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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In 1979, at age 48, Bud quit Sports Illustrated to pursue a career in Hollywood — not a terribly wise thing to do, he acknowledged recently. He had published two more novels, Strange Peaches, set in Dallas at the time of the Kennedy assassination, and Peter Arbiter, a satire about social misfits. Neither of the books had made much money, at least compared with the money being handed out in Hollywood. A few weeks after leaving SI, Bud was on the Left Coast, working on the screenplay Tom Horn for actor Steve McQueen and living with Don and Susan Meredith at their house in Beverly Hills.
The seventies and early eighties were a time of spiritual reawakening as well as wretched excess for Bud and a group of hell-raisers known as the Mad Dogs. Old friends suspected that Bud was a deeply religious man, not in the sense of an organized religion but in the sense of looking for a larger meaning. On trips to Mexico I noticed that he liked to sit alone in cathedrals. One day I asked him why. “I look at the devout and wonder where their faith comes from,” he told me. “But I also wonder about that unworldly feeling that I get; where does that come from?” Bud got himself ordained as a doctor of metaphysics in the Universal Life Church by sending a $100 donation to a mail-order house in New Jersey. While the title carried no official weight, Bud accorded it a degree of respect and so did those of us in his circle. He officiated at the weddings of several friends, including Hollywood producer Craig Baumgarten. In 1975, in a backroom of the Texas Chili Parlor in Austin, he wrote and read the vows that united Phyllis and me. A woman from the Travis County clerk’s office telephoned a few days later for clarification, asking if it was true that we had been married by a Reverend Shrake from the Universal Life Church. Told that it was, she duly recorded the marriage, and 26 years later it remains as valid as the Law of Abraham.
Bud’s second marriage, to a young, beautiful, and high-spirited Long Island debutante named Doatsy Sedlmayr, lasted nearly fourteen years but proved as turbulent and ultimately as doomed as his years with Joyce. Doatsy was a fact checker at SI when they met and was swept away by the famous, handsome author and his tales of a wild and wonderful place called Austin. They moved there in 1967, to a house in West Lake Hills that soon became the scene of endless parties and debaucheries. Musicians such as Jerry Jeff Walker and sports figures such as former Cowboy Pete Gent were in and out at all hours. Benders commonly lasted several days and nights, and sometimes the better part of a week. I remember dimly the occasion of Hunter Thompson’s visit: I fell out after about 27 hours, the reputedly insatiable Dr. Thompson folded 10 or 12 hours later, and Bud and Jerry Jeff were still on the town the morning of the fourth day.
Doatsy left him several times, but the separations were usually brief. Looking back, I think the marriage began to fall apart irrevocably during the filming of his screenplay Kid Blue, which was shot on location in Durango, Mexico. For three months assorted Mad Dogs mingled with the cast and crew in an orgy that blurred reality and twisted relationships. The Shrakes stopped speaking, and Doatsy split for Austin. Though Kid Blue became a cult favorite, it was a financial disaster that almost wrecked Dennis Hopper’s career and so disillusioned producer Marvin Schwartz that he quit the business and joined a Buddhist monastery in Nepal.
In 1985 Bud learned that he had diabetes. He stopped drinking and smoking and started playing golf again, with typical obsessive-compulsive abandon. Some days he played ten or twelve hours. Bud has an almost spiritual connection to golf, as though the game is part of his birthright, and in those bleak and bloodless days this obviously sustained him. The experience of writing “Plum Creek,” and having it rejected, had drained his energy. “I couldn’t imagine writing without a cigarette burning nearby,” he confesses, “and without knowing that I would go swimming in cocktails at the end of the day.”
After a time Bud set himself a test: to write a novel without a cigarette or a drink — or a single mention of Texas. He began to write Night Never Falls, a story about a hard-drinking American journalist named Harry Sparrow who leaves a comfortable life in London to write about the French war in Indochina. “It was a struggle in moment-to-moment reality,” Bud told me later, “but I wrote it without drinking or smoking.” He did fail one part of the test, however. Flipping through the finished book, he realized that he had made an offhand reference to the Alamo.
He wrote other movies throughout the eighties, most notably his fine original screenplay of Songwriter, which starred Willie Nelson. As-told-to autobiographies of Willie and football coach Barry Switzer paid well and kept the Shrake name alive. But the work that finally recharged his career was Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, which he co-wrote for love, not money. Though his agent predicted it wouldn’t sell 10 copies, the Little Red Book sold 1.6 million, more than all of his previous books combined, and eventually he co-authored three other Penick books. Together they have sold about 3 million in hardback and are now in paperback. “I think people fell in love with Harvey because he tried to live his life by doing unto others as he would wish to be done unto,” Bud explains.
Harvey taught Bud to reconsider the Golden Rule, and the lesson led him back to the battle of Plum Creek and his rendezvous with destiny.
At 68 Bud has hit the literary equivalent of a grand slam. The Borderland is the work of a naturally gifted writer who has honed his skills and instincts, marshaled his courage, and scaled the peak of maturity. “Blessed McGill was a quartet,” Bill Wittliff says. “The Borderland is a symphony.” Lee Cullum, an author and a columnist for the Dallas Morning News, wrote that the novel is “an epic laced with magical realism that’s equal to Edna Ferber’s Giant and the best of Larry McMurtry.”
It is really two books, a straight-on dramatization of an unexplored chapter of Texas history and an allegory of good and evil. Characters like Lamar and Sam Houston are drawn close to historical fact. Since this is a work of fiction, Bud takes some license with characters like Texas Ranger captain Matthew Caldwell, the real-life hero of the battle of Plum Creek, and he condenses some of the historical events in time and invents other actions and people to carry the story beyond the facts. But the narrative is true to the spirit of the times.
The allegory of good and evil works on another level, one where the Reverend Shrake, doctor of metaphysics, prevails. The borderland of the author’s imagination is “the very edge between white civilization and the unknown, between reality and the fantastical …” Everything beyond the borderland — which is to say the Comancheria — was a realm that was as mysterious then as outer space is now. Several wonderful characters live with one foot in the world of magical realism. An Austin entrepreneur named Gruber, for instance, goes about his business with a Comanche axe sunk in his skull. The novel’s strangest character is a Man-Ape who lives in a cave west of the Colorado and is the sole guardian of the “final wisdom.”
“How the hell did you come up with a character like the Man-Ape?” I ask Bud. “Too much dope?”
“This is hard for me to explain,” he admits. “In my mind, he is a Neanderthal or some other branch of the evolutionary tree that was wiped out during the passing of time. Why? Because his civilization didn’t practice the Golden Rule. That may well be the reason our own species ceases to exist.”
If The Borderland sells, Bud may write a sequel. Otherwise, he has plenty of work to keep him busy. He is collaborating on a play with Michael Rudman, a highly successful stage director who was born in Dallas but has lived and worked in London for nearly forty years. They hope to stage the play, a comedy called Benchmark, in London later this year. Meanwhile, Limo, a book that he co-authored with Jenkins in 1976, will soon be reprinted.
As for another marriage, forget about it. “Ann and I love each other and enjoy being together,” Bud says, “but neither of us wants to get married again. We live very different lives. She travels constantly, working, making speeches, taking her kids on holidays to China and Peru. I’m not so keen on traveling anymore, but I go with her now and then. I can imagine that we may live together somewhere down the road, and we intend to grow old together.”
And of course he reserves the option to write about it.
Read an Excerpt from The Borderland.
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