Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage That Made a President - Softcover

Betty Boyd Caroli is the author of Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage That Made a President; First Ladies: Martha Washington to Michelle Obama; Inside the White House; and The Roosevelt Women. She has been a guest on Today, The O’Reilly Factor, Lehrer NewsHour, Al Jazeera, Booknotes with Brian Lamb, and many others. A graduate of Oberlin College, Caroli holds a master’s degree in Mass Communications from the Annenberg School of the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in American Civilization from New York University. She currently resides in New York City and Venice, Italy.

Lady Bird and Lyndon 1

BIRD LEARNS TO FLY

A YEAR AFTER her husband died, Lady Bird Johnson sat down for an interview on the Today show. With millions of Americans watching, she expected anchorwoman Barbara Walters to ask her about the beautification project she had started as first lady and had continued in the five years since leaving Washington. It was a topic Lady Bird felt comfortable with. She had given countless interviews and speeches on the subject. But Walters quickly veered away from wildflowers and national parks to ask a question that had nothing to do with beautification. It zeroed in on Lady Bird’s marriage: “How did you handle your flirt and ladies’ man husband?”

After only an instant’s hesitation, Lady Bird replied evenly, “Lyndon was a people lover and that certainly did not exclude half the people of the world, women.” The unflappable Lady Bird had faced down one of the most renowned interviewers in the world and answered a potentially embarrassing question with honesty and grace.

If Walters had researched Lady Bird’s early years, she could have anticipated the sort of response her query would elicit. It was all there, in the first years of Lady Bird’s life, how she virtually raised herself in a household where humiliation and adultery were part of the picture. It was also a home where the exercise of raw power was taken for granted, and managing it became vital to survival. Rather than strike back against an attack such as Walters’s, Lady Bird relied on the protective carapace she had begun developing as a child—it equipped her to spar, disarm, and vanquish while maintaining what looked like gentle, ladylike composure.

Mrs. Johnson rarely talked about her early years. Perhaps she preferred to forget. More likely, she never knew the whole story—part Gothic novel, part comic opera—of how her aristocratic mother wound up giving birth on a December day in 1912 to her only daughter in a hardscrabble part of Texas that she loathed, among people she wished she had never met.

Lady Bird’s father, the big, dynamic Thomas Jefferson Taylor (known as T.J.) was one of those men who had to feel he was the most important man in the room. At six foot three, he towered over most people, craved attention, and expected his behavior to be tolerated, no matter how outlandish. The deference he commanded frequently involved money, and he had ingenious methods to keep people owing him. One oft-repeated story had him manipulating an impoverished neighbor back into debt after the man had struggled hard to pay off the last cent owed. The story goes that T. J. Taylor knew the man’s weakness for cats and he offered to give him one, but the man, being scrupulously fair, insisted on paying a little something. The two settled on a minuscule amount, but that was enough to put him back on T.J.’s debtor list. While he wheedled to get what he wanted, T.J. also contributed generously to both churches in town, an effective way to keep the entire community in his debt. The local saying was: “T. J. Taylor owns everything.”

T.J. so firmly ruled that part of Harrison County, lending at exorbitant fees and collecting on his own timetable, that virtually everyone called him “Mr. Boss.” But not his wife, the pampered Minnie, whom he had lured to Texas from more cultured surroundings in Alabama. Miss Minnie called no one “Boss.” When the adult Lady Bird offered one of her rare descriptions of her parents, she called theirs a “stressful” union, and those words, though true, did not begin to capture the truth.

Minnie Pattillo and T. J. Taylor grew up in the same Alabama county, but on different planets. Her father, Luther Pattillo (whose Scots ancestors spelled it Patiloch), had begun acquiring land after the Civil War, and by his shrewd (some would say exploitative) management, he had become one of the largest landowners in the state. While most sharecroppers in the region split 50/50 with their landlord whatever the crops brought, Luther Pattillo demanded 60 percent for himself, and because he owned so much land and the general store where many sharecroppers traded, he could get away with it.

Luther and his wife, Sarah, liked to enjoy their wealth by moving around, from one of the homes they owned to another, depending on the social season and the school year. Wherever they lived, they maintained a large library and kept a piano in the drawing room so Minnie and her younger sister Effie could perform for guests. Effie got so proficient she set her sights on attending the Juilliard School in New York City, while Minnie remained the bookworm of the family, content to sit alone reading for hours at a time.

Behind that genteel facade, of piano music and shelves of old books, the Pattillo household reeked of jealousy and malice. Sarah had been a Confederate widow with three young children when Luther married her, and she never let him forget that she came from a background superior to his. While he used his cunning to accumulate wealth, she had been born to it. It would have been appropriate for Luther to treat his stepchildren as his own, but he neglected them in favor of the two boys and two girls—including Minnie—he fathered by Sarah. As a result of his ruthless business practices, he became known as “the meanest man in Autauga County,” but his offspring, proud of their self-made father, liked to lord it over their half-siblings and play up to him. Luther called himself a “general merchant,” and passed along the label (with the business) to his own son Claude, leaving his stepchildren to fend for themselves.

If Autauga County, Alabama, had been more urbanized, the Pattillos would have looked at T. J. Taylor as coming from the wrong side of the tracks. In rural Alabama, the common phrase for people like the Taylors, who never managed to own much land of their own but had to eke out a living as tenant farmers, was “dirt poor.” Polished pianos and store-bought books were foreign to them, and they worried not about the winter social calendar but about winter shoes. Yet Autauga County was small enough that Minnie Pattillo and T. J. Taylor, born within months of each other in 1874, were bound to cross paths. Whether it was the romantic setting of his rescuing her after she had been thrown from a horse, as family lore had it, or some other, less dramatic meeting, the mutual attraction was strong. Standing alongside the much taller T.J., Minnie, with her many freckles and ruddy complexion, made his jet black hair and olive skin appear all the darker.

Who knows what really drew Minnie to the untutored T. J. Taylor? One answer seems obvious. T.J. acted much like Luther Pattillo in his ambition and business practices, and if most women marry their fathers, Minnie was simply following that instinct. Minnie had a rebellious streak, and she may have found T.J.’s rough edges exciting, so at odds with the social snobbery she witnessed at home. Naturally, her parents were dead set against her having anything to do with T.J., and it was all too clear that she could register her defiance to them by sticking with him.

For his part, T.J. set out on the fast track to prove himself worthy. Leaving Autauga with an older brother in late 1898, he managed to pay cash for 116 acres as soon as he crossed the Texas border. Where he got that $500 (about a year’s wages for a working man) remains a mystery. He later told his daughter he had sold a saddle, but only a very elaborate saddle would have brought $500. And how would he have acquired such a saddle in the first place? His neighbors decided he must have robbed a train along the way. T.J. soon bought more land, swapping poorer acres for better, and when he opened a shop in Karnack, the sign he put out front, “Dealer in Everything,” sounded like a bloated version of his future father-in-law’s “general merchant.”

In November 1900, when T.J. returned to Alabama for Minnie, the Pattillos still labeled him “white trash.” Acquiring a rustic little store in a speck of a Texas town did not catapult him into their class. Even if they made allowances for his lack of education, they weren’t likely to forget that his mother had married four times and produced thirteen children, making her something of a joke to their society-minded friends. When Minnie persisted with plans to wed, her family refused to attend, and so the ceremony was a Taylors-only event at the home of T.J.’s older brother.

If Minnie had known where T.J. was taking her, she might have reconsidered. With fewer than one hundred residents, Karnack, Texas, had only recently gotten its own post office. Marshall, the county seat fifteen miles away, had already become one of the wealthiest towns in that part of the state, and it would have suited Minnie better. Its strategic location, on the railroad connecting Dallas and Shreveport, made it a hub for commerce, and prosperous local residents had built imposing large homes along Washington Avenue and opened centers of higher learning, including a Female Institute. But a man on the make, like T.J., needed a less settled spot, with weaker competition. Karnack was his kind of place. He set down his stakes and refused to budge.

The marriage showed cracks from the start. Minnie made clear she detested her new home, and she wanted nothing to do with neighbors she saw as clearly inferior to herself. Most had never seen an opera or traveled outside the county. Her husband offered little consolation. His long workdays, as he continued to accumulate acres, meant she saw little of him. What she might have heard, she would not have liked. His reputation as a “ladies’ man” was well deserved, and what’s more, he didn’t care a whit what people said about him.

Yet Minnie stayed, at least for a while. The son she bore within a year of marriage was named for his father, but by the time the second was born, in August 1904, Minnie wanted a name that had nothing to do with her husband, and she settled on the exotic-sounding “Antonio.” Before little Tony could walk, she left Karnack, taking both boys back to Alabama where she farmed them out to relatives, both T.J.’s and hers. To her family, she explained that she had left her husband because he was seeing other women. What had started out as a summer break for Minnie and the boys was going to last a lot longer.

According to court documents T.J. filed in February 1909, Minnie had been gone four years and he wanted a divorce. Whenever he had written her to ask for an explanation, she had pled illness and requested more time to convalesce. But T.J. suspected she was not even with her family but had decamped to more appealing surroundings in the upper Midwest, possibly opera-rich Chicago or Battle Creek, Michigan, where she and all her family liked to go to take cures at the Kellogg Sanitarium.

It’s not clear where T.J. was getting his information, but his suspicion was confirmed when he received word from Michigan that Minnie, having left her sons in Alabama, was indeed a patient at the sanitarium. But, as the Kellogg doctors informed him, she had recently undergone surgery and was unable to travel the “two thousand miles” (the actual distance was half of that) to answer T.J.’s charges. She was not too sick, however, to know what she wanted, and through her attorneys, she asked for alimony, payment of her attorneys’ fees, and a share of the Texas property considered hers under the state’s community property laws. Her counterclaim left out all mention of her two little boys, Tommy and Tony, whose custody T.J. was seeking.

That response raised T.J.’s ire and, through his lawyers, he went after Minnie’s father and officials at the Kellogg Sanitarium, demanding to know who was supporting his wife and what ailed her anyway. Luther Pattillo’s response has not survived, but Dr. Bertha Moshier, an internist younger than Minnie, signed a statement on October 6, 1909, declaring that Minnie had been under her care in Battle Creek for “5 weeks” (only a tiny bit of the four years she had been gone) and that since she suffered from “nervous prostration” she needed a private nurse day and night. Travel was out of the question for “four or five months at least.” Given Minnie’s delicate condition, any trip sooner than that carried the risk of “permanent derangement.”

Now T.J. sounded baffled: if his wife was indeed suffering from “nervous trouble,” would she not be better off in his “quiet country home [than in] a hospital where . . . numerous other people are being treated?”

Minnie continued to dither, even accusing T.J. of taking unfair advantage of her by filing for divorce after he had encouraged her to seek treatment. She had never intended to abandon him permanently, she insisted, but in the meantime she refused to set a date for her return. As for the “valuable . . . real and personal property,” accumulated during the marriage, her lawyers noted, she “avers that she has an interest.”

During the years Minnie was separated from T.J., she moved back and forth between the sanitarium and the home of one Alabama relative or another. When the census taker came around her parents’ house on April 18, 1910, she was there and described herself as a “widow” named “Minnie Pattillo.” A different census taker, enumerating Karnack, Texas, a few days later, listed T. J. Taylor as “married” and “head of household.” Neither parent claimed the company of Tommy and Tony, now aged nine and six, but a census taker found the boys living with T.J.’s older sister and her family in Alabama.

When T.J. was granted his divorce nearly a year later (on February 6, 1911) Minnie was still in Alabama, but she immediately went into action. It was grossly unfair, she telegraphed her attorneys, that T.J. had won a “judgment by default,” without her presence or participation, and she instructed her legal team to obtain a new hearing.

Within weeks, T.J. and Minnie were back together. He dropped his case and she brought the boys to live with him in Karnack. He showed no signs of giving up his womanizing but he did offer Minnie one considerable consolation—a big, showy house, one of the most impressive for miles around. The couple had begun their married life in humble quarters behind the store, but during her absence he had purchased a two-story mansion (with seventeen rooms and six fireplaces) three miles south of Karnack. Built originally by slave labor and always called the Brick House, it had fallen into disrepair, but T.J., who resisted spending money on any personal pleasure, spared no expense in turning the house into one of the most elegant in the county. He put huge white columns out front—giving Minnie something to flaunt if her picky Pattillo kin ever came to visit.

Even without the house, Minnie had her reasons for returning to T.J. She still felt drawn to this big, commanding man, for whom she had once bought barbells and a mat for workouts. More importantly, he provided an escape from the infighting of Luther Pattillo’s household in Alabama, where one of his stepdaughters, a widow with four children, had recently returned to live. The always festering resentment between Luther’s own offspring and those of his wife Sarah could only grow, now that both parents were failing in health and questions about inheritance became more pressing.

In fact, both parents died withi...