A musical scholar, Hallman was less impressed with John’s abilities than others who had less sophisticated ears. He held his old friend to be a “skimmer” on the piano and a showboat tuba player. John originally asked to become the Heartbeats’ pianist, the fellow with many solos. But there was already a capable piano player in the group. The plastic surgeon then became the band’s first tuba player, Hallman glad to have him, for the instrument added a richness to the brass section.
The two musical doctors were much alike, both coming from small Texas towns, both rising quickly in the professional and social hierarchies of Houston. But Hallman could not help but feel he worked harder for his success. During his residency his family lived on furniture made from orange crates, and he ate Fritos and fried pies until his tongue turned red from poor nutrition. It was difficult not to compare this period of hardship with John Hill’s limousine and River Oaks existence. Perhaps that contributed to the stand Hallman would one day take, when John Hill was so desperately in need of allies.
On the surface, Joan Robinson seemed very much the model of the busy young housewife and mother, her calendar crowded with civic activity, charitable commitments, car pools, opening nights at theaters and night clubs. More than one doctor in Houston envied John Hill his wife, for she was better than a full-page advertisement in the Houston newspapers. Every Tuesday she put in a full day as volunteer at Texas Children’s Hospital, bustling about the corridors in a starched pink and white apron, her smile wide and white. She dutifully joined the organizations of doctors’ wives, attended their teas and luncheons, tried to stay awake during their book reviews. She was a rare commodity, the beautiful girl admired by both men and women. One smitten doctor, the veteran of four failed marriages, summed Joan up well: “She was the friendliest gal in town, natural, affectionate, and warm. She didn’t care what she said, and she could cuss like a roughneck. But on her the words didn’t seem coarse. She wore them well. She was not a threat to other women, even though she often flirted with a husband and put her arm around him and kissed him on the cheek. The reason other women didn’t mind was that Joan didn’t give off vibrations saying, ‘I’m available.’ She obviously loved John Hill. She was a helluva desirable woman, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to try and screw her.”
She cared nothing for fashion, and her clothes were the despair of her friends, whose lives revolved around Vogue, Neiman-Marcus, and Christian Dior. Her hemlines remained resolutely long and below the knee, at ballerina length after the style had been buried. She saw nothing wrong with a pair of ninety-eight-cent plastic earrings from Woolworth’s, and she was delighted to wear a $9.98 dress from Foley’s basement to a society tea. In later years, as John’s practice grew to more than $100,000 a year, he bought her a full-length mink, only it was from a resale shop in New York and a trifle thin and chewed in places. But it was from John, and she loved it, and she wore it like a trophy.
Her character dictated her taste, or lack of it, in clothes, and this was fortunate, for there never seemed to be enough money. When John went to work in Nathan Roth’s office and they set up housekeeping away from Ash, Joan received the sum of $100 a month to run her household. “A hundred bucks a month! You must be kidding!” cried Sheila Roth during a lunch with Joan. No, it was not a joke, insisted Joan. She was hard pressed to buy groceries, pay a part-time maid once a week, cover the utilities, and entertain at John’s musicales. “That’s madness,” said Sheila, still disbelieving. But she was a probing sort of woman and one afternoon, noticing John Hill’s checkbook open on his office desk, could not resist thumbing through it. Joan’s monthly check was precisely $100. There were, however, checks totaling many times that drawn by John each month to cover his musical desires—lessons, records, new instruments.
When her purse was bare, Joan fell back, as she always had and always would, on her father. By custom from the old days in the oil fields, Ash liked to have cash on hand, and he always kept a thousand or two in tens and twenties in a locked filing cabinet in his home. And Joan, who knew where the key was hidden, was given to understand that she could dip into the cache when the occasion arose. Undoubtedly John knew of the dependable supply of family money, although Joan never told him. She was determined to please her husband by staying within the financial limits he had set.
And Ash liked the arrangement. That was one more way he could be assured of seeing his daughter often, and of keeping the leash taut. When he was not away from the city on oil business, Ash normally began each morning at his daughter’s house having Louisiana coffee with her and his grandson. Each morning.
After the retirement of Beloved Belinda, Joan never found a horse with the same glamor and potential. She owned and showed a few others—Precision Possession and Belle Destiny, and a promising colt named Major Maygar, the foal of Belinda herself. And while Joan won several more competitions with these horses, there was not the electric partnership that had wed her and the dappled gray mare. It had been Joan’s hope that Belinda would foal colts infused with the championship blood and inherent equine nobility. But it was not to be. Belinda was not a good breeder. She miscarried often; the colts she produced were skittish and stubborn. The only one of promise, Major Maygar, won competitions due more to the trainer’s skill and Joan’s distinctive style. Musing on this for months, Joan had an idea which she broached to her father one morning over coffee. How would it be, she suggested, if she bought a small farm somewhere near Houston, a place where she could breed horses, where a trainer could live and work with them daily? Her face lit up as she spun out her fantasies of how her farm could become known all over the world, how it could be dedicated to the classic American saddlebred horse. There could also be a riding school, where children could take lessons, their fees bringing in enough money to cover expenses.
Joan paused, waiting for Ash’s response. It came quickly. “Go ahead,” he said. “Sounds good. Go look for something.”
“I’ve found a little place already,” she said. Excitedly. “It already exists. Three acres, just west of town.”
Ash Robinson bought the small farm for his daughter, paying $25,000, on the condition that he keep the books and hire and fire the staff. Joan was content with the arrangement, for she was hard pressed enough to run her own household.
It was christened Chatsworth Farm, named after Rhea Robinson’s ancestral estate in New Orleans, and Joan attacked her new possession with enormous zest. Enlisting her friends, she led fence-whitewashing parties, cut back weeds, mowed grass, planted azaleas and climbing roses. By the spring of 1965 Chatsworth was a lovely place, reminiscent of the Kentucky horse country, with thirty-six horse stalls kept impeccably clean and sweet-smelling, a regulation show ring, and trails that wound lazily along a bayou where the city and its pressures seemed a thousand miles away. Yet it was but twenty minutes by Cadillac from Joan’s home.
John Hill tolerated his wife’s new passion, for it gave him a needed counterbalance to his own musical avocation. Early in their marriage Joan had carped at some of his expenditures for phonograph records—his collection was already enormous. Now he could throw the stables back at her whenever a money argument arose, although this weapon was blunted because Ash was the source of most of her cash.
John rarely went to Chatsworth, except for the annual late spring picnic that he and Joan gave—with Ash picking up the check—for several hundred doctors and their wives. The affair was famous in the Houston medical world and valuable to John as a source of good will in his profession. The show arena was covered with a giant tent, and tables were set with checkered cloths. Beer flowed from kegs, barbecue was dished out of steaming cauldrons, vaudeville acts cavorted on a makeshift stage, and everyone who entered passed through a brief receiving line, headed by John Hill’s famous wife, who had a phenomenal memory for names and who could tease and flatter the dourest old GP into an ear-to-ear grin. The social amenities aside, the annual picnic not only stamped John Hill’s presence and style on hundreds of poten
tial referring doctors, it introduced Chatsworth to their wives, most of whom had children and would not have objected to their learning to ride as well as Joan. The week after the party, telephones rang continuously with mothers wanting riding lessons for their daughters. And Ash benefited in his way, standing next to his daughter, catching out of the corner of his eye someone pointing his way and paying tribute to the lord-in-law of the manor, drinking to the fullest the cup of power that was his in these special moments.
The source of John’s real dream was somewhere in his youth. Perhaps it was the music of his church, ringing, unaccompanied voices praising their God. Or the first radio he owned as a teenager, with an antenna rigged so that it would pick up the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoon from the station in San Antonio.
One day in 1965, John came home from the hospital and told Joan that he had seen a house that was for sale on Kirby Drive in the very heart of River Oaks. It was located at 1561 Kirby, only a few blocks up the boulevard from Ash Robinson’s home at 1029. The current owners were embroiled in a turbulent divorce, said John, and they were anxious to sell—quickly.
Joan knew the house, as did everyone who had the wherewithal to live in River Oaks, an opulently lovely enclave of great houses on wooded estates. Houston’s aristocracy settled in River Oaks in the 1920s, and it quickly became a convocation of manor houses whose owners were first citizens like Ima Hogg and Oveta Culp Hobby and Hugh Roy Cullen and John Connally. They dwelt in the city’s chief preserve of quiet and dignity and permanence. Their Cadillacs waited on gently curving driveways, like the carriages of archdukes. They lived concealed behind groves of ancient oak and cypress, with thick banks of azaleas hugging their walls and bursting out each spring in sheets of crimson fire. A magnolia blossom did not fall from a branch but a gardener was there to carry it away.
The house that John had found was a dominant one, a powerful and rather forbidding structure set diagonally on an oversized corner lot. The façade was classic Southern colonial, like Margaret Mitchell’s Tara. White columns marched across the front and, about it, pines and oaks hung with Spanish moss stood as sentries. The house was both graceful and at the same time arrogant, positioned diagonally as it was, out of balance with the other estates lined up obediently on the famous drive. At first Joan demurred, feeling that such a house was not only out of reach financially but pretentious for a young couple with but one child. And their budget would not permit servants to run the enormous place.
Besides, she had been nursing the idea of building a ranch house at Chatsworth, now that freeways were being built that would loop and whirl about the city, making a country home accessible quickly to any hospital that John needed to attend. But her socially ambitious husband was an ardent salesman. He pointed out the proximity of her parents, two minutes away, built-in baby sitters when she needed care for Boot during her frequent journeys to horse shows. Moreover, he felt the house fitting for a doctor on the rise, one that would suggest a prominence and success that he did not yet have. John’s journey from Hill’s Corner in Edcouch had been quick and easy. Now he would make the final climb to the top in a compulsive leap.
At the rear of the house was the garage, approachable from the side street, and above that was an unfinished room, probably intended as servants’ quarters. Joan hardly noticed it as she toured the huge house, but it was of great importance to John. He did not mention it at this moment, for the culmination of his dream would have to take its place after acquisition of the house and the accumulation of the fees from another few hundred operations. But he shivered with anticipation as he stood in the barren, junk-filled room. Someday, soon, it would be what he knew it could be.
And so it happened that John and Joan Hill bought the great white house for the sum of $95,000, with Ash loaning his son-in-law $12,000 interest-free for the down payment. He would have given them the entire sum in return for having his daughter and grandson so close, on the very same street.
Ash knew the house well. He had once looked at it himself before he built his own home. At the time, he recalled, it had seemed both too large and too cut up, too many rooms.
He had also heard troubling stories attached to the house, dark reports of unhappiness and horror. Besides the nasty divorce of the previous owners, another had died an agonizing death of cancer in one of the bedrooms. And still another had gone up to the top floor and blown his brains out.
But he did not mention these to Joan and John. They were young, they were exuberant. And she was close to him once again.
EIGHT
Maggie Foster, the cardiologist’s wife who first introduced Joan Robinson to John Hill, was right. They were a mismatch, so much so that no child, no success, no mansion could glue together the disparities of their lives. They were more than opposites. They held acutely different attitudes toward the business of running their beings. Joan seemed a creature of daylight, open, unsuspicious, no shadows cluttering her world. She held no secrets; indeed she told all to her friends, unloading her private thoughts on the telephone or at the Kaffeeklatsch she assembled each day at the big house. Only the fact that she had been married twice before John did she keep to herself. Few knew that. Out of pain or humiliation, she concealed that chapter of her history. Conversely, John seemed a resident of the night, a man who relished the concealing cloak of darkness. Secretive, uncommunicative, he did not confide in his wife or his friends, for there were none in whom he could invest the torments of a soul. He was a pious man. And stiff, unbending. “You know the funny thing about John Hill?” said a neighbor-psychiatrist to his wife. “I can never remember seeing John in anything but a scrub suit or a coat and tie. I know I must have. He comes over here for pool parties and he undoubtedly wears a sport shirt, maybe even bathing trunks, but he’s always wearing a suit as far as I’m concerned.”
Joan was the magnet for her crowd, the chairman of the group. For years, she and three other women played a regular Friday night bridge game, but it was always at her house. On occasion Maggie Foster or one of the other women would insist that it was her turn to be hostess and relieve Joan of the responsibility, and Joan would agree, only to about-face during the afternoon hours of Friday and insist that everyone come to her house. “She wanted to be close to the telephone,” observed Maggie Foster. “She had so many irons in the fire, so many people calling her, and she was proud of the god-awful house.”
It was difficult to reach Joan, for her telephone was always busy. She was either running down her “sucker list” or “angel roster,” her alternating terms for her compilation of wealthy businessmen who could be leaned on for a contribution to the children’s hospital or the zoo fund or a community theater, whatever her charity of the moment was, or she was gossiping with the girls, or she was trying to reach John, for he had taken to disappearing for hours on end, the excuse being that he was “at the hospital” or “making rounds” or “doing charts.” The neighbor-psychiatrist who categorized John as always wearing a business suit felt it strange that the plastic surgeon should sometimes be gone for six or eight evening hours “doing charts” when he, a doctor himself, knew the work could easily be done in an hour by even the busiest physician. But he never mentioned this to Joan.
John Hill was a complex man who did odd things. On one occasion a couple arrived at his home for cocktails before going out to dinner. Joan greeted them with an excuse—John was on his way from the hospital and would be late. In a half hour he bustled in wearing his greens and went upstairs to change. When an hour passed and he had not returned, Joan asked her male guest to go check on him. She was engrossed in an anecdote. In a few minutes the man returned shaking his head. “Your husband,” he told Joan, “is standing stark naked behind the bathroom door, playing his recorder.”
They spent precious little time together alone. By sunrise John was always gone, practicing his music in his office before the doors opened for patients. And he was rarely home until long after dark, until long after Boot had di
ned on a tray prepared by the Mexican cook, his mother sitting beside him trying not to fret over her missing husband. When the Hills were together, it was usually out on public view. They seemed constantly on the go. “John and Joan strike me as people always on their way to somewhere else,” commented one River Oaks hostess.
“Hell, honey, I’d rather be in the sack with my husband,” confided Joan in her earthy manner to a friend named Camille Nichols. “But we don’t get along too well in that department, so we go out on the town.” In public, with friends, Joan often picked at her husband, but there were rarely signs that her barbs were piercing his flesh. “Sex? What’s that?” she snapped when the subject came up from a complaining wife at their restaurant table. John ignored her, as he usually did; sometimes he would dispatch a frosted look that indicated the subject was better discussed in the car going home. The Hills became known in their circle for their quarrels in public, one-sided ones, Joan usually flaring over her husband’s lack of attention or his aloof attitude. His response was a patient look, the kind a parent uses with a misbehaving child. John did his nagging in private. He criticized Joan for smoking, telling her that her breath was foul and not enjoyable in a rare embrace. She tried, desperately but unsuccessfully, to quit. He often remarked that she smelled like a horse, despite her baths in perfumed oils and the colognes she splashed over her body after coming home from the stables.
“Their relationship was as fragile as a piece of cooked spaghetti,” said one friend, “but somehow they stayed together. Joan loved the man. She adored him, for all of his faults. And I surmise that John wanted for some reason to stay married to her.”
Although both inhabited worlds where extramarital affairs were quickly and easily accomplished—John at the hospital, classic fertile ground for casual involvements, Joan at her horse shows where vivid people were thrown together in hotels away from home for four or five days at a time—there was no hint that either betrayed the other during the first few years of the marriage. Joan was known as a one-man woman, always rebuffing any would-be seducer with a kind appreciation for the offer. John impressed those who knew him as a man so busy with his medicine and his music that he had no time for horizontal escapade.
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