Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  “We were both so excited we were ready to bust,” Ma would recall. ‘“But Joan was disappointed and Pa was angry. They both thought she should have been first.” That night Joan took the white ribbon and tacked it onto a wall beside her bed. A dozen years later, by the time she had graduated from a private high school and was enrolled in the proper Stephens College for women at Columbia, Missouri, the wall was filled with ribbons, mostly blue, and the shelves sagged from the trophies won in horse show events across the American South. In 1951 Ash wrote to a newspaper that inquired about his daughter:

  Joan asked me to write a résumé. It’s as simple as that—she thinks. But how do I begin to tell you about my talented little girl?

  She won her first ribbon in equitation when she was five years old—a third at the Houston Fat Stock Show. She began riding three- and five-gaited horses—and winning!—in amateur stakes by the time she was seven. She was reserve champion in amateur five-gaited stake at the Baton Rouge, La. show in 1938 (when she was seven years old) on Midnite, a black gelding. I am sending you a picture torn out of my scrapbook (and please return, it is so important to me). She was first and second in practically all of the equitation and juvenile three- and five-gaited classes from 1938 through 1945. She won the $2,000 championship three-gaited stake at Jackson, Miss., in 1945 on Peavine Rhythm Step, and others at Selma, Ala., New Orleans, and Pensacola—so many on this horse until its death this year.

  She sings, plays the piano, swims, works, reads, and is a perfect, wonderful child. Her mother and I adore her. Every minute around her is a treasure. That’s about all that I personally know about her—that is, first hand. Yours truly.

  When Joan was ten, she wrote a brief composition on the subject “My Father” for an English class. It read:

  My father is big and strong. He likes to get his way. He is usually right, Mama says. He is good-looking when he takes his glasses off. He is gone a lot looking for oil. Sometimes he rides horses with me, but I run off and leave him and he gets scared.

  He tells funny stories all the time and sits beside my bed until I go to sleep. Sometimes I wake up and he is still there watching me. I used to think he was the sandman. I love my father very much. He gives me everything I want.

  The day that a young woman leaves home and goes away to college is normally the day that the umbilical cord is cut. But this was not the case when Joan Robinson left Houston and enrolled at Stephens. Her parents followed her there. Ash leased a suite of rooms at a hotel adjacent to the campus and sent Ma to keep her eye on Joan. He commuted for long weekends, trying to make a little joke about the unusual shadowing of their daughter. “I figured it was cheaper to let Ma move up there than pay the god damn long-distance phone bills,” he said at the time. But the truth was that Joan had become the sun for two dulling lives, and neither Ash or Rhea could bear to exist without its warmth.

  At Stephens, Joan was a popular, achieving student who made average grades, more interested in rushing from class each afternoon to ride the horse she had brought with her to board, a creature with the lovely name, Song of Revelry. The college was of the old tradition, where wealthy young women could bring their horses and keep them at a campus stable. A classmate would remember that Joan was “the busiest girl on campus.” She must have been, rushing from class to stable to her parents’ hotel suite, trying to satisfy obligations to all. The same classmate, who later became one of Joan’s married friends in Houston, recalled, “Most of us felt sorry for her. She was completely under her parents’ thumb. She couldn’t even accept a date without checking with them first. The thing I remember most about Joan was how starved for affection she seemed to be. With all that attention, she was hungry for love from somebody other than Ma and Pa.”

  Briefly, Joan became enamored of acting, and her performance in a college production, along with her regular appearances on the covers of Sunday rotogravure sections from Houston to Tampa, aroused the attention of an MGM talent scout. He offered Joan a screen test if she could find her way to Hollywood. Almost eighteen, she was wholesome, in a June Allyson sort of way, and possessed of a freshness and class that motion pictures might have found appealing. Excitedly, Joan burst into her parents’ rooms with the news.

  Ash Robinson’s face darkened. He was not enthusiastic. “I can’t let you do that, Joanie,” he said. Too many “good girls” had been destroyed by show business. Dangerous men with salacious intention were lying in wait behind every palm tree in Beverly Hills. It was out of the question.

  Joan argued ineffectually. She was not yet strong enough to buck her father. Nor was she sophisticated enough to discern that Pa would not let her go off on her own on any project.

  Even marriage.

  There were two, in quick order, both disasters. Ash Robinson hovered over both like Zeus throwing thunderbolts down from Mount Ida. The first man was a New Orleans boy named Spike Benton, and their romance flowered the night of the June Ball at Annapolis. “He’s from a lovely family,” Ma told her husband. “His grandmother was queen of the Mardi Gras, and he’s going to be a Navy pilot.” Of course Ma had accompanied her daughter to Annapolis, and had dressed her for the ball, and had watched the handsome young cadets come in dress whites to fetch the girls, and had sat up until daybreak with Joan as she poured out her love for the Benton boy.

  Ash Robinson watched the relationship grow serious, and when his daughter’s beau came calling to ask permission to wed, he could not even pretend good humor. Joan and Spike were too young, too naïve, too financially dependent on their elders. Who would pay for Joan’s horses? Did this boy have any idea how much the hobby cost to sustain? What would Joan do while he was off flying his Navy airplanes around the world? Marriages cannot be impetuous! Go away and let some time pass and come back when they were both mature. Spike Benton had dreaded this scene, but now that it was being played, he realized he had underestimated his antagonist. It was clear that Ash Robinson would sooner tear out his heart than surrender his daughter to another man.

  Joan took her father aside and spoke to him in private. She loved Spike Benton. And she wanted him. It was natural. It was the way things had always happened, and always would. She would give up her horses. They were something she had loved as a child, but now she was a woman. She wanted her father’s blessing.

  Ash Robinson sadly assented. In the family album are wedding photographs revealing a bride of honeyed hair and exceptional beauty, a groom with traditional apprehension, and a father whose smile was forced and tight.

  The newlyweds immediately moved to Pensacola, Florida, where Benton would undergo flight training. They were not long left alone. Abruptly Ash “retired” from the oil business, even though he was hardly past fifty years old, and in vigorous health. He was feeling a little weary, he said, and the climate in Pensacola was supposed to be nice. Surely it would be a suitable place for him and Ma to put their feet up, watch the world go by, and visit the young folks now and then. The Robinsons thus moved to Pensacola and took an apartment a few minutes away from their daughter and new son-in-law. Ash found it necessary to begin each day by visiting Joan and drinking coffee. Not unsurprisingly, the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Spike Benton collapsed within six months. So did the retirement of Ash Robinson.

  Husband number two was a young New Orleans lawyer whom Joan had known since she was a child. His name was Cecil Burglass, and he shared Joan’s interest in horses. Cecil’s bloodlines were acceptable, at least to Ma, and his proposal of marriage would have seemed an attractive prospect.

  This time Ash was not only cautionary, he was adamant. His face purpled. Absolutely out of the question, he stormed. He would not permit his daughter to run from the ruins of one marriage into another one. Rebound romances are as perishable as gardenias. “I will give neither my blessing nor my permission,” he said. “And if that is not clear enough, then I forbid it. Joan is still a minor in the eyes of the law.”

  Joan Robinson and Cecil Burglass eloped and were married by a justi
ce of the peace. When Ash heard the news he ordered Ma to pack their belongings. For a time the Robinsons had been living in New Orleans. Declaring that he had shut his disobedient child out of his life forever, Ash moved back to Houston. In less than another half year Mr. and Mrs. Cecil Burglass were separated, soon to be divorced. The Robinson family explanation was that the son-in-law, though charming, bright, and full of promise, was also devoted to the race track.

  There was another reason that contributed to the breakup. Joan kept it secret for years, finally confiding in a close girl friend almost a decade later.

  “I can laugh about it now,” Joan told her, “but at the time it was very strange. In the middle of one night I got a long-distance call from Ma in Houston, and she said Pa had had a heart attack and was critical. It sounded like he was on his deathbed with the arteries spurting blood. So I rushed home as fast as I could.”

  When she reached her father’s deathbed, he was not reclining there. He was, in fact, up and around. If there had been a heart attack, the recovery was swift and miraculous. Ash begged Joan to stay in Houston for a spell. He needed her. Unsaid was the fact that her second marriage seemed so bruised that it would take very little to destroy it altogether.

  “Pa offered me a new Cadillac, a mink coat, a diamond ring, and any horse I wanted,” Joan told her girl friend years later. “And so I figured, what the hell.”

  Her luck with men had thus far been poor, with the exception of one whose love she could depend on. Pa. Joan Robinson returned home. She was twenty years old.

  FOUR

  Joan Robinson and the city of Houston were metaphors for one another during the 1950s. Both were young, ambitious, restless, wealthy, and tempestuous in an era when most of the nation slumbered contentedly in the bosom of Eisenhower. Both girl and city were eager to establish identities, and both, in their flawed ways, succeeded. In a pale green Cadillac with a rared-up bronze horse as adornment on the hood, a mink tossed around her shoulders, diamonds glinting at her throat, Joan Olive Robinson Benton Burglass dyed her pony tail a hot silver blonde, colored her lips flame red, and began the dance. She became one of the city’s first celebrities, prowling its boulevards at night, flash bulbs marking her way. Her needs were both complex and basic. She wanted laughter to surround her, she wanted attention, and she wanted companions to blur the emotional wrenches of two failed marriages. And she found them all, there being no lack of similarly inclined spirits in a town that was a raw-boned country lad who found oil and tried to become a baron in a fortnight.

  It was an era of excess and vulgarity, both applauded. Was anybody poor? One oilman appeared at public gatherings with a hundred-dollar bill serving as his bow tie, and, if the evening wore well, he took to ripping it off and throwing it to the nearest pretty woman, and clipping on another—and another—and another. A man wrote Picasso in the South of France and sought to buy ten paintings. He specified no color preference or subject, only the size of the wall in his wife’s gallery room. The eccentricities of another Croesus were novel, even in Houston. This one kept precisely two thousand silver dollars in racks at his mansion, employing a Negro whose obligation was to keep the coins polished and pristine. The master was given to seizing handfuls for his journeys about the city, throwing them from his open-air Cadillac, laughing like a Roman nobleman as the less fortunate scrambled for his largesse. While he was absent from the house—which, incidentally, contained fifty telephones—the racks would be refilled to the brim.

  Oh, what a lovely carnival it was! How abundant were the stories for Joan to hear and tell! Could anybody not laugh at the account of the two oilmen, Mr. A. and Mr. B., who relished playing practical jokes on one another? Finally Mr. B. triumphed, at some cost. When his friend was away on lengthy sojourn in Europe, he ordered a real roller coaster erected in Mr. A.’s ample back yard. Or what of the terrible fire that destroyed the home of a rich man and his wife? The paper reported that the lady of the house rushed outside in the night to fight the blaze while wearing her mink stole. The very next day her secretary telephoned the city desk with a correction: “It was not her mink she was wearing, but her marten furs.” Everyone could enjoy the millionaire’s wife who always purchased two extra first-class airplane tickets for travels to New York and Paris. Where else would she put her matched poodles, with jeweled collars and chinchilla sweaters?

  H. R. Cullen, an oilman who did sensible things like endowing the University of Houston, and less sensible things like insisting that Senator Joseph McCarthy was a voice to rival Thomas Paine, had his biography published in 1954. And he was annoyed that it went largely unread. Therefore he spent more than $200,000 of his own money to mail more than 100,000 copies of his life story to libraries and newspapers across the non-Communist world.

  One man used $50,000 vainly trying to keep penguins alive in a refrigerated chamber of his home; another rode lions bareback to greet the mailman. They found oil on the city dump. And at the city prison work farm, too. A Houston lady wrote the Smithsonian to inquire if the Hope diamond was for sale. Property values exploded like land mines. On Main Street lots sold for $2,000 per front inch. Skyscrapers shot up like volcanoes raring through the cracks of a massive earthquake. “Was Houston here last year?” asked a visitor in 1955. “Of course,” said her friend, the local. “Why?” Because, said the newcomer, looking at the new buildings rising clean and characterless all around him, “it looks like they built everything last week.” It was actually difficult to work in downtown Houston because of the noise level. Secretaries stuffed cotton in their ears before descending to the street for lunch. Bulldozers had waiting lists. Steel hammers crashed down anything old. The city became a movie played at the wrong high speed. Newspapers ran regular front-page boxes applauding the number of new residents streaming into the city. “Why did you move to Houston?” asked a reporter of a new resident in 1955. “Because it is a place that is still wide open,” replied the man from New York. “Fellow can breathe clean air here.” As he spoke he stood within a mile of the Houston Ship Channel, and the air he was prepared to breathe was noxious with fumes from a cauldron—sulphur, oil, petrochemicals, and gas fires—that burned every minute of the day and night, spewing excess into the skies. The city’s population jumped from 500,000 in 1940 to 1,250,000 by 1960, the largest growth of any place in the U.S. “I’m One in a Million” read the favored bumper sticker when the city at long last passed the symbolic mark of 1,000,000 souls. Its coming—M-Day—had been measured and anticipated by the Houston Press, whose editor actually said, in front of witnesses, “My land, this is a bigger story than D-Day.” An urban planner cast worried eyes over the convulsive landscape and predicted that by the year 2000 Houston would be the biggest city in the world. Another study marked Houston in 1950 as the nation’s leader in industrial construction with building permits for a three-year period totaling more than half a billion dollars. Never was the “big is good” chorus so hosannahed. Let the Eisenhower recession deeply wound the rest of America; Houston felt not even a scratch.

  There was indeed a serious side to the Houston of these years—Stokowski led her symphony, DeBakey and Cooley repaired her hearts, scholars of world rank worked quietly at the Rice Institute, good theater was performed. But though her body public was proud that the Texas Medical Center was throwing up great hospitals faster than mushrooms sprouting in a wet forest, it was more enjoyable to prate of the local boy who married Hedy Lamarr, or the other one, the fellow who wed the Egyptian belly dancer and stuck diamonds in her navel and invited his friends to watch her grind. Houston was an adolescent and behaved accordingly.

  Joan Robinson was princess of café society, that slightly ill-mannered relative of the old guard, the principal difference being that the former performed its antics in public with new oil money and the latter stayed at home with dollars stored up from a generation before. Café society even had its official birth date in Houston, that being the evening of March 17, 1949—St. Patrick’s Day—when a wildcatter
named Glenn McCarthy opened the Shamrock Hotel. It was an indulgence which matched in expense, if certainly not in taste, the Taj Mahal. Eighteen stories high, five miles from the center of downtown Houston, its interior décor slathered with sixty-three different hues of green, the $21-million hotel was a monument to the worst. Frank Lloyd Wright saw it, stared thunderstruck, and was heard to mutter, “Why?” Later, however, he cheered sufficiently to say, “I always wondered what it was like inside a juke box.” On opening night, 175 Hollywood stars were brought in as rhinestones, and the ensuing party was as sodden as a banquet at Caligula’s court. It would be fictionally celebrated in Edna Ferber’s much-loathed (in Texas) novel, Giant (one Houston newspaperman always printed the title with a lowercase g, and in a type face several sizes smaller than traditional newsprint), and in the ensuing film, which starred James Dean as a McCarthy-like oilman who pitched forward in a stupor as he welcomed his guests.

  But, again, never mind. The attitude in Houston was that the carping came from out-of-towners. It’s us against them, and we know best. The Shamrock was the Waldorf and the Paris Ritz redoubled in spades. It was the place to go, the place to be seen, the womb for the rich and the restless of Houston.

  Joan Robinson in effect set up headquarters there. Tanning beside the “world’s largest hotel pool,” dancing in the Cork Club, stopping in the lobby and impetuously buying a hundred-dollar sequined sweater on her way to the garage where her Cadillac was washed and waiting, she was one of the hostelry’s most admired patrons. Houston’s newspapers, eager to establish a sophistication for the city, encouraged their gossip columnists to fabricate a racy dream world of beautiful people afloat on flying carpets of gold. One such, whose Houston Press column of trivia was called “The Town Crier,” enshrined Joan Robinson. There were weeks when Joan’s name and photograph appeared six or eight times. Always she seemed to be “flying off to a horse show” or “winging in from Hollywood where people ogled her at the Mocambo” or “sporting a new diamond from her oilman pop, Ash.”