New York Times"Mercedes chaired the endowment campaign for the Fort Worth Symphony, and Ramona had her own causes with the zoo," Ms. Bass said, referring to the wives of Sid Bass and Lee Bass. And that's not mentioning Little Anne, as Robert Bass's wife is known, or Big Anne, Sid's first.
"When I first married Ed," Ms. Bass recalled, "somebody asked, 'Well, what's going to be your cause?' " When Ms. Bass said it would be the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, seriously, "she acted like that was not big enough."
Set to open with four days of celebrations through this weekend, the Cowgirl Museum has turned out to be big enough, and then some. Lynne V. Cheney, the wife of the vice president, has already come in for a luncheon, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, Reba McEntire and Laura Bush have joined the advisory board.
Fort Worth has acquired the cultural ambitions of Florence under the Medicis, while preserving the memory of citizens like the Sundance Kid. City boosters give annual parties in New York to promote their latest projects, with their architects, like Tadao Ando and Philip Johnson, on hand. But few of these undertakings have attracted as much national backing and international attention as the Cowgirl Museum. Already, German and British tourists are including it in their plans.
Still, Fort Worth remains the target of mockery in Dallas, its neighbor, whose own boosters describe as "world class" any project greater than a railroad crossing sign. But Fort Worth has discovered that being known as Cowtown can be as bankable as a champion Hereford bull. In what other city of Fort Worth's size, with more than half a million people, do the prerequisites of high social standing include the skills of veteran cowhands? Plus, the need to decipher invitations that may say Western Black Tie, Cowboy Black Tie, Boots and Black Tie or Diamonds and Denim?
"As a man, you kind of get down your routine," said Ed Bass, in boots and suit at the moment. "Well, this," he continued, glancing up from an imaginary invitation into an imaginary closet, "means this outfit."
Mr. Bass would know. At the pinnacle of society stands the chairman of the Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show, Mr. Bass's station since April of last year. Asked over lunch at Angeluna, looking across the street at the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall, named for his parents, whether the livestock show or his seat on the Yale board meant more to him, he diplomatically said, "I'm equally proud." But he added that the livestock show position is for life.
The Cowgirl Museum is set between museums housing Rembrandt, Picasso and Georgia O'Keeffe on one side, and the livestock show's fragrant sheds, the swine barn the nearest, on the other. Its mission is to write women back into the story of the West -- in fact, to shove the cowboy aside so the cowgirl can share a parade-leading place in American mythology.
Not that the founding donors, many of them politically conservative, would ever put it this way. Among them, besides all four Bass families and the brothers' parents, are foundations associated with Alice Walton, the billionaire Wal-Mart heiress and rancher, and Anne W. Marion, a rancher and philanthropist who founded the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., and married John L. Marion, Sotheby's former chairman. Advisers included executives from the Smithsonian and Disney.
This Thursday night, donors of at least $100,000 will have cocktails in the colonnaded rotunda, then dinner in a gallery. On Friday morning, Sandra Day O'Connor will be inducted into the Hall of Fame and cut the opening ribbon. Earlier this year, Justice O'Connor published a memoir, "LAZY B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest" (Random House). By age 8, she had learned to shoot and ride.
The women of the Cowgirl Museum point out that, rather than pursuing the fashionable cause of the moment, they are inspired by devotion to horses and cattle. "We're cowgirls, too," said Kit T. Moncrief, the museum's president. "They put me on a horse when I was a baby. At first, I cried. Then they tried to take me off. I cried much louder."
Mrs. Moncrief, a philanthropist who married into a Texas oil dynasty, was among the generations of Fort Worth women trained by Connie Reeves, a rancher and renowned riding instructor. "Always saddle your own horse," Ms. Reeves told the girls, a line that has become a museum motto. Ms. Reeves, a Hall of Famer herself, will, at age 100, saddle and ride her own horse among 1,400 other riders and marchers in a parade on Saturday morning.
The amalgam that is the museum and hall of fame took eight years to perfect, yielding another tale of cowgirls holding on despite adversity and some bucking from males of the two-legged variety. Founded in 1975 in Hereford, Tex., in the panhandle, it languished in the basement of the Deaf Smith County Public Library, so desperate for cash that it sold Manhattan's Cowgirl Hall of Fame restaurant the right to use its name.
When, in 1993, the museum saw the need to move, Fort Worth fended off competitors that included Houston and Oklahoma City. Vicki Bass, who competes on cutting horses, deftly separating cows from a herd, saw her duty.
First came fund-raising. "No, it's not our thing," said Perry Bass. But his wife, Nancy Lee, responded by inviting Ed and Vicki to dinner. The building has since been named Nancy Lee Bass Cowgirl Hall to honor the largest gift for its construction.
When Vicki Bass and Mrs. Moncrief approached the board of the National Cutting Horse Association for funding, they met with an especially chilly response. "We can't go around donating money to every cause and museum that asks for it," one board member said just after they left.
Lindy Burch, then the only woman on the board and the holder of the highest score ever in competition, spoke up. "Excuse me," she began, gesturing with hands that look strong enough to bend a rifle barrel. "What did you say?" Before the women from the museum reached their car, several men from the board had caught up with them to present a pledge for $25,000.
All told, the women raised $21 million. The resulting museum has elements of what David Schwarz, the Bass family's unofficial court architect, calls Tulsa Deco. One side shouts C-O-W-G-I-R-L-S in metallic letters backlighted with blue neon. On the other side, five cowgirls gallop from a heroic trompe l'oeil mural.
Inside, sculptured and carved horse heads, ropes and wild roses (pretty but prickly) climb chandeliers and banisters. Separate galleries honor women in entertainment, in the rodeo arena, and in Western settlement and ranching.
Everywhere, education and inspiration are dressed to entertain. There is Dale Evans's silver saddle and Annie Oakley's gun, never on loan before. Here, a video of Julie Krone winning the Belmont; there, a jukebox playing Patsy Montana. And a plexiglass bronco that girls can saddle and mount.
The museum is the sunnier side of a scholarly effort to show that Western history should be more about women and Indians than solely about white cowboys. The Hall of Fame, with 158 members, defines cowgirl generously, including not only Evans, Oakley, Krone and Montana, but also O'Keeffe and Sacagawea, the Shoshone who helped guide Lewis and Clark.
But why stop now? Already, plans are underway to enlarge the museum to take up twice the ground it does today. As Patricia W. Riley, the museum's director, explained, "We brought the brick for the expansion at the same time as we bought the brick for the building, so it can weather at the same rate."