The Blood of the Farentholds
The mysterious disappearance of Sissy Farenthold’s youngest son is only the latest chapter in a tragic family history.
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The Bluntzer-Dougherty-Tarlton-Farenthold family tree abounds with all the requisite characters for a Texas dynasty: Civil War officers, oil and cattle men, lawyers, and landholders. Substantial wealth remains in part of the family, and the surnames retain a certain cachet. But three features distinguish Sissy Farenthold’s clan from others that sprawl across Texas. First, it is a family in which women have never quavered in the shadow of their husbands. Lida Dougherty, Farenthold’s great-aunt, was the first woman in Texas to become the superintendent of a school district. Farenthold’s aunt Genevieve Tarlton Dougherty, a well-known philanthropist, was conferred the Lady of the Grand Cross of the Holy Sepulchre by Pope Pius XII, one of the highest honors the Catholic church accords a laywoman. Other female antecedents were educators and community leaders; there was even one adventurer of sorts, Farenthold’s great-great-aunt Theresa Bluntzer Hasdorff, who at the age of four was kidnapped by Indians and returned a year later, decked out in native headdress, speaking the tongue of her captors.
Perhaps not surprisingly in a family of such strong female figures, Farenthold’s kin have also stood prominently to the left of the state’s most famous families. Her father was a Klan-baiting lawyer and lifelong Democratic activist. While other Texans were admonishing their children at the dinner table, “Think of the starving children,” Farenthold’s relatives were donating enormous sums of money to feed Biafran and Mexican orphans.
There is a third aspect to this great family, a feature more often associated with the characters in William Faulkner novels than with real people. Beneath the public facade, the prim liberal sheen, lurks a disquiet—perhaps genetic in nature, perhaps owing to a series of unfortunate coincidences. But it has endured through generations, spreading across the Bluntzer-Dougherty-Tarlton-Farenthold family tree like an unseen fungus. It has given rise to alcoholism, drug addiction, and manic depression. It has saddled descendants with disorders ranging from the mildly disabling to the fatal. Still others have fallen to diseases such as cancer, and others still have died freakishly—shot with their own hunting rifle, drowned in their own swimming pool. Rustling within Sissy Farenthold’s family is a severe capacity for self-destruction.
IN 1950, 24-YEAR-OLD VASSAR COLLEGE and UT law graduate Frances “Sissy” Tarlton was wedded in a Corpus Christi Catholic cathedral to George Edward Farenthold, a furry-browed, bull-bodied Belgian who had received his U.S. citizenship in 1940 and subsequently became a decorated Air Force captain. The great-grandson of a prosperous inventor, George was a man accustomed to high living, which included making a home in what is now the official residence of the president of Algeria, getting his education in a Swiss academy, and enjoying the company of a manservant wherever he traveled. His first marriage to a Texas woman had been a bust, ending in 1948, but not before George had availed himself of his wealthy father-in-law’s business knowledge and capitalized on a few lucrative opportunities. Thus he came to the Bluntzer-Dougherty-Tarlton family, bringing with him an internationalist’s savoir-vivre, a good head for the oil business, a ten-year-old son named Randolph by his previous marriage, and the rich bloodlines of Belgian aristocracy.
Yet there was a peculiarity to the Farenthold blood: It did not readily coagulate. Belgian doctors had diagnosed the syndrome as “pseudo-hemophilia,” less serious than the classic condition, though still resulting in excessive bleeding. Indeed, George’s aunt had bled to death during menstruation, just as George himself had suffered a near-fatal blood loss when his tonsils were removed. But he managed to live with the condition, dutifully rushing off to the hospital to get sewn up after every ice hockey accident. The pseudo-hemophilia was not a marital issue for George and Sissy. And since his son, Randolph, did not seem to be a free-bleeder, the newlyweds fearlessly embarked on having children: Dudley in 1951, George Junior in 1952, Emilie in 1954, and the twins in 1956—first Vincent and then, a minute later, Jimmy.
None of the Farentholds can recall exactly when it became apparent that the offspring had inherited their father’s condition. Instead it seems that the discovery fell on them like the family plague it was. “My children bled and bled and bled,” Sissy Farenthold says of the routine childhood mishaps that escalated into emergency-room episodes. After consulting with doctors at Houston’s Texas Children’s Hospital, the Farentholds learned that George and his children—minus his two eldest children, Randolph by the first marriage and Dudley by Sissy—suffered from von Willebrand’s Disease, a hereditary bleeding disorder caused by a deficiency in the clotting agent factor VIII. The disease had no cure; the family would learn to live with it and pray that fate would show clemency. Then Vincent fell.
“FOR YEARS AFTER THAT, IF I heard a child cry, it would just tear me up,” recalls Sissy Farenthold. But at her husband’s urging, she fought to turn away from her pain. The natural avenue was politics. As a child, she had been dragged to county elections by her yellow-dog Democrat father, who exhorted her to memorize the names of every Corpus Christi city council member. Throughout the early years of her marriage, she carried on the family’s Democratic traditions. Now politics became her obsession, the path away from malaise.
Yet she could not bring herself to desert Jimmy, who seemed lost without his brother. The twins had been inseparable; even when placed in separate cribs, they would talk to each other across the room in a language no one else understood. “They didn’t have the sense of needing parents,” says Sissy. The bond was intense, and so was the sudden disconnection. For at least a year following Vincent’s death, the surviving twin would run for the screen door every time he heard it slam, expecting to see Vincent in the doorway.
And so as Sissy began her foray into politics, she took the baby of the family wherever she went—to city council meetings, to campaign rallies. So concerned was she that a bloody fate would claim her son that she persuaded other mothers at Jimmy’s school to lobby for improvements in the playground’s safety standards. It was Sissy Farenthold’s first attempt at political organizing.
In many ways, Jimmy seemed fine. He was sweet and generous by nature, loved pets and plants, and often wandered through crowds, striking up conversations with total strangers. But the tendency to stray from her side disturbed Sissy, for the boy possessed a heedless, unanchored quality, a tendency to leap before looking. At times this was literally true. Before becoming a proficient swimmer, Jimmy could not resist the urge to dive into a pool and thereby sink right to the bottom, causing lifeguards and parents to scurry after him. All the Farenthold children were schooled in the hazards of von Willebrand’s Disease, but Jimmy continued to take risks and spill blood. “I was very careful,” his mother sighs. “But he was a daredevil.”
In time, her fears gave way to new preoccupations. Sissy became active in the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, helped coordinate her cousin Dudley Dougherty’s unsuccessful congressional race, and in 1965 became the director of legal aid for Nueces County. In that position she saw, for the first time in her pampered life, the horrors of poverty and the government’s apparent indifference to human suffering. Her passions grew even as her sadness mounted.
Still, when a family friend persuaded Sissy to run for the Texas House of Representatives in 1968, no one who knew her could have sized her up as a natural politician. For all her intellect and liberal convictions, she was a painfully shy person. When the campaign began, the new candidate could not bring herself to approach voters on the street. Finally, George dropped her off in a crowded shopping center parking lot one afternoon, handed her a stack of 1,500 campaign brochures and a dime, and told his wife, “When you’ve given all these out, call me and I’ll come get you.” Then he drove off and left her there.
She would later refer to that first campaign as “unbelievable torment.” But the family tragedies that made a pessimist out of Sissy Farenthold also made her tough. Sonny’s death had all but incapacitated Sissy’s mother, leaving Sissy to manage many of the household matters. Although Sissy showed signs of dyslexia—she could not read until she was almost ten—she willed herself to graduate from Vassar and later made the dean’s list at UT law, where she was one of only four female students in her class. Thus steeled by death and doubters, 42-year-old Frances Tarlton Farenthold again overcame her handicaps, and in November 1968, she became the first woman ever to represent Nueces and Kleberg counties in the Legislature.
The 1969 House roster consisted of 149 males and Sissy Farenthold. Unlike her sole female counterpart in the Senate, Barbara Jordan—who took pains not to ruffle conservative feathers while she prepared for a U.S. House candidacy—Farenthold refused to play it safe. She stood alone in her opposition to a 1969 resolution commending the performance of former president Lyndon Johnson. When she found herself locked out of House Constitutional Amendments Committee meetings—which were held at Austin’s all-male Citadel Club—she did not sulk privately but rather took the matter to the media and forced a public apology from her colleagues.
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