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Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life | By Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith | PublicAffairs | 360 pages, $26.95
On July 6, 1964, Henry Holland, the brilliant and eccentric scion of a wealthy Texas family, was driving his motorcycle down a country road when a dog ran into his path. Holland swerved, his bike slammed into a roadside guard rail, and he was killed instantly.
Hollandâs death might have been lost to historyâa meaningless tragedy among so many othersâexcept for the fact that it would go on to produce, in a roundabout way, one of the most famous journalists in America. Holland was the boyfriend, and quite possibly the fiancĂ©, and either way the soul mate, of a Smith College sophomore named Mary Ivins. Molly, for short. And his loss, suggest the authors of the new biography Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life, turned the future columnist away from the path for which sheâd been groomedâa privileged existence among the Texas eliteâand toward the one for which sheâd be known.
The turnabout wasnât merely a matter of Hollandâs death, of course. She had shown a flair for writing at an early age, and despite a penchant for reading that would make her seem withdrawn (her family nicknamed her âThe Moleâ), she aspired to celebrity. Throughout her teenage years, she carried a note, addressed to her future self, folded in her wallet: If she hadnât become famous by the age of twenty-five, she pledged, she would commit suicide.
Still, had a dog not crossed her boyfriendâs path that day in 1964, Ivins would likely have become Molly Hollandâand we, in turn, would likely have been deprived of Molly Ivins, the Molly Ivinsâthe reporter who skewered politics and politicians in Austin and Washington and places in between; the columnist who combined her Texas roots and patrician education to brilliant (and devastating) effect; the advocate who fought relentlessly for civil liberties; the celebrity who, upon her death, was eulogized by everyone from President Bush to Maya Angelou; the writer who was compared, as a stylist, to Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, François Rabelais, Lenny Bruce, and the prophet Jeremiah; the charismatic characterâsix feet tall, with a mega-watt smile and a shock of red hairâwho swore with abandon, drank with even more, puttered around barefoot, laughed more loudly than was proper, and had a dog named Shit.
Ivins was âan extraordinarily fastidious self-chronicler,â the biographers Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith note, and their book benefits not only from fresh interviews of Ivinsâs relatives, colleagues, and many, many friends, but also from the information contained within the thousands of personal documents she donated to the public archives at the University of Texas at Austinâamong them phone logs, travel itineraries, reportersâ notebooks, memos to and from editors, Broadway tickets, grocery lists, medical records, grade-school report cards, and intimately personal letters. The gift in this case was a nod toward generosity and transparency by a woman who valued both, but also, the authors speculate, a reflection of her desire to demonstrate that âin real life she was far more complex than the public persona familiar to millions of readers.â
If so, they have carried out her wish, and in meticulous detail. Minutaglio and Smith trace Ivinsâs childhood in River Oaks, the ostentatiously wealthy Houston enclave where she grew up; her education at Smith, where she developed both her confidence as a communicator and her fondness for strong cocktails; and her summer spent in Paris, during which she perfected her French and became enamored of John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, and Charles De Gaulle. An internship at the Houston Chronicle, followed by a year at Columbiaâs J-School, led to a short stint at the Minneapolis Tribune and a long one at the progressive Texas Observer.
It was at the latter, covering the Austin Statehouse, where she fully developed the writing voiceârollicking, wryâfor which sheâd be celebrated. The Observer, the authors note, gave Ivins âfree rein not just to address issues that barely dented the pages of the mainstream papersâthe out-sized issues of poverty, racism, systemic corruptionâbut 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.â And she embraced the freedom. Confronted with the swaggering, booze-fueled theatricality that was the Texas political scene of the early 1970s, Ivins found irreverence. The kind that would lead her, later on, to dub George W. Bush as âShrubââand to render such pronouncements as âRonald Reagan is so dumb that if you put his brains in a bee, it would fly backwards.â
Her Observer days solidified both Ivins’s opposition to journalistic detachment as a value and a possibility (âThere is no such thing as objectivity,â she would say; in fact, âI actually think it is pernicious as a goalâ), and, relatedly, her progressive politics. It also set the stage for the one-foot-in, one-foot-out relationship she would have, throughout her career, with Establishment Journalism: She worked at The New York Times, but was never really part of it. She was nominated for a Pulitzer, but never won. Friends visiting her Austin home were amused to find that many of the awards she did win had been put to use as coasters, trivets, and serving trays.
In fact, an enduring quality of Ivinsâs life was, as the bookâs title makes clear, rebellion itself. A good many of her quirky Mollyisms were not truly quirks at all, the authors suggest, but minor mutinies that gradually coalesced into personal idiosyncrasies. Her parents named her Mary? Sheâd go by Molly. Her mother wanted her to become a Lady of Society? She swore, and smoked, and drank, and took up with fellow swearers and smokers and drinkers. Her father wanted her to become a good Republican? She cavorted with leftist radicals during a time when being a leftist radical actually meant something, and went on, sure enough, to become the most famous liberal columnist in the country. Her fans were eager for her to hurry up and finish her next book? She printedâand woreâa t-shirt emblazoned: DONâT ASK ABOUT THE BOOK.
A Rebel Life could easily have reduced Ivinsâs life to a kind of ongoing dialectic: public persona versus private person, expectations versus hereâs where you can put your expectations. It could have also devolved into a simple study of the journalistâs body of work. But thankfully, the authors resist reductive aesthetics in favor of something both more challenging and more rewarding: empathy. They provide a portrait of their subject that is loving in the most literal sense, one that treats her simply as a person, with the attendant freight of ego and insecurity, strength and frailty.
And since biography is one of the few contexts in which that modern scourgeâvoyeurismâis an asset rather than a weakness, A Rebel Lifeâs candor is immensely valuable, if sometimes also uncomfortable in its intimacy. The book shares, in searing detail, Ivinsâs many brushes with tragedy. In addition to Hollandâs death, there was the alcoholism (âI have wasted so much time getting drunk,” she wrote in a note to herself. “I have wasted so much time hating myself for it the next dayâ), there were the bouts of depression, the loss of friends to illness and accident, the breast cancer that would weaken her for years before taking her life, the suicide of a nephew she loved as a son, the relationship with her domineering father that ranged from tense to turbulent to, the authors suggest, traumatic.
In that sense, the biography is like its subject: unrelentingly honest, unapologetically unfiltered. Fuck it, this is how it was. Though Ivins may be remembered mostly for her work and, with it, her wit, her biography remembers her in the way that she probably would have preferred: as someone who fought against the pressures placed on her by retreating into, and then projecting out, her own humanity. By laughing. By listening. By being a good friend. And by combining those things in the most productive way she knew how: by writing.
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