Chairman Billy

"What was he really Like?" I was asked on the way back from Plains.

"Wonderful. We drove all around, drinking beer and throwing the cans out the window and meeting veterinarians and talking about goats and monkeys and getting out to piss in the highway right near a billboard that said Nail Beggar-Weed in peanuts and----"

"Yeah," this guy said, looking skeptical. "But how much of that was calculated?"

"Well," I said, "I know part of it wasn't. We were trying to piss on the shoulder."

But this guy still wasn't quite ready to buy Billy Carter's act, as he saw it. A lot of other people are.

•

"There's that goddamn invalid woman!"

"Billy, she's been waiting all day."

"I don't give a goddamn. I don't care if she is a goddamn invalid."

A middle-aged woman on a walker is making her way resolutely in a drizzling rain from door to window to window to door of the Carter peanut-warehouse offices in Plains, Georgia. She wants to meet old Billy, the President's brother, hero to beer drinkers and workingmen, who is trying to get some work done so he can get away and drink some beer.

Outside, in a street that never used to see any tourists except an occasional one who was seriously lost, people from all over America are hanging around, peering in, waiting for Billy to emerge. And now three old folks have just barged right in through the front door past the No Admittance sign. "We've come all the way from Atlanta to see Billy," one of them announces.

"Lady," says Randy Coleman, Billy's office manager, "we have people come all the way from Japan to see Billy. But I can't give him to you if he's not here, can I?"

Billy is hiding in his inner office. The visitors peer around suspiciously. Finally, they leave, muttering, and Billy--chunky, blue-jeaned, intense--re-emerges into the anteroom, shaking his head and sucking in cigarette smoke that never seems to come back out. He looks a little like Opie, the kid on the old Andy Griffith show, grown up and considerably filled out and harried half to death. His expression eases when he picks up his bullpenis-in-rigor-mortis walking stick. "The other day, we had a lady in here holding it. She said, 'Ohhh, what's this made of?"' He goes "Heenh-heenh-heenh" in his distinctive, nervous, strangled and infectious laugh.

"Dear Gussie," sighs Billy's big, blonde, serene, ironically smiling wife, Sybil. She doesn't say it loudly enough to hurt the new visitor's feelings.

Another one has gotten in and he has caught Billy flat-footed. A spry Bermuda-shorted man from Cincinnati who wants Billy to pose holding a can of Cincinnati-brewed beer. "I saw the old gentleman your uncle over at his antique shop," the intruder says. "He said you'd be over here." At that, Billy's friend Tommy Butler, the Swift & Company salesman, known as Tommy B., begins to make faces and act like he's choking.

Glumly, silently, with the air of a dog being dressed up in baby clothes, Billy takes the beer and holds it up and the man snaps the picture and hands Billy his card and urges him to stop by the next time he's in Cincinnati and goes away happy.

Billy begins to chase Tommy B. around the room. "I didn't say anything," Butler whoops, dodging kicks. One thing that really riles Billy is to hear his cousin Hugh Carter, Jr.--an encourager of tourists and a frequent opponent of Billy's in local political matters--referred to as his uncle.

A thump is heard against the side door. The phone rings and Billy's secretary says, for the umpteenth time, "No, I'm sorry." At home, Billy's phone is off the hook. Too many bomb threats coming in. The listed phone at his gas station is off the hook, too. A while back, one college kid won $48 in an afternoon of answering it, hanging up and betting another college kid that it would ring again within 45 seconds.

Outside, a bus operated by one of the town's 12 tour services is passing. A megaphonic voice says, "There goes one of Billy's daughters!"

The daughter, Jana, 18, wearing a sweat shirt that says Twinkie, bursts in to say, "Momma, one of the chickens has its head under another one and I think she's eating the eggs."

Sybil says, "Chickens don't eat the eggs. That's pigs that eat little pigs."

Jana is relieved. Someone mentions that a research organization is taking a survey at Billy's gas station to see what percentage of Americans are willing to show a stranger their belly buttons on request. "I wouldn't do that," says Jana, "but I'd throw 'em a moon."

"That old crazy man called," Randy tells Jana with relish.

"No! The one that chased me in Americus?" The police and Billy had had to be called. "What did he want?"

"He called asking for a job."

In an adjoining office, piles of strange tributes may be seen. A wood carving that reads, inexplicably, there's a pork happy birthday to someone with style, mounted on four upright beer cans. Dozens of huge floppy hats made of beer cans crocheted together. Several cases of strange off-brand beers. "Four or five different cases come in every week," says Sybil. "We have to throw most of it away. You can't be sure what somebody might have put in it."

"This one's Guatemalan," says Billy. "Probably wash the bottles out with sewage."

Many people who, as Billy says, "claim they are women authors" have sent in copies of their vanity-press books, in response to his assertion on the Mike Douglas show that women could do some things well, but writing books was not one of them. This is not, of course, a defensible assertion, but the books that have been mailed in tend to bear it out. They come with inscriptions: "Maybe and God willing you will read this true Book even if written by a woman. You proply [sic] got an avelange [sic] of Books through your talk shows. . . ." "Maybe you have never experienced the vibes that would get you into the head of a woman."

"Here's a poet wants you to autograph a poem so he can sell it," says Sybil. She is going through the day's big stack of fan mail. "This man says he has a thing for Jimmy about heating and if he's interested, to call him.

"'I will send you round-trip bus fare. You can stay with my two boys and. . . ."

"'I sent your mother a life-size picture of Christ and she answered with a sweet letter, but your sister-in-law never. . . .'

"This one's marked on the envelope, 'Mr. and Mrs. Billy Carter, Very Personal.' Then it begins, 'Dear sirs. . . .'

"This man wants you to go into business with him. 'It wouldn't hurt your image to be the first person to strike oil in Georgia. There are definite hydrocarbon deposits. . . .' And he wants you to get them out.

"This lady asks which side you would have fought on in the Civil War."

"Tell her I'd probably hid out in the swamp," Billy says.

Sybil rolls her eyes. "One lady in Rome wrote to say she wanted a picture of Billy to replace one of the two Popes she had on her wall. People keep writing in to say we're real. Oh, how nice. I thought we were artificial."

"You can tell your brother to kiss my ass," Billy tells Randy, whose brother, a state legislator, has just voted for legalizing 14-foot-wide trailers on Georgia roads, something Billy is against because "Georgia roads are only sixteen feet wide."

"Your cousin Hugh was the one pushed it through," Randy says.

"I already told him--several times."

"What if somebody comes to take us someone asks. "I'm getting a shotgun in here."

"I already got two," Billy says.

Randy is scanning the tourists with binoculars, looking for good-looking women among them. Various members of staff and family join him at the window.

"There's a man going to the bathroom."

"Where?"

"Look at that lady in that box there. What's she doing?"

"Selling tickets."

"To what?"

"To look at the man going to the bathroom."

Billy tells Sybil a friend of theirs has asked him to put in an appearance at a function the same day he's already been asked to be in several other places. "I don't know what to tell him."

"Tell him no, Billy."

"You call him."

"No, I'm not going to. You've got to learn to say no, Billy."

Billy sighs. "When I was on the Tomorrow show, I drove to Albany and flew out of there at ten A.M. and back in at one-fifty the next morning. I must've spent four thousand dollars of my own money traveling to things before I started getting expenses. Anything to get away from Plains for a while. Plains is one big rip-off. You can't buy a quart of milk or a loaf of bread anymore. Just Jimmy Carter souvenirs."

Billy takes a business call in his office. In a few minutes, muffled shouting can be heard.

Another of Billy and Sybil's six children, their daughter Kim, 21, comes in.

"Who was that little writer, went back and wrote that I looked like Daisy Mae?" she asks after a while. "Said I walked off twitching my behind? Sat right over there on that couch. Little bitty man. And you all made me go off with him and show him around town."

Billy bursts out of his office, enraged by his phone call. "Do a favor for the man, and then he screws me out of two thousand dollars. One thing I can't stand is to have a man tell me I can't call him a goddamn son of a bitch when that's exactly what I just finished doing. I dunk I'm going to go into Albany and hit a man and get throwed in jail!"

But here are some more people, another elderly threesome, strolling in. They want Billy to come out and pose on the doorstep with them.

"No, ma'am, I can't."

"We heard you were a good old boy."

Billy draws away to the far side of the room.

"Said you were the nicest person in the world."

"Yes'm."

"Well, you're not being too nice now."

There is a pained silence. Looking like people who have been denied a civil right, the tourists leave. It's noon! Boom! Billy and Sybil and Jana and Randy and Tommy B. and I dash outside and leap into the Blazer--tourists are banging on the sides, the lady on the walker is bearing down, she is yelling something; the car pulls off in a cloud of dust and we are off to Americus for lunch.

"Now," Billy says, "do you see why I hired an agent?"

•

"You better love me!" Tandy Rice had exclaimed over the phone a few days before. He said he had persuaded his new client to let me hang around with him for this article, if it turned out that we got along. "And I can't imagine anybody not getting along with Roy Blount," Tandy had cried in his Mod-Southernevangelist-gone-more-than-about-halfway-worldly voice. "Unless they run over your damn dog with their car!"

That is the way the President's brother's agent talks. He is 38, dresses sharp, moves fast, has a bright toothy smile and an intermittently hard cast of eye.

"I'm just a little country booker," Tandy may tell you, but in the eight years since he bought Top Billing, Inc., the Nashville-based booking-and-management firm has gone from a single telephone line to 12, any one of which is likely to be answered by someone crying, "Hi! How you doing?" Top Billing handled Dolly Parton's bookings before she shifted her business to Los Angeles and still books singers Tom T. Hall, Dotty West, Del Reeves, Little Jimmy Dickens, Jim Ed Brown and Helen Cornelius, and humorist Jerry Clower, whose stories about coon hunting and chain saws have achieved great grass-roots renown. "What happened, I read that the William Morris Agency had signed not Gerald Ford but the entire Ford family," Tandy says. "And the William Morris Agency is my competitor. And I'm probably the most competitive man that ever lived. Son, I'll tackle a buzz saw. We went after Billy with letters, Mailgrams and phone calls."

Tandy went down to Plains and shook hands on the deal with Billy. "He gives his word, it's bond," Tandy says. "He's the kind of guy, to paraphrase Jerry Clower, if he says a pissant will move a bale of hay, I'll start clearing a space." A more formal agreement was worked out between Tandy and Billy's three Americus lawyers, of whom Tandy says respectfully, "They're fat. And they like it." Anything Top Billing arranges for Billy is subject to veto by the lawyers and by Sybil.

But neither they nor Billy has yet balked at anything Tandy has lined up. Like Billy's friends, children, mother, gas station and wife (if not his brother), Billy's agent seems to just about fit his pistol. I wish Tandy hadn't turned down Saturday Night Live, which wanted Billy as a host, but he has a good sense of what events suit Billy best. "He's presenting the Golden Ratchet Award, to the best team of auto-race mechanics. Ain't that cute as hell? Here's one--the World Championship Belly Flop and Cannonball Contest in Vancouver." And Tandy's people handle all the arrangements and collect in advance the $5000-a-day fee, so that Billy can just show up and be natural. One day, first in Tandy's offices and then in a Nashville bank lobby, I watched Billy meet, pose for pictures with and equably insult nearly everybody in Nashville who owned a set of dress clothes.

"She's a lawyer now," Tandy said, introducing someone.

"Oh, I don't like women lawyers," Billy said, "Tandy done introduced me to thirty lawyers. Anybody knows that many lawyers can't be honest."

Tandy beamed.

"That's quat a sports coat," Billy told a man who had been waiting in line for 20 minutes.

"I only paid fifteen dollars for it," the man said.

"You both got screwed," said Billy.

"The wit and wisdom!" said Tandy. Later, surveying the bank lobby chock full of politicians waiting for a shake and a photo, Tandy cried, "This man. . . . It's a dern phenomenon, that's what it is." From time to time, Tandy counsels with Billy about avoiding impolitic statements. Billy nods and goes out to make more of them.

"He's the biggest celebrity in the world today!" says Tandy. "And I hope you're laughing with me, not at me, because I can just about defend that statement." A group in North Carolina wrote in, Tandy says, listing the people they would most like to have address them. In reverse order, those people were the Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman, the Fonz and Billy.

Currently, Tandy is committing Billy to no more than four appearances monthly. In other areas, he is holding out for such big money--reportedly, $150,000 is his price to publishers desiring Billy's participation in an autobiography--that the only contract signed so far is with Revell, Inc., for a Billy Carter toy truck. Tandy is turning down offers of minor television roles on programs like Hollywood Squares, A movie or TV special on Billy is what Tandy has in mind.

Big endorsement deals have for some time been in the works, Tandy says, with "a peanut concern and a beer concern." Inasmuch as Billy has been affording Blue Ribbon a steady stream of free publicity since his entry into public life, I leaped to the conclusion that the beer concern is Pabst. "That's just what everybody assumes," Tandy says, rather defensively. He may be resisting that assumption on the part of Pabst people.

Billy seems willing to go along with most any commercial that won't take up too much of his time, whether it befits the President's brother or not. As a matter of fact, he would probably enjoy it more if it did embarrass the White House, although I doubt that he would go so far as to do a 90-second spot for, say, South Korea.

But--and this is one of the things that, in my view, has kept the merchandising of the First Brother from being sordid so far--admen might have doubts about Billy's dependability as an endorser if they ever listened to one of his speeches.

•

Billy generally begins his speeches by throwing the floor open to questions. "Why is Pabst your favorite beer?" a banquetgoer asked in Tifton, Georgia. Aha, I thought. But Billy told the banquet the same thing he had told me:

"Pabst is my favorite beer because Robert, who drives their beer truck, is my favorite beer-truck driver."

Ever since then, I have been trying to imagine a commercial with the real Billy Carter in it. He is standing knee-deep in a mucky fishpond, perhaps, and he is holding up a can of Blue Ribbon and saying, "I'd recommend Robert to anybody." Or he is hiding from tourists behind a pile of peanuts and grumbling, "Well, I'm allergic to peanuts"--which happens to be the truth--" but if I wadden't, hell, I'd as soon eat Planter's [or whatever the brand is] as any others, I imagine. As long as they got 'em from our warehouse."

"How come you had your picture in Time drinking Budweiser?" somebody else in the Tifton audience asked him.

"The day that was taken, it was a hundred and ten degrees," he said. "If they'd handed me a milk, I would've drunk it."

"How about Coors?"

"Coors is about like marijuana. If you could buy it in Georgia, you wouldn't want it."

As a matter of fact, I can't remember hearing Billy say anything favorable from a podium about anybody or anything except Roy Acuff, Mel Tillis, Blue Ribbon/Robert and the Israeli army. This last came when he was asked what he would do about Idi Amin. He replied, "I would send one company of the Israeli army over there and clean up the whole mess."

At the end of his remarks, he was presented with a fine big jug of Jack Daniel's--a Tennessee-distilled whiskey of which the state is extremely proud--and a beautiful handmade dulcimer. Billy's response to these gifts was the most sublimely ungracious acceptance from a dais I have ever witnessed.

"Thank y'all very much and that's another vicious rumor, that Jack Daniel's is my drink," he said. Then, looking blatantly like a man who didn't know what in the hell he was going to do with a beautiful handmade dulcimer, he dabbed bemusedly at one of the instrument's strings: plank. Tandy looked uneasy.

At the 50th anniversary of a Lewiston, Texas, car dealership, he said of the President, "I would give him good grades, since he's my brother. If he was not my brother, I would say he has performed average. I don't know anything about national politics, but I know a lot about agriculture and they're screwing up agriculture worse than it's ever been."

Too much bureaucracy is one thing that's getting agriculture down, Billy says. "A lot of what they ask for in those Government forms they send out is nobody's business." The Occupational Safety and Health Administration wants him to put a couch in the women's washroom, which isn't big enough to hold a couch. Such (continued on page 126) Chairman Billy (continued from page 116) complaints have led Senator Herman E. Talmadge of Georgia to praise Billy in the Congressional Record as a man who does not pull any punches.

Billy has not invariably drawn enough people to justify his fee, and one event--the annual Swamp Buggy Races in Naples, Florida--was blighted by adverse reaction to his being paid $10,000 for the weekend when all the buggy drivers together had made only $3000 the year before. I am told that some of Billy's question-answering sessions have been uninspired. But I have seen him before four different audiences and each time, he was cooking.

"I ain't the Carter that won't tell a lie," he frequently says, but he doesn't tell polite lies. "I'll lie like hell in a minute, but I ain't humble worth a damn." Here is a representative sampling of Q's and A's:

"How is Miss Lillian?"

"My mother very seldom speaks to me unless she wants something."

"How do you get along with your brother?"

"We get along fine as hell as long as he's in Washington and I'm in Plains."

"Did you ever lust for a woman besides Mrs. Carter?"

"You know I said I'd answer every question." Pause. "You must think I'm a damn fool."

"Were you accused of cheating in the Plains mayor's race?"

"Ma'am, the accusation wasn't exactly that. The accusation was that I was doing it like hell and lost."

"What has all this fame done for your sex life?"

"Nothing. It's still once a week."

"Are you smarter than your brother?"

"I know I'm smarter than Jimmy, I think I'm smarter than Gloria."

"Would you spend a night in the White House?"

"Not in Lincoln's bedroom. If there was a George Wallace bedroom. . . ."

"Did you accept outside contributions for your race for mayor?"

"Well, I didn't get any local contributions. I got some money sent in, but I mailed it all back, saying I didn't need it. Cost me thirteen cents a contribution to send it back. After the election, I found out I did need it."

"Did you really sell beer on Sunday?"

"Sunday used to be my best day. It is against the law in Georgia. I got caught. I didn't know how to plead lazy, so my lawyer said plead nolo contenders. I said, 'John, I better plead just as guilty as hell, because that's what I am.' He said it wouldn't cost me a thing. Cost five hundred dollars. I'll never plead again."

"What do people think of you back in Plains?"

"They took a poll to see who was the biggest son of a bitch in Plains and I won hands down. And you'd be surprised some of the son of a bitches running against me."

"Are you for legalized gambling?"

"No. If they do that, I'll have to pay a tax on it, too."

"On the serious side, would you speculate on your brother's energy policy?"

"I'm kind of against it. I've got seven cars."

"What do you talk to your brother about?"

"Well, he's got this blind trust, and it's got so blind now. . . . I used to talk to him about peanuts. Can't do that now. We can talk about the fishpond, but if we start charging people to fish, we can't talk about that. I guess we'll start talking about nut grass, except they got some stuff now that they say will do away with nut grass."

"Did you really think your brother was going to be elected President?"

"Well, I bet twenty-two thousand dollars on him."

Yes, but how much of that is Calculated?

I feel sure of my ground when I say that Nashville writer John Egerton was mistaken when he wrote in The New York Times that Billy has retained not only a booking agent but also gag writers. Conceivably, that notion arose while Billy was addressing the tourism folks in Nashville. He was following his usual format, which is to stand squarely behind the lectern, take a swallow from a can of beer, field a shouted question, squint, lean into the microphone, toss off an irresponsible answer, sip again and giggle deeply. After some 20 minutes of this, someone cried: "Who writes your speeches?"

Billy looked over at the press table, where I was feverishly taking notes. As though offering the audience a chance to see his writer at work, he said, "Right there; Mr. Roy Blount does."

I, of course, felt honored, but I can claim to have written Billy's gags only into a notebook and only after he pulled them.

Billy talks all day long the way he does from a podium, only more expansively.

Did Billy ever own a goat?

I'm glad you asked that question. Billy says, "I had the smartest goat I ever saw. It'd sit up here in the front seat and people would think it was one of the kids. It wasn't housebroken, but anything it did on the floor it would either drink or eat, so it didn't have to be housebroken. I'd take it down to the gas station and it'd eat all the cigarette butts. I hated to get rid of it, but I came to find out it had been stolen. It was a hot goat. So I took it into Atlanta and left it in Charles Kirbo's law office."

Is billy a real redneck or a businessman?

You're assuming that the two categories are mutually exclusive. I'll say this: Until recently, Billy had a '49 Studebaker in his front yard. It had a piece of angle iron for a front bumper, there was hardly any paint on it and it took ten quarts of oil to get it started. Sybil made him remove it.

"Do you know how much value there is in a 1949 Studebaker that runs?' Billy demanded as we drove to Americus for lunch. Nobody responded. "Ok, when I have my party with the five thousand dollars I get from selling my Studebaker, I'm not going to invite y'all."

"I just didn't want it in my front yard," said Sybil.

"When it was there, we didn't have all those tour buses turning around in the front yard," Billy said.

People might say that Billy doesn't dress like a businessman. He wears jeans and boots and a wide belt with a big buckle. In Nashville, he stood in the doorway of his hotel room dressed in coat, vest, trousers, tie, off-white shirt and everything else required of a man about to address a big banquet. He grimaced and said, "I'd rather eat shit than wear a suit."

On the other hand, Billy gets to the warehouse at 5:30 A.M. and works hard and runs the sizable family business well. And, as he has pointed out in his speeches, he probably makes a lot more money than the President does. Not even counting the $500,000 he stands to make this year from appearances.

Does Billy Resent his big Brother?

Well, once during the Presidential campaign, Billy kicked a dog all the way through a press conference Jimmy was holding. But that was because Jimmy was holding it on the scales outside the warehouse and a long line of peanut-laden trucks was backed up, waiting to weigh in.

It is generally assumed that a certain gap exists between Billy and Jimmy, dating back to Jimmy's being away during most of Billy's boyhood and then returning and presuming to act paternally toward him after their father died. But rather than repress the tension between them, the brothers tend, publicly, to acknowledge it slyly. I remember when, deep into the vote-counting night, after Jimmy had been projected as President, someone asked Billy on television what he was going to do now and he said, "Stay up all night and when he gets here, still call him Jimmy."

And when he did get there, Jimmy said, "The first thing I want to do is thank Mr. Carter for waiting up all night to meet me. Everybody's got to call him Mr. Carter till dinnertime."

Part of the impetus behind Billy's flowering as a public figure is his unspoken message that "I, the President's brother, ain't only the President's brother. In fact, I grew up more original and more like Daddy and deeper rooted and more independent and sounder and wilder and a hell of a lot more normal than he did," Like any entertainer or politician of interest, Billy is insecure enough about that proposition to need to keep proving it but secure enough about it to be convincing. When people ask him whether Jimmy objects to any of his statements, he says, "No, and I don't get after him for some of the things he says."

Psychology aside, I would say Billy genuinely resents the fact that he can't hang out in his beloved filling station anymore and has had to move to a new house outside Plains because of the tourists his big brother brought in. On the other hand, I think he genuinely appreciates being able to spend his weekends getting $5000 a day going around the country drinking free beer and raising hell with stock-car racers and country singers.

It is true that Billy sleeps badly, smokes and drinks more than is healthy, shows a lot of aggression and has apparently been known to get a chip on his shoulder. And when he gets tired and loaded, he stutters. Once he tried to cure his stutter by means of some kind of therapy that involved staring at a candle flame. "After a while, I thought that candle was my mother."

He may resent something. He may resent that people tend to assume that a man from south Georgia is quaint, for one thing. And he may resent that his father died when he was 14 or that he is going to die himself sometime. In Nashville, the night of his 40th birthday, a lady asked him what his greatest goal in life was and he said, "Ma'am, it's to live to be forty-one. And I think I'm over the hump."

How come billy popped up out of Nowhere all of a sudden?

"There's a vicious rumor," Billy says, "that I was hid from the Baptists during the '66 governor's campaign." It does seem strange that Billy was so little heard of even in Georgia until national reporters started going to Plains. But according to Atlanta newsmen who covered Carter campaigns from the first, Billy was never covered up. He just didn't strike Georgia reporters as too remarkable. Most people who run for anything in Georgia have a brother or two along Billy's lines.

"He was not perceived as a wit or a talent," says one Atlanta newsman with asperity. "He was no dunce, and beneath the surface he was sensitive. But I always viewed Billy as an ill-tempered, bad sort. During the governor's campaign in '70, he would get really upset and offer to punch people out if they wrote badly about Jimmy. After Jimmy was elected, Billy invited me to come down and go bird hunting with him. If I'd promise to walk ahead of him the whole time."

The reporter stayed home.

What does billy do for entertainment when he's not being a celebrity?

"Running dogs, drinking liquor and eating turkey nuts" are things Billy's friend Dr. Paul Broun says they enjoy doing together. I have heard of folks' eating a lot of things, but never turkey gonads. "You fry 'em," says Dr. Broun. "I never cleaned a turkey to get any myself, but a dog trainer in Leesburg, Georgia, gave us a big hog-nut and turkey-nut dinner. Turkey nuts are . . . bigger than a pecan."

Billy also derives pleasure from driving around drinking beer with friends like Bud Duvall, who superintends the gas station for him, and Tommy B. They'll stop in at the Plains Country Club, which is a small cinder-block building with a pool table inside and a sign outside saying, Membership free. Or they drop by the Americus Moose Club, where Billy still fits right in, though nobody else there is world-famous. Once a year, at the end of peanut season, he hosts a hat burning. This custom began one night when Billy got to drinking and climbed on top of a car and burned up his hat. The only price of admission is to bring a hat and burn it.

Sometimes Randy Coleman from the office will drive him around. "The first time Randy drove me and Tommy, we got to fighting and I had my loaded 38 cocked and holding it to Tommy's head, and it scared Randy to death," Billy says.

He enjoys reading--"chemical magazines or something light. Or if there's nothing else, encyclopedias. Just to read." A mystery that I was unable to penetrate is exactly what titles he reads. When I pressed him on that point, he was evasive. When I pressed his friend Broun, he said, "Billy reads just anything he puts his hands on. It doesn't make a whole lot of difference to him what it is. He's a real rapid reader. He read one book in the time it took us to fly from Nashville to Columbus, Georgia." Broun couldn't recall the nature of that book.

Billy entertained himself and others pretty well the night of the Presidential election. "We had eighty people in the house and didn't know but four of 'em. One of 'em introduced me to one other, so then I knew five. Next morning, there were sixteen asleep on the floor. Sybil got dozens of bunches of flowers from people we never heard of the next day, thanking her for the hospitality. We drank up a whole lot of champagne and everything else in the house, and all the beer at the station, and then we took up a collection of three hundred and sixty dollars to buy more liquor and drank all that. Then a stewardess showed up with a case full of miniatures. We still kept running out.

"By that time, I was down at the depot and Sybil saw me on television and called down there and told me to stop drinking. I was supposed to be interviewed live. But then they had a delay of twenty-two minutes and, in that time, I started drinking again and drank nine beers, and then I disappeared. I don't know what became of me."

Is billy prejudiced?

"When did you get over being prejudiced?" I asked him the first time we talked. I assumed that he had gotten over it, since Miss Lillian and Jimmy said they had and since Billy had sued the members of the public school board to try to require them to send their children to public schools instead of to private segregated schools. "I'm still prejudiced, I guess," he said. "It would still bother me for my daughter to marry a black man."

But the person he most enjoyed meeting during the campaign was the former Atlanta Hawks center Walt Bellamy, who is seven feet tall and black. (The two people he told Jimmy he wanted to meet were Bellamy and John Glenn; of the two, Bellamy was the one who sufficiently impressed him.) And Billy is friendly with Kenny, the traveling black American Express man whose stops include his gas station. "Kenny is going to ruin my redneck image," he says. To Billy's surprise, he trusted Bill Turner, the black pilot who for a while flew out of Peterson Field, the airstrip in Plains. "I'd never been in the air with a black pilot before. I didn't know what to think. But he's a good pilot. I'm particular who I let fly my kids, but he's real nice to them, makes sure they get to their next connection." And Billy sends his kids to integrated public schools, because "I'd rather fight than quit."

As a matter of fact, Billy tends to make his school suit sound like a local political struggle more than a stand on principle, but Manuel Maloof, an Atlanta tavern-keeper and populist politician who is a friend of Billy's, says that Billy used to come into his place wearing a Wallace button and speak privately with feeling about the rightness of integrated schools.

(continued on page 193)

Chairman Billy (continued from page 128)

Billy undoubtedly makes a point of avoiding anything resembling a lofty liberal pronouncement. After I got to know him better, though, he confided, "You're the first one I've ever told this. Why I left the city council. I ran in the first place to change the vote against me getting a beer license. I won and got the license and then I told everybody I was going to run again. So nobody else qualified against this black man. He was running for my post and everybody figured I'd beat him. Then, when it was too late for anybody else to qualify, I withdrew and he got on. It was a flimflam deal. I figured it was time the blacks got some representation."

Now, you could say that Billy was making a calculated effort to sell me a Billy Carter who is at once nationally unfashionable on the abstracts of race relations and locally progressive on the specifics. But I'm inclined to believe that that is about what he is. I am also inclined to believe that however rotten a mayoral candidate he is, Billy commands a political and imagistic deftness comparable to--of course, less ambitious than, in some sense maybe purer than--his brother's. Of course, he might have wanted a black to get on the council just to get under people's skin. I asked Billy why he said he would campaign for George Wallace.

"George Wallace broke the seal," he said, meaning that Wallace had proved, before Jimmy Carter, that a Southern Presidential candidate could command electoral respect.

"But to a lot of people, Wallace represents white racism," I said.

"George Wallace is not a racist," Billy said. "He stands for the common man. He stands for the common man a hell of a lot more than Jimmy Carter or anybody else."

"The common man black or white?"

"Yeah," Billy said. "That's my opinion."

"How do you feel about capital punishment?"

"I think everybody who deserves it ought to get it."

Billy's least felicitous public remark to date was, "I hate to say this, but we've all left a nigger in the woodpile somewhere." That is what he said at a press conference in Oakland when black politician Carter Gilmore asked him whether they were related. Nobody white has a call to be flippant about the ways in which black people got white names. But then again, it was not too tasteful a question. Gilmore had been straining to capitalize on his first name (he was running for the Oakland city council on the slogan "Let's elect another Carter") and he and Billy had been kidding each other freely on the topic of their ancestry before the press conference. I would say Billy's remark was more satirical, cutting both ways, than bigoted. And Billy never said nigger, or anything like it, when I was there, though several people did who were good-old-boying around with him.

The question of women's rights seems to rub Billy wrong. He gives female reporters an even harder time than he gives male ones, and with less humor: "You'd make a fine cook, ma'am, but I don't know about a reporter." He opposes the Equal Rights Amendment: "I've got a brother that's in favor of it, a sister-in-law that's behind it and four daughters that I don't want drafted." I'd have to guess that Billy resists competitive women because women in more or less old-fashioned supportive roles are so important to him. Sybil says she married him when she was only 16 because his father had died and he seemed to need somebody to take care of him. When he says something about himself, he often adds, "You can ask my mother."

But he gives Sybil credit for the way she keeps the books at the office, seems to see her as a partner as surely as Jimmy does Rosalynn and, by all accounts, is as true to her as he claims to be. And he enjoys pretty much the same give-and-take with her and with their daughters as he does with his friends who are men. "How's that boyfriend of yours?" he asked Kim one afternoon.

"He's fine," she answered. "But he says if you don't stop calling him maggot. . . ."

"I called over to the station the other afternoon and asked if there were any tourists," Billy was saying in the warehouse. "They said, 'Naw, come on, it's just a beer hall.' I got over there and two tour buses stopped and a couple of hundred old ladies got off. Now, there's nothing in the world you can do with a 75-year-old woman but be nice to her. . . .

"'Course, if it'd been a busload of twenty-year-old girls, it'd been different."

"I'll say this," said Sybil, "and I'll say it in front of him," meaning me, "if it was a twenty-year-old girl, you wouldn't know what to do with her."

Here is how a discussion of the E.R.A. went in the office one afternoon:

"I can't see it," said Randy. "They want to have just one bathroom."

"There are good things about it, though," said Sybil. "A woman ought to be able to make the same money as a man. A woman ought to be able to borrow money."

"Yeah, but. . . . They want to be in the same bathroom."

"I don't," said Sybil.

"She does want to, too," said Billy, "with Randy."

"One thing for sure, nobody would want to be in the same bathroom with you," Randy told Billy.

"Billy is noxious," explained Sybil.

"I never did say," said Billy, "that my shit don't stink."

What is the Key to Billy's Appeal?

He is unsentimental about people but still appreciates them. I asked him whether he was as moved as I was when all those variegated Democrats stood with a white and a black Southerner and sang We Shall Overcome after Jimmy's acceptance. "I left just before that part," he said. "Daddy King--he and I are friends. But when he starts preaching, you have to ring the bell on him. Then, when you ring it, he preaches harder."

Another time, Billy started talking about Miss Julia Coleman, the Plains schoolteacher Jimmy invokes so reverently and quoted in his inaugural address. "She pulled me through school," Billy said. "I'd say, 'Miss Julia, you know I can't take this D or this F home.' She'd say, 'Well, how about a C?' I'd say, 'Naw, you know my parents, I need a B-plus or an A.' She'd say she couldn't do that. I'd say, 'Please, Miss Julia, just this one time.'

"She would write every week to every former student of hers who was in the Service. When I was in the Far East, I'd get a letter two inches thick, handwritten, with three or four lines on a page. Because she was so nearsighted. I could have gotten another boy to sit in my chair and she wouldn't have known the difference.

"You know, when she had her funeral in Plains, I went. Only twenty-five people came to her funeral."

Does Billy have a serious Side?

If pissed off counts, he does. Billy has had altercations with at least two members of the national press who pushed him too far. One accused him directly of lying and the other scurried around, with what struck Billy as ghoulish alacrity, taking pictures of his station when it was on fire.

Years back, at a high school basketball game in Unadilla, Georgia, Billy took on a man who he claims was 6'7". "I jumped on his back and started biting him and he fell backward over on top of me. Then Sybil come up and hit him on the head with her high heel."

"Well, he was scrubbing your brand-new blazer on that concrete floor."

"When I got up, I spit out skin, backbone, T-shirt and shirt. Later, people came around saying, 'Did you hear a man died in Unadilla of a human bite?' It scared me for a while."

Another time, he was in Atlanta with Tommy B. and another friend and was having a drink in the hotel bar, waiting for them to come down. They came in and took a table. Billy paid his bill at the bar and headed toward them, but the bouncer stopped him.

"He said those two men said I was queer and had been bothering them, following them around all night. Said he wasn't going to let me join them.

"I said, 'The hell you aren't,' and he got another man and they threw me out. So I went drinking somewhere else and when I got back to the hotel room, Tommy was sitting there, laughing, and I hit him, and he'd of gone thirteen stories if he hadn't fallen out of the chair before it got to the window."

Billy can go at it verbally, too. "We were at this party and one man started saying he wished he hadn't contributed five dollars to Jimmy's campaign, the way it was going. There's always one like that in each crowd. Finally, I said, 'Here's your five dollars, we don't want it,' and started in on him. Within two minutes, I had his wife crying, and in one more minute, I had him shut up. I'm a professional dozens player."

Aside from that, I can't say for sure about Billy's serious side. But he probably has a serious layer. Somebody at one engagement asked him why he didn't go to church. He said, "Well, maybe I'll talk about it later. It gets kind of deep."

Did Billy ever own a Monkey?

I'm glad you asked that question. One time, he and his son Buddy went into Americus for groceries and Buddy saw a spider monkey in a pet store that he couldn't do without. He begged and pleaded. So they came home with the monkey and named him Tommy B., because his ears stuck out like Tommy B.'s, and the monkey would get on their pet rabbit's back and ride him around. The only way the rabbit could get the monkey off was by running under the bed and bumping him off.

Then, just before Christmas, the monkey got up onto the tree and started throwing all the ornaments off. Billy grabbed him and the monkey bit his hand down to the bone and held on. Billy was yelling and waving him around, trying to throw him up against the wall, and the children were yelling, "Don't kill Tommy B.! Don't kill Tommy B.!" So he had to hold still "and we prized that monkey out of his hand," Sybil says. "We gave him to a man who sprayed the house."

"The next time I saw that monkey," Billy says wistfully," he was in the sheriff's office, riding on the back of a dog."

•

Jeane Dixon, the seeress, recently predicted that "Billy Carter will become a popular television personality, much to the dismay of the White House. He will become the Martha Mitchell of the Carter Administration, but he will always know what he is saying and where he is headed. In time, his talents will be recognized and his wisdom better appreciated." I don't usually set much stock by Mrs. Dixon's sooth, but I'll tell you one thing: If any Secret Servicemen ever try to stick a needle in Billy's ass, I will join the revolution that should ensue.

"Q: 'What has all this fame done for your sex life?' A: 'Nothing. It's still once a week."'