Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society by Tracy Daugherty

Abstract

Reviewed by: Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society by Tracy Daugherty Don Graham Tracy Daugherty, Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society. Austin: U of Texas P, 2018. 436 pp. Cloth, $29.95. Tracy Daugherty, biographer of major figures Joan Didion, Joseph Heller, and Donald Barthelme, here turns his attention to Billy Lee Brammer, a Texas writer who produced one book, The Gay Place (1961). Perhaps this is the place to point out that "gay" means happy and that the title derives from an obscure poem by Scott Fitzgerald, whose gauzy, gorgeous prose much influenced Brammer's style. The novel offers a tripartite portrait of a salty, licentious Texas governor, Arthur "Goddamn" Fenstermaker, based on Lyndon B. Johnson. Unlike most of his liberal friends, Brammer admired LBJ. Of course Johnson was never governor of Texas, but he was a piece of work, and Brammer knew him better than most because he and his wife Nadine worked on Johnson's staff when the great man was Senate Majority Leader. The novel did not sell, but it has persisted [End Page 335] down the decades and is still in print, and anybody interested in Texas writing or in a fictional portrait of LBJ will find much to commend it. Brammer struggled to write another, but the arc of his career is profoundly depressing. Early on he became addicted to narcotics of an increasingly dangerous kind and his post-Gay Place efforts consist of some journalism and a never completed sequel titled Fustian Days. Daugherty does a very good job of describing both the promise and the shear waste of Brammer's life. He was born into a working-class family living in Oak Cliff, a blue-collar suburb of Dallas, and was spoiled rotten as the phrase has it. He attended North Texas State Teachers College in Denton where he met the spirited Nadine Cannon, his first wife, who introduced him to the stay-up-all-night seduction of diet pills. The marriage would be marked by three children, serial infidelities by both parties, and divorce. Women were drawn to Brammer, and he had many affairs. In 1961 when he and Nadine and family were living in Washington, DC, he took up with a young Radcliffe graduate, Diana de Vegh, who as it happened was keeping company with another figure of that era, John E Kennedy. Both tormented and tantalized by his rival, Brammer made notes of Vegh's conservations with JFK, and Daugherty's inclusion of those is a high point if one is interested in the thirty-fifth president's priapic history. Brammer was in Dallas that fatal day of November 22, 1963, and as an insider and former intimate of the new president, publishers considered him the logical person to write a book about LBJ. Brammer leapt at the opportunity but either Johnson or, more likely, Lady Bird ("Sweet Mama" in the novel) slammed the door on that idea, and Brammer began the long drift into stupefied incoherence. Austin is where Brammer acquired his guru reputation, a celebrity among a group of hangers-on, writers, políticos, college girls, wives, and hipsters who formed a kind of salon centered on a local watering hole in Austin, Scholz's Biergarten. Members included the writers Edwin (Bud) Shrake, Gary Cartwright, Ronnie Dugger, Willy Morris, Larry L. King, and activist Ann Richards, who would recover from alcoholism to become a one-term governor of Texas [End Page 336] (1991–1995)· The former Dallas Cowboy Pete Gent (North Dallas Forty) was also part of this group that styled themselves as Mad Dog, Inc. Brammer's teenage daughters were not impressed. Shelby called them a "bunch of silly old men getting wasted and wasting time" (336). Her sister Sidney saw through them as well: "They were big and drunk and loud. He'd [her father] sit quietly and then let out a pithy remark, and they'd fall over—he enjoyed that" (336). Another Texas writer, Larry McMurtry, cast a cold eye on the Austin scene. For a brief period in 1961 he shared a rental house with Brammer in Austin, and in a recent...