The Kings of Big Spring

by Bryan Mealer

  In Scottsdale, their very own senator, Barry Goldwater, was the man carrying the torch for their swelling movement. The conservatives had wanted Goldwater in 1960 but got Nixon instead. They were mad when Barry refused to fight for the nomination on the convention floor, and even angrier when Nixon lost to Kennedy and flung the cause into obscurity. But Goldwater remained a conservative hero into JFK’s term, “the favorite son of a state of mind,” as Fortune put it.

  Frances loved Goldwater and felt he was the only hope for a country facing its demise: from Kennedy bungling the Bay of Pigs and letting Castro make us look weak to the United States going head to head with Khrushchev and skidding to the brink of annihilation. Goldwater wouldn’t pussyfoot around with communists and he took the Constitution at its word, believing the Civil Rights Act ran roughshod all over it. But to back Barry meant you were part of the total movement. So that spring Frances helped the Scottsdale Republican Women get other conservatives on the ticket, including a local lawyer named John Conlan who was running for Congress.

  Frances worked closely with Conlan, canvassing signatures to put him on the ballot, then manning the telephones to raise money and votes. The campaign put her in close contact with wealthy people in Phoenix who threw lavish fund-raisers. The fact that Conlan was a former army captain with a law degree from Harvard, and handsome to boot, made Tommy burn with jealousy. One evening Frances returned from a big gala to find Tommy piping mad. “Were you with Conlan?” he demanded to know. And when Frances answered yes, he smacked her so hard it left her face numb.

  In November 1964, LBJ pummeled Goldwater in a landslide, but Conlan got elected. So did many other conservatives across the country, and that was enough to keep Frances pushing for the cause. In 1967, she became a delegate for Phyllis Schlafly’s bid to lead the National Federation of Republican Women and traveled to Washington for the convention. Schlafly had written the book A Choice Not an Echo, which had galvanized the Goldwater movement and made her a cult hero among conservatives, including Frances. Schlafly ended up losing to a more moderate candidate, but she and Frances became friends. Later, Frances helped her mobilize housewives to take down the Equal Rights Amendment when it came up for congressional approval. In 1967, she also went to work for Goldwater’s successful Senate reelection campaign. Frances was a demon on the telephones, so much so that Goldwater presented her with a gold pendant in the shape of a rotary phone, one of her most prized possessions.

  But her biggest project came the following year. In reaction to the mounting protests over the Vietnam War, to seeing crowds booing returning servicemen and calling them names, Frances started writing letters to soldiers and recruited other housewives. “We are launching [this] campaign with the belief that our gratitude and support is much more effective than marching in the streets,” she told the Arizona Republic.

  After the story ran, hundreds of people began calling her house asking for names and addresses of soldiers, and Frances always had a ready list. Goldwater then encouraged her to start doing “talking letters” where people recorded messages on tape and sent them to boys overseas. Soon her kitchen table was a mess of wires and recording equipment, with strangers coming and going. It was during all of this that Tommy started staying out all night. “I slept at the office,” he’d say, but Frances knew this was a lie because she’d hired a detective. Tommy not only had a mistress but he was keeping her in a rented house. The most devastating part of the news was that her brothers Leamon and John knew about it and never said a word.

  Frances kicked Tommy out and filed for divorce. While their daughters reeled from the breakup—one requiring counseling and another plagued by violent nightmares—Frances circled her wagons and focused on being a good mother. After Goldwater sent a letter expressing sympathy and support, she pressed on with the yeoman’s work of the cause—knocking on more doors, making more calls, registering voters. The cause is what kept her sane, and in the ground game there was but one objective: she was out to save America.

  5

  Hollywood comes to Big Spring … Preston goes to ’Nam … Bobby slips out of reach …

  By 1968, the war in Vietnam had killed over a dozen young men from Big Spring. But if news of Preston being drafted had any impact on Bobby, who was fifteen, he doesn’t remember. His brother barely acknowledged his existence, and the feeling was mutual. Besides, Bobby had problems of his own.

  Marie was running around on him with another guy from church. His name was Steve, and people said he had a wild streak wider than Ronnie’s. Steve had waited until the Wednesday night service when Bobby was working to ask Marie out, and she’d told him yes.

  Already, she’d been giving off strange electricity. Bobby feared she might be drifting, so the previous weekend, he’d sprung for steaks at Herman’s to try and see where he stood. Marie wore the necklace he’d given her for her birthday, which put him at ease, plus the expensive bracelet he’d bought for her. Half of every paycheck from the grocery store disappeared trying to make her happy. And how did she choose to thank him? By going out with Steve the very next week.

  One of his friends saw them together that Saturday night. Bobby had driven around for hours trying to collect his wits, trying to decide if he ought to confront Steve and bust his nose. But that was too risky, he decided, because what if Steve really was wild?

  He had to do something, so he drove to the cemetery and stole a big floral wreath off one of the tombstones, along with some flowers, and waited until the following night when Marie and her family were at church. He hung the wreath on their front door, scattered the flowers on the porch, and scrawled a note in big red letters that read STEVE’S FUNERAL!! When he asked Marie about it the next day, all she did was roll her eyes.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1968, Bob and Opal found a two-bedroom house near the corner of Eighteenth and Main and for the first time in their lives signed a mortgage. From the front yard, they could look north along Main Street and see the town dip into the valley, where the Hotel Settles rose proudly. As a boy I would come to know the house’s every crack and corner.

  Unfortunately, it had sat vacant for years and needed a lot of work. Cardboard closets had to be ripped from the wall and framed out properly. The kitchen needed new cabinets and the whole house had to have a new ceiling. Opal assigned these tasks to Bob, without much success. However capable he was with dump trucks and drilling rigs, he couldn’t seem to cut a straight line into wood and power tools ceased to function in his hands. To make matters worse, he was short on patience. He would fly into a rage and pitch his tools against the wall, screaming so loudly that Opal had to close the windows. Once when Bobby was helping him fix the washing machine, Bob grew so frustrated that he ripped it from its plumbing, pushed it all the way to the back door, then kicked it down the steps, shouting, “Dat-burn piece of garage sale crap!”

  Opal then enlisted Zelda’s Charlie for the home improvements, and slowly the work got accomplished. The house still needed a fresh coat of paint, but Bob wouldn’t pay for it. Then, in late July, Opal saw a story in the Herald about a Hollywood film crew coming to town. They were looking to hire local talent, in particular, “rodeo-type performers, gospel singers, a 45–50 year old Negro male musician, boys 19–24 years old, and a blond man, six foot one or two.” The movie was called Midnight Cowboy. Those interested needed to call Mr. Michael Childers at the Ramada Inn for an appointment.

  Gospel singers, Opal thought, then picked up the telephone.

  The paper described the film as “a late western,” in which a young man leaves his small Texas town “in search of love and success” in New York City. British director John Schlesinger had driven five thousand miles across Texas looking for the ideal location for the character’s childhood home before deciding on Big Spring. He also chose nearby Stanton for a few scenes.

  For three weeks in August 1968, cameras and set crews, along with fleets of production and catering vehicles, took over the downtown streets. I
n the now-classic opening montage, a young Joe Buck, played by Jon Voight, leaves home dressed like Hopalong Cassidy and heads down Fourth Street clutching a cow-pattern suitcase. After quitting his dishwashing job at Miller’s Pig Stand, he boards a bus for Manhattan and the town fades in the distance.

  The production hired dozens of locals to play extras. The scene for which Opal was hired involved Joe Buck being baptized in a lake. Opal and about forty others spent the morning at Moss Creek, east of town, singing hymns along the bank. At the end of the day, she collected her twenty-five dollars and bought a trunk load of key-lime paint, feeling pretty proud of herself.

  Of course, nobody told Opal or anyone else what really happened to Joe Buck once he reached New York City, how he became a male prostitute. That was revealed the following year when Midnight Cowboy hit theaters carrying an X rating, which the Motion Picture Association issued due to the film’s “homosexual frame of reference.” People in town were scandalized and felt betrayed.

  Schlesinger had suspected as much. Shortly before the crew pulled out of West Texas, Voight found the director alone in his trailer. He was flushed and trembling all over, in the grips of an anxiety attack. Voight suspected he was dying.

  “What have we done?” Schlesinger said. “What will they think of us?”

  Thinking fast, Voight replied, “John, we will live the rest of our artistic lives in the shadow of this great masterpiece,” and he was correct. That year the film dominated the Academy Awards, taking Best Picture and Best Director. Harry Nilsson, who sang “Everybody’s Talkin’” over the opening montage, also won a Grammy.

  But the accolades of the secular world did not impress Grandma Cora and the congregation at First Assembly, several of whom had been tricked into participating. It would take years for Opal to live down her role, even though she appears for only a split second. The choir’s songs ended up muffled in the background anyway, denying the world her magnificent voice.

  * * *

  One of the people to come out publicly in support of Midnight Cowboy was Bobby’s friend Grady Cunningham, who, at sixteen years old, worked as an usher at the downtown Ritz Theater. In November 1969, he penned an editorial in the Herald defending the R- and X-rated films the town’s moral majority were in the habit of protesting, such as Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, pointing out that church people usually made up a good portion of the audiences.

  Grady was taller now, yet pudgy still, and, like Bobby, wore his hair down to the shoulders. And also like Bobby, he’d become aware of the greater world outside of Big Spring and didn’t much like his family’s place in it. But it wasn’t poverty that irritated Grady, because his parents weren’t poor. It was their commonness. It was his father coming home day after day from the same job to sit in the same chair to be served the same suppers, forever until death, and his sisters marrying men he saw as no different. To him, his family seemed content with being invisible, and it made Grady want to live as loudly as possible. To be admired. To be known as a person of consequence.

  * * *

  Ever since starting at the Ritz, Grady had come to admire its owner, Ike Robb, whose family was revered throughout town. Since the early part of the century, the Robbs had built an empire of movie houses across New Mexico and West Texas and acquired vast holdings of property. In Big Spring alone, Ike’s father, J. Y. Robb, had owned and operated over a half-dozen theaters over the years while keeping his hand in civic affairs.

  During high school, young Ike had garnered his own fame as a standout defensive guard on the Big Spring Steers, lauded by the Herald as “fast, aggressive, and with a football heart.” He later played for SMU, earning a spot on the All-Southwest Conference team before returning home to work the family business.

  In the late fifties, as Big Spring’s population soared from the air base and refinery, Ike’s father ceded most of the theater operations to his son and turned his energies toward land development, in particular a project at the base of South Mountain, a large bluff on the southern end of town. Robb had purchased 960 acres from the T&P for a high-end subdivision he called Highland South—“Big Spring’s Most Desirable Living Area,” as described in its ads. The development would cater to Big Spring’s new upper class: air force officers and Cosden executives, along with the bankers, lawyers, and wildcatters who’d grown rich in the recent boom. Highland South would feature spacious lots for family homes, plus apartments, a park for the kids, even an eighty-acre lake. But sadly, in February 1960, even before the bulldozers moved in, J. Y. Robb’s health declined and he died.

  Ike carried on his father’s vision. By the early sixties, giant homes were going up in Highland South and lots were in demand. Along one of its cul-de-sacs, at the bottom of a craggy cliff, Ike built a dream house of his own: a two-story ranch with a second-floor office that featured a built-in movie projector and screen where his staff could preview films before they played at the theater. As Grady sat watching Love Story and The Hawaiians, he knew what he wanted.

  By then, people in Big Spring regarded Ike Robb—like they did Tollett—as a pillar of community life. He sat on the board at State National Bank, served as Chamber of Commerce president, and raised money for the YMCA, among other charities. In 1964, the city had honored him with its Outstanding Man of the Year award.

  Grady deeply admired what Robb’s family had built, and over time he began to see Ike as both a mentor and a person to emulate. The only thing was, Grady had an issue he didn’t know how to resolve, one that could easily thwart his ambitions.

  He was still attracted to men. Lately, he’d gotten into the habit of driving to the city park to meet them. He did this mostly at night, though he’d gone there in the daylight, too. He parked his car outside the stone bathrooms and waited alone inside, moonlight pouring through the window, until he heard the sound of car wheels and the crunch of footsteps. The consequences of being caught soliciting gay sex in a small town went unstated. At that same park, gay men had been dragged out and beaten. One man was pushed into the bushes and stabbed.

  But Grady was young and careless, and during one of his visits, someone from school must have driven past and recognized his car. Now people were talking about him in the halls.

  The one place where Grady found sanctuary was the Ritz. He strove to impress his boss, and his enthusiasm earned him a reputation as a little despot. Each shift, Grady patrolled the dark aisles like a mother superior, aiming his flashlight at anyone who violated his own code. Talking, even whispering, drew an instant reprimand. But he appeared to take special pleasure in punishing young couples drawn to the privacy of the balcony. He’d find them kissing and shoot his spotlight into their faces, then hiss for all to hear, “Up! Out!” The more popular the kids, the better: the sons of oilmen and bankers who spent their Christmases in Colorado, their summers at the lake; the football players and their cheerleader dates—the ones he suspected of mocking him behind his back. These people enjoyed no immunity on his watch.

  Whenever Bobby heard rumors about Grady, he wanted to curl up and disappear. Part of him was nervous. What if people remembered that he and Grady were friends? What if they concocted some kind of lie? This made him terrified of being seen with Grady, made him want to smash his chubby face every time he shouted “Bobby Gaylon!” in the hallways like some deranged game show host. With Grady, there was always an act. If Bobby saw Grady first, he’d turn and walk the other way. His flimsy social standing would never survive that association.

  But what people didn’t know was that Grady still came around the house. He showed up on weekends dressed in his shirt and bow tie, acting like he and Bobby had never lost a step. Bob still called him Sister Grady, and Grady still did his preacher routine to make Opal laugh, grabbing Bobby by the forehead in a death grip of prayer.

  During these visits, Grady rhapsodized about the prospect of being rich like Ike Robb, even saying things like, “One day when I’m rich…” But he never said how he planned on making his money. He’d sta
rted entering Publishers Clearing House and other sweepstakes, mailing away envelopes full of stamps for a chance to win a house, a new car, or tens of thousands of dollars. One afternoon he even switched on the electric adding machine that Bob kept on the breakfast bar, right next to his ledger, and started punching numbers. Opal asked what he was doing.

  “Counting,” Grady told her.

  “Counting what?”

  “The number of days I have to work at the Ritz until I’m a millionaire.”

  * * *

  Like everyone at school, Bobby’s girlfriend Marie was put off by Grady—by his ill-fitting clothes, his wild red hair. Marie didn’t understand why Bobby stayed friends with him.

  “He’s so shabby,” she said. “I don’t know what on earth you see in him. You’re just loyal, I guess.”

  He was loyal, and it was his cross to bear, especially with Marie. After he’d left the funeral wreath on her door, she’d apologized for trampling on his heart and he’d forgiven her, only to find out later that she’d kissed another guy.

  But for the moment, anyway, things were good with Marie. Lately they’d started double-dating with her brother Ronnie and Merlee, who was Marie’s best friend from church. The four of them piled into Ronnie’s GTO and the girls rolled their skirts a little higher once they were out of their father’s houses.

  They dragged Third and Fourth Streets and stopped at the Wagon Wheel to have a hamburger. The night usually ended with them making out at South Mountain, Marie and Bobby in back, Ronnie and Merlee up front. Merlee was a good girl who didn’t round the bases, not that it mattered to Ronnie. He knew plenty of girls who would. In fact, Ronnie had even started sleeping with a married woman. The problem was that she was a member of their church.

  Marie knew about the affair, and so did Bobby and Merlee, and the stress of holding such a secret gave Marie an ulcer. How their father discovered the affair, nobody knows for sure, but by August 1969, Ronnie was gone. His parents put him on a bus to Waxahachie, hoping he’d meet a God-fearing woman who could set him straight. Within a year, he’d met his first wife.