Some sample and actual items:
“The booful blonde in the Shamrock was Joan Robinson, the socialite honey—dateless—but in a crowd.…”
“Shamrock singer Dick Kreuger first dated gorgeous socialite Joan Robinson Monday night … she forgot to tell her folks she’d be late, so Dick met her oilman Pop when they returned home at 5 ayem. Oh, my-oh-my.…”
“CELEBRITEMS—Gay blade builder Eben Locher and blonde socialite Joan Robinson musing with stars in their eyes …”
“Shamrock singer Dick Kreuger has no trouble getting suntan lotion spread over his frame poolside these days. All the cuties volunteer. Socialite Joan Robinson especially likes to do it.…”
“Glamorous socialite Joan Robinson handholding at the Fontaine Lounge with medical salesman Charley Wagner (and how her list of swains grows and growwws!!!) …”
“Joan Robinson was the Troubadorable last night, looking soooooooo gorgeous, and sooooooo rich.…”
These were years tinged with the real abandon of Scott Fitzgerald’s imagined world, Joan playing Daisy to a score of Gatsbys. Wasn’t that Joan Robinson who was offered a magnum of Dom Perignon to jump fully clothed from the Shamrock’s dizzying high diving tower? And they say she refused, only to return that midnight, leaping in compromise from a lesser elevation, in the arms of a suitor, into the deserted pool? And that was certainly Joan who accepted one beau’s diamond ring of proposal, only to break impetuously with him and run to the nearest bayou and hurl the modest gem into the muddy waters. Everyone knew of the night when an escort put a fifty-dollar bill down on the waiter’s tip tray at the Shamrock, only to have Joan sniff that the offering seemed penurious. Not until the swain put a pair of hundreds into the waiter’s hands did Joan smile her favor.
“If she wasn’t at the Shamrock, then she was at the Troubador,” remembered a best friend, Joan Jaworski, twenty years later. The two Joans were, decided the columnists, “the gold dust twins.” Both were slim, blonde, vivacious, given to loud laughter that could rattle a room, and both shared a love of horses since childhood. Fortune blessed them both with adoring and indulgent fathers—Joan Jaworski’s would become in 1974 the Watergate prosecutor—whose purses allowed them to decorate the city at night like falling stars that would never fade and vanish.
Always, never far away, a guard dog, was Ash. Each time his daughter’s name appeared in print he eagerly clipped it and added to the scrapbooks that now reached from the floor of the closet to his shoulders. With mock complaint he paid Joan’s monthly bills at the city’s private dinner and drinking clubs, waving them around now and then as if they were the national debt. Still Joan knew her father did not object to her life style. The core of the matter was that each night she returned to his home, not to the bed of another man. Occasionally Joan invited Ma and Pa to join her in an evening’s revels, and Mrs. Robinson especially treasured these hours. “I often felt the only real love in my life was Joan,” Ma said. “Every time I was out with my daughter I had a wonderful time. She made me feel loved. She called me ‘hon.’ She’d look across the table and she’d smile and she’d say, ‘Are you having fun, hon?’ She made me feel wanted.”
Of the men who flowed in and out of Joan’s life like ocean currents, none stayed very long without arousing the attention of Ash. He was not loath to engage private detectives for examination of the backgrounds of men who seemed to have caught his daughter’s fancy. One such check revealed that a playboy seen often with Joan was homosexual. Ash found it important to inform his daughter, and she thereafter refused his dates. Another bachelor whose name frequently appeared in the columns beside Joan encountered an assailant as he walked to his car in a dimly lit parking lot. Savagely beaten, he always suspected that Ash had dispatched the pair of knuckles.
During the day Joan spent much of her time around her horses. Her show animals were kept at a stable in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the hands of a renowned trainer. When Joan participated in a show in, for example, Los Angeles, she would fly there, and the horses would travel separately, in the comfort of a palace railroad car. At home in Houston, Joan boarded a knockabout palomino pony named Danny at the Alameda Stables, not far from where she had kept Dot as a child. Several of her affluent friends kept horses there and it became a clubhouse. “They were wonderful crazy years,” remembered a horsewoman named Betty Dorris. “We rode every day, we raced, we had a girls’ polo team and we’d get out there and knock the shit out of each other. We even had a drill team and we’d get all gussied up in outrageous satin cowgirl clothes and ride in rodeos. And Joan was the leader of the pack. If she told us to get ready for a ride up Mount Everest, we’d call our daddies and ask for plane fare to Tibet.”
Although Joan’s group was composed of young women whose ages were generally in their early twenties, one older woman closer to forty hovered nearby. She was not a blooded member of the group, for her social credentials were lacking. But she loved horses and she wore expensive Western clothes and from her lips poured a river of rough talk, so profane that it was artful. It was said that Lilla Paulus could cuss better than a stable hand kicked by a mustang. She also had an attar of the forbidden about her, for it was also said that her husband, Claude Paulus, was a society bookie. Lilla came to the Alameda Stables regularly with her little girl, a spunky child named Mary Josephine whose passion for horses was as great as Joan Robinson’s had been twenty years before. Now and again Joan would stop whatever she was doing and give the little girl a pointer in equitation, a kindness that Lilla Paulus noted. There would be a day when Lilla Paulus and her daughter would play major roles in the convoluted drama of Joan Robinson. But at the time no one paid them much attention.
Of the men who orbited around Joan in these vainglorious years, only one endured for more than a figurative moment. She fell deeply in love with Travers Fell. He was, according to Betty Dorris, “the most gorgeous son of a bitch in Texas.” His bloodlines were provincially royal, he was heir to a land fortune—one of his antecedents owned great chunks of real estate which lay in the paths of planned freeways—and he knew and loved horseflesh even better than Joan. He also drank heavily and when drunk enjoyed using his ham fists to break up bars and beat up their patrons. His Cadillac sped terrifyingly across the city, sometimes with a loaded .38 under the seat and an open fifth of bourbon on the dash which he swigged like Coke. Legends grew about him. He was the paradigm romantic, reckless Texan. Once he borrowed a dime from Joan at the Alameda Stables to make a telephone call during which he bought a $100,000 race horse.
He was also, according to Ash Robinson, not worth a pitcher of warm piss.
“When Joan and I met,” said Travers Fell two decades later, time having cursed him with a face pumped up and reddened from whiskey and a mind tormented by memories, “it was like two magnets coming together. Pow! No two people ever fell in love quite so fast. We could have moved mountains if they got in the way. On the day we met at Alameda Stables, I had two other serious girls in my life, but within forty-eight hours I had forgotten their names. Nobody existed but Joan!”
Ash hated the new man in his daughter’s life. When she brought Travers around to the new home he had built on Kirby Drive in River Oaks, the city’s most elegant neighborhood, Ash was not even civil. “I could see the hate in his eyes,” Travers would one day remember. “Right away old Ash recognized that him and me were two of a kind. Neither one of us would settle for half the hog, we wanted it all! That old bastard leaned on me every way he could. You see, he knew that if I won Joan she’d belong to me. And not to him. I got the impression that Joan wanted to get away from her father, but she both loved him and feared him. I told her I was going to tell the old son of a bitch just what was what, but she warned me off. I remember exactly what she said, ‘Pa can be as dangerous as a rattlesnake.’”
Conversely, the crowd at Alameda Stables felt that Joan and Travers were a perfect match, having their love of horses as a common bond, he—if his relatives ever died—having enough money t
o cover all circumstances. Joan tried to enhance her beau’s image in her father’s eyes, but the now familiar eruption always occurred. For God’s sake, thundered Ash, the man didn’t even have a job. Man must work! Man must produce! Man was of the earth and he must give back some small measure!
For years the affair continued with Joan openly dating other men with whom she was publicized in the newspaper columns. But in her heart there was only Travers. She met him secretly at horse shows away from Pa, at the country homes of friends. She nagged at Travers to get a job, any job, even the semblance of a job, anything to prove to her father that the man she wanted was more than a reckless firestorm.
There was another love in Joan’s life at the time, one for which Ash had complete approval, although it placed a strain on his bank account. At a minor horse show in San Antonio, Joan noted a dappled gray mare whose name was Beloved Belinda. The foal of an unknown mare and sire, she nonetheless possessed unusual gaits. “I’ve got to have this horse, Pa,” Joan begged her father. “I want her more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life.” Ash paid $27,500 for Beloved Belinda, an enormous price for an animal with undistinguished lineage. But to anyone who exclaimed over the sum, he answered, “Look at my little girl’s face and tell me if it isn’t worth it.”
Joan elected to make her debut with the mare at an important horse show in Louisville, Kentucky, a city celebrated for its attention to equine excellence. She devised a secret dollop of showmanship. Normally Joan wore the black formal riding habit favored on the society show circuit. But to complement her new mount she commissioned her tailors in Houston to design a riding costume in exactly the same shade as Belinda—a lustrous pearl gray. Even the derby must be the same, she insisted.
When Joan arrived at the Louisville arena she dressed secretly and threw a robe over her costume. She had schemed to enter the ring last, after the other thirty horses and their riders had performed. When the announcer called her name, Joan held Belinda back for a moment of suspense. Then, following a calculated script, she and the great horse burst forth, an exquisite duet in gray, demanding every eye in the house as a pair of superb dancers do when they seize a stage. Suddenly there was no other horse or rider in the ring. At the end of the evening Joan Robinson and Beloved Belinda swept the boards, and the crowd rose in emotional standing ovation.
A newspaperman wrote, “When Joan Robinson rides Beloved Belinda it is one of the most achingly beautiful sights in the world. It is a poem, a waltz, it is the sculpture of Rodin and the painting of Cezanne. My goosepimples get goosepimples.” Horse shows tend to be hugely boring to the unsophisticated in that the typical one can last four hours, with endless processions of horses and riders pouring in and out of the ring, with tedious waits for the judges to mark their cards. There is, of course, only so much that a horse can do, and a canter is not that much more invigorating to watch than a trot. But for seven years Joan and Beloved Belinda were like a Roman candle set off in the middle of the preacher’s sermon. So accustomed were Joan—and Ash—to winning that, when the ribbon was not blue, a judge could feel their wrath. “Ash Robinson cussed me from hell to breakfast because Joan came in third,” one judge remembered. “I told him it was a fair call—the mare was a little heavy in the hock and it showed that night. But Ash said I was a god damned disgrace and I should be thrown out of the horse world.”
Joan’s temper often rose in concert. Once, in San Antonio, she accepted the second-place red ribbon with no show of pleasure and carried it back to a hotel, the prize wadded in her hand like an unwelcome telegram. When the porter helping her with her bags remarked politely, “Sure is a nice ribbon, ma’am,” Joan whirled and snapped, “You like it? You can have it!” And flung the ribbon at the man’s feet.
Always Ash was there, just at the edge where the spotlight ended and the black anonymity of the crowd began. Sometimes the lights would catch him, but he made no effort to shield his face from their lovely glare. Always he hurried to the telephone in Louisville or New York or wherever, once the results were in, and he rang the Houston newspapers with his daughter’s latest triumph.
He courted the press, sending cases of whiskey and flagons of perfume to favored reporters at Christmas, parceling out “scoops” like choice bits of beef in a stew.
Joan won five world championships on Beloved Belinda from 1953 to 1958, but nothing much else changed in her private moments. Travers Fell remained what he had always been and would always be, the hard-drinking, carefree pursuer of the sweet life. Joan continued as the girl about town, with Ash protecting her, financing her, not closing his eyes for sleep at night until the front door slammed and she was home. In another time and place, perhaps Joan and Travers could have lived together as lovers. Then, perhaps, Joan’s music would have always been a waltz.
Too soon began a dance of death.
FIVE
Idly, bored with her own dinner companions, her gaze this autumn night swept across the tables of Houston’s rich and those pretending to be, settling momentarily on a young man who looked impossibly out of place. Joan liked to examine strangers surreptitiously and imagine instant biographies for them. What is this one doing at the Cork Club? she wondered. He is definitely a farmer in town for the one big night of his life, she decided. Somebody’s cousin from Waxahachie. An Aggie, most assuredly. Or maybe a roughneck who just brought in a well and his boss is buying him dinner. His cheeks were apple pink, almost shining, his suit from the Monkey Ward catalogue with a shirt collar so tight it made his neck bulge, his expression that of a man who has no idea what fork to pick up. If he owns a suitcase, it is cardboard, and if he stood up, his trouser legs would quit three inches above his white socks. Although it did not occur to her at the time, he looked not unlike Travers Fell, who was currently estranged from her companionship. Both had the fleshy, boyish good looks that catch a woman’s eye from a distance.
On her way to the powder room later on, Joan noticed that the stranger was in the company of two unlikely friends, one of Houston’s most striking couples, Dr. Riley Foster and his wife Maggie. He was a slim, aquiline cardiologist with aristocratic bearing, noted for his patronage of the arts, she an uncommon beauty who so resembled a film star that in the columns her name always contained an identifying afterphrase, “… the Lauren Bacall look-alike.” Joan knew them both well, for they were very much a part of her crowd, the pack that graced the best restaurants and parties. She could not resist stopping to find out who the bumpkin was at their table.
Maggie Foster smiled and introduced the new man. “This is Dr. John Hill,” she said.
“Hi,” said Joan, summoning a show ring smile for Dr. John Hill, who rose like an obedient hound dog and pumped her hand enthusiastically. He was almost six feet tall, a well-built man with broad shoulders, thick dark hair, and a wide and guileless face. Joan decided he was worth knowing. She made a discreet signal which Maggie Foster caught. The two friends went to the powder room.
“I don’t know much about him,” said Maggie. A few nights earlier her husband had called from the hospital and said he was bringing a young intern home for dinner. He was new in Houston, didn’t know anybody. Lonely kid, that sort of thing. Supposed to be from some hick town in the Rio Grande Valley.
Good old country boys appealed to her, said Joan.
“Don’t fool yourself,” answered Maggie. “I opened the front door and here stood this farm boy who is probably the best-looking man I ever saw. He says ‘howdy’ and ‘ma’am’ and then he sees Riley’s piano and he sits down and plays a Mozart sonata. An exquisite Mozart sonata.”
Joan freshened her make-up and combed her silvery pony tail. A little cattily, Maggie thought her friend was getting a touch long in the tooth to be wearing her hair in that fashion, but she knew that Joan cared nothing for style. With all that money, Maggie thought to herself, Joan’s hemlines are always in direct opposition to the dictum of the season. And she will bounce her grandchildren on her knee with her hair tied back like a college
cheerleader.
“I think I want him,” said Joan. “Fix it up, Maggie.”
In later years John Hill would attempt a modicum of self-depreciation (not much, for he would become a vain and humorless man) by introducing himself as from a town in South Texas so small and so hayseed that “I never even saw a Cadillac until I got to Houston.” It was hardly true, for the area from which he sprang was the most fertile soil of Texas, the Rio Grande Valley, a semi-tropical wedge at the extreme tip of the state, with Mexico on one side, the warm Gulf on the other. There the world was lush and steamy, fortunes were made from the grapefruit and oranges that grew in orchards tended by the cheap labor force that crossed the river from Mexico. Among the first settlers to arrive in response to the land booms of the early 1920s were John Hill’s parents, who settled in shortly after World War I, at a place that had no name and but one rough dirt road. Within a few years a town was formed and named after the local real estate developer, Ed Couch. That hardly had a progressive ring about it, and looked silly on postal marks, so the decision was made to run the two names together. The town was thenceforth called Edcouch.
Raymond Hill and his wife Myra owned a 75-acre farm where they raised vegetables, cotton, and grain, on what was once an arid desert, made to ripen by the cheap electricity that pumped in water from the Rio Grande. Theirs was a prim and businesslike marriage, he being an inquisitive farmer who wanted little more from life than time to work his earth and tinker with the machines that tilled it, she a strong, hardworking American Gothic woman with a passion for religion that lay somewhere between the devout and the fanatic. Early in their partnership an accommodation was reached. Myra had more than enough religion for both of them. Therefore Raymond announced he would not go to her Church of Christ, or sing her hymns, or even pay much attention to her biblical quotations, which were produced for every human occasion from crop failure in the rare, ruthless winter to the births of their three children.
Blood and Money Page 5