Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (34 page)

31

CARLTON CARL RETURNED TO AUSTIN
after twenty-five years in Washington, DC, to become publisher of Molly's favorite former employer, the
Texas Observer
.

He probably knew Molly longer and better than anyone other than Molly's brother, Andy, and their sister, Sara. Molly and Carlton met in high school when both were teenage social misfits of the same stripe: both living in Houston, both in love with reading and writing, both firmly ensconced in their respective school newspapers, both almost painfully shy. They gravitated toward one another. He looks today a lot like he looked thirty years ago, only grayer. He could easily be cast as Tevye in
Fiddler on the Roof
.

Carlton and Molly were from Houston's decidedly upscale River Oaks neighborhood and attended rival schools. He graduated from Kinkaid, a pedigreed, century-old, nonsectarian prep school that boasts of its position as Houston's oldest independent coeducational school. Molly finished at St. John's, also a private, nonsectarian school despite its religious name. She was on the newspaper a year ahead of Carlton, and he was assistant editor of his. They met, as he recalls, at a high school newspaper event. As has been known to happen in such circumstances, the two outsiders focused on what they knew they could do well. Both ended up at Columbia University, she for grad school, he for both undergrad and graduate studies.

Despite their privileged backgrounds, they were drawn to community service outside their elevated place on the socioeconomic spectrum. Continuing their parallel lives, they found summer jobs at the
Houston Chronicle
.

Carlton remembers those days well. “We got to the
Chronicle
and Molly headed straight for the morgue—which was what we called the newspaper reference library back then—to look up the paper's history. She found this book recalling the good old days of dirty newsrooms, where editors drank whiskey from a coffee cup, and lamenting how those days were gone, probably forever.

“At that point she looked up and saw Zarko Franks, the night city editor, pouring what was probably bourbon into his coffee cup. Her eyes lit up; she smiled and announced that she was going to like it at the
Chronicle
just fine.”

The Carl/Ivins friendship sustained itself over the years, primarily through letters and internships where they hung out with reporters who went on to make names for themselves—including political columnist Dave McNeely, who became a close friend. They frequented the kind of ratty bar that at one time could be found in close proximity to any major daily. The one diagonally across from the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
was called the Press Box. Its Houston counterpart was the Golden Stein. Dave McNeely remembers going there the year he worked at the
Chronicle
—the same year he met Carlton and Molly.

As the summer job season closed on their fledgling newsroom experiences, they returned to New York. Carlton's most specific food memory from those Columbia days involves hot dogs and beer at Columbia football games. “Athletic events at Columbia were always a kind of bad joke,” he said. “Sports weren't a priority and the teams rarely won anything. But the hot dogs and beer were good.”

In a display that was to become a hallmark of Molly's egalitarian approach to life, she took part-time jobs to earn extra money—always a puzzlement to Carlton, who often wondered why somebody from River Oaks was cleaning toilets in a bank building to earn mad money. But that, he said, was Molly. She never thought she was too good to do menial work. Carlton's final days at Columbia should have ended on a bright note, but in 1967, as his parents and brother drove to New York from Houston, his father had a fatal heart attack. Molly wrote a warm and comforting note that meant a lot at the time and made him appreciate her even more.

Molly pursued the reportorial fame she had predicted for herself back in her days as Mole. Carlton, after a successful career in Washington, DC, retired from his post as vice president of policy and strategy for the American Association for Justice (formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America). Carlton's turn to comfort her came some years later when her father killed himself; when her mother died of cancer; and when Dax, one of her
much-loved nephews, committed suicide. When her father killed himself, she said she could almost understand it because he had always been healthy and in control of his life, and felt he couldn't adjust to being cared for by others. Dax, on the other hand, she said, had his life before him. His death hit her hard. Carlton was among those who offered consolation.

A friendship spanning almost half a century ended where it began—in Texas, but in Austin instead of Houston, and with Carlton as publisher of the paper Molly held so dear. By then she had become something akin to a state, if not a national, treasure. Her columns had grown to syndication in more than three hundred newspapers. She'd been shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize three times, had been a National Book Award finalist, and had received too many honors and awards to detail. In 2001 she was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, entering a pantheon of men and women honored for the wide range of expertise they bring to multidisciplinary analyses of contemporary issues. Elected by a committee of their peers, members range from astro-physicists to zoologists.

Carlton's link to Molly and food exists in its own unique way: the round table and matching chairs she commissioned now reside in the living room of Carlton's Victorian home in Martindale, a quiet community first settled in the 1850s. Not much has physically changed over time. If you've seen Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner in
A Perfect World
, or Matthew McConaughey and Ethan Hawke in
The Newton Boys
, or the 2003 remake of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
, you've actually seen Martindale. All three movies were filmed there.

This is a town where residents numbering maybe nine hundred still parade down Main Street and adjourn to a Fourth of July potluck picnic in the park. Carlton hasn't yet decided what to do with it, but he owns a bunch of Martindale property. Molly and I made the forty-mile drive from Austin to see for ourselves: three vacant general stores, an abandoned bank, a cottonseed weigh station, several warehouses, a movie-set courtroom, a seed elevator, sixteen seed silos, and three hundred feet of land that fronts the San Marcos River.

I don't know about anyone else, but as I pointed out to Molly at the time, I want dibs on one of the storefronts. Martindale deserves a restaurant. These people only think they've seen smothered pork chops and chicken-fried steak. I can see it now. The Martindale Diner and Dive Bar, serving late lunch and late dinner. If my daughter could bring sushi to Fredericksburg, Molly and I could have brought baked pork chops, African chicken,
truite amandine
, and
clafouti
to Martindale.

Carlton threw his first official dinner party in 2009 in tribute to Molly and the table. Carlton, Mercedes Peña, and I each made our favorite meat loaf. His was an applesauce version, adapted from the recipe of the mother of a college friend. He'd made it at one time or another for Molly. Mine was a turkey interpretation of Paul Prudhomme's Cajun meat loaf, which I had also made for one of our many crazed Cajun/zydeco meals. Mercedes prepared a Cuban number with spicy chorizo sausage embedded in the center; she too had served it at one of Molly's multiculti culinary convocations.

Doug Zabel, a respectable cook himself, joined us, as did Dave Richards, who, with his wife, Sandy, and a few other friends, had accompanied Molly on her big float trip through the Grand Canyon. Seated around that beautiful table, we did what Molly intended folks to do: we drank beer and wine and regaled one another with Molly tales. “Remember the time she did that video about dildos?” (Raucous laughter.) “Remember the time she let those lovebirds out and forgot to turn off the ceiling fan?” (Guilty hysterical laughter.) “God, I loved the time she said that calling George [W.] Bush ‘shallow' was like calling a dwarf ‘short.'” (Giggles.) “Yeah, but remember what she said about [President Ronald] Reagan—the bee thing?” (“He's so dumb, if you put his brain in a bee the bee would fly backwards.”) This went on until recollections were exhausted and it was time to return to Austin.

Until Martindale installs me to cook for the diner and dive bar—well, until Martindale gets a liquor license—it's enough to sit, listen to the mockingbirds, and remember the many Molly meals that preceded the dinner of dueling meat loaves.

32

MOLLY, BERNARD RAPOPORT, AND BERNARD
'
S WIFE
, Audre, were a perfectly triangulated mutual admiration society. They shared the same socio-political views—he, even into his nineties, remains a smidge to Molly's political left.

“B,” as friends call him, is probably one of the least known and most influential Democrats in the country. He stands a few inches over six feet. His booming, raspy baritone voice invariably precedes him by several giant steps, in contrast to Audre's carefully modulated tones.