Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (2 page)

Yet there was much more to Molly than the public persona, as interesting and entertaining as it was. She was polyglot fluent, speaking Texan, Smith College English, and French. She was complex. She read broadly and deeply. She was loyal to a fault, often hiring a larger entourage of unemployed friends than did Elvis. She was an ardent Elvis fan and loved Jerry Lee Lewis enough to
buy a piano she never learned to play in hopes of someday mastering “Great Balls of Fire.”

It was in the kitchen and at the table with small groups of friends that Molly disarmed. It is Molly disarmed whom Ellen Sweets introduces to readers.

On the Sunday morning following the McCormick & Schmick dinner, Molly invited a group of about forty to brunch at Fonda San Miguel, an Austin Mexican restaurant that has cultivated a national following in the thirty-five years it's been in central Austin. The brunch at Fonda, an elaborate buffet of dishes you would have to travel to Oaxaca or Mexico City to find, was the end of a weekend celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Molly's beloved
Texas Observer
, which continues kicking ass and taking names in a state where a substantial number of asses need kicking.

At one end of a long table, my wife and I sat with Adam Clymer. Adam wore a sport coat, a freshly laundered white shirt, and dress slacks. Because it was Sunday, he had forgone the tie and was wearing a Washington Nationals baseball cap.

At the other end of the table sat Molly, in a
Texas Observer
shirt and dark velour pants so worn they were weirdly iridescent. (I always considered her something of a sartorial felon.)

Adam was magisterial, quoting polls and attitudinal surveys that defined the insurmountable challenge that lay between then-Senator Barack Obama and the presidency, when the other end of the table erupted in laughter as Molly wrapped up a story.

“You know,” Adam said with a smile, “she never fit in at the
Times
.”

She didn't. But she found a home in four hundred smaller newspapers in smaller markets, where hundreds of thousands of readers isolated by geography and political beliefs devoured her columns. Those readers, who knew Molly on paper, will now get to know her in the kitchen.

I
'
M ETERNALLY INDEBTED TO MY PARENTS
, Melba and Nathaniel Sweets. Before my mother died at the age of ninety-seven, I grudgingly but sincerely thanked her for all those red-pencil corrections she applied to everything I wrote, even after stuff had been published. She was often right, damn it all.

I'm grateful to my father for teaching me that the power of the printed word is something to be treasured and never taken lightly; that respect is earned, not conferred; and that if you drive into the back of another car it's always your fault.

When I said I was going to write a book, my brothers, Fred and Nathaniel Jr., shrugged and said, “Hey—cool; do we get free books?”

Committing to paper kitchen tales from Molly's big love—after family and journalism—would have been difficult, if not impossible, without assistance from friends who ate and/or cooked with and/or for her. I am one of the luckiest people ever to know such good people, not one of whom ever said, “Are you nuts? What do you know about writing a book?!” I said it to myself instead.

Thank you, Stu Wilk, who, as
Dallas Morning News
assistant managing editor, hired me. If I hadn't come to Dallas, I might never have met Molly, let alone become her friend.

The
Denver Post
deserves an appreciative mention, especially editor Greg Moore, who not only understood my sense of loss when Molly died but in 2009, for two and a half months, provided me with space to write a substantial portion of this book.

Reference librarians are almost always unsung heroes, but not here. I'm indebted to Cleora Hughes at the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, Darlean Spangenberger
and Angelo Cortez at the
Dallas Morning News
, and Barb Hudson, Jan Torpy, and Vickie Makings at the
Denver Post
for their research assistance.

I owe a debt of gratitude to folks in Boulder, including Tracy and Michael Ehlers, who were Molly's Colorado hosts for several years, and Maura Clare, communications director for the University of Colorado's Conference on World Affairs. Molly loved the CWA, and it loved her right back, as evidenced by invitations returning her again and again and again.

A big fat
muchas gracias
goes to a supportive hometown posse in St. Louis—Harper Barnes and his wife, Rosanne Weiss; my other “sister,” Rose Jonas, and her husband, Ed Finkelstein; Art and Gayla Hoffman; and former
Post-Dispatch
colleague Christine Bertelson, who, when I told her about the book, exclaimed, “Holy shit!” That's when I got scared.

I met Lewis and Phyllis Sank and Beth and Ravenel Curry when I moved to New Jersey in 1981. Both couples were generous with moral support, shelter, and dinner on several varying occasions. (My daughter and I moved around so much that once, when a classmate asked Hannah why we lived in so many different places, she told them we were in the witness protection program. Not bad for a ten-year-old! She made me proud.)

I must thank Austin friends who gave of their time, especially eagle-eyed copy editors Charlotte McCann and Kaye Northcott. Malcolm Greenstein and I went to dinner one night and reviewed pages of notes on flaws he extracted from the original manuscript.

What a mensch.

Without help from librarians at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, where Molly's papers reside, this book would have serious holes. It might anyway, but it's not their fault. Andy and Carla Ivins saved many of Molly's cookbooks and shared them along with their collection of family photographs and food memories.

Finally a truly appreciative nod to the folks at UT Press: Allison Faust, my editor, who took a chance on me; copy editor Jan McInroy, who caught stuff, fixed it, and all the while made me feel good about my words; in-house manuscript editor Lynne Chapman, who pulled it all together; and expert proofreader Regina Fuentes.

To all I've mentioned and to those who might have been shortchanged, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Hillary Clinton was on the right track: it takes a village to write a book.

Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins

1

PEOPLE OF TEN ASK HOW I MET MOLLY
and how we became friends. And I always say the same thing: our meeting was an indirect consequence of missing the newsroom.

I'm a Midwesterner who grew up in a newspaper family. My father owned the
St. Louis American
, a black weekly in Missouri, and my mother was an editor and columnist. Ink in the blood and all that.

It's also altogether possible I became a reporter in part because I was born nosy. Reporting is one of the few jobs where you get to ask people all sorts of personal stuff and more often than not, by God, they'll tell you. Maybe I could have done that as a cop or a federal agent, but neither of those professions would have had me. Trust me.

Unfortunately, as a single parent I needed to earn enough to put my kid through college. When it transpired that she was seriously smarter than I, I went in search of a more substantial salary to subsidize whatever college she got into. Through a friend I learned of job openings for ex-reporters at Bell Laboratories, AT&T's former research and development arm. Equally unfortunately, I later learned that in corporate America, when you do a good job at something, you probably will be promoted. And when you get promoted, you get new bosses. Some are good and you want to work with them forever. When you get to the other ones, it's perfectly acceptable to look elsewhere.

If you're really dumb, you take a job someplace you've never been, earning a whole lot less, redeemed only by the fact that your kid is out and on her own and you're having a good time being paid to be nosy. I sailed from a cushy
corporate port in a Fortune 100 company back into the turbulent waters of the Fourth Estate. I missed newsroom insanity, so in 1989 I hired on as an editor at the
Dallas Morning News
.

Loved my work at the paper. Dallas? Not so much. It just didn't feel like a good match. Endowed with a job I liked in a town I didn't, and locked into a contract that said moving expenses had to be repaid if a new employee departed within a year of hire, I embarked on a quest for kindred spirits. The search ended several months later, in November 1990, when, thanks to the transfer of my ACLU membership, I got invited to a Jefferson Day dinner honoring Ken Gjemre, founder of Half Price Books. It was to be moderated by a spunky woman reporter whose work I had admired over the years. Her name was Molly Ivins.

I sent a check and marked my calendar. As a reporter, and therefore theoretically a neutral purveyor of information, I wasn't supposed to belong to the ACLU at all, but hey, the membership had been paid in full in my former corporate life. Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, I must here confess that as an intrepid reporter I am fearless; but walking cold into a social situation where I know no one, oh dear.

If it hadn't been for the movie
The Princess Bride,
I might never have met Molly up close and personal. What, you might reasonably ask, does that have to do with anything? Well, this: near the end of the movie, Mandy Patinkin's Spanish character, Inigo Montoya, has long been searching for the six-fingered man who murdered his father. Montoya finally finds the homicidal villain and at last is able to speak the mantra that has sustained him through the long, circuitous journey to this, his adversary's final swashbuckle. As hero faces down dastardly bad guy, Montoya repeats the phrase that has guided him lo these many years: “Hello; my name is Inigo Montoya. You keel my father. Prepare to die.”

Borrowing from the first part of the mantra and modifying the rest, I sallied forth. En route to the entrance to where the ACLU shindig was to be held, I kept repeating to myself, “Hello; my name is Ellen Sweets. I just moved here and I don't know a soul.” Seated on a stone bench outside the entry door was a rather substantial woman extracting a few final drags from a Marlboro Light. As she picked up the pack, I launched into my spiel. She looked up, nodded and smiled as she shook my proffered hand, and replied in that unmistakably resonant voice of hers: “Well, hello thay-uh, Ellen Sweets,” she intoned. “Mah
name is Molly Ivins.” Just like that, the woman I had hoped to at least speak with after the dinner was speaking to me. Her columns had been generating serious buzz for a quite a while; a book based on them was due out any minute. And there she was, seated outside, waiting to meet me.
The Princess Bride
had worked its magic.

She squished her cigarette in the adjacent sand-filled stone ashtray, took my arm, and escorted me in to the dinner, allowing as how, although she couldn't invite me to join her table because she was seated with the honoree, she would park me with friends. After dinner and some lighthearted speechifying, Molly, her friends John and Susan Albach, and I adjourned to a nearby piano bar for drinks. Midway through my second vodka martini, I learned that Susan was from Short Hills, New Jersey, and a graduate of Kent Place School in Summit. I had lived in Summit, and my daughter graduated from Kent Place exactly twenty years after Susan.