Ann
An Appreciation.
The first time I saw Ann Richards she was playing bridge with old friends at the home of Fletcher and Libby Boone in the hills overlooking Austin. With kids whooping in the bedrooms, a half-dozen card games uproarious in the living room, and much strong drink poured in the kitchen, I was parked on a sofa. I had been invited to the Sunday night tradition because I was courting Dorothy Browne, one of Ann’s old friends and, later, her devoted and trusted aide in state government. It was a hard crowd to overshadow, but that never daunted Ann. She was 47 then, a Travis County commissioner. She was a very attractive woman; for all the premature facial lines and a hairstyle that harked back to a time when “permanent” was used as a noun, sexiness was a distinct part of her bearing. When she turned it on, she was all blue eyes and dimples.
She cocked an eyebrow at the dubious prospects of the hand she’d been dealt, leaned back in her chair, and said, “I’ve just got to tell you all about club,” stretching one syllable into three. “We have such a good time at club. We just talk and talk. And when we get to the end, we vote on what’ll be our next topic of discussion. I think I’m going to propose vaginal itch.”
The bawdy and rowdy feminist was a well-known side of Ann. But something else underlay her crack about the stuffiness and pretensions of social clubs. In a crowd that was well juiced and thought nothing of it, she was talking about the newness and rawness of her commitment to Alcoholics Anonymous. A few Sundays before, her family and close friends had, with great pain of their own, reduced her to sobs in the ordeal of intervention. She walked into a house in West Lake Hills, and on seeing them all, she responded with the instinctive fright of a mother: “Are the children all right?” Hours later she was on a plane to a treatment hospital in Minneapolis. She later said she’d tried to fight off their pleas and their harsh evidence of what she was doing to herself, and to them, because she thought that if she quit drinking, she’d lose her gift for being funny.
“I was terrified,” she wrote of the trip to Minneapolis in her first book, Straight From the Heart. “I was a public person, there was no way I could survive it.” Ann’s long marriage to David Richards, a labor and civil rights lawyer who was also our friend and still is, came to an end in the same period. When Dorothy and I married, in 1982, we invited Ann to our wedding on Fletcher and Libby’s lawn. She sent us a nice gift and a poignant note. She wished us all the best, she wrote, but weddings were something she was having a hard time handling right then.
Ann was wounded in spirit. By standards she held dear—as a wife, as a mother, as a responsible person—she had reason to feel like crawling under a rock. But that was not her way of doing business. Those months at the start of the eighties were the very time when she began a leap upward in politics that would make her grin, drawl, and grit celebrated throughout the world.
ANN WAS AN OMNIPRESENT FIGURE in the lives of her friends. She seemed to have been everywhere, seen and done it all, which made her impatient with those of us who were trying to keep up. She was born in 1933, one of the darkest years of the Depression, in a rural community north of Waco. Her dad called on area drugstores, delivering pharmaceuticals, for a salary of $100 a month. She went to Waco High, where she narrowly lost a state contest in debate and met David at an A&W Root Beer stand. After they married and graduated from Baylor University, he went to law school and she began teaching social studies at twenty in a boisterous South Austin junior high. They were standouts in the Scholz Garten gang of liberals. At thirty, living in Dallas, she was a homemaker and political activist awaiting a luncheon speech by the president when it was announced that he’d been shot in a motorcade downtown.
Back in Austin six years later, she carried on her political activism with friends who attended her Episcopal church in West Lake Hills. Other friends, the writers Bud Shrake and Gary Cartwright, embarked on the fabled zaniness of Mad Dog Inc. and a would-be acrobatic act, the Flying Punzars. (The third Punzar was singer Jerry Jeff Walker. Look at the photos on the album cover of Jerry Jeff’s storied ¡Viva Terlingua!, recorded in Luckenbach in 1973. Ann sits on a picnic table, taking it all in.)
Like all successful politicians, she was an opportunist with a run of good luck. Seasoned by working for local candidates like Sarah Weddington, who was elected to the Legislature after arguing Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court, Ann ousted an incumbent on the Travis County Commissioners’ Court in 1976. She was good at shaking hands and promising to keep folks’ roads fixed. There was a prickly edge to her feminism, but her articulation of those views had an old-fashioned quality that resonated in Texas. “I know there are exceptions,” she later wrote, “and that there are men who do the laundry and who go to the grocery store and plan the meals. But most of the men I know go to the grocery store with a list of instructions. And that list is put together by the female of the household. Men drive the car pool or pick up the cleaning because they are told to. … So, if a woman is not there, the whole management of the house suffers.”
By the time Dorothy and I married, Ann was sober and single, though she and David called it a separation for two more years, and she had defeated an incumbent Democratic state treasurer who had been indicted for misusing his office. At the treasury Ann found employees trundling numbers on obsolete calculators and undeposited checks to the state gathering dust on desks. She was no banker or computer programmer, but she hired some, and she set about managing the state’s money.
Ann also had the antiquated authority to commission and pin old-style badges on treasury agents and other peace officers. As the state’s top tax collector, Comptroller Bob Bullock—Ann’s mercurial drinking buddy and shrewd political mentor—decided he wanted such a badge; he pestered her for it, and he never took kindly to anyone turning him down. Well-known for his love of firearms, Bullock was rumored to have once stuck a pistol in the ear of an offending driver of a New York taxi in which he and Ann were passengers. “I can’t commission him as a peace officer and license him to carry a gun,” she said with an exasperated laugh. “He’d be dangerous.” (Bullock decided soon after Ann that he too had better sober up.)
For several years Dorothy had been the assistant director of the Texas office of the American Civil Liberties Union. She burned out and took a few months off, and in the course of her 1985 job hunt, she wrote Ann a shy and tentative letter of interest, telling her old friend that she didn’t really know what the treasury did or what she could offer. “Dorothy, come over here!” Ann commanded on the phone. When Dorothy arrived, she told her, “You can do anything you set your mind to.”
Her job entailed research of myriad issues and knowing the names and personalities of political associates who expected to be recognized, and she drafted correspondence for Ann in a style reasonably close to her voice. Ann liked to work in her stocking feet. At night, when most of the staff had gone home, Dorothy often heard the sound of her padding down the hall, a letter in her hand. Our daughter, Lila, recalls Dorothy marveling that Ann would be talking about policy while pulling out a needle and thread and stitching up a runner in her pantyhose.
It’s never been clear how Ann got to make the keynote speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention—she was as surprised as anyone. When she got the chance, she hit a home run, though the speech tailed off when she made it to the part about the ticket, Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen. The lines—about George H. W. Bush’s silver foot, Ginger Rogers’s dancing backward in high heels, Ann’s game of ball with her grandchild Lily—were matched by the beauty of her, all silver and blue, and the sheer joy of her timing and delivery. She went onstage a little-known state politician and walked off a television superstar.
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