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Summary
Summary
She was a groomed for a gilded life in moneyed Houston, but Molly Ivins left the country club behind to become one of the most provocative, courageous, and influential journalists in American history. Presidents and senators called her for advice; her column ran in 400 newspapers; her books, starting with Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? , were bestsellers. But despite her fame, few people really knew her: what her background was, who influenced her, how her political views developed, or how many painful struggles she fought.
Molly Ivins is a comprehensive, definitive narrative biography, based on intimate knowledge of Molly, interviews with her family, friends, and colleagues, and access to a treasure trove of her personal papers. Written in a rollicking style, it is at once the saga of a powerful, pugnacious woman muscling her way to the top in a world dominated by men; a fascinating look behind the scenes of national media and politics; and a sobering account of the toll of addiction and cancer. Molly Ivins adds layers of depth and complexity to the story of an American legend--a woman who inspired people both to laughter and action.
Author Notes
Bill Minutaglio is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas and author of several critically acclaimed books, including the first unauthorized biography of George W. Bush, First Son: George W. Bush & The Bush Family Dynasty .
W. Michael Smith was a researcher for Molly Ivins for eight years. He also worked for Gail Sheehy and several other authors, including staffers at The New York Times .
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Until her death in 2007, Molly Ivins was a staple of the op-ed page, aiming her arrow at favorite targets like George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and the circus of Southern-particularly Texan-politics. The Texas daughter of an oil executive and major player in Houston society, Ivins enjoyed an early, privileged view of Texas deal making and the rise of modern Republicanism. Her subsequent career was a full-fledged rebellion, beginning with her father's conservatism, and culminating in a rejection of both "objective" (read: neutered) journalism and the oil-rich Republican machine. Ivins's insight couldn't be timelier, and the lines she crossed on behalf of women and journalists are overdue for celebration. She was also a fascinating and private person who charmed with her Southern character and was rumored to have had a number of high-profile affairs. An ideal investigation would get into these deep, dark corners, the way Ivins herself would have, but this biography is based on select personal papers and positive recollections, written by close admirers: Minutalglio is a Texas journalism professor, Smith was a long-time researcher for Ivins. Though they fail to explain what truly motivated Ivins's relentless crusade, or the deep tradition of American opposition behind her seemingly-anomalous Texas liberalism, this book should please fans and win Ivins new ones. (Nov.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
New York Review of Books Review
WHAT fearful fun Molly Ivins would have had with Glenn Beck, the birthers, Sarah Palin, Representative Joe ("You lie!") Wilson and, of course, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas - he of the secessionist aspirations and wonderful hair. And how pained she would be, while never losing hope, as she showered President Obama with tough love over his policies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and his difference-splitting diffidence on health care reform. Ivins, who died in 2007 at the age of 62 after a battle with breast cancer, was that rarest of endangered species, an unreconstructed Texas liberal. As a newspaper reporter, syndicated columnist and public speaker, she built a body of work enlivened by political passion and rollicking wit. She lampooned the Texas Legislature, the business establishment, the power elite and most of all George W. Bush, whom she immortalized as "Shrub." But, as suggested by Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith, in "Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life," her greatest creation was herself. The authors frame her self-invention as a lifelong mutiny against her bourgeois upbringing in River Oaks, the same gilded Houston neighborhood where George W. grew up after his family moved from Midland, and the harsh judgment of her authoritarian father, a Republican oil company executive with yacht-club airs and some ugly racial theories, which he freely shared with his daughter. By August 1992 - when I briefly crossed paths with Ivins on the Clinton-Gore bus caravan making its way through the Lone Star State (only briefly, because she quickly abandoned the press bus after being invited to ride with Bill and Hillary) - she had already perfected the persona that was equal parts cracker-barrel and belletristic. She was a majestic presence, six feet tall and ruby-haired, raucously laughing, squinting like a gunslinger and tossing out epigrams with a redneck accent. Typical Ivins lines: If a certain Dallas Republican congressman's "I.Q. slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day." "Calling George H. W. Bush shallow is like calling a dwarf short." Pat Buchanan's notorious culture-war speech at the 1992 Republican convention "probably sounded better in the original German." It was largely a pose. Ivins had attended a fancy prep school in Houston, and spoke proficient French after attending a cultural immersion program at the Chateau du Montcel not far from Paris and spending her junior year abroad in Paris researching a paper on Charles de Gaulle. She shared her father's affection for the pricey pastime of sailing, graduated from Smith College just like her ditzily genteel mother and grandmother, and received a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. She even had a brief flirtation with Ayn Rand, which ended with the motorcycle death of her college boyfriend - "the love of my life," Ivins later said - a wealthy Yale man and "Atlas Shrugged" enthusiast of whom her father might have approved. Molly Ivins at The New York Times. "She spoke with an East Coast, educated elite diction, inflected by a junior-year-abroad French accent. She sounded like Jacqueline Kennedy," her close friend Terry O'Rourke told Minutaglio and Smith, recalling the Molly Ivins of the mid-1960s when they were both reporter-interns at The Houston Chronicle. "She was the daughter of corporate power and wealth." Ivins owned up to her background when it suited her - once fretting that a prominent New York editor, with whom she was preparing to dine at an expensive French restaurant, might dismiss her "as a hick from Texas." But more often she played the rube. "I grew up in East Texas," she once claimed in a speech at Smith College, fiddling with the geographical and cultural map to locate herself in one of the rural mill towns where the girls' high school basketball teams (against which Ivins had competed as a teenager) "always wore pink plastic curlers in their hair during games so they'd look good at the dance afterwards." Her newspaper career began conventionally enough at The Minneapolis Tribune, where she polished her prose for three years on human interest filler, until her editors let her write about the city's young radicals. She dated and moved in with one of them, while flouting the norms of objective journalism by campaigning for tenants' rights in her spare time. IT wasn't until 1970 that Ivins came into her own. As co-editor of The Texas Observer, the Austin-based journal of progressive politics whose influence outdistanced its tiny circulation, she established herself as a leading authority on the cowboy-booted rascals and occasional idealists who populated the State Legislature, attracting the attention of national journalistic heavyweights like David Broder and R. W. Apple Jr., and befriending the blacklisted television personality John Henry Faulk, one of her early supporters. She also courted local up-and-comers like the future governor Ann Richards and the state land commissioner Bob Armstrong, with whom she went rafting and camping. Ivins grew especially close (possibly as a lover) to the Democratic state comptroller Bob Bullock, the most skillful power broker in Texas, a gun-toting, whipsmart manic-depressive who shared her weakness for hard drinking. As Ivins's barroom mentor, Bullock bequeathed her a precious perspective on the inner workings of state politics and government. Decades later, as lieutenant governor, Bullock played a similar role (minus the sexual tension and alcohol) with Ivins's nemesis, George W. Minutaglio, the author of a well-received Bush biography, "First Son," and Smith, who spent six years working for Ivins as a researcher and gofer, draw on voluminous private papers and interviews to produce a painfully intimate portrait of her family dysfunction, struggles with alcoholism, thwarted love life and professional frustrations - notably an ill-conceived stint in the late 1970s and early '80s with The New York Times. That job ended shortly after the legendary editor Abe Rosenthal gave Ivins a dressing-down for her suggestive phrasing in a story about chickens. Rosenthal chided her for trying to make Times readers think dirty thoughts. "Damn if I could fool you, Mr. Rosenthal," Ivins quoted herself as replying. WhUe chockablock with colorful anecdotes and psychological insights, "Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life" isn't convincing as the biography of a significant figure in journalism. Minutaglio and Smith fall short of making their case that she was, variously, "one of the best-known and most influential journalists in American history" and "a Texas Mark Twain." Despite publishing some best-selling collections and several well-regarded magazine articles, and co-writing two slight volumes about Dubya, Ivins never wrote the big, important book about Texas that she'd always wanted to. But true to form, she made a joke of her failings, once wearing a black T-shirt blazoned with the message: "Don't Ask About the Book." Ivins lampooned the Texas Legislature, big business, the power elite and, most of all, George W. Bush. Lloyd Grove, a former newspaper reporter in Corpus Christi and Dallas, is editor at large for The Daily Beast.
Kirkus Review
Sturdy life of the hardworking, hard-living Texas journalist, commentator and bane of Bushes everywhere. Molly Ivins (19442007) grew up privileged in Houston, and she went to the same club as the Bushes, including the one to whom she would later give the devastating nickname Shrub. "People from Houston who knew both families tried to draw parallels between the Bush and Ivins households," write Minutaglio (Journalism/Univ. of Texas; City on Fire: The Forgotten Disaster That Devastated a Town and Ignited a Landmark Legal Battle, 2003, etc.) and former Ivins researcher Smith. The parallels don't seem so far-fetched, especially in the upper-class codes that all concerned were expected to keep. Shrub didn't exactly uphold those codes, and neither did Ivins, who wriggled away from class conventions to become an icon of the old media through an old-fashioned ethic of endless work and serious guzzling. Minutaglio and Smith write with a certain nostalgia for the boozy, smoke-choked, decidedly un-PG newsrooms of old, in which Ivins cut her teeth and began amassing mountains of clips, writing on topics as various as Native American rights, rock concerts and cars. Yet she would not come into her own until the '80s, when, having worked for the New York Times and many papers in Texas, she took on the Bush family as her special beat and braved Karl Rove's dirty-tricks machine. (One of them was signing Ivins up for magazine subscriptions and then sending collection agents after her for nonpayment.) The authors dip into the dangerous waters of psychobiography at a couple of points, hazarding guesses on the effect of the death of an early love and pondering the what-ifs of Ivins's persona. Yet they also offer a solid account of her development as a reporter and writer. The best part, of course, is rereading Ivins's old zingers, as when she said of a Pat Buchanan speech, "It probably sounded better in the original German." Aspiring journalists, read thisand then get to work. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Molly Ivins had a voice to be reckoned with at a time when female reporters were relegated to the "women's pages." Throwing off the mantle of convention and embracing the quirky rebelliousness of her home state of Texas in the 1960s, she forged a career as an influential political columnist and social activist. Minutaglio (journalism, Univ. of Texas; First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty) and Smith, who was a researcher for Ivins for eight years, provide a detailed account of Ivins's tumultuous personal life and successful journalism career. They show how she rebelled against her parents' conservative views and country-club lifestyle to become a lifelong champion of the First Amendment and liberal politics. The authors have gleaned insight from interviewing her family, friends, and colleagues and combing through her personal papers; unfortunately, their use of superfluous details and slang and off-color words bogs down the narrative. Verdict Fans of Ivins's work and readers interested in feminist history, contemporary politics, and media studies will like this first full-length biography of Ivins.-Donna Marie Smith, Palm Beach Cty. Lib., FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. ix |
| 1 General Jim | p. 1 |
| 2 River Oaks | p. 25 |
| 3 Ghost | p. 47 |
| 4 Naturally Backwards into Journalism | p. 67 |
| 5 Young Radicals | p. 89 |
| 6 Us Against Them | p. 121 |
| 7 Necessary Humor | p. 143 |
| 8 The You Know What | p. 167 |
| 9 "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?" | p. 189 |
| 10 Molly, Inc. | p. 215 |
| 11 The Kind of Pressure | p. 241 |
| 12 You Got to Dance | p. 265 |
| 13 Dearly Beloveds | p. 287 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 307 |
| Notes | p. 311 |
| Index | p. 325 |
