Shrake’s Progress
Bud Shrake has written sports stories, screenplays, and novels. He’s hobnobbed with the rich and famous, raised some hell, and searched his soul. Now he has crowned a colorful 49-year career with The Borderland.
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As Bud celebrated success, Joyce sank deeper into the mystic transfiguration of Catholicism. She desperately wanted to be remarried in the Catholic Church, and in 1960 Bud finally agreed. He took instruction and signed an agreement that their sons, Creagan and Ben, would be raised Catholic. Because of the divorce in 1953, the marriage took place in the church rectory rather than the sanctuary (a similar scene appears in The Borderland). Waiting for the service to begin, Bud smoked and fidgeted. When it was time to step up to the altar, he looked for a place to stub his cigarette and spotted a cup of water — holy water, he realized too late. The normally faint sizzle of an extinguishing cigarette echoed in this instance like a fireball rolling down the corridors of hell. “I knew as soon as I’d done it — we all knew — that this marriage was doomed,” he says.
By this time Bud had left the Times-Herald to write the lead sports column for the Dallas Morning News. On Christmas Eve, in one last gesture toward saving his marriage, he arrived home with a turkey and presents under his arm and the keys to a new sports car for Joyce. “Here’s your Christmas present,” he chirped merrily, handing her the keys to a black Karmann Ghia. “And here’s your present,” Joyce replied, smiling beatifically and indicating his suitcases, which she had thoughtfully packed.
We had kidded Bud unmercifully about buying the Cadillac, but as things turned out, he had demonstrated great foresight. After Joyce filed for divorce, Bud lived in the Cadillac for several months, sometimes spending the night in the Dallas Morning News parking lot.
Some years later, while she was teaching at the University of New Mexico, Joyce went to Rome and petitioned the College of Cardinals to annul her marriage to Bud. She died of an asthma attack in 1994. The night of her memorial service, Bud told me recently, his children and grandchildren surrounded him in the parking lot and asked him to bless the family. The request stopped him cold. “I felt a thousand years old,” he told me. “But I realized then that I had become our family’s senior person, and I said some words while we stood holding hands.”
It’s all grist for the mill. the title of Bud’s second novel, But Not for Love, is drawn from Shakespeare’s prophetic admonition in As You Like It: “men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” The TCU Press selected it as the book that best captures Fort Worth in the sixties and will return it to print this fall. A tamer version of the novel’s birthday party scene, in which the revelers strip to their underwear in a game of “naked bridge,” actually happened at Dan and June Jenkins’ home in Fort Worth. Nobody noticed it at the time, but the ladies and gentlemen with losing hands ditched their clothes in front of a large picture window just across the lawn from the house where Dan’s mother and grandmother lived. A few days later Dan’s ladylike grandmother smiled nicely and asked Bud and Dan, “Who was that basketball team you-all were entertaining the other night?” We all knew that life was merely material for a novel, but as Dan says, “Bud knew it first.”
Bud wrote But Not for Love just before he moved to New York to work for Sports Illustrated in 1964; Jenkins had joined the SI staff two years earlier. He wrote it on his old Smith Corona Skywriter portable, riding trains around Europe, getting off in city after city, and finally stopping for a few months in Frankfurt at the apartment of Dick Growald, another Paschal friend, who was then the boss of all European bureaus for United Press International. During his stay in Rome, Bud had had what might be called a religious experience. Reading of the canonization of Mother Cabrini, he realized that there had not been a North American saint before her. That started him thinking about a plot in which five Texans travel to Rome for the canonization of just such a saint. He began writing the book a few months later, in his New York apartment. He had a great title — “These Happy Occasions” — but about two hundred pages into the first draft, he hit a wall. “Wait a minute,” he thought. “Who is this saint? He/she has to be Catholic and has to come from the oldest part of the country, the Southwest.” “I started writing about the saint,” he remembers, “and after fifty pages, I threw away ‘These Happy Occasions’ and began writing Blessed McGill.”
If Bud hadn’t survived to write The Borderland, his magnum opus would be Blessed McGill. It’s the story of a most un-Christlike man, Peter Hermano McGill (1850-83), who at the end gives his life in a Christlike act that saves the Taos pueblo and mission. To a lesser degree it’s the story of two raucous, hard-drinking Franciscans, fathers Higgins and Mulligan, who use McGill’s death for their own cynical purposes. Though it’s a great adventure tale and a historically accurate account of the brutal life of the nineteenth-century Southwest, the themes of life, death, and salvation are the book’s foundation. Raised a Catholic by his beautiful, educated, cultured mother, who becomes so obsessed by religion that she eventually cuts off all contact with the outside world (guess who?), McGill develops his own theories about God and religion. He lives at times with Indian tribes and wears around his neck a silver chain with medals of Our Lady and Saint Jude as well as a lion’s tooth given to him by his boyhood friend and eventual murderer, a Lipan Apache outlaw named Octavio. Because of McGill’s miraculous ability to escape from life-threatening situations, the Indians regard him as a prophet, a man who “refuses to die.” They believe that Jesus Christ is one of many sons of the Sure Enough Father and that after death a good warrior goes to a country beyond the setting sun where the horses are fast, the hunting is fine, and there is no war, darkness, or sorrow. McGill sees much merit in this belief, but the two Franciscans are dead set on converting the savages — and him too. McGill enjoys drinking and talking religion with the priests, and ignores Higgins’ warnings to “stop kicking against the bricks.” Nevertheless, when the outlaw Octavio shows up to settle an old score with him, threatening to destroy the mission and pueblo unless he surrenders, McGill realizes that his fate is sealed. After his death, Higgins convinces the Vatican that McGill died as a Christian martyr, refusing Octavio’s offer to spare his life if he would renounce the divinity of Christ.
BUD’S NEW YORK APARTMENT, AT Sixteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, was always full of interesting and famous people and often the scene of the kind of heroic revelry that makes great literature. One of the grander occasions was the Saturday night before the December 1965 Cowboys-Giants game, when Don Meredith challenged Bud and literary man-about-town George Plimpton to a pissing contest — off the third-floor balcony. “We stood on the rail and Meredith was fantastic,” recalls Plimpton. “He damn near reached the opposite curb.” Several couples from Texas shacked up at Bud’s apartment, though not always with their spouses. The fabled Billy Lee Brammer was writer-in-residence for a time, persuading his editors to give him a new advance on a long-unfinished novel called “Fustian Days” by arranging great stacks of paper on the floor in a way that suggested he had fifty chapters outlined.
Jenkins and Shrake pretty much owned New York in those days, or so it seemed to me. Their evening routine started at a bar just down West Fiftieth Street from the Time-Life Building where Sports Illustrated editor André Laguerre held court each evening from five until seven-thirty. Most of SI’s important business was conducted at the bar. One evening Laguerre turned to Bud and said, “I wonder what’s happening to all those sporting facilities in the Far East now that the British are pulling out of the Suez Canal?” Soon Bud was off on a three-month tour of the sporting facilities of the Far East. Each night at seven, half an hour before Laguerre’s limo driver was to arrive, the great man would start his countdown. He would order a final Scotch, followed by a grand final, then el ultimo, and finally a drink he called El Shrako, at which time the driver had orders to grab Laguerre and whisk him off to his Upper East Side apartment. Jenkins and Shrake would work their way over to Toots Shor’s, then uptown to P. J. Clarke’s, and finally to Elaine’s, setting consumption records and strewing havoc along the way. One night at Shor’s, Frank Sinatra sidled up to Bud and began talking about his hobby, photography. Bud got the brilliant idea to hire Sinatra to shoot the upcoming Floyd Patterson-Eddie Machen fight in Stockholm for SI. When Laguerre learned the following morning what Bud had done, he chuckled and approved the project.
Blessed McGill is dedicated to André Laguerre.
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