Straight Talk and Texas Zingers From Molly Ivins

I think everyone probably has the same reaction upon meeting Molly Ivins for the first time--"wow, she really is tall." She also really is as funny and as down-to-earth as her columns would suggest.

After a week tracking her Random House publicist down (who for some reason kept confusing "Molly Ivins" and "Maya Angelou"), I was prepared for an interview conducted with a secretary in the room and a security guard outside the door. I should have known better. This, after all, was the woman fired from the New York Times for describing a community chicken-killing festival as "a gang-pluck."

Ivins answered her own hotel phone (if she has a publicist travelling with her, he or she was nowhere in sight) and took off her shoes as soon as she sat down. The one thing surprising about Ivins is her voice. Her columns shout; she speaks so softly that the tape recorder could barely pick up her voice:

LES: As your work has become syndicated in the last few years, you have in some ways become sort of the imparter of Texas news to the world. The comparison that comes most easily to mind is the early work of Mike Royko, who performed much the same service for Chicago.

MI: For years, syndicates would call me and say: "if you'd just move to Washington, we could get you nationally syndicated."

I'd tell them: "I don't want to move to Washington. And if Royko can do it out of Chicago why I can't do it out of Texas?"

LES: Do you think knowing you're writing for a national audience has influenced or changed the way you write about Texas?

MI: I do three columns a week for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and I write for Fort Worth very specifically. I think I'm supposed to try and do one non-Texas column a week but I kind of never pay any attention to that.

And no, I don't think it's changed the way I write about Texas. I've been writing for Texas, about Texas for Texas, about Texas politics for a long time.

LES: Do you ever get reactions from friends who otherwise agree with you but worry about how you're making Texas look?

MI: Oh yes, the "making us look like fools problem." I'm a journalist, I'm not in public relations, I'm not an ambassador, I'm not supposed to make Texas look good to the rest of the world, I'm supposed to talk about what's going on.

LES: At the Wordsworth reading in Cambridge you spoke about how Rush Limbaugh has turned into sort of a cult figure for many of his listeners. Leaving the cult aspect aside, he does have the sort of humorous maverick style that appeals to many young people.

MI: I don't think that Rush Limbaugh is the equivalent of say, Mort Sahl. And again, it's because of who his targets are. Yes, it's identifiably satire, but the point I was trying to make last night is that when you aim satire at powerless groups it is really not only cruel, it's pathetically vulgar.

I suppose Mr. Limbaugh thinks that comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted has the charm of novelty, but frankly, it seems to me that a great deal of the American media already does that.

LES: You talk about Clinton quite a lot in your this book and in more recent columns. What about Al Gore? Is his being Vice-President going to hurt his profile or help it?

MI: As I think people are starting to notice, he's a lot funnier than you might think when you look at him. I've noticed that with children of politicians (you know Gore's daddy was a senator), they're just so long in the public eye and started so young that they tend to have a real public face. And Gore has, of course, the public face of an utterly humorless young Baptist minister.

As much as you can with that job, he seems to be making a good reputation for himself. If he can straighten out the glass ashtray procurement problem, we'll probably declare him a national hero. But I must say in terms of fun, he's no Dan Quayle.

LES: You write in your book about going back to Smith for your 25th reunion. What, if anything, did you learn by coming east to college that you would not have learned had you stayed in Texas?

MI: I do think that part of one's education should be going to school somewhere other than where you were raised. Just because I think it helps broaden your mind.

It was not a happy time to be a Texan. John Kennedy was assasinated in Dallas in November of 1963. I was in college and I assure you, going to school in Massachusetts with a Texas accent was not a lot of fun. One of the first things I learned to do was speak without a Texas accent.

And it's true I still love to laugh at my Smithie classmates who are still called Mudge, Midge, Buffy, Muffy and Tooters. But actually I think I got a pretty good education at Smith. They were, when I think about it now, amazingly patient with me. I fancied myself a great intellectual rebel.

LES: Whose bylines do you always read?

MI: One of my great heroes in journalism is Bob Sherrill. I always read Sherrill pieces. They're usually to be found in obscure publications like the Nation. I like both the Brits who write for the Nation. I frequently don't agree with them, but I think they're both wonderful writers, Cockburn and Hitchens.

I think some of the best journalism today is being done in books, which does not speak well for the periodical industry in this country. Jonathon Kozol, Neil Sheehan, Susan Sheehan for that matter. Oh gosh, the trouble with starting a list like this is that you're always are so afraid you're going to leave someone out.

LES: Well, for example, who do you read on the New York Times editorial page, if anyone?

MI: I read Safire. I like to read him. I have a lot of respect for him because he does his own reporting. A lot of columnists just suck their thumbs. Baker and Safire I think are the only ones I read regularly. I read Kinsley in the New Republic.

LES: You, Ellen Goodman and Anna Quindlen are probably the three female columnists who are read the most. I'm wondering if you think there are any other similarities.

MI: I really like Goodman's stuff. But there's an extent to which--and of course I like Anna's stuff too--I'm more of a reporter. I cover politics. And it seems to me I'm still frequently in the gritty maw of it all. I guess at this point I'm a certified thumb sucker--I still think of myself as a reporter.

LES: In Woman of the Year, the Katherine Hepburn character is supposedly loosely based on Dorothy Thompson. So if you envision someone making a movie of your life sometime in the future, who can you imagine playing yourself?

MI: I'm trying to think. Lily Tomlin. There's no one big enough. I was a great fan of a wonderful actress who died recently. She did Moon for the Misbegotten; she did quite a lot of Eugene O'Neill on Broadway. Colleen Dewhurst.

LES: You talked a bit both at the book reading and in your book about populism being a term that's misused greatly. ("Calling David Duke a populist is like calling Pat Buchanan a global visionary: message--Zulus are coming.") Can you ever see--

MI:--real populism starting again? Yes. I think it grew out of the soil last time and it'll grow out again.

Maybe it sounds fatalistic or predestinarian or something to say that politics responds to the times but I think it does.

LES: When you say "grew out of the soil" is that a reference to farmers, or do you just mean in an organic sense?

MI: Organic sense. It's so needed. Larry Goodwill's book on populism (well, he's written two) is still the best. It is one of the great tragedies of American history that populism was essentially destroyed by racism.