Short Cuts: Episode I 
The Best of the Texas Century—Lifestyle
Socialite of the Century
For more than thirty years Lynn Wyatt, the blond-maned Sakowitz heiress and wife of oil and gas tycoon Oscar Wyatt, has spent her days shopping, lunching, and flying off to Europe to take in a fashion show or attend a party. She’s a fixture in New York, she summers on the Riviera, and when she’s in Houston, she occasionally serves as honorary chairwoman of a charity gala. Ho-hum, right? In truth, no Texas socialite has been as mesmerizing. Andy Warhol painted her portrait. Everyone from Liza Minnelli and Sammy Davis, Jr., to Monaco’s Princess Caroline and England’s Princess Margaret has dropped by her Houston mansion. In the mid-seventies she made the International Best Dressed List three years in a row, and she is still regularly photographed for the fashion bibles Women’s Wear Daily and W. What is it about Wyatt? It’s not just her beauty and her natural sophistication (Houston writer Clifford Pugh once called her the “Last of the Glossy Group”). She loves playing the rich Texan, greeting people with “How are yew” and showing off her Texas roots. When she was asked by Princess Grace to host one of Monaco’s premier social events, the Bal de la Rose, in 1981, she turned it into a country and western party with longnecks and barbecue. Runner-up: Electra Waggoner was always known as a clotheshorse. In the early 1900’s the daughter of North Texas land and cattle baron Tom Waggoner bought $20,000 worth of clothes at Dallas’ Neiman Marcus in one day, then came back the next day and spent an additional $20,000. But it wasn’t until after her divorce from Easterner A. B. Wharton that she became the state’s first great international socialite, buying a three-block-long estate in the Turtle Creek area of Dallas and throwing magnificent parties, occasionally even hiring private trains to move them across the country. Skip Hollandsworth
Party of the Century
The Shamrock Hotel’s Opening Night Gala on March 18, 1949, was the biggest, brashest, most outrageous party Houston had ever seen. Broadcast live on NBC radio with host Dorothy Lamour, the extravaganza put Houston on the map, sparking a national media sensation and heightening Texas’ larger-than-life image. “Diamond” Glenn McCarthy, the flamboyant wildcatter who was the inspiration for Giant’s Jett Rink, built the Shamrock. The oilman decorated it in 63 shades of green and outfitted it with an emerald swimming pool so vast that you could water-ski across it. He spared no expense for the hotel’s debut, which drew the likes of Ginger Rogers and Errol Flynn as well as the Kilgore Rangerettes and a crowd of Houstonians who became so rowdy that NBC pulled the plug on the broadcast mid-program. All told, the revelers drank more than 12,000 bottles of champagne before the night was over. Runner-up: On June 11, 1926, oilman Edgar Davis threw a lavish picnic in Luling for family, friends, and co-workers to celebrate his sale of an oil field to Magnolia Petroleum; at the time it was the state’s biggest oil deal. The tab for the picnic was $5 million. Pamela Colloff
Do-gooder of the Century
Edna Gladney of Fort Worth was so famous for her crusades to care for abandoned children in the first half of this century that a film was made about her life, Blossoms in the Dust, starring Greer Garson. Gladney was barely twenty years old when she made unwanted children her cause in life, first working to improve the conditions on a poor farm, then becoming superintendent of the Texas Children’s Home and Aid Society (later renamed the Edna Gladney Home). By the time she went into semi-retirement in 1960, the childless Gladney had placed more than 10,000 babies with adoptive parents and successfully lobbied the Texas Legislature to have the word “illegitimate” kept off birth certificates. Runner-up: Clara Driscoll, the daughter of a wealthy Corpus Christi ranching family who crusaded to save the Alamo. Among other things, in 1903, when she was 21, she put up the money to buy the long barracks adjoining the chapel, thereby preserving the “cradle of Texas liberty.” Skip Hollandsworth
Bad Girl of the Century
In the early fifties a nymphet with tropical green eyes and a body that would stop the Dow Jones taught the puritans of Dallas the pleasures of sex, and they taught her their version of justice. Stripper Candy Barr got fifteen years for possessing less than an ounce of marijuana, but her real crime was shaking her fanny at the establishment. Candy’s activities had been an open secret for some time. She popped her G-string at smokers and SMU fraternity parties, and she starred in Texas’ most famous stag film, Smart Aleck. Trouble started when Candy became the headliner at the Colony Club, in the heart of Dallas’ business district. Not only did people read about her in the dailies and hear about her at the country club, but a life-size cutout of Candy in her skimpy cowboy outfit, pointing a toy pistol under a cocked leg, greeted shoppers strolling along Commerce. Suddenly, both guilt and repressed fantasies were unleashed, and the police and prosecutors went to a lot of trouble to put her away. The evidence was likely planted, and her trial was a four-day farce in which the judge took snapshots of the shapely defendant. Runner-up: Miss Jessie Williams, the kindly madam who in 1905 took over a little house of prostitution in La Grange that would become known as the Chicken Ranch and turned it into a whopping business, servicing many of Texas’ finest young men. Gary Cartwright
Preacher of the Century
The white-haired, white-suited W. A. Criswell came to Dallas’ First Baptist Church in 1944 and turned it into the biggest Protestant church in America, with a reported membership of 30,000 in its early-nineties heyday. Nobody could stir a crowd like Criswell, who is part theologian and part thespian. During one eighteen-year stretch at First Baptist, he preached the Bible all the way through, word by word, his voice so powerful that he didn’t need a microphone to reach his audience. Today, when his health permits, the 89-year-old Criswell participates in Sunday services as a kind of pastor emeritus. Though he no longer shakes the downtown church’s rafters with his trombone of a voice, he still kneels on his Bible for the morning prayer. Runner-up: Let’s face it—flamboyant evangelists have been far more popular in Texas than the most pious ministers, and the best of the lot was Robert Tilton, Dallas’ goofball, blow-dried television preacher who in the eighties used to get on his desk and roll around in the letters people had sent him. After a series of scandals at his Word of Faith church, Tilton moved to Florida. Too bad. We miss the way he used to wave his arms around and speak in tongues, then glance at the television monitor to make sure he hadn’t messed up his hair. Skip Hollandsworth
Good Old Gal of the Century
While we do have our share of socialites and beauty queens, the greatest Texas women are its good old gals, sassy, earthy straight talkers who can flirt magnificently with men and make them look like idiots without their even knowing it. During Prohibition in New York in the twenties, the most popular performer at the illegal speakeasies was a flashy former cowgirl from Waco known as Texas Guinan. A onetime trick rider in a circus, Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan moved to Los Angeles and appeared in more than two hundred two-reeler films in the early 1900’s (including Little Miss Deputy in 1919). At the age of 38 she moved to New York, where she made a new career for herself as a nightclub emcee. Billing herself as “that two-gun Texas gal,” she greeted her audiences with “Hello, suckers!” as she was rolled onstage atop a piano, and she had a habit of thumping tennis balls into the crowd during her act. Runner-up: Ann Richards is not only smart, she is a smartass—which is why it was so much fun to have her in public life. Of course, her great line at the 1988 Democratic convention about the elder George Bush’s having been born with a silver foot in his mouth could well have been one reason George W. entered the race for governor, leading to her defeat. Skip Hollandsworth
Pretty Young Thing of the Century
Texas is renowned for creating the latest bombshell every fifteen minutes (from beauty queens like Phyllis George to models like Jerry Hall to Playboy playmates like Anna Nicole Smith), but no one has had the endurance of Farrah Fawcett. Although her career has consisted of a few television commercials, a single season twenty years ago on Charlie’s Angels, one well-received Off-Broadway play, and a smattering of films (mostly TV movies), she is still, at the age of 52, a source of endless fascination—just as she was in the sixties at the University of Texas, when the line of fraternity men hoping to meet her at her sorority house went around the block. Witness her most recent appearance on David Letterman, in October: It turned out to be one of his highest-rated shows this year. Runner-up: Jayne Mansfield, the busty Dallas blonde who in the fifties became a B-movie queen. After attending Highland Park High School in Dallas, then studying at SMU and the University of Texas, Mansfield moved to Los Angeles, where she was soon starring in such epics as Female Jungle and Too Hot to Handle. Skip Hollandsworth
My Library
