The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  The little blue book served a not-so-subtle psychological function. With the book in their hands, Houstonians could see at a glance how much their neighbors had pledged. It became a race to see which Houstonian could afford to pledge the most.

  When enough money had been raised to hire an orchestra and conductor, Miss Ima used the same forthright technique to peddle season tickets and subscriptions. Armed with her notebook, she trudged up and down Main Street, calling on Houston businessmen, selling advertising space in the Symphony program. At the same time, like Eleanor Belmont—though Mrs. Belmont would not emerge until the 1930s and this was still the teens—Miss Ima insisted that culture in Houston, though it might be financed by the rich, not turn into an elitist affair. She organized special Symphony concerts for school children, for the elderly in nursing homes, and for patients in mental hospitals. As she put it in a speech to Houston civic leaders many years later, “If our symphony is to qualify as an instrument of brotherhood, it must meet certain requirements and expectations. In a world struggling toward peace and universal humanitarian regard for mankind, there is no place for an aloof or exclusive institution. I must say that it has ever been the aim of the symphony to serve as a unifying agency in our region and city, that music may reach and touch every facet of our civic life.” She became the Symphony Society’s first vice-president, and served as its second president from 1917 to 1921.

  There were some people in town, of course, who thought some of Miss Ima’s notions were pretty radical. In 1916, for example, when women still did not have the vote, Miss Ima’s campaign to get a woman on the school board seemed going too far. “We were all in the early movement together as suffragettes,” recalls a friend, “but Ima wanted more than just the vote; she wanted to get improvements in the schools as well.” As usual, Miss Ima got her way, and eventually ended up on the school board herself. Among her daring innovations: seeing to it that courses in art and music were added to the curricula of the black public schools. Such egalitarianism was almost unheard of.

  With each new civic triumph, her confidence in herself grew. As she entered her forties she had become a personage of aplomb and gracious command. Though she stood only five feet two, and her once-slender figure had thickened into a series of comfortable curves, when she entered a room now there was always a little hush, and one knew that one was in the presence of a force, or Force. Miss Ima’s regal presence was abetted by her voice, which was clear and bell-like, with only the softest trace of East Texas in it. Lucius Beebe once observed that when a person moves from not-so-rich to very rich, his physical appearance changes—“a new set to the jaw.” This had happened to Miss Ima. Early photographs showed her with her chin tucked in, her eyes modestly downcast. Now her chin was held high, her eyes cast upward, fearless. One morning during the early 1920s she awoke to find a strange man standing in her bedroom. “What are you doing in my room?” Miss Ima demanded. “You have no business being here!” As the man turned from her dresser drawer, where he had been rummaging, she said, “What do you have in your hand? Give it to me at once.” The burglar, shaken, opened his fist to reveal a piece of Miss Ima’s jewelry. “Bring it to me,” commanded Miss Ima. “Why are you taking my jewelry?” Handing her the piece, the burglar muttered something about being out of work, out of money, and needing her jewelry to buy food for his wife and children. “That is no way to do it,” said Miss Ima firmly. “Here, hand me a pencil and paper from my desk.” The burglar meekly complied. “You should look for a job,” she said. “I’m going to give you the name and address of my brother’s office. He’s always looking for good workers. Go see him and ask for a job.” She wrote down Will Hogg’s name and address and handed it to the burglar. “Now, then,” she said grandly, “good day.”

  Later, astonished friends asked her how she could have the nerve to deal so audaciously with her intruder. “He didn’t look like a bad man,” she replied. Another hunch, perhaps.

  Meanwhile, plans were under way for her and Will’s and Mike’s new house on the fifteen acres in River Oaks. The land lay along the winding banks and steep ravines of Buffalo Bayou, where the slow-moving stream meandered through tall, centuries-old stands of pine and live oaks. Because of Houston’s warm, moist Gulf Coast climate, Bayou Bend, as Miss Ima would call her estate, would be brilliantly green year-round. Even the water in the lazy bayou was bright green. Birds and other small wildlife abounded in the acreage, and otters played on the bayou’s banks. And it was all only three miles—Miss Ima often walked the distance—from the center of downtown Houston.

  In 1927 the architect John Staub was commissioned to design the principal house for Bayou Bend. Miss Ima’s collection of American antiques and decorative pieces was now quite large—it spanned two hundred years, from seventeenth-century Pilgrim furniture to pieces from the Federal period of the early nineteenth century—and it included Chinese export porcelains, antique china, silver, and glass. Room for all these objects was needed, and the house Mr. Staub designed was large, with a room for each period and style. Still, because Bayou Bend was low and sprawling, built of pale pink stucco with green shutters, in the Spanish Colonial style, and with a certain amount of ornamental ironwork, and because it was nestled in the tall trees, it did not look overpowering. Also, Bayou Bend differed from its River Oaks neighbors—mansions built close to the street where they were obviously arrayed for the inspection and wonderment of passersby. Bayou Bend was hidden at the end of a long, curving tree-lined drive, invisible to the curious, where it appeared as a gradually revealed surprise to the invited guest.

  While John Staub supervised the construction of the house, Miss Ima turned her attention to the extensive grounds. She was, as she put it, subject to “compulsions,” and gardening had become one of these. Working with her head gardener, Alvin Wheeler, she began laying out the various flower beds and boxwood hedges and clipped monkey grass parterres, using stakes and string to assure their geometric precision. Her general idea was to compose a design that would contrast hedged-in formal gardens with natural woodland walks of wild flowers and wilderness. But it was to be much more ambitious than that. Miss Ima’s overall plan called for no less than eight separate and distinctive gardens—in time there would be nine—each opening onto the next so that it pleased the eye in some new way.

  With Bayou Bend completed and its gardens laid out and planted, Miss Ima quickly began to demonstrate another talent—as a hostess. Dinner parties were her favorite form of entertaining, and though her dinners were often black-tie, they were not therefore necessarily sedate or spinsterly. On the contrary. Her major-domo, Lucius Broadnax, was famous for his bourbon old-fashioneds, which he served in sterling silver mugs the size of small vases, and which, on his boss’s instructions, he saw to it were constantly replenished to their brims. If one was not careful at one of Miss Ima’s parties—or if one was not like Miss Ima, who appeared to possess the proverbial hollow leg—one could sit down at her dinner table in a state of woozy euphoria, willing to support Miss Ima in any endeavor. Because most of her dinner parties were not just for fun. Usually they were about something which, as she put it, “needs correcting,” whether she was promoting a tax levy for the public schools, a lecture series for the University of Texas, the Fine Arts Museum, the Symphony, the Opera, the Visiting Nurses Association, a Democratic political candidate, the Boy Scouts, or the Garden Club, of which she was a founding member. Whenever opponents of any of her projects needed to be brought around to her way of thinking, Mr. Broadnax’s old-fashioneds were powerful persuaders. “I went to Miss Ima’s house for dinner determined to fight her on a bond issue,” recalls one Houston politician. “Damned if I know what happened, but the next morning she called me to thank me for my support.”

  Miss Ima’s correcting endeavors, and their attendant entertainments, were so numerous that, for a while, there were complaints from Miss Ima’s neighbors about the amount of traffic that came and went nightly at 2940 Lazy Lane. Miss Ima simply began invi
ting more of her neighbors to her parties, until they too had fallen under the spell of her cajolery and the heroic proportions of Lucius Broadnax’s old-fashioneds.

  One of her most effective techniques was to adopt a pose of utterly unassuming modesty, an It’s-jes-little-ole-me stance. “Why don’t you drop by my place before your meeting, and we’ll chat about it,” she’d say. Or “This is probably just another crazy idea of mine, but I’ll mention it anyway.” Or she’d say, “If there are going to be any speeches at your, banquet, I hope there won’t be any honoring me.” Told that there would be—by the 1930s there nearly always were—she’d become all nervous and bashful, and say, “Oh, then do please keep them short!” In this vein she once wrote, “I have no answers, only a burning desire to see something encouraging happen.” And once, accepting a special award from the University of Texas, she said, “I realize, in choosing me to honor, it was not so much for my personal worth as for the fact that I represent members of my family whom you wish to remember, and through them, you have identified me with certain forces and ideas which I am gratified you hold worthy.…”

  It was all an artful ruse, of course, but it made people putty in her hands. She loved the center of the stage as much as she loved her expensive furs and dresses, her spectacular jade earrings and necklaces, and the fact that everywhere she went in support of her various causes and enthusiasms she was now known, simply, as “The Lady.” The self-effacing façade was just another way of getting what she wanted. Her daily telephone calls to civic leaders and city officials with “little suggestions” were becoming legendary. She might claim to have no answers herself, but when she had questions she wanted them answered right away. Once she telephoned the curator of a park she had given to the city to ask whether the wild flowers were blooming yet. Thinking the question unimportant, the curator quickly replied, “Oh, yes, ma’am.” There was a pause; Miss Ima had obviously detected something in the man’s tone that told her he was putting her off. “How many varieties?” she demanded.

  She had very much admired the work of President Roosevelt’s Work Projects Administration during the Depression, and so she wrote to the mayor of Houston suggesting that unemployment in Houston could be solved by the establishment of the city’s own WPA. The mayor responded politely, but noncommittally, saying he would give the matter some thought, etc., etc.—a politician’s letter which, in the end, said very little, though it was the sort of letter that would have satisfied most people. Not Miss Ima. The next time she saw the mayor at a party, she approached him. Shaking a long, bejeweled finger at him, she said, “You didn’t answer my question! I asked you why Houston can’t have a WPA.”

  “Yet,” says an old friend, “she was arguable. If you did your homework and could show her the evidence for doing something in a way that differed from hers, she would change her mind.” That was the key, of course. You had to have done your homework, and you had to produce hard evidence to convince Miss Ima. Otherwise, woe betide you. Once, during a performance by the Houston Symphony—in which Miss Ima naturally retained a certain motherly interest—of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the orchestra had played no more than a few bars when the familiar, throaty voice could be heard in a stage whisper from Box B-4, audible for at least thirty rows, to comment, “They’re playing that much too fast!”

  “The trouble was,” the conductor ruefully admitted later, “that she was right.”

  That, indeed, was the trouble with most of Miss Ima’s interventions, interruptions, crusades, and corrections. She was nearly always right. And as she approached her sixties, as she moved into her years of full and unchallenged civic, social, cultural, and political command, her jeweled hand was into almost everything in Texas.

  * The four Hogg children were remarkably close. Like Miss Ima, brother Will never married. Mike and Tom eventually did, but neither had children. In Houston, rumors persist that the Hoggs feared marriage and children because the family was prone to some inheritable illness. Big Jim Hogg’s parents had both died young. So had Miss Ima’s mother. Though Miss Ima never spoke of it, the problem may have been diabetes. Miss Ima’s health was always robust, though as she grew older, she suffered from failing eyesight—a diabetic symptom.

  27

  “I’M DOING WHAT I WANT TO DO”

  Miss Ima was fascinated by mythology and Greek goddesses and muses, and there is evidence to suggest that, as she grew older, she began to believe in her own myth—not an uncommon occurrence, it should be quickly added, with an American grande dame. Told so often that what she did and what she wanted were right, she began to believe that she could do no wrong. Of course these delusions did no one any real harm. In fact, delusions of grandeur may be the most precious assets of the grande dame. They enable her to sail on with confidence from one worthy project to the next, certain that each new achievement will top the last. Delusions of infallibility keep the grande dame on her toes, and make her unwilling to rest on her laurels. The myth, once created, must be kept alive. When one has become a legend in one’s lifetime, one cannot let the legend lapse.

  By the late 1930s Ima Hogg had become such a legend in Texas. No one of importance—whether it was Eleanor Roosevelt, Arturo Toscanini, or a young comedian named Danny Kaye—who passed through the state failed to make the pilgrimage to Bayou Bend to pay homage to its chatelaine. By then, no one questioned Miss Ima’s claim to be clairvoyant. Her story about the fate of the doomed ship sailing from Hawaii had been printed so often in the Houston Post that it was accepted as gospel. And the tale of the aunt and the Dallas-bound stage was equally sacrosanct. Miss Ima had said it was so, and that made it so.

  Miss Ima could usually find or invent historical reference points in her own life to justify her various enthusiasms as they came upon her. For example, she said that she vividly recalled going as a little girl with her father to state schools, prisons, asylums, and hospitals for the mentally ill. Her father, she explained, had always been interested in mental illness. But his interest had been in the social conditions in the general community, and in seeking out the responsibilities for the conditions which caused mental illness, rather than in the way it was treated in institutions once it had been diagnosed. He was more concerned with eliminating causes than in treating results. He had been influenced, it seemed, by an early book on the subject which Miss Ima discovered years later in his library: Responsibility in Mental Illness, by Henry Maudsley, published in 1898.

  She, of course, had studied psychology in college, where her professor—and later lifelong friend—Dr. A. Caswell Ellis had been a well-known psychologist. When her brother Will died in 1930, the bulk of his estate had been left to his alma mater, the University of Texas, with the stipulation that his sister and his brothers would decide in what way the money was to be spent. As an administrator, Miss Ima decided it should be used to promote mental health, or, as it was called in those days, mental hygiene. “Most of my compulsions,” she commented at the time, “are rooted and grounded in the University of Texas.” Furthermore, both she and Mike decided to add funds of their own to create the Hogg Foundation. As she wrote:

  In accordance with this provision [in Will Hogg’s will] and also with my numerous discussions with Will prior to 1930 of the common goals we had in mind, I have chosen the field of mental health as the area of support for both our funds. Also, in keeping with his wishes and mine, I have chosen as trustees the members of the Board of Regents of The University of Texas to administer the funds. They have established the Hogg Foundation for Mental Hygiene as the instrument for accomplishing this goal.

  The Hogg Foundation was officially set up in 1940, and the following year she wrote to the trustees, “I think The University of Texas has an opportunity through a broad mental health program for bringing great benefits to the people of Texas.” This letter was by way of being a gentle reminder—that the foundation was to benefit the people of Texas, and not, as she put it privately, “a lot of gray-beard researchers.” Many creators
of foundations modestly retire from the scene and leave the day-to-day administrators to follow whatever lines they choose. But not Miss Ima. It was her foundation, and she intended to keep personal track of its every move and expenditure. She understood the importance of research, but she had no patience with it, and was determined that her foundation was not going to support investigations that wound up filed away as musty monographs or articles in obscure professional journals. What she wanted were practical, human results—a decrease in the population of Texas’s mental institutions, for example.

  Foreseeably, she was able to get her trustees, the Board of Regents, to go along with her, and it certainly helped that she had the president of the university, Homer P. Rainey, in her pocket. So was the first director and president of the foundation, Dr. Robert L. Sutherland. Beginning in 1940, her letters to Dr. Sutherland, and his replies to her—“My dear Dr. Sutherland,” “Dear Miss Hogg”—continued almost daily through the years. Miss Ima’s letters always stressed that the foundation’s emphasis was on prevention of mental illness, not on cure; on the importance of maintaining mental health, rather than on the treatment of the insane. And, though the foundation would cooperate with the University of Texas’s Medical School, it would not be headquartered there, or isolated there in an academic ivory tower. One of Miss Ima’s notions, in fact, was to use the foundation’s funds to employ visiting lecturers to carry the message of mental health to the rural hinterlands of the state.