Swank in The Arts; 111; Betsey & Oliver Hailey (Elizabeth Forsyth Hailey)

Good evening, I'm Patsy Swank. Once upon a time, a young college girl named Betsy Forsyth worked summers on the amusement's desk of the Dallas Morning News and shared her press tickets with a young city desk reporter named Oliver Haley. When he left Dallas to go to the Yale Drama School, they were married and left happily ever after. I presume, certainly busily ever after, that was 14, 17, I'm sorry, that was 17 years ago. Now they have two daughters. Oliver is established as an important American playwright, and Betsy has produced her first novel just published by Viking. Both of them are here.

We're going to talk about their work and see a short scene from Oliver's play who's happy now. But first, I want to give you a little preview of Betsy's book. It's called A Woman of Independent Means, and it was inspired by Betsy's grandmother, Best Walcott Kendall Jones of Dallas. The book's protagonist is also called Best, and the story is told in a couple of hundred of her letters to her family and friends. A Woman of Independent Means is an absorbing story, but more importantly, it catches the spirit of a very particular kind of person. The Texas woman, just emerging from the frontier, trailing the gentility and the manners of her southern heritage over the steel of need, her duty, and let's be honest, her own strong will. I've chosen a few letters to read, though this book is fiction, the face that you will see is that of Best Jones, because both Besses had such strengths in common. December 10th, 1899, Honey Grove, Texas, Dear Rob, I just asked Miss Appleton to put us on

the same team for the spelling bee, since we're the only two people in the fourth grade who can spell perspicacious, so our team is sure to win. When you come over after school, the gardener is clearing the holly hawk bed, so there will be more room to play tag. It was my idea, Bess. May 5th, 199, Stanton, Dearest Mama, I will be home in a month, and Rob and I will be married this summer. Please don't say anything to him, as I want to be the first to tell him. I would like to be married in our front parlor. It is more splendid than any church in Honey Grove, and I have been happier there. I imagine it will be many years before Rob and I can afford a house as fine, but I want him to know what is expected of him. Your loving daughter, Bess. April 21st, 1913, Dallas, Dear Mother Steve, ever since Annie described to me the freedom

accorded expectant mothers in Europe, I have been hinting to Rob that I would be happier spending the summer abroad. Today he surprised me with steamship reservations for a transatlantic crossing. One of the reservations is for you, if you are willing. When I spoke of traveling abroad, I, of course, hoped, and indeed assumed, Rob would be at my side, but unfortunately his business will keep him at home. He seems to have complete faith in my ability to manage without him. Why else would he encourage me to make this trip? I suppose I should be flattered, devotedly, Bess. February 6th, 1919, St. Louis, Mr. Joseph Darnell, attorney at law, the Wilson Building, Dallas, Texas. Dear Joe, I am enclosing a cardinal to Rob's will that he dictated to me this morning. The signature is very shaky, but I can attest to its authenticity as I helped guide his

hand. He has been bedridden with influence of for over a week now, and his condition grows more critical by the hour. The doctor says there is nothing more we can do. Each body has to fight the disease in its own way. I am appalled at how helpless all the supposed advances of modern life have left us as individuals. Science may be the new religion, but I have yet to hear a minister say there is nothing more he can do. At least they pray with you to the end, devotedly, Bess. July 3rd, 1922, Dallas, Texas, dear Mother Steed, I was very sad when Manning and Lydia arrived today without you, and I trust that even though we will not have your presence at our wedding tomorrow, we will have your blessing. No one loved Rob, as I did, or mourned his passing more, not even you. So no one has the right to judge me for committing what is left of my life to another man.

No one would rejoice more than Rob to see how happy his children are in the presence of the man who is about to become my husband. And if you love your grandchildren as much as you say you do, then you will rejoice with us tomorrow, even though you have chosen to do it alone, affectionately as always, Bess. September 3rd, 1938, you dad Monte Mexico, Burton Baby, Florence Nightingale Hospital, Dallas, Texas, my darling grandchild, am desolate that I was not in Dallas to witness your arrival, but take it as sign of independent spirit that you do not wait for anyone. Same can be said of me. We are going to be great friends. I love you already, grandmother. On 15th, 1966, Dallas, city editor, the Dallas Morning News, Dallas, Texas, dear sir. I am in closing an obituary notice I have composed in advance of my death for you to keep

on file in your morgue. If I have omitted any essential details beyond the cause and time of death, or if you have any further questions, please feel free to call me. I would like to spare my family any intrusion on their grief on the day of my death. There are undoubtedly many details in my life about which they would be understandably vague, sincerely Bess Steed Garner. Betsy, I love a woman of independent means. I am the daughter of a Bess Steed Garner. I am the piano protégé of another Bess Steed Garner. How in the world did you catch the climate and the time and the fabric of that woman? Well I think there are a lot of Bess Steed Garner's in Texas and nobody has ever written about them before. I began to be a little frustrated with the books I was reading about Texas because they were about oil people or cattle people and really matriarchs who made no pretense of not

being boss and I wanted to write about another kind of Texas lady that I knew from Dallas. I think a Dallas lady is quite different from South Texas lady. My grandmother was one of a whole breed of women I think. She was quite typical. Well Oliver is this a part of your life as well? Not really. I come from West Texas but once I met Betsy's grandmother, I was absolutely overwhelmed. Someone had said to me that I came from a very strong grandmother too who grew up in East Texas and Windsboro but there was something about Betsy's grandmother that just knocked me out. From the moment I met her I was an absolute awe of her and finally fell hopelessly in love with her. And I still haven't recovered and it's just so thrilling now to have it all in book form but we can keep her forever. We have her portrait hanging on our bedroom wall and I think there are days that she looks down at me and wants to be moved to the living room.

We'll see. We'll see. Well how close does the woman of independent means actually go to your grandmother? How much of this is fact and how much of this is fiction? My grandmother's life provided some of the factual incidents that happened. I brought a lot of the emotion to it. I either imagined that's how she felt or I just thought that's how the character would feel once I started writing it. But my grandmother had been through enormous tragedy as a young woman. She had lost a husband and a child which to me are the two greatest crises that a person could face and other material, her house had burned down. She'd been through so many terrible incidents and yet she had enjoyed life more than anybody I ever knew as an old lady and I just wanted to put myself through what she'd been through and see if I could come out with the same sense of enjoyment at the end of it. When did you start writing it?

What ticked it off? Oh let me tell you. You're very simple. She was going to leave me. The marriage had come to that. He always says that and I haven't corrected him. It brings an element of danger to her marriage. She got very caught up on the whole women's lib notion and at just at the time that our second daughter was leaving for kindergarten and she got very restless and you fell as bright enough. He can pick up on that in time. So I said, Betsy why don't you write a book? Why don't you do something for yourself that'll be just yours because she'd always been very helpful with me in my work but I kept her in the closet. Nobody knew who she was or how much help she'd given me. We had been in Europe this summer before and we had met a friend of ours who had left her husband and her children and run away to Europe for a year. That was the big thing about four years ago. It may still be rather large but anyway, she said, I think I know what I'll write about. I'll write about Bonnie and I will write letters. Bonnie's writing back to her husband and her children.

Letters from her run away wife and I said boy that strikes me is very boring. And I said also by the time you get it finished that will be a dead issue because it's so topical. It's what's happening at this moment but two years from now when the book is ready and I said besides you have in your background a woman who was so remarkable, your grandmother who ran away constantly without ever leaving home, without ever leaving her marriage, who never burned her bra, always wore it and yet with great excitement and flare and dignity. And I said I think that's what's exciting about what's happening today is looking back and recognizing that it's happened many times before and that the great women of this country have always been women of independent means on every level. And you weren't talking about financial. Not at all. Not at all. I think that's part of it but there is I do think liberation begins inside and for my character and probably for my grandmother it began from the day she was born. She never occurred to her that she was not a totally independent person and marriage restrained her a little initially and more so in the book I think probably than in real

life I've fictionalized attention that she probably never went through I've imposed some of my feelings on it. Well tell me a little bit about how your work has developed. I like Betsy with her novel Drew on my life and who's happy now my childhood. Now my mother will watch the show and lower her head because she absolutely abhors the notion that the play is autobiographical and it's autobiographical only in essence not in literal fact at all but I think finally the breakthrough moment for any writer and certainly who's happy now is my most successful piece and was the thing that enabled us to really get to Los Angeles and begin to work seriously in television and film is the thing that goes the deepest to one's core the core of one's being and those truths and those terrors that one lived through as a child and that one finally has to take enough time to find an objectivity about.

And you can give me

two of them luncheon loaves where you mix the cheese with a horse meat it's crap but they love it. Horse? Horse could you fix me a nice meatloaf for tonight's supper special. I'm fixing lamb chops. My customers don't like lamb chops. Well I like lamb I'm in the mood for lamb and I'm having lamb and if they don't like it they can eat supper somewhere else. Well where else I'd like to know it's the only cafe in town and you know it. They can eat at home. Oh hello miss Helen I didn't see you there.

Good morning. Well I'll be getting back on over the cafe now you send that order over this quick as you get it ready whatever it is as you supply brains horse I got a good price on brains as well. Well the ones I got in the box are probably spoiled already nobody eats enough brains anymore. I better check. You work a full day now miss? I do not I just clean the meat cases after I've walked the bar to school. You stop there. Right now I mean it. I thought you might appreciate it sometimes the wives do you know. I appreciate it but I don't like it.

Horse wouldn't like it either. You might be surprised if I sometimes the husbands appreciate it too. I'll secure you catch you doing that to me don't you bet on it. Let me take your hand. You see I told you. Oh you chopped off two of my fingers. We have seen a clip from who's happy now. What does this play come out of for you?

My play really deals with a serious conflict that I had growing up with my father and once the play was written my father and I became great friends again and it was really a therapy and that's another thing that I'm constantly urging other writers I've never been psychoanalyzed never been to a psychiatrist simply because my writing does that it's terribly therapeutic. Well it sounds like that you have come to what is it watershed or a benchmark. That's that is correct and a very exciting one indeed because Betsy is now hard at work on their second novel. Thank you so much Betsy Haley, Albert Haley for being here this evening. Thank you. Thank you. Summer is not really going to settle down. Thursday the Dallas Repertory Theater at North Park opens a run of the Makato directed by Ed Delad, elsewhere in North Park the Dallas Symphony will present Bill Cosby to open its summer top series a week from tonight. Summer is busy in a lot of other places too, the second annual Shreveport Summer Music Festival

begins tonight at Holy Cross Church there and all through June will present solo orchestra chamber music and choral concerts without standing guest artists. Students from a tri-state area will get the chance both to hear and to perform with those artists. Smyzenbach young Dallas cellist is to be presented in a bonus concert in the festival Saturday June the 17th. And this is the weekend of the 14th annual Bond Sally Art Fair around Hillsboro's beautiful old Victorian courthouse. Along with the fair the Hillsboro Library is going to hang an exhibition of the paintings of Otis Dozier. Three weavers from San Antonio will come for the weekend to demonstrate spinning and weeding. And in a salute to Texas writers Frank Talbert is to be on hand to autograph his books and to visit. The 8th annual Round Top Music Festival starts Friday with a recital by Stephen DeGroote this year's Clyburn winner. That will launch a whole month of concerts, master classes and seminars with distinguished

soloists as faculty all under the direction of Round Top's founder Pianist James Dick. We'll find Round Top on Highway 237 just off the main drag between Austin and Houston. And in Stanford, in connection with the 49th Texas Cowboy reunion, the Stanford Art Foundation will hold its 5th exhibition and sale of Western Art which will benefit the West Texas Rehabilitation Center. There's a collectors preview scheduled for June the 29th. Tonight, right here, PBS's Great Performances Dance in America series is going to show the San Francisco Ballets full length Romeo and Juliet. I think you'll be as fascinated as I am with this mobile and beaten steel by Jose de Rivera, watch it. Saturday is an important day, terribly important for every one of us.

I guess I feel it so strongly because slowly over the years I've watched us come to this day. It couldn't have happened when I first got here fresh out of college, but our community has grown and matured so beautifully in so many ways that now we can face this responsibility and most of us are ready to accept it. It's to those who aren't ready that I want to speak. When I moved to Dallas, I used to ride a street car for an hour to get to a concert. How far we've come, and not just in years, to get to Saturday June the 10th. On that day, we have an opportunity we have never had before that no other city in this country has ever had, on that we may never have again. We vote on a $254 million bond issue, carefully planned to give us some important things that we need without raising our taxes.

It includes the usual things that we must have and that we vote on every three years or so. Public safety, fire protection, street improvements, water, waste disposal funds. But in this one, we have some new projects that will change the character of the city and of our lives. Some of them can hardly be in question. We know from experience what libraries mean, the branches near our homes, the new central facility being planned to meet the mind-boggling demands for knowledge in the future. We know from experience that our parks and open spaces must be expanded. We know from common sense that the Trinity Green Belt we already own should be improved for our use, and that the quality of the water in the Trinity River is a problem to be solved with or without town lake. We know with a little vision that a sound and careful beginning on that town lake, as called for in this ballot, can unify and consolidate this entire city.

But many of us may not know from experience, the importance of Proposition 5, which asks $45 million to improve two arts facilities to build new homes for two more, and the land for a fifth in a planned downtown arts district, which will give them a beautiful setting and which will help revitalize the whole center of Dallas. It is a sad, provincial habit to consider the arts some kind of luxury fringe benefit for a city. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There is not one of the arts organizations named in this proposition that does not have a program beamed to the disadvantaged in this city. That doesn't mean just poor. Thousands of people here, especially children, have never had the chance to know what impact music and art and dance and theater can have on their lives. Proposition 5 gathers in every geographical division, every economic level, every ethnic

and racial background of Dallas, through a human creative urge that is older and stronger than any of them. Nor does it hand anything to anybody on a platter. This public money must be met with private funds to build these buildings. Money alone is not enough. It takes people to build a fine arts community, people who have had the opportunity from childhood to know the importance of the arts experience, whether it is participants or audience. The chance to find out how that experience spills out into all their lives. The museums and the performing arts people can't do it alone, but they provide the focus for it, the center for the waves of action that gives school programs that demands sound planning and responsible zoning and all the related implementation that makes a good life city. We are told over and over that the arts are good for business, and that's true, and that's one reason why.

Excellence symphony and opera and theater and ballet in museums do attract new industry and new residents, because their excellence reflects a standard of city life that can't be played or acted or danced or sung or painted. A healthy arts community means that a city has reacted to a most profound need of its citizens, and therefore must be concerned with other needs as well. There's a tremendous surge of arts activity that's brought this proposition to the ballet thanks to elected officials who recognized its implications. Not every arts group that needed this kind of help got it on this ballot, but the passage of Proposition 5 will encourage them to work for another ballot another day. There is some opposition to this proposition, but what will really defeat it will be apathy. Don't leave this opportunity to anybody else, do it yourself, go Saturday and vote. Next week Bob Ray Sanders and a group of performing artists will join me to talk about that

special Texas holiday, June 10th, good night. See the link in the description below! .

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