Molly Ivins, Populist
Texas Columnist,
Dies at 62
By KATHARINE Q.
SEELYE, NYTimes on the Web, January 31, 2007
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Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman, via
Associated Press
Molly
Ivins in 2006. |
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Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper
columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking,
her Texas culture, died today at her home in Austin. She was 62.
Her death, after a long fight with breast cancer, was confirmed by her personal
assistant, Betsy Moon.
In her syndicated column, which appeared in about 350 newspapers, Ms. Ivins
cultivated the voice of a folksy populist who derided those who acted too big
for their britches. She was rowdy and profane, but she could filet her
ideological opponents with droll precision.
After Patrick J. Buchanan, as a conservative candidate for president, declared
at the 1992 Republican National Convention that America was engaged in a
cultural war, she said his speech “probably sounded better in the original
German.”
“There are two kinds of humor,” she told People magazine. One was the kind
“that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity,” she said.
“The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s
what I do.”
Hers was a feisty voice that she developed in the early 1970s at The Texas
Observer, the muckraking biweekly that would become her spiritual home for life.
Her subject was Texas. To her, the Great State, as she called it, was
“reactionary, cantankerous and hilarious,” and its legislature was “reporter
heaven.” When the legislature was set to convene, she warned her readers:
“Every village is about to lose its idiot.”
Her Texas upbringing made her something of an expert on the Bush family.
She viewed President George H. W. Bush benignly. (“Real Texans do not use
the word ‘summer’ as a verb,” she wrote.)
But she derided President George W. Bush, whom she first knew in high school.
She called him Shrub and Dubya. With the Texas journalist Lou Dubose, she
wrote two best-selling books about Mr. Bush: “Shrub: The Short but Happy
Political Life of George W. Bush” (2000) and “Bushwhacked” (2003).
In 2004 she campaigned against Mr. Bush’s re-election, and as the war in Iraq
continued, she called for his impeachment. In her last column, earlier
this month, she urged readers to “raise hell” against the war.
Mary Tyler Ivins was born on Aug. 30, 1944 in California and grew up in the
affluent Houston suburb of River Oaks. Her father, James, a conservative
Republican, was general counsel and later president of Tenneco Corporation, an
oil and gas company.
As a student at private school, Ms. Ivins was tall and big-boned and often felt
out of place. “I spent my girlhood as a Clydesdale among thoroughbreds,”
she said.
She developed her liberal views partly from reading The Texas Observer at a
friend’s house. Those views led to fierce arguments with her father about
civil rights and the Vietnam War.
“I’ve always had trouble with male authority figures because my father was such
a martinet,” she told The Texas Monthly.
After her father developed advanced cancer and shot himself to death in 1998,
she wrote: “I believe that all the strength I have comes from learning how
to stand up to him.”
Like her mother, Margot, and grandmother, Ms. Ivins went to Smith College in
Massachusetts. Graduating in 1966, she also studied at the Institute of
Political Science in Paris and earned her master’s degree at the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism.
Her first newspaper jobs were at The Houston Chronicle and The Minneapolis
Tribune, now The Star Tribune. In 1970, she jumped at the chance to move
to Austin, where she became co-editor of The Observer.
Covering the statehouse, she found characters whose fatuousness helped focus her
calling and define her persona, which her friends saw as populist and her
detractors saw as manufactured cornpone. Even her friends marveled at how
quickly she could drop her Texas voice for what they called her Smith voice.
Sometimes she combined the two, as in: “The sine qua non, as we say in
Amarillo.”
Ronnie Dugger, the former publisher of The Observer, said the political circus
in Texas inspired her. “It was like somebody snapped the football to her
and said, ‘All the rules are off, this is the football field named Texas, and
it’s wide open,”’ he said.
In 1976, her writing, which she said was often fueled by “truly impressive
amounts of beer,” landed her a job at The New York Times. She cut an
unusual figure in The Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and
bringing in her dog, whose name was an expletive.
While she drew important writing assignments, like covering the Son of Sam
killings and Elvis Presley’s death, she sensed she did not fit in and complained
that Times editors drained the life from her prose. “Naturally, I was
miserable, at five times my previous salary,” she later wrote. “The New
York Times is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.”
After a stint in Albany, she was transferred to Denver to cover the Rocky
Mountain states, where she continued to challenge her editors’ capacity for
prankish writing.
Covering an annual chicken slaughter in New Mexico in 1980, she used a sexually
suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article. But
her attempt to use it angered the executive editor, A.M. Rosenthal, who ordered
her back to New York and assigned her to City Hall, where she covered routine
matters with little flair.
She quit The Times in 1982 after The Dallas Times Herald offered to make her a
columnist. She took the job even though she loathed Dallas, once
describing it as the kind of town “that would have rooted for Goliath to beat
David.”
But the paper, she said, promised to let her write whatever she wanted.
When she declared of a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to
water him twice a day,” many readers were appalled, and several advertisers
boycotted the paper. In her defense, her editors rented billboards that
read: “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” The slogan became the
title of the first of her six books.
After The Times Herald folded in 1991, she wrote for The Fort Worth
Star-Telegram, until 2001, when her column was syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
Ms. Ivins, who never married, is survived by a brother, Andy, of London, Tex.,
and a sister, Sara Ivins Maley, of Albuquerque, N.M. One of her closest
friends was Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, who died last year.
The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the Texas wilds.
“Molly is a great raconteur, with a long memory,” Ms. Richards said, “and she’s
the best person in the world to take on a camping trip because she’s full of
good-ol-boy stories.”
Ms. Ivins worked at a breakneck pace, adding television appearances, book tours,
lectures and fund-raising to a crammed writing schedule. She also wrote
for Esquire, the Atlantic Monthly and The Nation.
An article about her in 1996 in The Star-Telegram suggested that her work
overload may have caused an increase in factual errors in her columns.
(She eventually hired a fact-checker.) And in 1995, the writer Florence
King accused Ms. Ivins of lifting passages from Ms. King’ for an article that
Ms. Ivins had written in Mother Jones in 1988. Ms. Ivins had credited Ms.
King six times in the article but not in two lengthy sentences, and she
apologized to Ms. King.
Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in
describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you;
then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than
that.”
But she continued to write her columns and continued to write and raise money
for The Observer.
Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On
the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote: “This is where you can
tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go
after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”
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