by Jan Reid
Later they took on a third partner, Segal Fry, a banjo player of note, and they closed the original tiny place near the police station and opened two more Raw Deals. These joints had much more space, the owners had a liquor license, and the food was reasonably priced and more than passable; and if it wasn’t, a sign above the bar read “It’ll Be Better Next Time.” For a decade, the Raw Deals were the salons that Eddie Wilson had envisioned: friendly places frequented by politicians, lobbyists, real estate brokers, reporters, artists, professors, authors, and musicians—as long as that last bunch observed the house rule about guitars stated on another sign: “Leave ’em in the car.”
But for all the pleasure of that company, David admitted in his memoir that by this time he was working up a keen distaste for Ann’s political career, and what its future might hold for him.
Initially, being Ann’s sidekick in the political mainstream was sort of fun. Shortly, though, I found myself uncomfortable. I don’t think it was because I was taking a backseat to Ann; I had always done that in our social life, but that could well have been a source of discontent. I know I was not at ease in the respectable circles to which she was drawn. The anarchist side of me made me ill-suited for conventional behavior. For a while, I discharged my escort duties in reasonable fashion, but down deep this role did not square with my self-image. I thought of myself as a maverick, a dissenter, and a troublemaker. Much of this is now hindsight, but I am certain I was not destined to fit into polite society. . . . Somewhere inside me, I feared that my new role as consort was hurtling me toward the very life I had fled for so long.
Ann and David were among the regulars at the Raw Deal. The extravagance of her drinking was becoming more and more apparent, and so was the conflict between them. One time when she was really drunk at the Raw Deal, a friend heard her attack David venomously, and the friend could only flinch and recoil. “You are so perfect,” Ann assailed him. “It must be hard to go through life being so goddamned perfect.”
Still, her offbeat sense of humor continued to attract people. Because of it, she got a lot of constituent mail for a county commissioner, enough that she assembled one file titled “Weirdos.” Most of its letters were harmless, to wit, one that arrived in February 1979.
Most Honorable Ann Richards
Noble Person Dedicated to Human Interests
Another dear soul told me maybe I should let you know what I’m up to. This “Bell of Human Being” is in the UN and the Kool-Meanie’s Hands. The “spirit of humankind” has called me to defend my fellow human beings from a kind of mentality that seems running rampant world wide. . . . Feeling I am speaking for the people, I shot my “Mojo” to the world. This is the second edition. Please “Grok” and if you understand that the higher spiritual powers are at work, my point is organic, not political; my values are human, not mechanical. My position is righteous indignation of my human dignity. I am merely exercising the right of free speech. Call the turkey hunters off if you can, please.
I give you my knowledge, I give my life. I am your servant.
The Hobo
Postscript: If you dig my rap please make copies for all humanistically concerned individuals in this area. I give the world a gift of an “early” Christmas. I want to give everyone in the whole earth a copy of this free.
Om Shanti,
Love peace
She was receiving invitations to participate in roasts of prominent individuals and to talk about politics with groups of progressive women. She didn’t hesitate to make sport of powerful men. She introduced a comic act in which she pulled over her head an elastic band that was attached to a mask of a hog’s snout. “Hi, I’m Harry Porco, president of Porco Electronics,” she began one routine, as reported by the Austin-based magazine Third Coast. “I always say, when better women are made, Porco Electronics will make ’em. I’m good to my girls. We’ve had a number of firsts here. We were the first to put horoscopes on our bulletin boards. You know, for the girls. It’s the little things that count. We were the first to give the girls on the assembly line hair nets made of real hair. We give them a plastic rose—we call it the “Yellow Rose” award—for five years’ service. You just give your girls a hug and a pat on the fanny and they’ll work like dogs.”
When she wasn’t off making speeches, she found bars to frequent after work that were more her place than David’s Scholz Garten and the Raw Deal. One hangout near the Capitol, heavy in its politics, was the Quorum. The owner, Nick Kralj, was a former aide of Ben Barnes who now lobbied the legislature on measures that included legalizing pari-mutuel betting on horse and greyhound tracks. Kralj was as colorful and volatile as some of his customers. Molly Ivins passed on a tale that Kralj and Bob Bullock used to trade potshots at the building’s large cockroaches. Kralj said that was preposterous; the bullets would have gone right through the hollow walls.
At the Quorum, Ann would laugh with the guys at some tale Bullock told about once doing legal work for small-time hoods who had monopolized the jukebox and cigarette-machine trade. Bullock had first been elected to the Texas House in 1955 from a district in the rolling farmland and small towns between Waco and Dallas. In those days, he sided with the segregationists, but before long he changed his mind and proclaimed himself a liberal. He was elected state comptroller in 1974. “Bullock’s Raiders” locked up businesses that ignored or fell far behind in paying their sales and franchise taxes—the Raw Deal was one such threatened enterprise, though it never happened—and he recruited a virtual think tank of professionals who became the state’s de facto auditors and revenue estimators. Bullock was like the little guy in a leather sport coat who walks into some country beer joint, and for a few seconds the clatter of the pool balls stops and the place falls quiet, and then he laughs and becomes the life of the party.
Ann loved hearing Bullock’s tales about his up-and-down road through Texas politics, and she welcomed him as one of her mentors. But she braced for the demons that could send him off in some direction that was just crazy. In the summer of 1980, she and Bullock traveled to New York City together for the Democratic National Convention. They were reportedly in the backseat of a cab racing through Manhattan when Bullock grew alarmed at the rate of speed and perceived nearness of car wrecks, and a couple of times he informed the driver of his wishes. His remarks went ignored. Bullock pulled out the pistol he carried in his boot, stuck it in the cabbie’s ear, and snarled, “I said slow down, motherfucker!”
Ann dons her costume as Harry Porco, sexist pig, in a photo shoot for the Austin-based magazine Third Coast in February 1984. A few years later, when her profile was higher and her political calculus had changed, Vanity Fair requested use of this photo. To her relief the photographer declined.
It was also widely reported that they boozed all over Manhattan but never got very close to Madison Square Garden, Jimmy Carter’s renomination, or the high-profile speech he had to grant his defeated challenger, Ted Kennedy.
Back in Austin, she had some drinking pals who were surprising, given her self-description as a fuzzy-headed liberal. One was Frank Erwin. A jowly lawyer, he was the last of the old lions of the LBJ machine who still had political power. Erwin chaired the University of Texas Board of Regents with ferocity, especially when challenged by long-haired students and leftist professors. Erwin kept a large, detailed map of Vietnam at the Quorum, and periodically, as if he were an army general, he would deliver a briefing on the progress the troops were making over there. He personally ran off a group of brilliant academics that Chancellor Harry Ransom had recruited to the UT faculty in the sixties. His most flamboyant stunt came during the “Battle of Waller Creek” in 1969, when he ordered the chainsawing of some towering trees that campus rebels were desperate to save. (The trees were removed so that a street could be shifted and Memorial Stadium expanded.) A lonely widower, Erwin sometimes slept in a fraternity house where he was much admired. A mentor and friend of Barbara Jordan, he was a complex man. Ann wrote that one evening at the Quorum
she turned to Erwin and said, “I’ve got to go home to be a wife and mother.”
Erwin snorted. “You won’t like it.”
CHAPTER 9
Capsized
Living with my dog and cat in a cabin overlooking the valley that locals called Rogues Hollow, I was no stranger at Another Raw Deal, as the new one on West Sixth Street was called, but I also spent a fair amount of my leisure time in San Antonio. I had friends who lived in the King William district of restored and not-so-restored Victorian homes. Gerry Goldstein was a criminal defense lawyer of storied success and a protégé of the Richardses’ old friend Maury Maverick, Jr. One day, I went to my mailbox and laughed upon pulling out an invitation to the thirtieth birthday party on September 27, 1980, of Gerry’s tall, blonde, British-born wife, Chris, along with that of an Austin friend, Shelia Cheney. The graphic, done in the style of a 1920s Vanity Fair, featured the profile of a sleekly dressed woman with her index finger stuck down her throat. The caption read: “Boogie Till Ya Puke.”
In San Antonio that night, I was at the foot of the Goldsteins’ staircase, talking to my friend Pete Gent, the former Dallas Cowboy receiver and author of North Dallas Forty, when Dorothy Browne walked over to us. She wore tan pants and a fitted top that complimented her short blonde hair and a lustrous pair of brown eyes. Pete introduced us, and she grinned and said she would rather talk to us than Fletcher Boone, the co-owner of the Raw Deal, who was carrying on at high volume. I knew who Dorothy was. Billy Lee Brammer, her first husband, had been one of my mentors, but I hadn’t known them when they were married. Dorothy had ridden down from Austin for the birthday party with a group that included Fletcher and his partner, Lopez Smitham. Gerry Goldstein then owned a part interest in a thriving little bar three or four blocks away called the Friendly Spot. Chris shooed the party on to the bar, and I set out, intent on not losing Dorothy in the crowd.
The first Texas woman elected to statewide office in half a century has a motherly moment with her son Clark.
When we reached the bar, Fletcher became embroiled in some dispute with his wife, Libby. He broadened the scope of their disagreement to women in general, whom he continually maligned by saying, “You people.” After the first few of these insults, Libby burst into sobs. I was happy where I was, but Dorothy told me her friends clearly had to leave. We followed them at a distance on a street of adobe houses. Libby would duck off toward a porch light or an alley and cry a while. Dorothy and I were calling it the Trail of Tears.
I gathered up the Austin party in my car and drove them to their hotel. In the large room the Boones had rented, Fletcher got in a raging argument with a cook at the Raw Deal. Jaws and fists were clenched at one point. Libby sniffled and wailed intermittently. As the evening tumbled on, I envisioned myself as riding a quarter horse, trying to cut Dorothy out of that herd. I said at some point, “I really like you, Dorothy, but you’ve sure got some quarrelsome friends.”
The next day I was back in my cabin on the hill, weathering a hangover and watching a football game, and they were on the interstate headed back to Austin. Whatever had bothered Libby so thoroughly the night before was forgiven, even if not forgotten, and she laughed merrily on hearing about my remark. I waited until Monday afternoon and then got the number from Austin information of the Texas Civil Liberties Union. Dorothy chuckled, “I didn’t think I’d ever hear from you again.”
“Yeah, you did.”
I tell that story here because we were so smug in our self-assured hipness and hard-won hangovers; and because of the utter shock that awaited Dorothy, Fletcher, and Libby when they learned what that Sunday had been like for some of the people they loved and admired the most.
Dan Richards had gone to Texas A&M for a while and did not distinguish himself in his studies or the results. He came back to Austin and got a job on a construction crew, pouring concrete, but after several months he enrolled in the city’s community college and won a part-time job in the warehouse of the comptroller’s office. Bullock’s Raiders had accumulated enough office furniture and the contents of enough liquor stores that the facility had to be managed like a true warehouse, with forklifts and such. Dan worked there happily for several months, and he dropped out of his community college classes so he could draw a full-time paycheck. He was twenty years old.
Cecile had meanwhile graduated with honors from Brown University and returned to Austin. The siblings shared an apartment, but she was gone most of the time, helping organize labor unions in El Paso. Clark and Ellen were away at school. Since he was the only Richards child living in Austin full-time, Dan got first notice of the pending upheaval of their lives. “Jane Hickie called me one night and said, ‘Your mom’s sick.’ I jumped up like, where is she? I thought maybe she was in the hospital. Jane said, ‘No, she’s sick but doesn’t know it. I’ve met these folks, and we need to do an intervention.’”
The intervention as outlined by the couple that directed it, John and Pat O’Neill, got mixed reviews. At first, David didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Hickie asked Dan and their law professor friend Mike Sharlot whether they would come along and help convince David that this had to be done, and that he had to be a part of it. David at last relented.
“We got together and had kind of a pregame strategy session,” Dan told me, “where we were going to figure out how we were going to convince Mom she had to quit drinking. There wasn’t anybody in the room who was fired up about it at all.” Hickie had painfully given up drinking herself; she knew what was going to be sprung on her boss and hero. Dan recalled the original plan: “The couple told us that we all had to write down something she’d done that was bad and hurtful to us and that we didn’t think she would have done it if she hadn’t been drunk. That was the plan, so we all did that. Then they said we needed to keep working on this for a week or so, and I remember everybody saying, ‘No way! If we’re going to do this we’ve got to get it over with.’ They were thinking we were going to be able to tiptoe around this for a week or two? Then say in a chorus, ‘The jig’s up’? I think we rushed their schedule. I know we did.”
“We had to do it!” Sue Sharlot told me. “Just the driving was insane, with Ann roaring around the narrow roads up in those hills. She was going to hurt or kill someone or herself.” So that Sunday morning, Sue went over to Ann’s house and told a lie about a health crisis of her father, and said she was terribly worried. Would Ann come over to Sue’s house and stay with her?
Ann replied, “Of course,” and rode the short distance to the house with Sue. When she walked in the door, she encountered David; her two oldest children, Cecile and Dan; and her best friends sitting in a circle. There were Tony and Claire Korioth, Jane Hickie, Sam and Virginia Whitten, Sue and Michael Sharlot, Sarah and Standish Meacham, and the two strangers—the O’Neills, the professionals.
In a mother’s reflex, she asked about Clark and Ellen. She was assured they were all right, and the O’Neills took over. They offered a chair and said, “Won’t you have a seat? Your friends want to tell you that they are concerned about you.”
The chair was placed in a circle of other chairs, and each of those seated people had to read an essay they had prepared. These were articulate, well-educated adults, and they didn’t let their stories wander or take on aspects of retribution. They couldn’t have endured it themselves. They had all been coached to say at the end, “And I know you would not have done that if you had not been drinking.”
The choreography was surreal. Ann was so furious at David she could barely look at him. The hypocrisy! She felt cheaply used by some of her friends too. She didn’t lash out at them, though, which they appreciated, for they were well aware of her talent for sarcasm and ridicule. She did speak sharply to the O’Neills, questioning their authority, training, and qualifications. “She lit into those folks a couple of times,” said Dan, “and I don’t blame her.”
Soon Ann was sobbing, and so were others in the room. “I was in such a state of shock,” Ann wrote, �
��that I really don’t remember much of what anyone said. Except for Tony Korioth. Tony said that one time I had been at a Fourth of July party at their house and Ann Korioth, who is my namesake and is their only daughter, had been sitting with me. I had held on to her hand and she had tried to get out of my lap, and I continued to hold on to her hand, and Tony thought that I had hurt her. I had certainly scared the little girl.” Frightening and maybe inflicting pain on a child who had trusted you enough to crawl up in your lap—what a self-image to have to carry around!
“I had made a point of not knowing,” Dan Richards said, “but I thought Mom and Dad were already breaking off at that point. So there was some talk about who would travel with her. And she was a county commissioner; that was another issue. But despite everybody’s fears, at the end she said, ‘I’ll go. I’ll do it.’ I think usually it doesn’t go like that. First they tell you to go to hell.”
By three o’clock that afternoon, she had packed her bags and boarded a flight to the St. Mary’s Chemical Dependency Services at Riverside Medical Center in Minneapolis. She had just turned forty-seven. In real ways, the life she had lived up to that point came to an end. David flew with her to Minneapolis, though they hardly said a word to each other. The place where they arrived was not one of those rehab centers set up like a spa. To Ann it looked more like an asylum than a hospital. Initially, she shared a room with a woman who was suicidal. Ann convinced the doctors and therapists that a private room was essential if she was going to make a recovery. She was lucky that she wasn’t such a heavy drinker that she had to endure detoxification. One of the first things she surrendered in therapy was her anger at her friends and children who had taken part in the intervention. David, well, that was another matter.