[AGL] Paid 2/3 page Cartwright obit in Statesman

[J. David Moriaty]

In 1972 Gary Cartwright and Bud Shrake sent the Rip Off Review of Western Culture an enormous manuscript written under the pseudonym M.D. Shafter. It dealt with the filming of Dennis Hopper’s movie, complete with photos. Even then, Bud and Jap’s reputations were such that we dared not edit a word, so the piece ran in two issues of the Review: 14 pages in issue #2, and 18 pages in issue #3. Single spaced 10-point type.

Why contribute to an unknown publication under a pseudonym? Enough sex and drugs to make it unpublishable for money and enough liability to need some rag as judgment proof as the Review. Hard to remember those days when the present issue of the New Yorker has a story with frank descriptions of lesbian cunnilingus.

I have a few copies of those editions, and if anyone is interested, send me a mailing address and I'll send you the two issues subject to supplies on hand.


CARTWRIGHT, Gary


Gary Cartwright, the best Texas
journalist and nonfiction
stylist of his generation, died
February 22 at 82. His passing
resulted from complications of
injuries suffered in a fall in his
Austin home. Born in Dallas,
August 10, 1934, Gary spent
some of his early boyhood in
the West Texas oil boom village
of Royalty, where his dad ran
a Texaco station, but he grew
up in Arlington. In high school
there he was inspired when an
English teacher told him he had a gift for writing.

After five semesters at the University of Texas-Austin and his
hometown college, then called Arlington State, and a two-
year hitch in the army, Gary took a journalism degree from
TCU. He caught on first with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as
a $55 a week “cop shop” reporter. He later reflected, “Covering
the night police beat was where I learned to use fear as a
battle-ax. It is cold and relentless out there, and fear is your
primary weapon. Fear can induce paralysis, and will if you allow
it, but it can also inspire accomplishments that at times seem
unlimited.”


He operated out of a joint newsroom with new friends and
rivals—among them tall, handsome Edwin “Bud” Shrake of the
Fort Worth Press. Bud lured him to the Press,which turned
loose on the city a sports staff brimming with flair, wit, and
style—Bud, Gary, Dan Jenkins, and their exacting editor
Blackie Sherrod. A crank who covered bowling took in Gary’s
swarthy skin and mistook him for a past Asian-American
intern he disliked and groaned about someone letting “that
Jap” back in the building. Gary’s new cronies at once
nicknamed him “Jap.” He accepted their politically incorrect and
misconstrued term of endearment but grew sensitive about it.
Decades later, when his rowdy friend and the recovered
alcoholic Ann Richards was governor of Texas, she carefully called
him Gary, never again Jap.

While with the Star-Telegram Gary married an art designer
of retail show rooms named Barbara. They had a son and a
daughter and divorced after seven years. In Dallas he married
a stewardess named Jo, and they too had a son. Gary followed
Blackie, Bud, and Dan to the Dallas Times-Herald and then the
Morning News. Jack Ruby gave the sportswriters free drinks
at his Carousel Club, for they were celebrities. Some nights
Gary, Bud, and Blackie donned capes and tights and conned
gatherings into believing they were a troupe of European
acrobats called the Flying Punzars. Their pratfalls wrecked a lot
of furniture. Bud and Dan soon went off to New York as stars
of the newborn Sports Illustrated and became accomplished
novelists.

Blackie meanwhile edited the Morning News sports section
and wrote his popular column while Gary specialized in the
pro football beat. In 1965 the Cowboys were trying to stop
being a woeful expansion franchise. That fall in Dallas, with
time running out they were one yard away from upsetting
Cleveland’s then-mighty Browns and their dominant runner
Jim Brown. Don Meredith, the dashing quarterback and past
SMU heartthrob, dropped back and threw a pass over the
middle straight into the brisket of an astonished Cleveland
linebacker. He was ordered to throw to a spot where a Dallas
receiver, not the linebacker, was supposed to be. Coach Tom
Landry made the call but let Dandy Don take the fall. In the
press box Gary began his story with a nod to an apocalyptic
verse in Revelations: “The Four Horsemen rode again Sunday
in the Cotton Bowl. You remember their names: Death,
Famine, Pestilence, and Meredith.”

Dandy Don was wounded, but in practice that week he
calmed the Dallas players who wanted to take some hide off
Cartwright. “Just doing his job,” Meredith said of Gary. They
remained friends the rest of Dandy Don’s life. The last time he
called Gary, it was just to sing him a pretty song.

Gary had also befriended Billy Lee Brammer, author of The
Gay Place, the classic novel of 1950s Texas politics featuring a
dominant governor that resembled Lyndon Johnson, whom
Billy Lee had written speeches for in the Senate. That August,
while the Cowboys trained in Thousand Oaks, California, Gary
had gotten a call from Billy Lee, then freelancing for Time. He
told Gary to hurry down to the Watts section of L.A., which
was aflame. Drawing on the resources of fear and adrenaline
he learned as a police beat rookie in Fort Worth, Gary plunged
into the gunfire, rage, and chaos, filing report after report.
The Morning News ran none of it. Gary later wrote that when
he was back in Dallas, he challenged the editor-in-chief, who
responded airily, “This was an important story, but we couldn’t
have it written by one of our own.”

Alienated, weary of Dallas, Gary and Jo agreed without
hesitation to a move when the Philadelphia Inquirer offered him
a sports column at twice his Dallas salary. They liked the city
but Gary hated what he was writing, and so did his
superiors. He was fired after 89 days. For Harper’s, then edited by
Texas Observer ex Willie Morris, Gary wrote “Confessions of a
Washed-Up Sportswriter.” The essay established him as one of
the hottest young magazine writers in the country.

However, back in Texas, Gary was arrested for giving a joint to
two cops posing as Austin hippies who had knocked on their
door and said they had lost their way on Comanche Trail. The
statewide headlines were punishing, and the famed Odessa
leader of his defense team, Warren Burnett, advised Gary to
pipe down about the Constitution and wanting his
confiscated weed back if he didn’t wish to spend years in “the Big
Rodeo” of Texas prisons. Another defense lawyer, A.R. “Babe”
Schwartz,” was a state senator from Galveston and won a
legislative continuance, allowing Gary to party with pals and
their wives for some months in Mexico City, Zihuatanejo, and
Acapulco. When the trial began in Austin, Burnett proposed
a defense of jury nullification—a theory that juries had the
power to refuse to convict when they rejected the laws
covered in the indictment. The prosecutors moved for a mistrial
and got one, then lost interest. Gary’s indictment went away,
but the misadventure contributed to his second divorce.

Gary and Bud wrote a film script about a convict turned rodeo
bull and bronc rider, J.W. Coop. The movie came out in 1971,
but they had to sue the star and director, Cliff Robertson, and
then settle in beaten fashion to get some pay and their screen
credit. Robertson floated their names in taunting yellow type
against a field of yellow wildflowers. Next for Gary came a
voyage to Durango, Mexico, to observe the filming of Bud’s
movie Kid Blue, starring Dennis Hopper, who was still riding
the success and excess of Easy Rider. Gary and Hopper became
friends, though in the course of a Christmas party that got out
of hand Hopper stuck a cocked and loaded pistol in Gary’s face
and said, “Bang bang.”

Gary then won a prestigious Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, which
provided him six months on J. Frank Dobie’s old retreat along
Barton Creek. Gary enjoyed the beautiful setting, but the
most work that came out of that term was done by a house
guest, Pete Gent, the ex-Dallas Cowboys flanker who was
writing a bestselling novel, North Dallas Forty. Still, the return to
Austin allowed Gary the fortune of meeting, courting, and
marrying the love of his life, Phyllis, who was becoming a
superior real estate agent. Bud Shrake, a minister of some
obscure faith, performed the legal ceremony in a side room of
the Texas Chili Parlor, and the party moved on to a club where
Gary whanged away on Willie Nelson’s guitar and made up a
ditty called “Main Squeeze Blues.”

The marriage to Phyllis was not the only influence that
settled him down some. Mike Levy, a young lawyer from Dallas
who had sold ads for a Philadelphia city magazine, borrowed
enough money from his father to pursue his dream of
bringing that publishing concept to the whole of Texas. Levy
interviewed hundreds of candidates for editor, including Gary, but
hired William Broyles, Jr., who in turn hired Gregory Curtis.
Bill and Greg had been writing students of Larry McMurtry
when he taught at Rice. The birth of Texas Monthly turned
loose a herd of ambitious twenty-somethings that included
Griffin Smith, Al Reinert, Richard West, Stephen Harrigan, Jan
Reid, Paul Burka, Prudence Mackintosh, and others of much
talent to come. But most admitted they really didn’t know
what they were doing. Suddenly Gary was the grownup in
the room—the seasoned veteran at 39 and leader of the pack.
His first feature in the debut issue in February 1973 was a
profile of Duane Thomas, the enigmatic star runner of the Dallas
Cowboys’ first Super Bowl winner.

Gary and Bud dreamed up Mad Dog, Inc. with the
slogan “Doing Indefinable Services to Mankind” and the credo
“Anything That Is Not Mystery is Guesswork.” Members
included David and Ann Richards, Pete Gent, Molly Ivins, and Eddie
Wilson and other creators of Armadillo World Headquarters,
who let them office upstairs in the converted armory. Mad
Dog, Inc. was Austin’s answer to Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters,
and though they didn’t roam the country in a wildly painted
bus, they tried without success to buy three Texas ghost towns
where they hoped to rule in anarchy and unbridled fun. All of
their grand schemes fizzled, but in 1976 Hunter S. Thompson
came through town and decided he didn’t have enough
octane to run with that crowd.

In a January 1976 Texas Monthly story titled “Is Jay J. Armes
for Real?” Gary debunked an El Paso private eye’s growing
renown as the best shamus in the country. Armes had grown up
poor and lost both hands in a boyhood blasting cap accident—
he was a genuine wizard at getting through life with hooks
instead of hands. Gary punctured his grandiose claims yet
portrayed him sympathetically. The magazine had taken on
a rookie fact checker named David Moorman. Gary, Broyles,
Moorman, and the magazine’s libel lawyer Jim George went
to El Paso and certified all but one of Gary’s allegations. Armes
had a menagerie of large caged animals, such as bears and
mountain lions, around his mansion. Moorman couldn’t prove
or disprove Gary’s closing line about the menagerie, but how
could they not use it? “A neighbor killed the elephant with a
crossbow.”

Gary’s December 1976 cover story was a post-prison profile of
Candy Barr, a baby-faced blonde stripper and star of one
pornographic movie. Dallas police and prosecutors had put an
end to her fame with a marijuana conviction. Gary talked her
into letting him come see her in Brownwood. She came to the
door with her hair in curlers and wearing a short disheveled
house dress and no apparent underwear. Gary recalled the
meeting: “‘Don’t think I dressed up just for you,’ she told me.”

On and on rolled Gary’s panoramas of Texas, Mexico, and
points beyond. He wrote about people imprisoned for crimes
they didn’t commit, and he didn’t stop fighting for them when
the issue was on the stands and another deadline called. He
described the wanton killer Kenneth McDuff under a
cover that shrieked, “MONSTER.” He was a one-man town
without pity on the subject of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.
He spoofed himself as the state’s greatest cook and greatest
middle-aged lover. “Nobody checked my facts on that,” Phyllis
chided a staff newcomer, John Spong. Gary shared his
inconsolable loss and grief when his older son Mark and beloved
Phyllis died of cancer.

Gary made one real stab at writing fiction, his 1969
novel about pro football, The Hundred Yard War, but he knew
nonfiction was his métier. Texas Monthly stories spawned his
most successful books: Blood Will Tell: The Murder Trials of T.
Cullen Davis (1979); Dirty Dealing: A True Story of Smuggling,
Murder, and the FBI’s Biggest Investigation (1984), and
Galveston: A History of the Island (1991). Blood Will Tell
won the non-fiction book of the year award from the Texas
Institute of Letters and was adapted as a TV movie. That book
was also translated in Russian by Soviet apparatchiks as proof
of the depravity of American capitalism and justice.

Gary and Bud wrote scripts for two TV movies starring Willie
Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, A Pair of Aces (1990) and
Another Pair of Aces (1991.) Following a major heart attack
and bypass surgery, Gary wrote Heartwise Guy (1998) about
his toned-down lifestyle and philosophy. He envied writers
of good fiction and read it constantly. He was the last one to
condescend to newspaper reporters; many were his friends,
and he had given a decade of his life to that hard trade. When
Gary retired from Texas Monthly he wanted his last column to
be a visit with John Graves, the revered but age-stricken
author of Goodbye to a River and Hard Scrabble. Their lives had
played out in such different ways, at different decibels. Some
wondered if they would connect, but they did.

In 2012 Gary won the Texas Institute of Letters’ Lon Tinkle
Award for career achievement. His eloquent remarks at
the Institute’s awards banquet inspired his finale, The Best I
Recall: A Memoir. He relived high points of his long life but
owned up to his considerable failures as a father and husband.
‘“Maybe I was an imperfect man, writing my own obituary,’” he
recalled Willie Nelson saying in a sorrowful conversation they
had on the singer’s bus. “I didn’t understand the meaning at
first, but after a few years I discovered that Willie told me a
profound truth: once you choose the night life, all roads are
pretty much the same.”

Gary Cartwright is survived by his daughter, Lea Hickman, of
Santa Rosa, Florida, and his son, Shea Cartwright, of Houston.
Another son, Mark Cartwright, is deceased. He leaves behind
five grandchildren and six great grandchildren. On Saturday
March 4 at 11 a.m. he will be honored with a graveside
ceremony and remembrances at the Texas State Cemetery, where
he will be interred near the graves of his friends Edwin “Bud”
Shrake, Larry L. King, and Governor Ann Richards. The
cemetery is at 909 Navasota Street, just east of downtown. A
rollicking wake and testament of Gary’s spirit will follow at the
Scholz Beer Garten.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Wittliff
Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, where his
papers and mementos reside and are now on display. For more
information, contact the Wittliff’s Director of Development
Ramona Kelly at ramonakelly at txstate.edu
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