Lady Bird and Lyndon Read online

  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 within months of Minnie’s going back to T.J., and Luther, who managed to survive his wife by only a few weeks, made sure to funnel the bulk of his estate to his own blood, leaving only a pittance to each stepchild. That gave Minnie, now heiress to almost a quarter of her father’s holdings, ample reason to put some distance between herself and her disinherited half siblings. Her new wealth wasn’t hers to spend immediately—it came in land and revenues to be turned over later, when acres were sold and loans paid back. Even if Minnie had inherited a ready fortune, Southern ladies did not go off to live on their own. Certainly not a woman in her forties with two young sons.

  All through the turmoil of the divorce proceedings, the statements of Minnie’s attorneys highlight the importance of money. She knew that T.J. had become a wealthy man in her absence, owner of thousands of acres of cotton-growing land. By renting to farmers who paid him back with a share of the crop, and by supplying those same folks with most of the store-bought items they needed, “Mr. Boss” held them in what even his loyal re
latives described as a kind of peonage. His continuing good fortune was virtually assured by the fact that his neighbors could not avoid dealing with him—he owned the gins they needed to process their cotton. If Minnie had accepted the terms of the divorce, she would have lost a lot.

  On December 22, 1912, little more than a year after Minnie returned to T.J., she gave birth to a baby girl with large brown eyes. Dr. Baldwin, living just over a mile away, arrived in horse and buggy to deliver the newest Taylor, named Claudia, after Minnie’s bachelor brother Claude. But very soon, chubby little Claudia Alta Taylor got a nickname that stuck: Lady Bird. The popular version of its origin credits a hired nursemaid, who pronounced her “pretty as a ladybird,” but the subject herself admitted that it came from her black playmates—Stuff and Doodlebug—who preferred something more vivid than Claudia. Later, it was “deemed more respectable to assign credit to the nurse” and avoid any mention of interracial socializing.

  Nobody suggested that Minnie liked being back in Karnack. She still found it a dreary, lonely place, populated by people who knew nothing about Italian opera or her favorite authors. She had no close friends, and kept clear of her neighbors, who considered her “wacky.” She sometimes accompanied T.J. to the store, then walked the three miles back to the Brick House alone. But more often she rode alone in her chauffeured sedan, a veil covering her face. When she went out for a walk, she loped solo through T.J.’s acres, her long skirts swishing through the grass and her reddish blond hair blowing in the wind. Local residents saw her as a dreamer at heart, a woman who yearned for life on a bigger stage than Karnack could offer. It was that deep, overpowering yearning that she passed on to her only daughter.

  For her sons, Minnie wanted exposure to a world beyond Texas, and soon after Lady Bird’s birth, she dispatched both boys to boarding schools so distant they would find it difficult to come home, even at Christmas holidays. At first enrolled at Riordan, an upstate New York school known for its progressive ways, they were then split up, with Tony transferring to a school in New Mexico. That meant the two brothers, just entering their teens, were deprived of the comfort of each other’s companionship, and their little sister saw neither of them. Minnie showed scant interest in making amends for taking the boys away from their father earlier or for leaving them with relatives while she traveled for cures and culture. She reserved her minimal maternal instincts for little Claudia, who remembered her as a gentle figure, who liked to play records of Italian operas on her Victrola and read Norse tales aloud.

  Neighbors saw a less benevolent figure, who showed little interest in anyone but herself. On the rare occasion she took a stand on a community matter, T.J. was sure to be found on the opposite side. Her sole foray into politics is a case in point. After Texas granted women the right to vote in primaries in 1918, Minnie began crusading against a popular local candidate, whose relatives were T.J.’s friends. The candidate had been a “slacker” in the war, she argued, and did not deserve public office.

  T.J. and Minnie disagreed on just about everything. She still liked to travel, to attend musical events in Shreveport, fifteen miles away in Louisiana, and confer with doctors at the Kellogg Sanitarium. He stayed close to home, going to bed early so he could be up and at work before sunrise. The half of Harrison County that was African American interested him only as subjects for exploitation, but she assembled a few of them in her living room to talk about their religious practices. (She claimed she wanted to write a book on the subject but aggravating T.J. seems a more likely motivation.) He continued to strike back in ways that humiliated her. When a dog sniffed him out at his store one day, T.J. turned to a customer and said, “I’ve been with a black woman and that dog can smell her on me.” What clearer evidence does one need to show that Lady Bird grew up in a home where marital fidelity carried little weight? The black youth named Sugar who came past the store for handouts was widely believed to be T.J.’s son, half brother to his three children borne by Minnie.

  What Lady Bird called a “stressful” marriage was actually one from hell, as the adults she called Mother and Daddy fashioned a reunion on the shards of a bitter, multiyear separation. Her brother Tony captured some of the rancor in that household when, as an adult, he talked about T.J. beating both sons. He told his sister that she never knew how bad the boys had it, and perhaps she didn’t. But it’s far more likely that she began then to learn what later became her strongest defense against what she did not wish to hear or see—she simply shut it out.

  The Taylors’ marriage ended abruptly in September 1918, when Minnie died, in mysterious circumstances that continue to raise questions nearly a century later. Was it suicide, as some Marshall residents believed? A botched abortion, as others suggested? Or did one historian get it right when he relayed rumors that T.J. had “pushed her down” a flight of stairs?

  Claudia, only five years old at the time, remembered little of her mother’s death, and since her father permitted no discussion of the subject, she was unlikely to learn more. The sketchy version she relayed as an adult has become the accepted one—that Minnie, forty-four years old and pregnant, was tripped by a dog, causing her to fall down the stairs of her home, and then die from a subsequent infection. The graphic details haunted one of Minnie’s granddaughters, who admitted that during her own pregnancies she stayed on high alert whenever a dog came near.

  Other information about Minnie’s death raises strong doubts about whether a dog had anything to do with it, and the disappearance of documents that would help resolve those doubts maximizes the suspicion. Minnie’s death certificate, on file at the Harrison County Courthouse, gives the cause as “septicemia,” commonly called “blood poisoning,” but not commonly associated with falls. Although the official date is September 4, multiple family communications place it ten, or even fourteen, days later. Tommy and Tony, aged seventeen and thirteen at the time, could offer little in the way of verification. Still hundreds of miles away, they did not learn of their mother’s death for a full year because their father did not tell them.

  While it would require an autopsy to pinpoint the exact cause of Minnie Taylor’s death, a betting person would put money on a botched abortion. Septicemia frequently resulted—and was often fatal—when women tried to abort using metal objects. Since it was common knowledge around Karnack that she was pregnant, she must have been in an advanced stage. Yet neither her tombstone nor death certificate mentions a fetus or stillborn child. Since she had already sent her sons away and was investigating boarding schools in Washington, D.C., for little Claudia, it is reasonable to suspect she would not welcome a fourth child. She was buried, without a funeral service, within twenty-four hours of her death, highly unusual in that county at the time, and it was another physician, not the trusted neighbor, Dr. Baldwin—who had attended Claudia’s delivery—who signed Minnie’s death certificate. Issues of the county newspaper, which might fill in details of what happened, are missing for those weeks from the archives at the newspaper office and from an otherwise complete collection at the local college. Most suspicious of all is the completeness with which Minnie was erased from her children’s lives. Not a single photograph of her survives, indicating that whoever possessed pictures taken of her during the forty-four years that she lived was very angry with her. And T.J. was certainly angry. The only time Lady Bird saw her father fly into a rage was when the local minister tried to console him by saying he should view his wife’s passing as “the will of God.”

  Whatever its cause, Minnie Taylor’s death left her daughter, five months short of celebrating her sixth birthday, even more isolated. Without those tenuous ties that had once connected her to a remote, often absent mother, the lonely child became even lonelier. Claudia would later hear talk about her mother, how she treasured fine leather bindings on her books and liked to wander alone through the fields. But the picture emerged only in shadowy outline, like that of a distant aunt she barely knew.

  In the weeks following his wife’s death, T.J.
took time from management of his business to comfort his daughter. When she admitted she missed her mother’s nighttime stories, he offered to read aloud to her. It was the first time, she later admitted, that she knew he could read. But this was busy cotton season, and he soon decided to cart her off to visit her Alabama cousins five hundred miles away. Rather than engage an adult to accompany her, he hung a sign around her neck and put her on a train. The sign, which read “Please deliver this child to Claude Pattillo, Autauga, Alabama,” functioned perfectly, and she arrived without mishap. Behind the sign, a smart little five-year-old was learning the value of self-sufficiency.

  After his daughter returned to him, T.J. decided she needed a woman’s guidance, and he invited Minnie’s younger sister Effie to come and live with them. It was a little like asking an injured hunt dog to take care of the pack. Effie Pattillo, who had shown considerable talent as a pianist in her youth, was now in her early forties, a fragile, wispy woman for whom the phrase “having the vapors” could have been invented. Smaller and physically weaker than Minnie, Effie had grown to adulthood pampered like an invalid, and much as she valued appearing the “real lady,” she acted more like a spoiled child who took little responsibility for financial decisions or other life choices. Shielded by Papa Pattillo’s wealth and standing in the community, she had the luxury of not having to worry about what others thought of how she dressed or acted, and so she became more and more the eccentric bystander.

  Aunt Effie deserves some credit. She widened her niece’s view of the world by taking her along on trips to the Kellogg Sanitarium, and she tried to foster what Minnie had started, introducing Claudia to nature’s pleasures, teaching her to appreciate a colorful field of wildflowers or the special light of a setting sun. T. J. Taylor’s huge landholdings provided the space for exploring those joys, but neither he nor Aunt Effie could provide the reliable companionship of the “piney pine” woods and “true blue” wildflowers that had sustained Minnie in a place she hated. Nature was her preferred solace, and it would take center stage in her daughter’s life. As Lady Bird explained later, nature was “my daily companion. My kingdom, my place, my love.” Outdoors, walking across her father’s acres, she could shut out ugliness and forget the envious glances of the neighborhood children who had far less than she. To transport her to a world of her own, she supplied her own soundtrack, by humming to herself or whistling.