History Lesson 
Return to The Gay Place
Forty years ago a little-known writer named Billy Lee Brammer published one of the great political novels of all time. The Gay Place depicts an Austin that no longer exists in a state whose politics have changed completely.
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He was born on April 21, 1929, to doting Dallas-Oak Cliff parents who named him Billie Lee. He feared the spelling implied a girl’s name, so starting in grade school, he signed his name Billy Lee. By the time he was a journalism and economics major at North Texas State College, in Denton, he called himself Bill. A handsome young man with a soft gaze and distinctive round cheeks on an otherwise slender face, he was short, just five seven, but he was a good athlete and a skillful dancer. On campus in 1949, the daughter of the McAllen police chief caught his eye. Nadine Cannon had cut her hair short after seeing Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls. At the end of an Easter break spent in the Valley, Nadine was on her way back to school with friends in a wildly driven Olds convertible when they recognized the car of Bill Brammer. Such a romantic gesture: He had set out on the five-hundred-mile drive to surprise her. Nadine moved her bags to his car. They were in love, and they talked about what to do. They couldn’t go to Europe and be expatriates, as they wanted, and they didn’t dare live together.
“So we eloped to Lewisville,” Nadine reminisces with a laugh. “The office was down a dirt road. We interrupted the domino game of a one-legged justice of the peace. A little kid was delivering a testimonial in a tent revival across the street. It was just totally depressing.” As married students, their grades shot up, but Nadine believes she planted the seeds of Bill’s addiction. “Growing up in the Valley, I saw Benzedrine all the time,” she says. “I used it to cram for tests—stay up all night and forget everything as soon as I took the exam. But Bill liked it. I mean, he really liked it.”
After college he interned for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, then, like legions of young Texans who yearn for Paris or New York but can’t make that leap, he and Nadine moved to Austin. Billy Lee caught on with the Austin American-Statesman as a sportswriter and met Bob Sherrill, the first of a remarkable number of Austin friends who went on to writing careers of a national reputation. Sidney Brammer was born in 1952; her sister, Shelby, in 1954. Bill won awards for his newspaper writing in both those years, but he was always desperate for money. In 1955 Ronnie Dugger hired him to help put out the new Texas Observer. The liberal muckrakers tore into the archconservative Texas Legislature like a pack of terriers. A few blocks away, Willie Morris was about to be elected editor of the University of Texas’ student newspaper, The Daily Texan. At the end of the day the liberal cognoscenti gathered for beer, laughter, and much flirting at Scholz Garden, near the campus and the Capitol. “We were having fun,” says Nadine, “but we couldn’t keep up with it financially. Bill was an impulsive buyer; he was just awful. He bought nine cars in six years.”
One of those transactions poured fuel on her resentment and played an important role in the birth of The Gay Place. Bill traded her treasured Nash Rambler convertible for a Plymouth station wagon so that he and Nadine could go to Marfa, where he researched an Observer story about the making of the movie Giant. Nadine was livid, but they got to see Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean.
The material and the bizarre setting bored deep into the writer’s imagination. In “Country Pleasures,” the voluptuous movie star Vicki McGown comes roaring back from a whiskey-soaked excursion into the desert with Arthur Fenstemaker, Hoot Gibson, and the governor’s top aide, Jay McGown, who just happens to be the actress’ estranged husband:
“It was wonderful, Ed,” she said to [the director] Shavers. “You should’ve been there . . . We just gave everything back to the Mexicans! All of it! We had a little ceremony.” Vicki turned and yelled at the people eating lunch under the big tent: “You white men got twenty-four hours to clear out!”
The studio people had all turned to look now. . . . Arthur Fenstemaker sat in front next to Vicki, shaking his head. Jay tried not to look at anyone. He continued to sit upright in the backseat, and from time to time batted his eyes.
“What’re you talking about, Vic?” Shavers said.
“We gave it back!” Vicki repeated. “The whole damn state—every heathen square mile of it. To the Mexicans. We signed the Treaty of San Felipe Dolores del Rio. Governor here signed it over to the Mayor. Back there. Mexican mayor. Deeded it over to him. Mayor promised to give it back to the Indians first chance he gets.”
He had been working for the Observer just a few months when an Austin supporter of Lyndon Johnson’s relayed word that the Senate majority leader was looking for a liberal to join his staff. The Observer crowd viewed LBJ with suspicion, but he was planning his presidential run in 1960 and wanted people who could help him touch every Democratic base. For the money and a chance to stabilize his marriage, Bill seized the opportunity.
Shortly after Bill arrived in Washington, Johnson hired Nadine as well. They found someone to stay with the girls, left for work before dawn, and got home after dark. Johnson often asked them to come to his house for weekend socializing, and he was a hard man to turn down. They liked him because he was so entertaining. “But he was such an old lech,” says Nadine. LBJ’s sexual posturing was never-ending; he referred to Bill and other aides as his “hard-peckered boys.” On trips home to Texas, Bill would accompany LBJ on drives to small towns and watch the senator deliver speeches he had written. In the car he would jabber in staccato rhythms, wired on speed, as Johnson drawled back in volleys, fueled by scotch and his vast opinion of himself. LBJ had a trick of striking a match on the fabric of Bill’s suits to light his cigarettes. “Stick with me, son,” he often said, “and I’ll make you rich.”
But Bill and Nadine’s marriage was in trouble, and libertinism defined them as much as liberalism. “Everybody was into Jack Kerouac,” Nadine recalls, “champing at the bit to have extramarital affairs and be as wild as possible.” Their problems climaxed in 1956 when Nadine got pregnant again. They decided to swear off their flings and stay together, forging a closeness they hadn’t known for years. Trying to make more money, Bill started writing the novel that evolved into The Gay Place. After dinner with the children, Bill took a nap. At midnight he got up and began writing. Nadine would wake up in the early morning hours, read his pages, and they would talk about them. How did he bear up under such a schedule? Speed, amphetamines, of course. Sometimes he didn’t sleep for days.
The situation took a toll on Nadine: She missed her parents, and she missed Austin. She told Bill she wanted to go home to have the baby and continue living there. The separation would last four years. The Big Pumpkin, as Johnson’s staff called him behind his back, tried to insert himself into even such private affairs. Just before Nadine left in the spring of 1957, Johnson put his arm around her and said, “If you’ll name that boy after me, I’ll give him a calf, and he’ll have a whole herd by the time he’s twenty-one.” But when their son was born, they named him Willie, not Lyndon, after their friend Willie Morris.
In Austin Nadine found a woman to help with the children, and she didn’t sit at home pining. Late in the day the phone would start ringing: Where was the party tonight? Scholz Garden was still a magnet for the in crowd’s politicos, professors, artists, and writers. Nadine fell into a serious affair with a politician from North Texas, and though Bill was having affairs himself, he didn’t like hers one bit. Nadine recalls that Bill went to Dallas to confront the man who had cuckolded him. When she asked Bill how that went, he replied, “Terrific. I think I’ll divorce you and marry him.” Nadine says the character Roy Sherwood was modeled on her paramour. Artist’s revenge—Bill invested a great deal of her lover and himself in the state legislator in the book’s opening scene. “When I read his book,” Nadine says, “I felt like he ripped me off. He was using all my stuff.”Yet their correspondence seldom faltered. In a January 1959 letter to Nadine, he fretted: “Have not seen much of Johnson. Don’t know whether I am IN or OUT.” In Boston, though, Bill had found an avid audience for his work. The managing editor of Houghton Mifflin, Dorothy de Santillana, wrote him in June: “It is wonderful reading, it has swing and glitter and pace. The people, even those who are only briefly on stage, are real and round. Governor Fenstemaker is GREAT.” That same month, he received a contract. The Gay Place brought just a $1,500 advance, but the deal was prestigious, literary. The gushy feedback and a swirl of entertainment provided by his New England publishers sent him on a surge of new production.
But other elements of his life were sorrowful. He and Nadine almost divorced later that year. He missed his children. Austin liberals thought Bill had fallen into an almost adolescent infatuation with LBJ. Yet in a letter to Nadine that spring, he hardly sounded like a teenager in his rebuttal. Asking her to return a book Ronnie Dugger had sent him to review, he wrote, “[A]fter the lengths to which Ronnie’s gone in condemning LBJ, [I] don’t think I could write anything for the Observer for a long while . . . Sounds shitty, but I like Johnson, and I can’t very well lend my name to [a] paper that calls Johnson a racist and a labor baiter. As much as I respect Ronnie, it’s just not true.”
The life of Washington politics had worn thin for Bill, though. Having given Johnson four years of his life, Bill took a job with the economics newsletter published by Eliot Janeway, the father of his friend Michael and a key supporter of LBJ’s in New York. Living in a small Greenwich Village apartment, he had an office on the fifty-ninth floor of the Empire State Building. In June his editors announced that The Gay Place had won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. Previous winners of the honor included Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Philip Roth.
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