God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(26)
When we moved to Dallas, in 1960, I encountered my first pizza. It took place at Campisi’s Egyptian Restaurant—which was, despite the “Egyptian” moniker, the first pizzeria in Texas. The only actual “ethnic” restaurant I can recall in the city at the time was La Tunisia, which was notable mainly for the seven-foot-tall, fez-wearing doorman, along with cocktail waitresses dressed as harem girls. There was no such thing as a fajita in Texas until Ninfa Laurenzo introduced the dish in her revered Houston restaurant—Ninfa’s—in 1973. (I’m aware of the scholarship on this matter, which proposes that the fajita was actually an indigenous Tex-Mex creation of the mid-nineteenth century, which migrated south and ingratiated itself into the kitchens of Coahuila, Mexico, before returning in its full beer-marinated, sizzling-plattered, sour-cream-dolloped glory.)
Level Two is marked by the rise of cultural institutions—the opera houses, ballet companies, symphonies, music halls, museums, galleries, libraries, theaters, and schools that have proliferated in the last several decades. These institutions begin by importing other people’s culture and, one hopes, end by fostering their own. To understand the anxiety that floats beneath the boasts of Level Two, we have only to visit the vaulted sepulcher of the Dallas Museum of Art. Solemnly designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, it opened in 1984, boasting “the finest collection of post-war American art” in the Southwest. It also laid claim to the country’s “finest collection of Japanese-influenced American silver,” “the largest display of Chinese export porcelain,” “the largest Robert Rauschenberg painting,” the “largest painting by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo,” and finally, “the world’s largest indoor sculpture by Claes Oldenburg.” Only in Texas is Large Art an aesthetic category.
The DMA also houses the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection. Wendy Russell Reves was a leggy blonde from Marshall, Texas, who became a New York fashion model and the longtime lover of a wealthy European publisher, Emery Reves, whom she finally married in 1964. She was the Jerry Hall (from Gonzales, Texas) of her day. Wendy became the chatelaine of a villa on the C?te d’Azur formerly owned by Coco Chanel. Winston Churchill spent months at a time there, to paint, and to drink in Wendy’s charms. His wife pointedly refused to join him. No?l Coward observed in his diary that Churchill was “absolutely obsessed with Wendy Russell…I doubt if Churchill has ever been physically unfaithful, but oh what has gone on inside that dynamic mind?”
After Emery died in 1981, Wendy offered to donate his $30 million collection of impressionist and postimpressionist art to the new Dallas museum, which was still in the planning stage. Museums in France and elsewhere avidly courted the widow, but they were unwilling to accommodate her intransigent demand that her residence be faithfully reproduced in order to showcase the art.
Thus, one leans into the roped-off rooms in the DMA’s version of a Mediterranean villa to see life as it was lived by a Hungarian playboy with his spirited Texas mistress. Here in their dining room, with still lifes by Courbet and Cézanne, are the Reveses’ china plates and silverware all laid out on the immense banquet table. (Housewares occupy center stage in this exhibit; the art is mere decor.) A nude Degas pastel looms over the tiger-skin boudoir chairs in the master bedroom, and the bed itself is mounted on a kind of presentation dais. At the foot of the bed is a pair of Wendy’s not-exactly-Cinderella-sized slippers.
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STANLEY MARCUS WAS the great Level Two proselytizer in Dallas. He was the only liberal, and practically the only Democrat, that I was aware of in the city when I was growing up. This was a city so hysterically anticommunist that the Dallas Symphony had to cancel a program of Shostakovich because he was Russian, and the Park Board ripped out a bed of poppies because they were red. Marcus fought against the absolutism and paranoia that dominated Dallas politics, creating space for ideas to breathe. Through Neiman Marcus, the marvelous department store that he oversaw, he tutored the newly affluent city, not only on how to dress and what to buy but also on how to behave. He raised the standard of cuisine in the city when he hired Helen Corbitt to run the store’s restaurant, the Zodiac Room. He almost single-handedly desegregated public facilities by welcoming black citizens to shop in the store and, in 1961, by serving two black couples in the Zodiac Room. The word went out in Dallas that desegregation had arrived. Marcus hired Eddie Bernice Johnson, a nurse, as an executive assistant, on the singular condition that she run for office. In 1972, she was elected to the Texas legislature—the first black woman from Dallas ever elected to anything. Since 1993, she has served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Stanley Marcus changed Dallas. Few individuals have ever had such a profound and beneficent effect on the city in which they lived.
Houston had its own great cultural modernizer in Dominique de Menil, the French heiress of the Schlumberger oil-field-services company. She and her husband, John, immigrated to Houston in 1941, following the Nazi occupation of Paris. They brought with them a sensibility that was practically unknown in Texas, intending to plant a flag of cosmopolitanism far from the volatile capitals of Europe. The de Menils collected more than seventeen thousand paintings and other works of art, centering on cubism, surrealism, pop—a totally alien aesthetic for the place and time. “What I admire, I must possess,” Dominique once admitted. They brought artists and filmmakers, such as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Bernardo Bertolucci, to speak and teach. They put a cowboy hat on René Magritte and took him to a rodeo.