Showing Off for the G.O.P.

By Gregory Jaynes

The Big D has come of age, but the funkiness is gone

All the good old stories have been worn down worse than river rocks. The oilman who re-created an entire Neiman-Marcus window display--gowns, gems, furs and all--in his living room one Christmas morn because his wife had said she had seen something in the window she wanted. The fellow who told LIFE magazine that he bought a Rolls-Royce because its powder-blue paint job matched his wife's favorite hat. Then there was H.L. Hunt, who, a Dallas editor once said, "would be the most dangerous man in America if he wasn't such a damn hick."

Loose lips, eccentric behavior--characteristics long affixed to this town--have to be searched for now, rooted out. Oh, evangelists still holler on the radio stations: they do not say things so much as they "sayeth" them. And H. Ross Perot did plan a commando operation against a whole country, Iran, to get two of his employees back. "Mad" Eddie Chiles-an ideologue who, says a longtime listener, "lives in a permanent state of incoherent fury"--is still on the air, and people drive around sporting bumper stickers that say I'M MAD, TOO, EDDIE.

But the romantic, down and dirty Dallas that television keeps alive has long since gone. "It's such a straight town," says Dallas Times Herald Columnist Molly Ivins. "It is so earnest about making itself a great city. When people spot funkiness in Dallas, they race around with a wrecking ball and get rid of it immediately. "The Dallas of the '80s is a community that has adopted the construction crane as its municipal bird," the introduction to a fact book about Dallas crows, and it is a fact. A skyline that now looks like a comb on its back with some teeth knocked out will one day be blocked in, assuming the cranes persist. Dallas leaders, boosters to their marrow, want the world to know this. They hope the Republican National Convention next week will give them the stage to get out the message. That message--Dallas is an international city, Dallasites are so community-minded that they paid for the convention out of their pockets rather than dipping into public tills, Dallas is tidy, well-oiled and a most wonderful place to live--is, well, boring. It is also true. For a long time the success story was overshadowed by the act of a jackal with a firearm in 1963.

After the Kennedy assassination, Historian A.C. Greene writes in Dallas USA, "the old Big D arrogance was gone for years, drained away by attacks against which no defense was allowed. If someone reads Dallas newspapers of the seventies, for instance, it will be found that few local columnists ever displayed the old Dallas, or Texas, Brag."

Now, a generation later, notes Greene, "most of the guilt that 'it I happened here' has disappeared. Dallas (and this includes the people who have become residents since 1963) now feels it is the guardian, the protector, if you will, of the history of the event."

Until the television program Dallas debuted in 1978, Dealey Plaza, the assassination site, was the most popular tourist attraction in town. Now the most popular place to see is Southfork, the ranch where Dallas is set. Fred Meyer, chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party, finds an offensive image here. "When the No. 1 tourist attraction is a fictional location of a fictional TV show," Meyer says, "that's a powerful argument that there is a lack of knowledge about Dallas" Dallas Mayor A. Starke Taylor Jr. wants to send forth a truer picture too. "There are places in the world where people think we're still cowboys here, wearing boots and hats" So the truth: they wear pinstripes, gray flannel in season, wing-tipped cordovans, tassled loafers; sunup brings the thump of the Wall Street Journal at the foot of the drive.

The city is so conservative that even its gay community has a Reaganaut flavor."There are thousands of gay Republicans in this town," says one of them. "We pack some power." Dallas, with over 900,000 people, seventh biggest metropolis in the nation, is the largest city with a manager form of government. It wants the world to know that politics has no place in municipal services here. Sewers and garbage are attended to with dispatch. Potholes--called chuckholes in Dallas--are supposedly filled within three hours. Dallas is a clean family town. In preparation for the convention, a "Haul a Heap" crusade towed away 4,418 abandoned cars.

It is also a town that pulls its own weight as much as possible and in doing that it is seen as a Republican ideal. When the city decided to build a new mass transit system, says G.O.P. Chairman Meyer, "we didn't send people to Washington for money. We voted a tax to pay for it" When the city and G.O.P. asked for volunteers for nonpaying convention tasks, 20,000 Dallasites stepped forward. The city's share of the convention will be entirely funded by private donations, totaling $3.9 million. "San Francisco spent 8 million bucks to put on that convention," huffed Dallas Welcoming Committee Chairman David Fox. "Here it's going to be put on by private citizens' money."

In Dallas, entry into society is shut tight to anyone who has not paid his or her dues in service to the city. If one has more money than one needs, a handsome percentage of the surplus is expected to be given first to God, second to Dallas. Money Titans Clint Murchison Sr. and Jr. used to say, "Money is like manure. If you spread it around it does a lot of good. But if you pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell."

Will Rogers said that Dallas is the city where the East peters out, and that Fort Worth, some 30 miles to the west, was in fact where the West began. Fort Worth welcomes comparisons. It has stockyards, Dallas does not. Fort Worth is Texas. Dallas in many ways is not. "Dallas is so smug, so pretentious," writes Greene. "The rest of Texas hates Dallas." Other Texans see Dallas as the place where the dry-goods salesmen from the East climbed off the stagecoaches and set up shop. Houston, good old earthy Houston, attracted the wildcatters. Houston has oil. Dallas does not. Dallas has class and flaunts it; Houston has money and is learning manners.

And Austin, liberal, Democratic Austin, has been known to take its own potshots at pompous Big D. In an anticipatory and funny recent stroke, Texas Monthly, a fat, fast and loose Austin publication, gave its readers a look at what the pols and the press might get into when the Republicans gather next week. The magazine asserted that the convention, a minds-made-up affair, would be so surpriseless that the networks would pursue "The Other Dallas" (CBS), "The Hidden Dallas" (NBC) and "The Dallas the Republicans Don't Want You to See" (ABC). Poverty in the black sections of South Dallas would be revealed. Cases of provincialism would be found among the rich. One bit would be shot at Southfork to display "who has been helped by Reaganomics." In short, every boil the city imagines it possesses would be lanced in prime time.

The Texas Monthly forecast could easily turn out to be dead on the money, for to invite world attention is to endure meticulous investigation. In the face of it, Dallas is, as a Texan might say, as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

Nervous, but not scared, or hiding anything. Conventioneers will be offered a three-hour tour ranging from preppy Southern Methodist University to single-family ghetto homes, from the J.F.K. assassination site to the astonishing wealth of Turtle Creek. They will see Highland Park, just a nine iron away from the Dallas Country Club, the area's most exclusive. In Highland Park Village, even the Safeway is disguised as a hacienda. Throughout the town, in the rich north and the poor south, the visitor will notice crape myrtle in full, riotous bloom-the only living thing that seems to enjoy Dallas in August.

"We'll show 'em everything," promises Welcoming Committee Chairman Fox. To boot, says Mayor Taylor, the thing that will win strangers over to Dallas is its people. "You don't find people anywhere in the world better than those we have in Dallas."

Indeed you do not. It is a please-and-thank-you kind of town, with a sheen of sophistication the rest of Texas begrudgingly still aspires to. Elsewhere, Texans have been known to agree to meet at "dark-30" or "half-past dawn." Dallas people meet according to the clock. Elsewhere in Texas, the beautiful are "pretty as a speckled pup under a red wagon," and the plain are "ugly as homemade sin." Dallas prefers straightforward adjectives: gorgeous, beautiful, attractive, interesting looking.

Dallas does not like losers, poor-mouthers, pessimists. Dallas does not fool much with the banking term negative net worth. Negative net worth, meaning, of course, you owe more than you got, is a term that dogs cotton farmers. "Fellow came by here the other day," a farm-supply dealer outside Lubbock once explained, "and told me that if he could just get back up to broke, he'd quit. Trouble is, he has to get back up to broke first."

One suspects there is a measure of envy of Dallas out there in the Lone Star State, though no one, no one, admits it. Years ago there was a widely circulated cartoon that captured this never expressed emotion. In the frame were a man and a barefoot woman, a farming couple, with an oil gusher erupting on their barren land. The woman was saying, "How late does Neiman-Marcus stay open?"

The main-store answer is 5:30,6:30 on Thursdays, probably because Dallas itself seems much in favor of being early to bed--it also follows Ben Franklin's advice on the other end of light. People are out of the chute and into a capitalistic day before a Type B visitor can finish the front page. Dallas. The chest-beating lyric will be heard a lot in the coming week: "Big D--little a-double l--a--s!"

--By Gregory Jaynes. Reported by David S. Jackson/Dallas

With reporting by David S. Jackson