by Jan Reid
Two decades later, the red lights suddenly turned green; the producer Stan Brooks started a company that would deal exclusively in television movies, and Bud and Jap found themselves positioned to deliver bankable stars, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson. Kristofferson played the Ranger, Rip Metcalf, and Willie played a safecracker named Billy Roy Barker, who swore he was innocent of his alleged crimes and teamed up to help the Ranger protect his daughters from a serial killer who preyed on high school cheerleaders. It was not the best movie ever made. But A Pair of Aces (1990) scored well in the ratings.
In April 1991, Dorothy and I were invited to the home of Jap and Phyllis one afternoon to watch the sequel, Another Pair of Aces. Bud and Jap had graduated to the title of executive producers. A pair of state troopers accompanied Ann when she ventured out now. The ones we saw most often were tall, rangy Billy Rhea and his handsome black partner, Sam Maxey. In the new movie, Kristofferson got to play the love scenes, but Willie, whose character was now named Billy Roy Rodriguez, was on such a tear with his music that now he was billed as the higher draw in the film’s promotion. I sneaked glances at Billy Rhea, who stretched out amiably in his chair and watched Texas’s most flamboyant and unapologetic dope smoker enjoying his time as a movie star. I also watched Ann as she watched the movie. A couple of times, as the snappy comic dialogue sped on, her features seemed to restrain a wince. Billy Rhea later remarked that the governor liked a lot of movies that frightened him.
That year, Ann sold her house on Shoal Creek, and Bud gave one of her prized possessions a new home. Ann had bought a large abstract sculpture from their friend Fletcher Boone. Bud, along with Ann’s sons, Clark and Dan, took on the task of moving the weather-fast sculpture to its new place as sentinel of Bud’s home on Wildcat Hollow.
Dear Guv:
Muy implantes buenos!
This is an idiomatic way of saying the Boone stands handsomely in the flowerbed beside my front door, looking as if it has grown there.
Soon as Dan and Clark drove off in the red pickup, I let my dogs out the front door for what we call a “Runaround.”
The dogs raced up the driveway, did a screeching U-turn, raced back, and started barking at the Boone!
But they like it now.
I like it, too.
Come visit it sometime.
I love you, Bud
Christmas 1991 found Bud off on some travel. He sent her a card that was captioned “Mad Dog Enjoying a Smoke.”
A few laughs . . . a little music. . . . Thank you for the great stuff you have let me share with you. It has been an extraordinary experience for me—even more fun than running around with pro athletes or movie stars. Or musicians, I hasten to add. Feliz Navidad y prospero Año Nuevo.
Love as always, Bud
One of his roles was to shelter her from too many social demands by her old friends, and he admitted he valued the perks that came with the assignment. A few weeks into the new year, he wrote her about their joint invitation to a birthday party for Jerry Jeff Walker.
Dear Guv:
You are off any kind of hook tomorrow night. Susan [Walker] called this morning with another assignment (for me to get Dennis Hopper to come to JJ’s birthday), and I told her I wasn’t going with her group tomorrow night, no matter what. I said I no longer go out with anyone who can’t park where they please.
Love, El Punzar
Friends of the pair wondered what went on between them when the lights were turned down low. Even Jap seemed to have no clue. Was it platonic? Did Sam Houston’s famous bed creak when its occupants got rowdy? I figured then, and still do, that what happened in the governor’s bedroom was none of my business. Their correspondence was voluminous but never explicit, yet there was no question their romance was profound. An undated card from him supplied a hint. Bud could have been a professional cartoonist or graphic artist, and in a hand-drawn mock-up he composed a pitch for a daring new magazine, the kind one might see in a publisher’s office. If Ann still believed she had never gotten a love letter, she was one demanding soul.
A Mock-up of Perfect Boyfriend: A Fantasy Magazine
In this issue
Endless backrubs
Constant cuddling
Willingness to talk about the relationship
Endless foreplay
Plus
More backrubs
Flowers for no reason at all
Romantic nuzzling
The sexual prowess of a jungle ape
Bud was sure enough of his place on earth that he was not ill at ease or too surprised to find himself seated beside Ann in the presidential library of Lyndon Johnson at a formal dinner honoring the queen of England in May 1991. Others at Table 1 were Lady Bird Johnson; Bill and Diane Hobby; the library’s director, Harry Middleton; and Ann’s old friend, the distinguished historian Standish Meacham. At Table 2 were the Duke of Edinburgh; Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock and his wife, Jan; the Speaker of the Texas House, Gib Lewis, and his wife Sandra Majors; the RoboCop actor Peter Weller; and Nancy Lee Bass, the wife of Perry Bass, the Fort Worth oil and gas tycoon and philanthropist. Thirty more tables were populated by the likes of LBJ’s daughter Lynda Robb and her husband, Virginia senator Charles Robb; Texas treasurer Kay Bailey Hutchison; former governor John Connally; the veteran CBS commentator Harry Reasoner; Ross Perot, growing more political by the day; and Ann Richards’s first and only boss in politics, Sarah Weddington. President Bush and his family were not invited. That was explained as just protocol, a belief that those greetings should be arranged in the nation’s capital.
At the welcome ceremony at the Governor’s Mansion, the queen’s visit was choreographed down to bobs and bows every five seconds. The matter of who sat where at the LBJ Library affair became an issue because a snub was perceived by the lieutenant governor’s office. No offense to the Duke of Edinburgh, but the number two table? Drafted by a member of Bullock’s staff, a bristly letter went out over his name to the governor’s aide LaVada Jackson:
Regarding your call from Houston this morning and your and Cathy Bonner’s confusion, please know that we clearly realize the Governor’s lead role. It was not our intent to signify otherwise. It had been our understanding this visit was a mutual leadership function—a joint effort that involved the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Speaker. Since you indicated that that was not the case, we regret any confusion that was caused. We do hope, however, you will consider our request for some additional seating.
This was just what Mary Beth Rogers and Paul Hobby, the past lieutenant governor’s son and the new lieutenant governor’s chief of staff, needed—another spat between Ann and Bullock. But as the royal visit unfolded, the principal hosts brushed that conflict aside.
Ann was in a near panic because her voice was a croak; Bullock prepared to fill in for her. But she got over the laryngitis in time to carry on. The queen arrived with her husband in a carriage with a team of richly groomed black horses they evidently transported all over the world. Ann said she and the queen had a nice chat about horses. The outdoor reception for the royal couple took place on an uncommonly windy day. It was reported that the only thing that didn’t flap or flutter was the governor’s hair.
Bob Bullock had more things to be annoyed about than his secondary role in welcoming the First Brits to Texas. Suddenly, he spoiled for fights with Ann. In a story told by his biographers Dave McNeely and Jim Henderson, Ann asked Bullock and the House Speaker to come to the Mansion for Monday breakfasts so they could address pressing issues in the legislature: “After one breakfast, according to the House Speaker Gib Lewis, Bullock had about $100 worth of groceries delivered to the Governor’s Mansion, along with a note: ‘Next time, I’d like to be fed.’”
Bullock had nothing against the governor rubbing shoulders with movie stars and foreign royalty, if that was what turned her on. But he felt that when it came to actual governance, he was doing all the heavy lifting. Early in the 1991 legislative session, Ann had proposed a school-finance
plan that would essentially be based on a statewide property tax. She dropped that like a hot rock when school boards, superintendents, and Republicans raised a howl and legislators showed no interest. And on schools and their performance, she relied on a New York educator, Lionel “Skip” Meno, to trim and reform the beast of the Texas Education Agency, which he was not able to do. Bullock scorned Ann for, in his view, hightailing it to the sidelines on public education. (And that view was increasingly shared by a parent and private citizen in Dallas named George W. Bush.)
As long as property taxes were the primary source of revenue for schools, students in the Edgewood school district in San Antonio (the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the state) were never going to have the equivalent opportunity of rich Dallas kids in Highland Park. Property taxes were determined by property values—it didn’t take the best tax collector the state had ever been blessed with, as Bullock perceived himself, to divine the inequity in that.
Early in the legislative session, Bullock had gone over to the Governor’s Mansion to meet with her and major newspaper editors and editorial writers. He climbed a few steps up the flight of the grand staircase and told them in his resonant growl, “Texas needs an income tax.”
It was definitely not what the public wanted to hear. Paul Hobby told Bullock’s biographers, “We literally had two fax machines melt into the corner over the weekend.” Under fierce attack, Bullock declined to back off. He sent the newspapers an op-ed explaining the logic of his position: “Full implementation of a state income tax would let us completely eliminate the school property tax on all residential property. A Texas income tax would apply to people and corporations from out of state who do business and make profits in Texas. For the first time, out-of-staters would be paying a Texas tax on the money they make here.”
Bullock embarrassed Ann in her own damn house, and she let him hang out on that limb and get blistered. She said she didn’t believe an income tax was necessary, commenting accurately that the chances of it getting through the legislature were “slim to none.” For Texas politicians, calling for an income tax was tantamount to throwing open the doors to vampires and werewolves. The only thing as bad was to oppose the death penalty.
From the outset, Ann had stressed that one of her most important priorities was to reorganize and streamline Texas’s outmoded bureaucratic and regulatory structure. But only one major consolidation of agencies occurred, and Bullock quickly claimed that as his turf. Both the governor and the lieutenant governor backed a bill carried by Carl Parker, the voluble senator from Port Arthur, to create a new, overarching environmental department. Bullock wanted nothing less than a rigorous state equivalent of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Ann had started out with a bang on the environment—demanding a moratorium on hazardous-waste permits and the passage of a statutory no-hire policy to help slow the “revolving door” of regulators who made good contacts on the state’s payroll and then became highly paid lobbyists as soon as they quit. I wrote the swearing-in speech of John Hall, her choice to chair the Texas Water Commission and manage its consolidation with the Texas Air Control Board, the Texas Water Development Board, and the Water Well Drillers Board, along with other areas of regulatory oversight, into a new Department of the Environment. One of her most praised appointees, John was a tall, deep-voiced black man who had grown up on a cotton and hay farm near the hamlet of Washington-on-the-Brazos—the birthplace of Texas government—and had worked in the Carter White House and for Senator Lloyd Bentsen; he had become my friend while he was the chief deputy of Garry Mauro at the General Land Office. My gaze happened to fall on a veteran lobbyist when John raised his voice and said, “The revolving door will be closed.” The lobbyist shook his head on hearing that, and with a disgusted grimace walked away.
John’s fellow commissioner Peggy Garner was an engaging woman with a dry sense of humor whom Ann had befriended when Peggy was a county judge in small-town West Texas. Ann also appointed Pam Reed, a smooth, attractive woman who had won the Travis County commissioners’ court seat she once held. Peggy remarked to one reporter, “There have been nothing but all-Anglo male boards here in the past, and now here we are without an Anglo male. It’s been quite a culture shock around here.”
Though groups like the Sierra Club were cool and suspicious during Ann’s campaign, she had won considerable credit for her record on environmental issues by the end of that first legislative session. Her efforts helped bring safe drinking water and sewage facilities to colonias. She championed landmark legislation that empowered the land office to respond to oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and its estuaries in hours instead of days; the bill also established a fund to help cover cleanup costs, compensate Texans for damages incurred, and advance scientific research into the long-term effects, prevention, and remediation of spills. She signed a bill aimed at reducing municipal solid waste through novel programs to recycle or safely dispose of used tires, newsprint, motor oil, and car batteries. The moratorium she announced on the Water Commission’s granting of new hazardous-waste permits drew raves from environmentalists. “This is sending shock waves through the environmental community because it’s so sweeping and it happened so quickly,” said Brigid Shea, a leading Austin activist.
But the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory announced once more that Texas had the worst record of all the states. A number of serious problems contributed to this unenviable status. An alarming legislative standoff arose over the Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant’s inability to properly dispose of its nuclear waste. Similarly, the governor overruled a plan to put the low-level nuclear waste of other states in desert caverns along the Rio Grande, claiming it would endanger groundwater. And even though the quite conservative Texas Medical Association backed the Democrats’ contention that children with asthma were placed at greatest risk by the state’s urban air quality, the plan offered by Garry Mauro, the governor, and other key Democrats to utilize the state’s wealth in cleaner-burning natural gas to essentially burn up the pollutants of coal fell by the wayside when consumer advocates and lobbyists for electric companies raised a howl that it would increase utility rates.
A second part of Texas’s plan to reduce noxious emissions was to mandate the use of compressed natural gas as an engine fuel in state fleets of trucks and vans and public school buses, and to encourage the conversion of private-sector fleets that covered about the same route each day and could be accommodated by strategically placed refueling stations. The plan won the praise of the U.S. Senate majority leader, George Mitchell, of Maine, and then from President George Bush when he unveiled the 1990 renewal of the Clean Air Act, which he considered one of the highlights of his administration. Bush caused a stir in Texas when he targeted Houston, New York, and Los Angeles as the metropolitan areas with the most polluted and harmful air in the country.
Mauro’s ideas and programs were twenty to thirty years ahead of their time, and though gasoline refiners and school-board transportation chiefs hated them, they were no pipe dream. The dominant motor fuel in Pakistan, for example, became compressed natural gas, not gasoline or diesel. In this country, the energy tycoon and corporate raider T. Boone Pickens promoted natural gas as a panacea and proclaimed himself the man with the answer to America’s dependence on foreign oil. And in 2012, as this book was going to press, the GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney made natural gas the linchpin of his energy and clean air policy. But in the end, Ann’s dogged support of Mauro’s ideas cost her plenty.
Adding to the mess, Bullock’s style alienated House Speaker Gib Lewis and ignited talk of a feud between the two chambers of the legislature. As reported in the Austin American-Statesman: “Lately, in addition to irking some staff members of Governor Ann Richards, Bullock has gone to chewing the behinds of several powerful House members, and they don’t like it one bit.” He steered Senator Carl Parker’s bill creating a new Department of the Environment to unanimous Senate approval, but the House offered a quite dif
ferent bill. House members heeded lobbyists’ pressure to strip a provision that would keep landfills at least 500 feet from residences and 1,500 feet from schools, and the new agriculture commissioner, Rick Perry, balked at losing control over the regulation of pesticides. The Democratic House sponsor of the bill, Bruce Gibson, claimed that Bullock finally said, “Just send me something.” In joking contempt for his own bill, which he did not believe would pass, Gibson branded the new agency the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission—soon called, just to make sentences possible, the TNRCC. And that soon spawned the mocking nickname “Train Wreck.”
John Hall got high marks on his performance from Ann, the business community, and the press, but he told me about being summoned to Bullock’s office and tongue-lashed. His veteran staffers called the experiences “drive-by ass-chewings.” The rebukes occurred often enough that John sought advice from Mauro, who was once known by comptroller employees as Little Bullock. Garry told him, “You’ve got to hire a Bullock-ite.” John found one of these mediators, and his trips to Bullock’s woodshed stopped.
Bullock’s mistreatment of another head of an important agency would become the stuff of legend. Andy Sansom, the director of Parks and Wildlife, went to the lieutenant governor’s office one day to discuss his agency’s budget. Two cents of each dollar collected from the cigarette tax had been going to Parks and Wildlife; Andy had hopes of doubling that to four cents. But the Senate under Bullock’s leadership had eliminated the funding arrangement altogether; the agency would now get zero pennies out of that tax dollar. John Montford, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, told Andy he had to talk to Bullock if he wanted to complain. He made the appointment and presented his case for how that revenue would finance the improvement of state parks, how they needed the resources to do a better job of managing the state’s wildlife, and how it would fulfill the state’s obligation to its many hunters and anglers.