by Jan Reid
“A thing you have to remember about Ann,” said her friend Sue Sharlot, “is that she was so pretty. And God, she was fun, including times when she was drinking. One time we went to New Orleans on a trip. Some guys wound up with our party but didn’t really know us. Ann got us to doll up and come on to those guys like we were hookers. And when they found out we weren’t the genuine articles, they got really pissed!
“She was like Marilyn Monroe. She got those lines in her face and throat pretty early in life—her mother had those, too—so some people who came to know her in politics never knew what a beauty she was. And she was incredibly generous to her friends. Sarah, our daughter, still talks about the Hanukkah Chicken. This was a character invented by Ann. The Richardses’ home was Christmas in full bore, with a giant decorated tree and lots of beautifully wrapped presents. Ann felt sorry for our kids because we didn’t celebrate Christmas, so she would dress up in a chicken costume and come to our door, announce that she was the Hanukkah Chicken, and give presents to Sarah and Matthew. She would show up in the chicken costume clucking and yelling: ‘Braaaaaach! Braaaaaach! It’s the Hanukkah Chicken!’
“When we had those parties at the Richardses’ house, the kids would just be given free range—swimming and playing. There was a sign by the pool in Spanish that I think said something about a wet floor, pisa. The kids thought it meant ‘Don’t piss in the pool.’ I remember spending lots of time around their big dining room table, stuffing envelopes for various candidates. There was always a lot of people and food and it was a very festive atmosphere. Like the Christmas gatherings but without Virginia Whitten’s cheese grits and the venison.”
In the summer of 1973, the Richardses embarked on the adventure of transporting the entire family to Europe. They had gotten the chance to trade houses with a couple living outside the quaint English village of Cookham. It was a large pastoral home with leaded windows and views of sheep and cattle grazing on a hillside, there was a garden of lettuces and green peas, and it looked out toward the verdant banks of the River Thames. They saw the Henley regatta, Stonehenge, and a play in London starring Alec Guinness. They had a pleasant lunch with a London Observer editor who had taken advantage of their hospitality in Dallas while covering the Kennedy assassination, and they tested the patience of Clark and Ellen by hauling them through countless museums. David fretted over the experience of driving cars that had steering wheels on the right, and he lost heart one day when he failed to properly set the brake of a neighbor’s borrowed car, which rolled down a hill and bonked against an apple tree.
Ellen gave them a horrid fright by almost getting run over in traffic, snatched to safety at the last instant by her dad. David and Ann got drunk in a pub with a one-night gang of pals who were tossing down the house special—vodka and pineapple juice chased with beer. Unbelievable hangovers. Following a dash through Scotland, they flew over to Paris to meet their friends Betty and Mike McKool. Worried about the expense, Ann cooked meals whenever she could, instead of trying to feed her small horde in restaurants, but she sniped at David for being so cheap.
Ann was like any American dazzled and exhausted by a first exposure to Europe, but she had prepared to do one thing differently: she had alerted Eleanor Richards (her mother-in-law), Sue Sharlot, Virginia Whitten, and a few other friends to keep the letters that she and the rest of the family would write from Europe, and she would keep theirs. When they got back to Texas, she edited the travelogues and got them typed cleanly and bound. In one letter, she regaled the Sharlots with her critique of the Henley regatta and British people in general. The women wore “droopy, sweeping dresses and floppy hats with ruffled pink parasols. And the men! Migod! Sue, such peacocks! They’re not a very handsome people anyway—ruddy—and they wore ancient (source of pride) moth-eaten blazers (‘Bring down me blazer, dearie, it’s Henley’) with rowing club crests on the breast pocket and ‘frosh’ caps, crossed oars over the bill. Old school, m’dear, old school!”
Ann’s only reason to assemble that journal, apart from the obvious pleasure she took in writing it, was to preserve some memories from that trip for her family. She had no ambition to publish any of it. From Edinburgh: “Clark can play ‘Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here’ on the radiator! Gets lost always. Ellen wants to know what we’re doing next. (Before we do what we’re going to do first.)” Cecile was full of curiosity and an avid travel companion. Some nights she and Ann would take off together and leave David to entertain and feed the younger ones. “Paris is really beautiful, but the people look sneaky,” Cecile wrote the Whittens. “We had our first (and probably last) experience with taxis. We were trying to catch one to go to Betty and Mike’s hotel. After having about five empty ones very obviously passing us by, I suggested they were hesitant to pick up a family of six (the taxis are small). So we all stood behind a building while Daddy got one. The first one stopped and we all ran to it, only to have the driver floor the accelerator with us left behind. . . . The best thing I’ve seen since we’ve been in Paris was a pet store selling bats. They had a cage with these two bats hanging from the top, licking their teeth.”
Toward the end, Ann wrote the Sharlots: “A boat trip down the Seine was a mistake. . . . The female narrator of the sights managed to speak French and English at the same time, which emerged as a hypnotizing double talk like playing an old 78 that’s been in the attic and has mildewed. It would be wonderful to talk with or at some French people. We’ve encountered none of the hostility [toward Americans] of advance warnings. I respond to the scene more than England or Scotland, and I finally decided it was because of the multi-hued faces—England is terribly lily white but the skin hues of France run the gamut. If the damned people could talk! I don’t think they understand each other either. The intensity of the listener is as great as the talker’s. The women are beautiful. Men-dominated, I think.”
Finally, they reached a chateau near Dijon where they could unwind and the kids could find friends and games that entertained them. One could tell by her writing that Ann was having what was then the time of her life. A world far beyond Texas had opened up to her, and she got on with it just fine, as people back home would say. But that may have been the last time those six people hung together as a family.
PART TWO
Superwoman’s Chair
Ann addressing an audience of Democrats on behalf of her friend Mike McKool, who won election to the Texas Senate. Dallas, late 1960s.
CHAPTER 6
Problem Lady
Ann swore when they made the move to Austin that she was through with politics and campaigns, through with doing mundane office work for Democratic Party chieftains, and for almost two years she made good on her pledge.
Her first calling to employment in public life came from the Texas Legislature. The senators and representatives meet for 140 days every other year, though special sessions are often required. The governor, attorney general, other statewide officials, and some appointed agency directors drew reasonable salaries, but the lieutenant governor and all state senators and House members had a base income of just $4,800 a year (raised to $7,200 in 1975, where it still stands). The years when the legislature met, they could add a per diem of $12 for the six-month session, but even with that, their income barely exceeded $9,000. (The per diem is now around $170; to make up for their lowly base pay, legislators award themselves generous pensions.) How many people could afford to take leaves from their jobs, professions, or businesses for half a year, every other year, for that? The system guaranteed that rich white folks ran the legislature.
It was a slipshod way to govern such a large and complex state, but that was as much government as the writers of the Texas Constitution of 1876 had wanted. (Though amended 467 times, it still stands.) When sovereignty was regained by the southern states after Reconstruction, legislators wanted no more abusive governors like Edmund J. Davis. The Whig lawyer and judge turned Democrat had fled the state to avoid having to fight for the Confederacy, and Abraham Lincol
n commissioned him a general and put him in charge of the Texas Unionists. Elected governor in 1870 by the small number of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freed slaves allowed to vote, Davis convinced the legislature to pass the Militia Bill, which enabled him to declare martial law in any county and suspend its laws, and it supplied him with a State Police force under his direct command. The Enabling Act allowed him to control patronage with the whim of a monarch. The Printing Bill established an official state journal and required privately owned newspapers to print all gubernatorial notices.
When sovereignty returned to Texas in 1874, a surge of voters awarded every congressional and legislative seat to a Reconstruction-hating Democrat. The Democrats’ monopoly on power in Texas would last for the next century; almost all contests would be waged between factions of that party. President Ulysses Grant decided to let Governor Davis stew in his own broth. Davis quit the governor’s office in 1874 but did not leave a key. His successor kicked the door in. Reconstruction in Texas had come to an end.
By design, the Texas Constitution left state government so limited that voters have had to approve amendments to allow cities to donate surplus firefighting equipment to rural volunteer fire departments, or to phase out the elected office of inspector of hides and animals. In the “plural executive” system, statewide elected officials direct agencies like the General Land Office, the Department of Agriculture, and the Railroad Commission. Those officials have their own ambitions and agendas and do not have to follow the orders of the governor. Those limitations have fueled a conventional wisdom that the most powerful official in Texas government is the lieutenant governor, who presides over the state Senate.
In Texas, it is against the law for corporations and labor unions to make political contributions in state campaigns, and all fund-raising must cease when the legislature is in session. But the state can hardly boast about the rigors of its limits on campaign finance. When the legislature is not in session, the sky is the limit for individual contributions as long as the gifts and favors are reported. When legislators retire, a large proportion of them never leave Austin. At once, they become lobbyists and take on as clients the same interests that in past years loaded them up with gifts and kept their political-officeholder accounts stuffed with money. On occasion, voters and legislators on the outskirts of power get disgusted and throw the rascals out. One such outbreak set Ann Richards on the course of becoming a politician.
During the 1971 legislative session, a House coalition of liberal Democrats and Republicans called the “Dirty Thirty” revolted against an autocratic Speaker named Gus Mutscher and his lieutenants over a stock-fraud scandal originating in the Houston suburb of Sharpstown. The Handbook of Texas describes the essence of the furor: “The scandal centered, initially, on charges that state officials had made profitable quick-turnover bank-financed stock purchases in return for the passage of legislation desired by the financier, Houston businessman Frank W. Sharp. By the time the stock fraud scandal died down, state officials also had been charged with numerous other offenses—including nepotism and use of state-owned stamps to buy a pickup truck.”
Before it was over, the Democratic governor, Preston Smith, who had succeeded John Connally, ran a distant fourth in his bid for reelection; the attorney general, Crawford Martin, lost his bid for reelection to John Hill; Gus Mutscher and two of his business associates were convicted of felonies; and half the legislators were either voted out of office or shamed and bluffed into retirement. The Sharpstown scandal and the antics of the Dirty Thirty completely roiled the Democratic primary the following spring.
And simultaneously, something else happened that was pivotal. The Texas Supreme Court ruled that the state’s three main urban counties—Dallas, Bexar, and Harris—had to elect their state representatives from individual districts rather than allowing them to continue to run at-large. The lead attorney in that litigation was David Richards.
Politically, the biggest loser in the Sharpstown affair was innocent of most of the charges made against him. Red haired, personable, and slick, Ben Barnes was the overwhelming favorite to win the governor’s race in 1972. From West Texas peanut-farming and ranching country, Barnes had been chosen by his colleagues as Speaker of the House when he was twenty-six, and then had risen to the post of lieutenant governor, presiding over the Senate. Barnes was on a fast track upward; Lyndon Johnson and John Connally both saw in him the next torchbearer in their line of succession. Mobilizing party functionaries and the LBJ machine’s fund-raising behemoth in his behalf, they thought he would notch his belt by winning the governor’s office, and from that base he might move quickly toward the White House—they envisioned him as a young, charismatic president, a cross between JFK and LBJ.
But a member of the Dirty Thirty used the onslaught of headlines and editorials to take Barnes down. Barnes’s antagonist, state representative Frances “Sissy” Farenthold, came from a prominent family in Corpus Christi. Sissy was an attractive woman in her midforties, but her thick black hair was such a tangle that the look became a major part of her public persona. Barnes could only shake his head and smile as he watched her put an end to his career. He failed to make the runoff in the primary, finishing a battered and badly beaten third, running ahead of only Preston Smith. His downfall triggered the sudden and lasting collapse of LBJ’s machine.
Once and future stars: Ann conversing with Ben Barnes, former speaker of the Texas House and lieutenant governor and a continuing behind-the-scenes power in Democratic politics despite his unexpected poor showing in a gubernatorial race in 1972. This was probably taken at a roast of Barnes, Austin, late 1970s or early 1980s.
It was ironic that the Sharpstown scandal benefited Sissy Farenthold and other left-of-center Democrats, for the power manipulating the upheaval was the Nixon White House. The Republicans feared that Barnes, as governor, might challenge and defeat John Tower for his Senate seat in 1978. Also, Tower resented the influence that John Connally, still nominally a Democrat, had in Washington as Nixon’s Treasury secretary. The timing of the investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department was designed to maximize the damage to Barnes and other Texas Democrats. When John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general at the time of Sharpstown, got out of prison after the Watergate scandal, he apologized to Barnes for his role in targeting Barnes’s political career. Tape recordings from the Nixon Oval Office substantiate the plotting to destroy Barnes.
Johnson had been a recluse since leaving the presidency amid the chaos of 1968; he seldom left his ranch, grew his hair long like the hippies who had so reviled him, and would die of chronic heart problems in 1973. Connally switched parties three months after the death of his mentor and benefactor, hitching his fortunes to Richard Nixon at the very worst time for choosing that man as his champion. When Connally finally ran for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan buried him—the Texan spent millions and wound up with one delegate vote. Unlike Connally, Barnes would remain a loyal Democrat; he became a major fund-raiser and power broker for both the state and national parties. He never ran for office again.
But Texas was still Texas. In the end, Farenthold’s demolition of Barnes just made it easier for a rich rancher named Dolph Briscoe to dominate the runoff and once more carry the day for conservative Democrats.
In 1972, the whole country was awash in political scandal. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other news organizations put forth a stream of stories about the Watergate break-in, but the Democrats’ antiwar candidate, George McGovern, had no chance of making Nixon work hard or spend much to claim Texas’s electoral votes in his quest for reelection. And yet woeful as it was, McGovern’s race launched the careers of future leaders in the Democratic Party. His national campaign manager was Gary Hart, who would go on to win a Senate seat in Colorado and in 1988 would see his considerable presidential hopes implode in an adultery scandal. (He took a boat named, incredibly enough, Monkey Business to a private island in the Atlantic with
a young woman who was not his wife and who was photographed sitting in his lap. That, plus his dare to news organizations to put a tail on him, spelled the end of a frontrunner’s career.) For the McGovern campaign in Texas, Hart sent to Austin a young couple who had just graduated from Yale Law School and were living in Arkansas. Bill and Hillary Clinton didn’t move the Nixon landslide in the state by one percentage point—Nixon battered McGovern in Texas by more than a million votes, a two-to-one margin—but during those months, they made friends of young peers who would be strong supporters decades later, when both of them got their chances to run for the presidency. The most visible ones were Garry Mauro, a future land commissioner and gubernatorial candidate, and Roy Spence, one of the partners of the fast-rising advertising agency GSD&M.
Ann crossed paths with the Clintons and their team during those months, and she educated a St. Stephen’s history teacher named Don Roth on how to carry his precinct convention for McGovern over George Wallace, but she was not one who spoke of the good old days of the McGovern campaign in Texas. Her focused involvement in 1972 was in state campaigns. With the Sharpstown scandal growing ever larger on editorial and front pages, a woman named Caryl Yontz called Ann and asked her to talk to a young Austin lawyer who wanted to run for a seat in the state House of Representatives. Ann tried to convince Yontz that she wasn’t interested, but she finally agreed to have lunch with Sarah Weddington. From the West Texas town of Abilene, the attorney had a round, pretty face—dimples when she smiled, and lots of blond curls. She was in her midtwenties but looked as if she might have been younger. Though she had a clear idea of what she wanted to accomplish, the only Democratic male politico who would give her the time of day was George Shipley, known in the trade as “Dr. Dirt.” “She wanted legislation giving a woman the right to credit in her own name and not her husband’s,” Ann wrote in her book. “She wanted laws that would stop the practice of putting the woman rape victim on trial for her character rather than the assailant on trial for his assault. She wanted to make it illegal to fire a teacher because of pregnancy.” Ann, who, at thirty-eight, was a dozen years older than Weddington, reflected, “I don’t think I had been around any women who I would call out-and-out feminist activists until I met Sarah.”