Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (45 page)

THE YEAR
2007
WAS ONE I
'
D JUST AS SOON FORGET
, although I will always remember Molly's laugh. Ten months after Molly died, my mother died. Shuttling between Denver and Austin and Denver and St. Louis had brought me as close to certifiable as I ever need to be.

It had been two years since Molly's worst diagnosis. Her friend Ann Richards, another authentic spitfire and the first woman to be elected governor in her own right, had died in 2006. I hate that I never talked with Ann about meals she had shared with Molly. When we last encountered one another in Austin, we engaged in the kind of chitchat that people do when they're at a huge dinner with too many people and too much noise. Few knew that Ann was dying too. I didn't. But then, I didn't know I'd ever write about cooking with Molly beyond the brief tribute I wrote for the
Texas Observer
.

I last saw Eden Lipson at a small dinner party in New York several years before cancer claimed her in 2009. Eden, Molly's “New York Mom,” cooked with her, fed her, hauled her off to smart shops for good clothes, and nurtured her spirit even when it became apparent that Molly was not quite right for the Old Grey Lady.

I never met the writer John Henry Faulk, Molly's truest hero, although I did get to know his widow, Liz. And by the time I knew there was a food connection between Molly and Bud Shrake, he too had died.

Molly and I shared one of those long, lingering Mexican meals at Manuel's in Austin with R. W. “Johnny” Apple, a friend from Molly's tenure at the
Times
. After a few gossipy exchanges, they reminisced at some length about good and
bad meals taken in various restaurants in various cities around the world, but he too died in 2006—again, way before a Molly book was a probability.

Former Texas secretary of state, comptroller, and lieutenant governor Bob Bullock was also gone, and with him went a treasure trove of Molly-based meals-around-the-campfire tales.

(Bob Bullock tales abound, not the least of which is almost everyone's favorite; it is the kind of story Texans like to tell, so I'll repeat it here because it not only appears in
Bob Bullock: God Bless Texas
, by political writer Dave McNeely and journalist and author Jim Henderson, but it surfaced again in a column by
Austin American-Statesman
columnist John Kelso, following Bullock's death.

It concerns the time Bullock got kicked out of the house by one of his several wives during a heated, bourbon-fueled domestic dispute. He somehow managed to drive to his friend Carlton Carl's house. Getting no response after knocking on the door, he crawled into the back of what he thought was his friend's car to sleep it off.

The next morning, our erstwhile public servant woke up in the backseat of the car as it headed up Interstate 35. The driver thought he was alone. Bullock sat up and scared the bejeebers out of the poor man by cheerfully announcing, “Hi, there. I'm Bob Bullock, your secretary of state.”)

I know Molly prepared
saumon en papillote
for Judge William Wayne Justice, another of her heroes. There was more than a little irony in his surname. He is credited with reconfiguring the landscape of civil rights law by handing down some of the largest institutional reform decisions in the country, affecting juvenile justice, prisons, education for the children of undocumented workers, and the right of men with long hair to attend college. Yes, this took a federal court decision. Those decisions, invariably in support of plaintiffs least able to defend themselves, earned him death threats and the undying appreciation of those who believed in, well, justice. He was on my list of people to interview, but that was not to be. He died in 2009.

As I rooted through Molly's archived material, a variation on an old bromide kept rattling around in my head. It says, “If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.” My version: “If I'd known I was going to write a book about Ellen/Molly cooking adventures, I'd have talked to people sooner. I'd have kept notes as meticulously as she did.” Some time ago someone said, “We know Molly got a lot of enjoyment out of your visits; but what did you get from her?” I had never asked myself that.

I certainly paid more attention to politics, going beyond just reading up on candidates on election eve; I learned that invective laced with humor is less likely to lead to an upset stomach; I had never read Howard Zinn, but I once spent a lovely evening with Studs Terkel, whom I had admired for many years. Molly loved that I met him at a dinner party in Chicago where, believe it or not, the main course was seafood and sausage gumbo.

Gumbo lore aside, I now have a dog-eared copy of
A People's History of the United States
, by Zinn, who died in 2010. I write letters to my representatives in Washington. I'm not afraid to criticize even Democrats when I think they're screwing up. I write to corporations who abdicate their corporate responsibilities to the consumers who make their cushy lives possible. I rail against entities like BP and Exxon. Got a petition castigating them? Gimme. I remember a favorite Molly quote that she used to define populism. It's from long-gone Texas senator Ralph Yarborough: “Populism is putting the jam on the lower shelf so everyone can reach it.”

Over the years Molly and I forged a relationship that was more like a sister-hood. I'd always wanted a sister, but got two brothers. I love them both, but it's not the same. Molly and I shared details about our lives. We talked about men we'd, ahem, known, those we wished we had, and those we wished we hadn't. I also learned to employ the phrase “Bless his/her heart” properly.

We shared confidences I could never bring myself to write about. It's not that she ever asked that anything
not
be repeated; she didn't have to. At some point you gotta engage a personal braking mechanism when it comes to revealing a friend's private conversations. Bringing people together on a regular basis creates a bond, and as that bond grows stronger, trust levels evolve. You only invite into your home those you care about, and you only cook for those you love. Time and again, friends cited the way Molly used food to bring people together.

And what better way to commemorate that assessment than to share a cookbook for all seasons. Many of the same cookbooks that lined Molly's shelves also sat on shelves wherever I happened to land. So for my sixtieth birthday she gave me a copy of something I surely lacked:
In the Kitchen with the Chippendales
, 100-plus pages of recipes illustrated by a multiculti collection of photographs that almost have something to do with food but nothing, I assure you, to do with antiques.

The recipe for Chick on a Bed of Roses (chicken breast with rose petal mole) ain't half bad, nor is the one for Saffron Potatoes. I'm not as interested as I once was in such recipes as the one for Orange Orbit edible body paint—concentrated orange juice mixed with vanilla pudding—but I've bookmarked it just in case.

On the other hand, I do cherish the chef's jacket and toque she brought me from the Cordon Bleu after she took classes there. I had no idea she thought my head was that big. Despite my best efforts to wear the toque properly, it kept sliding down, and down, and down—until my face was completely obscured. She thought that was hilarious. When I saw the snapshots I understood why.

I think our friendship, built in large measure on a mutual love of food, also had a foundation in our respective family lives. In their book
Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life
, Austin authors Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith chronicled her reaction to growing up in a wealthy white Houston suburb where people with her background, access, and opportunities were expected to cleave to the haute bourgeois milieu that nurtured them. I was rebellious even though the jam was within my reach too. This was not a good thing for either a middle-class white female growing up in the 1950s or for a middle-class black girl either.

Case in point: Somewhere in or around 1956 I dove off the high board at a swimming pool in the (then)
really
white St. Louis suburb of Webster Groves. As I climbed out of the pool, very pleased with my near-perfect entry, lifeguards were closing the pool. Apparently they hadn't noticed me before. I was later told they drained the pool altogether after I left.

It was the same year Frank Blache and I made
Time
magazine for having the unmitigated gall to try to eat at Adcock's, a Jefferson City cafeteria. We were returning from an Episcopal youth camp in southern Missouri. By the time we got to the state capital we were a busload of ravenous teens. Frank and I were the only blacks on the bus. When we were refused service we opted to take our food to go. All of the others did the same, and we sat on the curb in front of the restaurant to eat. When a photographer asked us why we were there, we told him. Next thing we knew, we were enshrined in
Time
. Shortly after the issue came out, the owners of Adcock's saw the future and quietly desegregated its facilities. It was destroyed by fire in 1970. I had nothing to do with it.

Molly once asked me, over a mountain of peach cobbler and vanilla ice cream, why I didn't hate white people, why I wasn't angry—something I also
asked myself. The only answer I could come up with was that investing energy in hate is nonproductive. In the end it serves no meaningful purpose other than to corrode whatever vestiges of decency reside within the hater. When I get angry, I write letters. And mail them. Just ask US senator John Cornyn. He had the temerity to think he represents me. By now he knows he doesn't.

The misbegotten behavior of bigots eats away at them even as they fail to recognize the corrosion. Better to invest energy in trying to change the conditions that give rise to such bitterness. Better to sit down and eat together, whenever, wherever, possible.

Another of my favorite movie scenes, after
The Princess Bride
and
Casablanca
, occurs in
The Blind Side
, the movie based on Michael Lewis's beautifully crafted book. It's about a conservative white family's improbable decision to adopt a black teen. In the movie there's a scene where Sandra Bullock's character, the mother, is having lunch with friends. They chide her for her decision. She could have laughed along with their thinly veiled racist barbs, but she didn't. She excused herself, let them know she was done with them and their so-called friendship, and left stunned companions in her wake.

There's a reason power lunches and dinners exist. Discussions over food change the tenor, if not the gravitas, of conversation. The dynamics shift. Food is the foundation on which diners can build a form of communion that has nothing to do with religion.

At this point I'm prepared to let the next generation pick up where mine leaves off and hope they can make it work better than we have.

For all of the gustatory marvels we assembled in the Ivins kitchen, Molly always returned to three favorites: gumbo, that artery-clogging bacon-onion-spaghetti-cheese casserole, and the chicken soup I made when I thought she had bronchitis. On my last Austin visit, a month before she died, I made the soup again. I delivered enough, I thought, to get her through a couple of lunches. Being Molly, she insisted on sharing it with Hope Reyna, Del Garcia, and me, and we promptly consumed it all.

It's a simple soup, made with homemade stock and grated vegetables. It's nourishing, easy to swallow, and easy to digest. I had made it several times during Molly's valiant fight against that demon disease. This time, it would be our last shared meal.

I had promised to make it again when I returned for my birthday in early February. We laughed as she reminded me that I would probably cook it myself
as I had done for past birthday parties ostensibly in my honor. This time I knew there would be a difference: she wouldn't be sous chef.

Del Garcia, Hope Reyna, Molly, and I sat in the kitchen that late December day and reminisced about the
Texas Observer
party that had been dedicated to Molly a few weeks earlier. We even managed to extract laughter from that seemingly endless stream of Bush administration bloopers. As weak as she was, she could rattle off names and transgressions—US Representative Tom DeLay's indictment for money laundering; the federal grand jury indictment of Bush fund-raiser Thomas Noe, also for money laundering; Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's knuckleheaded approval of torture at Guantánamo and his less-than-candid testimony before a Congressional committee. Still, for all our levity, I sensed an undisguised air of resignation.

At that moment, Del, who has spent many years working with epidemiological issues around the world and who knew more than she wanted to about the ravages of end-stage cancer, commended Mol on her ability to maintain such good cheer under such chickenshit circumstances. Without missing a beat, Molly replied, “Fuck cheerful. I've sworn off cheer. Cheer is highly overrated.”

With that, she threw back her bald head and laughed as hard as her weakened lungs would allow. We laughed with her, fighting back tears. Molly's rejoinder called to mind a wonderful Linda Ellerbee quote: “I have always felt that laughter in the face of reality is probably the finest sound there is and will last until the day when the game is called on account of darkness.”

For sure.

Almost everyone I interviewed had an anecdote recalling Molly's sense of humor, a gift that remained throughout her battle with that hateful cancer. One friend, communications consultant Larry Norwood, tells of visiting Molly during one of her end-stage hospitalizations. An adverse reaction to a new medication had provoked a hideous, painful result. As she struggled to find a comfortable position, she looked into Norwood's eyes, smiled, and said, “God, I wish Dick Cheney had these hives.”

Although Molly had difficulty swallowing, her love of ice cream was undiminished, and therein lies one of Hightower's more memorable Molly meals, if it can be called that, since it didn't really involve cooking. At some point during her final hospitalization, he got a very late night call. At the other end of the line was a very bored Molly, demanding that he bring ice cream. Right Now.
So he did what Molly friends were ever willing to do: he got out of bed, got dressed, grabbed two spoons, bought the requested ice cream, and headed for St. David's Hospital.