The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

‘Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins’: My Q. & A. with playwright Margaret Engel

A black mon­grel dog scam­pers across the stage, “drag­ging a leash and a canoe paddle.”

Her owner yells for the dog by her proper name, “Shit”—an ever-handy exple­tive for a Texas oilman’s red-headed daugh­ter, grouchy about the sta­tus quo.

This is the pop­ulist jour­nal­ist Molly Ivins at home, in a new play by Mar­garet (Peggy) Engel and her sis­ter, Alli­son. With the bless­ing of the Ivins estate, the twins have deftly stitched together an Ivins solil­o­quy from her actual writings.

Ivins wrote best-selling books and syn­di­cated columns and fired up hun­dreds of young reporters, only to die of breast can­cer in 2007 at 62. But if Kath­leen Turner’s act­ing is as good as the script I read the other day, even Molly’s bare­foot ghost might have to double-check the death certificate.

The play’s debut, March 19 through April 18, is in Philadel­phia. Ahead is an edited email inter­view with Peggy Engel (right in photo by Mark Berndt), for­mer Wash­ing­ton Post reporter, ex-managing edi­tor of the New­seum and long-time direc­tor of the Ali­cia Pat­ter­son Foun­da­tion. Peggy and I have been friends for decades, start­ing with her first news­pa­per job in Lorain, Ohio, near Cleve­land. Peggy now lives in Bethesda, Mary­land; Alli­son, in Los Ange­les, where she is direc­tor of com­mu­ni­ca­tions at the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern California.

Q. Tell us more about who Molly was. Which other writer, dead or alive, was she most like in her humor and some other respects? Admir­ers say Ambrose Bierce or even Mark Twain.

She was hilar­i­ously funny. She was so smart and her wit just sparkled. She was a com­bi­na­tion of Bierce and Twain and Will Rogers, with some of that caus­tic humor that Ann Richards possessed.

Q. How well did Molly know George W. Bush while in high school? Any mem­o­rable inci­dents involv­ing the two?

She knew him casu­ally as they cir­cu­lated in the same pri­vate school and coun­try club cir­cles. She found him easy to like per­son­ally. It was his poli­cies that she detested.

Q. Just why did she count so much to you and other female jour­nal­ists, per­son­ally and in other ways? Her most attrac­tive traits as a per­son and polit­i­cal writer?

She counted to other jour­nal­ists period, regard­less of gen­der. She was fear­less, hard-working and never was swayed by someone’s posi­tion or influ­ence. She kept the ordi­nary per­son front and center.

Q. Tell us about the ori­gins and evo­lu­tion of Molly’s polit­i­cal views. Would they have been dif­fer­ent if her boyfriend Henry Hol­land had lived longer, and why? Did she her­self believe at one point in the teach­ings of Ayn Rand?

She was a vora­cious reader, gain­ing the nick­name “Mole” because she was always behind a book. It was her expo­sure to the Texas Observer and its pas­sion­ate cru­sades against the Viet­nam War, cor­rup­tion, rip-offs, etc. that turned her away from her com­fort­able Repub­li­can upbring­ing. She may have flirted with Ayn Rand as some 20-year-olds did, but she was a seri­ous stu­dent of cur­rent and past his­tory and edu­cated her­self into the pop­ulist views she held for a lifetime.

Q. What about the role of alco­hol in Molly’s life? Could she have accom­plished more with­out it, or did it actu­ally help—by bond­ing her closer to friends and sources?

She accom­plished a stun­ning amount with alco­hol, so I don’t think it would have made a big dif­fer­ence in her out­put. There’s no ques­tion that she got inside the work­ings of the Texas leg­is­la­ture through her reg­u­lar after-hours socializing.

Q. Some say she was too close to politi­cians such as Ann Richards. True? Or did this actu­ally work to her read­ers’ benefit?

Molly would take after friends and foes when the occa­sion called for it. Her read­ers def­i­nitely ben­e­fited from her many polit­i­cal friend­ships because she wasn’t in the busi­ness of keep­ing sto­ries out of print.

Q. Peggy, tell us about your career. You’ve made quite a rep­u­ta­tion as a man­ager type at the New­seum and elsewhere—did your man­age­r­ial back­ground at all get in the way of your writ­ing about a hell-raiser who said edi­tors were mice train­ing to be rats? Or, as a younger Peggy, were you Molly? If so, in what ways? And did any rem­nants hang around? Think she had edi­tors pegged right with that rodent gem? Any edi­tor hor­ror sto­ries of your own?

My for­ays into man­age­ment were always fairly brief. My atti­tudes were cast as a reporter push­ing against the grain, so, of course, Molly was a hero to me. But she was best known for her com­men­tary, some­thing I’ve rarely writ­ten. Hey, we’ve all had edi­tors who are rats. But they are so out-numbered by the truly genius and inspir­ing edi­tors I’ve worked with, start­ing with Irv­ing Lei­bowitz at the Lorain (Ohio) Jour­nal. I wish he and Molly had met!

Q. Tell us about your sis­ter and her own back­ground and how she would com­pare with Molly in areas such as politics.

Alli­son started out as a reporter on the Des Moines Tri­bune, cov­er­ing every­thing from shoddy car repair shops to scor­ing a rare inter­view with Mamie Eisen­hower where Mamie defended Richard Nixon after Water­gate. She then worked for Mered­ith Pub­li­ca­tions for sev­eral of its mag­a­zines, an affil­i­a­tion that has con­tin­ued for 30 years. She later worked for the San Jose Mer­cury, Pacific News Ser­vice and won a Knight jour­nal­ism fel­low­ship to Stan­ford. She’s just fin­ished a master’s in screen­writ­ing at USC while work­ing to put out the university’s mag­a­zine, news­pa­per and website.

Q. Molly called her father “the gen­eral.” He was actu­ally gen­eral coun­sel to the Ten­neco oil com­pany but a hawk on all things mil­i­tary. You your­self were born at West Point if I recall cor­rectly, and your father led a dis­tin­guished Army career. Did this lead to any inter­est­ing dia­logue on Viet­nam or other issues? How caught up were you in the Sixties?

We had daily and nightly dis­cus­sions and argu­ments about Viet­nam in our house­hold as my par­ents were very active cit­i­zens. At one point, my par­ents had com­mu­nity dis­cus­sions in our liv­ing room with other stu­dents in our classes and their par­ents. We protested the war and we also had friends who served in Vietnam.

Q. Why would a New York Times review of an Ivins bio try to down­play her impor­tance and say she con­cealed her Smith back­ground? Was the paper set­tling old scores, or did this just come nat­u­rally to the out­side con­trib­u­tor, him­self once a Texas news­pa­per reporter?

The review gave her credit, but had the cus­tom­ary neg­a­tive graph that seems oblig­a­tory in Times book reviews. As one jour­nal­ist pointed out, there are plenty of much-lauded reporters (Wal­ter Lipp­mann, James Reston, etc.) who never pro­duced a doorstop Big Book, but they didn’t get crit­i­cized for it. Molly gave the world an abun­dance of orig­i­nal, insight­ful mate­r­ial, in columns, reportage and books. Her record stands for itself. She never con­cealed her Smith back­ground; Texas just super­seded it.

Q. How did you come to do the play? Did you ever meet Molly Ivins or know a lot of peo­ple in common?

I did meet Molly a few times at con­fer­ences and was a long­time addict of her col­umn. I do have some friends in com­mon with her, but I was not in her orbit in any way but as a fan.

Q. Did you write the draft of the play first, and then get the autho­riza­tion of the estate, or did you sound ‘em out early? Any dis­agree­ments with the estate? Did her fam­ily or oth­ers put any­thing beyond bounds?

We wrote the play always know­ing that we would need to get per­mis­sion from the estate. For­tu­nately, her lit­er­ary agent and Molly’s lit­er­ary ben­e­fi­cia­ries approved the script. There were no restric­tions put on us.

Q. How did you and Alli­son divide up the play­writ­ing? Since Alli­son is on the West Coast, did you work entirely by com­puter and phone?

The play was my idea—really a reac­tion to my grief at hear­ing about her death. Alli­son and I have writ­ten together a lot—three books and count­less arti­cles. When we first started col­lab­o­rat­ing, there weren’t even fax machines, so we had the world’s largest phone bills. It’s a lot eas­ier now. I sent her a draft, she sends back her improve­ments, and we keep ping-ponging like that, with long phone calls. Early on, I did fly out to Cal­i­for­nia and we worked straight through one Easter break to get the flow right.

Q. Washington’s Arena Stage helped you develop the play. Why isn’t the play open­ing there?

It was a func­tion of Kath­leen Turner’s sched­ule. Arena is re-opening this Octo­ber in its new, glo­ri­ous space, but Kathleen’s fall sched­ule got booked. She had an open­ing this spring and for­tu­nately the Philadel­phia The­atre Com­pany was able to squeeze it in.

Q. Loved Kath­leen Turner in Body Heat, The War of the Roses, you name it. How’d she end up in your one-woman play? Not a bad trick at all for a pair of first-time play­wrights, how­ever gifted. Did you sug­gest her?

We had both seen her onstage in “Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf?” and she was our dream cast­ing choice. Alli­son is friends with Jim Autry, the for­mer mag­a­zine group pres­i­dent of Mered­ith Pub­li­ca­tions, who serves with Kath­leen Turner on the board of Peo­ple for the Amer­i­can Way. That’s how the script got to her.

Q. What per­cent­age of the play is in Ivins’ words, and how much is tran­si­tion, and how much did you change the lan­guage to make things flow?

We’ve been through many rewrites and prob­a­bly are at a 50–50 level between her writ­ing and ours.

Q. Has the New­seum mem­o­r­al­ized Molly in any ways, or are there plans to do so? Or will her mav­er­ick his­tory make that difficult?

The New­seum explic­itly is not a Hall of Fame. Molly is included where most jour­nal­ists are, in the News­peo­ple Data­base in the News His­tory Gallery and prob­a­bly a few other places, such as the video archives.

Q. What would Molly think of the finan­cial decline of America’s great news­pa­pers? Would she be mourn­ing the loss of jobs or actu­ally be happy that there might be more room for alter­na­tives in the Net era—cyber ver­sions of the Texas Observer where she worked?

She mourned the dis­in­te­gra­tion of news­pa­pers and the elim­i­na­tion of expe­ri­enced reporters and edi­tors. She wel­comed the explo­sion of new news sources, but she didn’t under­stand why news orga­ni­za­tions pushed their top tal­ent out the door.

Q. Do the stereo­types apply? Are today’s reporters and edi­tors less aggres­sive than their coun­ter­parts from Molly’s era, and if so is that because of busi­ness pres­sures from above?

There always are good jour­nal­ists out there. What’s miss­ing is the sup­port of decently-funded news­rooms so that these peo­ple can earn a liv­ing wage and spend the needed amount of time report­ing and writ­ing impor­tant stories.

Q. Any advice for J stu­dents and other young jour­nal­ists, espe­cially in the Inter­net age? And any­thing in par­tic­u­lar they can learn from Molly’s life?

They can learn to not care about the sta­tus of your news affil­i­a­tion but work as fairly and hon­estly as you can. Begin­ning jour­nal­ists need to spend the years that Molly did, cov­er­ing news from city coun­cils to the U.S. Capi­tol, before they can com­ment with her level of wis­dom and humor.

Q. Along with your hus­band, Bruce Adams, you’re the author of some well-received base­ball books. Was Molly into base­ball or other sports?

She loved any­thing on water—sailing, canoe­ing, and was a big enthu­si­ast of camp­ing and hik­ing. She was suited to Texas’ great outdoors.

Q. Ah, yes, that canoe pad­dle! So what are you and Alli­son work­ing on next, both indi­vid­u­ally and as a pair? Thanks, and break a leg!

We’ve writ­ten a screen­play based on one of our favorite books from our childhood—a block­buster that’s long been out of print and we have a Los Ange­les film agent who is rep­re­sent­ing it. We’re work­ing on another play together. I’ve been gath­er­ing string for five years on a third play and Allison’s writ­ten a charm­ing book for middle-school read­ers that we’re cir­cu­lat­ing as well as a com­edy screen­play that she just finished.

Thanks for your good wishes!

Related: Ear­lier item men­tion­ing Molly Ivins and a biog­ra­phy about her, as well as the Engel sis­ters’ play.

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