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When Molly Ivins died in early 2007 at 62, more than 300 newspapers were carrying her political columns. Over the previous two decades, several of her books – including Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? and Shrub, her prescient campaign biography (co-written with Lou DuBose) of soon-to-be President George W. Bush – had occupied the national best-seller lists.
As her fame spread through television, radio and lecture appearances, “The Texas kicker” achieved folk-hero status. Six feet tall, with a flowing mane of red hair and a rollicking, throaty laugh, Molly was more than a journalist, pundit or wordsmith: she became an outsized personality, an American icon who, like Madonna or Cher, became known by just her first name. (Actress Kathleen Turner will play her in a one-woman theatrical show, Red Hot Patriot, which debuts in March in Philadelphia.)
In an era when women were still expected to write for the society pages, Molly crashed both her male-dominated profession and the macho world of Texas politics. She drank, smoke, quarreled and partied up a storm with good-ole-boy politicians of all stripes. She broke down gender barriers and helped reshape political punditry.
But, most of all, this woman who “spoke private school French, erudite Smith College English and ribald Texan,” write Bill Minutaglio and Michael Smith in their revealing, admiring and often tender biography, Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life, achieved legendary status with her rapier-like wit.
At the muckraking Texas Observer, that lonely outpost of Lone Star Liberalism, she first honed her skills at unmasking the pretensions of self-important, often buffoonish politicians and special-interest lobbyists. After a star-crossed stint at The New York Times, she found her voice as a regular columnist at the (now defunct) Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram, evoking comparisons to such cracker-barrel sages as Mark Twain and Will Rogers.
When know-nothing Dallas Congressman Jim Collins made the observation that the energy crisis could be avoided if “we didn’t use all that gas on school busing,” she responded that if Collins’s IQ slips any lower, “we’ll have to water him twice a day.” She wrote that, if Reagan’s brain were grafted onto a bumblebee, “It would fly backwards.” And after commentator-turned-politician Pat Buchanan unleashed a right-wing diatribe at the 1992 Republican Convention, she quipped that the speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”
Drawing on interviews with colleagues, friends and family members, as well as a voluminous paper trail of journal entries, letters, reporters’ notebooks – even scribbled-on restaurant menus – the writers locate the roots of her transformation from a budding, albeit bookish, Houston socialite to rebel journalist. Readers who always counted on Molly to make them laugh, however, might be startled to learn that her life was not the carefree joyride she outwardly conveyed.
There was the loss of Hank Holland, her college boyfriend and the “love or her life.” As brainy as Molly, he was a young Nietzschean superman, possessor of such a ferocious tennis game that challengers made a pilgrimage to Yale to test his prowess. But while riding a motorcycle in the summer of 1964, he swerved to avoid a dog and “his head was crushed and he died instantly.”
His death, the authors suggest, sealed her fate. It meant that a professional career – not marriage and family – would forever occupy her attentions.
Molly fans might also be startled to learn that she suffered from a lack of self-esteem. Though privileged, the Ivins household was the scene of unending remorseless conflict between her “seriously ditzy” mother and her, sequoia-sized, authoritarian father, a top executive at petroleum-pipeline company Tenneco and a “Nixonian Republican.”
“My mother used to tell me, bitterly, viciously, ‘You are an ugly girl, Mary, you are a very ugly little girl,’” she writes in a diary entry when she is already in her mid-20s.
Jim Ivins could be tightfisted, withholding money as well as his approval and emotions from the daughter with whom he disagreed politically. He would walk out on his wife and take up with another woman. At the age of 85, dying from cancer, he committed suicide.
“My old man is one of the toughest sons of bitches God ever made,” Molly wrote in one of the few columns in which she would share personal feelings. “So what am I supposed to tell you about Big Jim? Am I supposed to tell you that he was a great father and a loving human being? He wasn’t … He blew his brains out six hours ago, and I, as his child who most bitterly disagreed with him, tell you that was a man.”
Butting heads with male authority figures (her father was known as “The General”) is a constant leitmotif of the biography. At the buttoned-down New York Times in the mid-1970s, Molly wore denim, went barefoot and brought her dog named “Shit” to work. For any reader who wants to know how an organization can grind down a brilliant but headstrong and irreverent non-conformist, Molly’s stint at the Times stands as a cautionary tale.
She was posted to Denver as the sole head of the Times Rocky Mountain bureau. But after she wrote that a chicken-killing contest was a “gang pluck,” she was recalled to New York, handed lousy assignments and had her work edited to bits by myrmidons on the copy desk until she resigned.
If over the years her columns inspired a devoted following – Esquire honored her in 1990 as one of the “Women We Love” – she was nonetheless a lightning rod for right-wing venom. “You are so arrogant that you are insulting even when you try to be reasonable,” wrote a disgruntled reader. Another penned: “Ivins, you are an ugly, mean, vicious bitch. You are sickening to look at.”
National politicians courted her and, as her fame grew, there was talk of drafting her for public office, perhaps U.S. Senator. But, over the years, her journals tell of struggles with weight gain (a scale reading 172 pounds “pissed me off a lot”), bouts of depression and alcohol addiction. “I do not want to drink ever again … I don’t want the awful out-of-control, leaving pots on the stove, lights on all night, doors open, files scattered about. I don’t want the danger of driving drunk.”
She finally did get clean and sober. But by then she was already diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent mastectomies, painful chemotherapy and radiation. Still she kept a stiff upper lip, admitting in a Time essay that it was “no fun,” yet still joking that it was better than blind dates she’d been on. Privately, she admits avoiding contact with her emotions, jotting after a conversation with Austin friend Mercedes Pena: “Mercy insisted I get in touch with my feelings (Yoo-hoo, anybody there?) … ”
She never wavered from her commitment to democracy, peace and social justice. Racked by pain, weakening, her head shaved, she kept giving speeches and raising money for pet causes like the American Civil Liberties Union. Just days before her death in late January 2007, she appeared at a fundraiser for her beloved Texas Observer.
In her final column for the magazine, she called on readers to join in public protests against the endless war in Iraq. “Raise hell,” she wrote. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans.”
This is a very good book. “Beloveds,” as Molly might have said to the authors, “Good on you.”