Audre Rapoport

Audre Rapoport, who shared cigarettes with Golda Meir, dined with (and adored) the Clintons, and scoured close-out clothing outlets in Waco and Austin, died April 4 2016 in her own bed in the home she shared with Bernard Rapoport until his death in 2012. In 1942, Audre Newman was Jewish aristocracy, daughter of a physician from Chicago and a prominent family in Waco; Bernard a Jewish merchant prince, working in a jewelry store in Wichita Falls. A lifetime later, Bernard’s sister Idel McLanathan would tell his biographer Don Carleton that she understood why her brother was swept off his feet. She had seen Audre at a University of Texas party: “I just thought she was sheer glamour.” Marrying Bernard Rapoport must have been like dancing with a tornado. He worked as a jewelry salesman but was a classic liberal intellectual better suited for the professoriate (or the rabbinate). Or politics, where the couple would go on to invest their time, passion and money. As a student, Bernard had been involved in the campaign to defend University of Texas President Homer Rainey against the corporate putschists on the Board of Regents who eventually ousted him. When Bernard joined Rainey’s quixotic campaign for governor in 1945, Audre was all in. Many great relationships are a marriage of prudence and passion, and theirs was one. B. was a young man with big ideas, Audre a petite woman whose immersion in the practical side of politics recalls the Ann Richards quote, “The rooster crows but the hen delivers.” “Bernard didn’t know anything about political fundraising,” Audre would tell Don Carleton 50 years and 50 political campaigns later. They would figure it out, working together on the campaigns of Ralph Yarborough, Ted Kennedy, George McGovern, Ann Richards, Bill and Hillary Clinton, et al. They had met Bill Clinton when he showed up in Texas to work on George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972. Their commitment to liberal politics and causes led them to Texas Observer founding editor and publisher Ronnie Dugger, who asked them for financial support in 1962. The Audre and Bernard Rapoport Foundation continues to support the Observer. Along the way, Bernard built an insurance company he would ultimately sell for half a billion dollars after starting out in business with Audre’s uncle. When he was close to losing the company to a rogue board of directors, Audre’s mother talked him into returning from New York to Waco, lending them money and reassuring Bernard that she could find 12 people in Waco to put up $25,000 each to purchase a controlling interest in the company. Audre brokered the deal between Bernard and her mother. After Bernard’s death in 2012, .Audre responded by showing up for work each day at the foundation office, remaining involved in the philanthropic work that had defined the two of them even before they set up a foundation to give away their money. Audre Rapoport is survived by her son Ronald and his wife Patricia, granddaughters Abby and Emily (whom she worshiped and could discuss endlessly) and two great-grandchildren, Lewis, age 11, and nine-month-old Bina.