Notes From Texas: On Writing in the Lone Star State

7. Famous Arthur

L A R R Y L . K I N G L A R R Y L. KI N G grew up in Putnam, Texas. He is writing his fifteenth book, Safe at Home: Life in World War II America. He is also the author or co-author of seven stage plays, including the international musical hit, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and has written four television documentaries , a dozen short stories, and more than 300 articles and essays. He is the only writer to have been nominated for a National Book Award, a TV Emmy, and a Broadway Tony. The Larry L. King Theatre in Austin, dedicated in 2006 in ceremonies at the parent Austin Playhouse, will host an annual new play festival also named after King. 107 Austin American Statesman/Larry Kolvoord, Courtesy of Southwest Writers Collection King is a member of PEN, the National Writers Union, Dramatists Guild, and the Texas Institute of Letters. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife-lawyer-agent Barbara S. Blaine who, like her husband, grew up in Texas. F A M O U S A R T H U R W H E N I WA S eight years old in 1935, I told all in the vicinity of Putnam, Texas, who would listen that I intended to become a rich Famous Arthur, believing “author” to be spelled and pronounced as the given name. Twenty miles to the west was the nearest “city,” Abilene, with a population of about 25,000 in the mid-1930s. An unimaginable 159 miles to the east was Fort Worth, surely almost as big as New York City since it had tall buildings, cafés that stayed open past dark, a newspaper that came out every day, and a college that existed, in my mind, for the sole purpose of unleashing the mighty Texas Christian Horned Frogs on such sorry outfits as the Baylor Bears, Southern Methodist ’s Mustangs, the Texas Longhorns, and the Texas A&M Aggies. In the summer of 1936, when I was seven and laid low by whooping cough, events conspired to inspire my first fantasy of becoming a “rich Famous Arthur.” Mother, compensating for my having missed the Clark family reunion in Cisco, got from the library there a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer NO T E S F R O M TE X A S 108 and read it to me. It was ever so much more interesting and entertaining than the books I had read in school (“See Spot run. Run Spot. Run. See Dick and Jane chase Spot. Run Jane.”). So, I asked mother if Mr. Mark Twain had written any other books. She soon provided The Prince and the Pauper. Scribbling on a five-cent Big Chief tablet, I began stories titled “The Adventures of Hap Hazzard” and “The Rich Man’s Son and the Poor Man’s Kid.” They were truncated, but the few pages I wrote persuaded me that I had found my calling. Unlike my contemporaries, I never entertained notions of becoming the next cowboy movie star, à la Tom Mix, or a war hero, or a fireman, or, a bit later, Superman. Perhaps now and again I dreamed of saving Anna Lou Williams from a fire-snorting dragon, but such dangers were in short supply locally. When I wrote Anna Lou a mash note, she crumpled it and threw it in my face. It was my first rejection slip, even though the poem I wrote Anna Lou was not original with me: “Tell me quick/Before I faint/Is you mine/Or is you ain’t?” Few were safe from my dispatches. I read to the unwary, ambushed on the school playground, in the town square, or in Uncle George Gaskin’s Piggly Wiggly grocery store. I wrote that any number of “white hopes” could defeat Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber and current heavyweight champion. I wrote that Louis won because he paid off the referees, just as did our natural enemies eleven miles to the west, the loathsome Baird High School Bears. I also “proved” that Franklin D. Roosevelt was the best president we ever had, that Texas was not only the biggest but the best state, that on the evidence of the Bible’s report of winds blowing from “the four corners of the earth,” the earth was most assuredly flat, that Turkey Triplett and Hooter Allen of...