Tall Texan Talk : Actor in LBJ Movie Casts Long Shadow Over Barbecue in Van Nuys

Bob Wills Jr. was getting ready to throw a party Saturday in the style he knows best: Texas style.

Sporting a white 10-gallon hat, the huge Wills strode around the backyard of his rambling ranch house in Van Nuys, orchestrating half a dozen sons, hired hands and hangers-on who were setting up to accommodate about 200 people.

Wills and his wife, Elizabeth, were going to play host in several hours to the Southern California Motion Picture Council, and the party was also a chance to celebrate his latest role, that of a Texas politician named Tiny in the made-for-TV movie “LBJ: The Early Years,” which airs on NBC tonight.

Wills couldn’t be closer to the role. In 1960, reportedly with the backing of Vice President-elect Lyndon B. Johnson, he became one of the army of candidates vying for the U. S. Senate seat that Johnson was about to vacate. He lost.

At 6 feet, 7 inches and about 300 pounds, Wills resembles a snow-capped mountain. He rises and recedes into the distance, a rugged mass topped by a spray of white hair and bushy white sideburns.

Dizzying Array of Lives

Besides his stab at politics and his recent turn to acting, Wills has lived a dizzying array of lives--many of them overlapping. He has been an auctioneer, a leader of a Texas swing band, a Golden Gloves champion boxer, a financier, an Army lieutenant colonel, a husband to nine wives and father of 23 children.

Wills’ father was Bob Wills, the father of Texas Swing, a rollicking brand of Western music that combined the fiddle and twang of country music with the finesse and power of big-band jazz. He was raised, though, by the Thorne family, well-to-do Texas bankers.

His musical career started at the age of 8, when he ran off for a while to the Fort Worth stockyards. The boy walked into a honky-tonk near the yards, looking for a position playing guitar. There was no job, but the proprietor had a set of drums and no one to play them. Within a few hours, Wills said, he had learned how to set up a rhythm.

That night, he took home $4.75 out of the kitty collected at the door. “In those days, we used to get two bits a hundred for cotton, and chop cotton from daylight to dusk for a dollar,” Wills said. “That $4.75 is what made me a musician.”

He didn’t get serious about music, though, until after World War II. That is when he put together a band.

“I guess I played every cut-and-shoot in America at one time or another,” Wills said, referring to barrooms. He toured the country with an entourage of family members and musicians that, at its peak in the 1950s, filled three buses.

Somewhere along the line, Wills got into Texas-size financing--closing deals on oil fields and the like. He said he made quite a bit of money.

The boxing fit in somewhere, as well. Wills has scrapbooks filled with newspaper accounts of his boxing career. One account in 1949, from a Minnesota paper, went like this:

“Texas isn’t nearly as big today as it was a little while back. There’s a big hunk of it ambling around Duluth. . . .”

Discovered in Gym

Boxing led Wills to acting. He was sparring in a gym when a film crew from Italy came in scouting talent and locations for a film about an Italian-American basketball star. Wills landed a leading role. Many roles followed, but nothing that brought him fame.

Wills said his role in “LBJ: The Early Years” is small but crucial. In the film, Tiny is the man who establishes the animosity between the Kennedys and Johnson and his Texas friends, Wills said.

Wills’ memories of Johnson are of a ruthless politician who stopped at next to nothing and bore a grudge as big as Texas.

Johnson had said he would give the young candidate financial backing and the vote of his constituency. But Johnson also demanded commitments that the young politician didn’t want to meet.

“Lyndon was real bitter,” Wills said. Johnson threw his support behind another candidate. Wills dropped out of the race, and the Democrats lost the seat to Republican John Tower, who still holds it.

In State 5 Years

Wills settled in California five years ago and moved six months ago to the house in Van Nuys, which has a “Wills Ranch” sign hanging over the driveway. “This is the last place I’ll ever move to,” he said.

After telling his Texas tales by the pool, he got up from the bar area there, where deep trays of smoked sausage swimming in Wills’ homemade barbecue sauce sizzled in an oven.

Wills walked over to a den crammed with a pool table and stacks of guitars, drums, amplifiers and electronic pianos and synthesizers.

After flipping several switches and pushing a series of buttons on a synthesizer--”this damn stuff is amazing”--Wills sang a song he had recently scrawled in a well-worn notebook bulging with tunes.

To the beat of a slow Texas waltz, he crooned, “I loved an angel last night, and my heart will never be the same. . . .”