The Price of Being Molly
(Page 4 of 5)
The Observer office, in an old house at Seventh and Nueces, was a rat’s nest of old newspapers, empty beer bottles, and overflowing ashtrays, but the people it attracted became the family Ivins should have had: Ann Richards and her husband, Dave, who practiced law from the first-floor office; writers like Gary Cartwright and Bud Shrake; good-time politicos like Don Kennard and Bob Armstrong; and humorist John Henry Faulk. Faulk, a garrulous activist and folklorist who had been blacklisted in the fifties, was a particular inspiration, teaching Ivins that she could be both a committed liberal and an entertainer. On the river trips and camp-outs, at the singalongs and great debates, the shy, self-deprecating writer perfected a new persona: thick-talking, quick-thinking, hard-drinking Molly Ivins. In Austin she could be an outsider, but she also belonged; for the first time in her life, she fit.
But only briefly. The New York Times had taken note of her work, asked her to write some op-ed pieces, and in 1976, hired her away. Friends believed she was bound for stardom. But the Times of that period was quite different from the paper it is now. In the mid- to late seventies it had few women reporters, few feature sections, and very little lively writing. For Ivins, that meant trouble.
She covered many of the big stories of the era and tried to imbue them with as much of her voice as the paper would allow. She covered the Son of Sam killings, Elvis’ funeral, and the state’s fiscal crisis. “Governor Carey proposed an $11.345 billion New York State budget today that calls for major cuts in welfare and Medicaid, along with a revised formula that would reduce local school aid to many districts” was a lead of one front-page story that ran under Ivins’ byline. In 1977 she was made Rocky Mountain bureau chief. From her home in Denver, she covered nine states, writing about, among other things, Mormons, Indian tribal courts, grasshopper plagues, ski bums, and the joys of Butte, Montana.
Her work was fresh and funny, but she was unhappy. “It’s hard to leave Texas behind,” Ivins says. “I carried it right with me.” She tried to style herself as the eccentric outsider — affecting her tall Texan act, wearing a buffalo-hide coat to cover the legislature in Albany, greeting everyone with “Hidy!” and taking her dog, Shit, to the newsroom — but it backfired. The Times did not want Molly to be Molly; they expected Molly to become, well, the Times. The copy desk regularly translated Ivinisms to Timesisms — converting “beer gut” to “protuberant abdomen,” for example — and the paper’s executives didn’t go for her laid-back Austin look. After her probationary period ended, Ivins was criticized not for her reporting but for dressing badly, laughing too loudly, and walking around the newsroom in bare feet. “That did bring back a whole lot of feelings,” Ivins says now. “I’m too big, I’m too loud, I’ll never fit in’ — the way Texans are perceived in the East. I was just miserable.”
The situation deteriorated, and Ivins became more rebellious. After describing a ritual chicken slaughter as a “gang pluck,” she was called to the office of Abe Rosenthal, the paper’s legendary Napoleonic editor, and was demoted to number two on the city hall beat back in Manhattan. The painful episode exposed a conflict in Ivins’ nature: She wanted to be an outsider, but she also wanted to be a player. Expelled from the loop, she was sitting right back at her father’s dinner table all over again.
The Times Herald came to her rescue. In 1982 Dallas was still booming, and a real newspaper war was flourishing. The Herald had become a flashy paper of rogue columnists — John Bloom dreamed up drive-in-movie critic Joe Bob Briggs there. Ivins was recruited with the promise that she could write what she wanted; instantly, she resumed her traditional role, skewering the city’s white-male establishment. She called Ross Perot “a man with a mind half-an-inch wide” and Eddie Chiles “a loopy ignoramus.” Mayor Starke Taylor she nicknamed Bubba, Governor Bill Clements the Lip. She satirized Dallas’ passion for positive thinking: “The entire contents of one such rally,” she wrote, “is contained in the children’s book about the little train that thinks it can.” She regularly took aim at the city’s delirious devotion to conspicuous consumption: “The inequities in our society are becoming too glaring, too cruel, finally obscene. It is not just that the upper middle class hastens to switch to rice vinegar while children starve in Ethiopia — our fellow citizens are homeless in our streets.”
Eventually the city fathers stopped getting the joke, especially when her leads began with “It’s been ten years this month since Saul David Alinsky died” and “Happy May Day, comrades.” The bust was settling in. Pressure was put on the paper’s owner, the Times Mirror Corporation. It was felt, in the words of then editor Will Jarrett, that “Molly was not in love with Dallas and Dallas was not in love with her.”
In what appeared to be a brilliant compromise, Ivins was dispatched to Austin to cover Legislature once more. She was forty. She had learned form Saul Alinsky that a journalist should never want anything, but three years later, she bought a house — a real one, a nice one, with big windows and a garden. She began to plan — the idea for The Big Book was percolating — the Herald would be her base from which she could come and go. But then the Herald was gone, and as had happened with so many plans before, this one seemed to slip form her grasp.
Driving back over the river toward that home in South Austin, Ivins is thoughtful. At the convention she had bemoaned the lack of role models for women. “With Hillary Clinton on one side and Barbara Bush on the other, you wind up thinking there’s something wrong with you,” she had told a reporter, adding, “I don’t think there’s a woman in America who doesn’t suffer doubt, confusion, and anxiety.” Today Ivins drops the pundit’s mask. She never married, she says, because the men she liked never asked. She is sorry that she never had a child. Her face, in the setting sun, is proud, but her voice is soft. For years she had something to prove to herself, and now maybe she doesn’t. She turns into her driveway and pulls out her keys, and out of ten polished fingers, only one is chipped.
INSIDE THE CAVERNOUS ART DECO interior of the auditorium, Ivins is alone on a naked stage, behind a podium flanked by two small areca palms. She is dwarfed by the space. Something about the stripped-down scene — the hall blissfully unremodeled, the lone performer, the unreserved warmth of the crowd — gives this night at Lamar University-Port Arthur a timeless quality. Scenes like this one have played in Texas for decades: the sophisticate bringing to the smaller towns stories of the larger world.
As part of the university’s distinguished lecture series, Ivins is talking presidential politics, but the subject has been folded into her basic speech, the one that reveals how and what she thinks. Aglow in a bright purple dress, rhinestone earrings, and the adulation of the audience, she begins by spinning those seductive insider’s tales. She tells them what Perot sounds like when he calls to grip about a column (“A Chihuahua,” she says, mimicking his high-pitched bark expertly) and what it was like to watch the campaign trail in 1984 (“Worst case of attempted milking by a presidential candidate I had ever see”). She’s polished without being intimidating, and she’s got a seasoned comic’s timing. Guarded and sometimes haughty offstage, Ivins has the star’s gift of appearing open and intimate in front of a crowd.
When Ivins gets to Bill Clinton, the jokes taper off and her sermon begins. First she proffers and endorsement. “He likes to campaign and he likes to govern,” she says. She follows with an endorsement of the political process in general (“I still really believe in all of it”), followed by a recitation of the Declaration of Independence. “These are ideas people are dying for,” she tells the crowd. Turning somber, she warns, “We are in danger of taking our political legacy and flushing it away out of sheer inertia.”
Money is ruining our political system, Ivins declares, her voice quickening with intensity. “Sixty to seventy percent of the money that puts people in office comes from organized special interests,” she says. “This is legalized bribery.” Ivins exhorts the crowd to take back their government and to regain control over an “economy hijacked by ideological zealots in the 1980’s.” The after-dinner speech has become a call to arms, Ivins style. “It’s actually great fun to be a freedom fighter,” she tells the audience.
If it seems odd for a journalist to be endorsing candidates and freedom fighting, it pays to remember that Molly Ivins has never styled herself as an ordinary journalist. Her beat, as she sees it, is injustice, and objectivity is, to her, of only limited value. As her speech — and her column — reveals, Ivins knows what she thinks and how to package her ideas. “What I really want to do is get people interested,” she says. “They should be absorbed by politics as they are by sports. The best way to get them interested is to be funny.” The irony is that as Ivins’ fame has grown, it has become harder to accomplish her goals.
