Independent dailies like those have dwindled. Chains and corporations stifled competition through buyouts. Lack of competition -- fear of being scooped by another newspaper -- instills laziness, and corporate CEOs are more likely to cater to influential people and advertisers, whose money ensures profit margins desired by stockholders. "Lack of motivation is what brought the Soviet Union down; communism takes motivation out of the system," Milner said. "Greed is the big problem in capitalism. If we're not careful, greed is going to bring us down."
I forget what color the pill was because I think I closed my eyes as I took it from the banker's fingers and transferred it to my mouth and swallowed. I remember thinking, "I don't really want to do this," but by then it was too late. That's one thing about LSD that anyone considering trying it should keep foremost in mind: Once you swallow it, there's no going back. You are on your way to somewhere, somewhere that might turn out to be scary, very scary, or very interesting, or -- more likely -- both. -- Describing his first acid trip in 1998's Confessions of a Maddog Financial problems doomed the New York Herald Tribune about the time Milner's first book was published, and he moved back to Texas to live the easy life of a rich and famous arther. When that didn't pan out, he headed briefly to Washington, D.C., to freelance articles and continue trying to write a second novel. There he met Larry L. King -- not the tv talk-show host, but the uproarious magazine writer who would later become a prolific author and co-write the Broadway smash The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, made into a 1982 movie with Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton. In 1964, King's successes had not yet blossomed, and he and Milner were struggling writers living at the same cheap hotel. "I've known him so long it's hard to remember how we met," King said in a recent phone conversation from his Washington, D.C., home. "Oh yeah, I remember now. He was living in a little hotel on Capitol Hill, and I had just got a divorce and I was living there too." Their mutual West Texas roots, high school football triumphs, and an appreciation of literature and writing cemented the friendship. Rent wasn't much, King recalled, but Milner still had difficulty paying. "One day, I thought I'd go over there and cheer Jay up a little," King said. "I heard a-whoopin' and a-hollerin' going on inside the room. I knocked and Jay came to the door and he was looking all elated and waving a check in my face. It was for $1,200, which was a ton of money in 1964." The $1,200 was compensation for a Sports Illustrated story Milner had submitted weeks earlier. The mail carrier delivered the check to the front desk, where it had been sitting for awhile. King said the desk clerk had notified Milner that a letter was waiting for him, but Milner ignored the messages. "Jay thought it was a trick to get him to come down there, and then they'd padlock him out of his room," King said. Money in hand, Milner paid his rent and took off on a partying binge. "He came back with $12 and some change in his pocket," King said. A return to Texas in the mid-1960s and a knack for sniffing out a good party and contributing to its rowdiness put Milner in the inner circle of distinctive writers who were making as much noise partying as they were with their prose. They printed Maddog Inc. membership cards with their slogan, "Everything that isn't a mystery is guesswork," and "carded" people who displayed the appropriate combination of eccentricity, intellectualism, and a knack for creating ruckuses. In 1960s Austin, writers were celebrities, and the Maddogs were wild-eyed Pied Pipers. Where they went, a-whoopin' followed. The group embraced the musicians who flooded the town in the late 1960s and early 1970s. "Shrake said the writers were the celebrities in town until the musicians showed up," singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker said during a recent phone conversation with Fort Worth Weekly. Together, they were a roaming pack of creative creatures on a careening mission to have the most fun possible while striving for fame and fortune. Walker, Willie Nelson, Rusty Wier, and others would play Austin clubs, and the writers would go listen. Afterward, everyone would head to somebody's house to drink, talk, smoke pot, woo the opposite sex, and play music until sunup. "Up until about 1974, Austin bars had closing at midnight," Walker said. "I never left the house where I didn't put a case of beer in the trunk. Later, it was two cases. We were always going around someplace." These were exciting times, but Milner wasn't doing much writing, and his home life was in disarray. He first married in 1948, a 10-year union that ended in a bitter divorce. His ex-wife gained custody of their two children, and Milner saw little of them until years later. A second marriage in 1959 produced a daughter, Carter, named after his old publisher. But that marriage, too, soon ended in divorce. Milner gained custody of his daughter, who survived her father's misadventures and benefited from the strict but loving supervision of Milner's mother, Nina Payne. By 1966, he had two failed marriages, no money, amphetamine dependence, and a strong affinity for parties. He was in his 40s and aimless. He jumped when TCU offered him a teaching job with benefits; his financial stability seemed assured in 1969 when SMU asked him to head its journalism department. The department was listing, with only a handful of students pursuing journalism degrees, when Milner arrived. He quickly changed that and began attracting some of the school's top students, said 1971 SMU graduate Don Brown. "When I started college I thought that I would be a lawyer," he said. "Then Jay came along, and I decided I'd give journalism a try. Various friends of Jay's would show up from time to time, like Larry L. King and Gary Cartwright. Jay was impressive because he had real-world experience. He had worked for Hodding Carter, and he had worked in New York." King not only spoke to Milner's classes, he observed his friend in class and was impressed by his natural ability to relate to students. "Jay did some great work teaching journalism at SMU and TCU," he said. "I tried that once at Princeton, and I wasn't worth a damn at it. I saw Jay in action and, believe me, he was good." The combination of Milner's personality, talents, and willingness to help his students was powerful. "He spent a lot of time talking to students," said Brown, who served as editor of the school paper his senior year in 1971. When he was married the following year, he asked Milner to be best man. Brown would go on to work 14 years with UPI before becoming a lawyer and establishing a practice in Washington, D.C. A couple of months ago, he was in Texas researching a case and made it a point to visit Milner in Fort Worth. "He was a great professor and mentor," Brown said. Despite his closeness with students, Milner wasn't cut out for college. Big, stubborn West Texans with independent streaks don't always make ideal college professors or department heads. "Politics on the university level is as bad as everyone thinks it is," Milner said. "It was a situation where they wanted to go a certain way and I wanted to go another way, so I went another way. My plan was to stay at SMU until I retired. When that didn't work out, I didn't have a Plan B. I was really confused."
In 1972, Milner was unemployed, approaching 50, broke again, and feeling emotionally unbalanced, in large part because of the "Dexamil, Dexedrine, and dexa-anything else." He rented an apartment in Fort Worth with his daughter, Carter, and spent a year as a public broadcasting newsman at Channel 13/KERA. He has almost no memory of that time and doubts that he displayed much tv reporting promise. Milner quit his tv position after a year and became managing editor of Iconoclast, a Dallas underground weekly with designs on mainstream legitimacy. One day, an acquaintance called and told him he should visit a club called The Western Place and check out a performance by Willie Nelson, who had rebelled against Nashville and was forging a new style of country-and-western music in Texas. Back in the early 1960s, while Milner was in New York, he had written a weekly folk music column. When someone told him to go to Greenwich Village and listen to a young kid named Bobby Dylan, Milner procrastinated, and the New York Times wrote Dylan's first mainstream review. The Times writer was often quoted in subsequent stories about Dylan, and Milner kicked himself for losing the scoop. True to form, he procrastinated with Nelson as well, missing several shows over a period of weeks before finally catching Nelson's act. Midway through the show, Nelson told the crowd he wanted to play songs from a record in progress, a conceptual story album about a failed marriage. Milner was surprised that the rowdy crowd fell silent for the next 45 minutes, and he was floored by the songs, which would be released in 1974 as Phases and Stages, one of Nelson's most profound efforts. Milner was hooked. He wrote favorable stories about Nelson and the new progressive country movement, and Nelson began visiting him at the newspaper and inviting him to shows. About that time, Milner began clashing with the Iconoclast's publisher, who seemed to resent that people were referring to the tabloid as Milner's paper. "The guy that owned it got real jealous," Milner said. "We had a falling out, and he tried to turn it into a music newspaper but it just never worked. It was a borderline operation anyway as far as money goes. After I left I think he had one or two other editors and they didn't last but a few months, and then the paper folded." Milner began freelancing for various magazines but wasn't making much money. "I just bounced around a lot about that time," he said. "Freelancing means you're out of work." |
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