The Price of Being Molly
(Page 3 of 5)
IN A NAIL SALON IN NORTHWEST Austin, Molly Ivins is getting the second manicure of her life. The first one was for the Republican convention, and now, as she prepares to ride a campaign bus with Bill Clinton and Al Gore, she is treating herself again. The salon is located in a small converted home; the front room is full of girlish things, like makeup and sweatshirts decorated with ribbons and bows, and the back room is crowded with a baby swing and toys. A cheerful toddler appears and disappears. It is not an atmosphere one would normally associate with Ivins, who has come late to the word of femininity and domesticity. Part of Ivins’ shtick is her declaration, sometimes accompanied by batting lashes and rolling eyes, that she always felt excluded from “the norms of southern womanhood.” Indeed, she has lived most of her adult life as a nomad and a rebel, directed by her notebook, unfettered by convention. She did not plan her life this way. “In all my fantasies I always assumed I would get married and have six children along the way with the greatest of ease,” she says, splaying her nails so that the barely pink polish catches the light. At her twenty-fifth college reunion in the spring of 1991, Ivins confessed to her classmates that she was astonished at how they had planned their lives and met their goals. “I don’t think I’ve decided much in my life,” Ivins says now, bewilderment creeping into her voice. “Don’t you think life just happens?”
When Ivins talks about her childhood, her voice drops to a whisper and she becomes more terse than normal. The “sweethearts” and “darlin’s” — the southern girl’s social grease — disappear from her lexicon. As with the stories she tells on others, Ivins has been known to embellish the story she tells on herself, though she tends to leave out the jokes: The biography she fashions for readers and viewers can create the impression that she is a product of a tiny East Texas town, especially when the information is delivered in her best down-home patois. She also says that she was shaped by the racism of her era. A much-recounted memory is of being told that the water fountains designated for black people were dirty, while she could see even as a young child that the fountains for whites were the ones choked with chewing gum and litter.
While true enough, the stories Ivins has shaped for herself obscure a somewhat more complicated history. The East Texas of her childhood is actually the better neighborhoods of Houston, where her family moved from California after she was born. Her parents were from Illinois. Her mother was from a prominent family; her father, a proud and ambitious oil company executive, was not.
“A classically upwardly mobile family,” Ivins says dully. The Ivins’ home was prosperous—they moved to River Oaks when Molly was in the seventh grade—but it was also highly regimented and deeply conservative. Friends recall Molly’s father, James E., as a commanding figure who was hard of hearing as a result of a World War II injury. “He was kind of a Captain Ahab type,” an old friend remembers. “He yelled a lot, and you had to yell around him.”
Ivins, a bright student and a voracious reader, struggled to be heard in more ways than one. In the fifties and early sixties Houston was a segregated town, and the same hypocrisy Ivins saw on the street she also perceived at home. The family dinner table became the scene of screaming matches over civil rights between Ivins and her father, then general counsel for Tenneco. (Her older sister and younger brother, as well as her mother, were less political.) Ivins rarely won. “He was not the kind of guy you would identify with Molly,” says Roy Bode, an editor who worked with Ivins at the Times Herald. “He was the kind of guy you would identify as one of Molly’s targets.” Though father and daughter eventually called a mealtime truce, Ivins was marked. “I’ve always had trouble with male authority figures,” Ivins says, “because my father was such a martinet.”
Like many shrewd children, Ivins found other people who encouraged her worldview: a firebrand teacher at St. John’s, Houston’s most exclusive private school, who encouraged her writing talent and her budding liberal views; her best friend’s parents, social activists who subscribed to the Texas Observer, which was then literary and left-wing, the only publication of its kind for thousands of miles.
Another factor also moved Ivins from the mainstream: She was six feet tall by the sixth grade. At St. John’s she tried basketball without success and took up smoking, hoping it would stunt her growth. Her best friends were also bright but eccentric. “We weren’t cute; we weren’t in a sorority mold,” recalls one. “The only thing we had in common was that we just didn’t fit anywhere.” Dates were rarer than liberals, a fact Ivins took to heart. “If you’re a woman who’s never been picked, you’re able to take a different approach,” says the same friend. “You don’t have to be ladylike and prim.”
So at a time when many women, particularly in Ivins’ social strata, planned to stay close to home and join the Junior League, the tall girl from Texas set her sights on a career as a foreign correspondent. She studied philosophy and language at Smith College in Massachusetts, doing a little fine-tuning on her personality as well. “You try going to Smith from Texas after November 1963,” she says. “Being a Texas was not a treat. I learned to speak with no accent very quickly.” She took a year at the Institute for Political Science in Paris but soon after found herself back in Houston, reporting on sewers for the Chronicle. Ivins persevered, however, and won the Perle Mesta Franco-American Friendship Foundation Scholarship to the Columbia School of Journalism. She got her master’s degree, living on Campbell’s split pea soup with ham, and in the late sixties she got a job at the Minneapolis Tribune. She moved from the police beat to one she calls “movements for social change”—blacks, women, student radicals—but her heart was elsewhere. Ivins answered and ad in Ronnie Dugger’s Texas Observer, flew down to Austin for an interview, and was hired almost instantly. “Home,” she would come to say, “is where you understand the sons of bitches.”
“What people saw in the Observer was another way,” says Kaye Northcott, who was editor in 1970, when Ivins was hired to be co-editor. Often, the person who pointed the way was Molly Ivins. She had been teaching herself how to be an Observer writer — opinionated, funny, unabashedly left-wing — since her adolescence; now she turned her talents on a state that was as backward, poor, and ignorant as any Third World country. The first day Ivins set foot in the statehouse, she saw one legislator dig another in the ribs and announce, “Hey, boy, yew should see whut Ah found mahself last night! An she don’t talk, neither.” Ivins was hooked, not just on politics but on the theater of politics, and her great gift was that she could convey these comic but crucial scenes to her readers.
While other newspapers were mired in the House-Bill-x-passed-by-x-votes form of political reporting, Ivins was crisscrossing the state, packing a typewriter and one wrinkled, defeated dress, sleeping on air mattresses in the homes of Observer subscribers, reporting on the foibles of public servants. She brought home national issue of the day—racism, sex discrimination, abortion, busing, pollution. Almost always, her weapon was humor. On a case of rural air pollution, she stated, “Even hardly folk who enjoy the sharp, natural odor of a fresh cow pie find feedlots overpowering.” She described Governor Dolph Briscoe as having “all the charisma of bread pudding.” Morning News stories contained “the most meat-headed, shallow, unctuous, sanctimonious, vapid, ludicrous, knee-jerk prose ever printed in all seriousness by a major metropolitan daily.” In a sense, she would be heard. Using the Observer as her forum, Ivins promoted her “dripping-fangs liberalism.” She was for labor and against racism, for big government and against big corporations. She believed criminals could be rehabilitated and that gun control should be legislated. Above all, she believed in the sanctity of the First Amendment. If Daddy didn’t like it, lots of other folks did.
Ivins was having a great time. “Being a liberal meant having more fun than anybody else,” she says. Texas’ kamikazelike left held no power—“it was better to be right than win” is the way the left thought of itself — but these liberals were the state’s embattled intellectuals. For many, the futility of their enterprise funneled their sense of humor. Money didn’t matter; what counted were politics and beer, books and ideas, pranks and stories. Those were the days when a legendary crowd gathered at Scholz Garten, and under the stars and the live oak branches would flow twelve-beer arguments on the nature of man.
