Everyone wants to praise Texas’s dead literary titans like Larry McMurtry but how about a few words on the living? McMurtry was kind of a shit and a racist but he was successful. That is why in a place like Texas where, as you may know from television and films—not so much from books—right and wrong don’t matter, only success. Even in the literary world. So, like, for once, how about mentioning someone who did the right thing and was successful and is still writing? That’s William Broyles, Jr., the first editor of Texas Monthly.
The magazine which just had its 50th birthday is kind of a bump on the Lone Star literary highway now—whitebread and unoriginal despite last week’s Pulitzer for coverage of the Kerrville floods—but you can’t underestimate how groundbreaking it was at birth, founded by Dallasite and Wharton School graduate Mike Levy. Before getting into Broyles’ bio, Levy’s is also pertinent. Wiki says Levy's father was plumber, and Mike himself worked as a taxi driver and a jail guard before putting together the financing for a magazine, headquartered in Austin but not of Austin, and designed to be the Texas version of the New Yorker which like TM has also become whitebread and unoriginal.
Before being picked by Levy as the first editor of the magazine, Broyles had famously been a Marine in Vietnam (he said that he decided at the last minute that deploying maybe was not such a great idea but his wife told him that he had to go) and, like Gatsby, attended Oxford University, although he was a Rice University grad like many of TM’s early folks who in fact were all on the student newspaper together. He taught at West Point. He was like Gatsby in one other respect. That smile, when he looked at you and gave you the treatment there was just no saying no. But unlike Gatsby he was real and his achievements were real. From Wikipedia again: He created the television series China Beach, and Six, and wrote such films as Apollo 13, Cast Away, Planet of the Apes, Unfaithful, the Polar Express, Jarhead, and Flags of Our Fathers. You don't have to be a fan of the movies to respect his run. In today's media-centric world, it's faint praise to say this but Bill Broyles is a good guy. And like his publisher Mike Levy, he knew something about the world beyond the written word.
He had a poor run as Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek with the fictitious “Hitler Diaries,” that's true, but he picked himself, dusted off his backside and moved to Hollywood. Broyles has had courage through his career, not the manly-Marine Corps kind of courage although he had that too, but as a writer. And at TM as an editor. This is the point where someone talking about Bill would mention his first meeting with his subject.
He had a poor run as Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek, with the fictitious “Hitler Diaries” but he picked himself, dusted off his backside and moved to Hollywood. Broyles has had courage through his career, not the manly-Marine Corps kind of courage although he had that too, but as a writer. And at TM as an editor. This is the point where someone taking about Bill would mention our first meeting.
The year was 1981 and me working as a cop reporter at the now-defunct Houston Post where owner Oveta Hobby had decreed that everyone who met a violent death in the Bayou City merited a couple of paragraphs in the newspaper. Which meant writing a lot of shorts. And, wanting to spread my wings as a journalist, writing an equally short letter to Broyles, asking if he would like to hire “a hip young black reporter”? No lie.
There was a call a few days later inviting me to an interview in Austin, just Broyles and then-executive editor Greg Curtis, another member of the Rice mafia. They offered me the job, at a very good salary. The trick is that Broyles had hired an African American woman, Gwen Craddock, as his assistant. She opened the letter, she told me later, and put it under his nose. Like a lot of great men, Broyles knew what he didn’t know. He didn’t consider himself the white expert on black people, a white savior in other words, who are so common in today's journalism. He was also ex-military, who actually tend to be a lot more race-friendly than are may liberal whites because blacks and Latinos are not abstract concepts to other soldiers but instead people who they have worked with and died alongside. Contrast Broyles with one of his Monthly successors Jake Silverstein who did not publish a single black writer during six years in the big chair in Austin and who, as editor of the New York Times Magazine, criticized and forced out a young black female writer who had the temerity to sign a petition calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
In Austin, at the Monthly, Broyles also put Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan on the cover, wearing a crown, the kind of praise for a black woman—not involved in sports or entertainment—that was unheard of at the time and still mostly unheard of now.
You also have to mention when you saw the guy last. It was twenty or twenty-five years ago, at Deep Eddy Pool in Austin. Bill still had that Gatsby smile. He still looked good. In retrospect, he still looks good now.
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