Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  Bud later commented on his addiction in e-mails to Brant Bingamon:

  With the money I spent on coke, I could have bought a suburb. I made some very poor decisions because of it, but it did lead me into some interesting places. You suddenly look around, and it’s five o’clock in the morning and you realize you are in some stranger’s house with a bunch of people you don’t know and everybody is very loaded and it might be a surfer’s house or an actor’s house in the Hollywood hills or it might be a roomful of Mexican gangsters. . . . I have one piece of advice about cocaine—do not use it. It will make you stupid.

  Bud and Jap also wrote a script about a bull rider, called J. W. Coop, which the actor Cliff Robertson wished to star in. He had come to Texas and hung out with the writers for a while. Don Meredith, the Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback, watched the man closely one night and murmured to his writer friends and David Richards, “That’s not Cliff Robertson. I’ve met Cliff Robertson.” Another night Jap goaded the vain actor by introducing him as Biff Richardson.

  Later the actor sent them a letter of regret that he had been unable to get the movie produced. They shrugged and moved on. Then, amazingly, the film premiered, with a virtually unchanged script and all credits claimed by Robertson, who was coming off an Oscar-winning performance in Charly. A lawsuit over the writing credits ensued in an Austin state district court, with David representing Bud and Jap. The matter might not have gotten so rancorous had Robertson not claimed that he had gotten caught up in a Manson-type gang, he allegedly characterized Jap as an ex-convict hustler. Bud sent the actor’s lawyer a letter on Mad Dog, Inc., stationery that vilified Robertson, and he attached a clipping from the Fort Worth Press: “Police Believe Frozen Dog Weapon in Beating Death.” He signed off, “Mad Dog on Prowl.”

  At trial, David said his plaintiffs “looked like street people, with coats and ties that didn’t fit and a distinct aura of seediness.” The handsome and suave Robertson schmoozed with the gallery, prospective jurors, and the judge. After that first day, David told his clients that they had to be back in court at eight o’clock the next morning. On hearing that, they quickly caved in and agreed to a settlement giving them screenwriting credits and at least some of the money they had coming. But on the screen in the revised print the Texans’ names floated in yellow against a field of wildflowers the same color.

  Mad Dog, Inc., was mostly beer, whiskey, and marijuana talk, and the collective brainstorm quickly petered out. But before it did, the wild seeds proposed a magazine called Mad Dog Ink, which, in its first issue, would feature the prison poetry of Candy Barr, a famous stripper and porn movie star who had run afoul of Texas’s antimarijuana laws. Another brainstorm was a publishing company named the Mad Doggerel Vanity Press. Jap, Bud, and others egged on an heiress to write a novel titled Sweet Pussy, which they proposed to publish. All this was extravagantly sexist, of course. Bud and Jap claimed that they could read fortunes by inspecting bare nipples, not mere lines in hands, and some young women peeled off their shirts to let them. Ann saw no humor in that, and she occasionally let them know it. But she did consent to be seated and photographed at a table with a young woman who was topless except for a sign across her chest.

  She and David enjoyed going out on the town in costumes. She liked to make herself up like Dolly Parton, her face smeared with lipstick and padded boobs projecting from her shirt like a pair of howitzer shells. One night they went to a beer joint and honky-tonk called the Broken Spoke. “This one guy asked me to dance,” Ann recalled his approach to the two-step. “If he had let me go, I would have flown through the walls. He was driving me around that dance hall like a truck, and he said, ‘I don’t care if you’re Dolly or not. Come back to the Motel 6 with me and we’ll have cotton all over that room.’”

  Ann was a practiced flirt, but a part of her was quite conventional about sex and fidelity. She and David had a good friend named Bill Kugle. He had won election to the legislature from Galveston, where he played a role in the dismantling of the long-established but illegal gambling empire of the Maceo family, and the backlash in Galveston was so harsh that he abandoned his House seat and moved away to the East Texas town of Athens, where he set up a practice with the esteemed William Wayne Justice for a while. Kugle was thoroughly delightful but randy as a goat. “Ann was really shocked one time when Bill made a pass at her,” David said. “She couldn’t believe he was so direct and explicit.” But another night at First Friday, an academic who considered himself a Don Juan hit on Ann in a particularly obnoxious manner. The man’s daughter, who witnessed the incident, later told me, “I’ve never seen a woman take down a man like that. She sent him out of there like a dog with his tail between his legs.”

  David and Ann were considered the straightest Mad Dogs, but they held their own in the frolics. Their home, said Jap, “became a sort of Mad Dog sanctuary.” The New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal appeared one night and was greeted at the door by Ann, who was costumed as a giant tampon. It had a smear of painted blood and a string coming out from the top. (You had to have been there, I suppose.) Rosenthal was charmed enough that he devoted half a column to the party and its hostess. “Bud was there, then Jap showed up,” David recalled, “and they went into this routine that was hilarious and absolutely unscripted. We had a big Afro-style wig sitting around from some other costume event. Bud snatched it, put it on, and went into this act in which he was Dr. J.”—the pro-basketball star Julius Erving. Rosenthal got into the spirit of the romp and started conducting a mock interview of the tall writer turned basketball star. “How can you achieve the kind of stardom that has come to you?”

  “Learn to dribble, white boy,” Bud replied.

  Years later Rosenthal wrote again, “One of the best parties I ever went to was in Austin, Texas. . . . I realized later why I had such a good time. None of it was catered, a form of surrogacy that dominates evenings in most big cities. . . . The crayfish were cooked in Ann’s kitchen and she spread them out on the table herself. There was music—not a hired pianist but some guest picking on a guitar. . . . There was a great stand-up comic—a novelist with a buzz on [Shrake]—right there in the living room, not on television. And the guests were not catered either—Ann invited them herself for her own party.”

  In his memoir David wrote about another night of festivity at the house in West Lake Hills. It was a fund-raiser for Vietnam Veterans against the War.

  The music was provided by a group that called themselves the Viet Gong or some such moniker. . . . At some point in the evening, the town marshal, who was our neighbor, arrived in response to a number of totally justified noise complaints. I remember thinking that I had placated him by toning the music down and promising to shortly end the band’s efforts. The marshal’s report to the town council was more alarming. He claimed he had been surrounded by a bunch of stoned hippies who kept screaming, “Off the pig.” Who knows, it was a large yard, and I suppose something like that could have happened.

  One afternoon in August 1973, Ann again displayed her gift of being in places where memorable events occurred—in this case, the daylong party following the recording of Jerry Jeff Walker’s ¡Viva Terlingua! album in Luckenbach, Texas. A photograph of Ann appears in the album’s liner notes. Thoroughly wasted, she looks primed to topple right off the picnic table. Eddie Wilson was fond of saying that life in Austin in those days was fueled by cold beer and cheap pot. Riding in a convertible one day with David and—who else?—Jap Cartwright, Ann had taken a few puffs off a joint and soon realized that she quite enjoyed marijuana. “But Ann was an alcoholic,” insisted Jap Cartwright. “She had a vodka problem, she didn’t have a drug problem.”

  More perilous to her health than the marijuana was her prescription medicine Dilantin. Since 1938, the Pfizer drug had been the standard preventive for epileptic seizures, but the National Center for Biotechnological Information eventually issued a stark warning: “Tell your doctor if you drink or have ever drunk large amounts of alcohol. . . . Yo
u, your family, or your care-giver should call your doctor right away if you experience any of the following symptoms: panic attacks; agitation or recklessness; new or worsening irritability, anxiety, or depression; acting on dangerous impulses; difficulty falling or staying asleep; aggressive, angry, or violent behavior; mania (frenzied, abnormally excited mood.)”

  “When I was a kid,” Clark Richards told me, “I remember Mom would be cooking dinner, and she would ask me to make her a martini. Mom’s version of a martini filled up about the size of the glass you’re holding there.” He indicated a ten-ounce glass of water I had in my hand. “I filled it with ice,” Clark went on, “and then to the brim with vodka, with a drop of vermouth and a twist of lemon. She would drink one without a problem, maybe a couple of them. I mean, I’m ten years old—what did I know about booze? That’s just what Mom drank.”

  After the move from Dallas to Austin. From left, Ann, Clark, Cecile, Ellen, Dan, and David Richards. Early 1970s.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Hanukkah Chicken

  Ann and David added another dimension to their lives by partnering with their carpenter friend John Huber in the purchase of a few hundred acres of wooded ranchland on the clear-running San Gabriel River, about an hour’s drive northwest of Austin. The property contained a ramshackle house, which they gave up trying to make habitable, but the wooded banks of the shallow stream became their frequent weekend campsite. My wife, Dorothy Browne, told me of one campout: “The most impressive thing I ever saw Ann do was, after a full night of drinking, singing, and story-telling, she made pancakes over a campfire for the whole gang of us—without one hair out of place.”

  There were many outdoor adventures like the “Sam Rayburn Lake Caper,” as Ann called it. Several families of friends had set out for a cabin reserved on the large lake along the Louisiana border. After many hours of driving, they almost never found the cabin, and then a tremendous thunderstorm blew up. It sent the barometric pressure plunging, and Ann could not get a large pot of water to boil for the night’s pasta. Sue Sharlot thought the sparks blown out of the fireplace by gusts were going to burn the cabin down, and just as Ann’s pasta water began to bubble, Sue dumped it all on the fireplace. Ann was furious. A while later, as they were trying to calm down and warm up, the door burst open with a bang. The adults gasped, children cried out. Standing large in the doorway was a frightful apparition: the tall Texas Observer writer Molly Ivins with a soaked sleeping bag over her head.

  In 1974, Jo Cartwright walked downstairs in her and Jap’s Austin apartment, dumped an armload of clothes, boots, and other possessions on the floor, and announced to her husband that their marriage was over. He looked down and wondered whether that could possibly be all in the world he owned. He moved to New York for several months, scaring up some freelance work, and then came back to Austin for a visit during the summer of 1976. He met a twice-divorced single mom named Phyllis McCallie who had grown up riding horses outside Wetumka, Oklahoma. In Dallas, she had been an animator and production coordinator for the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon series before going to work as an assistant and organizer for the photographer Shel Hershorn. They ran into each other again at one of Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnics, and afterward Jap canceled plans to go back to New York. Some months later, they got married on impulse in the back of a Capitol-area joint called the Texas Chili Parlor, their vows solemnly performed by Bud Shrake, who was an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church. The party moved on to another drinking establishment, where Jap jumped onstage with Willie Nelson and band and serenaded his bride with a spontaneous howler called “Main Squeeze Blues.”

  All this zaniness contributed to Austin’s legend, but numerous marriages did not survive the strain. Doatsy Shrake would stay in Austin and remain Bud’s devoted friend, and they shared great travels to Europe and other eye-opening places, but they were divorced by 1985. Despite running through booze and drugs like a man obsessed and becoming addicted to some of them, Bud was always a prolific writer. By his midforties, he had been married and divorced three times. Bud never suffered from a lack of women who desired his company.

  In the meantime, accompanied by Jerry Jeff Walker as the team’s catcher, Bud and Jap had once more taken to dressing up in the tights and capes of their acrobatic act the Flying Punzars. Ann and her Dallas friend Betty McKool were still producing their annual Christmas cards; the costuming for one of the card’s photo shoots led Ann to sport a Santa Claus outfit to a party at the Cartwrights’ house. Years later, Ann recalled what happened next. The sun was up, barely. “David and I had left and come home at a halfway decent hour, and when I woke up the next morning I could tell it was still very early. I was mixing in what I was hearing with whatever my dream had been, and somehow I thought my father was coming downstairs to my bedroom.

  “My bedroom door burst open, and in came Jap and Bud, plus Jerry Jeff Walker, all dressed in what they insisted on calling their Flying Punzar outfits. They were attended by their wives, whom they were referring to as their groupies.”

  She said the Punzars wore long black tights, black T-shirts with lightning bolts splashed across their chests, and little capes that hung down as far as their waists. David reminisced, “In this instance, it developed that the Punzars had come to seek the assistance of Santa Claus. As best Ann and I could determine, the Punzars had reasoned that no pharmacy would turn down a request from Santa Claus.” A doctor friend had written them a prescription for some amphetamines, and they were far enough gone to think that someone in a Santa outfit could walk in a twenty-four-hour drugstore, get that filled, and prolong the party for a few hours, perhaps days.

  Ann and David talked them out of that idea, but the Punzars insisted on treating them to their new and improved act. The three of them flapped their winglike capes, Jap made another running leap at Bud, and as ever they crashed all over the deck outside the bedroom. No one was hurt, and the Punzars and their wives climbed in bed with Ann and David, with Jerry Jeff serenading them at one point and playing his guitar. I later asked David why he allowed this to happen. “Hell,” he whooped, “I was the one who opened the door!”

  The wildness of Austin in the seventies was one aspect of Ann’s life. In another, she remained the diligent mom who was surprised and angered to find herself in an ongoing battle with the educators of her children. Cecile had always been the one who did everything right. Though shy, she studied hard and excelled at school. Their Dallas friend Mike McKool had won a seat in the legislature, and he made Cecile the state’s first female senate page when she was in junior high. Cecile was such a model student and citizen, in her mother’s view, that when the principal at Westlake High called and said her daughter had to leave school, Ann told him he must be making a mistake. “Indeed not,” the principal replied, in her recollection of the heated conversation. “She will have to leave school immediately.”

  “What in the world has she done?”

  “She wore a black arm band to school this morning.”

  Oh yes, the war. Cecile told me about that chain of events: “When I got to Westlake High, right away we were involved in the protests of the Vietnam War. And then if you wanted to be on the drill team, which was like the Rockettes or something, you had to be between five five and five eight in height.” She brought home the paper announcing the rules and regulations of this elite group. Cecile was not eligible because she was five nine.

  Ann was outraged, and she said that not long after that, “Dan came home really excited because his gym class had been given Gatorade as a reward for cleaning out the varsity football players’ lockers. Dan was in junior high and, of course, thought it was a wonderful honor.”

  Ann asked Dan, “Son, why can’t the football boys clean out their own lockers?” Dan replied that the football players were too busy, that they had to practice.

  “That was it for her,” Dan told me. “She gave up on public schools out there. She really pushed to get us into St. Stephen’s.” St. Steph
en’s Episcopal School was (and still is) a well-respected prep school on a campus tucked away in the hills above Austin. The faculty members had advanced degrees, and many of them lived on campus. Cecile and Dan were somewhat removed from their classmates who lived in the dormitories. But the new arrangement worked, especially for Cecile. “St. Stephen’s was the progressive school, the alternative,” she told me. “That was the first time I’d ever been in class with someone who was African American. Which was a real indictment of public school systems in Texas.”

  I asked, “Did you want to be on that drill team at Westlake High?”

  “Oh no,” she laughed. “I would never have done something that traditional and conformist. There were just a handful of kids like me. Just about everybody who taught at Westlake then was a coach. I had a coach for science, a coach for math—it was all about football, and we had to go to all these pep rallies. Two friends and I came up with the idea that we wanted to go to study hall instead of going to the pep rallies. That resulted in Mom getting in another big row with them. I wouldn’t say we ever fit in at Westlake. Other people weren’t having political fund-raisers on the weekends at their houses. But we were.”

  Dan recalled one party celebrating the release of the Watergate tapes and the downfall of Richard Nixon. “Mom and Molly Ivins were out there, and I think Maury Maverick, our friend from San Antonio. There were four or five of them. They each had parts they had chosen to read. They sat out by the pool, and they were wearing signs. One was [Bob] Haldeman, one was [John] Ehrlichman, and so on. And they’d picked portions of the transcripts to read and perform, while everybody sat around laughing and carrying on.”

  He recalled another gathering focused solely on the kids. “There was a Celebration of Life with us and the Whitten kids. It was almost like a teenager baptism ritual, but there were absolutely no religious overtones at all. We were all given a little silver sand dollar with our name on it. Mom and Dad and Sam and Virginia talked about how great it was just to be alive. I saw a keepsake from it recently. There was actually a printed invitation.”