God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(6)
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Steve Harrigan.”
I don’t know why that came out of my mouth. Jane never got us straight after that, always seeming a little anxious in our presence. In any case, Jane married Ted Turner and retreated from the film business, while Steve and I returned to our books and articles. The lure of Hollywood faded, although we each continued to do occasional screen work from afar. Another friend of mine moved back to Austin after spending a couple of years in the screenwriting business. “One day in Los Angeles, I heard a mockingbird imitating a car alarm,” she told me. “That’s when I knew. I was like a bird that had lost my song.”
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WE DECIDED to save the two prettiest missions, Concepción and San José, for the ride back so we’d have plenty of time at the Alamo. On the horizon we could see the Tower of the Americas, a lonely remnant of the 1968 HemisFair. There was once a bill by a San Antonio lawmaker and professional gambler, V. E. “Red” Berry, to divide Texas in half, with San Antonio becoming the capital of the southern entity and the governor’s office placed in the rotating restaurant atop the tower. South Texas today really is a virtual linguistic province, like Quebec, with San Antonio playing the role of its bilingual capital.
Soon we were on city streets, passing through the King William Historic District, with its great nineteenth-century German houses nested under massive oaks and pecans, and then into the low-slung downtown. Unlike other bustling Texas metropolises, San Antonio still has the look of a city that might be on a colorized postcard.
We were hot from the ride, and Steve suggested we indulge in a snow cone. Bees swarmed around the syrup dispensers at the shaded stand in front of the Alamo. On the plaza, we examined the Alamo Cenotaph, which the former lead singer of Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, peed on in 1982. (The conscience-stricken celebrity later apologized for his actions.) The stone barricade that once enclosed the mission has given way to parasitical tourist attractions such as Ripley’s Haunted Adventure and the Guinness World Records Museum. Steve pointed out the area where the Mexican forces broke through, near the corner of what had been the north wall, now occupied by Tomb Rider 3D.
The Alamo itself is a modest construction of limestone, yellowed by the patina of age, like old teeth. The primitive symmetry of the facade, with its arching pediment resembling a child’s drawing, is a familiar feature of the Texas imagination. Steve once described it as “a squat and oddly configured structure that is in almost every way inscrutable.” Here in 1836 about 250 men and a number of women and children gathered, determined to block the progress of the army of General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the imperious president of Mexico, who styled himself the “Napoleon of the West.” Santa Anna might easily have gone around San Antonio or stationed a small garrison to keep the rebels penned up inside the mission as he pursued Sam Houston’s army of insurgents. The hapless defenders were expecting to be reinforced at any moment. “The Alamo guarded the Camino Real, the only road and supply route into Texas from Mexico,” Steve observed. “The defenders just got trapped there, and Santa Anna wisely attacked before help could arrive.” As for Houston, he never wanted to defend the Alamo; he had proposed simply blowing it up.
The defiant Texians—as they were then called—held off Santa Anna’s forces for thirteen days under the command of a prickly young Alabama lawyer, William Barret Travis. With him were Jim Bowie, a land speculator and renowned knife fighter, and David Crockett, a legendary frontiersman and former U.S. congressman who had once been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. After being voted out of office, Crockett advised his Tennessee constituents, “You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas”—an example followed by many since.
As boys, Steve and I had fallen under the spell of the Alamo legend, having been indoctrinated by the Disney television series Davy Crockett, which Steve compares to Star Wars and Harry Potter in terms of its cultural sway. Like every other boy we knew, we sang “Davy! Davy Crockett! King of the wild frontier!” We owned replicas of Davy’s coonskin cap, a fashion statement that is perhaps hard to account for but now seems ripe for revival among the tattooed ironists of the coffee shops. My family had just moved from Abilene to Dallas in 1960 when The Alamo, starring John Wayne as Crockett, came to the Capri Theatre. At the time, the movie was widely read as a rallying cry for the right-wing politics that Wayne trumpeted, with the Mexicans serving as standins for the forces of international communism; in Texas, however, The Alamo was our creation myth. In some elemental and irresistible manner, the movie told us who we were.
One of Steve’s fans is the British rock star Phil Collins, who has amassed the world’s largest private collection of Alamo relics, including a rifle owned by Crockett and a knife that belonged to Jim Bowie. As a child, Collins had also been fixated on Davy Crockett and the Alamo myth. His grandmother cut up a fur coat to make him a coonskin cap, which I suppose wasn’t as readily available in London as it was in Texas. Collins once told Steve that when he finally saw the Alamo in person—in 1973, when he was the lead singer for Genesis—it was like meeting the Beatles for the first time.
Collins inadvertently triggered a bitter legal and political contest between the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the jealous guardians of the Alamo for more than a century, and the newly elected Texas land commissioner, George P. Bush, son of the former Florida governor and presidential candidate Jeb Bush. In 2014, Collins offered his artifacts to the State of Texas under the condition that a suitable repository—i.e., a $100 million museum—be constructed to house the Phil Collins Alamo Collection.