Free Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins by Ellen Sweets Page A

meal at her home and in local eateries. It was my good fortune that John keeps meticulous notes on his travels, so rather than paraphrasing his chronicle of events, I’ve selected excerpts from his Paris diary, below.
    Molly somehow managed to score three eight-pound turkeys—not bad in a country where the fourth Thursday in November is just another day—unless you’re dining in an elegant St. Louis flat lent by San Antonio millionaire and Molly fan Bernard Lifschutz.
    Thanksgiving Day began with Molly and Eden Lipson, a former
New York Times
editor and Molly’s surrogate mother at the
Times
, removing quills from the birds with their eyebrow tweezers, while Pope and Pinckley assembled crudités and adorned each place setting with a little chocolate turkey that they had carefully brought from New Orleans. Guests began arriving around 6 p.m. The guest list included a foreign correspondent who had known Molly and his wife; a pianist from Plano, Texas; Molly’s goddaughter, Nicole, an architect,and her beau, Philippe, an editor at
Liberation
, a progressive publication started by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre; journalist and author Charles Kaiser and his partner, Joe Stouter, who contributed Molly’s much-loved haricots verts and a sublime Roquefort; and Joe and Charles’s friend Mark Trilling, a nephew of Lionel and Diana Trilling, two of the twentieth century’s most prominent authors and intellectuals. Other friends, including Tamara Kreinin, who now works with health programs for women and children at the United Nations Foundation, Rosalind Hinton, who teaches at Tulane University, and Roz’s niece Nora, brought wine and Veuve Clicquot. Pope was bartender.
    Of the experience, he wrote:
    Charles, Eden, and I carved. Before we dined, we stood in a big circle—that flat had plenty of room—and Molly reminded us all of the importance of the day—to give thanks for our blessings and remember those who aren’t so well off.
    Dinner was at the dining table and the massive coffee table. In addition to the aforementioned beans, we feasted on baked sweet potatoes, creamed onions, two types of dressing and three styles of cranberry sauce from Neal and one from us, which we had found in Harrods Food Halls earlier in the week. Wine flowed.
    Sometime during the evening, Molly decreed that, in honor of the apartment owner’s hometown, we all should do something called the San Antonio Shuffle. We were waving napkins and doing a second line à la New Orleans.
    Because we ate so much, Eden decreed that we take a good walk before tucking into dessert. So off we went into the brisk night to stroll the Ile St.-Louis. . . . We all marveled at our good fortune to be at that dinner in that city. All because of Molly. . . . Neal [Johnston; Eden’s husband] had made four pies with precisely measured spices he brought over in medicine bottles. The pies: lemon, chocolate chess, pumpkin Cointreau, and a cranberry concoction. The last guests left around midnight. Pinckley cleaned up until about 12:30, when Molly ordered her to stop.
    Susan Concordet, one of the Smith classmates Molly stayed in touch with over the years, couldn’t join her because Susan’s husband, Jean, was dying of cancer. Nicole, the Concordets’ daughter, represented the family. Molly and Susan hadformed a strong bond during their time together at Smith. Both were somewhat estranged from their families, and Molly kept her counsel about her family’s wealth.
    â€œShe was very discreet about her family,” Susan said during a telephone interview from France. “I never knew Molly was rich. She never talked about it, except when her brother was sick. She just said her father was a lawyer, not that he was the president of an oil company. Once, she made chili con carne for me and we talked all night. She told me stories; I was impressed by that easy, free, storytelling tradition. But I never