Untitled Document
At the end of the film Venus, which stars Peter O’Toole as a decrepit actor
holding off his final curtain, Vanessa Redgrave delivers a bleak line:
“When you die, everyone wants to be your friend.” Though I knew
Molly Ivins forever — since the Kennedy administration — I
would never claim that I knew her well. If I implied any special
relationship, I’m sure that Molly, listening somewhere, would roll
her eyes toward the heavens in one of those gestures of wry exasperation
that all of us who knew her scrambled to avoid. Even in graduate school, during the year at Columbia
when I saw her every day, we were nothing approaching inseparable. If she
felt that I was still struggling with testosterone management, small
wonder. At our first meeting, when we were undergraduates in Massachusetts,
I was a lamentably unevolved member of one of the more notorious
“animal houses” on the Ivy circuit. As irony would have it, a
couple of her suitemates at Smith were dating my fraternity brothers. The
first time I heard Molly’s name, they were trying to “fix her
up,” as we said in those days, with a suitable blind date. Apparently
several of these experiments had gone awry; boys had been traumatized.
Molly came with more intelligence, sarcasm, and undiluted Texasness than
your average New England preppy had ever prepared for, not to mention an
unsettling dose of pure height. As I recall it — there are living
witnesses to correct my memory and rein in my exaggeration — we
matched Molly with a power forward on a National Merit Scholarship, and
still she put him in intensive care.
That some of these experiences might have been
painful for Molly, too, was never considered. In spite of our lingering
reputation for sissified Aquarian sensitivity, cross-gender empathy was
almost unknown among college students of the ’60s. There’s more
than a clue in a column she wrote about her treatment for cancer:
“First they mutilate you; then they poison you, then they burn you. I
have been on blind dates better than that.”
The last time I saw her: Key West, the winter before
last, at a literary seminar celebrating American humor. Mutual friends had
been circulating grim rumors about her health, but Molly looked great. She
was warm and funny, remembered all the weird characters we had in common
and seemed pleased to see me. After 35 years of agreeing with her on nearly
every issue, I may, at 60, have gained a small measure of maturity in her
eyes. (Can you tell that it mattered to me?) Thanks to a couple of drinks I
was able, even in the inhibiting presence of my wife and other humorists,
to tell her how much I’d always appreciated her work and relied on
her instincts. She sipped her mojito. Neither of us cared much for
praise close up. But last fall, when I heard that she was dying, I was glad
I’d taken the risk. The death of a true original attracts a flock of
fancy eulogists; everyone from Garrison Keillor to Ariana Huffington has
said goodbye to Molly, sharing a wealth of anecdotes and unpublished
Mollicisms that I wish I could match. It was a Texas-size sendoff that she
richly deserved. But her inimitable style and personality, magnified in a
media culture that worships personality, sometimes obscured what was most
important about Molly Ivins. Her brand of commentary — intimate, indiscreet,
defiantly regional, exuberantly scathing — does not survive her and
will not be revisited in the corporatized, gadgetized, homogenized future
of print journalism. Like H.L. Mencken, unlike a legion of pinch-faced
whiners, Molly leavened her invective with glee. But forget her voice for a
moment, if you can — the voice that at its most forceful said,
“Listen up, boy, Mama’s talkin’ to you now” and
then dispensed home truths your mother never suspected in language your
mother never used. Forget the voice and concentrate on the message.
Whenever anyone asked me whether there was an indispensable columnist,
I’d begin with Molly and sometimes go no further. She was on message, column after
column, for the past 20 years and more, and the message was the one our own
Paul Revere would be carrying, if the news still came on horseback —
the only message that could possibly save this country from wrack and ruin.
Every week Molly Ivins warned us that our birthright
has been sold out from under us, that ruthless, careless corporations and
the plutocrats who profit from them have created a cash-and-carry
caricature of democracy. In her own words, which could not be mistaken for
anyone else’s words: “Oligarchy is eating our ass, our dreams,
our country, our heritage, our democracy, our justice, and our tax
code.”
“Either we figure out how to keep corporate
cash out of the political system,” she wrote last summer, “or
we lose the democracy.”
That’s all she wrote. It’s the only
message that matters anymore, and you can stretch it to cover every issue
that signifies — the wars, justice, health care, the economy, the
environment. While you were watching American
Idol and playing with your electro-toys,
boardroom bandits drove away with everything you had. Corporate flunkies
such as George W. Bush (“the master of crony capitalism”
— M.I.) and Dick Cheney are not the authors of our misery, any more
than Donald Rumsfeld was the author of the cataclysm in Iraq. They’re
just pieces on the chessboard where macro-capital plays its games,
lightning rods for the occasional outrage those games provoke. If you ever
doubted the organic connection between Texas oil politics and the Middle
East bloodbath, you never read Molly Ivins. Her finest hour coincided with the gross polarization
and rapid decline of her profession, along with the rise of a belligerent
right wing that treated mainstream liberals like Marxists. By merely saying
what was essential while most of the press labored to ignore it, Molly the
prairie populist acquired a radical identity: the Red Rose of Texas, the
Lone Star Lady of the Left. Because she was so entertaining, she was even
invited on occasion to play that role among the Sunday-morning talking
heads, on those badminton shows where the political spectrum usually ran
from three degrees left of center to three degrees right of Otto von
Bismarck. It was proof of her good nature — and incomprehensible to
me — that she never, to my knowledge, actually laid hands on Robert
Novak or Charles Krauthammer or hurled any heavy objects in their direction
— at least nothing heavier than her contempt. The haughty,
mean-spirited Krauthammer was always the true acid test of my affections.
If you can read four tortured paragraphs of Charles Krauthammer without
choking and cursing, you and I would never get along. Molly called him
“the ineffable Krauthammer.” E-words like
“egregious” and “execrable” worked for me. Molly’s solid presence among such people
reminded us of their pitiful weightlessness, of the devil’s bargain
they strike when they hold their places in the Washington food chain by
pretending not to see what’s clear to a 6-year-old — “as
obvious as balls on a tall dog,” Molly must have said somewhere. The
Scooter Libby case is the hilarious quintessence of “The
Emperor’s New Clothes,” performed by the Blind Boys of Foggy
Bottom. Did anyone with a fully oxygenated brain ever doubt that the White
House (Cheney, Rove, who cares?) tried to burn Joseph Wilson for spoiling
their fairy tale about Saddam’s awesome arsenal, that they went after
him by outing his wife as a CIA agent, that if poor Scooter was the actual
leaker he was under orders and set up to take the fall for his boss,
probably for future considerations? What part of this was ever unclear? Yet
the entire press corps followed Libby’s trial as if great truths were
being revealed by slow degrees. Look at the journalists who testified: Novak, Bob
Woodward, Tim Russert, Judith Miller — a virtual roll call of
Washington’s best-connected and most compromised reporters. As Paul
Krugman pointed out when Molly died, these were the deep insiders who
preserved “highly placed” sources by playing dumb, back when
she was warning us that the invasion of Iraq would immortalize George W.
Bush as the greatest fool who ever sat in the Oval Office. And none of
them, not even the ones who held his hand in secret, knew Bush half as well
as Molly. When a print journalist of real substance and
consequence dies in midsentence, so to speak, it’s hard in these
times to separate her absence from a sense that she was the last of her
kind. In Austin in November, Molly herself gave a speech titled “The
Future of Journalism: Slow Death or Suicide?” Amid chain-shuffles,
sell-offs, layoffs, buyouts of senior staff, and the replacement of
columnists by blogs, a wave of retrenchment that almost no dailies have
been spared, the American newspaper industry is foundering in plain view.
With TV news long gone to the corporate dogs and every solvent magazine
scrambling for the key demographics of dumb and nasty, where will the next
generation find the free and obstreperous press on which every healthy
democracy depends entirely? “Keep these little independent voices
alive,” was the Ivins prescription. “I think that’s where
the hope of journalism lies.”
Does journalism have a future? Back in the
’60s, idealists such as Fred Friendly sold it to us as a sacred
calling, a kind of priesthood without the celibacy. The answer to what
makes a journalist who matters, like Molly Ivins, is the same as the answer
to what makes a journalist. Some of our classmates at Columbia had earned
undergraduate degrees in journalism; many of them had years of newsroom
experience. I remember her winking at me once — we were in the same
boat, barely legal and stuffed with liberal arts — when some seasoned
newsman questioned whether an Ivy League English major was ready to run in
the fast lane with real professionals. Our confidence then was just youthful ignorance, the
mother of arrogance. Yet experience never corrected us too severely. The
recipe for an effective journalist, then and now, is 1 percent vocational
training; 9 percent intelligence, talent, and experience; and 90 percent
attitude. The proper attitude? Picture a touchy pit bull who pulls his
chain off the ringbolt every time he smells smugness — privilege
without humility — and mendacity. A real journalist, we were taught,
only unsheathes his pen in the public interest, defending the social
contract and protecting the citizen without leverage, the underdog. If you
don’t believe that, you can write like E.B White and appear in 400
newspapers and you’re still a publicist, to me.
Molly Ivins had all the attitude in the world —
she blamed it on an overbearing Republican father, a motivation with which
I can identify — a world of attitude, and the gloves-off roadhouse
prose style to make it stick. It didn’t charm everyone. When you die,
they all want to be your friends — but they aren’t above a
patronizing dig or two when you’re no longer there to defend
yourself. I don’t know that “loneliness” plagued Molly
any more than it plagues most intelligent people. I thought a line about
her “battle” with alcohol was gratuitous and naïve. You
don’t “battle” alcohol the way you battle cancer. Alcohol
isn’t your enemy — it’s an old friend you can never trust
but with whom you share many of your sweetest memories. Reporters who never
drank were very rare in the newsrooms of yore, and of low prestige. One posthumous critic thought that Molly’s
Calamity Jane persona, the one that hollered “Let’s
rodeo!” to motivate a crowd of left-wing reporters, was a touch
disingenuous for an upper-middle-class girl who went to Smith. But which of
us educated exiles from the provinces (in the media, everywhere but the
East Coast and LA) hasn’t amped up the old accent when someone from
home walked into the room? Molly had to earn her spurs in Texas before she
tackled the rest of the country, and Texas is a hazardous high-testosterone
zone where a woman has to be a little larger than life to command
attention. If she had detractors, I suspect that they were grandsons of the
old boys who condescended to the great Dorothy Parker. As Regina Barreca wrote in Parker’s defense,
“It’s not hard to dream up a conspiracy plot which demands that
all women writers who speak successfully with a satirical tongue get
lacerated critically, or, worse, that such women are presented as sad,
shriveled shells of frivolous femininity, or — worse still, worst
ever — that women who don’t act nicely get left alone.”
Amen. A lot of men carry secret grudges against women who don’t make
them feel smarter and taller. Molly Ivins could operate with Dorothy
Parker’s scalpel, but she also packed a chainsaw in her toolbox,
which cleared the way for the coarser chainsaw journalism of such women as
Maureen Dowd of The New York Times. These editors who encourage Dowd might even have been
able to accommodate Molly, but it was an appalling mismatch when she went
to work for the Times in 1976. Encouraged by “legendary” editors who could
never write a lick (Abe Rosenthal gets a century in pressroom purgatory for
assigning Molly Ivins to City Hall), the tradition at the Times was to crush — to
neuter — any writer who betrayed the slightest pleasure in
manipulating the English language. Molly’s six years there must have
seemed like 40.
Unfortunately, she was a few years ahead of the Times and ahead of her
time. But she was a big girl who didn’t need the likes of me to stick
up for her, then or now. My only quarrel with Molly Ivins was
philosophical. She always claimed that she was an incurable optimist; I
tend to swing the other way. Scrape away a few layers of accumulated irony,
and I’m not so different from another of our contemporaries,
songwriter Joni Mitchell, who says, “My heart is broken in the face
of the stupidity of my species.” I followed David Broder once on a
public-radio show. When the host told me that the tirelessly sanguine
Broder had just proclaimed his great faith in the American people, I
replied, “In my experience, anyone who praises the wisdom of the
people is trying to get away with something.”
I like to think that Molly wouldn’t shout me
down on that one. If she declared that Texas legislators were dumber than
houseplants and root vegetables, she must have considered the intelligence
of the people who voted for them. One of her last columns noted the
difference between populists, who are born with the ability to recognize
their friends and their enemies, and the liberals who like to split hairs
and set traps for each other. She was never an ideologue, of course, but a
one-of-a-kind, organic, hands-on populist. As I see it, it was never the
wisdom but the ornery, dirt-plain humanity of people that won her heart.
And it was probably a much bigger heart, to begin with, than most of us
ever brought to the newsroom.
Hal Crowther’s book of essays Gather at the River was a
finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism. He
was the author of “The jig is up,” published in
the Dec. 14 edition of Illinois Times.
This article appears in Mar 15-21, 2007.
