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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“Billy just couldn’t believe it,” explains Dorothy. “Hardly anyone would talk to him! People he’d known for years! Everyone said it was, you know, because of Lady Bird, but he never really knew. He never got near Johnson.” He no longer trusted himself to write about the man, couldn’t satisfy himself when he tried; his writing lost clarity, even conviction. “Billy said he just didn’t care about Johnson anymore. He’d sit down to work and nothing would happen. He’d just piddle around, type up his notes, then retype them. He finally did get together a bunch of anecdotes about Johnson, funny stories. It kind of turned into a joke book.” The writing is so lifeless that most of the jokes don’t even work.
Deciding that staying in Washington was useless as well as expensive, the Brammers retreated to Austin to discover that Columbia pictures, quite out of the blue and with no explanation, had canceled production of The Gay Place. Everybody was well paid, of course; Billy’s option was even picked up, thus relieving him permanently of the film rights to his novel. It was generally assumed the new president was behind the cancellation.
Billy knew when he was beat. By summer he was down in Manzanillo eating LSD with Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and an early sixties youth culture hero. Then it was on to San Francisco and more LSD, long hangouts at the Family Dog with the first true hippies, then to Denver, where the Brammars badly managed a rock ’n’ roll club. Billy never again wore a Brooks Brothers suit.
“He became fascinated by what was going on with young people,” Dorothy remembers. “The whole sixties thing that was just getting started, he could see it coming, you know. He thought it would change the country, and he wanted to be a part of it. I think the reason he took so much speed was he just couldn’t stand the idea he might miss something interesting, something fun. He’d stay up for days—listening, reading, talking. He was trying to absorb it all, everything. He was interested in everything.”
Because he believed in nothing. “Billy just sort of accepted everything,” as Dorothy puts it. “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.”
His writing degenerated into random and erratic fragments, notes from his endless readings, song lyrics, sporadic entries in an aimless journal. He and Dorothy moved impulsively and often. “Every time we’d move Billy would set up his writing place first thing,” recalls Dorothy. “He’d get his typewriter just where he wanted it, then he’d tack up all his funny little momentos, arrange all his books and his files, stack his paper just so: orange paper here, green paper, blue paper. That’d take him about a week and by then the house would be full of people every night.”
Billy grew adept at country-shucking New York editors out of large advances for unlikely stories, a skill that required increasing artistry as his reputation spread. He peddled “Fustian Days” like it was the Brooklyn Bridge. He did a little film work in San Francisco, some newspaper pieces, in Denver he even made a running start on a rock ‘n’ roll novel, but there was never anything Billy could sustain. Not even his marriage survived the decade.
The cataracts came on, the glaucoma, his hair started falling out, then his teeth, his joints stiffened: the calcium attrition of the dedicated junkie. Billy in fact was a legendary junkie, a man who knew the Physicians Desk Reference almost by rote, who could seemingly identify every pill ever minted and recount its effects. Some of the earliest underground acid comics, Wonder Warthog and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, were conceived in the garage back of Billy’s house in Austin, on Billy’s acid. Doses that could paralyze an ordinary junkie would sometimes barely dilate his eyes. He even copped his pitiful dog Suzy’s epilepsy pills and kept refilling her prescription for three years until she finally died.
But Billy’s steady drug of choice was straight crystal methedrine, speed, the napalm of all drugs: a quarter-gram tapped into a spoon and dissolved in water, cooked on a flame to the color of milk and the warmth of blood, sucked with nervous fingers into the syringe, the arm quickly tied off, artery pumped-shoot. “The nature of vision is human and not chemical,” says an entry in his journal, a lonely sentence on a blank green page. Billy had been writing on speed since he was in college, the drug and the writing were so intertwined he couldn’t separate them, but neither could he focus them. He did more speed than a punk-rock band and all he could show for it were reams of stray impressions, run-on sentences, midnight digressions. He couldn’t concentrate his attention for more than a page or two. Speed, after all, is only a stimulant. What Billy lacked was inspiration—a vision, a dedication, a certainty of belief in what one is doing.
He never saw Lyndon Johnson again, not after that shameful moment on Air Force Two when Johnson made him doubt himself. Billy watched him on television, of course, like everyone else; he even went to a couple of Johnson’s appearances and speeches, but they never looked each other in the eyes again. In the winter of 1972 Johnson was dying out on his ranch west of Austin, the same ranch Billy parodied so cheerfully in his novel. Rumors were all over Austin that Johnson was calling in his oldest friends for last farewells, some of them friends he had broken with years before—Walter Jenkins, even Bobby Baker—trying to mend the fences of his cyclonic life.
All that winter Billy was obsessed with Johnson, pulling out old notes, old tapes, reading all the books and articles he could find, telling the old stories again. He even cadged a major assignment from Playboy for a Johnson piece, then surprised everyone by actually producing some forty pages of a rough draft. It was the longest piece of sustained writing he had done in years. But the invitation never came, and he never finished it. Lyndon Johnson went to his grave still bluffing, afraid to look at the man who had seen into his soul more clearly than anyone else he had ever known.
To any objective reader, Arthur Fenstemaker is Lyndon Johnson at his down-home, earthy best. That is the side of him Billy brought out, hence the side he saw and captured with such penetrating subtlety. To Johnson, it must have seemed like running naked past CBS News: so what if it was his best side? Probably he never could read past the first ten pages. Nor did he ever again trust that part of himself that had trusted Billy. More than any other modern president he was intimidated by and suspicious of writers, artists, intellectuals of all brands. Like a tragic flaw, it grew under pressure into paranoia—FBI files, small deceptions, larger ones—which came back on the rebound as a gap in his credibility. Much the same thing happens to Arthur Ferstenmaker.
The novel like Johnson’s reputation has aged well. In retrospect we appreciate the man more for those qualities that Billy valued in him and grow lenient toward his failings. Lyndon’s brother Sam Houston Johnson—warmly lampooned in the novel as Hoot Gibson Fenstemaker—came to Billy’s funeral, hobbling forward on twin maple canes to stare in the casket with a longer, sadder silence than anyone else save Billy’s two daughters, Sidney and Shelby, and his son, Willie. George Christian, the press secretary from the stormy years, was also there, and a few others. Not Lady Bird, of course, or anyone from her circle.
Otherwise there was a pretty wide assortment: veteran legislators, dope dealers, musicians, innumerable married women who came alone, and anyone in Austin who claimed to be a writer. Plus a large quota of the nondescript. Over the years Billy had followed his curiosity wherever it wandered, and he always discovered friends. No matter who you were or what your story, when Billy was with you he gave you his full attention, and that was a lot of attention to have.
In his last years Billy was a redneck version of Woody Allen, a gnomish little man with giant glasses and cowboy boots. He found humor in irony and ironies everywhere, he thought people endlessly fascinating, he loved conversation, and he always learned your deepest secret. He was a fatalist with a positive attitude. He was also a gossip, a kleptomaniac, and a man you couldn’t trust with your sister, daughter, or car—but he still had the direct gaze and serene brow of a man with a very clear conscience.
Perhaps most important, though, for a whole generation of would-be Texas writers, Billy was that which he’d never had himself: a resident guide, teacher, standard of comparison. He provided a homegrown role model, flawed surely, but that was a vital lesson in itself. “To have something to say,” wrote Billy’s idol Scott Fitzgerald, “is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless ratiocination of a subject—of endless trying to dig out the essential truth, the essential justice. As a first premise you have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have the talent without the conscience, you are just one of many thousand journalists.”
And no one has ever proved that better than Billy Lee Brammer, who more than any other writer of his time dug out and evoked the essential truth of Lyndon Johnson, the essence of the man. Billy’s talents as a writer were crippled and gone before most of us ever knew him—they disappeared with his confidence—but he always had the integrity of an artist, which is far more precious and lasting than talent. He brought to Texas letters a sense of honesty, sometimes painful but always sympathetic, and Texas is richer for his having done so. He knew it, too, and died a contented man, rushing like mad on a head full of speed, moving too fast for his own good. In his own way, Billy died singing, like William Blake. It was the rest of us who mourned.
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