Empress Clara

Even for Texas a woman like Clara Driscoll was something. She came from tiny St. Mary's, on the Gulf Coast, and when she was born (in 1881) many an aging Texan still remembered the Alamo. Her father, Cattleman Bob Driscoll, was just beginning to compound his $10 million empire out of equal parts of land and oil and trail-driven herds.

She was a restless little redhead of 22 when she came home from a costly education and a trip abroad. At San Antonio she found the Daughters of the Republic of Texas floundering in a $75,000 campaign to save the Alamo. (Its courtyard was up for sale as a hotel site.) Clara Driscoll appeared before the startled legislature at Austin, vainly heckled its members, finally rescued Texas' shrine with her own $65,000 check.

Two years later the penitent lawmakers paid her back and for good measure hung her portrait (titled "savior of the Alamo") on a capitol wall. One of the legislators was Newspaperman Henry Hulme Sevier, founder of the Austin American. By the time he married the fiery-eyed, sabertongued heiress in 1906 she had written two novels, a musicomedy (Mexicana) which the Shuberts produced on Broadway. And she was already up to her pretty neck in politics, business, philanthropy.

Money Player. Politicians soon learned to respect her: she could drink, battle, cuss and connive with the best of them, outspend practically all of them. Uvalde's white-browed John Nance Garner became her great & good friend--in & out of smoke-filled rooms, they understood each other. She made quadrennial $25,000 donations to national campaigns, but know-how, not money, worked her up to national committeewoman.

Franklin Roosevelt made Hal Sevier Ambassador to Chile in 1933. But the Seviers' stay in Santiago was short. In four years Texas' rich daughter was divorced, back home, back in politics.. Into the abortive effort to make Jack Garner president she threw all her energy and, it was said, $250,000. After Brother Bob Jr. died in 1929, she ruled the family domain of oil fields and ranches all alone. When Hal Sevier died in 1940 she changed her name (to Mrs. Clara Driscoll) but not her fast, energetic pace.

Last year aging Mrs. Clara Driscoll, still addicted to cosmetics and long skirts and still chipper, won her last political fight. She stomped into the Nueces County Democratic convention, acidly scolded it out of joining the Texas revolt against

Term IV, later had the satisfaction of seeing her man nominated.

Having given away her mansion and large chunks of her fortune, Clara Driscoll established herself in a giant (twelve bathrooms) penthouse atop Corpus Christi's luxurious Driscoll Hotel. She had built the place in a typically willful gesture, after dressing down the manager of another house where she didn't like the service, and promising him she would put up a hotel of her own, tall enough for her to spit on his.

Last week in San Antonio the Lone Star flag drooped at half-staff above the weathered walls of the Alamo. In impressive state in the Alamo's chapel lay the body of its savior. Death (of a cerebral hemorrhage), as it must to all empresses, had come to Texas' Clara Driscoll.

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