Cormac McCarthy's secret underage muse who he fell in love with when she was 16 and he was 42
American novelist Cormac McCarthy's secret underage muse has been revealed, more than a year after his death from prostate cancer.
The writer, whose novels include The Passenger and Stella Maris, was not known for the female characters in his westerns.
But many of his leading men, were inspired by a single woman, Augusta Britt, who first met the author in 1976 when she was just 16 years old and he was 42, Vanity Fair reports.
She explained that she had been in and out of foster care at the time, and used the pool at the Desert Inn motel in Tucson.
'It wasn't very safe in the foster homes,' Britt, now 64, explained. 'They weren't allowed to have locks on bedroom or bathroom doors, so the men would just follow me into the rooms.
'But at the Desert Inn, I could use the showers by the pool to shower.'
It was there, she said, that she first saw McCarthy.
'I thought he looked familiar, but couldn't quite place him,' Britt recounted.
American novelist Cormac McCarthy's secret underage muse has been revealed, more than a year after his death from prostate cancer
'So I went back to the home I was staying in and realized that the man at the swimming pool was the man in the author photo on the back of the book I was reading, The Orchard Keeper,' she said, referring to McCarthy's little-known debut novel published in 1965.
The following day, she said, she brought the paperback to the motel for him to sign.
'I was wearing jeans and a work shirt, and I had a holster with a Colt revolver in it, which I had taken to wearing. I had stolen it from the man who ran the foster home that I was in.
'And Cormac looked at me and he said, "Little lady, are you going to shoot me?" And I said, "No, I was wondering if you would sign my book,"' Britt said.
'He was so shocked,' she recounted. 'He said he was surprised that anyone had read that book, let alone a 16-year-old girl. But he said he would be delighted to sign it.
'Then he asked me why I carried a gun,' to which the then-teenager told the author about her past.
She told Vanity Fair she lived a normal life until the age of 11, when her family abruptly moved from North Dakota to the border town of Tucson, Arizona, where some tragedy occurred that sent her father into violent alcoholism.
For five years after, Britt said she was sent back and forth between foster care homes and her real family, where her presence would inevitably send her father into binges, followed by beatings and sometimes hospitalizations.
Augusta Britt told Vanity Fair she first met the author in 1976 when she was just 16 years old and he was 42
'I would not have been able to articulate it at the time, but it just seemed like I was the problem, because if I wasn't around, then my parents didn't have to be reminded of what had happened to us all.
'And I very much internalized everything, because that's what kids do. In the absence of an explanation, you look for an answer to why things happened, and the answer I kept coming up with was "I must have been bad, and if I could just find a way to be good again, then everything would be OK."
'I never blamed him,' she said of her now-deceased father. 'He did the best he could.'
'So I've decided I'm not going to be hit anymore,' she remembered telling McCarthy.
'I'm going to shoot anyone who tries.'
Britt said she remembers the author responding, 'Well, that would explain the gun.'
'And that was so Cormac,' she said. 'And I thought, "Thank God, this man gets it. He wanted to hear about my life."
'It was the first time someone cared what I thought, asked me about my opinions on things. And to have this adult man actually seem interested in talking to me, it was intensely soothing.
'For the first time in my life, I felt just a little spark of hope, that things might be OK.'
From there, Britt said, McCarthy gave her his editor's phone number in case of emergencies and began to send her letters and books.
Whenever he returned to Tucson, the author would also make a point to see Britt and leave cab or phone money for her.
That arrangement lasted until 1977 when Britt once missed a call, after she had gone back to living with her family and was hit again.
She wound up back at the hospital, and when she finally managed to reconnect with McCarthy at the Desert Inn, he was upset.
'I was worried sick about you,' she remembered him telling her. 'If you stay here, they're going to kill you.
'I'm going to Mexico and I want you to come with me. At least then you'll be safe.'
'I want you to know, I don't want anything from you. If you want to come home at any point, I'll put you right on a bus.
'But if you do come with me, you've got to say goodbye to this place. Even if you come back a week or a month from now, it will never be the same. You need to understand your life will change the minute you leave with me.'
Still, she agreed to go, and McCarthy tweaked her birth certificate to smuggle her into Mexico.
The novel All the Pretty Horses is largely based off of Britt's life
They made love for the first time when he was 43 and she was 17, but Britt insists she did not think their relationship was predatory.
'I can't imagine, after this childhood I had, making love for the first time with anyone but a man, anyone but Cormac. It all felt right, it felt good.
'I loved him. He was my safety. I really feel that if I had not met him, I would have died young.'
After a while of laying low in Mexico, though, McCarthy received a phone call from his publisher, saying the FBI visited him and the state of Arizona is looking for Britt.
Her mother had apparently found letters from McCarthy in her room and turned it over to police, who put out a warrant for the author on charges of statutory rape and the Mann Act, which prohibits the transportation of people for sex crimes.
'But he was undaunted,' Britt recounted. 'I think he kind of liked it, actually.
'I was terrified that they'd find us,' she said. 'I didn't want to go back to Tucson. I didn't want to go back to foster homes. I didn't want to go back to that life.'
She said she asked McCarthy what they would do if the authorities ever caught up with them, 'and he looked at me and he said in this funny Southern drawl... "I will shoot them...I will kill them."
'That calmed me down,' Britt said. 'And for as long as I knew him, 47 years, if I was having a bad day or I was really sad, he would try and cheer me up by telling me all the ways he would kill people.'
The couple then stayed in Mexico, traveling from town to town, after which Britt would send her mother reassuring postcards.
When her mother realized her daughter was OK, she stopped cooperating with the authorities who did not have enough conclusive evidence - or jurisdiction - to continue their investigation.
Eventually, Britt and McCarthy formed a routine, in which he would work while she attended Catholic mass.
Then, when Britt turned 18 on September 13 - the same date on which the calendar stands still in All the Pretty Horses - the couple spent the day in Mexico City and then flew to El Paso, Texas the next day.
Once they arrived back in the US, though, 'that's when I found out he was still married to Annie,' Britt said of Annie, referring to English singer Annie De Lisle.
'And then about a year later, on a trip to Las Vegas, when I found out he had a son my age, it just shattered me.
'What I needed then, so badly, was security and safety and trust,' she explained. 'Cormac was my life, my pattern.
'He was on a pedestal for me. And finding out he lied about those things, they became chinks in the trust.'
The final straw came one day when McCormick failed to show up for her, and she feared he was dead.
'And I froze. I shut down. And I realized if something ever happened to him, I could survive physically, but I wouldn't be able to survive emotionally. I wouldn't be able to survive on my own without him.
'And that's not love. That's not healthy at least.
'So when he won the MacArthur grant and had enough money for me to go home and see my family, I just never came back.
'It wasn't a choice,' she confessed. 'I always wanted to be with him. But I had to learn to live by myself before I could be with him again.'
Still, McCarthy never forgot about Britt - using her story as inspiration for his novel All The Pretty Horses and basing the characters Harrogate and Wanda in Suttreee off of her.
The novel-turned-film No Country for Old Men was also based on his experiences with Britt.
In the book, Llewelyn Moss chances on a satchel full of money, setting him on a path that forever takes him away from Carla Jean, who is 16 at the time she marries Llewelyn and 19 in the novel.
McCarthy would also continue to make visits every few months to Tucson and stay at the Arizona Inn, and even tried to propose to Britt several times.
'I mean when you saw them together, they were so in love, just so in love each other,' Michael Cameron told Vanity Fair.
'Their home in Mexico was absolutely the inspiration for All the Pretty Horses, that impossible to realize love.
'Cormac loved her and she was his muse. She was the truest witness of his life.'
Britt said McCarthy had long told her to tell her story, but she was too afraid.
'It feels like I'm disloyal to Cormac,' she said of telling her story. 'I've always wondered too, who would believe me.
'He kept me safe, gave me protection, he was everything to me. Everything,' she said of the author.
'He was my anchor. He was my world. He was my home when we didn't live together anymore.
'And Cormac gave me protection and safety when I had none. I would be dead if I didn't meet him.
'He was the most important person in my life, the person I love the most.
'He was my anchor. And now that he's gone, I'm shiftless.'
