Molly Ivins and Justice, Among Friends

Molly Ivins, whom you probably know better as Molly, was the thinking person’s Norma Jeane Baker, whom you probably know better as Marilyn Monroe.

Beautiful spirits fit poorly into jars marked “celebrity icon.” It’s not a matter of fragility or weakness. It has nothing to do with old gender stereotypes (made old, in part, with Molly’s help). Even Muhammad Ali was nearly smothered by the American celebrity bottling company.

I just finished reading Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life, by Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith. It is a poignant story well told, a parable about, well, about so much of our contemporary life  — including the tragedy and comedy of celebrity — that one gets dizzy trying to grasp Molly’s influence on American journalism and politics.

The book wasn’t easy for me to read, though. I was never a close confidant of Molly’s, though we were friends for twenty-five years. Molly inspired me, as she did countless others. She sacrificed her time to do favors for me. She graciously wrote the forward to my book, The Politics of Deceit, during a stressful, unhappy time in her life. I didn’t know just how difficult that time was until I read this book. I hope that had I known, I wouldn’t have asked.

I was able to return some of those favors to Molly over the years. But as I closed the cover on her biography I realized, sadly, that I never gave enough to Molly, who gave so much of herself to all of us.

I came to — and left — the biography in something of the frame of mind Thoreau brought to his July, 1850 trip to Fire Island where he hoped to recover the remains of writer Margaret Fuller. Fuller and her family were drowned in the Atlantic when their ship wrecked just off the coast. She was returning to America after covering the Italian Revolution for the New York Tribune.  There on the broad, flat beach, relics seemed at first “only a slight inequality in the sweep of the shore,” Thoreau writes in “Cape Cod.” He was soon overwhelmed:

…as I stood there they grew more and more imposing. They were alone with the beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them, and I was impressed as if there was an understanding between them and the ocean which necessarily left me out, with my sniveling sympathies. That dead body had taken possession of the shore, and reigned over it as no living one could, in the name of a certain majesty which belonged to it.

There are a good many painful details in Minutaglio and Smith’s tale. They have to be there, because the biography would be misleading without them, and because there are profound lessons for us in Molly’s ordeals. It’s as though she’s done us all one more favor by making the tough parts of her personal life so available.

She lost the man she called her first real love  to a tragic accident when she was still in college. She struggled for decades with her drinking. Her relationship with her father was troubled. She took up the burden of celebrity to prove herself, but also because she knew her fame could help others, could help the causes she put so much of her life into advancing.  In her last years, rocked by illnesses she refused  to give an inch to, she was nothing short of heroic.

What’s under-nourished in the book is the sense of the joy that was every bit as present as the pain, as it is in all lives fully lived. This may not be the fault of the authors. The happy times are referred to and described in A Rebel Life. But ecstasies and celebrations are a lot like dreams, damned engaging while you’re in them, hard to remember and render convincingly in the morning. Few readers will be intoxicated by plain, simple reference to Molly’s world-embracing laugh or descriptions of all-night bacchanals, though many will shed tears at some of her soul-wrenching journal entries. I suppose there’s a clue to the birth of tragedy in this.

Molly found plenty of joy. I was blessed to share some of it with her. Here are a couple of very small sketches of passing moments with Molly, given with the understanding that there are hundreds or thousands of folks who can paint such pictures. They are rather offhand, punchline-free moments, certainly not unique. They are here because Molly’s life with her friends was an endless series of such small but priceless times.

There was an afternoon in Santa Fe, where we’d come to celebrate lawyer-hero David Richards’ birthday. Molly invited me along to visit her physicist brother-in-law. We sat in the courtyard of a Mexican restaurant. Ever vigilant, we let no throats grow parched. For hours we talked of mountains, galaxies, quarks, the Middle East, books and music. Molly was simply transported by adventures in ideas. She was in love with learning. Under the soft light of an afternoon Southwestern sun, Molly gave us a glimpse of a world made new. To the casual onlooker we were just another table of talking and laughing drinkers. We knew better.

Another time  comes to mind. In 1987, Molly hosted my daughter’s  one-year-old birthday party at the small ranch of a friend in the Hill Country. I drove her back to town that night.  Along the way she managed to weave a hilarious but intellectually coherent story involving novelist Anne Rice and political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls had written that real justice was possible if we were to choose its principles from behind a veil of ignorance, unaware of where we would fall in the pecking order. Could we make room for Rice’s passionate vampires in such a world? Molly wanted to know.

These brief moments mean the world to me.  Insignificant in any grand narrative of her life, they help show the thrill Molly found in caring for and thinking about the world. There were more legendary and star-studded times.  Famous folk would appear at the Final Friday parties at her home and some of us would annoy her closer friends, who were more aware and concerned about her health than a too blind and selfish boy like me, by staying up talking till three or four in the morning.

Molly understood the maelstrom she entered as she became America’s most famous journalist (as Minutaglio and Smith rightly note).  She weathered the killing schedule, the hate mail, the never-ending demands. Her close friends, like Sara Speights and Kaye Northcutt, knew that Molly left herself out of the care she offered the world, so they offered it to her. By making her private papers so public, Molly left a reminder for the rest of us that no matter how hard we struggle for justice, we have to remember to care for those closest to us, those who need our strength even more than we need theirs.

In the end, justice is beheld among friends.  Or, as Molly would say, beloveds.

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