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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Bill entertained Willie and Celia Morris when they were in town. He hung out with Robert Benton (who later directed a comic movie called Nadine, in her honor.) At his boss’s expense, Bill watched Bobby Short sing and schmoozed with Edward G. Robinson, June Allyson, and Satchel Paige. But his tales of the good life in New York did not amuse Nadine. A $109 Brooks Brothers suit set off another rage. She wrote her parents: “The girls need shoes and I need money.” Their marriage needed to end, and in 1961, it finally did.
And he was off into another life. After much debate, the novelist’s Boston editors endowed him with the dignified but wholly fictional name of William. “No one, I repeat no one, up here thinks ‘Billy Lee’ is possible,” wrote de Santillana. “With all respect for your parents, who gave it to you with such evident love (it is a very ‘loving’ name), it has not the strength and authority for a novel which commands respect at the top of its voice.” But his haughty editors hatched the good idea of arranging the novellas in the reverse order in which they were written. Ornamented with the lovely opening passage, which Bill actually wrote last, “The Flea Circus” is the longest. Fenstemaker is a social reformer who knows what he’s up against in Texas; he readily sacrifices principle for results, and his legislative trickery leaves opponents and allies equally confused. Fenstemaker has a habit of picking out young louts who have some promise, and one of those is Roy Sherwood, a bachelor who dreads having to go back home and make a real living off his law degree. The governor rousts the legislator one morning, saying it’s the Prophet Isaiah calling: “Hell of a note. World’s cavin’ in all around us; rocket ships blastin’ off to the moon; poisonous gas in our environment . . . Sinful goddam nation . . . laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers. My princes are rebels and companions of thieves . . .”
The editor of a liberal paper much like the Texas Observer is Roy’s best friend Willie—a broad hint that the character’s model was Willie Morris, though it may have contained some Ronnie Dugger too. The chosen few drink and dance at the Dearly Beloved, a mirror image of Scholz Garden. They consume alcohol in stupendous quantities, almost like they’re in search of a superior social drug. Roy gets punched to the ground for sleeping with the wife of a colleague. “Aw, hell, Roy, I’m sorry,” the cuckold says, offering a hand. Roy replies, “You want a sonofabitch, I’ll be your sonofabitch, Earl.” All the way through, the novel gleams with such simple, right-on dialogue.
Despite glowing reviews, the novel was no best-seller. Bill needed the job he found as a Time correspondent. “The last thing he wanted to do then was work for Time,” David Halberstam says, chuckling. “But they had this money box in the office, and he’d just grab a handful. He’d laugh and say, ‘This may be the only time in my life I can take you to lunch.’” Bill had an affair with a New York socialite who had been one of John F. Kennedy’s mistresses. Another new acquaintance, Gloria Steinem, landed him a gig as a delegate to a youth festival in Helsinki. Trying to save money, Bill booked passage on a freighter that proved to be a very slow boat. When he arrived in Finland, the festival was over and gone with the gig was his stipend. He hitchhiked to Paris and met his girlfriend from New York; they jumped on a train to Spain. Bill’s European idyll lasted six months, till the end of 1962. At 33 Bill was a success, and he wore it well, but the glamour of writing fiction far exceeded its revenue.
He moved back to Austin and briefly roomed with Larry McMurtry, whose first novel, Horseman, Pass By, had also come out in 1961. (McMurtry’s ranching novel beat out The Gay Place for the Texas Institute of Letters’ prize for fiction that year.) Gary Cartwright, a senior editor of this magazine, was living in Dallas and working as a newspaper sportswriter. He and Bud Shrake came to Austin once and went to see Bill. “Bud and I hadn’t seen him in a while,” Cartwright recalls. “When we walked in, there were three coeds sleeping in T-shirts and panties on a mattress on his floor. Each one was a knockout. ‘Uh, how you doin’, Billy Lee?’ we said. Not too bad, evidently.” One of those bottoms belonged to a woman who, nineteen years later, would do me the honor of becoming my wife.
Her name was Dorothy Browne. A sorority dropout and an English major at the university, she had gotten Bill kicked out of his previous apartment by staying over one night, though all he did was help her write a paper on F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Her professor gave her a C, faulting her ghostwriter’s sentence structure.) So he moved into the apartment below that of Dorothy and her two roommates. By this time, Nadine had married Bob Eckhardt, a Houston state representative who later had a sterling career in Congress. Sidney and Shelby would speculate on which of the three coeds their daddy would marry. “They were all such beautiful women,” Sidney remembers. “Shelby and I were just in awe.”During the summer of 1963, Bill drove to Northern California to hang out with Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who had been introduced by their common friend McMurtry. In the company of Kesey and his gang of friends called the Merry Pranksters, Bill added LSD to his repertoire of drugs. Around that time, he took a giant step in his intake of speed: He started putting a needle in his arm. His career continued, though. Bill was in Dallas on November 22, the day Kennedy was assassinated; he followed the dying president and the wounded Texas governor John Connally to Parkland hospital. The same day, he landed assignments to write about both LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson. He was at the Dallas jail when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Suddenly his novel writing was on hold. He was the earth’s most praised writer about the new American president; Random House gave him a contract for what his editors projected as the definitive nonfiction portrait of LBJ. But first he was getting married. He was 34 and Dorothy was 23. At their Houston wedding, Dorothy wore a pillbox hat of the style popularized by Jackie Kennedy. Then they left for Washington.
He shouldn’t have been surprised when Lady Bird declined to cooperate on a women’s magazine piece he had lined up. In his novel, Sweet Mama Fenstemaker was a caricature—one of the few characters he took no pains with. LBJ was also displeased with Bill. Writer Murray Kempton recalled that when Bill was working for Time, they were assigned one day to the vice presidential plane. Johnson turned to his former aide and said, “I tried reading your novel, Billy, but I couldn’t get past the first ten pages because of all the dirty words.”
Living in a basement apartment on Capitol Hill with a standard-poodle puppy named Rosebud, Bill and Dorothy socialized with his friends David Halberstam, Robert Novak, and Larry L. King. “I got really tired of seeing Larry asleep on my couch,” Dorothy now quips. Bill must have thought his service to LBJ and his close friends on the White House staff would eventually thaw the ice; it was in Lyndon Johnson’s pragmatic interest for that book to get written. But LBJ was through with Bill. Press secretary George Reedy, Bill’s old friend and colleague, finally told him that he would never be granted White House press credentials.
“When that was over, it was over; he moved on,” Dorothy contends. “I lived with him for seven years, and most of that time he never mentioned LBJ. He lost interest in politics. He didn’t even vote.” It was hardly Bill’s fault that book could not be completed: He was a good reporter, and he was willing to do it for the exposure and the money. And editors were still clamoring for him to write more novels. Yet the LBJ detour set a reckless pattern. Publishers gave him money that he accepted and spent, but then no book followed, and his patrons were left burned.
Bill and Dorothy moved to New York, renting a tiny but opulent efficiency on the Upper East Side. Unable to find his beloved Dr Pepper on the East Coast, he would bring gallons of the bottler’s syrup from Texas and mix it with club soda and Dexedrine. Columbia studios bought the movie rights to The Gay Place for $25,000. When the check was cut, Nadine had a lawman sitting in the office of Bill’s agent to collect her lawful half (child support would remain a contentious issue between them). But Bill and Dorothy had financial breathing room, and the movie deal had superb promise: It was the same creative team—Martin Ritt the director, Paul Newman the star—that had made Larry McMurtry’s little-read first novel into the success of Hud.
Bill and Dorothy moved back to Austin in 1964 and rented a house; then, with their poodle in the back of their Volkswagen van, they took off for Mexico for three months. Times were good. The unpleasantness with LBJ fast receded in Bill’s rearview mirror. He even indulged in some payback when he reviewed a collection of the president’s speeches for the New York Herald Tribune. Trying to coax him into writing for the American Scholar, an editor there praised his assessment of the book. A top editor at the Atlantic Monthly Press wrote in the same vein. But the winning bidder was the New American Library: a December 1965 contract worth $50,000 for two novels of his choosing.
My Library
