Billy Carter Is Back : Despite Inoperable Cancer, Ex-President’s Brother Is Anything but Somber

He was comic relief in a serious era, the irreverent court jester of an administration some saw as sanctimonious.

While Jimmy Carter lusted in his heart, brother Billy let his lust for life hang out. He guzzled beer and bourbon. He entered belly-flop contests.

In 1979, the self-described “world’s most public drunk,” checked into the Naval Hospital in Long Beach to be treated for alcoholism, and when Jimmy Carter lost the election the next year, the media soon lost interest in Billy. For a number of years he has worked in low-profile jobs selling mobile homes; then last fall he began radiation and chemotherapy for inoperable cancer of the pancreas, the disease that killed his father and sister Ruth Carter Stapleton.

But now, Billy’s back. The man who calls himself a George Wallace Democrat--and whom many Democrats called Jimmy Carter’s Billy-ache--has been stumping for Jesse Jackson. And in what might once have seemed an even more unlikely move, the former huckster for Billy Beer is now touting a substance-abuse treatment program.

A sober Billy is not a somber Billy, though, and while another brew may never touch his lips, Billy’s foot is almost certain to find its way into his mouth on occasion now that he again has a forum.

Those who can’t quite remember the second half of the somnolent ‘70s may want to take a quick blast through the past with brother Billy.

“In 1976, Jimmy’s inauguration as president was the No. 1 story, and my defeat as the mayor of Plains was the No. 2 story,” Carter, 50, said, flashing his famous toothy smile as he reclined in a chair at a hotel near LAX Friday, having flown to California to spend a few days chatting with reporters and talk-show hosts and promoting a new CareUnit Behavioral Center.

Following the election, “everything changed completely and it changed so fast, nobody knew how to handle it,” Carter drawled. “The press made me something I really wasn’t and I tried to live up to what they made me. Which was kind of hard.

“Before, what I said, three people listened to it. When the press was there, everybody did,” Carter said, adding that 90% of what came out of his mouth back then was what a family newspaper would refer to as poppycock.

When Jimmy first campaigned for governor of Georgia, Billy, who is 13 years younger, began running the family peanut business, building it over time from a $2-million-a-year business to a $6-million enterprise.

But when Carter became President, the business, of which Billy owned about one-sixth, was placed in a blind trust to comply with conflict of interest laws. Billy was eager to continue running things, and made an offer to buy the peanut warehouse. But the attorney representing the trust turned the bid down.

“My whole life style changed,” Carter said. “Instead of working 12 hours a day, I was working three or four hours a day on the celebrity tour and had 15 to 20 hours for drinking.”

Carter took to the celebrity tour like a squirrel to peanuts. He endorsed products. He gave advice at high school graduations. His “bumpkin humor” landed him on “Hee Haw” and on a talk show wearing a peculiar hat and vest made of beer can pop-tops. He even had a role in the movie “Flatbed Annie and Sweetie Pie: Lady Truckers.”

“Me and the press used each other, no doubt about it,” Carter now acknowledges.

At the time, he boasted that he was making a lot more money than the $200,000 a year salary his brother was getting in the White House. Now, grinning his goofy grin, he says: “Some of the figures of what I was making were not true. . . . And I paid most of it back in IRS penalties.”

In 1978, Carter commented that the sister of country-Western singer Dolly Parton had an inferiority complex worse than his, because she was “flat-chested.”

“At least my situation can be remedied,” Stella Parton replied. “But whoever heard of silicone for the brain?”

Few observers really took Carter for stupid, though. Which doesn’t mean he didn’t blunder his way through his brother’s presidency.

“The dumbest thing I ever did was my first trip to Libya,” Carter said, adding that “it was the people I associated with, not the trip” he regrets.

As President Carter pondered the fate of hostages in Iran, Billy faced charges that he’d accepted $220,000 from the Libyans to help polish their badly tarnished image in America. Billy called the money a loan. The Justice Department said the money was compensation for services and forced him to register as a foreign agent.

Meanwhile, “Billygate” did nothing to help Carter in his 1980 reelection effort against Ronald Reagan.

Flanked by his counselor from the Long Beach hospital, and later Dr. Joseph Pursch, now of CareUnit, Carter attributed 50% of that faux pas to his abuse of alcohol.

In an often-repeated yarn from that era, Billy once asked faith healer Ruth Carter Stapleton to cure a hangover. “She didn’t do it, so I lost all faith in her faith healing,” he said. But eventually the hangovers weren’t a joke.

“It was hard,” said his wife, Sybil, who was left to raise the couple’s six children while her husband traipsed around the country.

“He’d be drinking and it would embarrass the children because their friends would see him. . . . I’d see him on the first page of the newspaper with Peanut Lolita,” she said, referring to an enticingly dressed representative for peanut liqueur the cameras caught Carter embracing.

In March of 1979, Carter entered the Long Beach Naval Hospital. Sybil underwent counseling for family members, and continues to attend Al Anon meetings.

“I enabled him to keep drinking because I covered up for him,” she said. “You think you’re helping them, but you’re hurting them.”

A Fatal Flaw

With an air of dignity antithetical to his old image, Carter said he hasn’t had a drink in nine years. He isn’t a prohibitionist. But he does think there’s a fatal flaw in a national anti-drug campaign that excludes mention of alcohol, “the No. 1 drug of choice.”

He’s not proud he once peddled beer, Carter said. And he now believes such advertising is a major part of the problem. “It’s hard (for Nancy Reagan and others) to say anything against (alcohol) with baseball stars and football stars endorsing it. . . . It’s hard to say beer is bad, then you look on television and see Tip O’Neill advertising beer, or Bob Uecker.”

Last fall, Carter again entered a hospital, and this time was told he had cancer.

“When I first came down with it, they said they were going to make it so I could die easy,” Carter said. “Then Jimmy called around and found a doctor at Mount Sinai (hospital in New York) who’s been doing research.”

Now Carter is on a “a real unique protocol,” which includes an unusual combination of radiation and chemotherapy, which he undergoes once a week.

“A month ago I had a CAT scan and it showed it hasn’t spread,” said Carter. “I think I’m doing good. I think I’m gonna beat it.”

The parents of six children and grandparents of three, the Carters live in a home in Plains, Ga., with a yard adjoining the former President’s. And while he’s not the tourist attraction he was when he ran the town’s only filling station, Carter still takes time to jawbone with sightseers now and then.

Clearly, it wasn’t alcohol alone that made his tongue wag, and now that he’s dabbling with media exposure again, he seems ready to talk about anything. What might strike some as even more surprising is the fact that people and organizations still want Carter to speak for them.

Jesse Jackson was in Jimmy Carter’s office when he called to ask for support, Billy explained.

“I said, ‘Jesse if you don’t think it will hurt you I’ll be glad to,’ ” Carter said. “I told him every black needs a redneck in his campaign.”

‘Free Press Is Good’

Although his health will keep him from campaigning much, Carter did make it down to Atlanta last week to appear with Jackson. “We got a little press out of it, and (since) Jesse ain’t got much money, free press is always good.

“We talk once or twice a week by phone,” Carter said of their relationship. “I don’t really advise him. He runs some ideas by me, and I tell him whether I agree or not. . . . Jesse kind of talks my language.”

(The Jackson campaign confirmed that Billy Carter is supporting their candidate, but couldn’t be reached to further explain the nature of their relationship.)

In the past, critics have charged that the language of both Jackson and Carter included remarks that were anti-Semitic. Carter said he believes both his and Jackson’s offending remarks were taken out of context and blown up by the media.

But he adds, “One of the things I like about Jesse is his ability to go over and talk to Palestinians. He’s been to Libya. He’s been to all the states over there. I don’t think we are anti-Semitic. I never had anti-Semitic remarks. I had anti-Zionist remarks.”

Speaking for himself, and not Jackson--who couldn’t be reached for comment--Carter said: “Any other country in the world’s killing 14-year-olds because they’re throwing rocks, we’d be over there with the Marine Corps trying to wipe ‘em out. But because it’s Israel it’s all right. . . .

“The Palestinians were there for . . . 40,000 years. I’m sure I can find somewhere in the Bible that says I can take over California if I look hard enough.”

Carter isn’t optimistic about Jackson’s chances. “I think there might be a groundswell and if he ran good, he might win the nomination. I think it would be harder than hell for him to get elected, because he’s black.”

“I think Jesse’s gonna run a lot stronger in the South this time,” Carter said, “because the sure-enough anti-Jackson voters will go with Pat Robertson. The John Birchers, the old Goldwater people, Robertson’s gonna draw a lot of those . . . the nut vote. It’s bad to say that but that’s the truth. I know the Robertson supporters at home, and most of them are nuts.”

(“Pat has swept Hawaii and Alaska, he beat the Vice President in Iowa, Michigan and South Dakota and he swept Nevada,” said Teresa George, Robertson’s deputy press secretary. “I wouldn’t call that the nut vote.”)

Once elected, though, “Whether it be a reporter or a president or a congressman or senator, once someone gets to Washington they have about three months before they start to think Washington is the real world,” Carter said.

“(But) people don’t really care what goes on in Washington. They don’t care what’s going on overseas. They care where their next paycheck is coming from. Whether their kid’s taking dope. Whether they’re going to get Social Security payments.”

His willingness to spout such homespun thoughts is what made him a bona fide American character, Carter believes.

“I always said what I thought, and I didn’t hold anything back,” he explained. “I still don’t much.”