Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life
By Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith
Public Affairs: New York
Hardback, 360 pages, $26.95
November 2009
You'll have no idea how much you missed her until you get the chance to read snippets of her again.
How sorely we miss and need Molly Ivins these days hits you like a four-by-four when you crack the pages of Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life. This new biography is written by a former researcher who worked for Ivins in the 1990s (W. Michael Smith) and a Texas journalist (Bill Minutaglio) who had access to all papers she packed away over the years, from shopping lists to personal letters.
And a packrat she was, to our benefit.
What emerges from this thoughtful biography is a very complicated woman, part self-constructed "personality," part tortured soul, pure brilliant iconoclast. What becomes most apparent is how flat-out unlikely it was that we ever heard from her at all. Raised as she was in a socially conservative, upper middle class family in Houston, Ivins attended all the finest private schools, went on an exchange to France (she was fluent in French) and eventually graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts -- not the biography you'd expect from someone with the perfect eye for viewing hypocrisy and the fiery down-home language to name it. Remember, we're talking about the woman who once quipped about a Texas Congressman, "If his IQ slips any lower we'll have to water him twice a day."
Ah, Molly. There will never be another like her.
She was, unsurprisingly, a reader from an early age. She was a shy loner. As a teenager, she towered over her classmates at six feet, with wild red hair and energy to spare. She sparred with her conservative father, relentlessly. Went to college at Scripps College, a woman's college in Southern California and found California not to her liking. After transferring to Smith, she began a series of summer internships back home at the Houston Chronicle. She also fell in love with Hank Holland, a co-Houstonite who'd been attending Yale, and he definitely embodied at least some of the requirements you'd expect a young Molly Ivins to fall in love with -- he was smart, funny, acerbic, risk-taking. But there was a dark side too, to hear friends (and Hank's sister, Ann) tell it-- the pair fed each other's superiority and manic energy, they seemed to feel both naturally more endowed with God's gifts of brains ... and of parents' gifts of money and power.
"Hank really wanted to manipulate the world. He wanted to be a power-monger. I know that he and Molly sort of envisioned themselves in a dynastic way. They believed that they breathed rarefied air. Very much an Ayn Rand scenario--and perhaps they would rule the world from an unseen location," said his sister. He was, she said, somewhere beyond aloof. It was as if he had not time to waste with ordinary people, he wanted to be around the movers. He was painfully judgmental and quick to draw caricatures, to home in on perceived weaknesses, to lump places and people into narrowly defined camps.
Holland died in a motorcycle accident on vacation. Given who he seemed to be, and Ivins' plan to marry him, it's hard seeing a way through such a relationship for her to find the Texas storytelling voice and the populist political passion she made her own. I mean, Ayn Rand? And Molly Ivins? Could a man really revere both those figures as we know them today?
After Holland's death, she stepped up her drinking and her smoking, spent some time in France, wrote witty and bitter letters, and finally went on to Columbia Journalism School, where she bloomed, opened up, loosened and luxuriated in her wry wit and dark humor, continuing her summer intern stints back home in Texas.
The authors capture her essence during the Columbia period so that she leaps with life off the page:
Ivins was constantly dragging on a Marlboro, swirling a cup of Chock Full O'Nuts coffee, and seemingly often rolling her eyes when some hot-air speaker was invited to talk to a class. She would mutter an insult in French and stare in a different direction when someone turned to see who had been talking. At the bars and diners, she was a good debater, someone who pushed back against Mencher when she felt she was right. For a school assignment, she wrote an article trying to explain Texas and particularly Texas liberals. She said they were too damned paranoid, too damned drunk all the time, too prone to depression. All, perhaps, for no good reason except some sort of fear, some sense that they were operating in isolation and only a handful of trusted Texas souls could ever really understand them. She surmised that Texas liberals had essentially drawn a circle of cracked glass against unseen conspiracies--and then drank some more, went into some bunker, and them drank some more. It was a paper that she later decided was pretentious. Friends who saw it would say that it was, in fact, brilliant--that Ivins had accurately described a certain circle of dedicated, hard-drinking, and occasionally paranoid Texas liberals who were chased by demons both real and imagined. In just a few years after leaving Columbia, she'd be in the heart of what she had presciently described--shoulder to shoulder with the pioneers of Texas liberal politics, reinforcing each other in both very good and very debilitating ways.
As she formed her ideas about liberals and Texas, about populism and politics, about the nature of journalism and its purpose in a democracy, she developed something very much like two personas: There was the New York Ivins--sophisticated, wise-cracking, cultured and well-versed in foreign policy--and there was Texas Ivins, storytelling, gritty, somewhat cornpone and allegorical. These two sides of her co-existed, sometimes comfortably, sometimes not. No matter where she was -- the New York Times city room for a bit of a spell, for example -- part of her itched for the convoluted politics of Texas. When she finally landed there, as co-editor of The Texas Observer, part of her yearned for the sophistication of New York.
This yearning and tension held for all of her life. In many ways, she could have been a sister of Dorothy Parker and would have been welcome at any Algonquin Round Table gathering. The down-home storytelling persona with which she eventually became most associated was very much a conscious study; she met and became the understudy of John Henry Faulk, a wisecracking Austin-based humorist/raconteur and populist radio host who'd been blacklisted during the 1950s.
The Smith College graduate who had gone to an Ivy League journalism school, and then studied in France, was increasingly being asked to talk the way she wrote--with a dialect, with some cornpone. For Ivins, Faulk was a role model for how to do it as an act of erudition. He was, in essence, a cultural anthropologist with a specialty in regional linguistics--he was a storyteller, from the Southern tradition, and she absorbed that facility.
At Faulk's knee she learned to love like never before the wit and warpedness of her native state, and she could not have been apprenticed to a better storyteller. The storytelling genre was particularly suited to what was emerging during this period as her strength--writing columns. While she could turn in the straight facts-and-nothing-but-the-facts article (she was, after all, a trained journalist), her skill set was getting honed on the 800-word immediate impression, often smart aleck, piece.
Her attention to aching details emerged in various articles, here and there, but not usually as the all-encompassing directive behind magazine-length narrative exposition. She was, in her way, preparing for life as a columnist--not a narrative nonfiction, long-form writer. The reporting details she would use in her stories--the fact that a Dr. Pepper clock was ticking away in a Texas courthouse, or that the men in Russia who had been sent to fix her hotel TV were behaving as though they were in a "Chinese fire drill"-- were dotted into her essays but they were not part of a huge, unfolding, chronologically ordered narrative. She was sprinting, as her editors would later put it, not pausing for book-length journalism or imbedding herself into a piece for several months at a time. As one of her editors said, it was hard to picture her in a writer's garret for months on end. She wrote quickly, almost spontaneously, and she often wrote about things happening that moment, that day, that week.
No doubt had she been born later and hit the current media circuit, Ivins would have been a blogger.
As life unfolded for her in Texas, with her column getting syndicated, her fame growing, her media appearances and speeches increasing and book contracts flowing her way, she seemed to settle into life in the Lone Star state with less regret and less looking back to the East Coast. Her work life, political life and social life all converged in a social circle dominated by Dave Richards and his wife, eventual governor Ann. There were camping trips, birthday parties, hanging out in bars. Lots of bars. Lots of booze. Both Ann Richards and Ivins were hard-drinking Texas gals for a long, long time. For both, it seems, it was hard to give up--as part of their swaggering good old gal persona, outdrinking the boys was part of the game. Ivins, it seems, never did completely lick her alcoholism, going through efforts to quit that would take for a few weeks, and then succumbing again, resulting in bouts of self-loathing that reached deeper and lasted longer.
The dark side of Ivins comes through in this book, and in many ways, she's not a person to envy. Greatly loved by close friends and admirers, she still appeared to feel alone and isolated much of the time; her wrestling with booze consumed much of her life. Even as a middle-aged adult she still struggled with rage toward her controlling conservative father.
Some friends also decided that, early on, she had developed an ability to compartmentalize. It was that way with recreation, her drinking, her work. They were in different zones; she didn't allow them to overlap, to conflict. And there was a special compartment reserved for her father. ... Reinventing herself as a Texas Mark Twain was still an ongoing process, an increasingly purposeful project. Many of her friends talked to her about it in the context of the relationship with her father. It was, she admitted to some of them, a constructed persona that allowed her to feed off her anger at her father and the values he represented.
She seemed to pour all her frustration into populist politics--and let's all bless her for that. It's hard to imagine a more constructive use of pain than putting it in the service of something larger than yourself, and certainly Ivins served as a superlative a model of the form. Few on the outside who didn't know her well could suspect the suffering within, and how in many ways, her public image was so at odds with the person she felt herself to be.
There was, perhaps, a sense among some people close to Ivins that she had willed herself to be perpetually extroverted--that she simply had decided to not slow down, to take time for herself, to really meditate. According to one friend, Ivins said it was simply a matter of finding it difficult to turn anyone down. And when people knocked on her door, when they invited themselves to her house, when they wanted her to show up at a party, she was usually willing to be in the moment. Faulk said that Ivins had made a choice. "She may have had the capacity for introspection, but she chose not to be introspective."
Well, there's no law that says we all must be introspective. And in a sense, post-mortem, Ivins has been blessed with two biographers who treat her with respect and make it unnecessary for the subject to be as self-examining as we expect in this day and age; they do the heavy-lifting there for her—and for us. As a biography, A Rebel Life is a model of how to assess a larger-than-life personality and outsize accomplishments while still keeping in mind the small, mundane moments -- camping trips, mornings alone, dark nights of the soul -- that make up the years of life. It's a keeper of a book.