Phyllis Cartwright

Phyllis Cartwright One of Austin's great love affairs has been interrupted for a while. Phyllis Cartwright passed away at the Christopher House on June 25 in the company of her best friends and soul mates, her husband Gary Cartwright and mother Lucy Mae McCallie. Phyllis had struggled three months with cancer. Phyllis's public persona was as the successful real estate broker, a partner of the thriving firm Avenue One who had been honored and inspired to serve on the board of the Austin Public Library Foundation. One of her great pleasures was her Monday Morning Breakfast Club with several close women friends. But Phyllis was never much of a joiner. Her front door and her dazzling smile were open to many friends and associates in her chosen hometown, but the most treasured part of her life was her private partnership with just one - her husband of thirty years. Long ago in another city, some crusty old newsroom hand branded an impetuous young reporter with a nickname that grows more politically incorrect by the hour. Most people call him Gary, but to Phyllis and a cadre of old friends, he would always be- have to be - Jap. When he grew frisky or full of himself, Phyllis would laugh and call him "Jappie." In 1998 the senior writer and editor of Texas Monthly shared a glimpse of their marriage and love affair in a widely noted article, "How to Have Great Sex Forever." "We made out on moonlit beaches, in cornfields in the shadows of interstate highways, and in darkened 747s over the Atlantic. We had been searching separately and shamelessly for fulfillment all those years, and we found it in each other, as one finds an answered prayer." A friend was in high political office at the time, and the politician's response to reading about the fantasies of Frenchy and Monique was guarded: "What are Phyllis's clients going to think?" If anything, the essay added to the realtor's clientele some prospective homeowners who, in the bargain, just wanted to meet her. Phyllis waved it off with her pealing laugh, her wry purring drawl, and her trademark mysterious grin. Phyllis Ann McCallie was born November 4, 1941, in Holdenville, Oklahoma, with enough Creek in her ancestry that she was a registered member of the tribe. Her father, Mike McCallie, was a pipe-fitter on industrial construction projects, and Lucy Mae was a career-long elementary school teacher. Outside the small town Wetumka, Phyllis grew up riding horses and was a baton-twirling majorette in high school, then her parents' work took them to Dumas, Texas, where she graduated. She majored in art at North Texas State in Denton and befriended members of the school's famed lab jazz band. She married one of them and in Dallas had two sons, Robert and Michael Sickles. Phyllis worked for ad agencies that filmed commercials, was an animator and production coordinator for film projects that included the "Bullwinkle" cartoon series, and organized the office and schedule of the noted photographer Shel Hershorn. During that period she met a stylish Morning News sportswriter, Gary Cartwright, in a press tent at a Dallas Cowboy game. In the early seventies Phyllis's second marriage brought her to Austin and a job at the Point Venture real estate development. By 1976 she was a single working mom, and Jap, also divorced for the second time, was living in New York, writing books and magazine pieces. They met again at the press gathering of Willie Nelson's Fourth of July Picnic - he scrapped his plans to go back to New York, and that was their summer of love, nights of honky-tonks and Austin music bacchanalia. At the urging and organization of their friend Doatsy Shrake, they got married in a back room of the Texas Chili Parlor the afternoon of October 20, 1976, vows performed by Jap's peer and pal for decades, Bud Shrake, the author and licensed preacher of the Universal Life Church. The storied rowdy event moved on that night to the Bull Creek Party Barn, where Jap leaped onstage with Willie Nelson, started batting chords on a guitar he had no idea how to play, and with backup by the master Austin songwriter and his band composed and yowled an extemporaneous song of love called "Main Squeeze Blues." A few years later a book deal and cooler summer climes prompted them to move to Taos, New Mexico, with their first pair of beloved Airedales. In 1982 they came back to Austin, where Jap joined the staff of Texas Monthly and she launched her remarkable career as a realtor. She entered the business when the market was booming, weathered its plummet when the eighties economy went bust, and within a progression of companies -Eden Box, West End Properties, and Avenue One - she saw it boom again. She and Jap built a beautiful home on a secluded block west of the Capitol. Doing business in a black Jaguar, Phyllis was among the first in her social circle to master the cell phone; her organizational talent and focus was extraordinary; she was forever juggling Saturday night dinner parties with Sunday open houses, returning dishes to friends' doorsteps with some small gift and a handwritten note. Phyllis built an enviable record of selling upscale homes to entertainment celebrities and beneficiaries of Austin's high-tech boom, but she never forgot where she came from, or how long and hard her climb to the home of her dreams had been. She guided young couples trying to break in the difficult Austin market with the same care and patience as she provided Dennis Hopper and Dianne Ladd. One young woman, who recalled that Phyllis showed her eighty houses, said that she wore a necklace with a pendant that was a compass. Phyllis's life had sorrow with the laughter. Her son Robert fell ill and died young, as did Jap's son Mark and Mark's wife Helen, whom they loved like a daughter. Her son Michael and his son Shea were often separated from them by circumstance and geography, as were their grandchildren. They doted on their Airedales and friendships and traveled as far and as often as they could. One evening in 1996 on their first of several jaunts with friends Dorothy Browne and Jan Reid, after immersion in the fifth day of a four-day village festival in Oaxaca, Mexico, that was awash with the local mezcal, Jap proposed that the four would henceforth have travel personas: He was "Mean," Phyllis was "Cheerful," Jan was "Steady," and Dorothy was "Reckless." Months later, when Jan proved none too steady after a Mexico City robbery and shooting, Phyllis cheerfully took the financial organizing in hand and helped raise over $100,000 for their friends' crisis in a matter of days. On the inside of a cabinet door in Phyllis's and Jap's kitchen is her typewritten list of their ten trips to Europe together. The first, dated October 1987, reads "Germany, Paris, London." The last, November 2005, is "Paris/Amsterdam." These two were made to roam the streets of Paris. Phyllis was always the strongest one any of her friends knew. After she fell so ill in March 2006, she was twice taken into marvelous hospice care of the Christopher House. By chance and the symmetry and faith that distinguished her life, she spent her last day in the "Willie Nelson Room" - dedicated after Willie played a fundraiser for the Christopher House in 1994. The first visit there, a friend called the room to ask with apprehension how they were doing. The old rabble-rouser Jap or Gary - take your pick - answered with a poet's heart: "We're making love with our eyes." Phyllis is survived by her husband; her son Michael Sickles of Duncanville; her mother Lucy Mae McCallie of Wetumka, Oklahoma; her brother Jim McCallie of Wetumka; her grandson Matthew Sickles of Duncanville; and her seventh and eighth Airedales Allie and Willie. A memorial service for Phyllis is planned Friday at 4 p.m. at the University Presbyterian Church, 2203 San Antonio St., Austin 78705. In lieu of flowers, contributions in her memory can be sent to the Austin Public Library Foundat