Deep in the Heart Of

THE SUPER-AMERICANS (395 pp.) --John Bainbridge--Doubleday ($5.95).

If there still is an American Dream, the State of Texas is the American Dreamland. Here flourish the myths--of slim-hipped, soft-voiced frontiersmen and sky-eyed, sexy gals; of boom town bragging and spaces that are Great and Open; of easy wheeling and cool dealing that turn a fortune at the breakfast table and double it at the barbecue; of a DC-3 on every private airstrip and His and Her Cadillacs in every garage.

Just how close the dream is to reality is lovingly explored in John Bainbridge's study of Texas and the Texans, whom he dubs The Super-Americans. Bainbridge is a veteran profiler for The New Yorker (where most of the book first appeared), and The Super-Americans has all the best (and traces of the worst) of New Yorker style--urbane detachment, smooth understatement, and relentless pyramiding of minutiae that sometimes suggests a late evening with a victim of total recall. But though The Super-Americans might not suffer much by being cut 100 pages, it is a perceptive and entertaining Baedeker-in-depth.

Droughts & Snakes. The Super-Americans seemed to Bainbridge highly touchy about criticism from the outside world.

Edna Ferber's 1952 Texas novel, Giant, made such a searing impression on them that the evils of "ednaferberism" are still good for a diatribe from the Panhandle to the Rio Grande. Novelist Ferber gathered all the Texacana she thought she needed in a six-week visit--though, as Texans like to tell it, she merely flew across the Southwest in an airliner and sent a note to the pilot: "Please fly a little lower--I want to write a book about Texas." Author Bainbridge moved his wife and two children from their house in Bronxville, N.Y., to Dallas, spent nine meticulous months in traveling, researching and interviewing.

He found Texas no smiling paradise. Droughts make the chiggers worse; floods bring out the rattlesnakes and copperheads; and the blazing heat of summer keeps people close to their ubiquitous air conditioners. In fact, Texas is so air-conditioned that even hearses are equipped with it, and un-air-conditioned automobiles have to be specially ordered. "I remember one we sold to a man that hated any kind of air conditioning," a car salesman told Bainbridge. "But his wife made him trade it in for a regular model. She had a French poodle that refused to get into an un-air-conditioned car."

Pioneer Spirit. One aspect of the frontier tradition that Texans keep alive, says Bainbridge, is the cheapness of life. More people are killed in Texas traffic accidents than in any other state except California, which has about 40% higher population. Perhaps, Bainbridge suggests, it's all the result of the old pioneer spirit. "Texans behind the wheel tend to excel by far all other Americans in aggressiveness, perhaps in this respect outclassing even the Germans. Courtesy can be expected on the splendid Texas highway system only from the lily-livered."

Murder, too, is extremely popular in Texas; more individuals are shot, stabbed and beaten to death there than in any other state, regardless of population. There are more murders each year in Dallas alone than in all of England, more murders in Houston than in Dallas. Writes Bainbridge: "There is always enough action in San Antonio to make it worthwhile for Alex's Reweavers, at 319 North Main Street, to keep in its window a large sign reading, 'We Weave Bullet Holes and Knife Cuts.' The proprietor, Alex Martinez, says he averages about four such jobs a month."

"All My Diamonds." Texas, of course, produces millionaires almost the way Texas millionaires produce oil. Oil, Bainbridge reminds his readers, is the U.S.'s biggest business, with some $50 billion worth of shares outstanding, more than the steel, automotive and chemical industries combined. Author Bainbridge takes his readers on a quick, colorful trip through the legendary history of oil and oilmen (including the young man who made $20 million while he was losing his mind), and lucidly expounds the magic tax laws that enable such a man as Haroldson L. Hunt to make about $200,000 a day.

"The rich costuming of the wives," observes Bainbridge, "is the rule whether they live in Dallas or Nacogdoches, San Antonio or Muleshoe. It is probably safe to say that Mrs. Dudley Dougherty, of Beeville (pop. 15,000), has a wardrobe as fashionable as that of any millionaire's wife in Houston (pop. 925,000). This is due in part to Mrs. Dougherty's habit of flying to Paris every once in a while for a clothes-shopping visit of some three or four days." Even in Dallas' suburban S & S Tea Room, says the proprietor, "when the temperature drops below 90, out come the minks."

For many of the wives, the transition from Levi's to Lanvins has been joltingly sudden. "There I was working in the oilfields," said Mrs. Bruno Graf of Dallas, "and the next thing I knew I was going all through Europe with all my diamonds and my personal maid." The oilionairesses tend to take their recreation in groups. Mrs. James Abercrombie of Houston and four of her friends call themselves "The Flying Five" and periodically take off in one of her husband's planes (with pilot and copilot) for a sightseeing jaunt in the Caribbean or somewhere. Mrs. Ralph Fair of San Antonio often piles a gaggle of girls into the family DC-3 for a fortnight --with a hairdresser and a masseuse--at the Fair ranch in Montana.

"Wanting to Shake Hands." For all their exaggerations and exasperations, New Yorker Bainbridge obviously developed some fondness for the Super-Americans. He praises their kindness and their courtesy. "Men and boys, even younger women, give their seats on buses to the elderly. Children are taught manners. Men tip their hats. Women acknowledge having a door held open for them. Men do not grab taxis ahead of ladies, even when it's raining."

He sums up the Texan of today by quoting British Journalist George Warrington Steevens' summary of the turn-of-the-century American: "He may make his mind easy about his country. It is a credit to him, and he is a credit to it. You may differ from him, you may laugh at him; but neither of these is the predominant emotion he inspires. Even while you differ or laugh, he is essentially the man with whom you are always wanting to shake hands."

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