“1979 in Dallas, Texas … It was a year after a soapy drama called Dallas debuted on prime time, a year after an NFL highlight reel dubbed the Cowboys America’s Team. You could call this Peak Dallas. In other towns, at other times, I might have grown up staring at royalty or beauty pageant queens. But in the blackland prairie of North Texas, in the late Seventies, I grew up watching the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.”
The words of Sarah Hepola, author of the New York Times bestseller Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget and host of Texas Monthly‘s new podcast America’s Girls, an eight-part deep dive series on America’s Sweethearts.
While pondering ideas for projects with one of her editors at Texas Monthly, he uttered the magic words ““What about a podcast on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders?” Following a year-plus of research, interviews and a journey through the past 50 years of history, “across changes in women’s lives, in media, in the city of Dallas and the country itself,” the show is being unveiled.
Below is our Q&A with Sarah Hepola:
PDC: How did this project on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders come about?
SARAH HEPOLA: It starts out that I was a little girl growing up in Dallas in the late ’70s. My family had come from Philadelphia, we were sort of outsiders. My mom was this earthy woman who was into classical music and her daughter was this person was drawn to sparkle and glitter and I fell in love with these beautiful princesses that you saw plastered all over Dallas, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. The late ’70s era was when they became a pop culture phenomenon. I grew up with that and I think of it as my infrastructure for beauty for what you think is glamorous, what you think is beautiful, what you think is sexy. But I became a journalist and lived in Austin and in New York and moved back to Dallas when I was 36. I was standing off the side of the highway and I remember looking up at this billboard and there was this Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader up there on the billboard and I was like “How are they still here?” You can tell in the story that I am not a fan of football, I wasn’t watching sports, but the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders were still reigning over my hometown. I think that’s when I had this realization that I did not know anything about them. I don’t know where they started or who they are , they’ve just always been there. It’s like a thing that suddenly becomes visible to you as a storyteller, so I started reading about them and it doesn’t take long to realize that they had a pretty large impact on pop culture with what you might call the sexy sideline craze of cheerleading in the late ’70s. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, it was always kind of rolling around in the back of my mind and then in 2014 and 15, you start to see lawsuits hit cheerleading franchises in the NFL. I’d grown up in this culture that worshiped cheerleaders and all of a sudden I’m reading these stories saying cheerleading is a hellscape or a Ponzi scheme, such an opposite media coverage. I had always wanted to write about this but didn’t know what to say and I was talking with my editor at Texas Monthly. He was kind of feeling me out for a podcast, that was kind of a natural form for me because I had done a lot of radio work and they were developing their podcasts. I had just listened to a podcast called Dolly Parton’s America and I was really in love with it and how they traced the culture through Dolly’s career and I thought it was such a profound project. Then my editor was like “What about a podcast on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders?” I never would have come up with that project on my own, but all of a sudden, I could see the possibilities. You had so much rich history and the changing times and it would be this opportunity to meet these women that I had only stared at on billboards and posters and on the television screen. And that was about a year ago.
PDC: What are some of the surprising things that you encountered over the past year of working on this project?
SARAH: The first thing I did was to try and learn the history of the Cowboys and the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. I read Joe Nick Patoski’s book on the history of the Dallas Cowboys and it was fantastic. It’s like 800 pages, it’s epic. I remember flipping to the back and the acknowledgement section of all the books he references and there was some insane number like 30 pages of the books, but only one title on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and that book was out of print. I started throwing lines out to friends of mine to see if anyone knew any of the cheerleaders. I got a couple of bites, met with some people but there’s something like 850 cheerleaders in their database from the very beginning in 1961. At some point, I started going through squad photos and randomly sending messages on social media and followed that trail until people started calling me back. Some didn’t want to talk, but they had friends that might. It’s like following these bread crumbs and that was going on for months and months. Absolutely one of the hardest things about this podcast was meeting the cheerleaders and getting them to trust me enough to talk to me. Especially in this time and this culture, there is a sense that maybe journalists can’t be trusted with this story. I had some of the women say that they had talked to different women at different magazines and they’d say she was going to write a great piece and then they wrote something that was really negative and we felt burned by it. There were a lot of women that were pretty skeptical of me in the beginning and it took spending time with a lot of them, sharing some of my work and meeting them in person before they would trust me.
PDC: Were there any other research outlets besides the former cheerleaders?
SARAH: During this time, I’m going on my own wild goose chase about the cheerleaders’ history. I watched the movie called The Daughters of the Sexual Revolution and it’s a great movie. My only problem with it is that it needed to be like 10 times longer than it was because there is SO MUCH that they needed to cover and they packed it in to 90 electric minutes. I needed it to keep going! Like the story that (the film’s director) Dana Shapiro tells about Bubbles Cash, the 1967 burlesque dancer that takes a very famous walk down the steps at the Cotton Bowl and a lot of people consider this where the cheerleaders started. So trying to find out if Bubbles is still alive and if so, can I get to her,? If so, how? Also, is this story real? In episode 4, we discuss that story and the creation of the cheerleaders and one of the big discoveries I had is this unsung hero named Dee Brock. She’s the founder of the squad who came aboard in 1961 and steers them through the mid ’70s. Tex Schramm is the general manager of the team and he is a visionary who gets a lot of credit for bringing cheerleaders into the NFL, but to me it feels like a rounding error because yes he was a part of it, but what you don’t see is the women who were doing this work and creating this team. Dee Brock is someone who was a huge surprise to me, she’s 91 and lives in Tyler, Texas. She’s fascinating, she has a PhD and left the cheerleaders to go on to work as vice president of educational programming for PBS in Washington D.C. She’s had a really full life, so much so that she wasn’t around to you might say “safeguard her own history” and tell her own story, but she had a huge roll in creating the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
PDC: Just to clarify, you were a fan of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders but not a sports fan?
SARAH: I wasn’t a fan of the Cowboys at all. I feel bad about saying that but whenever I would travel, people would always ask me about the Cowboys and I was the worst representative of Dallas in that way. My in, and this is true for a lot of girls and something that the early leaders of the Cowboys started to realize, was that the cheerleaders, while they may have been brought on to lure male fans, they were a giant hit with little girls. Their merchandising throughout the ’80s started to reflect that, which is something we get into in later episodes. By the ’80s, they started merchandising for children, little girls jackets, little girls clothing lines, pom poms, a coloring book and frisbees. When little girls like me are with their dads watching football, I’m just bored out of my skull, until I see these beautiful princesses on the sideline! Who are they? What are they doing? This story is about so many different things, but it’s really about dance and bringing dance into a very macho arena. There was a time when their brand was really associated with beauty and glamor exclusively, but I think over the decades it’s become acknowledged that they are dancers and their talent has risen to the point where they are really great dancers as well. I learned more about football doing the research for this project than I have in 47 years of my life and I am now conversant with my male friends who will say things to me about the Cowboys and I answer, “yeah, that was the Chiefs game.”
PDC: In addition to being dancers, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are also ambassadors for the organization. What were some of the things you discovered on that front?
SARAH: That was definitely one of the discoveries and probably what hit me was not so much the test that they have to take, it was their role as goodwill ambassadors in the community. I really knew the cheerleaders through pop culture and advertising because they are an amazing marketing tool. What I didn’t realize is the number of trips they took to veteran’s hospitals, children’s hospitals, the USO Tours and how deeply meaningful that was to a lot of the women. I have a journalist’s skepticism so I’m hearing these stories and thinking “wow, they made you do all of this stuff for free?” but when I spoke with them, what I would hear was how deeply meaningful that was to them. They are young women when they come into this and they see themselves as “girls.” We called the podcast America’s Girls because that’s the word that they use to describe each other. They talk about how amazing it was to be exposed to people less fortunate than you, people that were older and people that were sick and all at such a young, formative age. Where the general trend for that age group can be self-centered and vain, they were exposed to this different culture and the USO Tours are a really big part of that experience for a lot of those women. What I learned is that the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are very high achieving women that are all quite accomplished and very well rounded and extremely punctual. A friend of mine that I met through this project said the cheerleaders “Are like female ninjas! They can dance, they look amazing, they’re always on time and they’re ready for anything!”
PDC: When people listen to the first episode, they’re going to hear you and Vonceil Baker at the site of the former home of the Dallas Cowboys, Texas Stadium. What was it like being at such a historic site with such a DCC legend?
SARAH: It was a really cool experience. Vonceil Baker is the first woman to ever try on the uniform. She’s a Black woman from South Dallas with a fascinating backstory. Her mother opened the first licensed Black daycare in Dallas and built planes during World War II. Texas Stadium was torn down 11 years ago. I think there was grand plans to develop it into something bug, but it’s like one of those Dallas development deals that just languishes into nothing and it’s like a big heap of mounds of dirt and rubble and broken cement, just a wasteland. I drove there with Vonceil Baker, who was on the original seven squad in 1972 to debut the uniform and it was so cool. As we were driving in, Vonceil said “I can feel it.” She is an amazing woman for many reasons, but she has this beautiful, rich voice that you just have to listen to on the podcast to hear, but I could see her traveling back to that time. We found a little place to sit and we sat there there staring out at this apocalyptic landscape with her telling me what it was to be 20 years old and parking in this lot that used to be full of people and walking through Texas Stadium and how grand it was going on to that field for the first time. You could just see her whole body change, but she was very peaceful and very calm. Everything had been torn down around us, but we looked up at the enormous sky and she said “That’s the sky that I used to look up to when I was in the tunnel of Texas Stadium.” Of course, famously, Texas Stadium had a hole in the roof. It was awesome to time travel back with her.
PDC: On your blog, you mentioned that you were “frustrated by how much I had to edit, condense and skip” in order to make it eight episodes. Could there perhaps be any bonus episodes or with the fact that you’re already a best-selling author, is there a chance that there might be a book in the future where you can include the stuff that’s being left out, similar to a director’s cut of a movie?
SARAH: I still have to finish this project and there will be a big package in Texas Monthly next year that we’ll do that will be a written component of this, but I am open to that. I think this is such a rich story and it’s probably always going to bother me that there are parts that I didn’t get to tell. I really believe that this one of the great stories to come out of Dallas and we will do our best to honor that, but it could just keep going. This is the tip of the iceberg, what I’m doing here because 50-plus years of history and all the personalities and all the lore, I don’t have a fraction of it. Not dirt or scandal, but the beauty of how women really shaped that team, the women that are the leaders and choreographers and the dancers. I think they have a really unique and important story.
PDC: You mentioned earlier that The Daughters of the Sexual Revolution documentary left you wanting to know so much more. Is it possible that for the people who wanted more, this podcast can give that to them?
SARAH: That was my hope. When I saw that movie, there was a part of me that thought that was done. But I thought there was a lot left on the table and I wanted to know more about the women involved. I interviewed a lot of those women and this story does not stop with Suzanne Mitchell’s era, it goes through to the current day. I hope people that enjoyed that movie will enjoy seeing the story move forward, but also experiencing that story through a different lens. For example, the movie spent a lot of time on the Debbie Does Dallas lawsuit, we spent time on the Playboy story from 1978 which happened at the same time. Farrah Fawcett was on the cover of that issue and there was a spread inside with NFL cheerleaders, all current cheerleaders except for the ones from the Cowboys who were former cheerleaders that had formed a group called “Texas Cowgirls” that was kind of a rogue outfit that was a beauty and talent agency. They actually competed with the Cowboys for appearances and did appearances where the cheerleaders couldn’t go such as when there was alcohol and they did not have any restrictions. There’s a movie called North Dallas Forty and the “Texas Cowgirls” are in that as the team’s cheerleaders. We cover the same history as the movie, just in a different way.
PDC: Since the times we are in today are so much different than when the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders were introduced in the ’70s, does it make you admire them even more in how they have flourished over time?
SARAH: I think one of the amazing things about the cheerleaders is how they shape shift through the decades to move along with the culture and the way that they introduced their reality show “Making the Team” in 2006 was genius. I think it has been a huge game-changer for them in terms of who knows about their brand and the kind of people that come in to try out. They’ve transformed the fan base from primarily men to primarily women. Obviously there are men in there, but when I go to the fan groups, they’re talking about little things about all of the different women on the squad. When I think about the anonymity they had in the ’70s, then you go to these fan pages and they know what type of shoes Maddie was wearing in episode seven of season 13. I have admiration for the women on the team for their talent. I’ve watched the show and my favorite parts are always the solo performances and I think their dance is really top notch. I also have admiration for the incredible scrutiny that they must be under. I think most women can relate to being looked at and judged for their appearance, but I don’t think it’s anything like what a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader would experience in this very visual environment that we are in right now. You can’t slip up, not on the field, not on social media and not out in public. That’s a tightrope and it’s very impressive that these women walk it.
PDC: Have any of the cheerleaders from the past discussed social media?
SARAH: I would say that all of the ’70s cheerleaders I have interviewed at some point made a remark about how they can’t even imagine what being a DCC would be like now with social media. Now they came of age with the idea that (former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders director) Suzanne Mitchell would spot them anywhere, so they had the fear of Suzanne Mitchell put into them. It’s a whole new ballgame when someone has a phone that they can capture evidence of you doing such and such at such and such place.
PDC: It is hard to discuss the DCC history without referencing the 1979 TV movie Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders starring Jane Seymour. Part of the movie’s plot revolves around a magazine editor that wants to get a salacious story and you’d mentioned earlier how several former cheerleaders talked of being burned by journalists in stories. Now that you have interviewed these women, how important is it to you that they are represented fairly in this project?
SARAH: It’s very important and I have been a little tortured about it because you’re trying to represent a lot of different perspectives. There’s not one story, there’s multiple stories and I know that there will be future episodes that cheerleaders will hear and say that they aren’t really agreeing with some of the things she said in that episode, but my hope is that they would then say that “she was fair to me.” I wouldn’t have gone into this project if I didn’t love this story and the cheerleaders, but I believe that the real act of love is honesty and telling the truth. There’s moments when I say things that certain cheerleaders might disagree with or people who love the cheerleaders might disagree with, but I don’t think we are hard on them. But there is a lot of sensitivity around this topic and people will disagree with me at some point.
PDC: In the first episode, you mention that the America’s Girls podcast is about giving the cheerleaders a voice. Is that why it’s important that it is a podcast where you can hear their tone of voice as opposed to only being written online or in print?
SARAH: I actually think that it’s more important that it’s a podcast and not a television show, not visual. These are women that have been loved and worshiped for their image and that’s what a lot of people see. There is so much more to them and they know that and I really wanted people to hear them through their own voice.
America’s Girls is available on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes premiere on Tuesdays.
For the America’s Girls extended content collection, visit getpocket.com/texas.
