Billy Lee
In his novel, The Gay Place, Billy Lee Brammer captured the earthiness of LBJ as no other writer has, but the book’s honesty destroyed the two men’s friendship.
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His arrivals, like his departures, were always spontaneous yet bizarrely memorable. Rattling up in his impeccably funky old Chevy, on which nothing worked predictably but the deafening stereo system, Billy would greet anyone he saw with the cheerful drawl, “Hidy, got any speed?” Then out would come the table lamps, boxes full of this and that, sepia portraits of his pioneer grandparents, his father’s World War I doughboy jacket, his brother’s World War II medals, his own Sunset High School baseball uniform: the merchandise. Only indirectly and belatedly did his marks come to realize that all this stuff was merchandise, theirs for just a little petty cash or better yet, some drugs. There was also the danger that unless suitably bribed he might drive away and leave it all in the yard. Sometimes I think it was Billy’s revenge for all the gloomy pity we dumped on him. He sure didn’t take much pity on himself, and while he may have viewed his situation as uncomfortable, or unbecoming, he certainly never thought of it as tragic.
Billy Lee had begun his writing career in the usual way, by rejecting everything he saw around him. As the editorial columnist for the Campus Chat, the student paper of North Texas State College in Denton (forty miles north of Dallas), Billy wrote a stridently scornful column surrounded by frivolous chat and photos of coeds and football stars. Hot with indignation, he railed against the evils of the world: the poll tax, the Bomb, Jim Crow, Senator Joe McCarthy.
“Billy Lee was this really odd little campus intellectual,” recalls his first wife, Nadine Eckhardt, who met him in 1950 and married him a year later. “He used to wear these tight pegged pants and blue suede shoes, real blue suede shoes, went around quoting S. J. Perelman and Max Shulman all the time. He had his little column in the paper and was always making fun of the fraternity boys, writing about politics, books, jazz.”
Nadine was a Rio Grande Valley beauty queen who came to North Texas State for the purpose of escaping home, bringing with her the sultry manner and open mind of Border women combined with a nonstop spirit all her own. Enrolling as an art student, she cropped her hair like Elizabeth Taylor, mail-ordered some cashmere sweaters, Moroccan sandals, and gull-wing sunglasses, and became a bohemian. “By my standards Billy Lee was kind of unsophisticated. I was the one who turned him on to Benzedrine, for staying up late studying, and everything. All the kids from the Valley knew about it because we’d get it over in Mexico, but Bill had never heard of it. He loved it right away. He said it helped him get into his writing.”
He got slim help from anywhere else. Would-be writers were an upstart species of postwar Texan, an old legend crossed with a new dream. They were literary sodbusters on the literate frontier, outfitting their lives from New Yorker cartoons. Nowhere in the state was there a working novelist of even minor accomplishment, nor had there ever been. There were no Texas voices with whom younger writers could tune their own talents, compare insights, from whom they could learn.
Nor, more important, was there any tradition of or appreciation for the means and aims of honest writing: imagination, introspection, a deliberate search for models and values, for the grace and strength of true self-knowledge. The portrait of the Texan had always been made by others, from typecast actors to visiting reporters, sentimentally or cynically, but always superficially. To read about oneself, when the writing is good, is to recognize a more complex self than most Texans were then acquainted with; in fact, they were prone to regard such portraits suspiciously. That an entire generation of talented postwar writers—from Terry Southern and Donald Barthelme to Liz Smith and Rex Reed—abandoned the state in body and in principle expresses the conflict they felt with the dual roles of writer and Texan. Like their grandparents who struggled against the contrary land, only the really stubborn ones stayed on. Billy Lee, for instance, headstrong as a redneck, stayed and stayed, and those of us who came later were beholden and fated to love him for it, no matter what.
In the mid-fifties, Billy was widely considered the best writer in the Austin Capitol press corps, a narrow honor achieved with his clever essays in the new Texas Observer, a muckraking weekly with liberal bias and high energy, both innovations in Texas journalism. Austin in the mid-fifties was the hand and eye of a Texas looking reluctantly up from the land toward the strange and disreputable modern world. It was a time of vivid choices, loud convictions, and easy controversy, a time too noisy for subtle writing. Billy wrote florid diatribes that read like the postgrad edition of his old Campus Chat column, smug instead of strident, and he soon became a spokesman for all those newfangled semi-Texans like himself, who gathered in Austin as a last resort before running off.
“There was a real magic in Austin then,” sighs Nadine. “There was lots of excitement and energy, a lot of young people who wanted to try new things—new music, new politics, new ideas—new everything! Billy was sort of working on a book about Austin, or set in Austin anyway. It was mostly just notes and things, little sketches. It wasn’t really what you’d want to call a book. He’d complain a lot about how hard it was to get started.
“And he was so irresponsible!” she wails, even at the memory. “He was always buying sports cars, he loved little sports cars. We had nine cars in five years. Once he was taking our house payment to the bank and spent it on a Morris Minor instead. We had a Morris Minor and a Jaguar and we couldn’t afford groceries. And we had a baby then!
“Finally it got to where we just had to have some money. We’d all heard that Lyndon was looking for a house liberal for his staff, someone who was friends with the rest of the young liberal crowd. I think they were all secretly trying for the job. It turned out that Lyndon had read some of Bill’s articles and been impressed, so he hired him. Later he gave me a job, too, so we could move to Washington.”
It had been seven years since Billy first saw Johnson emerging from his helicopter, alive with nervous arrogance and promise, but the years had merely confirmed Billy’s youthful, intuitive impression: Lyndon Johnson, the peerless dealmaker, was already cementing his power as a domineering Senate leader who, in tandem with his old mentor and fellow Texan, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, held Congress in a hammerlock. Without a doubt Billy was the first genuine, practicing literary man that Johnson ever knew.
In most respects the two men were reflex opposites. Johnson was big and physical, expansive, a legendary dynamo of flattery and vanity and backroom savvy, a man with a firm grip on himself and a sure fix on Somewhere, while Billy Lee was passive, ambivalent, and introspective, a small, underfed intellectual and a closet novelist. Yet they were both brilliant in their separate ways, ambitious in their brilliance, and both of course were Texans, prodigal sons of that same provocative land. They were a natural pair.
“Lyndon perceived Bill’s intelligence,” Nadine remembers. “We were a couple of snobby, prissy intellectuals, and he recognized us right away for what we were. He used to argue with Billy about what a waste of time it was. After a while, you know, he really got to liking Billy. I mean he really liked him. He wanted us over at his house all the time in Washington. When we were in Austin we’d go out to the ranch on weekends. Our little girls would play with the Johnson girls, we’d drive around looking at cows, and Bill and Lyndon would talk for hours.”
They were one big happy family. Billy wrote timely speeches for Johnson and his Senate allies, wrote position papers, press releases, soothing letters to distraught liberals. Johnson put him to writing weekly notes to his mother for him, which worked so well that he was soon drafting fatherly letters to Johnson’s daughters. Before long Billy was handling the correspondence all by himself, signing for Sonny or Daddy, counseling and gossiping, now and then dashing off spontaneous greetings when whimsy overtook him.
“He starting wearing oxford shirts and those cute narrow ties,” recalls Nadine. “And Brooks Brothers three-piece suits. He even wore Brooks Brothers underwear!” There were times when he and Johnson drove home late from small-town speeches, Billy wired on speed and Johnson on himself, chugging Pepsi and Scotch, respectively, haranguing each other. At staff meetings or dinner parties it was always Billy who drew Johnson out, floating him questions or gentle rebuttals, like a straight man feeding lines to his star—but always good lines, incisive cues. Billy Lee was the first and last intellectual Lyndon Johnson ever really trusted. He welcomed his careful perspective and reflective temper, the inward bent of his mind, and he trusted him because he could dominate him, or so it seemed.
Billy’s oldest friends recall with a certain lingering chagrin how he idolized Johnson during the years he worked for him: waited on him, rhapsodized over him, toted and fretted and apologized for him. Billy exhibited all the symptoms of teenage dementia, worse even than usual because it was so obviously heartfelt and he was so smart; the rest of the young liberal crowd was aghast. What nobody could see was that Billy was slowly but surely finding himself in Johnson’s shadow—which over the years would prove an indelible method of self-definition.
He was writing more productively than ever before. “I guess Billy really got going on his book after we’d been in Washington a while,” says Nadine. “It finally started looking like a book at least. He must have had a couple hundred pages.”
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