Bess Whitehead Scott was the first female reporter for The Houston Post; hobnobbed and wrote screenplays for Hollywood’s biggest stars; was close friends with Lyndon Baines Johnson; became a public relations icon; taught in colleges and high schools; wrote textbooks; nearly became one of a handful of people in United States history to have lived in three centuries; and remained a devoted, passionate Baylor Bear her entire eventful, singular, joyous life.
And she did all of this with a profound hearing loss that made her virtually deaf.
Bess titled her charming, detailed autobiography, You Meet Such Interesting People, published in 1989 when she was 98.
But she was probably the most interesting person of all.
Bess writes in her biography that she was a 35th “birthday present” to her beloved mother Sarah on December 13, 1890, the ninth and final child of Civil War veteran William “Taz” Tazwell and Sarah Caroline Whitehead.
The Whiteheads were hard-scrabble farmers and ranchers outside tiny Blanket, Texas, living in a rough-hewn, dog-run “plank house.” When asked where she had been born, Bess replied, “The reason why Comanche and Brownwood are so cold is because they only have one ‘Blanket’ between them.”
When Bess was just 2 years old, her father died of pneumonia contracted while trying to save their precious crops during a Blue Norther.
Her older brothers and sisters joined their mother, Sarah, in managing the farm and crops, raising a few cattle and pigs, scavenging wild fruits, and just barely surviving the drought of 1898 that devastated much of Texas.
In 1900, an epidemic of measles swept through the community. A vaccine would not become available for another 50 years and deaths were common, particularly on the Texas frontier. Bess was among those severely afflicted and was nearly given up for dead on more than one occasion.
In her book, she describes in horrific detail the crude surgeries local doctors employed, usually without anesthesia, to stem the infections which had settled deeply in her left ear. In desperation, a doctor finally removed the diseased mastoid process and the tiny stapes, malleus, and incus bones of her inner ear. Bess survived, but with no hearing in the left ear and greatly impaired hearing in the right.
She taught herself to read lips, always sat on the front row, sweetly asked for clarifications, and worked constantly to hide her profound hearing loss for the rest of her life.
Only able to sporadically attend the local one-room rural schools, Bess writes that she found release in her own writing and reading and re-reading whatever books, magazines, and newspapers her older siblings could scrounge for her.
By 1902, only Bess remained home with her mother.
Her beloved older sister Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) taught school for a year to save up money to attend Baylor University and brought back wonderful stories of college life.
Bess recalled one of Lizzie’s Baylor stories, more than 60 years later, in an article for the September 1976 issue of The Baylor Line. According to Lizzie, in the spring of 1902, more than a dozen girls unexpectedly did not show up for the dinner gong at Burleson Hall. Alarmed, the dean of women summoned President Samuel Palmer Brooks.
“Are any boys involved?” Brooks snapped.
Word of the “kidnapping” spread mysteriously by grapevine, and soon small groups of boys came over from their nearby boarding houses. Burleson girls were sent to their rooms with strict orders to stay there, forbidden to gather in the halls. Whispered queries from boys under the windows brought whispered replies, but no answers to the dilemma.
An air of excitement and uncertainty, not unmixed with anxiety and even anger, hung over the campus.
Suddenly, just before the ten o’clock lights-out gong, gleeful laughter and the clatter of feet brought everybody to doors and windows.
“Where have we been? Where have we been?” came a teasing chorus as girls scrambled down the narrow stairs from the cupola of Main.”
It had been a spur-of-the-moment April Fool’s joke, though some girls had managed to slip cheese and crackers from the dining room anyway. Lizzie, who had been one of the pranksters, told Beth, “We were not punished, I guess because everybody was so relieved to see us. But Dr. Brooks did give us a tongue dressing-down later!”
But for the dirt-poor Whitehead family, college seemed like an impossible dream to Bess. Providentially, during a trip to distant Gaines County to help her brother Larkin build a temporary homesteading shelter, Beth writes that she saw a brochure in a Midland hotel titled, “You Can Go to College!”
Eagerly I read about the Cottage Home System at Baylor Female College in Belton, where a girl could go a year for $108 by working two hours each day for room and board. My heart pounded as I ran across the lobby to show the astonishing announcement to [her sister] Beatrice, who then worked as a practical nurse.
Alas, the Baylor Female College (later the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor) required the full $108 in advance.
But her eldest brother Jess generously offered to sell two of his mules to raise the money.
“I often told my grandchildren,” Bess writes, “that Jess sent me to college on a pair of mules.”
Bess took the train from Brownwood to Belton, where the one year stretched into three, serving as a cook and housemaid while boarding at the Cottage House and attending classes at Baylor Female College. She writes movingly of the Saturday gatherings at the boarding house, where students played games or music, read their favorite poems and stories, and acted out original or adapted plays. Playing a male character in a theatrical production at an all-girls school was particularly popular, she recalls, as it was the only time women were allowed to wear pants.
Schoolwork, unfortunately, wasn’t as enjoyable. Blanket’s unaccredited high school offered few courses, and Bess struggled mightily in the mandatory Latin, Greek, math, and science classes, hampered further by her severe hearing loss.
A kindly teacher, Martha Dowell, recognized Bess’ impairment, and became her mentor.
“She reached my heart and soul and made me her slave for life through her sensitive understanding of my physical handicap that I always tried so desperately to hide,” Bess writes in her autobiography.
In June 1911, Bess returned to her brother Jess’s ranch near Brownwood and asked both Jess and her brother Ben, a businessman in nearby Dublin, if they would lend her money to attend Baylor University for her 1911-1912 senior year.
“I assured them,” she writes, “that although my goal was to become a newspaper reporter and writer, I would first take a teaching job to pay off that debt. There was an understood verity in our family: your just debt was paid first, then your money was yours.”
Fortunately, she received a “Baylor College Scholarship,” which also freed her to be socially active at her new school. And active she was.
Baylor in Fall 1911 looked very different than today — only Old Main, the library, the science hall, and Burleson and Brooks dormitories existed then, with a separate academy for the many freshmen who lacked necessary high school credits. But for Bess, the main attraction (besides boys, she adds) was Dorothy Scarborough, already a nationally known author of both fiction and nonfiction, and who taught Baylor’s first creative writing and journalism classes that fall.
Scarborough also sponsored The Baylor Literary magazine, which published Bess’ first articles, including two which won campus-wide honors.
Bess, who wrote her autobiography in her late 90s, possessed an extraordinary memory and her chapter on life at Baylor in 1911-12 is a rich trove of specific, finely observed detail. Her description of Scarborough is particularly lovely:
I see Miss Dottie, slender and youthful, enthusiastic, fragile in appearance but really a robust sprite who skipped along the walk from the Science Building to Old Main with swirling skirts. She always seemed as young as we, her pupils, who were in our early twenties, but in talents and experience her real age was mid-thirties.
(Scarborough eventually left Baylor to teach and earn a doctorate at Columbia University, and write five critically acclaimed novels, including The Wind in 1925, a harrowing story of the impact of the merciless wind and droughts of West Texas on a brave pioneer woman. The Wind was adapted into a screenplay for the movie by the same name in 1928, starring Lillian Gish.)
Read more: A Visit With Miss Dottie
Bess writes that she was also fond of Baylor’s “indomitable” president “Prexy” Brooks:
We all knew that Dr. Brooks’ foremost concern was for the students. He laughed with us and wept with us, his Baylor children. He was noted for integrity, his moral and physical courage. Several years later, when Baylor alumni learned that on his deathbed he had managed to sign well over three hundred of the many diplomas awarded that year, we were filled with admiration but not surprise. “Just like Prexy,” we said.
You Meet Such Interesting People’s chapter on Baylor is a lively, charming, revealing chronology of her activities in and out of class and filled with keen observations of daily life at the Waco campus. Bess threw herself into Baylor to the extent that the 1912 Baylor yearbook, The Round Up, features 12 mentions and photographs of the highly social Bess. She served as a senior class representative and poet, worked as a writer for both The Lariat and Baylor Literary magazine, was active in the Calliopean literary society where she edited its publications and served as the society’s representative to the Erisophians, was a member of the Press Club, played forward for the Achillians women’s club basketball team, and was a member of the Fighting Four women’s club tennis team. She won prizes for her poetry (“Apostrophes to the Tree”) and a short story (“The Tomboy”) for The Round Up, and earned both of Baylor’s first-place awards for short story and poetry at the University Interscholastic League competition in 1912.
College yearbooks in that era also featured gossip columns and personal notes. In one such section, The Round Up includes a mention of Bess and a certain senior:
“WHITEHEAD – When Hal started out to make his last choice, he began looking for someone who had literary ability, rare wit, and patience. All these requirements were found in Bess, and as a result we have seen the two together at all Senior functions and elsewhere.”
Bess’ own reference to Hal (Herbert S. Lattimore) in her autobiography is short and sweet:
By Christmas, I had settled down to one “sweetheart.” Hal was debonair, handsome, and one of the most popular men in Baylor. He was a football star, a member of the top debate team, and president of the Erisophian Society, one of the two men’s societies in the school. What more could a girl ask?
With the Calliopean Society, Bess created a theatrical adaptation of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s epic poem, The Princess. The one-hour production featured three acts and included white, Grecian princess- styled costumes rented from Dallas. With their brother society, the Erisophians, the Calliopeans created or procured elaborate props and scenery. Rehearsals continued over several weeks towards the end of the school year.
But the night before the production, the dean of students, in reviewing the record of the players, noticed that the “beautiful, auburn-haired” co-ed portraying the titular Princess already had 10 demerits, which prohibited her from participating in the production. “Weeping and wailing,” Bess writes, “woe and calamity. They wouldn’t dare! But they did.”
Even Scarborough couldn’t convince Brooks to overrule the dean. At last, it was suggested that Bess herself — who knew the lines for the entire cast — play the part of the Princess, which she reluctantly did.
The production of The Princess coincided with Baylor graduation. Her sisters Lizzie and Beatrice sent her a new white dress to wear and her mother traveled from West Texas to see the play and the graduation ceremony. Both went off without a hitch. Nearly.
My roommate knocked my white shoes, wet from cleaning, off our second story window onto the cinder-covered ground. In rescuing and recleaning them, I was almost late for the march to get our diplomas. I was saved by my name, which, in alphabetical order, put me at the end of the line.
Bess Whitehead left Baylor with a degree in June 1912 and, true to her word, taught high school in 1913 and then at Howard Payne College in Brownwood from 1914-15 to pay off her brothers’ loan. When the financially strapped college nearly closed in 1915, Bess and other teachers missed multiple paychecks in the final months.
On the last day of classes at Howard Payne, and down to her last 10 cents, Bess rode with her brother Jess to his ranch near Brownwood. Bess writes that she told Jess that her sister Lila had invited her to live with her family in Houston until she could find work — preferably in newspapers: “‘Well,’ Jess said laconically, ‘looks like you can’t go anywhere but up.’ The next day he gave me $25 ‘to get started’ in Houston.”
Bess told interviewer Christie L. Bourgeois that her initial interview with The Houston Post’s managing editor Harry Warner went about as expected:
“We have a society editor and a women’s club editor and a music editor and that’s all the women we use,” he said. “We don’t use women on the city side.”
“That’s not what I want to do,” she said. “I want to write news stories and features.”
When Warner appeared unmoved, Bess told writer Denise Brown that she tried another tack with him:
“Mr. Warner, this is 1915. Europe is at war and everybody knows we’ll soon be in it. Your young men will go to war. You’ll have to train women for their jobs! I can do it. I want to learn.”
When Warner appeared to waver, she offered to work for free for the summer.
In an interview in 1987, Bess still remembered Warner’s response:
“I won’t have anybody working for me for nothing,” he said. “I’ll pay you six dollars a week for two weeks, and that will buy your streetcar fares and a sandwich for lunch. And if you’re not worth that to me at the end of two weeks, out you go! I don’t have any assignments. You’ll have to get your own stories – and don’t ask me any fool questions!”
Bess, who didn’t even know how to use a typewriter, immediately wandered over to Houston’s Carnegie Library, observed a children’s story hour, saw a traffic snafu involving a mule, walked back to The Post, and wrote up both stories longhand.
She told Bourgeois that the breakthrough came two weeks later when the Southern Baptist Convention met in Houston for the first time in 25 years. Fortunately, Ray Dudley, another Baylor graduate, was assigned to cover the convention and requested that Bess assist him.
“I helped him on that Baptist Convention for five days,” Bess recalled, “writing every line of my copy in longhand, helping him with the main [meeting] and during the women’s meetings. At the end of the week, I had $18 in my check instead of $6.”
Bess laboriously taught herself to type on her lunch breaks and also began covering the silent films of the era for the paper, particularly the kiddie matinees, in addition to her reporting duties.
Within a year, she was offered a job by Hulsey Theatres in Dallas, a national cinema chain, writing and editing their free Movieland magazine.
Her interest in cinema piqued, and Bess took a three-day train ride — World War I gas rationing having slowed travel considerably — to Los Angeles and Hollywood.
In 1917, she joined the staff of Thomas H. Ince’s studio in Culver City, working beside Adela Rogers St. Johns, who would later become known as “the world’s greatest girl reporter” for the Hearst newspaper chain and a successful novelist and screenwriter.
While writing publicity tear sheets, Bess said that she began writing screenplays as well. Though none were produced, it enabled her to meet the stars of the silent film era, including ZaSu Pitts, Wallace Reid, Mary Pickford, and others.
Bess returned to Texas at war’s end, staying with friends from her Baylor days, and rejoining Hulsey Theatres in Dallas.
Eventually, she said, she reunited with a childhood sweetheart, Hubert “Hugh” Scott, a returning Marine who had been wounded in the war. After a whirlwind romance, Bess writes that the couple were married by Dr. George Truett in his study at the First Baptist Church of Dallas.
But while Hugh was a successful traveling salesman with an expansive territory in the Midwest, he was a heavy drinker and prone to get-rich-quick schemes. While living in Denver, their first child, Lila Bess, was born on October 31, 1920, followed by Scott, on April 29, 1922, though the family soon moved again, first to Los Angeles, then to San Diego, and then Galveston, as multiple business opportunities failed. Bess finally left Hugh in 1927 and dejectedly returned to Houston.
Now a single mom with two young children, Bess was offered a job by The Houston Press, where she again covered movies and music. Among her interviews was one with the then-unknown actor, Clark Gable.
In a review of Gable’s summer stock theatre production in Houston, Bess told Bourgeois that she wrote that Gable and his leading lady, Nancy Duncan, “Made love like a bull in a china shop.” The next day, Gable came to the city room of The Press, leaned over her desk and said, “Mrs. Scott? I’m Clark Gable. So, I don’t know how to make love. Will you teach me?” Bess smiled and said, “Well, let’s go.” The two became friends over a cup of coffee and stayed in touch for several years.
“He was a very charming person and a very friendly person, and anybody would love him,” Bess recalled, “although, of course, he had many faults.”
She later returned to The Houston Post. Over the next 15 years, Bess writes that she reported on the 1928 Democratic Convention in Houston, several hurricanes, the first sound-on-film motion picture, the Lindberg kidnapping, and other major events and disasters, and became lifelong friends with a young debate teacher at Sam Houston High School in downtown, Lyndon Baines Johnson Jr.
Bess’ detailed her long relationship with Lyndon and his wife Claudia aka “Lady Bird” in an extensive oral history for the National Archives and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, following his career from teacher to president in a host of charming stories and anecdotes, as well as a box of personal correspondence.
One of Bess’ letters from Johnson, dated November 1934, alludes to an unexplained problem for Bess’ daughter, then at Baylor:
“Dear Bess, The minute I read your letter I got on the telephone to E.W. Brisbane, District Director of the National Youth Association in Waco. He said he would take care of Lila Bess. I told him the mother of Lila Bess had been another mother to me, and something had to be done for her.” So he put her on the payroll at Baylor.
Bess remained at The Post through World War II and her son, “Scotty,” enlisted in the Navy, serving at Guadalcanal and was even stationed in Tokyo Bay to witness Japan’s surrender to Gen. MacArthur. But Scotty died of cancer 12 years later after a two-year battle with the disease. Bess told Bourgeois that she found great comfort in a letter from LBJ that arrived shortly thereafter:
Dear Bess, I was so very, very sorry to learn of the ordeal that you and Scott and his family went through. I know you have had many lonely and troubled days these past two years, and my heart is heavy to think of them. I’m glad you found the strength and the courage to try to bridge a deep void in your life. Know that I will be thinking of you and hoping to hear from you.
Throughout her life, Bess never forgot Baylor University and remained an active member of the Baylor Ex-Students Association (later Alumni Association) throughout her life. One of her letters to the editor in the January/February 1954 issue of The Baylor Line ends with a short — but pointed — note: “Also, I’d like to see more women on the official board of the Ex-Students Association.”
At age 52, Bess writes that several former Post employees approached her about joining an advertising and public relations company, eventually called the Gulf State Advertising Agency, where she worked for 16 years. She retired from Gulf State in 1960.
From there, Bess taught journalism for five years at Pine Grove Baptist School in Houston, private creative writing classes for more than 20 years, wrote three communications textbooks, including The Teacher’s Television Manual, and even served as editor of The Texas Woman, a state publication of the Texas Federation of Professional Women, which she had been a member of for 50 years.
Her final letter from Johnson arrived on May 2, 1972, less than a month after his massive heart attack in April: “Dear, dear Bess: I think so much of you and your family and always will, so, of course, it pleased me that you thought of me during this particular time.”
Johnson died on January 12, 1973.
In the decades that followed, Bess frequently returned to Baylor. In 1984, she told The Baylor Line that the University had been the “crucible that burned from a young life some dross and refined some gold. Baylor taught me self-discipline by which to ‘know thyself,’ the most difficult lesson in the world.”
The interview followed yet another return to campus for the Alumni Association’s Heritage Week activities, where she yet again won the award for “the person participating in the earliest athletic event” in 1911-1912 and “oldest living graduate” recognition.
“I enjoy visiting the campus and seeing the changes,” she told Denise Brown. “No one from my class attends, but I always meet new young people.”
In 1992, the Austin Writer’s League organized a celebration to honor her 100th birthday and established the Bess Whitehead Scott Scribes Scholarship. When she met the first recipient, Baylor student Jennifer Lynn Pennington, Bonnie Skaar George of The Line reported that Bess whispered in Pennington’s ear, “I sure am glad you’re a girl!”
Shortly after her 103rd birthday in 1994, Gov. Ann Richards, another Baylor grad, notified Bess that she had been inducted into the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame, where she received the inaugural Pioneer Spirit Award.
Read more: Gov. Ann Richards (’54) Had Star Power
Bess died in Austin on December 27, 1998, just two weeks after her 107th birthday. She had outlived both her children and one of her grandchildren. A friend reported that she had been in declining health for the previous two years and had been hospitalized after a recent fall. Her obituary was carried by the Associated Press in major newspapers from coast to coast. Among her many accomplishments at her passing she was even noted as having been the “oldest living screenwriter” in America.
But Bessie Whitehead Scott was much, much more. Her unsinkable spirit had carried her through crushing poverty, a serious physical challenge, and the thousand-and-one daily hazards and obstacles facing a single woman with talent and drive in a society dominated by a deeply ingrained toxic patriarchy.
Yet, Bess didn’t just survive and overcome — she flourished.
She closed You Meet Such Interesting People with this delightful — and telling — paragraph:
To those of you who have read this book this far, stay with me. I’m thinking of writing another one, for there is no end to interesting people. It might be titled If Life is This Good and Pleasant at 98, Why Not Try for 100?
