Molly Ivins did say that, didn’t she?
Highlights from her Observer years
One reflection of Molly’s gift for listening and understanding people is the obituaries she wrote. Two examples:
John Berryman
January 21, 1972
AUSTIN -- John Berryman is dead. The Houston Post got his name wrong. It is not likely he has ever touched your lives, since not many people read poets these days, not even very good poets.
John Berryman was a wise, sane, civilized, sophisticated and funny man. He was also a drunk. He jumped off a bridge in Minneapolis.
I don’t know quite why you should read John Berryman’s poetry. He was not the least interested in Texas nor, generally, in politics.
Because he was a cosmopolitan man, he scorned the cultivation of a special sense of place as a deliberate self-limitation. I once told him I thought my roots were in Texas.
“Root!” said John indignantly. “Are you a plant?”
He did write a political poem once, for some people I had written newspaper stories about. I think it was quite bad.
John Berryman had so much charm that even his vanity became funny. He once told me, after he had won the Pulitzer and the Bollingen and National Book Award and everything else in sight, that he did think there were other Americans who should get the Nobel before he did. He named four or five — I think Robert Lowell was the only poet among them. Mailer was in there, I believe because, typical of John, they had gotten drunk at some fawncy lit-ry do and had a fine time making fun of everyone else.
And his snobbism was funny. John, unrestrained, on the subject of Time magazine was enough to make anyone ever connected with that publication crawl into a cave and stay there forever.
Like any other drunk, John told his stories over and over. But they were always good anyway, because he had that special poet’s gift for exactly the right word. He could hit people off so well with works that it was almost a physical pleasure to hear him talk. Because I went to Smith College, he always told me the story of how he had dated a Smithie in the days when he was a horny Columbia student whose greatest desire was to lose his virginity. The Smithie spent the weekend writing an English lit paper. “I have loathed Hardy’s ‘Dynasts’ ever since,” John would announce, deadpan.
How he gloried in the absurd pomposity of the ceremony in which he was made a regents professor at the University of Minnesota: he made such fun of it — and he got such a thrill from it.
He was a loving man and one of magnificently illogical prejudices. He loved his wife Kate and devoutly hoped that his daughter Twiss would not become a poetess because, he said, all good poetesses are either frigid or Lesbian.
He was right, of course, about critics. They are fools. They said he was Henry. Idiots. Henry was a creation of John’s. No one has that much detachment about himself. John was Mr. Bones.
I think he loved to teach, or else he put so much creativity into it because he was incapable of doing anything otherwise. I am not sure his students ever got the point.
I supposed you should read him because John Berryman knew and wrote about pain, love, sorrow, guilt, fear, delusion and misty Irish mornings with the concreteness of the cold tiles on the bathroom floor under your knees when you lean to vomit into the john of a morning. Because there is more to life than Texas and politics and the tire special on at Sears, and were it not for poets, we might forget that.
Hawkins Menefee
March 29, 1974
AUSTIN -- Maudlin sentimentality will not do and there has already been a lot, maybe not enough, but an awful lot of praise for Rep. Hawkins Menefee as a legislator, as a pol, as a guy who gave a damn and who worked his heart out for the people. So we thought we’d write an article about how funny Menefee was. It seems more appropriate to our memory of him and we think he would have liked it.
It may be true, as Lynn Ashby has said in The Houston Post, that Menefee was embarrassed about once having let slip a “dammit” in public. Fact remains that in private life he was more prone to use language considerably more emphatic than that. One of the more helpful innovations that has (sic) appeared in the course of the constitutional convention is the Code List. The Code List comprises 41 of the dirtiest expressions several great minds could come up with, and each one has a code number between 801 and 913. Thus one delegate is now able to say to another,”832,” without offending whatever tender ears might be in hearing range. In the shock of losing him, even some of Menefee’s closest friends have commented on his idealistic side to the point of losing sight of his splendid sense of the ridiculous. One of them suggested to us that Menefee’s most likely reaction to some of the high-blown, overly-pastel word portraits painted of him would have been a gleeful, “811!” Which checks out on the Code List as “Lovely, simply bleeping lovely!”
A few years ago, before he got elected but while we was working over at the capitol, Menefee used to help write the Observer. If Northcott saw him on deadline day when we were hard up for Political Intelligence items, she would whisper, “Tonight,” at him. And that night Menefee would show up at our office, sit down at a typewriter, and pound out all manner of “in” items for our P.I. column — bits of gossip, topical jokes and insider political skinny.
Even after his election, Menefee continued to pass on funny tidbits. “Got a P.I. for ya’,” he’d hiss at the Observer reporter covering the House, and then would recount some drollery he’s come across.
One of the bleep-ups he never let us forget was that, after all those years helping us out, the first time we ever printed his name, we misspelled it. We circumspectly noted, in P.I. yet, that a bright young fellow named Hawkins Minafee was running for the House down in Houston. “I don’t care how you spell my name, as long a you lavish adoring prose on me,” he assured us.
For years he “talked” an article that he never got around to writing down for us. It was to be a study of Texas legislators as a species, published pseudonymously, of course. Menefee’s theory was that Texas legislators should be studied the way ornithologists study exotic birds. He developed a fairly elaborate set of classifications and subclassifications such as Greeting Rituals (Arm Around Shoulder Technique; the ol’ Slap ‘Em On the Ass Trick), Mating Rituals (that was why the article had to be pseudonymous) and Methods of Communication.
Menefee’s humor was not cynical: it was zestful: it was joyous. He loved the Legislature, he loved being a politician. He was a short fellow (he had a fine line of patter on the importance of being short) and he looked like a cherub. In fact, much to his disgust, he looked like he was about 15 years old. He was 29.
Oh, dammit.
Or we could say 801 through 913. But that, while it might be our style, was not his. He was too merry and upbeat a soul to ignore comedy simply because it came along in the midst of gross malfeasance, or even aching sorrow.
Menefee was also capable of enjoying the humor in his own most serious efforts. His own, big victory last session (he got shot down by the lobby on some tough anti-pollution legislation) was the half-a-loaf bill. This less-than-burning topic (see Obs., June 15, 1973) became inexplicably controversial. The problem, as Menefee saw it, was that single folks like himself had to buy a whole pound-loaf of bread whenever they wanted to buy bread. By the time a single person works down to the second half of a pound-loaf, it is very likely to be stale. Menefee wanted to put an end to the sad sight of single folks throwing out a lot of stale bread. So he introduced a bill that would permit bakeries to make half-pound loaves.
Either the big bakeries or the small bakeries turned out to be against half-loaves: no one was ever sure which special interest was on whose sides, but Mrs. Baird did say that Menefee’s problem was that he didn’t eat enough bread. Sen. Bob Gammage of Houston, speaking in behalf of the Menefee bread bill, was moved to deliver an oration of piercing eloquence on the inequities of buying bread as opposed to buying Big Red (which can, you understand, be bought a bottle at a time). Menefee memorized the speech and would deliver it in toto upon demand at Scholz’.
One of Menefee’s good friends was Tom Daniel, age three, the speaker’s son. They used to do somersaults together down the hill outside the west entrance to the capitol. Their efforts to do somersaults uphill were not so successful.
Menefee plus a guitar always meant a good party and he was generous with his talent. In high school and/or college he had picked up some extra money by playing lead guitar with some absurdly named rock and roll group like Sam Socko and the Flip-outs. He knew the words to every rock and roll song ever written. He may have been the last person extant who could sing all of “Yew Stomped On Mah Hort An’ Squashed That Sucker Flat.”
Bill Combs, a young political operative who works at the convention, was a friend and a fan of Menefee’s. The night Menefee died (in a car wreck), Combs convinced a visiting national political reporter that he should come meet this guy…well, he was going to be speaker before long and he was going to be governor someday and he was the most promising pol we had down here, a natural populist who gets both the rednecks and the blacks to vote for him and this reporter should get in on the ground floor, as it were. Menefee was always being described like that. Either the most or one of the most promising politicians anyone had seen in years. He’ll be speaker, he’ll be governor, mark my words.
“The thing that gets me,” said Combs, “is that there are millions of people in this state who have no idea and never will have of how much Hawkins cared about them and how hard he worked for them. God, he worked hard. For a couple of days around here, everyone will be making noble speeches about him and then they’ll get back into the speaker’s race and the convention fights. And in three or four months, no one will remember.”
The shortage of good people in public life is agonizingly obvious these days. Robert Kennedy was fond of quoting Lord Tweedsmuir’s saying that, “Politics is an honorable adventure.” With Hawkins Menefee, it was also a hell of a lot of fun.