THE LAST OF THE SOUTH GIRLS
“I DON’T DO LUNCH.”
The candor was on point but still surprising for a woman with a reputation cemented as a “hostess” in the nation’s capital. That was Barbara Howar’s response to our first efforts to meet her, in 2003.
We sought out Howar because she, like each of us, was a North Carolina transplant to California. Decades earlier, she’d lived in Washington, D.C., where she became the focus of sensational media coverage. Magazine and newspaper images showed her doing the Frug in a miniskirt, waving to a photographer from Life while zipping through city streets on a scooter, and dancing with President Lyndon B. Johnson at his inaugural ball. She appeared to be the consummate Potomac party girl.
By the mid-1970s, “Barbara Howar from Washington” had become one of Johnny Carson’s favorite guests. During the eighties, you could hear her unmistakable Tar Heel lilt on Entertainment Tonight, where she was a senior correspondent. When we first called her, she was working for Norman Lear, creator of such iconic TV hits as All in the Family and The Jeffersons, searching for properties for him to produce.
Howar’s past also held intriguing literary allure. In addition to writing two best sellers of her own, Laughing All the Way and Making Ends Meet, she was rumored to have inspired the heroine in Willie Morris’s first novel, The Last of the Southern Girls, published in 1973. Following the success of his 1967 memoir, North toward Home, Morris had been named the youngest ever editor in chief at Harper’s, and he would go on to become such a treasured Southern writer that when he died in 1999, he lay in state in the Old Capitol rotunda in Jackson, Mississippi.
The novel chronicles a debutante from Arkansas named Carol Hollywell. Against the backdrop of national unrest, she has an ill-fated romance with an idealistic politician from the South as she tries to mentor him into greatness. Morris writes of Carol: “An aura of romance and beauty surrounded her, there was a rare electricity to her movements, she seemed touched with gold, and people would stare at her in the streets or in the restaurants, not just because of this radiance, but something more: the good juices and spirits of life which encompassed her, her elegance and proud defiance.”
What would it take to inspire such ardor in Willie Morris? The media portrayed Howar as somewhere between a “socialite” and an “enfant terrible.” Could she really be Carol Hollywell? We wanted to know.
“I don’t do lunch” would remain her response for almost a decade.
BY AGE TWELVE, BARBARA WAS already showing signs of being a provocateur. The middle of three daughters of Oscar and Mary Dearing of Raleigh, she attended a local Catholic school, where she engaged in “mortal mental combat” with the parish priest, whom she called Father Fart. She also created an underground newspaper for fellow students, naming it spelled backward. As she put it, the publication contained “graphic descriptions of what I
