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PrintBillie and Tracy Letts talk about their award-winning literary careers
This extraordinary mother and son — Billie and Tracy Letts — discuss their lives, their family and the rocky road that led to their exceptional successes.
Editor's Note: "August: Osage County" will be at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center January 26-31. Buy your tickets here.
Someone once said that behind every cynic lies a disappointed idealist. That could well describe Billie and Tracy Letts. Between the lines of their straightforward answers, their biting wit tells on them. They are tragedy and comedy hiding behind a mask. Deep and deeply feeling. Dark but tempered with lightness.
No mother and son could appear more different and yet be more alike. Red-headed Billie, tiny, almost fragile; her youngest son, Tracy, blond, lanky, large enough to swallow his mother in his arms. She’s a novelist; he’s an actor-turned-playwright. Both award winners. Both desert dry in their humor. Both apparently passionate about justice. Both fiction writers who tell brutal truths about people and life. Both recovering alcoholics. Both still in mourning for their husband/father.
The last year has been one of the best and one of the worst for them. Tracy’s Steppenwolf-to-Broadway play, “August: Osage County,” about a troubled Oklahoma family, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Award for Best New Play and seemingly every other major drama award this past spring. But at a cost. His father, Dennis Letts, an English professor-turned-actor, who played the father in “August” in both Chicago and New York, was diagnosed with and died of cancer before Tracy’s accolades became public.
“I know he is here in spirit,” Tracy told an audience at Tulsa’s Celebration of Books in late September, “but I miss him, damn it.”
Accepting the Homecoming Award from the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers that night, he paused and pumped his hand as if to pound the podium. It’s one more honor his father, who had predicted the play would garner a Pulitzer, would miss.
Until “August,” his fourth play, became a sold-out sensation at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, where Tracy is part of the ensemble, and then likewise on Broadway, Billie was the best-known Letts. If you haven’t heard of, read or seen the movie “Where the Heart Is” — her tale of Novalee Nation, an unwed pregnant girl who survives in a Wal-Mart — you best get to the nearest book or video store. Billie’s first novel, which she didn’t begin writing until her mid-50s, not only captures the warmth and pathos of small-town Oklahoma, but it also enraptured 3 million readers worldwide, won the prestigious Walker Percy Literary Award and more popularly became recommended reading for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. The 20th Century Fox screen rendition starred Natalie Portman, Ashley Judd and Stockard Channing.
Since then, Billie has reeled off three more such novels using Oklahoma and its people as her base — “The Honk and Holler Opening Soon,” “Shoot the Moon” and “Made in the U.S.A.,” perhaps her darkest tale yet. All only a portion of her written output.
She’s an easy interview. Lots of stories to tell. Lots of opinions, but she is a woman who, despite her openness, says firmly that she has “a very private side” that even people who know her well don’t know.
When we order lunch on a Thursday in September, she passes on the now-ubiquitous sweet potato fries. Doesn’t like them or orange yams, blue tortilla chips — “It’s not normal,” she says. It’s funny but then affecting as she begins talking about her youth in Tulsa, where she was the only child of parents “who were children themselves,” she has written.
“The atmosphere in my house growing up was very tense,” she says during the interview. “I was the peacemaker. If I sensed an argument, a fight, I mean a physical fight coming on, I was the one who tried to settle everything down.
“My parents worked a lot of jobs, so I was alone in the house a lot. By the time I was 7, 8 years old, I knew how to use a wringer washer and would do the laundry, ironing and cook the evening meal so that when they came in, everything would be nice, be clean; dinner would be ready to eat — nothing that would invite disagreement. I made good grades in school. I didn’t want to upset the applecart, but at the same time, I was the wild kid in the neighborhood.”
When she started school at Sequoyah Elementary, her mischievous side began to emerge. The sweet potato in the french fry ’40s and ’50s. In first or second grade her dog Poochie followed her to school. The teacher wouldn’t let her take the pet home.
“I said, ‘Watch me,’” Billie remembers. “I just stomped out of the classroom, took the dog home and stayed home the rest of the day.”
She became fond of creating exaggerated tales, which she embellished with each retelling. Once, when walking home from school, she told her friends two men were following them in a pickup. She found an old medicine bottle and told them it had been full of dope they had thrown from the truck.
“I didn’t see a pickup; I didn’t see two men in a pickup, but it became an epic story,” she says. “It went on every day when we were out walking. I would get them running (by yelling) ‘Here comes the pickup; run, run like the devil!’”
One day, with them all in near hysteria, one of the girls ran to her home and the rest followed. The girl’s mother called the police.
“Of course, the truth came out, and they called my parents to come home and get me, and they wore my butt out,” Billie says. “But it was a wonderful, wonderful event, this grand, glorious performance.”
Another time, she and friends hid at school because Billie had said a mysterious man was after them. That, too, exacted a punishment. In fourth grade, she caused a stir with her book report on Erskine Caldwell’s racy “God’s Little Acre,” which “my mother must have thought was of a religious nature,” she recalled in an essay. A few years ago, when she and Dennis attended Sequoyah’s 75th anniversary party, a greeter asked her to write down a memory. Billie’s choice? Writing 100 times on the gym blackboard, “I will not cuss anymore.” “Did it work?” the greeter asked. “Hell, no,” Billie said.
After graduating from Union High School, Billie attended Northeastern State University, where, pulling all-nighters to ace exams, she mostly partied, and met Dennis, whose brother she had known in high school. She saw them one day in the student union and zeroed in on Dennis, thinking, “Wow, he’s sexy.” Was it love at first sight?
“More like lust,” she says, having noted, “I went two years, then I got pregnant, then I got married, in that order.”
Unlike Novalee, in 1958, an unmarried pregnant girl had few options, Billie likes to remind young women today. You left town or you married. She and Dennis tried to lie, saying they married secretly three months earlier, but their parents knew the truth. The couple kept up the pretense until that first baby, Shawn, and second son, Tracy, were teenagers, a story she recalls in “Voices from the Heartland,” a compilation of stories by female Oklahoma writers.
“A fiction writer can say anything; we lie,” she says in our interview. But this lie wasn’t one that would keep.
In 1965, when Tracy was 2 weeks old, the family moved from Tulsa, where Dennis was working on a master’s degree, to Denmark to carry out the requirements of a Fulbright grant. The bright couples they met there opened Billie’s eyes to the world. She determined to finish college, which she did at age 30.
“I had, in the intervening years, been a roller-skating carhop, waitress, window washer, dishwasher, dance instructor and part-time secretary to a private detective who showed me clandestine photographs of my grandma’s longtime evangelist having sex with a teenager on the hood of a car,” she once wrote.
After living in various towns in various states, eventually the family moved to Durant, where Billie and Dennis taught English courses at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and became part of a coterie of academics. It was here that the Lettses “circled the wagons as a family,” as Tracy puts it, to survive in the small, “extremely conservative” town. Dennis’ son Dana from an earlier marriage would join them, leaving to live with his grandparents when he and his father disagreed, Billie says.
The presence of teachers and their families became “part of the solace of living in a place like that,” Tracy says. Yet “I don’t remember a day going by at school when I didn’t hear someone railing on black people or devil worshipers. We had as many black people as we had devil worshipers in Durant, meaning none.”
Well, not quite. One time, Billie says, police evicted them from their home, just because someone saw her sitting on the front porch drinking tea with the town’s only black citizen, a good friend and part of their kitchen table bridge foursome.
“We didn’t have the money to fight it,” she says.
The incongruity was that while his parents were “unique … beautifully complicated people,” Tracy says, “it’s not as if (they) were Parisians who had moved to Durant.” They were lifelong Okies.
The experience has made them unrepentant liberals. Billie, who also saw racism in high school, sometimes wonders why she continues to live here.
“But my cousin says if I moved away there’d only be nine liberals left in the whole state,” she says.
Since returning to Tulsa in recent years, she’s joined the local peace movement and was once arrested for crossing a barrier while protesting a Dick Cheney appearance. During his Celebration of Books acceptance speech, Tracy promoted arts education but also disparaged the views of U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe.
Tame subject matter comparatively speaking. Like his mother, early on Tracy had a taste for tall tales and gore. When his first-grade teacher asked her students to write a story, he came up with “The Psychopath,” about a man who hanged and then shot himself. The teacher gave him an A++.
“This was 1970-71,” Tracy says. “It’s amazing she didn’t call social services.”
The family had some real-life pain, pain created by Billie’s parents. Her father committed suicide when Tracy was 10, and her mother spiraled into substance abuse and was in and out of detox. One time Billie made Tracy take his Super 8 camera to the psychiatric ward to film his grandmother in her “downer delirium.”
“It’s the creepiest three minutes you have ever seen,” he says. “Not particularly dramatic, just depressing.”
Tracy says he drew the germ for “August” from this life experience but also says, “I’ve always had a taste for the bizarre and violent.” This was evident even in his youth — his mother recalls him making a homemade movie about a backyard burial.
He also poked out stories on Billie’s typewriter and got the acting bug in high school, something he picked up from his father, who had long performed in community theater productions. Tracy first acted with Dennis in Tishomingo’s adaptation of “Solid Gold Cadillac.” A part he got, Billie remembers, because the theater folks figured that if Dennis had to drive Tracy every night to rehearsal, he might as well take the lead role.
Tracy tried going to college at Southeastern, but instead he drank, did drugs and yearned to get out of the small town. At 17, he moved to Dallas and then to Chicago, his adopted hometown, where he has lived for 22 years.
“I love it for many reasons, not the least of which is a vibrant theater community,” he told the Celebration of Books audience.
As a struggling actor, he began to use the downtime between jobs to write. In 1988-89, he had a 9-5 temp job as a secretary with a Chicago ad agency and was drinking heavily.
“I’d write ‘Killer Joe’ at night and come in the next day very hung over, and try to sort out the nonsense I’d written the night before. I didn’t work very hard,” he says, but he was hoping the play might earn a grant from the Illinois Arts Council.
“It was the final day. I knew I had a full day of writing at work,” he says, but his bosses threw him a curve. They called him in, said they had a big project and needed him to work on their assignment. He left rather distraught, but “I went back to their office and sat down and said, ‘Fellas … I know you need to get this work done, but I am trying to finish my play.’” They allowed him to come to work early the next day and he raced the finished script to the arts office at the 5 p.m. deadline.
In the meantime, he began readings of his work.
“Everybody hated it,” he says. “Everybody thought it was awful. There were readings where people burst into tears and walked out. Not for good reasons either.”
He sent it to his parents, who responded kindly and then added, “There’s a lot of energy in the writing. But nobody is ever going to produce this, nobody is ever going to perform this and certainly nobody’s ever going to see it. But good luck next time.”
Months later, unemployed and living off American Airlines frozen dinners he had caged with his then-girlfriend’s food stamps, Tracy got a letter from the council, basically saying, “Congratulations! Here’s $5,000.”
“I called my parents immediately to rub it in,” Tracy says. “My father loved to tell that story to the end of his days.”
He dried up, kept writing, kept acting, amassing a long string of stage, movie and television credits. One friend described his acting style as “Jimmy Stewart with an ax.” (One of his roles was Mitch Albom in the stage version of Albom’s book “Tuesdays with Morrie.” In one of life’s serendipitous twists, Albom also was honored at this year’s Celebration of Books.)
Although “Killer Joe” and his other plays made it to the stage — “Bug” even became a movie, with Ashley Judd as a co-star, and “Man from Nebraska” was a 2004 Pulitzer finalist — none struck the chord that “August: Osage County” has.
Considered by some critics as the best play in years, its depiction of “an Oklahoma clan in a near apocalyptic state of meltdown,” according to The New York Times, has drawn comparisons of Tracy to the likes of Eugene O’Neill. Along with Best Play, it also won four other Tony Awards.
And “a large part of the reason I am here is the Steppenwolf Theatre company,” he told the Celebration crowd, explaining, “I walked in the Steppenwolf office and said to our artistic director, Martha Lavey, ‘I want to write a play, an ensemble, 13 characters, three and a half hours on a three-story set.’ And the response I got was, ‘OK.’ I’m a very lucky playwright.”
As Tracy’s plays began to have success, Billie began fighting her own battle with the bottle, which she brings up unbidden.
“Did I tell you I’m an alcoholic?” she says, then kids, “George Bush pushed me to be an alcoholic.” Although recalling her college days, she admits, “I think the beast was just in there waiting.”
One healthful glass of wine with dinner carried over to the evening news, where she watched the Middle Eastern War coverage and its toll. Soon one glass became two, which became a bottle and then two bottles. She thought Dennis didn’t know, that like all alcoholics she had hidden the evidence. She was wrong. The drinking ended soon after a homecoming party.
“I got really sloshed and he told me I had humiliated him,” she says.
She went to her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting knowing she had to get some help.
“I’d say, ‘I’m Billie and I’m confused’; ‘I’m Billie and I’m listening’; ‘I’m Billie and I don’t know why I am here,’” she says. “Soon after, I said, ‘I’m Billie and I’m an alcoholic.’ I cried and cried and cried.”
She fell off the wagon once, on a cruise with free drinks. Her AA friends welcomed her back with open arms. In this, the worst year of her life, when in the first three months after her husband’s death she wanted to pull the covers over her head, she still managed to beat back the voice that said, “What could one glass hurt?” She knew the answer and said “No.”
When Tracy called to tell her he had indeed won the Pulitzer, “there was a lot of screaming, hollering, jumping around, crying and tears,” and wishing Dennis were there to celebrate, too. Today they are busy enjoying Tracy’s success.
“It’s terribly exciting to be his mother. I don’t like him very much,” she says, that dry wit coming out, “but beyond that, it’s thrilling … I remember the boy who refused to wear matching socks to school.”
For Tracy, it’s been a bigger adjustment. If he doesn’t consider himself famous or a celebrity, he’s certainly Mr. Popular. He can no longer stand out back of the Steppenwolf with a director going over notes. People come up to him.
“You are like the hometown boy makes good,” he says of the reaction he’s received. “They think, ‘You live here, act here.’ They feel a sense of ownership in the most delightful way. I love that kind of popularity. I can go into a grocery store (and not be recognized).”
Some of his fellow actors and writers are not so lucky.
“I don’t enjoy that kind of fame,” he says.
Then there are the new best friends.
“Shortly after the play opened in New York, I got a call that Warren Beatty wanted to see me, ostensibly about the movie or producing a movie,” Tracy says. “So I went to the Carlyle Hotel and had tea with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. And I realized in terms of a movie, it was kind of a b******* pretext for getting me there. … Like … bring that guy before me so I can meet him.”
Now, because of the Pulitzer et al, he is as he says “certified” in the eyes of the industry.
And he has already moved on. His next play, “Superior Donuts,” set in Chicago, has been playing at the Steppenwolf. He’s working on a screenplay for “August,” which has been picked up by Harvey Weinstein, and other vehicles. The national tour of “August” begins next summer and “some local interests,” he says, are working on bringing it to Tulsa.
Billie’s screenplay for a part-animation, part-reality film, “Veritas, The Prince of Truth,” has opened in Mexico starring Kate Walsh and Sean Patrick Flanery. But mainly she is just trying to get through the first year of grieving for Dennis.
“There are a lot of lonely evenings when I turn the TV on just for the sound, or I go to bed at 8 o’clock because I can’t wait for the next day, because I think it is going to be better,” she says.
She’s pushed that time ahead to get through the year, that hardest first year. But she knows that this, too, shall pass.
If their fans are lucky, this year will only add seasoning to plays and stories Billie and Tracy Letts have yet to tell.
The other Lettses
Although mother and son Billie and Tracy Letts have garnered the most attention, other family members share the creative gene.
Dennis Letts, Billie’s husband, was a Fulbright Scholar who spent most of his career as a writing and English professor, mostly at Southeastern Oklahoma State University.
But he had another talent he shared with son Tracy — acting. After performing at university and community theaters while teaching, he began a post-retirement career, appearing in nearly 50 films. Among them: “Secondhand Lions,” “Passenger 57,” “Man in the Moon,” “Cast Away” and Billie’s book-movie, “Where the Heart Is.”
Most especially, he originated the role of patriarch Beverly Weston in his son’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “August: Osage County,” acting in both the Chicago Steppenwolf and Broadway productions before his death in February 2008.
Tracy described his father as “moody and introspective” when Tracy and his brothers were children, but “he sort of seemed to relax as he got older. He became more garrulous and open.”
The older Letts brothers, Dana and Shawn, found their own paths.
Dana, “extremely bright, curious and sweet,” as described by Billie, his stepmother, channeled the family’s interest in books, working at the Northeastern State University-Tahlequah library.
Shawn picked up another of his dad’s loves, music, including an affinity for the saxophone. A jazz musician and composer, he lives in Singapore. He has two CDs, a theatrical credit (he did the music for Tracy’s play, “Man from Nebraska”) and a film credit.
Photo courtesies
Photo one is by Evan Taylor.
Photo two is courtesy of Steppenwolf Theatre/Chicago magazine.
Photo three is by Joan Marcus/Steppenwolf Theatre.
Photo four is by Joan Marcus/Steppenwolf Theatre.
