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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If any young American novelist had reason to produce, it was Bill Brammer. But he persisted in trying to write a sequel to The Gay Place. The problem wasn’t just that he had killed off Fenstemaker—his writing wasn’t the same. He wrote scenes that had no movement, and his crisp dialogue turned into campy dialect. One can see his struggling in the manuscripts. Before, his typescripts had been almost as clean as his letters. Now the sentences were endlessly inked out and changed in a scraggly hand. The sequel was titled Fustian Days. He always had that yen for the obscure word. The adjective “fustian,” in this use, applies to “pretentious and banal writing or speech.” That, sadly, was what his fiction had become. He knew it. “He bought a new electric typewriter,” Dorothy recalls, “and I would wake up and hear him hit the x key and let it run, line after line, wiping out everything he’d written.”
The couple returned to Austin and moved into a handsome stone structure on West Avenue called the Caswell House. Billy Lee’s flair, reputation, and personality again made their home the epicenter of hipness in Austin. Famous guests included cartoonist Jules Feiffer and critic Dwight McDonald. But the crush was sometimes too much for Dorothy. “One night I counted,” Dorothy says, “and we had thirty-one drop-ins. I started yelling. ‘Get outta here!’” Their marriage was failing, but they kept trying to make it work. A friend gave Bill a job in the publicity department of Hemisfair in San Antonio, and Dorothy taught English at the old Brackenridge High School. “That was a good year for us,” she says with a sigh about their time in San Antonio. “It was stable. We both had jobs. But people still dropped in.” Among the guests for a couple of days were Ken Kesey and his Pranksters, driving their brightly painted and, by then, well-known bus. “When I went outside,” she says, “it looked like we were surrounded by every cop in San Antonio.”Over the years Bill’s children often visited him from Houston. “One afternoon Dorothy came out of their bedroom in these baby doll pajamas and said, ‘What time is it?’” remembers Sidney. “Bill said, ‘Look, kids, it’s the evil stepmother!’ We shrieked with laughter.” But those same weekends were when Sidney realized that something had changed, that something was wrong with her dad. “He’d be driving us home late at night, and instead of just pulling over and checking into a motel, he kept dozing off. I never relaxed. I kept saying, ‘Daddy, wake up!’”
Bill next got a job working on a movie script, and in 1967—the Summer of Love—he and Dorothy lived in Bolinas, a quintessential hippie town near San Francisco. He would drive a foggy cliff-side road into the city, his head full of acid and speed, to hear all the top bands at the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom. With the screenwriting gig playing out, Bill had a revelation about his work: He would abandon Fustian Days and move to Denver to manage a nightclub called the Family Dog and gather material for a new novel about rock and roll. Dorothy went on ahead. After a terrifying drive through a snowstorm, with no chains on her tires and a carful of poodles, she wound up hospitalized in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with an anxiety attack. The Family Dog quickly folded. Once more they were back in Austin and broke.
To make matters worse, the film of The Gay Place never got made. Rumors circulated that LBJ vetoed it by means of his loyal aide Jack Valenti, the longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America. But Valenti had been Bill’s friend. Until the end of his life Bill continued to get calls from people who wanted to make such a movie and from editors who never stopped hoping for another novel. He never quit writing, never stopped dreaming of putting it all back together, but letters were his art form now. For thousands of words and audiences of one he would type on through the nights—eloquent, ribald, self-pitying, proud.
By 1969 he and Dorothy had separated. He landed a job teaching journalism at Southern Methodist University, and from Dallas he sent her a barrage of letters on the subject he considered most important in his life. It wasn’t ambition or fame, and it certainly wasn’t a snub by Lyndon Johnson; it was what he considered his repeated failures at love. He had hardly lost his ability to write. But he couldn’t deal with deadlines, contracts, and expectations. In 1970 a top editor at Harper’s Magazine Press wrote Bill’s agent in hopes that a manuscript would soon be available. She dutifully reported her client’s fib that he had written half of the rock and roll novel. She mentioned, though, that New American Library had threatened legal action against Bill to retrieve $14,000 in unfulfilled advances. Bill’s receipt of that dun set off howls of laughter. He framed it and put it on his wall.
His career was in ruin, but in Austin a cultural ferment was bubbling: a time was approaching when a new cognoscenti would celebrate, in a lightly mocking way, the Texas heritage of men with good ol’ boy names like Jerry Jeff, Billy Bob, and Billy Lee. Suddenly no one called him Bill anymore. He even came to admire “Billie Lee,” the name and spelling his parents had given him. For the rest of his life, by one spelling or the other, that was how people referred to him. One Fourth of July found him wearing a large sombrero, hired to hand out programs at a Willie Nelson picnic.
Yet he always commanded loyalty and respect. William Broyles, the first editor of this magazine, hired Billy Lee on the original staff. “He had a job cutting cedar,” Broyles recalls, “and for his ‘nervous’ dog he once got animal tranquilizers that he accidentally took himself. But he worked hard on the smallest details, and he had the best story ideas. He convinced us we weren’t just a bunch of snot-nosed kids.” Billy Lee complained incessantly of growing old. He complained of losing his hair, his teeth, his eyesight, his potency. He disliked the indignities that befell him. Still, he was doing what he wanted to do. In one letter he half-jokingly summed up his life: “Bestowed from birth with a lucy-in-the-sky twinkle and irreverence for everything, [I] bounced around the sub-culture after leaving LBJ, writing unfinished masterpieces by the score, ingesting hogsheads of drugs and acquiring a local image as the best approximation of guru and human wonder around.” He was a living bridge between Kerouac’s Beats and Kesey’s Pranksters. Billy Lee failed at being Texas’ F. Scott Fitzgerald, so he settled for being its Neal Cassady.
Dorothy became his friend again after they divorced. He had enough of a sense of humor left that he coached Lila, her little girl from her second marriage, to call him Uncle Looney. Dorothy recalls, “He was shooting crystal Methedrine and taking acid and mescaline at the same time. He was just a mess.” There were two busts for possession. Then Sidney got a fateful call in the early evening hours of February 11, 1978. “He was living in a house near the Austin airport,” she says. “My father had just died, but I drove around the block three times before I stopped. Casing it, because I didn’t want to get in trouble. Sure enough, the place was swarming with cops.”
“Did he ever steal from you?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah,” she answers with a smile. “He got in my jewelry box once and took the wedding ring from my first marriage. But he left me a pewter teapot in return. He sold everything he could, maybe to get drugs. But he was so voyeuristic. He wanted to know all your stuff. His stealing was a way to get into you.”
Sidney, who now writes, directs, and teaches filmmaking, has lived all over the country, but something always lures her back to Austin. It’s the same with Shelby, who went to New York to act. Yet Austin is where they find their mother, brother, memories of their dad, and many friends. Austin is home, but it’s also the glimmering, prismatic wealth in that novel. For the book and the letters are what’s left of Billy Lee. For years the sisters have worked on a script, trying to establish the story line that Hollywood screenwriters found so elusive.
Willie Brammer Eckhardt now distributes wine and liquor to restaurants. “I was a teenager before I really knew Billy Lee,” he says. “So it was like having an older brother. Lots of talk about sex and music. I used to run into Doug Sahm all the time. He’d say, ‘Man, I loved your dad! His mind worked just like mine.’”
When I first read the novel, in 1970, and again late last year, I thought the second novella, “Room Enough to Caper,” was the most dramatic and powerful. Governor Fenstemaker has appointed another reluctant hero, Neil Christiansen, as Texas’ junior U.S. senator. In one marvelous scene, the senator makes a thoughtful speech in a ballroom that could easily be in Austin’s Driskill Hotel, then a demagogue in the race stands up and starts yelling vile things about Neil, his wife, his brother, and his best friend. With a wild grin on his face, Neil leaves the podium, grabs the man by his coat and the seat of his pants, and hustles him to the elevator as power brokers gape. Fenstemaker strides in and smoothly turns the possible fiasco into an act of political courage. The senator is torn between his life in Washington and a wife and two young daughters who live in Austin. The marriage is failing, but on Easter weekend they almost recover the “splendor and recklessness and intensity of late afternoon loves.” Neil hides the kids’ Easter eggs to surprise them, but when his wife and children come in from church, they think the eggs have been stolen. The kids are crying, the wife is angry, and Fenstemaker is on the phone. The moment fades.Forty years after those scenes were published, Shelby sits at her mother’s kitchen table in Austin. I’ve been telling her and Nadine how cinematic and how contemporary those passages read, and how moved I was by the father’s awkwardness and the delight of the little girls on seeing him again. “I don’t know if a movie of it will ever get made,” Shelby says of the continuing contacts by filmmakers. “Decades go by, and politically, I say liberalism is going to come back. Or at least as artists we deserve to put the idea out there. This was something to be proud of. Yeah, we screwed around. Yeah, we drank too much. But people were dedicated to making society better and more just.”
Nadine hands her daughter a napkin. “I don’t know why I’m crying,” Shelby says.
“Why shouldn’t you?” I reply.
“I remember that Easter,” she says and dabs the napkin at her eye.
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