Lone Starlets
By MIMI SWARTZ, Op-Ed
Contributor from the NYTimes on the Web, February 3, 2007
HOUSTON, -- THE last few
months have provided hard times for iconic Texas women and the Texans — and
others — who worshipped them. Last September, we lost both a former
governor, Ann Richards, and a former state first lady, Nellie Connally.
When the columnist Molly Ivins died on Wednesday, it seemed that a certain kind
of Texas woman might be gone forever.
If you’ve read the obituaries, you know the type: the funny, brave,
irreverent kind, who spoke out against a life in a (supposedly) brutal, backward
state. It was Ms. Richards who insisted that the elder President Bush was
born with a “silver foot in his mouth,” and Ms. Ivins who insisted that the
younger one had rightfully earned the nickname of “Shrub.” Mrs. Connally, less
well known outside the state, was almost as funny and probably more beloved
here, because she delivered her barbs in private.
As befits most icons, all of these women went by their first names among people
who didn’t know them. They will be remembered for their strength and their
wit, but what stays with me even more is their fragility and their anger.
I wrote about them all over the years, and with each of their deaths I found
myself thinking, amid the tributes, that being a Texas icon of the female
variety probably wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
You can make the case that fury goes with the territory here. The
male-dominated, rough-and-tumble Texas these women grew up in wasn’t hospitable
to ladies in smarty pants; all three had to come up with novel ways to satisfy
their needs and ambitions in a circumscribed world.
Ms. Ivins and Ms. Richards in particular were very interested in bringing about
social change; the relationship between the state as a whole and the liberal
coterie of which they were an integral part is one of the great, doomed romances
of Texas history. Mrs. Connally was far from a liberal Democrat — her
husband, Gov. John Connally, famously jumped from the Democratic Party to the
Republicans — but she, too, triumphed over a youthful shyness to serve as her
spouse’s most undying loyalist, whether he was pushing for school reform in
Texas or, later, trying to escape scandal in Washington.
In other words, rather than flee the state for friendlier waters, all three far
preferred to stay and swim upstream. All three, in fact, felt a deep
obligation to their home state: it energized them as it defined them —
favorably — to the outside world, which always felt better when it could look
down on Texas.
Nellie Connally had little choice but to play the part of the gracious, loving
wife; there wasn’t much else a woman of her generation could do (she was 87 when
she died). She was a former beauty queen who married a true prince of
Texas and became a very popular first lady. Yet when I last interviewed
her in 2003 she was living in a two-bedroom apartment overflowing with
memorabilia, waiting each day to have her two allotted drinks with Dan Rather at
5:30. She had attentive children and grandchildren, but she had by then
lost a daughter to suicide, struggled with breast cancer, and endured her
husband’s very public bankruptcy.
And, of course, after the deaths of her husband in 1993 and Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis the next year, she alone lived to tell the tale of what happened in
President John F. Kennedy’s car on Nov. 22, 1963. I heard her describe it
three times to three different audiences during the course of a few weeks.
(It was Nellie, ever smoothing things over, who said, “Mr. President, you can’t
say Dallas doesn’t love you,” just before the shots were fired.) As
horrible as that memory was, it kept her tied to history, and, more important,
to the love of her life — a man who suffered from such profound arrogance and
vanity that his personality has come to overshadow his many accomplishments.
When you saw Ann Richards’s weathered face you knew just what 73 years of life
had cost her. Sure, she had given herself over to the harsh Texas sun on
too many outings; but, like Nellie Connally, there had been other costs:
she, too, had played geisha, not to an ambitious husband but to a group of
ambitious Texas liberals. It was Ms. Richards who had planned the drunken,
irreverent costume parties — memories of the time are hazy, but she once went,
or dressed a friend up, as a tampon. Then she got up next morning to pack
the children’s lunches.
She did it all, pretty near perfectly for a while: a beautiful young woman
of supreme competency with a tart tongue and ambitions far beyond the P.T.A.
Triumphing over all that — as well as smoking, drinking and divorce — formed
part of her campaign story when she ran for governor in 1990, and made her
victory all the sweeter.
But her pain, smoothed over in folksy public speeches and slick campaign
commercials, could catch you up short: when I traveled with her during her
first gubernatorial campaign I marveled at how trussed up and hostile she was,
how her coterie of female supporters were protective to a fault, trying to
shield her from criticism. In the end, she lost her taste for the fight,
and essentially ceded the 1994 gubernatorial election to George W. Bush.
Being a decade younger than her friend Ann Richards, Molly Ivins never had to
serve as anyone’s geisha, and she never would have. But she was a big,
smart, ungainly girl in a state where a female could suffer something close to
capital punishment for those crimes; in self-defense she turned the cracker
vernacular on the crackers and won fame for herself in the process, playing the
Professional Texan. (Those hacks in the Legislature wouldn’t have given a
Smith graduate from ritzy River Oaks the time of day, but a hard-drinking,
foul-talking, big-boned country girl? Well, that worked.)
But in private, Ms. Ivins, too, battled alcohol, and had her coterie of human
shields; they were protecting a woman whose loneliness was as incomprehensible
as it was omnipresent. She was a performer who rarely allowed herself to
be offstage, which, of course, ensured that the majority of us kept our
distance.
There aren’t so many iconic women left in Texas, now — Lady Bird Johnson and the
oil baroness Lynn Wyatt come to mind — but maybe that’s to the good. We
don’t have to fight so hard to be heard, or noticed, or to avoid being taken for
a hick. It’s easier for us, but for everyone who knew them, maybe, not
quite as much fun.
Mimi Swartz is an executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine.
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