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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In Farenthold’s mind, her own predicament as the token House female was reminiscent of the inequalities she had seen as legal aid director. There was a rottenness to the institutions themselves, a tendency to favor a few and exclude the rest. Reform became her passion, and by 1971 it made Sissy Farenthold a household name in Texas. That year, she and 29 disaffected House Republicans and liberal Democrats—“the Dirty Thirty”—crusaded against corruption in the Legislature, focusing on House Speaker Gus Mutscher, who was accused of conspiring to take bribes to pass bills benefiting powerful Houston banker and developer Frank Sharp. Mutscher’s subsequent conviction ended the so-called Sharps-town Scandal, but to Farenthold the reform movement was barely beginning.
In 1972, with the strong encouragement of her admirers and the approval of her family, the Dirty Thirty’s self-styled “den mother” set her sights on the Governor’s Mansion. Farenthold ran as a reform candidate, positioning herself against a corrupt system and contaminated opponents. She bumped off Governor Preston Smith and Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes in the primary, when scandal-weary voters turned on incumbents, and trailed only Dolph Briscoe, a wealthy rancher. Briscoe won the primary runoff with 55 percent of the vote, but the defeat seemed to have no effect on Sissy Farenthold’s burgeoning celebrity. At the Democratic National Convention, she became the first woman ever nominated for vice president, receiving 407 delegate votes to finish second behind Thomas Eagleton. A few months later, she posed with Shirley Chisholm for the cover of Ms. magazine.
Sissy Farenthold had ascended, surpassing the feats of her forefathers. But all of her successes could not prevent her offspring from repeating the ritual descent of their ancestry.
THOUGH SISSY FARENTHOLD BLAZED trails for women everywhere, none left scorch marks as deep and lasting as her struggle to balance her political and parental responsibilities. As the only female member of the Texas House, Farenthold was faced with a stark choice. She could either come running whenever her children needed her and thereby suffer the derision of her male colleagues, who already guffawed whenever she spoke of the deep influence her children had on her thinking, or she could vow never to miss a vote or a committee meeting and thus be taken seriously but face serious consequences at home. As a candidate for governor, she could stay at home with the children and ensure her defeat, or she could take them on the campaign trail with her and hope that they would be able to bear the limelight. As was the way of the world in 1972, the father was exempted from the child-rearing equation. George had his pipeline business to attend to, and indeed a family of six could not scrape by on a state representative’s income.
Sissy Farenthold’s choice to be a serious politician took its toll subtly at first. Two of the children shared Sissy’s reading disorder and needed more help with their schoolwork than she could give. Jimmy’s dyslexia was most acute, and with Sissy no longer nearby to keep his fondness for wandering in check, it became a familiar sight to behold the youngest Farenthold, frail and dark-haired and grinning as he wandered the streets of Austin, a pre-teen urchin in search of who could say what.
When Sissy ran for governor in 1972, she did so with Dudley, George Junior, and Emilie in tow. The three were enthusiastic campaigners and even cut their long hair so as not to be a political liability; yet they were also of college age, and all of them had dropped out to assist their mother. Meanwhile, sixteen-year-old Jimmy was deemed a troublemaker by the authorities at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin and prohibited from living on campus. Not knowing what else to do with her youngest during the campaign, Sissy sent him to live with her friends Liz and John Henry Faulk. Three days after Sissy’s loss to Briscoe in the runoff, the body of her stepson, George’s 32-year-old son, Randy, washed ashore on Mustang Island. Chains were wrapped around his chest, along with a forty-pound concrete block around his neck. Years later it would emerge that he had been murdered for threatening to testify against four individuals who had swindled him out of $100,000.
Randy had possessed little in the way of ambition or common sense, but he was roundly regarded as a good-hearted fellow. Sissy and her offspring had been close to Randy. His bizarre death recalled all the old family demons and cast a pall of vulnerability on the Farenthold household, which by nature was already fragile. The family members rotated residences in Austin, Houston, and Corpus Christi, with the father and mother almost always living apart after Sissy’s election. Sissy and George’s marriage, never terribly amorous to begin with, now seemed to be purely an accommodation. The children were feuding with their father and forsaking their education to bolster their mother’s career. Sissy Farenthold saw the family’s demise in glimpses. Privately she fretted to political aides and friends and at times to reporters. To one of the latter, she let the fatalism flow: “You try to hold on to the family thing,” she said, “and you probably fail.”
The family’s failure was spurred on, at least partly, by drugs. Its bloodlines had revealed a predisposition for alcohol dependence. Now the latest generation introduced narcotics as a new variation on the old malady. One of Sissy’s nephews, an addict, shot himself in the head on his twenty-first birthday. At least two other nephews were arrested for possession. Yet another nephew, whose use was legendary, according to a family member, openly flaunted his heroin stash in front of Sissy—though in the end his premature death was due to hepatitis, said to have been brought on by alcoholism.
By the time Sissy had mounted a second unsuccessful candidacy for governor in 1974 and later moved to upstate New York to become the first woman president of all-female Wells College, drugs were an issue in the Farenthold household. Each of the children, by virtue of their conspicuous last name, had fallen into the proximity of the young idle rich, many of whom spent the seventies blowing their trust funds on cocaine and heroin. “Speaking for myself and my family,” says Sissy Farenthold today, “maybe some people can use drugs, but there are some who can’t. My family has been ravaged by drugs, and I include alcohol in that.” Some of her children emerged from the high life relatively unscarred, but others did not. One of them eventually sought treatment for alcoholism; another underwent treatment for narcotics addiction.
The fate of the Farenthold children would not be to live up to the great family standard but rather to wrestle with the great family infirmities. In time, each of them would prevail—all but Jimmy, who seemed not to wrestle with the curses but instead to embrace them.
AT THE CLOSE OF THE SEVENTIES, while Sissy Farenthold and her three eldest children were vowing never to drink or take drugs, Jimmy was living by a different sort of vow: Never pass up a thrill. The boy daredevil was now a young man and more reckless than ever, a free-bleeder who routinely courted bloodshed. He drove his car and his motorcycle at madman speed, without benefit of seat belt or glasses, though his eyesight was poor. He was injured after a motorcycle accident and wound up in the hospital after being stabbed in the nose during a barroom brawl. At a topless bar he went after a biker’s girl and wound up in a nearby dumpster—bruised but miraculously not bloodied.
Jimmy hid these incidents from his mother, feeling that he was one continual heartbreak to her. When absolutely desperate—flat broke, strung out on cocaine—he came to Sissy. Otherwise Jimmy avoided his family, whose very presence would raise the specter of his failure to amount to anything. He ping-ponged about, staying with a buddy in Houston, a family friend in Fort Worth, a cousin in Austin, or an aunt in Corpus Christi, leaving full wardrobes in closets all over the state. Several couples who took Jimmy in found that they had become a surrogate family and were flattered but also saddened when he took to calling them Mom and Dad.
With feigned pride he would tell his friends, “I’m the black sheep.” Referring to the drug overdose of Robert Kennedy’s son, Jimmy observed, “Now that he is dead, he won’t be an embarrassment to the family. They won’t have to try to keep the lid on,” and then drew the parallel: “My family will do anything to keep me under wraps.” At times he did not conceal his hostility—and during those times, he spoke of his twin: about how the family would not let him attend his own brother’s funeral; about how they never talked about Vincent and simply went on with their lives. Now and again the surviving twin would say, more to himself than to anyone else, “The good one died.”
“I like the edge,” he once told his mother, referring to his cocaine-fueled lifestyle. But his addiction was all too apparent to her. Sissy took Jimmy to one expensive rehabilitation center and then the next. “I’m going, but only because you want me to,” he would tell her. Jimmy left a treatment center in Phoenix after the patients complained that he was making a mockery of the program; at other times he simply withdrew, complaining of the food or the clientele. On one occasion, after being driven to a halfway house by a friend of Sissy’s, Jimmy escaped that evening and caught a plane to Houston. He phoned the friend two weeks later, more or less apologizing. “I’ve been a bad boy,” he said.
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