on a message of some delicacy and indelicate urgency. The lady friend back at the Capitol had contracted (who knows how? call it immaculate infection) one of the social diseases. Her physician suggested his immediate return to Austin for treatment, lest the pestilence find its way into and among respectable East Texas gentry. A thrilling denouement? Not a prayer. Here the fragment ends; I am ignorant even as to which direction the House member thereafter steered his car.
Once, not so long ago in time but light years in social dislocation, I was an accredited correspondent covering the Legislature, and I had this legislator friend possessed of certain lunatic urgencies and eccentricities. He was, in short, a friend whom I regarded as a thoroughgoing, unregenerate sex maniac—unarguably one of the kinkier, benign, outfront and unapologetic specimens one might be privileged to know.
Actually, it only seemed that matters sexual dominated his waking hours, work or play: He was in fact endlessly resilient, resourceful and boundlessly energetic, and he was equally obsessed with battling for populist reform and chronicling evil-doing everywhere. He appeared to give his enthusiasms equal time, and one was as likely to see him perusing some erudite sampling from Commonweal or The Economist or Foreign Affairs as any of scores of pornographic volumes (words and/or scruffy Tex-Mex pictures) he toted about with him in a huge grocery sack. His attendance record was respectable; he did his homework, labored in committee, lobbied his comrades. His arguments from the floor were cogent, well-documented, moving and often irrefutable—yet inevitably (perhaps in consequence) ineffective.
He meanwhile carried on with (and boasted of) such heroic feats of onanism and whorehouse marathon as to outdistance Portnoy or any long-suppressed Edwardians. My friend frequented the leaping houses south of Austin nightly; on early-adjournment days, he could often as not claim record endurance marks—with cancelled checks to document the telling.
He's long gone into genteel retirement now, my friend who cheerfully credited Texas Military Institute with his harmless aberrations; and the professional ladies who once catered to his compulsions (and to generations of his less-flamboyant colleagues) might well be drawing unemployment benefits. A bare-minimum resident housekeeping force remains, as much for servicing proud, nostalgic old-timers as from any towering cupidity. Lobbyists and elected politicians alike are in agreement here: Why bother heading South and paying for it when there's so much in abundance, free for the eyeball asking, right there in the Capitol?
One of the funkiest, most improbable, electoral time-warps in what passes for Texas recorded history occurred last election (1972), employing and exploiting techniques and intimidations that would have been rejected as hopelessly anachronistic, hoked-up and unconvincing even for the least discriminating of our dramatic forms (made-for-TV movies?). A candidate for high office was systematically shadowed, set up, and then meticulously, comprehensively photographed—a staggering 106 printable negatives in all, sensitive portrayals of the young candidate in every conceivable full-wheezing gamut of coital transport. And the actual political effect of all this tiresome, low-rent x-rated cinema verite? Little or no effect whatever, according to informed observers: at least none, in any case, so far as this campaign unfolded.
Yet elsewhere, further north and within a congressional district up for grabs, campaign strategists for one fellow, chortling over the now widely-circulated political porn from down south, were suddenly transfixed: From the 106 original photographs, someone pointed out how this young candidate from one part of Texas bore an almost uncanny resemblance to…none other than this other young fellow who happened to be out front in the local Congressional campaign. Resemblance, hell—they were goddam identical, for all anyone in these precincts might determine. And so it went, that inevitably, thousands of copies of that one uncanny-resemblance print, were just getting into circulation when threats of FBI intervention brought the semi-clandestine operation to abbreviated end. Coitus interruptus.
Reflecting at length on these and other adventures recounted by the participants themselves, two impressions stand out. One is that, for all the splenetic, single-minded, goaty-groping charm and center-stage acrobatics, it is a rather spurious sensuality largely stoked by nameless, faceless, stimulus/response urgencies from either sex. The men will speak of "Nice face, great shanks, no chest whatever," as if sizing up Superbowl personnel, now and again compelled to admire the rapid ascent of some notably clever or incontestably gorgeous staffer who has moved up from House member to Speaker to Lieutenant Governor and finally to the White House staff. The ladies, for their own part, invoke aesthetic criteria scarcely more exalted.
The second impression goes back still again to slip-slap logistics. Politicians, whether out of discretion, paranoia or bankrupt resources, expend an absurd amount of emotional and tactical energy in search of suitable places for top-security getting-it-on.
Unless your politician is independently wealthy or already wholly mortgaged to one or more of our vastly generous-hearted special interests, he is compelled to find some acceptable accomodation either within his own skimpy limitations or collectively, say, as with some specially-orchestrated "allskate" affair or at least a genial tag-team match among close friends. The next best step is to sound out potential supporters for some projected state-wide campaign war chest or appreciation dinner—a little spending money required to keep our boy up there from capitulating to every temptation in the books.
Some little while prior to his becoming a bona-fide, front-humping state-wide campaigner, one of our younger and comelier candidates was forced to do his earliest, unofficial campaigning on short rations indeed. Invariably, he traveled and shared hotel quarters with a high-ranking operator from the State Democratic Executive Committee, a gentleman who, for all his wisdom and clout and towering cupidity, was also both a hopeless drunk and unwavering celibate. He presumably worked uncommonly hard all day long as establishing his credentials as arrogant old sumbitch—for he was invariably semi-comatose with booze by nightfall. One evening the younger politician was ambushed and all but shanghaied into desperately urgent fornication by one of the prettiest little old supporters he'd ever seen. But where the hell to get down to it?
In desperation, and with time perhaps running out, he seized his constituent and headed directly upstairs to the room shared with his traveling companion from the SDEC, somehow hoping to beat the old juicehead there and by-god lock him out. But too late; his friend was already spread-eagled on the one double bed, wheezing and stinking hideously. Suddenly, transported by galvanic rage, the younger man demonstrated his capacities for decisive action then and there, hoisting his roommate bodily and unceremoniously, depositing and locking him inside the hotelroom closet. After which, the lovers presumably fell to it—they possibly fell right from it again some time later prior to the older fellow's nightmarish awakening amidst the silky suits and shoetrees and well-aged underwear lining his closet sleeping quarters.
Closet assignations, for that matter, can claim perfectly respectable historical antecedents. Warren Harding carried on a tempestuous affair for years, before and during his White House tenure, and he was clearly in love with the lady. When no other opportunities presented themselves, Harding and his mistress were known to hide away in a White House closet!
A legislator from South Texas was overheard giving a Capitol staffer this invitation: "Hunny, whyn't yew and me just step out tonight and I'll buy yew a big ole Texas-sized Coke." Pressed for particulars, he suggested a ride out to his South Texas ranch for "a look at the wild antelopes and thangs."
If this seems far-fetched, one remembers that LBJ's happiest ranch duties involved a livestock tour with favored lady visitors. A Johnson secretary vividly recalls the second day on her job when, summoned from Austin to the Pedernales, the girl was recklessly wheeled about the Johnson acres until, pausing at a pen enclosing a couple of Democratic donkeys, the future President 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!"
Lyndon Johnson called me one of his "hard-peckered boys," and I frankly didn't know what the hell to make of it at the time, which was the declining summer of 1956 when the Senate Majority Leader was all but strapped down at his ranch, convalescing from a massive coronary .
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