Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (18 page)

16

JAN DEMETRI, MOLLY
'
S LONG-SUFFERING ACCOUNTANT
, remained on the periphery of Molly's Austin inner circle, due, one suspects, to the need for her to keep her distance in order to maintain a professional relationship separate from their social one. It was just how things had to be. But she, too, knew about Molly's kitchen skills and is herself no piker when it comes to cooking.

Jan and Molly met through Sara Speights when Molly was still living in Dallas. Sara knew Molly needed help managing her finances, and Jan signed on. All information about income and bills came through her from 1980 until Molly died—as exasperating as it was at times.

“We'd either meet at my office or at someplace like Sweetish Hill [which still serves some of the state's most luscious muffins], and agree to put a certain amount of money in her checking account so she would always know how much she had, and then set some aside,” Jan said. “I was never controlling, but Molly had a way of giving money away before she made it. If I told her she didn't have any money, she would say, ‘Well, I'll just do three extra speeches.'” Pity the poor referee who had to mediate that particular accountant-client relationship.

What a lot of people didn't know, however, was that Molly had a serious philanthropic streak. There was only one caveat: no one was ever to know what she gave or to whom. It drove Jan nuts. “Molly's position on the matter was reminiscent of Rosie O'Donnell's declaration that she would fire her accountant if she ever appeared in
Forbes
because of her wealth and philanthropy,” Jan said. “Only where O'Donnell built arts programs, Molly gave free speeches for any ACLU chapter, anywhere. All the organization had to do was pay her way,
feed her, and provide a place for her to lay her head. Managing Molly wasn't always easy, and she wasn't always easy to work for or with. But as stubborn as she was capable of being, she had a good heart. A really good heart.”

And a big one. She was determined that her blood-kin nieces and nephews have a college education, and she saw to it that that happened. But she gave more than money. Molly never married and couldn't have had room for kids given the pace she kept. Instead she “adopted” the children of friends. They became nieces and nephews too.

Among them were Michelle and Candace McNeely, daughters of Molly's longtime friend Dave McNeely. The girls first met Molly when their ages could be measured in single digits. Dave and Molly had been friends since their overlapping days at the
Houston Chronicle
in 1965, a forty-year friendship that ended with Molly's death. They had met when she was a journalism student working summers at the
Chronicle
and he was a political reporter at the paper. He went on to cover politics for the
Dallas Morning News
, the
Dallas Times Herald
, and the
Austin American-Statesman
.

Dave spent a lot of time in Austin in the early '70s, and was among the crew that gathered on the balcony of the building that housed Dave Richards's law firm and the
Texas Observer
. McNeely remembers those visits as though they were yesterday.

“One of my frequent stops was to see Molly and the
Observer
crowd,” he recalled. “At that time, they were housed in an old two-story house at the corner of West Seventh and Nueces Streets. Sometimes in the afternoons when I was in town, I'd call over to the
Observer
to see what was going on. Molly would often say, ‘Come on over,' adding, ‘and you might bring along a six-pack of Bud.'

“So I would, and we'd hang out on that great second-story porch, look south toward Town Lake, exchange political and personal stories, and, of course, drink beer.”

When McNeely's marriage faltered, Molly invited Candace to spend several days with her in Denver, where by then Molly had become the
New York Times
's Rocky Mountain bureau chief. Candy, as she was called then, remembers conversations about divorce and the importance of not taking it personally. Molly remained Dave's friend through that divorce and became a friend to his next wife, Carole Kneeland—going the extra mile and helping to lead the singing and dancing at their backyard wedding.

Carole died of breast cancer in 1998.

Today Candace, who has legally changed her name to Mariposa, has two specific memories of meals with Molly. They shared a very grown-up conversation about how each felt to be an involuntary observer of an unpleasant divorce, with Molly being her usual attentive listening post. Although there was a twenty-year difference in their ages, they were essentially talking as peers because both were riding the same emotional roller coaster.

“The memorable thing is that she was seeking my help,” Candace/Candy/Mariposa said. “I was the expert, the sixteen-year-old giving advice to the thirty-five-year-old. I had already watched my parents go through what her parents were going through at the time.”

The other remembrance, several years later, was considerably less intense.

“I was visiting her in Denver when she was the
Times
's Rocky Mountain bureau chief. I don't remember what Molly had cooked, but it was something wonderful, and we had watermelon for dessert. We had planned to sit outside and eat it and see how far we could spit the seeds, Texas style—only the weather was too cool. So Molly decided we'd spit seeds inside with a painting on her wall as the target, and we did that for the longest time. She was the one who made me realize grown-ups weren't so different from kids after all.

“One way I keep her memory alive is by incorporating her terms of endearment into conversation whenever possible with friends and strangers. I don't call people ‘sugar plum' as much as she did, but I do use ‘honey' and ‘sweetie pie' a lot. I even called my sister ‘darlin'' a lot, even though we fought like cats and dogs.”

Mariposa's sister, Michelle McNeely Mueller, is now in her forties, but she still laughs when she recalls some of the inscriptions in books from Molly. Her favorite appeared in
Nothin' but Good Times Ahead
and is dated 12/23/93. It reads: “For Michelle—who at the age of 12 shamed me into shaving my armpits—and I have been doing it religiously ever since, I promise. With great affection, Molly Ivins.”

Michelle says she can't remember a time when she didn't know Molly. “But, really, other than Molly getting really pissed off at Sam Kinch at one of the Armstrong campouts because he didn't clean the deer meat well for the group-effort stew and there was still hair on it (it was so gross, and Molly gave him hell for it), I don't remember seeing her angry. The other thing I remember was helping Molly roast a whole pig, and her trying to convince us that the eyeballs were indeed a delicacy—if you want to call that a food memory!”

Kate, a daughter of
Denver Post
reporter Jack Cox and now in her thirties, has vivid Molly memories too. Her best recollection dates to ninth grade when her parents packed her off to spend a week with Molly in Austin.

“She hosted a dinner party in honor of my visit,” Kate said. “I mean, I was only fourteen and she invited several people, including a lovely gay couple. When I look back on it, I realize she was trying to widen my world. I didn't think anything of it then. It was such an experience for me. In the morning she would bring me a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. We'd go to the market and shop, then she would cook all day long. She treated me like an adult. She'd cook and we'd eat together. She loved being in the kitchen. I thought I had died and gone to heaven and I'll never, ever forget it; it was a defining experience, and because of her I now know a lot more about what it's like to have a personal lifestyle. She had a good life but she also had a gift for knowing what the good life was.”

Molly's involvement continued over the years. When she visited New York she took Kate to dinner with the young man who became her husband.

“We went to L'Absinthe, her favorite restaurant, with some of her New York friends,” Kate said. “By then I was maybe twenty-two, twenty-three, and she bought wine for the table. I thought I was totally out of my league but she made me feel comfortable. Another time she took me to the Plaza and the whole two hours we were there all we did was complain about [President George W.] Bush. But the whole idea that she took two or three hours out of her schedule to have this long leisurely meal with Aaron and me was really special.”

Kate Cox's experience was shared by numerous others. All were recipients of a very special kind of Molly treatment, including becoming a namesake.

When I moved to Colorado, Molly gave me a list of names of people to contact. Jack, now retired from a reporting career with the
Denver Post
, became a colleague and a friend. When Molly came to visit me in Denver one summer, I had a barbecue for her. Jack brought his other daughter, Molly, who was named for Miz Ivins. For much of the evening Molly visited with the small band of people she had asked me to include, but Molly and I took care to include Molly II in conversation. When she said her good-byes, she made a point of giving her namesake a big hug and, one must presume, some last-minute “atta girl” words of farewell.

Ben and Molly Stoff are the son and daughter of Michael Stoff, associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and director of UT's
nationally recognized Plan II Honors program. They too were part of that extended family of nieces and nephews.

Although both Molly and Michael lived in Austin, they didn't meet until the 1980s at the annual Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Founded in 1948 as a forum on international affairs, CWA has expanded over the years to encompass an eclectic list of participants, ranging from astronauts, political figures, musicians, and surgeons to authors, storytellers, historians, and philosophers.

Michael was part of this heady convocation of minds—but more about that later. The point here is that Michael and Molly became close friends. By then Molly was well known in Texas but not on the national scene; she was just starting on her first book,
Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?
The title grew out of a letter of complaint sent to her employer at the time, the
Dallas Times Herald
.

There she was, toiling away, writing, agonizing over which columns to include, which to exclude—moving her at one point to grouse to Stoff, “What the hell was I thinking? Writing a book is
hard
!” He agreed, having navigated that struggle several times himself. He became part of the Final Friday circle.

“Molly and I became close when she met my kids. They were maybe six or eight at the time,” he said. “She became their Texas godmother. She had the gift with kids. She was really tall, you know, so when she met them she got down on her knees to talk to them, putting herself at their eye level. Once, she took them on a camping trip. I endured it, but they loved it. I remember her leaning over a fire and grilling sausages of some kind. It was another way to connect with these little children, giving them the sense of really belonging. My son is thirty-two now and my daughter is thirty-three, but they still have this wonderful memory of their Texas godmother. Even then they loved how she could be a Smith girl one minute and pure Texas almost in the same instant.”

The friendship between Molly and Michael Stoff was sufficiently comfortable that she invited him to dinner once when her father visited. It is not classified information that Molly lived in an uneasy truce with “Big Jim,” a name conferred on the basis of his larger-than-life personality—a powerful corporate executive, an avid sailor aboard his own yacht, and a domestic tyrant who never harmed her physically but did more than a little emotional damage.

Michael Stoff saw her unease up close. “I knew Molly didn't have the greatest relationship with her father, so when she invited me to dinner I initially demurred,” he said. “My best friend, Stuart Schoffman, was visiting from Israel and teaching at UT, so I asked if he could come too. ‘Please,' she said; she was
insistent. I realized the real issue was she didn't want to not invite her father for dinner, but she didn't want to be alone with him either. She needed a buffer.