The country house that T.J. had bought for Minnie was just the place for their daughter to develop a rock-hard self-sufficiency. With both brothers away at boarding school and only the children of hired help for playmates, Claudia Taylor had plenty of time to herself, to invent games she could play alone, to observe her father’s strutting peacocks, to gaze off into the distance at the verdant hills and lush forests. After T.J. built her a detached two-room playhouse, she isolated herself within its walls, even sleeping there at night. Sometimes, as if pulled by a magic cord still connecting mother and daughter, the young Claudia descended the mansion’s front steps and set off to ramble for hours across T.J.’s fields, just as her troubled mother had done before her. Did she imagine herself following paths her mother had crossed, sitting on rocky outcroppings where her mother had once stopped to rest and observe the exquisite scenery?
As an adult, Lady Bird would always trace her love of the outdoors, its beauty and serenity, back to those solitary years in Karnack’s meadows. Driven by her own curiosity and guided by Aunt Effie, she developed an encyclopedic knowledge of wildflowers, so that she became to botany what Theodore Roosevelt was to insect study—she rarely met a species she could not identify. It was an interest she did not pass on to her daughters, and one of them, questioned about her own interest in wildflowers, admitted, “It did not come with the genes.”
By the time Claudia was no more than ten or eleven, she had figured out that Aunt Effie was someone to love, but a woman that “passive . . . weak and full of illnesses” did not provide a model to follow. Young Claudia set her “sights on being more like my father, who was one of the most physically strong people I have ever known.”
Lady Bird was very much T.J.’s daughter. Not only her dark hair, olive coloring, and oversized nose came from T.J. Taylor, but far more important, the ambition, business savvy, and almost incredible attention to ferreting out every cent in any exchange. She clung to his example in ways her brothers, separated from him at a young age, never did, and she became the risk taker in much bigger ways than they ever did. T.J. clearly loved and nurtured his only daughter, and he raised her, to a large extent, as if she were a son. At least he made no exceptions for the fact that she was a girl. He taught her the rules of success as if he fully expected she would one day run a business herself. Just as importantly, he made her comfortable with the idea of raw power, even if questionably achieved.
Although T.J. was busy as local employer, lending banker, and “dealer in everything,” he also served as his daughter’s tutor—by example. He never read a book for pleasure, but he was a demon with numbers. Even the tiniest entry on the ledger drew his attention, and his daughter, who would later be described as able to read a balance sheet the way a truck driver reads a map, learned from him. She had her own checking account by the time she reached puberty, and she viewed it as distinctly hers. Informed as an adult that some of her female employees had joint checking accounts with their husbands, she retorted that she “wouldn’t share an account with the Angel Gabriel.” T.J.’s talk of his own impoverished youth, of his mother being unable to provide “tea cakes” even at her children’s birthdays, convinced Claudia that he wanted far more for her. She understood why for him “value-of-a-dollar” was one word.
Unlike most people who knew T.J., his daughter saw only benevolence and kindness in him. She often talked about the time she inquired about a row of large wooden boxes in his store and he had assured her they were packing units. Only later did she learn they were coffins. Most of Karnack’s population emphasized his miserly, manipulative ways, but she singled out his rare acts of charitableness, like extending credit to the family of her good friend, Emma Boehringer, whose father had died, leaving his widow with little to support herself and her children. For Lady Bird, T.J. was a gentle, compassionate figure while others were more likely to use the term his father-in-law relished—“the meanest man” around.
Young Lady Bird was too smart not to know how T.J. was making his money. Although some of it was legitimately and fairly earned, much of it came from underhanded tactics and squeezing out his weaker neighbors. At the “company store” he operated, he took advantage of local residents who didn’t have the means to go elsewhere, and he gouged them on prices. When local lumber mill workers went to his store with the chits in which they had been paid, he gave them less than face value toward their purchases, but he demanded full credit when he cashed in the chits at the mill. He kept hiring men to fish with nets in the neighboring Caddo Lake even after the state legislature prohibited net fishing. Not until a game warden burned his nets did he stop.
This was the same Caddo Lake where his daughter liked to hang out in summer. As soon as she was old enough, she went with friends to picnic on its banks, under ferny cypress trees, and swim in its murky, green water. In spite of alligator sightings, she was quick to jump in. She took her boyfriends there and had herself photographed vamping in a bathing suit, like a Hollywood pinup as she hugged a tree trunk. She could not have failed to notice that her father was making a very different use of Caddo Lake—for his own profit. Yet he remained her hero.
As Karnack’s privileged little rich girl, Lady Bird learned early how to focus on the reality that worked to her benefit and block out the rest. Later in life, she talked about being able to stick her head in the sand, but her associates offered other descriptions of how she managed to ignore unpleasantness. One White House colleague noted she “had resources most people don’t have”; she would start whistling and will herself into a place “of birds and sunshine.” One acquaintance described her “veil” as a “Southern thing,” that came down when she needed to block something out. Her longtime friend Harry Middleton observed, “She put on her mask and let the world go by.” Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin called it “psychic leave,” and said she witnessed it many times. Lady Bird would be sitting there, in body only, until Lyndon called out, “Bird, are you with me?” Then she would snap back.
• • •
The tiny one-room Fern School that Claudia Taylor started attending the year after her mother died offered limited companionship. Enrollment rarely reached ten, and when the number dropped to only two or three, the teacher moved classes to T.J.’s Brick House. After six years at Fern, with its potbellied stove, Claudia enrolled in a considerably larger school in the more upscale Jefferson, ten miles away. Sharing a room with Aunt Effie, she learned to imitate the deep Southern accents of the two retired schoolteachers who ran the boardinghouse, and to roll her eyes, like them, when she wanted to feign ladylike ignorance. With those retired schoolteachers, she had two good examples of how a show of feminine weakness could mask real power.
Cut off from so much in life, young Bird learned to disappear into books. Like her mother, she could spend hours at a time with only printed pages for company. She later singled out “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Hans Christian Andersen as an early favorite. One family acquaintance remembered driving up to the Brick House and seeing the eight-year-old girl on the front porch, a copy of the tome Ben-Hur in her little hands.
Although T.J. had little schooling, he wanted the best for his daughter, but he was reluctant to send her away. When it came time for high school, he assigned one of his employees to drive her the fifteen miles to Marshall, the county seat. T.J. put little stock in keeping his vehicles clean, and Minnie’s daughter was embarrassed when classmates saw her being delivered each day by a dusty truck that smelled of cowhides. Besides, ferrying her back and forth took a driver’s valuable time. So T.J. bought her a car of her own when she was only thirteen, and since Texas did not require a driver’s license at the time, she drove herself back and forth. Her privileged status did not go unnoticed. “She had her own car,” one jealous classmate remembered, “when my family didn’t even have a car.”
T.J. had his reasons for granting his daughter her independence. In 1920, two years after Minnie’s death, he married his attractive young bookkeeper, Beulah Wisdom, twe
nty-four years his junior. Local residents knew her as a “looker” who wore the latest flapper fashions, the kind of woman only a rich man could hope to have. Eight-year-old Claudia did not see her new stepmother as a role model, and, when later asked, as an adult, if she found Beulah attractive, she said, “Yes, in a coarse and crude sort of way.” The class chasm between the Wisdoms and the Taylors was clear even to a child, and Beulah’s young niece remembered that when she was invited to sew doll clothes with Claudia, she carefully saved the scraps to make pants for her own little brother.
When school let out each spring, Claudia and Aunt Effie hustled off to Alabama, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and T.J.’s young wife. Since Aunt Effie had no home of her own, she parked herself with relatives and then pled illness and took to her bed, leaving her niece at the mercy of whoever was willing to take her in. Some of the Pattillo clan clearly welcomed the child and introduced her to watermelon evenings and Sunday picnics; they took her along on sightseeing trips to neighboring states, even as far as Colorado. Always aware that she was the visiting outsider, on probation, she was careful to mind her manners and look grateful as they bounced her from one household to another. One cousin recalled seeing this perfectly groomed little girl, arriving as the lone passenger in the backseat of a large car, her full skirt carefully spread out around her as if she did not mean to be touched.
By the time she was in high school, Claudia Taylor sounded like T.J. on subjects such as finances and international relations. These were written assignments, rather than topics she picked herself, but already, at age fourteen, she appeared opinionated, arguing that the United States should grant independence to the Philippines, not because it was right but because it would give the U.S. a monopoly on all rubber produced there. In another high school essay, on the subject of whether the United States should cancel debts it stood to collect from European nations, she wrote that she favored cancellation, not “because of sympathy” or because it would make other countries “like us better,” but because it would help get those nations back on their feet and in a position to buy American products. Sounding like a cagey, mature bookkeeper, she admitted that $26 billion was “a large sum to erase from the ‘right side’ . . . of the ledger,” but she reminded her reader that the U.S. “could make more money” from a strong Europe than from one strapped with debt.
It’s no wonder her classmates predicted a bright business future for Claudia Taylor when she graduated from Marshall High at age fifteen. The yearbook compared her to Erie Halliburton, the famed entrepreneur locally revered as the man who started out with only a borrowed wagon and a mule but quickly extended his oil and gas empire around the globe. That judgment was very much on the mark. Late in life she admitted that had she not married Lyndon, she would probably have become a businesswoman.
At high school graduation, she was not yet set on that course but she was determined to strike out on her own. Staying in Karnack meant constant contact with her flashy, unsympathetic stepmother, and accompanying pathetic Aunt Effie to Alabama was equally unappealing. From the daughter of the local Episcopal rector, she learned about St. Mary’s College, an Episcopal boarding school for girls in Dallas, and when she told T.J. she wanted to go there, he agreed. (She later said she hoped she granted her own daughters the same independence he gave her.) In Dallas, she would have a big city (population 158,000) and a chance to smooth out the rough edges of the schooling she had received in Marshall (population 14,000). St. Mary’s wasn’t exactly what her mother had in mind when she investigated boarding schools in Washington, D.C., but it appeared likely to offer similar rewards.
The two years Lady Bird spent at St. Mary’s gave her a chance to remake herself. After a religion teacher introduced her to a different version of Christianity than she had heard in the fundamentalist Baptist sermons in Alabama or the Methodist teachings in Karnack she decided to convert to Episcopalianism. An English teacher awakened her to the richness of her native language and encouraged her to write with vivid phrases: “Don’t just say ‘a man is cruel. Walk him on the stage and have him do a cruel thing. . . . Instead of saying, ‘It was stormy,’ write, ‘Thunder echoed through the valleys and lightning lit up the landscape.’ ” St. Mary’s gave little importance to domestic skills, like cooking and sewing—students at St. Mary’s expected to have others do those tasks for them. But it was there that Claudia learned the excitement of live theater. In the world of drama, she could lose herself, and theater became a mainstay pleasure of her adult life. “I loved the theater,” she would say: “I fed upon it.”
The young Lady Bird was game for adventure. On a trip to Shreveport, she insisted on going up in a tiny airplane, even though the wings looked precariously attached with wire. Her friend hung back, but Lady Bird loved it and called it “the most exciting ride of my young life.” Fearless at the wheel of a car, she relished driving herself around. Both her mother and Aunt Effie had owned cars but relied on others to operate them, illustrating a kind of dependence that was not for Miss Claudia Taylor. When Aunt Effie needed her car driven the five hundred miles back to Autauga, Alabama, her sixteen-year-old niece volunteered to do it, accompanied by a friend the same age. Detained by road construction and the need to wire T.J. for more money, the two teens finally arrived more than a day late, in the middle of the night, at the home of a very anxious relative in Alabama.
Before she turned eighteen, Claudia Taylor had formed the traits that would define her adult life. From her father she had learned the value of every cent and the importance of taking risks. From her mother came the equally strong pull to lose herself in nature and drama, in words and dreams of faraway places. The Southern belle demeanor she had absorbed from Aunt Effie and the two ex-schoolteachers in Jefferson, Texas, fooled many people, and when she rolled her eyes and drawled her vowels, she appeared soft and pliable. But her childhood had toughened her, and she had mastered the priceless technique of insulating herself against intrusion and hurt, encasing herself in a protective cocoon that no one could breach. She could rationalize—or ignore—the shortcomings of others, even those adversely affecting her, without sacrificing a whit of her dignity. She had prepared herself to do what her mother never did—leave Karnack for a more exciting life.
2
MAMA’S BOY
MOST PEOPLE think of Lyndon Johnson as a commanding, take-charge man, capable of manipulating others and ultra-confident of his own powerful reach. But inside that giant of a human being was an insecure and needy one, always grasping for signs of love and support. He recognized his weaker side as well as anyone else did, and explained how he had first become aware of it when he was only five years old.
By accident, he had hit his pregnant mother in the stomach with a ball, and afraid that he had harmed her and the unborn baby, he started walking to his grandfather’s house, half a mile away. His mother had always warned him to stick to the road and not be tempted by the river that ran alongside. But that day, he put her warnings aside and, eager to feel the cool water on his bare feet, he left the dry and dusty road and started skipping along the riverbank. Suddenly he tripped over the exposed root of a dead tree and fell, hitting his head hard.
As he lay there, unable to move, panic set in and he feared night would come and no one would ever find him, that he would die right there, all alone and hurting. It was his punishment, he decided, for exploring this out-of-the-way place he had been told to avoid.
Then his parents miraculously appeared, and his father carefully lifted the injured boy, put him across his shoulder, and carried him all the way home. Lyndon’s mother kept murmuring about how worried she had felt, how she had panicked at the thought of never finding him. After his parents bandaged his wounds and tucked him in his own bed, assuring him all the while how much they loved him, Lyndon felt such an overwhelming glow of happiness that he decided he could endure the most extreme pain if it led to an outpouring of attention and affection afterward. That hunger—for approv
al and adoration—would define the adult Lyndon, and his frustration when it was not fed would fuel his worst behavior.
The power of love was not the only lesson his parents taught him. From his mother, Rebekah Baines Johnson, he learned about the value of refinement, the importance of class differences, and the need to succeed. She made very clear she expected a lot from him. With her degree from Baylor University, she had fancied herself a couple notches above her less schooled neighbors, but that sense of superiority got battered by reality during the first year of her marriage. As she sweated over laundry tubs and toted pails of water from the outdoor pump, those dreams she once had for herself of becoming a famous writer looked entirely beyond reach. “Then I came along,” Lyndon later reported, “and suddenly everything was all right again. I could do all the things she never did.” The doting attention she lavished on her firstborn was returned in kind, and for his first school recitation, he chose the poem, “I’d Rather Be Mama’s Boy.”
When his mother later put together A Family Album for Lyndon, she described his birth on August 27, 1908, in terms usually reserved for another birth, in Bethlehem: “In the rambling old farm house of the young Sam Johnsons, lamps had burned all night. Now the light came in from the east, bringing a deep stillness, a stillness so profound and so pervasive that it seemed as if the earth itself were listening. And then there came a sharp compelling cry—the most awesome, happiest sound known to human ears—the cry of a newborn baby; the first child of Sam Ealy and Rebekah Johnson was ‘discovering America.’ ”
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 3