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 o.