The Path to Power (55 page)

But if Lady Bird Taylor would make such statements later, she made no statements then; the determination and ambition were well concealed. Despite the “unlimited” charge account her father had opened for her at Neiman-Marcus, she still dressed in flat-heeled, sensible shoes, very plain, and in plain dresses, too big, and of colors so drab that they seemed deliberately chosen to avoid calling attention to herself. During her years in Austin, her only coat was an old coat of her Aunt Effie’s.

She was still, as one observer was to put it later, “no glamour girl.” If her high school classmates remember a plain girl, almost dowdy in appearance, her college classmates remember a plain young woman. And her battle against shyness sometimes seemed to be a losing one. She had acquired a friend, Emma Boehringer’s older sister, Eugenia. “Gene made me feel important for the first time,” Lady Bird says. “She was one of those tremendously outgoing people who made everyone around her feel a little more alive. … I am a friendlier, more confident person today because of Gene.” But Gene herself didn’t observe much—if any—confidence in her friend. As for Lady Bird’s appearance, after attempting in vain to get her to buy more attractive clothes, Gene called her, in exasperation, “stingy.” Gene worked for C. V. Terrell, who, as chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, was bus inspector Sam Johnson’s boss, and Sam had introduced the vivacious, pretty young woman to his son Lyndon. She had turned down his request for a date, but they stayed friends, and in September, 1934, passing through Austin on his way to Washington from Corpus Christi, Johnson telephoned Gene and asked her to get him a blind date, and she did, with Dorothy McElroy, who also worked in Terrell’s office. Lady Bird dropped by to talk to Gene that afternoon, and when Johnson arrived to pick up Dorothy, she was there. Lyndon already knew, through Gene, who Lady Bird was; he quietly asked her to meet him for breakfast the next morning in the coffee shop of the Driskill Hotel. She says she didn’t plan to, but she was in Austin to consult with an architect about remodeling the Brick House, the architect’s office was next to the Driskill, and as she passed the coffee shop, she saw Lyndon sitting at a table at its window. As he realized she wasn’t planning to join him, he frantically waved at her until she did. Then he took her for a drive. On it, he first showered her with questions (“I never heard so many questions; he really wanted to find out all about me”), and then—this man whose “mind could follow another mind around and get there before it did”—with answers, answers, as she puts it, to “questions that hadn’t been asked. … He told me all sorts of things
I thought were extraordinarily direct for a first conversation”—about “his ambitions,” how he was determined to become somebody, and was already well on his way as secretary to a Congressman, a Congressman who was, moreover, a Kleberg, about “his salary … how much insurance he had … his family. It was just as if he was ready to give me a picture of his life and what he might be capable of doing.” And then, on this, their first date, he asked her to marry him.

“I thought it was some kind of joke,” she recalls. But she was impressed. “He was excessively thin, but very, very good-looking, with lots of black wavy hair, and the most outspoken, straightforward, determined manner I had ever encountered.” And he was insistent. The next day he took her to meet his parents, and spoke as though she were already in the family. (Bird’s eyes were sharp; describing her first meeting with Lyndon’s father, she said, “I felt sorry for him. It was obvious that he had been a vigorous, roaring personality once. Now he had a job—a poor-paying one—only because someone remembered him from back when.” Asked if she felt any competitiveness between father and son, she said, “I felt the competitiveness
had
existed” once, but no longer; by the time she met Sam Johnson, she says, “He was an old and ill man, old and ill before his time.” As for Lyndon’s mother, “As soon as you met them, you were aware that she was a lady. It was obvious that Lyndon just loved her greatly, and I felt drawn to her, and yet I felt like patting her on the shoulder and saying I wasn’t going to harm this son on whom she had pinned so many hopes. … I just felt like saying, ‘Don’t you worry.’ I had no intention at that time of getting married.” Bird also says that “The house was extremely modest. It was obvious that she had done what she could to make it prettier, had bought some furniture and nice bedspreads, but it was extremely modest. Lyndon knew it, and knew I knew it, and was kind of watching me look at it. But he was intensely proud of his family.”) He took her to the King Ranch, and she was
very
impressed by that feudal empire, telling her friends later that it was so big that the Klebergs and their retainers used compasses the way other men used watches. And Grandma Kleberg took her aside, and, in her gruff way, told her that Lyndon was a fine young man and that she should marry him. When, a week after they had met, he had to leave for Washington, she invited him and his traveling companion, Malcolm Bardwell, Maury Maverick’s secretary, to stop over for a night at the Brick House, which was on the way. Edgy over the impression he would make, Johnson exploded with embarrassment the morning after they arrived when Bardwell appeared downstairs in his pajamas. “He told me, ‘I’m going to marry this girl. You’re going to ruin my marriage if you run around this way.’” But the man whose opinions counted in the Brick House was not one to be put off by
déshabille
. Ruth Taylor, whom Cap’n Taylor was to marry not long thereafter, says that “My husband liked Lyndon from the
first. Both were much alike. Both were big men physically. Both were work-minded and always in a hurry.” Says Lady Bird: “I could tell that Daddy was right impressed with him. After dinner, he said in a quiet moment, ‘Daughter, you’ve been bringing home a lot of boys. This time, you’ve brought a man.’” Before Lyndon drove off for Washington, he asked her to marry him, and again she demurred, but kissed him before they parted (which led a scandalized neighbor to shout at Johnson: “Don’t do that! Hurry up, go on—or the Ku Klux Klan will get you!”). Bird was shortly to tell a friend, “I have never felt this way before.” Describing her feelings, she says, “I knew I had met something remarkable, but I didn’t know quite what. … I had a queer sort of moth-and-flame feeling.”

A
FTER JOHNSON ARRIVED
back in Washington, Latimer and Jones received what they regarded as the surest possible sign that his intentions were serious. His morning routine had always been inflexible. “He always had this invariable rhythm,” which nothing had ever been permitted to interrupt, Latimer says. “First he would do the mail, then go in the bathroom and go through the newspapers, and dictate to L.E. …” Now, however, after he did the mail, he would go not into the bathroom but into Kleberg’s private office, shutting the door behind him and sitting down to compose a daily letter to this young woman with the funny nickname whom he had met down in Austin. Latimer, who was to work for Johnson so long, says that during the early years of his career “that was the only time he ever got out of that rhythm—that one time, getting off that letter to Bird. The one and only time.”

He took a lot of care with those letters. Finishing a draft, he would summon Latimer, the brilliant letter writer, for corrections, “asking about the spelling and should there be a comma, or was that a dangling participle. He’d say, ‘You know, Bird’s got a journalism degree.’”

He was as insistent on a fast decision in his letters as in person. He assured her of his ambition (“My dear Bird, This morning I’m ambitious, proud, energetic and very madly in love with you—I want to see people—want to walk thru’ the throngs—want to do things with a drive …”) and pressed her for an affirmative response to his suit (“I see something I
know
I
want
—I
immediately exert efforts
to get it—I do or I don’t but I try and do my best. … You see something you
might
want … You tear it to pieces in an effort to determine if you should want it … Then you … conclude that maybe the desire isn’t an ‘everlasting’ one and that the ‘sane’ thing to do is to wait a year or so …”). He assured her of his interest in the cultural matters so important to her (“Every interesting place I see I make a mental reservation and tell myself that I shall take you there when you are mine. I want to go through the Museum, the Congressional Library,
the Smithsonian, the Civil War battlefields and all of those most interesting places …”), and pressed (“Why must we wait twelve long months to begin to do the things we want to do forever and ever?”).

And she responded, writing of the interests she evidently had been led to believe they would share. “Dearest: I’ve been reading
Early Autumn
[by Louis Bromfield] and am enthralled. If we were together, I’d read it to you. … There’s nothing I’d like better than being comfortable in a nice cozy place and reading something amusing or well-written or interesting, to someone I like. All good things are better shared, aren’t they?”

He was also telephoning her almost daily, and early in November, she recalls, “when we were on the phone from Washington, we decided he would come down and we would decide if we would” get engaged. The next day, to her shock, the Ford roadster pulled up the rutted driveway—he had driven from Washington to Karnack without stopping, “and had gotten to my father’s at least twenty-four hours before I was expecting it. I hadn’t gotten the house quite ready, and I hadn’t been to the beauty parlor.” No sooner had he arrived than he began arguing, in her words, “Let’s go on and get married, not next year … but about two weeks from now, a month from now, or right away.”

She agreed to let him buy her an engagement ring—they drove together the 300 miles to Austin to pick one out together—but when, in the jewelry store, he proposed buying a matching wedding ring, she refused to allow him to do so. She wouldn’t make any decision without going to Alabama and talking to Aunt Effie. “She had concentrated all her life and all her love on me, and I just knew that I had to go and see her.” She took the trip while Lyndon drove to Corpus Christi, and her aunt was appalled that Bird would even consider marrying a man she had known less than two months. But when she returned to Karnack, there in the driveway of the Brick House was the Ford roadster, and when she reported Effie’s reaction, her father said, “If you wait until Aunt Effie is ready, you will never marry anyone,” and added, “Some of the best deals are made in a hurry.” She said she wanted to ask Gene Boehringer’s advice, but Lyndon insisted on accompanying her to Austin, and hardly had they started driving when he issued an ultimatum: “We either get married now or we never will. And if you say goodbye to me, it just proves to me that you just don’t love me enough to dare to. And I just can’t bear to go on and keep wondering if it will ever happen.” When she agreed to get married at once, she says, he let out a “Texas yip” that she was sure could be heard in the next county.

The engagement lasted as long as it took to drive from Karnack to San Antonio. Worried about making arrangements on such short notice, Lyndon called Dan Quill, whose influence in City Hall procured an immediate marriage license, and who then argued a reluctant Episcopalian minister, who said at first that to marry two people he had never met on such short
notice would be a “justice-of-the-peace ceremony,” into making an exception in this case. Johnson was to recall that as he and Lady Bird walked into St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, he was still persuading Lady Bird that she was doing the right thing. And when, during the simple ceremony attended only by Quill, a lawyer acquaintance, and a hastily summoned friend of Lady Bird’s, it came time to place a ring on the bride’s finger, Johnson had still not bought one, and Quill dashed across the street to a Sears, Roebuck store and brought back a tray of inexpensive wedding bands—the one she chose cost $2.50—to complete the ceremony. After a wedding supper at St. Anthony’s Hotel—at which, because none of the guests had sufficient funds to purchase a bottle of the hotel’s high-priced wines, the wedding toast was drunk after the lawyer rushed home to get a bottle of his own—Lyndon and Lady Bird drove to the Plaza Hotel, where they spent their wedding night.

The next morning, Lady Bird telephoned Gene Boehringer, who had been expecting her in Austin, and told her surprised friend: “Lyndon and I committed matrimony last night.”

Lyndon telephoned his mother, who had hoped that when her son got married, she would be invited to the wedding.

T
HE TONE
of the letters that Lyndon Johnson wrote to Lady Bird before he married her was not the tone that others heard him using to her immediately after they were married. The morning after the ceremony, heading for a brief honeymoon in Mexico, they stopped at the little town of Cal-Allen, near Corpus Christi, to say hello to William P. Elliott, a reporter for the
Corpus Christi Caller
, and his wife, Mary, and as they sat chatting in the living room, Johnson said, in Mrs. Elliott’s recollection, “You’ve got to change your stockings, Bird. You’ve got a run.” Embarrassed, Bird did not immediately obey—and, Mrs. Elliott remembers, he ordered her to, “just
ordered
her—right in front of us.”

Back in Washington, where, after a few days in an upstairs room at the Dodge, they moved into a furnished one-bedroom apartment at 1910 Kalorama Road, the tone was similarly one of command; it was, in fact, little different from the tone in which he addressed Latimer and Jones. Acquaintances who heard it were shocked. If he disapproved of the clothes his bride was wearing, he would tell her so, in a voice harsh with contempt, regardless of whether others were present. Across a crowded room—at a Texas State Society party, for example—he shouted orders at her, and the orders had to be instantly obeyed.

“Lady Bird, go get me another piece of pie.”

“I will, in just a minute, Lyndon.”

“Get me another piece of pie!”

Wingate Lucas says, “He’d embarrass her in public. Just yell at her
across the room, tell her to do something. All the people from Texas felt very sorry for Lady Bird.” Seeing her shyness, her almost visible terror at having attention called to herself, acquaintances were soon making a remark that would be repeated for decades by acquaintances of the Johnsons: “I don’t know how she stands it.”