God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (22 page)

When I visited the capitol in January 2017, a group of high school girls stood on a terrazzo mosaic in the middle of the rotunda. In the center was the seal of the Republic of Texas, a lone star wreathed by branches of olive and live oak. “It’s two hundred and eighteen feet from this star to the one above,” a guide told them, gesturing to its mate on the ceiling of the dome high above the girls. “You could fit the Statue of Liberty in here.” Around the Republic of Texas seal are those of the five other nations that Texas has been part of—Spain, France, Mexico, the United States, and the Confederacy.

The walls of the rotunda are ringed with portraits of our former governors. When Greg Abbott, our current governor, leaves office, his portrait will go where Perry’s is now, and those of all the previous governors will take one step to the left. When a portrait gets to the end of the ground-floor circle, it rises to the wall of the floor above, and then higher and higher and further into obscurity.

The next portrait to make the ascent from the lobby floor is that of W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel. In some respects, O’Daniel, a Democrat, was a precursor of Donald Trump. He was a political naïf who had never even cast a ballot when he ran for governor in 1938, and he wasn’t even eligible to vote for himself because he hadn’t paid his poll tax. He passed himself off as a rube, but he was actually a savvy operator. He was a flour salesman who made a fortune in Fort Worth real estate, but he found his true métier when he began hosting a radio show with his band, the Light Crust Doughboys. It became the most popular show in the state. Radio was his Twitter. When his opponents staged a rally, sometimes hundreds might attend, but O’Daniel spoke to tens of thousands. Nothing like that had ever happened in Texas before. In his first race, he defeated eleven contenders without a runoff.

As governor, he reneged on the promises he had made to abolish the death penalty, block the sales tax, and raise pensions. His only real political platform was to stir things up. He was a scaremonger, railing against “Communistic labor-leader racketeers” and politically controlled newspapers. He was terribly ineffectual, but such a wonderful showman that, in 1941, voters elected him to the U.S. Senate over the young Lyndon Johnson. The portrait of O’Daniel in the rotunda shows a handsome, full-faced man with slicked-back hair and a “Who, me?” look in his eye.

Next to him is Coke Stevenson, whose steadfast demeanor was so much appreciated that he served longer than any other governor until Rick Perry. He was succeeded by Beauford Jester, whom I once described as “the last happy man to govern Texas.” He died in the arms of his mistress on the midnight sleeper to Houston.

Of all the governors on the rotunda wall, Ann Richards, who served from 1991 to 1995, is the most memorable, at least in my lifetime. She was incredibly vivid, with that stark white hair swept and sprayed into a blinding pompadour—Molly Ivins called it “hard hair”—and a switchblade sense of humor that was honed on the primitive male chauvinism she had grown up with. She became a national figure when she gave the keynote address at the 1988 Democratic convention. “Poor George,” she said of the Republican nominee, George H. W. Bush, “he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” She wasn’t nice, but she had a wonderful smile and batted those icy blue eyes when she stuck the knife in.

She was a recovering alcoholic and a single mother of four, so her rise to governor was a near miracle. Although she had been a successful state treasurer, her wealthy opponent, West Texas rancher and oilman Clayton Williams Jr., won the Republican primary in a landslide and was ahead by 30 points when the general election began. He blew that lead with a series of character-revealing gaffes. He told reporters that rape was like inclement weather: “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.” He had to fight off persistent rumors that he had invited his ranch hands and clients to join in “honey hunts,” which involved scattering prostitutes on his property like Easter eggs. But Williams still held a commanding lead in the polls when he met Richards at a forum in Dallas. She stuck out her hand and said, “Hello, Claytie.” He declined the gesture, violating the cowboy code that is deeply ingrained in every Texan. In that instant, Williams lost the election.

Richards wore designer suits but picked her teeth, and she cleaned her fingernails with a Swiss Army knife. I think she was always a little amazed, after storming the ramparts, to find herself in the seat of power, but she cherished the comedy of the situation. Molly once told me that when the ACLU filed suit against a manger scene in the capitol, she called Governor Richards and asked, “Annie, is it really necessary to remove the crèche?”

“I’m afraid so,” Richards replied, “and it’s a shame because it’s about the only time we ever had three wise men in the capitol.”

Richards had the most amazing drawl—a weapon that could be devastatingly comic, but with a cut-the-crap edge to it. She was a flirt and she loved dirty jokes. Once we had a fundraiser for a mutual friend in the ballroom of the Four Seasons. The writer Kinky Friedman, who is also the lead singer of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, seized the opportunity to tell the story of going to the beach with a family friend who wore a swimsuit that was so tight it squeezed one of his balls into view. It’s not so funny when I tell it, but Richards was laughing so hard she could barely stay in her chair.

Despite the state’s super-religious reputation, there has always been a tolerance for sexual misdemeanors on the part of elected officials. Charlie Wilson, the U.S. representative from the Second District, in East Texas, one of the most conservative parts of the state, was a drunk, a drug user, and the most energetic playboy on Capitol Hill, who enjoyed lounging in hot tubs with showgirls and cocaine. He was elected to twelve terms.

The tolerance for sexual liberty didn’t extend to Richards, however. She had surrounded herself with a coterie of very powerful women, which led to countless innuendos and slurs about her sexual orientation. She complained to a lobbyist I know, “I could be fucking Charlie Wilson on Sam Houston’s bed, and they’d still call me a lesbian.”

Richards’s loss, in 1994, after a single term, to George W. Bush, marked the end of the Democratic Party as a force of any consequence in the state.

This obsession with California really puzzles me. I play keyboards in a blues band, WhoDo, and our drummer has a sticker on his kit saying Stop Californication of Texas Music. The mayor of Austin, Steve Adler, a Democrat, warned that if our city stays on its current path, “we’ll end up like San Francisco,” with out-of-control housing costs. The newspapers often feature gloating stories about how many Californians are fleeing to Texas (eight per day to Austin alone), as an indication of the vast superiority of the Texas way of life; but if Texas could snatch away Hollywood, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, the California university system, the climate, the mountains, and the celebrities, I think the state would put up with a few more plastic-bag bans.

I love being in California for many reasons, but as a Texan I sometimes bridle at the elite disdain and raw contempt that Californians express toward my state. They reverse the sentiments you hear in Texas, like Greg Abbott speaking into a mirror. Historically, the two states act as a political seesaw. Texas was as blue as the cloudless sky in the first half of the twentieth century, when California was as red as a beet. The defining political figures of our time—Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan—emerged from these opposing political climates, shaping the country and changing the world. The fact that America can contain two such assertive, contrary forces as Texas and California is a testament to our political dynamism, but more and more I feel that America is being compelled to make a choice between the models these states embody. Under the Trump administration, Texas is clearly the winning archetype. The wave of conservatism that has rolled through so many statehouses and the three branches of the federal government makes the entire country look a lot more like Texas.

It’s not just the politics; the mentality and lifestyles of Texas and California are foreign to each other. They are alike, however, in their conformity. I had a liberal friend who moved from Texas to California. A few years later, I asked her what living there was like. “It’s confusing,” she said. “I’ve never lived in a place where everybody agrees with me.”

In 2013, I had a play,
Fallaci,
produced at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Berkeley and Austin are often thought to be political cognates—Austin being the “Berkeley of Texas.” I think this is a stretch. Once, while I was walking to rehearsals in Berkeley, I passed a woman who had an energetic Chihuahua on a leash. The dog’s paws were skittering all over the pavement as it strained to race ahead. As I passed by, the woman was instructing the Chihuahua, “Moderation, moderation.”

In Austin, we don’t have such high expectations of Chihuahuas.