Cashing In On Being Billy

By LANCE MORROW

When Billy Carter showed up in Boston to pick a winner in the Miss Piggy's Pizza Beauty Pageant, a woman reporter asked him: "Is there anything you won't do for money?" "Yes," cracked the President's brother, "but if you proposition me, I'll do it for free." Next question: "How much money are you being paid to be here?" Answer (amiably): "That ain't none of your damned business."

Actually, Billy Carter's honorarium these days runs between $5,000 and $10,000, depending on how badly a promoter wants him to show up. For such fees, Billy has presented the Golden Ratchet Award to a winning team of auto mechanics and lent his sudsy presence to the Annual World Belly Flop and Cannonball Diving Championship in Vancouver. This week he travels to Ohio for the U.S. Peanut Olympics, which involves a shelling contest and other hilarities. A line of Billy posters, T shirts and belt buckles is going on the market. California's Revell Inc. is manufacturing a model Billy Carter Redneck Power Pickup Truck. Billy has appeared at Manhattan's "21" Club to push a peanut liqueur, and a Kentucky brewer is bringing out a new brand called Billy Beer, which the First Brother will hawk on TV. He has forsaken the family's peanut warehouse business, but stands to earn some $500,000 this year from his various promotions and ventures. He could make more, but as his Nashville agent Tandy Rice explains, presumably with a straight face, 95% of the proffered business deals have been rejected as being "too flippant."

Never in U.S. history has a presidential relative engaged in such aggressively crass exploitation of a genetic coincidence. A couple of F.D.R.'s sons displayed a peculiar, almost prurient interest in their parents' personal lives, but only in books published long after Franklin and Eleanor had died. Margaret Truman's singing career might not have occurred without a father in the White House, but she earned painfully mixed reviews from it. F. Donald Nixon engaged in some murky financing on the strength of his brother's name.

Billy, on the other hand, has pursued his lucrative celebrity with such up-front good ole boy's cupidity that his ventures seem quite innocent--especially after Watergate. Critics quick to seize upon any hinted impropriety around a President have laughed off Billy. No one has to suspect Billy of anything --he simply takes a certified check, in advance, then goes out behind the microphone, usually clutching a cold one, and exhales his ineffable magic: one-liners, snorts ("hee-unh, hee-unh"), the buffooneries of a quick-witted redneck (self-advertised). "I ain't the Carter that won't tell a lie," says Billy.

President Carter has punctiliously stayed out of Billy's affairs; there is no strain between them, say the President's friends. Amateur Freudians believe they detect some snarls in Billy's mind--an almost angry competitiveness, a neglected brother's attention-getting exhibitionism and so on. Whatever the brothers' relations, the White House may instinctively understand that Billy in certain ways is good for Jimmy. One of the most flattering rumors ever circulated about George Washington had it that, in order to warm up his soldiers while crossing the Delaware, he told a dirty joke. Jimmy Carter seems incapable of performing such a humanizing service for himself. In an odd way, Billy does it for him. Billy compensates for his brother's sweet-eyed psalm-singing and persnicketiness; Billy drinks beer on Sunday morning instead of going to church; he is Huck Finn against the town's respectables. He has become something of a folk hero; in doing so he has begun to cut his celebrity loose from his sibling's and achieved a media being of his own.

Is there anything wrong with such goodhearted greed, openly pursued? Some argue in Billy's favor that he never sought his celebrity (not quite true), but is now obeying Adam Smith's "invisible hand" by selling the public what it wants for as long as it will pay. Tourist hordes made Billy give up his house in Plains, besieged him in his office and drove him from his beloved filling station; after such indignities, why shouldn't he become undignified himself, and get well paid for it? No one imagines for a second that Billy (whose political hero seems to be George Wallace) has the remotest voice in influencing his brother's policies anyway.

Nonetheless, something is decidedly wrong with the spectacle of Billy Carter. However much Billy trades on his independence, he is, after all, the President's brother, and his attraction depends upon that presidential nimbus. Watergate discredited the presidency, but it does not follow that the office therefore deserves to be treated cheaply. ("Cheap, hell!" Billy might answer. "I'm expensive!") Gerald Ford and his family managed to invest the White House with a relaxed kind of dignity during their tenure. They did not try to sell blankets along Pennsylvania Avenue. Billy Carter is hardly subverting the Republic by being tacky, but the psychodrama of his celebrity does not add much shine to the leader of the free world.

In all of Billy's heehaw, one senses a touch of Martha Mitchellism; it is sometimes hard to imagine his adventures ending well. One problem is that Billy's cracker vaudeville is based upon a certain amount of sneering contempt. Under the good ole boy fac,ade lies an unpleasant pool of anger. W.C. Fields was a professional at that kind of thing; it was his trade. The President's brother may discover that the Billy phenomenon can backfire. In any case, there is an unsettling symmetry about these two Carters: a President who forever asks the "decent, honorable, pristine" American people, Why not the best? while his brother, the Snopes in the woodpile, satirizes the theme by assuming the very worst of the American people and braying at them. About the gentlest outcome one can wish for is that the public gets bored, thus proving that for all Billy's low judgment of the folks, he has overestimated their attention span. In the absence of such popular fickleness, the President and his brother should try to reach some understanding. "Shut up, Billy," might be a useful presidential message. -- Lance Morrow

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