Such a long letter in his own hand was something of a stretch for Lyndon. In Kleberg’s office, he dictated letters and let someone else type them up. But his heightened emotions that evening must have staved off writer’s cramp because he ran on for five pages, telling Bird that she was “my first love in years.” Then, to underscore his meaning, he added, “I love you.”
He fully counted on her to match his enthusiasm and have a letter waiting for him when he reached Washington on Thursday evening. But cautious Bird was holding off. She still couldn’t quite believe the last week had really happened, and she was taking things slowly, trying to make sense of her feelings. It took four days for his letter to get to Karnack, but it would take even longer for him to receive a written word from her.
This is how Bird came to see how vulnerable Lyndon could be, and how quickly he lashed out when faced with that sense of vulnerability. When he still had not heard from her on Saturday morning, his temper flared, and he sent another letter, verging on the nasty, accusing her of “indifference” and lack of “sentiments of affection” or “expressions of love.” He felt “terribly blue,” and blamed her. Sounding like a self-pitying bully, he wrote: “I’m lonesome. I’m disappointed, but what of it. Do you care?”
Lyndon wired her and then followed up with a letter, saying he would phone her on Sunday to find out “definitely just how and where you stand.” In what sounds like an ultimatum, he underscored how much he resembled her father—an untiring deal maker who never took no for an answer. This young man wanted her commitment, and he wasn’t going to wait for her letter to tell him she would marry him.
Excited at the prospect of hearing Lyndon’s voice again, Bird wired him a number to call. Since the Brick House had no telephone, she had to talk with him from a neighbor’s home, and too wound up to wait she arrived at the appointed place half an hour ahead of the time set. Afterward, she gloated a bit about how the call had aroused her friends’ curiosity and envy, and she wrote Lyndon: “Nobody in Marshall knows you can talk that far over the phone—especially just for fun and not business.”
Her very first letter to him (written before the phone conversation but reaching him after they had talked) was on the cool side. This was a woman who knew part of her appeal to Lyndon was her self-reliance. Rather than admitting to any “electric going,” as she had after their first meeting, she sounded like Miss Competence as she listed the “simple things” she had been doing since he left, like overseeing repairs on bookcases and on a white wooden fence around her father’s garden. Only a tiny hint of the romantic crept in when she mentioned the “lovely moon” they had admired together on the night before he left. She signed off, “love, Bird,” no match at all for his head-over-heels declaration.
Although Lyndon was busy in Washington, juggling his day job with law school classes at night, he made time to write passionate letters, but with ample evidence of his fragility. Here was a man who could never be satisfied with what he had but was never sure he deserved what he got. Baring his insecurities, he confessed he felt like a defeated candidate, so “blue and depressed” that he came home from the office one day at 3:30 in the afternoon and went to bed. He questioned his “own perseverance, will power and self-control” and regretted his “moodiness,” the fact of “always feeling blue” when he didn’t hear from her. He admitted to having a restless nature, and being “never sure, never contented—always doubtful” about much of life. But of one thing he was sure—how he felt about her: “Again I repeat—I love you—only you. Want to always love—only you.”
His letters were very specific about what he expected from her: limitless, nurturing support regardless of whatever he said or did. He wanted a woman “who loved me, would pet me, and be as affectionate as I am,” someone “to nurse me,” and “help me to climb.” Why wouldn’t she show those feelings in her letters to him? He prodded her to keep writing and “Mix some ‘I love you’ in the lines and not between them.”
During those weeks they were apart, his mood swings reflected what he heard from Bird. He relied on her letters to recharge him; when none arrived, his spirits sank and he protested. If the morning mail yielded nothing from Karnack, he did not wait for the afternoon delivery but fired off an angry letter accusing Bird of neglecting him. When she wrote that “right this minute I’d rather see you than anybody in the world,” he called it the “best letter you have written . . . gave me new life—a real inspiration and a determination to make you the most happy and contented little woman in all the world.” He kept her letters lined up in his room, “one by one,” so he could take them down and reread them when feeling low. Her most recent letter had raised his spirits, giving him “new hope, new interest, new plans . . . just thrilled . . . to death.”
Her constraint annoyed him, and he kept urging her to loosen up and reveal the depth of her emotion. He knew some people found any demonstration of “real . . . inward feelings ‘silly,’ ” but he assured her that he did not. He had bared his deepest longings and admitted to faults; now he wanted evidence that she meant to rescue him with her love. How could she continue to hold back? After he had already told her how “depressed” he was?
Throughout their correspondence he repeatedly confessed to having a temperamental personality that caused him to jump too quickly, act hastily, and become far “too sentimental.” Here was a man who stopped to help hurt dogs and welled up in sad movies, while Bird could walk right past injured animals and rarely shed a tear over anything. No one had to tell her who was the more grounded partner in this relationship, and that if she married him, it would be up to her to keep him on track.
In her letters, she began playing the cheerleading role that she would continue to hone throughout their long marriage, rousing him time and again out of his gloom. After he wrote on October 14, “For weeks I’ve only half heartedly done anything,” she ordered him to “Stop it, dear! (That’s a command!)” She reminded him that it was his enthusiasm and “que vive” [sic] that had attracted her to him in the first place. Always the optimist, she saw better times ahead: “In the next few months or one year we shall find the way out of our difficulties . . . [and in the meantime] I shall not let you forget me.”
Because his letters did not always arrive in sequence, Bird scrambled to decipher what lay behind his rapid mood changes. He began one letter, “I’m very unhappy tonight. All week I’ve felt this way.” But buoyed by a subsequent upbeat letter from her, he turned jolly. Then his mood plummeted again, and shortly after begging her to marry him immediately, he warned that she might have to wait “four or five years.” Puzzled by the erratic shifts and turns, Bird inquired what caused them. What was he thinking?
In a sunny reply, Lyndon urged his “dear Bird” to forget all about the despair expressed in his previous letter because “this morning I’m ambitious, proud, energetic and very madly in love with you. . . . Plans, ideas, hopes. I’m bubbling over with them.” He regretted he had been “cruel” and let her know “how despondent” he had “felt last week.”
That high did not last either, and he sounded really dejected in a subsequent letter. Glum about his prospects in Washington, he was again considering a return to Texas. That would mean delaying marriage, because “No, honey, I haven’t over estimated what my Bird should have.”
Bird understood that it wasn’t just in temperament that she was the hardier of the two. She rarely fell ill, but Lyndon was often in bed with one malady or another, and he sounded very sorry for himself at those times. In September 1934, he had to miss work and law school classes because of influenza, and he wrote her that he feared a recurrence of the pneumonia he had suffered two years earlier, when he could not work for six weeks. In a poignant signal of how much he needed a strong, nurturing maternal figure to nurse him back to health, he wrote her that he felt like a “sick little man,” who missed his “real friends” and “yearned” to be with them, like a child, “wanting to get to its mother.”
While he r
attled on like a schoolboy, bouncing back and forth between loving her to death and scolding her for not caring enough about him, she remained unruffled. She had already concluded that if she lashed out at him, “something awful might happen to us,” and she would not allow that, no matter what unflattering names he called her. When days went by without a letter from him, she felt “forsaken,” but refused to retaliate by not writing or by answering in a pout. No, that was “one thing I won’t do,” she assured him, thus providing a clue to what others, who later witnessed his nastiness and infidelities, could never understand. She had promised him in one of her earliest letters that nothing would ever come between them, because: “I simply will not let it.” And both of them knew she was a woman who kept her promises.
When his letters dropped off slightly, she was disappointed but understood that his frailty would brook no punishment. Not from her. She promised to mete none out: “I think its [sic] plain silly (besides presumptious [sic]) to fuss at someone you love.” She was only twenty-one when she wrote that letter but it contained the basis of their grand bargain—that no matter how he treated her, she could take it because she was the stronger of the two.
Lyndon made very clear he was seeing other women at the same time he was begging Bird to marry him. One of them, named Helen, whom he referred to as “my little radio writer,” was the daughter of a judge in New York. Lyndon wrote Bird that he had gone drinking and dancing with Helen, then talked with her into the morning hours. Bird made no mention of the “little radio writer” when she replied to his letter in 1934, but she later explained that she had known it was not a platonic relationship. Rather than object, she was grateful that the sophisticated New Yorker had “sharpened [Lyndon] up.”
If Lyndon had been using Helen to ignite a bit of jealousy back in Karnack and move Bird to the altar more quickly, it did not work. She kept giving her reasons for holding off. They did not know each other well enough—she needed more time. Without a trace of coyness or deceit, she spelled out how she felt: “I love you [but] I don’t know how everlastingly I love you,—so I can’t answer you yet.” When he kept nagging, she replied, “Darling, don’t you see that I’m just trying to be perfectly sane and level-headed? I want to do what is best for both of us.” Like a mother tending a cantankerous child, she stayed steady, letting his tantrums play out without losing her temper or sense of who was in charge. She worried in one letter that her “poor lamb” was overworking and asked him, “Whenever do you play?”
Her letters gradually picked up in passion, with less about her renovation project and more about the “hundred kisses” she was sending him. Some days she wrote more than once, and in one letter she enclosed a newspaper clipping of a poem about love: “Why you are all my laughter and my light—why it is sheer delight to love you so.” But the last words in the letter were hers, with ratcheted up affection: “Goodnight, dearest love. Did you know you are my dearest love?”
Bird was entirely open about what she liked in Lyndon. Much more than a persistent suitor whose attentions she relished, he was part of that big “Outside World” she had been looking for, with its exciting “gay life beyond the ‘provinces.’ ” She shrank from the possibility that this life might elude her, and she admitted to feeling depressed by the prospect. Although normally cheerful and optimistic, she wrote him on September 27 that she did not feel “very happy, nor content” that evening and she thought it was because of her “wanderlust.” She pictured herself, not in dreary Karnack, but in “all sorts of queer, faraway places where Things are Happening!” She wanted to be “dining in some gay attractive place, with someone I enjoyed.” Maybe that someone was Lyndon: “Wouldn’t I adore being with you!”
In idle moments, she leafed through magazines, searching for photos of glamorous settings, and she felt “so cosmopolitan” when she recognized the Dodge Hotel in Washington, where she knew Lyndon was staying, and the Casino de Paree in New York, where she had gone nightclubbing with Cecille and those suave businessmen. In provincial Texas, she felt isolated, cut off from lively discussions, like those she had savored in Austin with her friends—the “richest, raciest conversations about the Russian playwrights and the value of money, and the relative merits of Viennese music and Spanish music, and college love, and life with a capital L.” In Karnack, all she heard was talk “about what we’re going to plant when it rains, and recipes for Mayhaw jelly.”
When she kept refusing to set a date for marrying him, his tone grew harsher: “I don’t want to wait. I want you now—when I need you most. . . . If you are still sure you want to wait I’ll make my letters less affectionate and consequently less embarrassing.” Rather than viewing his message as a threat, she saw it as more evidence of his weakness, and she sent a sunny reply. The packages of sweets and books arriving from Washington made her feel “Better than [on] a birthday—most as nice as Christmas!” When he supplied her with a book of recipes contributed by congressional wives, she tried her hand at baking a lemon pie and wrote him a description of the result. For someone who had zero experience in a kitchen, she decided she had produced a “creditable” dessert.
About a month after he had returned to Washington, Bird went to Dallas for the weekend to cheer for the Texas Longhorns in their annual football game against the Oklahoma Sooners. Since her classmate at St. Mary’s, Emily Crow, was living in Dallas with her family, Bird stayed with them, and Lyndon tracked her down with a person-to-person phone call. However did he find her, Bird marveled, when “there are so many Crows in the Dallas telephone book!” That she already knew the answer was clear in her next line: “But then you are a young man who generally gets what he goes after, aren’t you?” She had found her own T.J.
That weekend gave Bird a chance to catch up with old friends, including Gene Boehringer, who took the ninety-mile-per-hour Zephyr train from Austin. But Bird’s most definitive meeting was with her old boyfriend, Victor McCrea. The ambitious UT alumnus, who had dated her in college and squired her around the nation’s capital in June, had returned to Texas to work at a Fort Worth law firm, “so of course,” Bird explained in her next letter to Lyndon, “he came over [to Dallas] to see me, Sunday afternoon.” After driving around town and drinking Tom Collinses at the Shamrock bar, they went to the Adolphus Hotel for dinner, where she mustered the courage to tell him about her new love. Victor had been her most serious suitor, and she thought it important that he hear from her that she intended to marry “one Lyndon Baines Johnson” within the year.
Victor was so upset by her news that he couldn’t eat a bite, and Bird, seeing his distress, left her plate untouched. What disappointed Lyndon in Bird’s account of that meeting was the mention of a date—she kept pushing marriage way out into the future. He still hoped for a wedding at Thanksgiving, when he would be back in Texas, but she remained adamant that she wouldn’t consider a time “so terribly close!”
Although Bird kept writing that she wasn’t going to let him get away, she had objections to a quick marriage. Would it not be wise, she wrote him, to wait a year so she could “go traveling around a few months,—when I like being so free and foot-loose”? She recognized she had competition (Lyndon was dancing with more than one “Helen” in Washington) and the possibility of losing him “frightens me,” she wrote him. “I can’t imagine being quite without you.” But she would not be rushed on a matter as important as marriage. That “wouldn’t be fair to either of us—or safe.” As if he needed any reminder that she was not the impetuous type, she added that something prevented her “from caring deeply about people or things suddenly. . . . They have to grow on me.”
His obsession with keeping secrets bothered her, and she begged him to tell her more about the “New York [job] offer and whatever was troubling you in South Texas.” After he confessed that he had written her long letters and then torn them up without mailing them, she suggested he reconsider and clue her in on why he was thinking about moving back to Texas. On October 22, she wrote, “Lyndon, plea
se tell me as soon as you can what the deal is. . . . I am afraid its [sic] politics. Oh, I know I haven’t any business—not any ‘proprietary interest’—but I would hate for you to go into politics.”
Rather than spell things out, he continued to stonewall, writing that he had no intention of telling her more because he feared the “outcome.” That was another of his traits that she would have to learn to accept—this was a man who took enormous pleasure in keeping secrets and then springing a surprise when it was least expected.
Separated by twelve hundred miles, the two arranged to exchange photos, but Lyndon was quicker to get himself to a professional photographer than Bird was. She encouraged him to proceed quickly so she could show her friends how handsome he was, but she hung back from going herself, admitting, “I’ve an awful inferiority complex about having my picture made.” In an unusually physical sign-off, she wished he was with her “this minute because I feel silly and gay and I want to ruffle up your hair and kiss you and say silly things!”
From the photographer’s proofs he sent, she immediately picked out her favorite. Her father preferred the more formal shot of Lyndon in a suit jacket, but she chose the casual pose in “shirt sleeves with your arms on the desk.” She very much disliked arrogance in a person, “And you do look very arrogant there!” she wrote Lyndon. But the more she considered his pose, the more she warmed to the “proud, sure look out of your eyes.” It was an early example of the Midas touch she learned to apply to Lyndon’s less admirable traits—she simply converted them into something she liked.
His extravagance upset thrifty Bird, and after he spent an extra few cents on “special delivery,” she ordered him to “save that dime” on letters “cause one gets them at the post office just the same.” Much as she thrilled to hear a telephone operator say “Washington calling Bird Taylor,” she was shocked at what person-to-person calls cost, and she chided him on his “dreadful” spending habits.
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 8