Before she died in 2007, iconic columnist Molly Ivins gave 150 boxes of papers and personal items to the University of Texas.

'I don't think she wanted to be turned into a folksy, colorful archetype,' singer-songwriter Eliza Gilkyson says of her friend Molly Ivins, above in her home office.

Before she died in 2007, iconic columnist Molly Ivins gave 150 boxes of papers and personal items to the University of Texas.

BIOGRAPHY

No pedestal

Turns out it wasn't easy being Molly Ivins, a revelation that enhances her legendary status.

By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, November 15, 2009

Molly Ivins was not prone to share intimate feelings, at least not in the public space of her columns. There was too much important work to do, too many sassy barbs to share in the name of social justice or the Bill of Rights or peace in the Middle East. Feelings? Who has time for feelings?

"I am one of those people who are out of touch with their emotions," Ivins wrote in Time magazine, five years before her death. "I tend to treat my emotions like unpleasant relatives — a long-distance call once or twice a year is more than enough. If I got in touch with them, they might come to stay."

Ivins was always good for a laugh, even in an essay like this one, about dealing with breast cancer. So it's fortunate, in the name of posterity, for The Boxes — some 150 cardboard boxes of papers and personal effects the columnist donated to the University of Texas shortly before her death, at age 62, in 2007.

Molly Ivins kept everything, it turns out: letters from her family, shards of a novel, a red-and-gold New Year's party hat. She kept childhood drawings and birthday cards and old shoes. And she held on to personal reflections, cautionary messages to herself — "Alcohol is a drug. It is destroying my brain and my life" — written in firm hand on yellow legal pads or on random pages of her reporter's notebooks.

Austin authors Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith spent months sifting through the Ivins collection at the Briscoe Center for American History, and what they found there set the tone for their poignant new biography "Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life." In her words and her papers, the writers came to know a gentler, more vulnerable Molly Ivins, far more complex than the woman suggested by her folksy, lead-with-a-laugh persona. The experience clearly moved them. You can see it, even now, in the gentle way the authors sift through the contents of the open boxes, solemnly moving aside Molly's favorite blue shirt — the one she always wore when playing catch with her dog — to reach for a personal letter.

"Mike and I would sit there together, side by side, and say, 'My God. Look what Molly has written here,' " says Minutaglio, author of seven books, the lead writer of the biography. "We knew that she was self-aware. She was open and honest, always, in things she would tell her friends or say in speeches. But in terms of self-chronicling, neither of us knew about this extra layer, this extra dimension."

Molly Ivins is a seminal figure in the history of Texas journalism, a progressive and feminist icon. But she's clearly "off the pedestal" in this personal, empathetic biography. It's a book about a writer's conscience, not so much a writer's legacy, bolstered by reminiscence of family and colleagues and childhood friends. The authors could have called it "Inside Molly, Outside Molly" for the way the book examines Ivins' interior life, her doubts and dreams, while explaining so many external influences: her father, Houston of the 1960s, the Texas Observer, Austin of the 1970s, John Henry Faulk, The New York Times, cancer.

Despite her formidable intellect, it wasn't easy being Molly Ivins. Her idealism, her disdain for "PTR" — playing the role, professionally or socially — ensured that her life was often quite lonely. "Basically her whole life was a monument to iconoclasm," journalist Charles Kaiser, who knew Ivins at The New York Times, remarks with admiration in the book. "This was a person who succeeded almost everywhere she went by not conforming."

Raised in an island of affluence in Houston, Ivins grew up to renounce the political and social mind-set of her conservative father, the male-dominated culture of her times, the traditional mores of mainstream newspaper journalism and, ultimately, the policies of George W. Bush in the age of terrorism. Meanwhile, her personal life had many shadows. Ivins lost a great love, a man she might have married, in a motorcycle accident when she was only 19. She fought, for decades, with alcohol abuse. As a writer, she forever scolded herself for failing to live up to her own expectations. And yet. ...

"I think you find a person's greatest strength in their weakness," says Smith, the book's lead researcher, an assistant to Ivins from 1994 to 2001. This means the Molly Ivins story is ultimately about conviction, about laughter and loyalty, about generosity, about the courage.

Molly Ivins defied convention with a pugnacious, free-spirited vigor — especially as a budding journalist in the 1960s and 1970s, when a woman was expected to walk more demurely on the pathway to success. Yet the Minutaglio-Smith biography reminds us she was audacious by 21st-century standards as well.

Seeking the editor's job at the Texas Observer in 1970, Ivins showed up to the interview with founding editor Ronnie Dugger carrying a six-pack of beer. When she got the job, Ivins phoned her editor at the Minneapolis Tribune — collect — to announce her resignation and then published a tell-all diatribe about the place she called "The Daily Chuckle." During her stint at The New York Times, Ivins talked back, aggressively, to a copy desk that rewrote her stories and then added starch, changing expressions like "beer gut" to "protuberant abdomen."

"It has become known that I have a Bad Attitude," Ivins wrote to an Austin friend from New York in 1977. "... I am specifically charged with A) walking around the city room in my bare feet B) laughing too loud C) not dressing right D) making fun of editors E) showing insufficient enthusiasm for The Times and all its wonders F) just generally coming on too strong. What can I tell you? As Gary (sic) Trudeau once wrote: Guilty, guilty, guilty."

Who would have guessed that this Molly Ivins grew up the quintessential introvert: shy, obedient, self-conscious, reserved. Her given name was Mary Tyler Ivins. "Molly" appears to be a derivation of Ivins' childhood nickname of "The Mole" — an affectionate allusion to her tendency to hide away with a book in an attic bedroom. Ivins would even refer to herself as "The Mole" in letters to her family. The biographers who dug deeply into so many boxes of Ivins papers note of her childhood: "She was always burrowing, collecting, hoarding."

Ivins' childhood was riddled with insecurity: "My mother used to tell me, bitterly, viciously, 'You are an ugly girl, Mary, you are a very ugly little girl,'" Ivins wrote to herself in a reporter's notebook in 1969, when she was 24. "I believed her and still do. In a sense I consider myself unlovable."

Yet the writer's father, Tenneco oil executive Jim Ivins, played a bigger, more complex role in her life journey. By most accounts in the biography, her dad was a difficult man: quick-tempered, hard to please, authoritarian, racially prejudiced, strong in his opinions. He was also disciplined, motivated, ambitious. He was forceful by nature, and he pushed his daughter — even as his wealth exposed her to life at the yacht club and gave her the chance to study and travel in France.

Like Jim Ivins, his daughter Molly had a hunger to achieve. Young Molly was fascinated by power and yearned to be famous. Yet as she blossomed intellectually, Ivins would devote her journalistic career to the skeptical examination of power, of powerful men much like her father, in the name of the powerless. The insight Ivins inherited as the daughter of an authoritarian father served her well in this pursuit, even as it haunted her.

Molly Ivins' life was forever rich with paradox. The biography notes she was a woman who was fluent in French, who knew white gloves-and-pearls style, who could cook and enjoy fine Continental cuisine. At the same time, she knew how to talk Texan and play tough. "I fought my domineering father too long to give in to another man," Ivins once wrote in her reporter's notebook. After a few drinks, Ivins once punched her friend, the writer Billy Porterfield — who had done nothing to deserve it — so hard that she knocked out one of his teeth.

"I think what was always fascinating to me about her was the psychology of somebody who had grown up as part of the business and social establishment in Texas and then turned so completely. Ridiculed them and in a lot of ways just reviled them," her friend David Broder of The Washington Post remarks in the biography. "She came to have utter contempt for those people. Where and how that developed is a story I never heard from her."

Molly Ivins believed in journalism. But she was never comfortable with its objective ideal. "There is no such thing as objectivity," she said at the height of her career. "I actually think it is pernicious as a goal."

Motivated by the example of the journalists I.F. Stone and Jack Newfield, novelist George Orwell and First Amendment icon John Henry Faulk, the young Ivins consistently asked herself difficult questions about craft and conscience: Is it possible to be a leftist, and a journalist? At the Minneapolis Tribune, she knew frustration of diligently reporting stories — the detached "he said, she said" — and seeing "the truth murdered too many times in the name of objectivity."

So how does one balance integrity and subjectivity in journalism? The answer, for Molly Ivins: work for the Texas Observer, which she did from 1970 into 1976.

Minutaglio and Smith explain it this way: "At the Texas Observer, she had free rein not just to address issues that barely dented the pages of the mainstream papers — the outsized issues of poverty, racism, systemic corruption — but to do it with a chiding, confiding derision that two-stepped back and forth between a mocking condemnation and a can-you-believe-it kind of wonderment."

Ivins loved the freedom of the Observer. She found her voice there. "It occurs to me that I may never be able to work for a straight publication again," she wrote to a friend in 1971. "Doing what you want spoils you so." And yet Ivins did leave the Observer, did work for straight publications again — a testament to her quixotic belief that a nonconformist could find fame and freedom in the world of mainstream journalism.

Ivins pushed the limits throughout her life, and not just in journalism. She was a hard drinker who knew how to use that "gift" to her reportorial advantage when covering the Texas Legislature outside the walls of the Capitol or mining Bob Bullock's insight during countless happy hours. Eventually, Ivins became an alcoholic — a realization, it turns out, she shared in letters to family and private notes to herself.

"I should like to think the biggest mistake I have made in the first 30 years of my life was to start drinking and keep drinking," Ivins wrote in a reporter's notebook during her Texas Observer tenure. A few years later, during her New York Times tenure: "I have wasted so much time by getting drunk. ... I have jeopardized my job from drinking and failed in my responsibilities as a journalist."

Through the years, Ivins wrote poignant little scraps about losing her dog because she got drunk, or falling asleep in the bathtub drunk, or waking up with the house lights blazing and her memory vacant. It was a condition that haunted her, intermittently, through 2005 even as compassionate friends such as Kaye Northcott (her co-editor at the Observer) gently encouraged her to slow down. Sadly, working hard came hand-in-hand with drinking hard. "My dear Mole," Ivins' sister Sara would write, "quit worrying about Daddy and start taking care of yourself. You need more self-love and self-care."

"I'm sure (Molly) had an awareness that she was really powerful," her friend Nadine Eckhardt observes in the biography, remembering Ivins struggled with alcohol even after her cancer diagnosis. "She knew how things were going. But she didn't have enough self-awareness to realize she was dying, and she wouldn't take care of herself. It was terribly painful to see a person not take care of themselves. I think that child part of her — that wanted that cigarette, wanted that drink — was running her. She was a big child in many ways. 'I'll do this if I want to.'"

Like all conscientious writers, Bill Minutaglio and Michael Smith struggled with the big questions that come with assembling a "first" biography. What to leave in? What to take out? In the end, the authors felt compelled to focus on Ivins' personal story, knowing her columns were already a matter of public record, guided by the poignant flashes of a writer's conscience they found in those boxes at the UT Center for American History.

"Molly was a writer. She thought about things and wrote them down," says Minutaglio, standing before an open box of archives. "I believe she wouldn't have left these boxes behind if she didn't want people to know that she was more complex than the 'mug' (photograph) that appeared in the newspaper."

Does it matter?

Does it matter, ultimately, that Molly Ivins drank too much and suffered for it? Does it matter that she was never very secure in her body? Does it matter that her great love, a son of Houston elites, died young? Does it matter that The New York Times sought to punish her for her independence? Does it matter that her mother wished for her a career on the women's page, that her father wrote her on Earth Day to suggest she do her part for the planet and cut the lawn for a change?

Yeah. It does. Molly Ivins struggled, a lot, in life, which only makes her generosity shine brighter, her laughter ring louder. Sure, she was reckless ... and fallible ... and imperfect ... and, maybe, never quite who she appeared to be. Yet Molly Ivins wrote through it. She was pretty good at drawing lines, of making clear what could not be violated or compromised. The legacy of that is bigger than a book.

"She would always sign her books, 'Raise more hell' and 'Don't forget to laugh more,'" remarks friend and confidante Betsy Moon, outside the binding of the biography. "She tried to teach people, yes, that being a citizen is your job. You have to work at it. But by all means, have fun while you're doing it. Because you're not going to win very often if you're fighting for the 'good' things."

"I try to remember Molly Ivins as a human being," remarked singer-songwriter Eliza Gilkyson, again outside the bindings, shortly after performing at Ivins' memorial service in Austin. "I don't think she wanted to be turned into a folksy, colorful archetype. She was a deep-thinking, powerful woman who faced down the neo-con publicity machine. ... She dismantled it, made it funny for us. ... And at the same time, she was battling something every woman fears: breast cancer. She fought a battle in her body as she fought it out in the world, with courage and with humor."

Molly Ivins was not a conventional woman, a conventional journalist — and that's why, even now, it is easier to assess her manner, "The Rebel Life," at the expense of her impact. All the same, Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith leave us with these words from Ivins' friend, the late New York Times staffer Eden Lipson:

"I finally realized it was us, the cosmopolitan New Yorkers in the media capitol, with our literary and political gossip and hermetic chattering who were, in fact, provincial. Molly was the one who saw America large and clear, who out-reported the mainstream media from Austin, who had a balanced and ultimately optimistic view of the world. Molly's generosity was legendary, but in addition, she was brave."

bbuchholz@statesman.com 912-2967