Looking back at and with Molly Ivins (including her terrible times at the NY Times)

Molly Ivins (1944-2007)

"I know what kind of governor [George W. Bush] has been -- if you expect him to do for the nation what he has for Texas, we need to talk."

"We are pleased to announce the reelection of Senator Drew Nixon of Carthage. Nixon is the fellow who was found by Dallas police in a car with not one but three prostitutes. He explained he thought they were asking for directions."

-- "Mollyisms" from Molly Ivins: Letters to The Nation

by Ken

As I mentioned recently, I ordered the paperback (as opposed to e-book) editions of a pair of anthologies published by The Nation in its varied book series, volumes dedicated to the great Texas-born and -bred journalist Molly Ivins (1944-2007) and the great American novelist and political commentator Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), both edited by a former executive editor of the magazine, Richard Lingeman, who was in harness when they were contributing to it.

They're smaller books than I was imagining, but none the worse for it -- we get to savor the contents more fully. The Vonnegut volume is gently and wittily cataclysmic, and I definitely plan to come back to it. I thought I'd start, though, with Molly Ivins: Letters to The Nation."


"MOLLYISMS" (1):
THREE LONE STAR GOVERNORS

Editor Lingeman has a starter section called "Mollyisms: Is Texas America or Vice Versa?" From this section I've taken the liberty of extracting a bunch of the Mollyisms and grouping them thematically.

It seems natural to start with an unholy trinity of Texas governors.

Bill Clements (governor, 1979-83 and 1987-91)

"Our only Governor, Sweet William we call him, might be described as irascible. Actually, he's mean, bad-tempered and has a face that would sour milk. . . . Turns out the man lies like a skunk puts out stink. He couldn't change his mind without looking like a sackful of fishhooks. . . . Lots of politicians paint themselves into corners by making stupid campaign promises. Bill Clements is one of the few to ever survey the situation and apply a second coat."

"Clemens said he knows the NCAA has a hard task and he 'commensurates' with 'em and he hopes they 'secede.' "

"As our former Governor Bill Clements said during an etiquette lesson preceding the visit of Deng Xiaoping of China to Houston, 'We have to be nice to this little fella and remember we all like chop suey.' "

George W. Bush (governor, 1995-2000)

"One of the funnier slogans, from George W. Bush's last run for governor, was 'end social promotion.' Social promotion is the story of Bush's life."

"Hearing [GWB] has the charm and suspense of those old adventure-movie serials. Will the man ever fight his way out of this sentence alive?"

And as president --

"The fact is that unless someone else writes a speech for him, the President of the United States sounds like a borderline moron. But the media sit around pretending that he can actually talk -- can convince, inspire and lead us."

GWB's Texas successor, "Governor Goodhair" (2000-15)

"Bush was replaced by his exceedingly Lite Guv Rick Perry, who has really good hair."

MOLLY'S "CAREER" AS A TV CRITIC,
AND THE UNPLANNED TURN IT TOOK

Lingeman raises the question of how Molly came to write for The Nation.

The short answer is because the magazine's former editor, Victor Navasky, asked her. Originally, he planned to sign her up as the magazine's television critic, a post we were always trying to fill without success and one that would presumably elicit her wit with minimal demands on her time. [This "Victor Navasky" would be the same person known to us via Calvin Trillin as "the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky," the man who, as we've noted, got Trillin to write a column for The Nation for a fee "in the high two figures." -- Ed.]

Here is Victor's account of her hiring interview. The next time Molly was in New York, he invited her to dinner at Orso's, an "in" dining spot in the theater district popular with stage folk and first-nighters. Upon her arrival at the restaurant, Victor did a double take. She was dressed in an evening gown and a fur coat. On her six-foot frame that rig would have looked statuesque to say the least. Maybe this was her way of spoofing the idea of a good ol' gal from Texas trying to make a big impression in the Big City.

After Victor opened the negotiations, she confessed that she didn't own a television set. Victor apparently was not daunted by her lack of experience as a TV critic, indeed as a TV watcher. For she had the one essential qualification for the job: a built-in bullshit detector, fine-tuned on the bloviations of some of the windiest politicians on the Great Plains. And so he offered to buy her one and she signed on.

Time passed, and you know what? She never wrote a damn thing about television.

Instead, she did something better. She started contributing what might be described as Letters from Texas, bringing to the magazine's East and West Coast-concentrated readership the latest political developments in the Great State, which seemed to be full of exotic people known as the Gibber, Governor Goodhair and the Breck Girl ["House Speaker Gib Lewis, Governor Rick Perry, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, respectively"]. . . .

"MOLLYISMS" (2):
A MENAGERIE OF POLS, TEXAN AND OTHERWISE

More Mollyisms, branching out to other Lone Star political life forms, and beyond.

"The bill to make English the Official State Language came to naught, which is just as well, since we'd have had to deport the entire state leadership if it was passed."

"Former Congressman Tom Loeffler [from the 21st Congressional District, 1979-87, before losing to Bill Clements in the Republican gubernatorial primary] is now the Reagan Administration's new point man . . . for lobbying on aid to the contras. Loeffler . . . is the guy who thinks you can get AIDS through your feet, as we learned when he wore shower caps on his while on a trip to San Francisco, lest he acquire the disease from the bathroom tile."

"Jim Collins [U.S. representative from Texas's 3rd Congressional District, 1968-83] is the man who once moved me, in the days when I wrote for the Dallas Times Herald, to observe, 'If his IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day.' "

With some special love for a pair of Pats --

"Many people did not care for Pat Buchanan's speech [at the Republican National Convention]; it probably sounded better in the original German. No one could decide whether Phil Gramm or Pat Robertson made the worst speech of the convention, perhaps because no one listened to them."

"In trying to determine just how far to the right the GOP's loony wing will go, it's worth noting how Pat Robertson, past and possibly future GOP presidential candidate, is fighting Iowa's proposed equal rights amendment. Pat says feminism 'encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.' "

MOLLY'S SHORT, UNHAPPY CAREER AT THE
NY TIMES -- OR, LIFE UNDER ABE ROSENTHAL

You'd think this would have been a good thing, Molly being hired by the New York Times, but somehow it didn't work out the way one would have hoped. Lingeman clues us in to some of what that "somehow" was, and how unhappy a time it was for Molly. It seems to have had more than a little to do with Executive Editor Abe Rosenthal, who -- as anyone knows who's read or heard much about his career -- had a lot of screwy ideas about journalism which he upheld as if they were journalistic holy writ, quite apart from being a raging sociopath who managed to carry around more chips than you could fit on a dozen shoulders. To me it says a lot about him that he had this awesome talent on his payroll and managed to get less out of her than you would imagine possible.

In 1976, the New York Times beckoned to her as part of a feminization drive at the newspaper. There also seemed to have been some hope that her humor-brightened reportage would liven up the Gray Lady of West Forty-third Street.

As it turned out, her career with the Times was not a happy one, though she started off covering big stories like the Son of Sam murders. But she didn't really fit in. Maybe that all started when she showed up in the newsroom wearing jeans and trailed by her dog, Shit. The story goes that when she was serving as Rocky Mountain bureau chief in Denver (comprising a staff of one), she filed a story about the annual chicken slaughter in Corrales, New Mexico, which she referred to as a "gang pluck." The Times's executive editor Abe Rosenthal, who hated what he deemed to be wise-ass reporters who fooled with the news or snuck in double entendres, called her into his office and confronted her.

"Molly," he said, getting right down to the obvious, "you are going to make readers think of a gang fuck."

"Abe," she replied, "you're a hard man to fool."

He consigned her to purgatory -- covering City Hall -- which left her little to do. Eventually she resigned. "Abe was a hard man to fool," she commented.

A psychiatrist might guess that her double entendre was a subconscious protest. She had been unhappy at the way Times editors declawed her prose and dampened her humor. "Naturally, I was miserable -- at five times my previous salary," she later said of that period. "The New York Times is a great newspaper; it is also No Fun."

Lingeman points out that Molly's return to Texas proved "a great career move" -- she became a columnist first for the Dallas Times Herald, then for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and, nationally, Creators Syndicate. It was a terrible thing, though, for the NYT, its readers, and the country, that the Times editorial command didn't know how to make this treasure a jewel in its journalistic crown.


NEXT WEEK (I'M THINKING): KURT VONNEGUT

As the great literary critic, commentator, and editor John Leonard can be read observing in Vonnegut by the Dozen: "Like Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, even when he's funny Kurt Vonnegut is depressed." He was a great novelist, and in his own distinctive way as great and cataclysmic a political observer, and perhaps even more distressing.

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