Lady Bird
She was a shy, quiet girl from Karnack, Texas. Then she married Lyndon Johnson.
(Page 2 of 6)
Lyndon Johnson possessed not only a lash for a tongue but a talent—a rare gift, in fact—for aiming the lash, for finding a person’s most sensitive point, and striking it, over and over again, without mercy. And he did not spare the lash even when the target was his wife—not that great talent was required to discern the rawest of Lady Bird’s wounds: her terrible shyness, her dread of having attention called to herself.
Everyone was aware of the way he talked to her because he talked to her that way in public, shouting orders at her across a crowded room at a Texas State Society dinner (“Lady Bird, go get me another piece of pie.” “I will, in just a minute, Lyndon.” “Get me another piece of pie!”). “He’d embarrass her in public,” recalls Wingate Lucas, a congressman from Fort Worth. “Just yell at her across the room, tell her to do something. All the people from Texas felt very sorry for Lady Bird.” If while entertaining friends at home or while staying overnight at a friend’s house, he saw some imperfection in her attire, such as a run in her stocking, he would order her to change stockings, “just ordered her to—right in front of us,” as her friend Mary Elliot recalls.
Also public were Lyndon’s constant attempts to get Lady Bird to improve her appearance, about which she had always been so sensitive—to make her lose weight, to wear brighter dresses, to replace the comfortable low-heeled shoes she preferred with spike-heeled pumps, to get her hair done more often, to wear more lipstick and more makeup. And after 1940, when his assistant John Connally married Idanell Brill, Johnson was able to flick the lash even harder. The dazzling Nellie Connally was everything Lady Bird was not—perfectly dressed, outgoing, poised, charming, beautiful; as a freshman at the University of Texas, she had been named a Bluebonnet Belle, one of the ten most beautiful girls on the campus; as a junior, she was named the most beautiful: Sweetheart of the University. After Nellie became a member of the Johnson entourage, Lyndon made sure that Lady Bird never forgot the contrast now so conveniently near at hand. “That’s a pretty dress, Nellie. Why can’t you ever wear a dress like that, Bird? You look so muley, Bird. Why can’t you look more like Nellie?” Nellie, who had become close friends with Lady Bird, was distressed at such remarks. “He would say things like that right in front of whoever was present. ‘Get out of those funny-looking shoes, Bird. Why can’t you wear shoes like Nellie?’ Right in front of us all! Now, can you think of anything more cruel?” Aware of Lady Bird’s shyness, her almost visible terror at having attention called to herself, acquaintances said to each other: “I don’t know how she stands it.” And, of course, because of the complete lack of respect with which she was treated by her husband, they didn’t have much respect for her, either. Seeing that in her relationship with Lyndon her opinion didn’t count, they gave it little consideration themselves. She talked hardly at all, and when she did try to talk, Nellie says, “nobody paid any attention to her.”
Not long after he was elected to Congress in 1937, moreover, Johnson had begun spending frequent weekends at Longlea, an eight-hundred-acre estate in the northern Virginia hunt country that had been built by Charles E. Marsh, the immensely wealthy publisher of the Austin American-Statesman, and designed by Marsh’s mistress, Alice Glass. Glass, a shade under six feet tall, with creamy skin and long reddish-blond hair, a woman so spectacular that the noted New York society photographer Arnold Genthe called her “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” was a small-town girl from Marlin, Texas, who had become a witty, elegant hostess of a brilliant table and a sparkling salon of politicians and intellectuals. In addition, she possessed a political acumen so keen that the toughest Texas politicians enjoyed talking politics with her; it was Alice Glass who devised a compromise that pulled Johnson and the fierce Herman Brown off a collision course that had threatened Johnson’s career. By 1940 Alice Glass had been Lyndon Johnson’s mistress for more than two years, in a passionate love affair of which Marsh, patronizing and paternalistic toward the young congressman, was unaware. Observing Johnson’s willingness to sit silently listening to Alice read poetry, knowing the risks he took in being the lover of the consort of a man so vital to his political career—this affair stands out in his life as one of the very few episodes in it that ran counter to his ambitions—the Longlea circle believed that his feelings for Alice were unique, a belief shared by Alice, who had told intimates that she and Johnson had discussed marriage. In that era, a divorced man would be effectively barred from public office, but she said that Lyndon had promised to get divorced anyway and accept one of the several job offers he had received to become a corporate lobbyist in Washington. As a result, she kept fending off marriage proposals from Marsh. “She wouldn’t marry Marsh after she met Lyndon,” her sister, Mary Louise, says.
Whether or not Lady Bird was aware of her husband’s affair with Alice—and the circle of Longlea “regulars” was certain she was—weekends at the Virginia estate must have been especially difficult for the young wife; to Alice’s adoring sister, Mary Louise, and to Alice’s best friend, Alice Hopkins, both of whom knew of the affair, she was an obstacle to Alice’s happiness, and of course, she was not at home in the brilliant Longlea salon. No matter how many times he met her, Charles Marsh had trouble remembering her name; he was constantly referring to her as “Lyndon’s wife.” “Everybody was trying to be nice to her, but she was just…out of place,” Alice Hopkins says, and although the first part of that sentence may not have been true, the second was—and Lady Bird knew it; decades later, describing Longlea in an interview with me, she said: “My eyes were just out on stems. They would have interesting people from the world of art and literature and politics. It was the closest I ever came to a salon in my life….There was a dinner table with ever so much crystal and silver.” She appears to have felt keenly the contrast between herself and her hostess: “She was very tall, and elegant, really beautiful….I remember Alice in a series of long and elegant dresses and me in—well, much less elegant.”
On many weekends, moreover, Lady Bird was not at Longlea. “I could never understand how she stood it,” Mary Louise says. “Lyndon would leave her on weekends, weekend after weekend, just leave her at home.”
Throughout Lady Bird Johnson’s life, however, there had been hints that behind the terrible shyness, there was something more—much more.
At the university, there had been her decision to get a journalism degree and the courage with which she forced herself to ask questions at press conferences—and the glimpses her few beaux had beneath the quietness. One of them, Thomas C. Soloman, recalls that for a time “I thought I was the leader.” But, he says, he came to realized that “we had been doing what she wanted to do. Even when we went on a picnic, it was she who thought up the idea….I also knew she would not marry a man who did not have the potentiality of becoming somebody.” J. H. Benefield came to realize that the shy young woman “was one of the most determined persons I met in my life, one of the most ambitious and able.”
My Library
