BOOKS Wild Bull Writer

It is easy to forget what a good writer Larry King is. There are several reasons for this. I suppose for me the main one is that until reading the best of King’s magazine articles from the Seventies – anthologized under the unwieldy title Of Outlaws, Con Men, Whores, Politicians, and Other Artists (Viking Press, $10. 95) – I tended to lose sight of how well he wrote in my astonishment at how poorly he behaved.

Several years back, as a newcomer to the Manhattan literary scene, I frequently observed this fellow Texan belly up to the bar and three sheets to the wind, dressed in denim from head to toe, and looking like some mean cowpoke fresh off the trail. Back then, tales of King’s versatile sexual activities curled my hair. I once heard a story – perhaps apocryphal, perhaps not – of how he had become fed up with his girl friend in the middle of a fancy dinner party and, in a rage, had thrown the table over just like they do in the western movies. I wrote Larry King off as a good ol’ boy gone bad.

King himself repeatedly bears witness to his misconduct. In his candid introduction to Of Outlaws, he writes of his propensity for “drinking, doping, and loose-ladying” although, faintheartedly, he vows that he has recently cleaned up his “trashy act. “

Sandwiched between the pages of Esquire, Playboy, or Sport, a King story manages to do its work without marring the author’s carefully preserved redneck veneer.

But when a decade’s worth of King’s blue-ribbon stories is collected under one cover, the man’s delicate perception, honesty, and artistry are unmistakable.

Of Outlaws is in large part a book about Texans. King’s acknowledgments, typeset in the shape of the Lone Star State, thank assorted magazines and newspapers for allowing republication of the stories in book form, concluding with “Y’all real good folks, ya hear?”

The book is peppered with names and places that make a Texan feel at home. To mention a few: Gilly’s, Scholz Garten, The Raw Deal, Eddie Wilson’s Armadillo World Headquarters, The Texas Observer and its publisher Ronnie Dugger, folk humorist John Henry Faulk and neighbors Peavine Jefferies and J. R. Parten, Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, and Jerry Jeff Walker. (Incidentally, King does Jerry Jeff journalistic justice with a single anecdote: Walker is onstage passionately attempting to quote Dylan Thomas’ lines “Do not go gentle into that good night… Rage, rage against the dying of the light. ” King reports, “Walker’s brain was not doing its best work, however, and he settled for repeating, “Rage … rage… RAGE against the goddamn dark. “)

Of Outlaws is divided into three parts. The first is semi-autobiographical – on the American redneck, remembering the Great Depression, going home again, playing cowboy. Part two, dubbed “Others, ” includes a profile of country and western singer David Allan Coe, a tribute to the Chicken Ranch, “the best little whorehouse in Texas” (which spawned the Broadway musical hit and later a book), and accounts of run-ins with poker champion Amarillo Slim Preston, several Texas horse traders, and performer Willie Nelson. The third part, “Politicians, ” consists of nine stories that roughly constitute a political history of the Seventies. There are LBJ, Mo Udall, Jerry Ford, Representative Jim Wright, and the milk fraud scandal surrounding John Connally.

No discourse involving both politics and a Texan is complete without open season on Democratic turncoat Connally: “The only known case of a rat swimming out to the sinking ship, ” says King, became “the only show hog in a Republican pigsty. ” King recalls that despite Lyndon Johnson’s great fondness for Connally, the former president once remarked, “John ain’t been worth a damn since he started wearing three-hundred-dollar suits. ” King says that a reader can always tell whose side he’s on. “I simply don’t believe that’objective’political reporting exists, ” he writes. “People without political beliefs have no interest in writing about politics and don’t do it. “

A friend once observed of King that he has been selling his autobiography “a chapter at a time, for almost fifteen years. “The perception is accurate, and King sometimes worries about this tendency toward the autobiographical: “Let an editor assign almost any subject, and I’ll find a way to mine my past…. Sometimes I fret that this may be a weakness. And yet I believe that my better stuff is derived from my roots.”

King is a good judge of his work: The best of the book’s stories are from the section entitled “Myself. ” The first of these stories, “The American Redneck, ” distinguishes between good ol’ boys – rednecks who have acquired some polish – and true rednecks. A good ol’ boy, King says, “acts dumber than he is when he knows something and smarter than he is when he doesn’t.”

In “Remembering the Hard Times,” King tells of being born “on the first day of the first year of the Great Depression – 1929. ” He remembers his dirt-poor childhood in Putnam, Texas; leaving school at harvest time to pick cotton; eating Hoover steaks and Hoover cake and driving Hoover cars; listening raptly to FDR’s fireside chats. He remembers his mother quoting “Pride goeth before a mighty fall” to encourage in him the acceptance of harsh realities. And he remembers vividly the older brother who dropped out of high school to earn money to buy him milk. King writes, “I was much older than I should have been before I could fully appreciate his sacrifice, simply because the guilt was too much. Indeed, I hardly had come of legal age when I provoked a fight with him in order to declare my independence. Not until I was nearing thirty did I forgive him for all he’d done for me.”

The article “Mostly Likely to Succeed” details how King lost that title by 23 votes when the class of ’46 chose instead a young man who hoped to become minister of his town’s First Baptist Church. As a boy. King believed that the victor’s ambitions alone made him unworthy of the title. He writes, “For I knew, in all the private places, that the boy in the wind- and sun-blistered little village most eager to claw and scratch his deliverance slept in my bed each night.”

King cops to being a “professional Texan” in “Playing Cowboy. ” “More than half my close friends, ” he writes, “are expatriate Texans… Bill Moyers and Ramsey Clark, Don Meredith, Liz Smith, Judy Buie, Dan Jenkins, you name’em, and to one degree or another we play cowboy together. ” Though, apparently, professional Texans never move home again, they do visit. Of a sojourn in Texas, King writes, “For precious few minutes 1 exist in a time warp: I’m back in Old Texas, under a high sky, where all things are again possible and the wind blows free.”

Of Outlaws, Con Men, Whores, Politicians, and Other Artists is full of life andcolor, and a throwback to a time when magazine journalism was more adventuresome.King confesses in his introduction that “littlethat is garden-fresh appears on the menu, “but he believes that his “slumgullion maycontain a pleasing morsel or so. ” It absolutely does.