Texas

by James A. Michener

  As we cheered and whistled, Rusk, in a freshly pressed blue whipcord rancher’s outfit featuring a pair of special gold boots provided by Quimper, came onstage and bowed. Taking the microphone, he said, pointing to Quimper: ‘Loudmouth is right. I’m getting married. And I want you to be the first to meet the bride.’ From the wings he brought in Maggie Morrison, forty-nine years old, one hundred and twenty-one pounds, and the portrait of a successful Houston real estate magnate. She wore, to her own surprise but at the insistence of Quimper, the Mexican China Poblana costume, complete with Quimper boots and topped by a delightful straw hat from whose brim dangled twenty-four little silver bells. She was a warm-hearted, smiling woman of maximum charm, and I thought: Rusk is lucky to land that one.

  But Quimper was not finished—indeed, he was never satisfied with anything he did, so far as I could recall, for there was always a little something he wanted to add—and this time he added a stunner: ‘Good ol’ Rance is not only gettin’ hisse’f a stunnin’ wife, but he also gets one of the most beautiful daughters in Texas, Beth Macnab!’ When Beth came onstage, Lorenzo signaled to the wings and a pretty girl of fourteen ran out with a silver baton.

  ‘This is a surprise, folks, and I haven’t warned Beth, but how about some of those All-American twirls?’

  It had been some years since Beth had performed at the various half-times throughout the state—Dallas Cowboys, Cotton Bowl and the rest—and she could properly have begged off, but this was her mother’s big night, so she kicked off her high heels and said: ‘A girl doesn’t usually twirl in an outfit like this, but if Mom is brave enough to marry Ransom Rusk after what the papers say about him, I’m brave enough to make a fool of myself.’

  She threw the baton high in the air, waited with her lovely face upturned, and was lucky enough to catch it. Bowing to the crowd, she returned the baton to the girl, then blew kisses fore and aft: ‘Never press your luck. Mom, this is wonderful. Pop, welcome to the family.’ And she parked a big kiss on Ransom’s cheek.

  When the couple returned to Texas in August after a hurried honeymoon in Rome, Paris and London, Miss Cobb called me on the phone and asked me to rush immediately to Dallas, where our disbanded Task Force was to meet with Ransom Rusk and his new wife, and when we filed into the room to meet him, she spoke bluntly: ‘Ransom, my work with you on our committee and my attendance at your bull sale made me appreciate you as a real human being. And the fact that you were brave enough to marry this delightful woman from Houston confirms my feelings.’

  ‘Sounds like an ominous preamble,’ he said, and she replied: ‘It is.’

  None of us knew what she had in mind and we were startled when she disclosed it: ‘I think your good friend Lorenzo did you a great service when he prevailed upon you to throw that bash. Best thing you ever did, Ransom. Made you human. But it’s not enough.’

  ‘What else did you have in mind?” he asked gruffly.

  ‘You’re one of the richest men in our state, maybe the richest. But you’ve never done one damned thing for Texas. And I think that’s scandalous.’

  ‘Now wait …’

  ‘Oh, I know, a football scholarship here and there, your fund for leprosy research. But I mean something commensurate with your stature.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Have you ever, in your pinched-in little life, visited the great museum complex in Fort Worth?’

  ‘Not really. A reception now and then, but I don’t like receptions.’

  ‘Are you aware that Fort Worth, which people in Dallas like to call a cowtown … do you know that it has one of the world’s noblest museum complexes? A perfect gem?’

  ‘I don’t know much about museums.’

  ‘You’re going to find out right now.’ And she dragooned all of us, plus Mrs. Rusk, whom she insisted upon, and we drove over to that elegant assembly of buildings which formed one of the most graceful parts of Texas: the delicate Kimbell museum, with its splendid European paintings; the heavy museum of modern art, with its bold contemporary painting; and the enticing Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, with its unmatched collection of Charles Russell, Frederic Remington and other cowboy artists. Few cities offered such a compact variety of enticing art.

  ‘What did you want me to do?’ Rusk asked when the whirlwind trip ended, and Miss Cobb said boldly: ‘Rance, there’s an excellent piece of land in that complex still open. I want you to place your own museum there. Build the best and stock it with the best.’

  ‘Well, I …’

  ‘Rance, in due course you’ll be dead. Remembered for what? A gaggle of oil wells? Who gives a damn? Really, Rance, ask yourself that question, and let’s meet here two weeks from today.’

  ‘Now wait …’

  She would not wait. Standing boldly before him, she said: ‘Rance, I’m talking about your soul. Ask Maggie, she’ll know what I mean.’ And she started for the door, but when she reached it she reminded him: ‘Two weeks from today. And I shall want to hear your plans, because in my own way, Rance, I love you, and I cannot see you go down to your grave unremembered and uncherished.’

  No one spoke. Of course it was Quimper who finally broke the silence, for he did not like vacant air: ‘She’s right, Rance. It would be a notable gesture.’

  Rusk turned harshly on his friend: ‘What the hell have you ever done with your money, Quimper?’ and Lorenzo said: ‘Get your spies to uncover how much I’ve given to the university. Did you know that it now has a chair of poetry in my name?’

  ‘And forty baseball scholarships,’ Garza said, and Quimper laughed: ‘Each man to his own specialization.’

  When the meeting broke, Rusk asked me to remain behind, and this started one of the wildest periods of my life, for he wanted me to discuss with him in the most intricate detail what would be involved if he donated a fourth museum to the Fort Worth complex, but first we had to decide what the museum would cover. He arranged with the university for me to take a six-month leave, paid for by him, and patiently we went over the options. First he suggested a cowboy museum, but I reminded him that the Amon Carter had preempted that specialty, and then when he proposed an oil museum, I reminded him that what we were talking about was an art museum: ‘Besides, both Midland and Kilgore already have excellent oil museums. And what’s worse, oil has never produced much art.’

  He asked me if a man like him could buy enough European art to compete with the Kimbell, and I had to tell him no: ‘Besides, that’s already been done.’

  I shall never forget the long day we spent at the Kimbell, with him trying to discover what it was that justified such a magnificent building, a poem, really, for he wanted to know everything. I remember especially his comments on several of the paintings. The chef-d’oeuvre of the collection was the marvelous Giovanni Bellini ‘Mother and Child,’ and when he finished studying it he said: ‘That’s real art. Reverent.’ He dismissed the great Duccio, which showed Italian watchers hiding their noses as the corpse of Lazarus was raised from the dead: ‘That’s a disgrace to the Bible.’

  He paid his longest visit to a beautiful Gainsborough, a languid young woman in a blue gown seated beneath a tree. ‘Miss Lloyd’ the picture was titled, and I thought that she had awakened some arcane memory, for he returned to the portrait numerous times, in obvious perplexity. Finally he took out a ball-point pen, not to make notes but to hold it to his right eye as he made comparisons. After about twenty minutes of such study he said: ‘She’d have to be eleven feet nine inches tall,’ and when I restudied the delightful painting, I saw that he was right, for Gainsborough had elongated Miss Lloyd preposterously.

  ‘Whoever painted it should be fired,’ he growled, and I said: ‘Too late. He died in 1788.’

  But he did not miss the glory of this museum, its excellent structure and the way it fitted into its landscape: ‘What would a building to match this one cost?’ I told him that with current prices it could run to eighteen or twenty million, minimum, and even then, with far less square footage. He n
odded.

  At three A.M., three days before our scheduled meeting with Miss Cobb, my phone rang insistently, and Rusk cried: ‘Come right over. I’ve sent my driver.’ And when I reached his modest Dallas quarters in which the new Mrs. Rusk shared the lone bedroom and bath, I found both of them in nightrobes, in the bedroom, surrounded by a blizzard of newspapers.

  ‘I’ve got my museum! I was reading in bed, running options through my mind, and I asked myself: “What is the biggest thing in Texas?” And this newspaper here gave me the answer.’ It was a Thursday edition of the Dallas Morning News and I looked for the headlines to provide a clue, but I could not find any. Instead, Rusk had about him eight special sections which the paper had added that day, making it one of the biggest weekday papers I’d seen. He grabbed my arm and asked: ‘What is the biggest thing in Texas?’ and I said: ‘Religion, but the cathedrals take care of that.’

  ‘Guess again!’ and I said: ‘Oil, but Midland and Kilgore handle that.’

  ‘And again?’ and I said: ‘Ranching, but the Amon Carter Museum covers that.’ So he slapped the eight special sections of the newspaper and said: ‘Look for yourself. The Dallas News knows what really counts,’ and when I picked up the sections I found that the paper, in response to an insatiable hunger among its Texas readers, had published one hundred and twelve pages of extra football news: Professional, with accent on Dallas. Professional, other teams. Colleges, with accent on Texas teams. Colleges, the others. High Schools, very thick. High Schools, how star players should handle recruiting. Sixteen full pages on the latter, plus, of course, the customary sixteen pages of current football news, or one hundred and twenty-eight pages in all.

  Rusk, having made his great discovery, beamed like a boy who has seen the light regarding the Pythagorean theorem: ‘Sport!’ And as soon as he uttered that almost sacred word, I could see an outstanding museum added to those in the park.

  Neither he nor I, and certainly not Maggie Rusk, visualized it as a Sports Hall of Fame filled with old uniforms and used boxing gloves. Every state tried that, often disastrously. No, what we saw was a real art museum, a legitimate hall of beauty filled with notable examples of how sports had so often inspired artists to produce work of the first category: ‘No junk. No baseball cards. No old uniforms.’ Rusk was speaking at four in the morning: ‘Just great paintings, like that Madonna we saw.’

  I warned him that the art salesrooms were not filled with Bellini studies of football players, but he dismissed the objection: ‘It will be American art depicting American sports.’ And when dawn broke we three went out to an all-night truck stop and had scrambled eggs.

  By the time Miss Cobb and the others reached Dallas that weekend, the Rusks had a full prospectus roughed out, but before they were allowed to present it, Miss Cobb distributed a glossy pamphlet that had been printed in high style by the Smithsonian in Washington: ‘Before we mention specific plans, I want to upgrade your horizons. I want us to do something significant, and to do that we must entertain significant thoughts.’

  Holding the pamphlet in her hand, she looked directly at Rusk and Quimper: ‘You two clowns thought very big with your bull sale. Glorious. Real Texas. My two Cobb senators would have applauded. They said it was important to keep alive the old traditions, and I must confess, Rance and Lorenzo, you not only kept them alive, you added a few touches. Now look at someone else who has thought big.’

  I was perplexed when I looked at my copy of the pamphlet, for it apparently recounted a gala affair at the Smithsonian in which a Texas oil and technology man had been honored by the President, the Chief Justice and some hundred dignitaries from American and European universities. It was a rather thick pamphlet and three-fourths of it was taken up by photographs; before I could inspect them, Rusk said: ‘I worked with him. One of the best.’

  What the rear two-thirds of the pamphlet showed were the twenty-seven colleges and universities to which the Texan had given either magnificent solo buildings or entire complexes. Any one would have been the gesture of a lifetime—a tower at MIT, a quadrangle at the University of Vancouver in Canada, a School of Geology at Sidney in Australia—but when I saw the two entire colleges, and I mean all the buildings, which he had given to Cambridge in England and the Sorbonne in France, I was staggered.

  Twenty-seven tremendous monuments dug from the soil of the most barren fields in Texas, twenty-seven halls of learning. The total cost? Incalculable. But there they stood, in nine unconnected corners of the world, more than half in the United States, and more than half of those in Texas, centers of learning and of light.

  ‘I want us all to think in those terms,’ Miss Cobb said, and Rusk snapped: ‘It’s my money we’re talking about,’ and she said: ‘My father always told us “Rich people need guidance.” We’re here to help you, Rance, because we love you and we don’t want to see you miss the big parade. Now, what bright idea did you and Barlow come up with?’

  ‘Sport,’ Rusk said, and Miss Cobb asked: ‘You mean one of those pathetic Halls of Fame? Old jockstraps cast in bronze. Old men recalling the lost days of their youth?’

  ‘I do not,’ Rusk snapped. ‘I mean an art museum. As legitimate as any in the world. Fine art, like the Kimbell, but glorifying sport.’

  Miss Cobb pondered this, and then said enthusiastically: ‘That could be most effective, Ransom, but don’t keep it parochially American. Be universal.’

  ‘You mean art from all the world?’ he asked, and she replied: ‘I do. We Americans forget that our three big sports—football, baseball, basketball—are focused here. If you do this, don’t be parochial.’

  If there was one thing the new Texan, of whom Rusk was a prototype, did not want to be, it was parochial: ‘You make sense, Lorena.’ Then, turning to me, he issued an imperial ukase: ‘Barlow, we’ll make it universal.’

  At the end of that long day she kissed Ransom: ‘I have a feeling, Rance, you’ll do it right. Make Quimper your treasurer. He likes to spend other people’s money. And keep Barlow at your side. He’ll know what art is.’

  Early next morning Rusk summoned me to his office: ‘Hire the man who built the Kimbell and tell him to get started.’

  ‘Louis J. Kahn is dead. That was his masterpiece.’

  ‘Get me the next man … just as good.’

  ‘They don’t come “just as good,” but there are several around who design buildings of great beauty.’

  ‘Get me the best and have him start his drawings this weekend.’

  ‘Architects don’t work that way,’ I warned him, and he growled: ‘This time they will,’ and within a month, an architect from Chicago, noted for buildings of great style which caught the spirit of the West, was making provisional designs for a new kind of museum ideally suited to the Fort Worth site, and two months later, ground was broken, with no announcement having been made to the public.

  In the meantime I had opened an office in New York to which all the dealers in America, it seemed, traipsed in with samples of their wares, and I was astonished at how many fine American artists had created works based on sport. With a budget larger than any I had ever played with even in my imagination, I put together a guiding committee of seven, three art experts, two artists and two businessmen unfamiliar with Texas or Ransom Rusk, and with the most meticulous care we began reserving a few pieces we would probably want to buy when we started our actual accumulations. Rusk flew in from Dallas to see if we were prepared to fill his fine new museum when the scores of builders and landscape architects working overtime had it ready. For when a Texas billionaire cried ‘Let us have a museum!’ … zingo! he wanted it right now.

  Loath to accept personal responsibility for what he termed ‘this disgraceful delay,’ I assembled my committee and seven major curators and experts for a day’s meeting at the Pierre, and there we thrashed out our problems. Rusk listened as a curator from the Metropolitan explained that in the case of a wonderful Thomas Eakins painting, ‘Charles Rogers Fishing,’ negotiations with the pres
ent owners could require as much as a year: ‘The Sturdevant family is divided. Half want to sell, the other half don’t. A matter of settling the old man’s estate.’

  ‘Then we’ll forget that one,’ Rusk snapped, but the Met man counseled patience: ‘Were you fortunate enough to get that Eakins, it alone would set the style for your whole museum. Men like me, and Charles here, we’d have come to Fort Worth to see what other good things you have.’

  ‘You’re satisfied there’s enough out there to build a topnotch museum?’

  ‘Unquestionably!’ and they all grew rhapsodic over the possibilities.

  One man from Cleveland summarized the situation: ‘Even we were uninformed as to the magnificent possibilities. In the short time we’ve worked we’ve come up with a dazzling list of how artists have portrayed men engaged in sports. Ancient Greek statues, Roman athletes, Degas jockeys, Stubbs’ unmatched portraits of racing horses.’

  ‘Never heard of that one. Who was he?’

  ‘George Stubbs of England—1724 to 1806. No one ever painted horses better than Stubbs.’

  ‘Can we buy one of his works? I mean, one of his recognized masterpieces?’

  And that was the question which led to the explosive idea which got the Fort Worth Museum of Sports Art launched with a bang that no one like me could have engineered, because when these experts explained that to find a Stubbs or a Degas that might be coming onto the market took infinite patience and a high degree of skill to negotiate the sale, Rusk saw that his building was going to be finished long before he had much to put in it.

  ‘The things you’ve been talking about are European. I understand why they might be difficult to find and deal for. But how about American art? Have we produced any good things?’