God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(31)
The Texas I actually lived in finally did break into the movies, first with Hud, based on McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By. The book was about the end of the western frontier and the men who made it. The movie, with Paul Newman in the rapscallion title role, made the antimythic story into a legend of its own. A few years later, there was a terrific film called Midnight Cowboy, which opens on the Big Tex Drive-In, in Big Spring. The hero, Joe Buck (Jon Voight), works as a dishwasher, but he has a poster of Newman in Hud on his wall. Joe Buck tries to live out the myth by dressing up in movie-cowboy clothes and seeking stardom in New York, where he becomes a failed gigolo. I was teaching in Cairo when the movie came out, and one night during Ramadan I took my class to see it after the evening meal. To me, Midnight Cowboy was about the neurosis of wanting to live up to a myth. I came out of the film exhilarated, but my students were shaken. For the first time, I realized how much the rest of the world valued “Texas,” what a rich legacy it is, and how universally appealing the myth is. Perhaps Texas really is a place that exists more fully in film than in real life.
The fear besetting Texans, including its writers and filmmakers, was that, by leaving the myth behind, “Texas” would be crushed by ordinariness. And yet, it’s exactly that quotidian quality of life in the small towns and featureless suburbs that becomes so luminous and heartbreaking in the plays and films of Horton Foote, such as Tender Mercies and The Trip to Bountiful; it also awakens the comedy of Mike Judge’s animated series King of the Hill and his cult classic movie of the corporate software culture in Austin, Office Space. Richard Linklater became the chronicler of the ongoing dialectic of the Austin streets with his first commercial movie, Slacker (1991), and then in Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, and many other independent films. His tour de force Boyhood follows a child who actually grows up in Texas during the twelve years it took Rick to make the film, tracing the evolution of the boy’s consciousness as he approaches maturity. The myth has diminished, assuming a more modest place in the Texas psyche. It may never disappear entirely, nor would I wish it to. The myth has gone through hard times before and come back to life—although each time, I think, with a little less reality. The danger in holding on to a myth is that it becomes like a religion we’ve stopped believing in. It no longer instructs us; it only stultifies us. And besides, what do we want with a myth that makes us into people we don’t want to be?
Level Three requires shaking off the mythic illusions and telling new stories about who we really are. The noble quality of Level Three is that it returns us to the familiar. The songs we heard as children, the sounds of our labor, the primal smells of the kitchen, the legends of our ancestors, the phrases and intonations we cling to in our language, the colors of our land, the cloud shapes in our sky—all are folded into the art of Level Three. It feels like home. And isn’t that the point of culture, to come home again with a clear and educated eye?
FIVE
The Cradle of Presidents
The LBJ Ranch is now a national park, and one early summer day as I was driving west I decided to stop in. The bluebonnets and Indian blankets along the roadsides had faded, replaced by purple thistles and Mexican hats. Lyndon Johnson used to race down these narrow roads in his Lincoln convertible, with a scotch and soda in hand, terrifying visiting heads of state as he careened into the curves. The Lincoln was equipped with a special lever-action horn that bellowed like a rutting bull in order to capture the attention of the heifers in the pasture. Johnson would be trailed by a station wagon full of Secret Service agents, and periodically he would slow down and rattle the ice in his styrofoam cup outside his window until an agent dashed over and refilled his drink.
Johnson was the only president I can recall who really loved cars, especially convertibles. There’s a little museum at the end of the airstrip housing a 1934 Ford Phaeton, which he outfitted with a gun rack and a wet bar; the Corvette he gave his daughter Luci for her eighteenth birthday; an antique fire truck; and a little blue Amphicar, a chimerical cross between an automobile and a boat, which Johnson bought as a practical joke. He would drive his guests down to the banks of the Pedernales River and pretend that his brakes had failed as he plunged the vehicle into the water.
There is a one-room schoolhouse, where Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, one of the pillars of the Great Society; and beyond that, a walled cemetery, shaded by massive live oaks, where Lyndon and Lady Bird rest. Finally, there is the house itself, made of limestone, with a broad veranda overlooking the sweep down to the river, handsome but not majestic, the home of a Texas squire on a working ranch, with cow patties decorating the lawn. The last thing Lyndon liked to do at night was to stand on his porch, look at the stars, and pee.
On the wall beside Johnson’s desk are portraits of his two beagles, Him and Her, commissioned by Barbra Streisand. In the easy chair is a pillow embroidered with the sentiment “This is my ranch and I do as I damn please.” The living room has a bank of three television sets, one for each of the networks that existed during his presidency, and a domino table where he liked to play 42. The kitchen floor is yellow linoleum; there’s a copy of The Joy of Cooking on a shelf. On the back porch are a massive freezer and a beer tap. It was in the small den under the stairs that the staff gathered on November 22, 1963, to be told by the Secret Service, “You are now in the house of the president of the United States.” They had been busy preparing for the reception that night for John F. Kennedy.