Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  Ann elaborated on these discoveries when she wrote her memoir. “We knew how long it took us to get money into the bank, and so the next logical question was, How long does it take other agencies to get money to the treasury? How much time and money are we losing there? I called Garry Mauro, who had just been elected land commissioner, and asked, ‘Garry, how long does it take to get checks from your office to mine?’ He said he didn’t know, he’d just gotten there too, but he would find out. He called down and found that [the General Land Office], which collected sizeable sums from leases on state-owned lands, delivered money to the Treasury when the bag got full. And we were literally across the street from each other.”

  Ann bragged on their installment of a new section called Rapid Deposit, which was derived, she said, from efficient cash-management programs. They rolled out a high-profile campaign with slick public-service television ads advising Texans on how to investigate the Unclaimed Property fund and find out whether there might be an unknown bonanza waiting for them. Harding and Jesse James before him had called this fund Escheat, an archaic and suspicious-sounding term that did not encourage inquiry. And the modernization of the office that Ann and her team achieved was genuine, not just a public relations campaign. At peak efficiency, Treasury employees processed 34,000 checks a day from other state agencies and earned the state $300 million in a fiscal year.

  All that was the upside of the story. When Ann and her team took over the Treasury, state government was flush, operating with a large surplus. The OPEC oil cartel’s boycott of Western nations had triggered a paradoxical boom in Texas. One saw bumper stickers that read: “Freeze a Yankee in the Dark.” But the Texas boom went bust when the price of crude oil collapsed. Then a second economic blow battered the state. Texas senator Phil Gramm, who had been an academic economist, pushed through legislation to deregulate banking, and that contributed to the overleveraging of giant savings and loans. The savings-and-loan fiasco led to nearly 500 failed banks in Texas, and though some of these merged with banks that were on a sounder footing, the financial catastrophe caused a domino effect. The real estate market crashed, companies slashed discretionary expenditures on things such as advertising, another industry with a large payroll, and 300,000 Texans lost their jobs. Bankruptcies and foreclosures skyrocketed. In those first days after Ann took office, most letters she had received were giddy congratulations. Soon they came from people in search of employment.

  Ann had corresponded with Bud Shrake for years, though she complained at times about the difficulty of cornering him. “I need the money and I’m grateful,” she wrote at the end of one letter thanking him for a contribution. “I don’t know how to get to see you. Is it best for me to call for an appointment? Do you ever eat out or should I cook something?” In another note, she fretted about the oil and gas wells that were not being drilled in Texas, and the banks and savings and loans that were failing. “It’s more fun to be treasurer when there is a lot of money,” she wrote. “This job is turning out to be work.”

  When Ann was running for treasurer, the headline for a Third Coast magazine interview read: “Ann Richards Goes Statewide.” In an unsigned interview, the Austin-based magazine suggested that already a governor’s race might be in her future. The interviewer asked her to respond to the “liberal” label that was being applied to her. “That’s fine,” Ann said. “It doesn’t really matter to me.”

  The interviewer brought up the subject of her marriage. “You’ve been separated from your husband but coincidentally came to a reconciliation around the time you decided to run for statewide office.”

  Ann responded with her stock answer about not wanting to hang out at the Raw Deal anymore. “I wasn’t happy. It didn’t fit into my life. I no longer do things I don’t enjoy. And part of that is I don’t drink alcohol. I’d love to give up smoking.” She laughed and looked at the cigarette in her hand. “That’s my next goal.”

  The gist of the story came from this quote about her marriage and separation: “We didn’t have to come to a reconciliation, really. We had been married forever, you know, and I was very busy—preoccupied, working hard. David was off working hard at his own thing. And both of us, after several years of a kind of evolutionary process, felt we ought to have a shot at being individuals. David and Ann Richards were an institution—you know what I mean? If I thought one thing, David was supposed to think that, too. It was as if we couldn’t be ourselves—so we made the decision to live apart.”

  Texas Business ran a complimentary feature on the state treasurer, and then in February 1984 came a positively gushy story in Third Coast. Will van Overbeek shot the photograph of her grinning on the cover, the big-hair look evolving, though not yet into a helmet, with the caption “Ann Richards Laughing All the Way to the Bank.” The loving set of photos of her by Overbeek and David Stark led off inside with Roberta Starr’s text, and on another page was Stark’s photo in which she donned a black turtleneck, black hat, and a mask composed of black glasses and the Harry Porco pig snout. Ann had volunteered a sample performance: “I put big lights up in the parking lot to cut back on rape, but I told my girls, ‘Watch how you dress. Some women are just asking for it.’ I just love women. Take my ball and chain, Gladys. Some woman came to me wanting me to support her for state treasurer. You know, she was just as cute as a bug. Anyway, I looked at her and asked her, ‘Now, honey, why do you want to do something like this? Did you hate your daddy?’” (Years later, when Ann’s profile and the stakes were much higher, Vanity Fair contacted Stark with a request to publish the Harry Porco photo. He thought about it and declined—and received a handwritten note from Ann, expressing her gratitude.)

  And the parting with David was not as smooth as Ann implied in the Third Coast stories. “At the Treasury,” Mary Beth Rogers told me, “Ann and I had a door between our offices. She insisted on it—had a door cut through there. I thought, ‘Oh, god, I’ll never have any peace.’ But most of the time we left it open. That first year [after the election], David got a divorce lawyer and filed the papers. Somebody called Ann the day they were filed—she still had all those buddies down at the courthouse. And she called David and reamed him out. I got up at one point to close the door. She didn’t care. She was crying, she was screaming. ‘Who do you think I am, some shop girl at the dime store? You know, this’ll be in the paper tomorrow. You get what’s-his-name to go over there and pull those papers right now.’ And he did. So it never made the newspapers. They still had stuff to work out. . . . I think she was concerned about how the children’s trusts would be set up.”

  The end came when Ann’s lawyer filed the petition in August 1983. Ann went into the office one weekend and wrote her lawyer a letter that contained some questions about the settlement. In the division of property, the house on Red Bud Trail would go on the market. Ann would get a half interest in the building on West Seventh and the acreage of the camping retreat on the San Gabriel. Counting the separation, thirty years and seven months of marriage came down to a division of wealth and real estate.

  Ann wrote her lawyer: “This is being typed by my own poorly coordinated fingers on not-at-state-expense paper because I am a conscientious public servant. Please forgive.” She ran down a list of four monetary concerns and then the sad fifth one. “When the divorce is granted, when do we close out, signing the papers?” She feared it would be like a real estate closing. “Do I have to be present with David at that time? I do not choose to do so.”

  In December 1984, Ann returned to Europe with her friends Jane Hickie, Chula Reynolds, and Claire Korioth. Once back in Austin, she wrote to people to apologize because she and Betty McKool had not gotten out their Christmas cards that year (they never revived the popular ritual). “The election did make me feel as though a truck had run us down,” she wrote one friend, “and then backed over us for good measure, but I’ve bounced back. We have been beaten before and we will be again, but in the meantime we will have our share of victories.

  “I ju
st spent three weeks in Italy. It was a fantastic experience. The Rockefeller Foundation asked me to attend a conference of women from all over the world on population control. With my four kids, I’m hardly a good example, but I was pleased that I held my own with some pretty heavy duty folks.”

  On Treasury stationery, she wrote Bud Shrake after a silence between them of some months. He was off somewhere on a Sports Illustrated assignment or working on a book, as he always seemed to be.

  Dear Bud,

  If I had an address I would have written ages ago but I suppose it won’t hurt if this sits in the mail basket until you come home.

  I miss you.

  Ann

  Another day she spied a greeting card that seemed appropriate, and she sent it to him. The card’s cover read “Don’t Preach.” Inside: “I’m Perfectly Capable of Screwing Up My Own Life.” Under that she wrote: “And I’ve done a damned good job so far—but I must say that getting to spend time with you is a bonus I never counted on. For god’s sake let’s keep it up!”

  The notes between them often traveled inside one of the Far Side greeting cards by Gary Larson. One of hers read:

  Dear Bud,

  I had been on the lookout for a good-natured, rich man who wanted to take care of me. Problem is, they don’t come in that combination. There are a few who are borderline, but they want to talk and they want you to listen. This demand is a terminal liability since what they have to say is not worth listening to—even for a little bit. And since I am sober, I can’t even build a fantasy about how it might improve. Maybe there are some of the female gender and I’ve missed them but my best guess is that they don’t make them in either sex.

  Now—I have put the word out with the Texas Nurses Association that I am looking for one that will take minimal attention from me and for a short period of time, but who can still sign his name legibly. I can expand the call if you would like. I figure if they are rich enough, we can hire the “take care of” part.

  Jane Hickie has been working on a concept for years called “Curtains.” The idea is to start buying good retirement sites now and getting the Filipino houseboys trained. Well, obviously it will take a lot of planning. . . . If I stay in politics, I’ve decided to take a graduate degree in zoology. This [legislative] session has reinforced the need.

  Ann

  So there it was, she had said it—a joking suggestion that she might entertain notions of swinging both ways in her sexuality. More striking was her fear of being old and poor and not having anyone to “take care” of her. And the “if” in the last paragraph hinted that at least that day she was uncertain about her prospects, and that she might get out of politics should the right situation—and person—come along.

  CHAPTER 12

  Cheap Help

  My wife, Dorothy, had left the Texas Civil Liberties Union, and in the spring of 1985 she was job hunting. She had known Ann a long time, and finally she wrote her a shy, tentative letter. A call came back at once. Ann had spent a good portion of her life answering to her first name, Dorothy, and she had a particular way of pronouncing it. “Darthy!” is the closest I can come to spelling it. “Come over here,” she commanded.

  Dorothy told her that the only thing she knew about the Treasury was that she, Ann, was the treasurer. “Oh, hush,” Ann said. “You can do anything you set your mind to.” She had Dorothy set up appointments to talk to Mary Beth Rogers and Suzanne Coleman; Dorothy was uncertain how well those meetings went. “Darthy,” Ann told her in a follow-up, “I need somebody handling my correspondence that knows who Maury Maverick is.” By that, she meant someone who had a sense of history, the state’s and the country’s and her own. She also wanted someone drafting letters who had a clue about what her voice sounded like. One youngster given the task had written a long letter expounding on the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, and somehow that went out above her signature.

  “And I need someone rounding up people we have here doing research on various things that affect the Treasury,” Ann said. “Can you do both of those things?”

  Dorothy blinked and said she didn’t know.

  “Sure you can,” Ann said, grinning. “You’ll like it here, Darthy. We’re gonna teach you all about money.”

  And so the bawdy woman who had commanded my attention at a bridge party in the house of Fletcher and Libby Boone entered my life in a continuing way. Dorothy downplayed her skill as a writer, keeping the letters short—seldom more than three or four sentences. But it was uncanny how much they sounded like her boss. Treasury employees worked hard, with Ann inspiring and driving them, many days well into the dark. When I was traveling for my work, Dorothy would pick up my stepdaughter Lila and take her back to the office with her homework. Ann liked to work in her stocking feet, and they got to where they could hear her padding down the hall, a letter in her hand. Dorothy came home one night marveling that Ann had been talking about some complex fiscal policy as she pulled out a needle and a spool of thread from a desk drawer and stitched up a runner in her panty hose.

  Soul sisters: Ann as state treasurer greets county-western singing legend and new friend Dolly Parton in Austin, about 1983.

  Ann and David had sold the house on Red Bud Trail in the divorce settlement, and she bought a smaller one near the university, its porch and front windows looking out on some popular tennis courts and a handsome greenbelt along Lamar Boulevard and Shoal Creek. The first Christmas after Dorothy went to work at the Treasury, Ann had an after-work party at her house for members of her staff and their families. Everyone who came through the door was given a pair of white spongy reindeer antlers with a chin strap. Watching people like Mary Beth Rogers, Suzanne Coleman, and Nancy Cannon, I put the thing on my head because everyone else was wearing them, including the treasurer. It was odd watching people converse and move through the house, their antlers bobbing and weaving. Ann called us all into the living room, told us to take a seat if we could find one, and with grand flourishes, like a teacher directing a grade-school class, she led us singing, “On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . .” What an entertainer! She didn’t flub a line.

  During that year, something terrible happened to two families and many sets of friends, and it spelled the end of the Austin tradition called First Friday. Sam Whitten had been diagnosed with lung cancer, the treatment punished him, and in January 1986 he didn’t survive a surgery. Virginia and her children asked David to deliver one of the eulogies at the funeral in a Methodist church, and they asked Ann to deliver another. That time Ann didn’t ask for help from any of the gifted writers on her staff. She composed the eulogy on a typewriter, making many mistakes, having never mastered those tricks with her fingers. Ann had made countless speeches by then, but both in words and delivery, this one was more heartfelt than any of the ones she had made about government and politics or in humorous roasts of important people in her new milieu. It was her first masterpiece.

  Well, Sam Whitten was a dancing fool. He would arch that skinny back, wing out his arms, flash that smile, and his feet would step off into a life of their own. No wonder Virginia was in love. Who could resist that sailor boy in his crisp white bell-bottoms jitterbugging through “Tuxedo Junction.” I can still see him twirling Jill under his arm at Lynn’s wedding.

  But Sam hated all forms of physical activity except dancing. David said, as a friend, you knew Sam would do anything in the world for you, but he wasn’t worth a damn when you had a flat tire. . . .

  But he was a great listener. He loved conversation and he loved company. I would come back from a long campaign trip and Sam would rush to the door and as he saw me coming up the walk he would cry out, “Come in this house!” as if I were the person he most wanted to see in the world. And he would listen to my tale of woe or joy never really demanding more than I just keep talking.

  It was that insatiable love of good talk that made Sam tolerate camping—and other forms of outdoor carryings on. . . . He froze in the winter. Bundled and s
crunched up into a fold on his camp chair by the fire, he would mutter, “Why are we doing this?” But another song from Wayne Oakes or a jig from Mary Holman would jolly him.

  Always the last one to bed, he would crawl in the car, because he refused to sleep on the ground. Once, Virginia, who always did the driving, parked the station wagon on a slant. The next morning Sam complained bitterly that he’d been forced to sleep with his feet above his head and everything he’d drunk the night before ran to his brain. This condition was known as the Sam Whitten flu . . .

  Sam is such a sudden and irreplaceable loss to so many of us. He and Virginia, through their First Fridays, helped us develop and preserve a circle of friends that spans generations. It was not unusual to find three generations of the same family at First Fridays, sometimes four. And he adored being at the center of all that. Because Sam loved each of us, too. We were all a part of Sam’s family, after a time.

  All politics is local, the old saw goes. Ann often made day trips around the state, and she was annoyed that when she passed the Treasury’s offices on her way back home from the airport, all the lights were turned on. She complained of that one day to her developer friend Gary Bradley. The nemesis of Austin environmentalists told her that the wasteful lighting problem was easy to fix, and he could save the state some money. It was a motion-activated light switch that turned the lights off when, after a reasonable interval, no one moved. Bradley bought and sold Ann a batch of them, and the American-Statesman found out. The drift of the coverage was that Ann had done Bradley a covert financial favor when she should have put the job out for bids. Good grief, Ann reacted, but she had learned one more lesson about the press.