Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (40 page)

“Molly would make a list and I'd go to Central Market and tell the guy behind the counter what I needed, that it was for Molly, and he'd say, ‘Oh, okay.' They knew how to pair the meal she was cooking with the right wines. All I had to do was bring it home.”

Molly easily spent three times as much on food and wine as she did on clothes. But Shelia Cheaney fixed that by introducing her to Chico's. After
some discussion and debate among friends, it had been determined that the wardrobe of this now-Famous Arthur wanted some sprucing up—as in no more duct tape on the underside of a tear in a favorite pair of slacks. It was okay to buy new ones. Molly accepted Chico's into her life as her wardrobe's personal savior. My friend Del Garcia—also a close friend of Molly's—and I also introduced her to Blue Fish clothing when Blue Fish still had a store in Austin. Molly's style-savvy sensibilities got kicked up another notch in New York, where she was frequently called to speak or read, sign books or just glad-hand. But it still fell to Hope to pair pants with shirts, sweaters, and such.

Molly's new style consciousness drew notice from her friend Ann Richards, prompting Molly, in one of her characteristic displays of generosity, to instruct Hope to have an identical outfit sent to Ann.

It was Hope who bore the brunt of Molly's (mercifully) momentary infatuation with all things Martha—as when Molly once again decided herbs and spices should be alphabetized. Bottles of various geometric shapes were assigned containers for kitchen soap and dishwashing detergent.

It was also Hope, when Molly insisted she could manage alone, who refused to leave her on bad nights—no small feat, given Molly's remarkable stubborn streak. And she did have a stubborn streak. She also had a real low tolerance for women who, in her opinion, let the team down. Special laser-guided brickbats flew their way. They were few and far between, but when the boom was lowered, the aim was true. For a sample, visit Molly's lengthy 1991 book review for
Mother Jones
, ripping into the “I Am the Cosmos” manifesto by controversial self-styled feminist and author Camille Paglia. Molly wrote:

I have myself quite cheerfully been both a country-music fan and a feminist for years—if Camille Paglia is the cosmos, so am I. When some fellow feminist doesn't like my music (How could you not like “You are just another sticky wheel on the grocery cart of life”?), I have always felt free to say, in my politically correct feminist fashion, “Fuck off.” . . . What we have here, fellow citizens, is a crassly egocentric, raving twit. . . . That this woman is actually taken seriously as a thinker in New York intellectual circles is a clear sign of decadence, decay, and hopeless pinheadedness.

Yes, but how do you really feel, Ms. Ivins?

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MOLLY, HERSELF A CHARACTER IN NO SMALL MEASURE
, was always surrounded by interesting and unusual people. One candidate for both categories is Waco's Linda Jann Lewis, who first met Molly in the summer of 1973. Linda had a part-time job at the state capitol and Molly was reporting for the
Observer
. Molly's reputation for having a sharp way with words was en route to being well established around the Lege, and Linda had a friend who wanted to meet this rising star. Linda had never heard of Molly.

“So we just went over to the
Observer
office and announced that we wanted to meet Molly Ivins,” Linda recalled. “About that time, here comes Molly paddling down the hall, followed by her dog, Shit. We said, ‘We heard you didn't write about anyone unless they're rich and famous, so we're here to tell you we're gonna be rich and famous and we're here to save you the time.'

“I know she thought we were nuts, but we ended up talking for a couple of hours. I was making a grand total of something like four hundred dollars a month. We used to call ourselves the pet rock Negroes because if we didn't show up there weren't any black folks at any of those Democratic Party rallies.

“But the
Observer
crew were talking about things I wanted to talk about; at the time we had the local NBC affiliate jacked up because we were gonna challenge their license. Then in the middle of negotiations they offered me a job. I turned them down. I said, ‘This isn't about me getting a job, it's about you making commitments.' And Molly wrote about it.”

Linda's spirit and quirky character endeared her to Molly, and despite her reservations about sleeping under the stars, Linda actually went camping for Molly's thirtieth birthday.

Sort of.

“We were going camping, or should I say
they
were going camping on San Gabriel River property that belonged to Dave and Ann Richards, who were married at the time. I had to explain that my idea of roughing it is a Holiday Inn with bad room service. I had a raggedy Nash Rambler with a door held together by a coat hanger. So while they pitched tents and slept on the ground, I slept in the back of the car—I tried to explain that black people don't sleep on the ground. In the end it really didn't matter because we sat up all night drinking beer and telling lies.”

Linda's birthday gift to Molly was a case of Coors, which was consumed for breakfast the next day. Through a series of adventures—and misadventures—Linda wound up also endearing herself to the legendary Bob Bullock, who was state comptroller at the time and who eventually hired her. Linda hung out at Molly's house, dubbed “the chicken coop.”

Even then Molly alphabetized herbs and cooked from a Junior League cookbook that belonged to her sister, Sara. When Molly moved into Travis Heights she began her dinners for widows, orphans, and strays. They started out as potlucks but morphed into annual holiday events. If you didn't have anyone to be with at Christmas, you came to Molly's.

“We'd have this big-ass meal, then her big sing-along,” Linda says. “I used to tell her she was just a frustrated camp counselor. But she loved to cook for people and feed them. If anyone knew political progressives were in town, her house became the place to take them, like the time Molly called me on a Sunday morning because this editor from Australia was coming for brunch and I had to bring eggs and Bisquick and be at her house in forty-five minutes. She whipped together the most fabulous cheese grits soufflé thing. We had champagne, fresh fruit, and an egg casserole with chiles and lots of bacon. She also made a spinach salad with fruit—I think it had dried cranberries, mandarin oranges, and red onion. We were making it thirty years ago, and twenty years later it was in all the fancy restaurants.”

Molly and Linda, who forged a friendship that spanned three decades, had a great time playing together. On one particularly memorable 1993 visit to “SoWaco,” as Linda loved to called her hometown, Molly drove up from Austin because I drove down from Dallas on an assignment that intrigued her. A Waco family had become known for seasonally decorating the giant concrete gorilla that stood on a spacious front lawn in a very nice part of town—and
certainly not a neighborhood where you'd expect to see a giant concrete gorilla in a painted-on orange and black Halloween outfit.

My assignment was to write a story about this goofy gorilla. Always one to make the best of a road trip, Molly decided that since none of us had ever visited the Dr Pepper Museum, we should do so. She got so carried away with the tour that she bought a T-shirt on the spot, ducked into the ladies' room, and changed out of what she had worn—an outfit that, unsurprisingly, no one can remember. What we do remember is that upon seeing Darwin the Gorilla, dressed in his finest black and orange Halloween glory, Molly was like a child in a toy shop.

She insisted on having her picture taken with him—but not hugging him or leaning in and displaying the toothy smile that invariably lit up her face. No, Molly opted for a photograph of her picking Darwin's nose. I am not making this up. The photograph tells the tale. And with the kind of wicked glee that one would never associate with a noted columnist, Famous Arthur, and established member of the literati, she intoned, “You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends' noses. But that's not true, is it, Darwin?”

We laughed like ten-year-olds, which is roughly the age we were functioning at at the time. If only Molly's sophisticated East Coast friends could have seen her then, we giggled. Molly making gorilla booger jokes!

We also made a pilgrimage to Waco's Oakwood Cemetery because Molly wanted to visit the grave of William Cowper Brann. He was a nineteenth-century journalist, playwright, and iconoclast who in fact founded a publication called
The Iconoclast
. As the story goes, his writings incensed one reader, Tom E. Davis, enough that in 1898 the man was provoked to homicide. Irate over a Brann attack on Baylor University, Davis shot Brann in the back, and Brann, before dying, shot and killed Davis. Mind you, this was a year
after
another Brann-related shoot-out. That one involved G. B. Gerald, a county judge and Brann supporter; J. W. Harris, the pro-Baylor editor of the
Waco Times-Herald
; and his brother W. A. Harris. Both brothers died and the judge lost an arm.

And we wonder where people get the idea that Texas was part of the Wild West.

From there we traipsed around until we found the gravestone of Abner McCall. Texans would recognize his name because he was president of Baylor University from 1961 to 1981 and then became chancellor. But Molly wanted to
pay her respects for another reason: when McCall was a law professor, he once gave Bob Bullock a D in ethics. Molly wanted to assure McCall's spirit that he had done the right thing. After according McCall and Brann their due, the three of us repaired to the old Elite Circle Cafe for a late-afternoon lunch of bacon cheeseburgers, fries, and Dr Pepper. From there I hit Interstate 35 north to Dallas, Molly took it south to Austin, and Linda went home.

As gorilla stories go, it was a good day.

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