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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If I ever back off from Fenstemaker, it won’t be because I lost faith. Just the reverse. Because I might put so much faith in him I’d stop believing in myself. Can’t have that. Matter of self-preservation.
And if ever there was tragedy in Billy’s life it was when he wrote those cautionary words and put them in Sherwood’s agreeable mouth, like a friendly warning.
In late 1959, believing in himself for the first time as a writer, he resigned from Johnson’s staff to move to New York to live like one. He took an apartment in the East Forties, hung around the Village and P.J. Clarke’s, had an office in the Empire State Building. Houghton Mifflin realized by now that they had a major novel under contract, and Billy was awarded their annual literary fellowship, perhaps the most respectable prize an unpublished novelist can gain. He was talked up as a comer, invited to uptown parties and weekends in the Hamptons, off-Broadway openings, backstage at the Bitter End.
He decided to name his book The Gay Place, lifting the title from an obscure poem by Scott Fitzgerald: a tip of the hat to his other youthful idol. In its final published form The Gay Place reverses the order of the three novellas—it begins with “The Flea Circus” and ends with “Country Pleasures”—an arrangement that works to spectacular effect, one of those flashes of genuine art that the artist couldn’t possibly have designed.
There was now nowhere to back off to: Billy couldn’t honestly believe in himself as a writer unless he believed in his hero. He’d no sooner finished the final draft of The Gay Place, barely six months after resigning, than he was back with Johnson helping canvass delegates to the 1960 Democratic National Convention. When Johnson emerged as Jack Kennedy’s running mate, Billy put off proofing the galleys of his novel to enlist in the campaign, thus effectively postponing publication until after the election. He worked on Democratic press relations and white papers, drafted speeches for both candidates, traveled with Johnson on the Cornpone Special that held the South for the Catholic presidential nominee. Not until after the election did Billy go back to being a writer.
But he didn’t go back to New York. Instead he followed his novel back to Austin, where he finished polishing The Gay Place and promptly started writing a sequel, which he was calling “Fustian Days.” He was already a hundred pages into it by the time The Gay Place was published in March 1961.
The book got the kind of reviews that would-be writers dream about—“brilliantly written,” said the New York Times, “convincing, horribly convincing”—while Billy was likened to a string of famous authors from Scott Fitzgerald to Robert Penn Warren. “In this initial appearance,” saluted the New York Herald-Tribune, “he shows himself to be one of the ablest novelists now writing in America.” The Gay Place stirred debate among senior critics and other writers such as only happens with books of implicit merit or significance.
Arthur Goddam Fenstemaker, as literary samurai Gore Vidal and other critics have recognized, is quite simply the greatest politician in American literature, richer and fuller than Mayor Skeffington in The Last Hurrah, less provincial than Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, more truly American than the crippled cynics inhabiting Gore Vidal’s own Washington, D.C.
Most of the various commentators saw no reason to mention Billy’s tour of duty with Lyndon Johnson (noted in his dust-jacket profile); the novel clearly stood on its own where they were concerned. Besides, the new vice president was regarded in literary circles as a somewhat gross and disquieting anachronism on the stylish New Frontier. Encouraged by their Pulitzer Prize-winning president, literate Americans, earnestly idealistic, were asking what they could do for their country, and Billy’s “horribly convincing” novel of American politics suffered dreadful sales for a book so applauded. By the summer of 1961, The Gay Place was remaindered in its second edition.
Recently divorced from Nadine, Billy took an impressive job in the Washington bureau of Time magazine and became once more a nighttime, part-time writer. Every three or four days he would lock himself in his office, provisioned with Pepsis and candy bars, take some uppers, and confront himself. He was working on “Fustian Days,” but due to the poor sales of The Gay Place he couldn’t get a contract on it; even his agent tried to dissuade him from writing a sequel. Billy had nothing to sustain him but faith in his hero, and that was soon broken. Billy’s friend Murray Kempton, then with the New Republic, recorded the incident:
After publication, while Brammer was traveling with the vice president as a Time correspondent, Johnson said, quite out of the blue: “I tried reading your novel, Billy, but I couldn’t get past the first ten pages because of all the dirty words.”
It was the last time they would ever look into each other’s eyes, these two Texans—the moment was heavy with the weight of that possibility—and Billy flinched. His mind went searching for his dirty words, and he turned away. It didn’t even occur to him that Johnson was bluffing. The claim was so preposterous that, later on, Billy couldn’t even take it seriously—but in the moment of truth he’d believed in his hero more than in himself. For the rest of his life he would tell of it wryly but wistfully, like a man never quite reconciled to a missed opportunity. And he never had complete faith in anything again, least of all in himself.
The change was immediately apparent in his writing. He promptly abandoned his sequel in favor of some magazine pieces, which, poorly conceived and overwritten, were never published. He quit Washington for Atlanta, where he covered the early civil rights marches for Time, but he still couldn’t get his mind off Johnson. In the spring of 1962 he sailed for Europe, his first trip, newly jobless but adventurous, determined to find new inspiration. He sought out all the places talked about in Fitzgerald and Hemingway, from the Ritz Hotel bar to the Goyas in the Prado, listened intently for the continental muse American writers had been tapping for a century. But in ten months Billy didn’t write a single word he judged worth keeping. Finally, broke again, he limped home to Austin and took a job reporting on the Texas Legislature. At night, stubborn as ever but half-heartedly, he turned again to the nagging subject of Arthur Goddam Fenstemaker.
“It seemed to me that Billy’s enthusiasm had run down,” recalls Larry McMurtry, a temporary roommate in the summer of 1963. “He wasn’t getting anything back from his writing. 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.” Billy’s wit and facility were of no use to anyone, because his heart was no longer in it. He never completed the manuscript.
The film rights to The Gay Place were sold that summer to Paul Newman, the current top box-office movie star due to his huge success in Hud, the screen version of McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By. Newman wanted to play Roy Sherwood, Billy’s made-up alter ego. It could have been the modern equivalent of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, about the corruption of souls more supple and mortal that Jimmy Stewart’s. Columbia Pictures agreed to finance it, Paul Newman dropped in to look over Austin, a script was drafted. Jackie Gleason, one of Billy’s favorite actors, fresh from a triumphant comeback opposite Newman in The Hustler, was cast as Arthur Goddam Fenstemaker. Billy started taking whole crowds to dinner, playing big spender. He happily quit his job. But then Nadine’s lawyers in New York attached his royalties in lieu of the support payments for their three children, which he had flawlessly neglected. And then the President of the United States was murdered.
Billy was in Dallas that day, watching. He was at Parkland Memorial with John Connally, and later he was at the jail when Ruby killed Oswald: his instincts were alert. Within an hour after the announcement of Kennedy’s death, he had been approached by five magazines to profile the new president, and feelers were out to him for a full-scale biography. Billy committed himself to everything, oddly confident again, as if revitalized somehow by the tragedy. He realized he still had faith in his hero. Billy was so excited he even got married again, to Dorothy Browne, in the house in Oak Cliff, wearing one of his twelve new Brooks Brothers suits.
Next he signed a handsome contract with Random House for a Johnson biography, the first big Johnson book deal in the publishing business. Billy went to Washington fully prepared to play Boswell to his hero—it seemed to be his destiny—only to be told by his old friend George Reedy, the new press secretary, that he was the only journalist in the world non grata at the Johnson White House, denied press credentials. This would grow to a long list in the years to follow—and would be a prestigious distinction in some circles—but to Billy it felt like a knee in his soul, maiming his faith.
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