Landslide (18 page)

At The Elms, she finally had a chance to get it right. After Kennedy’s election in 1960, the Johnsons prepared to take on the vice president’s traditional role as a formal entertainer for the administration. The overstuffed house on Thirtieth Place would never be able to accommodate the large crowds the Johnsons might expect. (Congress would not designate the large Victorian house on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory as the vice president’s official residence until 1974.) In the spring of 1961, the Johnsons found a larger house, a three-story brick and stucco mansion in the rarefied Spring Valley section of Washington.

The house, modeled on a château in Normandy, was only thirty years old, but it aspired to ancient greatness. Named Les Ormes for the proud elm trees that dotted the property, it had been the home of the grande dame of Washington society Perle Mesta. It had a large marble foyer, sun rooms, sweeping terraces, grand chandeliers, and floors made of parquet imported from an actual Louis XV château.
Shortly after purchasing it for $160,000, the Johnsons rechristened it “The Elms.” “
Every time somebody calls it a château,” Lyndon growled, “I lose fifty thousand votes back in Texas.”

The press smirked at the Johnsons’ ostentatious ambitions. (“Ormes and the Man” read the headline in
Time
.) But for Lady Bird, The Elms was a paradise. Free at last to take her time in decorating, she’d added Western accents to Mesta’s French decor, covering the downstairs in satin and filling the foyer with paintings of Texas landscapes and drawings of Texas birds.
In the living room, she placed a cherry-red chair “that seems to say ‘Come in.’ ”

Her great pleasure was her garden. All her life, she had found special peace in the delicate beauty of flowers and trees. She lined the walkway to the pool with boxed English hollies. She planted zinnias, marigolds, and red, white, and pink petunias in her cutting garden. In the rich soil of Spring Valley, she had finally found a home she could love.

Now the great need of Lyndon and the nation—moving on—would require her to leave that beloved home behind. Though not right away. In her first days as a widow, Jackie had said that she intended to leave the White House quickly. But then there was Thanksgiving and the visit to Hyannis Port. November turned to December and still the old president’s family remained in what was now the new president’s house. Reporters and Washington gossips began to snicker, but Lady Bird silenced them with a single statement, delivered by her press secretary: “
I would to God I could serve Mrs. Kennedy’s comfort; I can at least serve her convenience.”

Finally, on December 7, a call came from J. B. West, the head usher at the White House, informing Lady Bird that the Kennedy family had left the residence for good. Photographers snapped pictures of Jackie, dressed in black from head to toe, and the children, in their blue funeral suits, as they climbed out of a limousine in Georgetown, where Averell and Marie Harriman had made their house available for the family’s use until Jackie could find a place of her own.

Meanwhile, Lady Bird and her daughter Luci were arriving at the White House with the Johnsons’ two beagles, Him and Her. In her hands, the new First Lady clutched a portrait of Lyndon’s first Washington mentor, the late House Speaker and eminent Texan “Mr. Sam” Rayburn. A few days later, she met with a group of female reporters in the White House library. As always, she stuck to the official message: “
When I wake up in the morning,” she told them, “I feel at home.” But in the privacy of her diary, she noted that it would not always be easy to live life in “this
glass house.” In the residence, she placed her desk up against a window, looking out over Andrew Jackson’s magnolias. One afternoon not long after her arrival at the White House, she stopped a maid who was drawing the curtains for the night. “Please,” said Lady Bird, “
don’t ever close the light out until the very last ray is gone.”

“I feel,” Lady Bird told her diary on her first night in the White House, “like I am suddenly onstage for a part I never rehearsed.” This was a common nightmare, but one that would be particularly unsettling for Lady Bird Johnson. “Practice makes perfect” was a guiding principle of her life. As a child, she would study lessons late into the night, earning nearly flawless marks in school. At the University of Texas, she majored in journalism and dreamed of an exciting life as a reporter, covering national politics. But
she also took extra courses for a teaching certificate, just in case.

Assiduous preparation had been her bulwark against an unpredictable life. Claudia Alta Taylor—her lifelong nickname came from a nurse who called her “purty as a lady bird”—was born in Karnack, Texas, in 1912. Her childhood, spent in the thick forests of east Texas in a rambling white-columned mansion called the Brick House, was privileged but lonely and marred by trauma. In 1918, her mother, Minnie Pattillo Taylor, suffered a fatal injury in a fall down a circular staircase. As she lay dying in the hospital, she looked at her five-year-old daughter, Lady Bird, standing beside the bed, and wailed: “
My poor little girl, her face is dirty … Nobody at home to take care of you but the black nurse.”

But there was someone at home besides the “nurse”—the little girl’s father. Thomas Jefferson “TJ” Taylor had built a great fortune as a dry goods salesman in Karnack.
T.J. TAYLOR
, read the sign on his store,
DEALER IN EVERYTHING
. Known as “Cap’n,” he was a man with tremendous power and a forceful manner of exercising it. In her biography of Lady Bird, Jan Jarboe Russell quotes a Karnack neighbor: “
As a child growing up, I was taught there were three things you never questioned—God, country and Mr. Cap’n.”

For Lady Bird, Mr. Cap’n was an uneven presence: fawning and loving one moment, filled with fury the next, gone altogether after that. Like the man she would marry, he seemed to fill any room he entered. The Cap’n had horrible rows with any number of opponents: with Minnie’s disapproving family members who would swoop in to look after her little girl; with his sons, Lady Bird’s older brothers, who chafed under his rule; and with the tempestuous women he courted after his wife’s death. His daughter retreated to out-of-the-way corners of the old house and quiet places in nature, seeking shelter and escape. The world around her could not be trusted. She learned to find order within herself.

It was a skill that came in handy in her first years in the nation’s capital. As a young congressman’s wife, she immersed herself in the byzantine regimens of protocol that governed social life in official Washington: a daily routine of afternoon visits to the homes of various dignitaries, where she’d deposit calling cards with her name and Lyndon’s. The less she left to chance the better. “Usually,” she would recall, “
I hoped the ladies weren’t in, so I wouldn’t have to stay.”

When her husband became a national politician, planning became more expansive and intricate. Before leaving on official trips, she would write out her outfits for each event on the schedule, planning times and location for changes of clothes. Arriving at a hotel, she would arrange her clothes in the closet in hanging bags, ordered precisely as to when she would need them.

But in adult life as in childhood, she could only impose order in her own affairs. Marrying Lyndon Johnson had taken her far from
the Brick House but not out of the storm. At the house on Thirtieth Place, she would spend many a night waiting for word from her husband as to when he would be coming home. Late in the evening, she would learn, via a brusque phone call, that his arrival was imminent, that he would be bringing four, six, ten, or more guests, and that they expected supper—hot!—on arrival. A doorbell left unanswered or a drink left unserved would always prompt a familiar bellow from Lyndon: “Dammit, Bird!” Witnessing one particularly violent outburst, Speaker Sam Rayburn was stunned: “
By God, he’s gonna kill her!”

Sometimes, it seemed, that really was his intent.
One afternoon in Washington, the couple went horseback riding in Rock Creek Park. Approaching her horse, a tempestuous stallion, Lady Bird was characteristically cautious. Her husband helped his wife gingerly onto the horse. Then, suddenly, Lyndon slapped the stallion on its rear, causing it to bolt wildly. Lady Bird, terrified, grasped at the reins as the horse nearly threw her from her mount. When the animal slowed, she returned, shaken, to her husband. “Damn you!” she said. “I could have been killed.” Lyndon would not apologize. To him it was a funny joke.

More often, his attacks were psychological. Guests were constantly embarrassed by the way Lyndon tore into Lady Bird in public. He offered a running critique of his wife in which no aspect of her person was off limits. Common sources of complaint were her appearance, her clothes, and her general lack of sophistication in comparison with the well-heeled women of Washington. And when one of those women happened to catch Lyndon’s fancy, he would pursue her with the same determined force he applied to the rest of his life. During their years in Washington, Lyndon had developed a reputation as one of the capital’s great and shameless seducers. He had two serious extramarital affairs, one with the actress turned congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, the other with the socialite Alice Glass.
He made little effort to hide either relationship, squiring the women to Washington social functions,
holding their hands in public, kissing them passionately in front of aides.

Lady Bird knew what was happening, and she didn’t say a word. “
Everyone felt sorry for her,” said Virginia Durr, a friend and fellow southerner in Washington. “He yelled at her, he ordered her around. He left her alone at the most important times of her life, and made no secret of his affairs. Still, she stayed loyal.” Her loyalty, it often seemed, was the most pitiful kind. To Jackie Kennedy, who knew about wayward husbands, Lady Bird gazing at Lyndon looked “sort of
like a trained hunting dog.”

The artful homemaker forced constantly to leave her home. The placid cultivator of order and routine married into wrathful chaos. The woman gazing lovingly at her torturer, like some kind of dog. It would seem that Lady Bird had chosen a life custom-tailored to bring her misery.

Yet there was more than that to the Johnson marriage. There were the moments of tenderness and affection. And there was the fact, obvious to anyone, that Lyndon Johnson, the most powerful man in Washington, relied on Lady Bird. He needed her more than he needed anyone else. And there was something else, something particularly important to the woman who grew up in the gothic gloom of the Brick House. During her childhood there, Lady Bird would escape to her quiet corners to read stories of ancient kings and dream of faraway lands. As a young woman, she had aspired to be a reporter in the most exotic place she could think of: Washington, D.C. She wanted to be the observer of great drama, not the center of the drama itself. But she, too, wanted to live a hero’s tale.

And then she’d met Lyndon Johnson, a man who could give her exactly that life. On their first date, he told her of his work as a young congressional aide in Roosevelt’s Washington. He told her of the New Deal, of the men around Roosevelt, of the busy and thrilling capital, which seemed a world away. “
It was just like finding yourself in the middle of a whirlwind,” she remembered years later. “I just had not met up with that kind of vitality before.”

“
You’re seeing the best side of me,” Lyndon warned her in those early days. Lady Bird was only twenty-two, but she was not naïve about human frailty. She knew that Lyndon’s worst side might be very bad indeed. She also would have known the alternative available to a well-off Southern girl like herself, a future of silky drawing rooms and lamplit passages, crisp linens and climbing wisteria, a handsome husband who would never dream of being indiscreet if by chance he strayed from home. She could see it all. And she wanted more.

That was what she’d chosen in Lyndon: more. She did not regret it. “
Ours was a compelling love,” an octogenarian Lady Bird told Jan Jarboe Russell. “Lyndon bullied me, coaxed me, at times even ridiculed me, but he made me more than I would have been.”

To wit, she was now First Lady of the United States, leading a group of reporters from that exotic city—Washington—through the hills and fields of the LBJ Ranch. And it was she who was telling
them
the origin story of Lyndon Johnson, the nation’s new hero.

As the bus drove on, they spotted her husband driving through the fields with two guests—Secretary of State Rusk and Secretary of Agriculture Freeman—with the top down on his car. This was a favorite ranch pastime: Lyndon riding forward, showing off all that was his. It was this side of Lyndon that made the trade-off seem worth it. She would put up with the rages, the women, the chaos, the strangers traipsing through her house. None of that mattered as much as the way she felt when she watched Lyndon Johnson in his home country, his mind fixed on a dream.

T
HE
J
OHNSONS
’
VISIT
to Texas was expected to last through the New Year holiday, but the “Man-in-Motion” president made clear that his week on the ranch would be no lazy idyll. The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day brought a state visit by Chancellor Ludwig Erhard of Germany and large clusters of official Washington to the LBJ Ranch for meetings with the president. “
It seems as if
one great crescendo of activity follows another so rapidly that I wonder how Lyndon manages to shift gears,” Lady Bird observed. “Rest at the Ranch is a complete misnomer to me. The airport stays busy, with planes disgorging Cabinet members with important difficult decisions, budget estimates, crises … I only know that somehow the Ranch manages to be restful to Lyndon.”

Lady Bird was pleased, one night after dinner, to see her daughter Lynda engage with Johnson’s economic adviser, Walter Heller, in a lively conversation by the fire. “
Lynda Bird,” the First Lady observed, “was deep in conversation with him about economics, the economy of Texas and the University of Texas … I could see Dr. Walter Heller responding to her, not only with interest but with respect. It was fun to watch.”