Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (35 page)

Were it not for Rapoport support, there is a strong possibility that the
Texas Observer
might be a thing of the past. There is nothing immediately obvious that signals his existence as one of the nation's wealthiest men, and only the photographs on his office wall hint at the extent of his connections. He is generally known as a staunch supporter of, and generous contributor to, the Democratic Party, and presidents have sought his counsel. Israel's former prime minister Golda Meir was once a guest in his home.

Rows of framed eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs are a visual history of those he holds dear: civil rights activist Bayard Rustin; former senator Thomas Eagleton; presidents Carter and Clinton; astronaut John Glenn; West Virginia senator Jay Rockefeller. Many are signed “To my good friend Bernie.” Bernard Rapoport has testified before Congress on several occasions, most notably in the late '80s, when he spoke on behalf of his friend, former House Speaker Jim Wright. Wright, who resigned his seat rather than face a
protracted investigation, was accused of House ethics rules violations related to the sale of his book
Reflections of a Public Man
.

(As part of a long-standing practice, B had purchased a thousand copies of the book to distribute to friends and business associates. He argued that his purchase had nothing to do with raising funds for the Democratic Party or for Mr. Wright. An avid reader, he often bought books he liked in bulk and sent them to friends.)

He was also called before the infamous Whitewater grand jury in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1996. While he was not the least bit intimidated by the experience, he was also not amused.

“Those guys really went nuts,” he said, referring to the special prosecutor's office. “I knew they didn't have anything on me; they knew they didn't have anything on me. They were just big on muscle flexing. Ridiculous.”

And to prove his point, B flexed a little muscle of his own by testifying without a lawyer. “They asked me why I didn't bring an attorney,” he said, still bristling at the memory. “I said 'cause I didn't need one; I hadn't done anything wrong.”

Although he isn't particularly comfortable talking about himself or his role as a power broker, he periodically relents, as he did once for the
Dallas Morning News
. He had been tapped for a singular honor—one even more important than the one conferred in 1998 when
Fortune
named him one of America's forty most generous philanthropists. That article grew out of a $15-million gift to his alma mater, the University of Texas, and $5 million to the Jerusalem Foundation.

Another beneficiary of his largesse is the
Texas Observer
. In a
Dallas Morning News
article, Ronnie Dugger, the
Observer
's founding editor, acknowledged that Rapoport's support had been a determinant in whether the paper survived. Dugger, not ordinarily effusive, spoke with great warmth in discussing the
Observer
's benefactor.

“Most of the people who make the kind of money he's made spend their lives protecting it, but not B. He has a commitment to the future, which manifests itself in his foundation. Just look at the list, and you'll know what I mean.”

The Rapoports and Molly were a natural fit, and they made no bones about it. When I cornered B at the
Observer
's annual high-dollar fund-raiser to tell him I was writing a book about meals with Molly, he let loose a hearty laugh and said, “Well, we've had plenty of those.”

And indeed they had, usually at one of two preferred destinations, but frequently at an Outback Steakhouse—which is where I first met the Rapoports in Dallas. Once when he informed Molly that lunch would be at a local country club, Molly, reverting to droll-humor mode, replied, “Why? Did the Outback close?”

33

ALMOST ANYONE WHO KNEW MOLLY
well has a food story, and Ellen Fleysher, otherwise known as “Flash,” is no exception. They met many moons ago, when Molly moved east to work for what she insisted on calling the
New York
City
Times
and was dispatched to Albany to cover the legislature. The
New York
City
Times
hired her and sent her to Albany ostensibly because they liked her style in covering the Texas Legislature.

The operative word here is “ostensibly.”

Flash, who speaks at ninety miles an hour, recalled the experience with dark humor.

“Molly, being Molly, wrote the same as she did in Texas, but the
Times
, which had hired her for her writing, proceeded to change her copy. Once she showed me a story she wrote about a [New York state] rep named Judah Gribetz.

“He was, shall we say, a rather large gentleman.

“Molly wrote that when he laughed his stomach shook like a bowl of Jell-O. [The
Times
] changed it to read that he had ‘a rotund protuberance.' She thought that was hysterical. I said I couldn't even laugh, because the whole flavor of the narrative was wrong. I couldn't believe it, and this happened all the time.

“It was the beginning of her souring on the
Times
. Molly said she should have taken her cue from Shit. She swore that when she drove to New York he started howling and never stopped.”

The good news is that for her abbreviated tenure as a New Yorker, Molly and Flash, who was with NBC at the time, had some mighty fine food times.

“I was always extolling chicken wings as the greatest thing ever to come out of Buffalo other than Millard Fillmore,” Flash said. “I had always heard that the
perforated postage stamp was invented during Fillmore's administration. As it turned out, it came from England and wasn't introduced until years later. Some guy with the [US] postal service went berserk over it.

“Anyway, there I was, telling Molly about old Millard and this post office guy who was having a conniption over the perforated postage stamp. Somehow the issue kinda segued into an idea for a salute to Buffalo.”

Read “party.”

“My job was to get the original chicken wing recipe from the Anchor Bar, where Buffalo wings are said to have originated,” Flash continued. “That led me to Frank and Teressa Bellisimo, and eventually to their son, Dominic. So I get the recipe—including the one for the secret Roquefort dressing—and we said, Molly and I, ‘Okay, we got the recipe; let's make wings and Texas mud pies.'

“I mean, this was a hearty meal, right? We got a ton of chicken wings, and we had the celery and the Roquefort and I got as big a supply of Molson and Labatt as we could afford.”

As would befit such a regal repast, the Albany-based twosome shifted into high gear.

Guest list: Everybody.

Music: Nonstop polka, of course.

Decor?

“We decided we needed to have snow tires and tire chains all around the living room,” Flash went on, clearly warming to the recollection. “Instead of candelabra we'd use antifreeze cans to replace Chianti bottles, which were all the rage then. It was fabulous, but the bottom line is we made thirty pounds of chicken wings. Thirty pounds. In the end we were both muttering, ‘We're never gonna do this again.'

“There was not one chicken wing left, nor were there any mud pies. At the end of the evening I asked Molly if she had eaten any of either. She hadn't. Neither had I, but the party was a major, major success.”

Bellisimo family members who launched the Buffalo chicken wing craze might have been generous with Flash, but that was then and this is now. Frank and Teressa Bellisimo died in the 1980s and Dominic died in 1991. Anchor Bar general manager Ivano Toscani—who says the bar sells 2,000 pounds of wings daily—kindly but absolutely declined my entreaty to release the recipe. He emphatically disputes Frank's Hot Sauce as a primary ingredient, insisting that the version marketed by the bar is the real deal. If you decide to do them at home, ask a butcher to cut the wings into sections but save the wing tips for making
soup stock. If you want to try the hot sauce that the Anchor Bar markets, it's available online.

The Fleysher/Ivins friendship involved food on land and at sea. “Back in the early '80s Molly got this idea that we effete Eastern women had no appreciation for the West, so she cooked up this idea for a white-water rafting trip,” Flash said. “It took us nearly a year and a half to put it together. We were going on the middle fork of Idaho's Salmon River, so of course we called ourselves the Salmonettes.”

It took some doing, but by 1979 Molly had organized the rafting trip. At the time she was Rocky Mountain bureau chief for the
New York Times
. As an inveterate lover of wilderness, she wanted her city slicker pals to experience the great outdoors. The high-powered mixed bag of participants included women Molly knew from New York, while others were either childhood friends or college classmates. Some were friends of friends. Flash invited Rosanne Cahn because she knew how to pitch a tent.

To commemorate the event, a “class picture” was made in which all participants are wearing “Salmonettes” T-shirts. Murray Resnick, a friend of Flash's, had them made for the group. She had told him about the trip and he thought the shirts would be a fun idea. “On the back of each one it said, ‘Sea front,' which was his idea of a little joke,” Flash said, recalling the trip. “I think the only time we wore them was when we had the photo done. We were really looking forward to the trip, although the fact that it was called the ‘River of No Return' wasn't all that encouraging.”

Salmonettes included Carol Bellamy, Molly, Alice Rivlin, Flash, Lynne Abraham, Pat Cloherty, Marg Elliston, a Los Angeles–based West Coast editor for
Rolling Stone
whose name is lost to history, Ann Crittenden, Marcia Chambers, Nancy Dowd, Betsy Weiss, and Donna Shalala. Molly, Crittenden, and Chambers were
New York Times
reporters. Dowd wrote the screenplay for the film
Slap Shot
and won an Oscar for writing
Coming Home
.

Bellamy, the first woman elected to the New York City Council, later headed UNICEF for a decade. Abraham, who died from breast cancer in 2002, was Bellamy's press secretary and later became communications director for Planned Parenthood of America. Cloherty, former head of the Small Business Administration, later divided her time between Moscow and the United States as chairman and CEO of a company that manages venture capital funds and has more than $500 million invested in fifty-five Russian companies.

Shalala served eight years as secretary of health and human services during the Clinton administration before becoming president of the University of Miami. Weiss and Cahn are economists, as is Rivlin, an expert on urban issues and fiscal, monetary, and social policy for the Brookings Institution. At the time of the Salmonettes experience, Elliston was doing consciousness-raising work among Chicanas in New Mexico. She is married to Fred Harris, a former presidential candidate, US senator from Oklahoma, and diplomatic envoy in the Obama administration. It was a impressive convocation of formidable woman power.

“Here we were on the ‘River of No Return,'” Flash recalled, “cooking over an open fire, chopping wood, and singing old rock lyrics from the '60s. We made French toast, which was probably pretty terrible, but anyone who has ever been camping knows everything tastes better when it's cooked outside over an open fire.