by A. W. Gray
The Masters Swim Club splashes into the Dallas Country Club pool bright and early so that its members will have the bulk of the day for business affairs. The members are professionals, doctors, lawyers, and corporate chiefs who congregate every weekday morning to loosen muscles, tread water, and labor through rigorous freestyle laps, finally emerging to face the day with blood coursing through unclogged veins. On January 9, Bill Dillard leaves the house before the eastern horizon grays with early, cloud-filtered light. He won’t eat until after his swim.
He hustles out to his car with mist dampening his cheeks, and shivers a bit under his overcoat, an intense man with thin gray hair, a straight Roman nose, and a businesslike thrust to his lower jaw. Pale, intelligent eyes move in his head as his gaze darts from side to side, taking in all, missing nothing. His complexion is fair, his skin smooth and unwrinkled. His family calls him Big Daddy, but that is misleading; at just over five-foot-seven, Big Daddy isn’t big at all. His shoulders are square, his bearing confident. If he promises, he delivers. If one crosses Big Daddy, one regrets.
He pauses for a moment to insert his key in the car door, and glances up and down the street. Though it is a damp and dreary morning, all seems well, fine homes stoic behind soggy well-kept lawns. As he climbs in to start his engine and back out into the street, Bill Dillard’s thoughts are on business. The devastated economy shows no sign of turning for the better; unlike the oil operators, Big Daddy sees no relief in the brewing Middle Eastern crisis. His fortunes turn on real estate values and, in peace or war, land is still land. His posted properties aren’t moving at any price, his stagnant joint ventures mired down and subject to vicious interest payments. As he cruises down Rheims Place and turns east on Armstrong Parkway, he thinks about advertising for rentals on some of his properties. It would be a desperate move. Good tenants are scarce.
Just a few miles away, Bill Dillard’s youngest daughter fights for breath. Her blood pressure is dangerously low, and there is no letup in her violent nausea. The puzzled staff at Presbyterian has moved her into ICU, and now contemplates life support. As Big Daddy heads for his morning swim, his thoughts riveted on the economy, he is mercifully unaware of the unfolding tragedy.
While fathers’ thoughts are filled with making a living, mothers think constantly about their children. So it has been and always will be, and Sue Stubbs Dillard is no different in this respect from other moms.
Though Bill Dillard Sr. is Big Daddy to the family, none of the Dillard clan would dream of calling Sue by the obvious counterpart. Big Mama she isn’t. Sue Dillard is a slender and gracious woman, like her husband appearing to be many years younger than she is, firm of chin and erect of bearing. She is a quiet but commanding presence, her voice soft, her manners perfect. She is without pretentious vanity; her wealth of rich brown mixed with dove gray hair is prettier in its natural state than it could be made by a herd of cosmetologists. In her own way, Sue is just as industrious as her husband, and the family’s financial success is as much about Sue as it is about Big Daddy. In an era when changing partners has become as common as moving one’s residence, Sue’s marriage has endured for going on fifty years. She has borne four children. On January 9, once Big Daddy has gone for his morning swim, Sue has time to herself. She sits in her fine home, has her breakfast, and thinks of her offspring.
Susan, Sue’s own namesake, is the oldest, and like many elder siblings seems the most stable. Susan lives a hundred and fifty miles to the northwest, in Wichita Falls, and has her own enduring marriage to an orthodontist named Billy Hendrickson. Susan has her own life, her own friends. She visits occasionally, mostly on holidays, and has brought a great deal more pride than grief to her parents. There is very little cause for Mom to fret over Susan, and, motherlike, Sue Dillard thinks only fleetingly of her stable eldest daughter. Sue’s mind turns quickly to her other kids, because with them there is a great deal more cause for concern.
As always, when Sue Dillard remembers her youngest boy, Tom, there is a sharp pang of grief. In many ways Tom was the brightest of the Dillard children. Certainly he was the most outgoing and friendly, popular with his classmates, quick to laugh, eager to extend a helping hand. Tom’s true potential was never known; brain cancer killed him when he was only thirty years old. Though it’s been more than five years since Tom died, the death of a child is a tragedy from which no parent ever quite recovers. Sue sheds a tear for her baby boy, then goes on to thoughts of her other kids.
Big Daddy’s moniker, of course, is straight from Tennessee Williams, and the similarities between the Dillards and the haunted clan of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof don’t end with Bill Sr.’s nickname. The Dillard family also has its Brick and its Maggie the Cat. Fans of the play will recall that Brick is the prodigal son, the object of undying affection from Big Daddy even though Brick has gone out of his way to reject his father’s love. William Wooldridge Dillard Jr. could play Brick to a fare-thee-well.
On the cold, rainy morning of January 9, Bill Dillard Jr. is forty years old. He is slim, straight, and handsome as a movie star, with close-cropped brown hair and a ruddy complexion. Like all of the surviving Dillard kids, he is married. His wife’s name is Mary Helen, and she is a petite and pretty young woman with a wealth of staying power. Her marriage has required toughness; she and Bill Jr. have traveled rocky roads. Sue Dillard knows as well as anyone that without Mary Helen, Bill Jr. likely would not have survived until now. As she sits in her fine home and reflects on her children, Sue thanks her lucky stars for her daughter-in-law.
It would be easy to dismiss Bill Jr.’s earlier troubles as rich-kid syndrome: too much money, too little discipline. He is the only Dillard offspring not to graduate from Highland Park High School, the public-but-very-private institution for residents of Park Cities. When Bill Jr. was fourteen, Big Daddy and Sue packed him off to boarding school in faraway Dublin, New Hampshire. The reason given by the family for his transfer to private school was that Bill Jr.’s dyslexia required special classroom conditions; however, in the terrible year to come for the Dillard family, what prompted Bill Jr.’s long-ago relocation will become a point of ugly contention.
What cannot be argued is that the problems of Bill Dillard Jr. began early on, at least as far back as his college years at the University of Mississippi. He was football student manager at Ole Miss, and during his junior year was charged with theft for selling Rebel jerseys to fans and students out the back door of the dressing room. This seems a semi-harmless college prank until considered in light of his drug possession bust the following year. Bill Jr. was a wealthy student and didn’t want for spending money; the secret selling of the athletic wear seems totally out of character. Unless he needed the extra money to feed a habit, of course. Whatever the cause, the outcome of the brushes with the Mississippi authorities is a matter of record. Big Daddy provided a lawyer—Darrel Dickens in this instance; in future years the list of attorneys would grow—to reduce the punishment to a wrist slap, thereby establishing a pattern that would continue for the better part of two decades: if Bill Jr. faltered, Big Daddy was there to lend a helping hand.
After college, Bill Jr. took the standard wealthy-graduate European odyssey, dallying for short periods in London, Paris, and Rome, and finally returned to Dallas ready to make his place in the world. He worked for his father for a time; then, along with two partners—and aided by Big Daddy to help swing the deal—bought one of the Dillard real estate companies. The business didn’t do well; even though it was the seventies, the big-boom time for the land business, the small company’s fortunes took a nosedive. Though there could be any number of reasons for the failure, one problem stands out. For Bill Jr. and his partners, the company was more of a sideline than anything else. Bill Jr. and his friends liked to play. Did they ever. And play they did.
Like all major cities, Dallas has its trust-fund society. The group consists of heirs to vast estates (with a few pretenders thrown in, of course, though
they normally can’t keep up the pace for very long), kids born with silver spoons in their mouths—and more than a few of them sporting even smaller silver spoons, hung from chains around their necks as nose-candy paraphernalia—and Texas-society marquee surnames who jet-set, golf in the seventies, and burn the candle into the wee small hours. Some masquerade as writers, others as restaurant owners, and some make no pretense of doing anything at all in the way of earning a living. Some are straight, others gay, and some go in either direction depending on the heat of the moment. All play hard. Some go to prison for drugs, serve short sentences, and burst once again into the limelight as though nothing had happened. Some mature and settle down, others die in the fast lane before maturity ever comes to them. In the trust-fund crowd, Bill Dillard Jr. fit right in.
He drank heavily and did drugs: cocaine, uppers, downers, the works. He flew an airplane and invested in nightclubs. One such venture, the Starck Club, was located in Dallas’ trendy West End District, and in addition to Bill Jr. claimed Blake and Blair Woodall (for whose family an east-west downtown freeway is named), among others in the trust-fund crowd, as active partners. The club was quite-quite private-private, members-only with enforcers at the door, and in the mid-eighties became the target of a drug investigation spearheaded by the Dallas Police, Texas Department of Public Safety, and federal DEA. The investigation culminated in a 1:00 a.m. takeover of the premises during which the authorities gave the customers an opportunity to rid themselves of any drugs in their possession before the law conducted a systematic search of the tables and surrounding areas. Pills, vials, and needles hit the floor in bundles; according to witnesses there were so many drugs on the floor that it was impossible for the cops to step around the containers in order to conduct the intended search. Shortly thereafter, the Starck Club closed its doors. Rumor has it that the closing was part of a deal; for whatever reason, the drug investigation ended with the shutting down of the club. It was Bill Jr.’s last venture into the night-club business as an entrepreneur. As a customer, though … well, that’s another story.
Once exiled to Dallas’ sleazy ghetto and industrial areas, topless bars during the eighties took on a certain respectability. The new image was in a large part due to a simple name change; instead of “titty joints,” the topless establishments now referred to themselves as “gentlemen’s clubs,” and relocated from the dusty far reaches of Harry Hines Boulevard, or near downtown on the shadier blocks of Industrial, to the more upscale neighborhoods of North Dallas. The change in image began in 1983, when a former barroom pool hustler named Donald Fuhr leased out his entire string of sawdust-floored topless joints—there were several, including Dandy Dan’s and Gino’s on Harry Hines, and a spot located on a secluded stretch of Highway 157 known as Baby Doll’s—and sank his profits into a gentlemen’s club called the Million Dollar Saloon, smack in the middle of a row of upscale Greenville Avenue restaurants.
Instead of truckers who parked their rigs ’round back and came in with fistfuls of greasy twenties, Fuhr’s new customers were men with razored hairstyles who wore five-hundred-dollar suits and brandished American Express and Visa cards. The Million Dollar Saloon’s girls discarded chewing gum and garish makeup, had their hair done at Neiman’s, and in between acts entertained in special rooms for special customers while wearing dresses with Saks and Lord & Taylor labels. By the mid-eighties, according to figures of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, the Million Dollar Saloon was the state’s number one liquor merchant.
Bug-eyed over Fuhr’s success, other topless bar owners followed suit and opened upscale gentlemen’s clubs as well, and Fuhr’s mysterious and unsolved 1988 murder (one homicide detective joked, two years after Fuhr’s death, that the case had been narrowed down to “around 2,500 suspects or so”) didn’t slow the topless bars’ upgrading movement one iota. As the decade of economic despair for most businesses neared its end, gentlemen’s clubs complete with valet parking and image-building names such as Caligula XXI, Deja Vu, and the granddaddy of them all, Cabaret Royale, flourished up and down Northwest Highway, on Greenville Avenue, and in the restaurant area fronting Stemmons Freeway near the Walnut Hill Lane exit.
The Cabaret Royale is a spectacular assault on the sensibilities of even the most blasé of flesh fans. Six elevated stages, each complete with its own dazzling light display, encircle a room large enough to seat three hundred customers, and there is nonstop action on each platform. On every side of the showroom, superbly formed young women whirl, gyrate, and wiggle provocative fannies, displaying a mind-boggling array of silicone-hardened breasts, supple muscular thighs, saucy hips, and sit-up-tautened pelvic areas. Stage-side spectators may reach over the footlights and poke paper money between g-strings and hip or buttock. For an additional fee—ten bucks during the day, twenty after six o’clock—a girl will come to the customer’s table and dance scant feet away. The law forbids touching; the girls are experts at wriggling and gyrating just out of reach of frenziedly extended fingertips. Special customers—with special quantities of money, of course—can join the dancers in secluded hot tubs.
With the new-wave movement in topless clubs came a new breed of exotic dancer. No longer do the Candy Barrs from a bygone segment of Texas lore consort with mobsters, swill whiskey straight from the bottle, shoot estranged husbands in the crotch, and perform their dances on worm-eaten stages with alcoholic comics as warm-up acts. New Age strippers have class. Not only are they beautiful and shapely, they have brains as well. Gone are the hootchy-koo bumps and grinds; these girls are magnificently trained athletes and marvelous dancers. Many are university students—the old “working her way through college” saw is no longer a joke—and more than a few are legal secretaries and housewives during the day. They read Michener and Saul Bellow and take calculus. Off-duty, they dine at Old Warsaw and Chateau, arriving in chauffeur-driven limos and gliding through the entryways on polished gentlemen’s arms.
At this particular topless club, the girl is known as Crystal. She’s Dawn at another place, Tigress at still a third. She’s a survivor, having lived on the dancers’ circuit for ten years. In 1992 she’s thirty, though under the muted blue and red lights she’s still a raven-haired baby doll. During peak times she’ll earn three thousand dollars a week, but she’s not kidding herself. She has two more years, three at the most. She has money saved, a leg up on ninety percent of the topless dancers, and in the past five years she’s earned a degree in marketing. She’s proud of her education, and even prouder that two years ago she kicked a heavy cocaine habit. To do her wanton dancing act, she now gets high on alcohol. She worries that drinking will hook her in the same way that drugs once did, but has decided that whiskey is the lesser of the two evils. When she retires from the topless circuit in a couple of years she hopes to go into sales. With the proper dress and makeup, her looks will open many customers’ doors.
Now she wears a filmy see-through black pantsuit over a g-string and push-up bra, and she hugs herself as she leans close to a small round table. Visible behind her, a petite blonde in a pink g-string and white western boots does high kicks and bring-it-on pirouettes to “I Shot the Sheriff.” Throughout the club, men cluster about more small tables. In the far corner, a cigarette glows hot red, then dims.
She glances nervously around the club, and tosses her head to move her bangs back away from her eyes. Her hair is shoulder-length and done in ringlets. “I don’t want to get anybody in trouble,” she says.
“You won’t,” the interviewer says. “All the trouble anybody’s going to get into over this thing, well, they’re already in it.”
She lowers her lashes. “I’m talking about Barbara.” Her voice is soft, and one has to lean close to hear her over the pulsing music. Her chin is pointed with a small cleft.
“She’s on record,” the interviewer says. “She was on the defense witness list.”
“She didn’t testify.”
“It doesn’t matter.
The list is part of the record. Besides, she’s got another life now.” The interviewer feels a pang of impatience. “Look, we’ve talked about this.” It’s their third meeting in their third topless club. The girl known here as Crystal has gone from hot to talk to lukewarm to demurely hesitant. The interviewer himself wonders why anyone wants to talk to writers; it’s a mystery to him. Something about everyone’s chance for five minutes of fame, though Crystal has suddenly decided at this meeting that she doesn’t want her name in print. The interviewer has agreed to that; it’s Barbara Moore that he’s interested in.
“That’s it,” she says. “If she was still in the business I wouldn’t worry about it. Those people out at that fancy college where she’s going, they’d take a dim view of this.”
The interviewer leans back and folds his arms. “It’s up to you. You want me to leave?”
She raises an eyebrow in thought. “I don’t guess. I’m just nervous is all.”
“Just remember, you’re not hurting Barbara. She’s going to be part of this story regardless. I don’t blame her for not wanting to talk about it, but I’ve got a job to do.”
A short brunette waitress saunters over to deposit Cutty and water in front of Crystal, plain soda in front of the interviewer. The interviewer pays and tips generously. He briefly wonders how much he’s spent in drinks and cover charges as he’s chased Crystal from club to club. The thought passes; spent money is water under the bridge.
“Last time,” the interviewer says, “we talked about how you and Barbara got to be friends. You don’t see her anymore?”
She smiles shyly. “Not since she quit. They, you know, go on to other things and then they don’t know us anymore. Two or three years, I lose track of time. Every day is pretty much the same.”
