Let the People In

by Jan Reid

Bud and Ann had been infatuated with each other for more than twenty years, ever since the parties in Dallas on Lovers Lane. The mutual attraction was quite apparent when their lives intersected again in Austin during the madcap 1970s, but it is unlikely either one pressed to take things beyond the laughs and conversation into an affair. Their lives were too different, and they were friends with each other’s spouses. The first part of Ann’s adult life came crashing to a close at the end of 1980, with the intervention by family and friends for her alcoholism, followed by her separation and divorce from David in 1983. Bud’s marriage to Doatsy ended in 1985. Doatsy stayed in Austin and became a prominent real estate broker, and she remained Bud’s devoted friend, but she reflected on how naïve she had been when Bud plucked her off the Manhattan staff of Sports Illustrated and transported her to the mania in Texas.

  Bud had written five novels and cowritten another with Dan Jenkins. When Sports Illustrated declined to publish his account of a jaunt with Doatsy into the rain-soaked, Deep South part of Texas called the Big Thicket, Willie Morris, the editor of Harper’s, eagerly ran it and later said “Land of the Permanent Wave” was one of the two finest pieces he published in his fabled reign at that magazine. Bud’s reputation as a novelist and journalistic stylist ushered him into the realm of writing screenplays. He worked on about thirty scripts for various studios and producers; most of those projects paid him well enough, though sometimes tardily, and several made it to the screen. The most memorable one, for which he shared credit with the famous novelist and Montana horseman Thomas McGuane, was the western Tom Horn, starring Steve McQueen in his next-to-last movie. Like all novelists entranced by the money and the mass audience of Hollywood pictures, Bud had his share of baffling and frustrating experiences. He told me that Eddie Murphy once berated Dan Jenkins and him over a cowritten script they mistakenly thought would get produced: “You don’t write funny—I’m the one that’s funny.” Bud also wrote stage plays, the most successful of which were produced by an old friend in England. One of his dramas starred Mick Jagger’s former wife, the Texas-born model Jerry Hall.

  Following Ann’s divorce from David Richards in 1983, the novelist, journalist, and dramatist Bud Shrake became the second great romance of her life; they are buried in adjoining plots in the Texas State Cemetery. This photograph was taken sometime in the 1980s or early 1990s.

  Bud was badly shaken when Joyce Rogers, an English professor who had twice been his wife and was the mother of his two sons, collapsed and died on a campus in New Mexico while in the throes of an asthma attack. Bud was not a recluse, but he was an expert at making himself hard to catch—a call to his house produced not the man himself or a recorded message, but the real voice of someone employed by an old-fashioned answering service. Yet he loved telephones; the conversations with Cartwright and other friends could go on for an hour or two. Often the telephone marathons involved the numerous women who enjoyed and desired his company. After his friends Pete and Jody Gent divorced and Pete moved back to his native Michigan, Jody worked full-time for Bud, keeping the household running, any necessary repair crews called, and his manuscripts processed and proofed at efficient speed. On a secluded lane called Wildcat Hollow, Bud’s house in West Lake Hills had a view of Austin as magnificent as the one Ann had enjoyed on Red Bud Trail. He doted on his dog and cat and decided that he was better off with only them as live-in companions. He had been married and divorced three times; marriage did not seem to be his calling.

  When he was in town, he worked in the mornings and then played golf almost daily on Willie Nelson’s golf course. Willie had bought a bankrupt country club on the westernmost fringe of Austin and refitted the clubhouse into a first-rate recording studio; until the IRS slapped him with an impossibly large tax bill, the nine-hole course was the plaything of cronies who included Willie, Bud, the western swing musician Ray Benson, the writer and moviemaker Turk Pipkin, and the former Texas Longhorns football coach Darrell Royal.

  Bud had taken on as-told-to biographies of Willie and Barry Switzer, the former coach of the Oklahoma Sooners and, later, the Dallas Cowboys. Those were lively tales, but the projects signaled that Bud was in need of money. One day in 1985, he suffered what he called a “breakdown” on the golf course. Nick Kralj, the lobbyist and friend who owned the Quorum Club, took him to a doctor, who told him that he was diabetic and that if he didn’t stop drinking and smoking and using hard drugs, he was going to be dead in six months. More than twenty years after this crisis, he told the interviewer Brant Bingamon, “I died in the hospital, but after I was with the spirits for a while, they brought me back to life. No kidding. Fantastic trip.”

  But he found that it was going to be very hard to just quit. Ann got him to try Alcoholics Anonymous. Though it must have helped, because he kept attending the meetings, he never talked about the twelve steps the way she did. He realized one day that fifteen years had sped past since he had written one line of a novel. He started a thriller in which he placed a foreign correspondent who resembled himself in a storm of 1950s history, the fall of the French Empire in Algiers and the Vietnam battle of Dien Bien Phu. That 1987 novel, Night Never Falls, became his favorite.

  “The real reason this novel was so important to me,” he told the author and archivist Steven L. Davis, “is it is the first long piece of prose I wrote after I had finally quit drinking booze and smoking cigarettes and snorting coke. I mean quit for good. Until this book I couldn’t imagine writing fiction without the release of tension that you get from liquor and tobacco. I wondered if I could write at all without a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray near at hand and without knowing there was a cold bottle of vodka in the refrigerator.”

  And alcohol and tobacco were just parts of the difficulty. Bud had started taking speed when the NFL Cowboys and the AFL Dallas Texans set out bowls of Dexedrine and Dexamyl in the locker room like handfuls of chocolates—the players and reporters were welcome to them. After the wild shoot in Durango, Mexico, of Kid Blue, he had put amphetamines aside and become thoroughly addicted to the more expensive cocaine. Smoking marijuana and writing Night Never Falls enabled him to overcome the addictions that were killing him. “I had no DTs from quitting booze,” he would tell the interviewer Brant Bingamon toward the end of his life, “which I had been drowning in for years, but quitting coke was a different and much more difficult matter. I haven’t done coke in more than twenty-five years, but for a long time it was a struggle every day, and even now if I think about it and press my finger to a nostril and snort, I can feel the memory of the coke rush.”

  When Bud obtained the ministerial credentials that legally authorized him to read the marriage vows of Gary and Phyllis Cartwright, it was not the cynical prank that many acquaintances supposed. A belief in God and spiritual life was part of his complex makeup. That spiritual life would enable him to write the short novel Billy Boy (2001), which dwelled on games of golf in the presence of angels. Brant Bingamon asked him to elaborate on his experience of dying and coming back from it. Bud directed him to a passage in his 2007 novel Custer’s Brother’s Horse.

  “I saw worlds and more worlds above them and below them, and there are a hundred thousand skies over them. I saw universe beyond universe. There are no boundaries or limits to God. I haven’t been able to find words for what I saw. I am trying, but it’s as if I am a worm under the crust of the earth trying to explain the stars to the other worms. That’s what I heard in theological discussions—worms debating each other about the stars. What terms could I use to make you understand?” . . .

  “You experienced this with your own soul?” asked the preacher.

  “I did,” Varney replied.

  “You truly believe this happened to you?” asked the preacher.

  “I used to wonder if I have a soul. Now I know for sure. This is not a matter of faith.”

  “You didn’t see any people on the other side? You didn’t see any friends or relatives?”

  “The quiet people were with me. T
hey didn’t say anything. I understood. There was no need somehow. They were very well dressed.”

  “Were you in heaven, or in hell?” the preacher asked.

  “The afterlife is far greater than either of those concepts. Hell or heaven don’t exist in the afterlife.”

  Pastor Horry looked into Varney’s eyes. “Were you afraid?”

  “I felt excited but calm and curious,” Varney said. “I was joyful. I wanted to stay. One of these days you’ll see for yourself.”

  “Inevitably,” said the preacher.

  Bud and Ann sobered up at different times and under different conditions. After all those years of knowing each other, for the first time they shared the same footing, even if not the same world. Each was fascinated by the professional life of the other. And it didn’t hurt that they had in common the intoxication of celebrity.

  He was the most devoted, inexhaustible supporter she had—particularly now that both had discovered personal correspondence by fax. In addition to the bracing notes before her keynote and the rave following the speech, he fired off, via fax, a critique of the CBS News coverage of her role in the convention to Dan Rather at his home in New York. He was enough in the know to possess that number. Bud sent a copy to Ann.

  Dan,

  Please don’t feel any need to answer this letter because basically it’s just bitching and is not aimed at you personally, but CBS pissed me off so bad the first two nights of the Democratic convention that I had to get it off my chest.

  Leaving aside all the ridiculous audio screw-ups, I was shocked Monday night to realize that while Ann Richards was being introduced and her great, touching story was being told on video (with Willie Nelson, yet) CBS was showing us a Texas delegate chewing gum and mouthing a bunch of garble that we couldn’t hear.

  Then, after the speech, you were trapped on camera with two characters out of Limo [the comic novel he had coauthored with Dan Jenkins]. “If you think this was a good speech, you should have heard the great stem-winder in 1948,” they said, and such shit as that. I expected them to start any moment talking about the London blitz. “Rat-tat-tat-tat, kapow, boom! Take that, you Nazi swine! Yes, we had heroes in our day, not these country wenches from Waco speaking above their station.”

  The gum-chewing Texas delegate whom Bud saw on television was Bob Slagle, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party—Dan Rather the newsman wasn’t just grabbing the first yahoo on the way to the hot dog stand. Ann knew Slagle plenty well. Easing him out of his position of power happened to be high on her political agenda. In any case, on reading that fax, Rather could have been excused for being skeptical that Bud was clear of head and all chemical influences.

  As the Dukakis-Bentsen campaign wobbled toward defeat, Bud wrote Ann a letter with a mock promotional campaign; he had picked up on Jane Hickie’s idea of a retirement home for aged hell-raisers. Ann’s reply contained a hint of how emotionally fragile she was.

  Dear Bud,

  The first two weeks after I received your promotional materials for the “Curtains” training school, I sort of moped around about how funny you are and how I could never compete with such wit . . .

  Then I hit the campaign trail through East Texas with Mark White, then South Texas with Oscar Mauzy, Jimmy Mattox, and Garry Mauro, and I thought, well, what the hell, of course I didn’t have much sense of humor left and Bud wouldn’t either if he did what I do for a living. The photograph of you and the trainees is filed in a fat folder called “Quality Stuff.” It is the most interesting collection of things and contains everything but a love letter—since I have never received one of those of even passing interest, much less quality . . .

  Cecile and Kirk and Ellen and I are going to Italy on the 20th of this month and staying two weeks. When I come home, I have to get into the serious mode of deciding what to do about my future. Seems to me that you don’t get much out of being governor except an old house with bad plumbing and velvet draperies. What do you think?

  Ann

  In many ways, it was a sad letter. She wasn’t sure she wanted to run for governor, and she verged on self-pity in the line about never having received a love letter. Bud wanted nothing to do with the clutter and stress of her political office—the Democrats’ headquarters are always the grimiest things, while Republicans place a higher premium on order and cleanliness—but he kept up an unbroken stream of advice; many of the faxes were long and politically incorrect. But he was going his own way, and she understood that. Some of her assurances that she didn’t want to intrude on time for his writing had the air of someone walking by his door on tiptoes. Few letters said more about their relationship than one concerning a New York fund-raiser and party hosted by Dan and June Jenkins and Liz Smith, the Texas-born gossip columnist of the New York Daily News. “Bud—Another day, another banquet in the glamorous life of a politician,” she wrote. “Dan and June are hosting a cocktail party in New York. . . . Want to go?”

  Bud replied:

  Dear Ann:

  I very much want to be at the grand party. . . . I will try my best to make it. But in case I don’t, I want you to understand why.

  For fifteen years Dennis Hopper and I have been trying to make a movie about Pancho Villa. . . . Years pass. Suddenly two months ago, Orion and Nelson Entertainment offer Dennis the job of directing a Pancho Villa movie based on a novel by Clifford Irving with a script by Oliver Stone and Alan Sharp.

  Dennis told them no. He said he would direct the Pancho Villa movie only if I wrote it. They had already spent a million or more on the property. Naturally they wanted to know what Dennis and I had that was so good that they should abandon their original investment. I went to Los Angeles. Dennis and I met with the people at Nelson Entertainment, a British outfit. We met with the brass at Orion. We were great. They almost believed us. So they paid me to get with Dennis and provide them a scenario of our new script. . . . The date is important because (1) they want to start shooting somebody’s Pancho Villa movie while they’ve got their financing together, and (2) Dennis is eager to go into preproduction, since a movie takes a year of a director’s life and he is being inundated with offers after the success of Colors [the movie about Los Angeles gangs and cops that Hopper directed].

  After we show the moguls our concept of the story, they can say: YES—and give us 35 million dollars to go make the movie our way. In which case, I write the script while Dennis does budgets and locations based on our plot outline. Then I go to Mexico for a crash course in Spanish. I have sworn to work with Dennis every day during the filming—a great adventure—probably in Argentina.

  YES, BUT—they like our version but want to use pieces of the story they originally bought. In this case, it’s up to Dennis. I go along with him either way.

  NO—meaning I am out. Dennis quits the Pancho Villa movie and goes off to direct a different film . . .

  The New York party is a wonderful event, and I want to be there with you, Ann.

  But this is probably the last chance Dennis and I will ever have to make this movie we’ve wanted to do together for so long.

  This being Hollywood, which is like a bubble floating on the water, everything could change in an instant and I might wind up flying to New York with the Austin delegation.

  However, right now the dice have been thrown and we’re supposed to play the game out. There is no way I would leave Dennis to play it by himself unless a sniper gets me.

  My love and admiration will be with you . . . whether my body arrives there or not. But you knew that already.

  Love, Bud

  As it happened, neither of those scripts about the Mexican revolutionary found their way to the screen. Ann couldn’t do anything to help as Hollywood whipsawed Bud from joy to gloom, but there could be little doubt all that came framed within a love letter, however inexplicit it was and others would remain. Bud’s dispatches became a wellspring of support that helped Ann through the most exhilarating yet brutal months of her life.

  Tense and p
ressured as her life became, Bud was her guarantee that she was not going to lose her sense of humor. In February 1989, she wrote him that she had received the first pages of her book from Peter Knobler, and she thought it was “pretty good, no literary epic, mind you.” Her letter mentioned my wife, Dorothy Browne; our friend Fletcher Boone; and a story that suggested the spirit of Mad Dog, Inc., was not done for yet.

  One afternoon in the Capitol-area joint called the Texas Chili Parlor, two women, longtime friends, were perched on barstools. Both were deep in their cups, and both had a gift for barbed remarks. Paula, having heard as much as she wanted from Cissi, whacked her hard with a longneck beer bottle. Both combatants were about fifty. Cissi, who already had lost one eye in a New York car wreck, went down howling and spitting, a furor erupted in the bar, the women were separated, no cops were called, but there was a fair amount of blood. Paula was consumed with guilt, Cissi tamped down her occasional rage for vengeance, and they became friends again, as close as ever. Cissi had been living with Paula’s daughter, trying to help her through a siege of severe depression. Ann shared this choice gossip with Bud.

  Paula called Dorothy Browne and said Paula’s dog ate Cissi’s glass eye. Paula was looking for donations to replace it—$600 or so. Fletcher said he saw an advertisement in a magazine where you could get “lifelike” eyes for $39.50, so he wasn’t going to pony up for much. The real question is how Cissi could help anyone with a depressive disorder . . .

  Tomorrow I leave for Laredo for George Washington’s Birthday celebration where the goal is to wear as many sequins and rhinestones as your body weight. If I am lucky, I will dance with a drunken caballero and dine on potted meat sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

  Come home—then come to see me.

  Love, Ann

  Ann waltzed through a continuing string of network-television appearances with an air of total aplomb. Texas, of course, was the real road test. In May 1989, word raced around the state about her cocky performance in Port Arthur at a roast for the football coach Bum Phillips, who had retired to breed horses at his ranch after his last coaching job, with the New Orleans Saints. Bum, who had established the Houston Oilers as one of the best teams in the NFL for a few years and ignited the “Luv Ya Blue” craze in the city, had worked his way up the hard way, starting as a high school coach in Port Arthur. Texans loved him for the boots, the cowboy hat, the old-school flattop haircut, and his sense of humor. The men who joined Bum at the long table that night were heavy hitters in that macho world—they included Earl Campbell, the Tyler kid who had trampled and outrun the best of the best for twenty years until his body just broke down, and Jimmy Johnson, a native of Port Arthur whom Jerry Jones had just lured away from the University of Miami to coach the Dallas Cowboys. The lineup included one other politician, Jack Rains, a Republican attorney who had been an insider, as secretary of state, on Bill Clements’s team. Rains hoped to get elected governor in 1990. Ann brushed him off that night with a reference to his insistence on delivering the roast’s final jokes and salvos. “I always like it when a Republican finishes last,” she drawled with a smile.