Bill Minutaglio - Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life

Table of Contents

To Tess Minutaglio, A STRONG AND LOVING SOUL

After examining thousands of personal documents she continuously donated to public archives in Texasand after interviewing more than 100 of her relatives, close acquaintances, co-workers, and bossesone thing was clear: Molly Ivins was many things. As her collaborator Lou Dubose once put it, she was trilingual. She spoke private-school French, erudite Smith College English, and ribald Texan. She was also, arguably, one of the best-known and most influential journalists in American history. Three of her books were national bestsellers, her columns appeared in over 300 newspapers, and she was pursued by the most powerful kingmakers and rainmakersthey wanted her to run for office, they wanted her to be on national TV, they wanted to know if she could help them win the presidency and if they could make a movie about her life.

Yet beyond her prolific work and the demands on her celebrity, there was something else. She was an extraordinarily fastidious self-chronicler. She stored everything, including items that people wished she had never saved. Copies of letters she had sent out to friends and family and colleagues. Reporters notebooks. White House invitations. Letters from statesmen, world leaders, senators. She kept her grade-school report cards, memos to and from her bosses, pay stubs, publishing contracts, postcards from France, Bolivia, and Mexico. She kept her itineraries and programs from Broadway shows. She kept phone logs, car bills, and grocery shopping lists. Medical records. Scribbled messages about her medications. Countless intimate letters from her mother, her domineering father, her supportive brother and sister. Letters from lovers. If someone sent something to her and she deemed it important, she kept it.

And then, at the height of her career, she decided to begin giving it all to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. A close friend of hers said that she wanted all of this to be seenas a nod, her friend surmised, to transparency in the historical record, an open accounting. But as the friend went on to say, it was also her way of finally showing that in real life she was far more complex than the public persona familiar to millions of readers.

Among many of these readers she had achieved a one-name status (Molly!), a latter-day Mark Twain-meets-Will Rogers. She was the wise-cracking social commentator who gleefully teed up on anyone whose boot heels clicked across the marble floors in the House of Power. Her column and her books were always anchored by a photo of her wide-open, inviting faceand she always seemed on the verge of a booming laugh. She crisscrossed the country, drew huge crowds, made innumerable national TV appearances, and was given honorary degrees, and all the while, powerful Hollywood producers were trying to decide whether to create a television series based on heror to go all the way and put her life on the big screen.

The many interviews with her closest friends and supporters pointed to a life that few of her many loyal readers were aware of. Entirely apart from her politics, she faced wicked physical and mental challenges for long stretches of her lifea life often characterized by breathtaking twists and turns and an aching poignancy. Through it all she maintained an almost compulsively generous touch. She had a difficult time saying no to people who came to her seeking somethingher money, her time, her celebrity. She gave thousands of dollars to close friends and to people she barely knew. She gave plane tickets, frequent-flier miles, and hotel rooms. She made public appearances and spoke for free even when she was in danger of dying. When she found out that someone had been tossed out of workor, in other cases, had lost their income and insurance when their husbands diedshe figured out a way to put them on her payroll. When friends were sick, she would come to their house, make the bed, clean, and cook. When someone admired a book at her home, she pressed it into that persons hands. After dining at a really good restaurant in New Orleans, she paid the entire bill for the large gathering at her table. When acquaintances needed a place to crash in Paris, she made some calls and found them one. And when a reporter from Rolling Stone came to Austin to learn about, say, George W. Bush, she patiently walked him through things he would otherwise never have been able to comprehend. She had circles of friends, and then even more circles of friends, throughout all those moments when she faced death and a seemingly endless series of narrative rollercoaster rides. Her powerful New York friends. Her Washington insider friends. Her liberal Dallas friends. Her loyal Austin friendsof which there were many. Her West Coast friends. As her fame grew, and with it her outsized influence, she rarely turned any of them down if they needed a blurb for their book, a letter of recommendation, a glance at their new screenplay, a place for their children to spend a week with Aunt Molly. She bought books for the children and quizzed them on history and life. She seemed not to question the motivations of the people who wanted a piece of her time or needed something from hershe just gave it to them. She threw famous parties at her house in South Austin and it was an apt metaphor that the door was always open to any stranger who wandered in (as happened frequently). For years, her home phone number was listed in the public directory. There was the sense that she was almost always availableand frustration prospered among the many famous people who wondered why she was too busy to instantly return their calls. And why, when they called her, they got this message:

As was also apparent from her friends, she had a gift for leaving people with the impression that she was letting them in on an intimacy, usually underscored with the impression that she was sharing a joke with you. At her private high school, the most refined one in Texas, her laughter would echo in the hallways. At Smith College, the door to her room would be open and you could hear her chuckling all the way down the hall. In Austin, at the madcap, smoky campouts with future governors and hippie musicians frolicking alongside a gin-clear river, her laughter would rise from under the canopy of ancient live oak trees. In New York, at the somber New York Times, she smiled as she padded barefoot in the newsroom and talked about her front-page stories on Elvis or Son of Sam. She seemed perfectly willing to share a laugh with people whose politics were diametrically opposed to hers.

Her laughter was also there when she was dying and people traveled from around the world to be at her bedside. Maybe not as booming or as hearty as before, but it was there more often than not.

This book is an attempt to outline Molly Ivinss roots and show the path that led to her singular American presence. She was often the only woman in the room, in the middle of the action, going blow-for-blow with the Texas and Washington potentates. A careful decision was made not to stud this book with endless quotes from her work. (Her columns and articles are readily available in several collections.) The idea was to illustrate how her upbringing and background led to her being a public figure.