“A HARD WOMAN TO SAY ‘NO’ TO”
It may have become apparent that among the various characteristics America’s grandes dames have shared has been a certain imperiousness, along with a certain stubbornness. It has been said of several of them that they “thought like a man,” and it was observed often that these ladies liked to get, and usually succeeded in getting, their own way. But at least one Texas woman, Mrs. Barbara Dillingham, finds sexist connotations in such observations. “You never hear that sort of complaint being made about a man,” says she. “You never hear anyone say that Henry Ford ‘likes to get his own way,’ or that Ronald Reagan ‘likes to get his own way,’ or that Louis XIV liked to get his own way. Getting your own way is all right for a rich and powerful male. But when a rich and powerful woman likes to get her own way, then that’s considered a bad sign.”
Mrs. Dillingham was referring specifically to her old friend, the late and legendary Miss Ima Hogg of Houston, a woman who was frequently taken to task for “liking to get her own way.” “Miss Ima wanted what she felt was right,” says Barbara Dillingham. “When they were planning to build a freeway smack through the center of one of the city’s most beautiful parks, that seemed wrong to her, and she fought it. She said, ‘They built a tunnel under the Bois de Boulogne—why can’t we?’ Well, that was one battle she lost, but she didn’t lose many.”
Among other things, Ima Hogg was a battler.
When introducing herself to people, she would always pause slightly: “My name is Ima … Hogg.” The little pause was for more than dramatic effect. The introduction, delivered in a firm, even voice, guaranteed that the recipient of this information would not laugh; Ima Hogg’s name was one thing about which she saw absolutely nothing funny, and the little pause said, in effect, “Yes, you have heard me correctly. My name is Ima … Hogg.” The little flash of her blue eyes which went with the introduction seemed to add, “And I wish to hear no further comment on this subject!”
In connection with her uncommon name, two legends that grew up about her never ceased to irritate her. One was the story that her father had given her the name out of spite, to humiliate and denigrate her. The other was that her father had been equally malefic in naming his other children—that Ima Hogg had a sister named Ura, a brother named Hesa, another sister named Shesa, and so on. Actually, she had no sisters, and her three brothers had been given down-home Texas names that were plain as Job’s turkey: Will, Tom, and Mike. Also, Ima Hogg worshiped her father, and the suggestion that he would have been capable of a cruel joke distressed her. Still, the stories about the Hogg family nomenclature persisted—set in motion, she always believed, by political enemies of her father’s—and have continued to this good day. There are still otherwise well-informed Houstonians who will confidently speak of Ima, Ura, Hesa and Shesa Hogg.
Ima Hogg was born July 10, 1882, in Mineola, Texas, the daughter of district attorney James Stephen Hogg and Sallie Stinson Hogg, and was named Ima in all innocence by parents who had simply seen nothing odd about the juxtaposition of the first and last names. A few years before her birth, one of her father’s brothers, a writer named Thomas Elisha Hogg, had written and published a long epic poem about the Civil War called The Fate of Marvin. The poem’s heroine was named Ima: “A Southern girl, whose winsome grace and kindly, gentle mien betrayed a heart more beauteous than her face. Ah! she was fair; the Southern skies were typed in Ima’s heavenly eyes.” Not long before the birth of James and Sallie Hogg’s daughter, Thomas Elisha Hogg had died, and Ima was given her name to honor her uncle’s memory. As her father wrote to another brother, John Hogg, “Our cup of joy is now overflowing! We have a daughter of as fine proportions and of as angelic mien as ever gracious nature favored a man with, and her name is Ima! Can’t you come down to see her? She made her debut on last Monday night at 9 o’clock. Sallie is doing extremely well, and of course Ima is.…”
One person not overjoyed with the baby’s name was Ima’s grandfather Stinson. He lived only about fifteen miles from Mineola, but news traveled slowly in those days. When he learned that his granddaughter was to be called Ima Hogg, he saddled up his horse and rode as fast as he could to Mineola to protest it. But he was too late. The christening had already taken place, and, as Miss Ima would say later, “Ima I became, and Ima I was to remain.”
From the beginning she bore the name proudly, even defiantly, refusing to change it—she could have become Irma, for example, by adding an “r”—or to hide under any number of possible nicknames. Equally defensive were her three brothers, who at one time or another all came home from school with blackened eyes and bloodied noses earned fighting for the honor of their sister’s name. And she herself, of course, as a child was relentlessly teased by her contemporaries. She refused to be fazed by any of it. In fact, it is possible that she might never have become the sort of woman she did had it not been for the character-building experience of living with a ludicrous name that made her the butt of vulgar jokes. And when she became the acknowledged “First Lady of Texas,” it was said in Houston that newcomers knew that they had become true Houstonians at the moment when Miss Ima’s name no longer seemed peculiar. By then, to be sure, she was known throughout the state simply as “Miss Ima,” or, as they said, “Mizima.”
“What a pity she never married!” people would say as she grew older. There were several possible explanations for her spinsterhood, and her own was probably not to be taken seriously. “I am fatally attracted to handsome men,” she would say, “and I know if I had married, I would have picked a handsome husband who was worthless.” Then there was the fact that in 1890, when Ima was eight, her father was elected governor of Texas, the first to be native-born, and the move from Mineola to the Governor’s Mansion in Austin certainly helped isolate Ima from her peers. More interesting was the rather primitive sex education she received. Her mother had been in poor health for a number of years, and in 1895 Sallie Hogg died. Ima was thirteen, and a maiden aunt moved into the Hogg household to help care for the children. “I remember,” Miss Ima would recall many years later, “that my aunt took me aside and told me that I was reaching an age when boys might begin taking an interest in me. She said, ‘Ima, you may find boys who will come up to you and say you’re pretty. But remember that you are not pretty. If a boy ever tells you you’re pretty, he’s lying.’” Miss Ima would pause at this point in the story, and then add with a wry smile, “A few weeks after that, I wore a new dress to school, and a boy spoke to me and said, ‘Ima, you look real pretty in that dress.’ I screamed at him, ‘Liar! Liar! I’m not pretty!’—and I ran away from him as fast as I could.”
The story is even sadder because, in fact, she was very pretty—with large, wide-set eyes, a perfectly shaped nose, full lips, a dimple at the center of her chin, and a petite figure. She looked very much like the Ima described in her Uncle Tom’s poem.
Then there was her overpowering father. A huge, attractive man whom nearly everybody liked, Big Jim Hogg had come to the governorship on a ticket demanding the regulation of large corporations, particularly the railroads, which had been charging through Texas bribing public officials left and right. As governor he was unusual in that he had actually fulfilled his campaign promises, and in 1891 he established the State Railroad Commission. From the beginning little Ima served as her father’s hostess. When she was nine, Ima and her older brother Will were among the guests of honor at Big Jim’s inauguration as governor, and, in the years that followed, Ima—seated at one end of the table while her father sat at the other—presided over formal dinners, teas, and receptions for visiting dignitaries, politicians, and important businessmen. Until her father’s death in 1906, Ima Hogg was his “official wife.”
Following his term as governor, Jim Hogg bought a house in Austin, where he resumed his law practice. Here the Hogg children established a menagerie, which included a horse for Ima, a pet bear, a fawn, several dogs, and a parrot named Jane that screamed “Papa! Papa!” whenever the Governor entered the room. And here, for her father, Ima continued to reign as “the sunshine of my household.” Still, he could be a tough taskmaster. When Ima was a young girl her allowance was 25 cents a week. One week she lost her quarter and, needing the money to go skating, borrowed the money from a servant. Her father got wind of this and was furious. After a long lecture on the impropriety of borrowing from servants, he advised her that he would personally pay back the quarter, but would deduct a nickel from her allowance for the next five weeks.
Though not yet rich by Texas standards, Jim Hogg was well off—well enough off to afford, among other things, a private railroad car. Once, on a trip with her father to Boston, teen-age Ima found herself alone in the railroad station while her father was off attending a political meeting. She fell into conversation with a young woman who seemed friendly and pleasant, and, thinking that she had made a new friend in a strange city, Ima chatted openly about her father’s career in Texas politics. The next morning she found herself extensively quoted in the Boston Transcript. Once again her father was furious, and from then on she was wary of strangers who asked her questions.
At age sixteen Ima was sent off to the Misses Carrington’s Preparatory School in faraway Dallas. She had been studying piano since she was a small child, and at the Carringtons’ she continued her piano lessons and even considered a concert career. Still, though physically separated from him, she still found her father the dominant influence in her life. He wrote her daily letters, and she responded as often. Big brother Will was also demanding on this score: “Dear Sis, please do not neglect your duty of writing them [brothers Tom and Mike] a joint letter once a week. Don’t forget to write me once in a while and your dear daddy every day.”
Jim Hogg’s letters to his daughter were full of exhortation and advice. In a 1902 letter he said, “Amidst the vicissitudes of a checkered career, from orphanage in boyhood, I know I have at times done wrong, but never wantonly, wilfully. Looking back I have little to regret. Looking forward I have unshaken hopes that in you and my three boys I shall enjoy much pride and undefiled pleasure in Old Age.” He also expected her to serve as an example to her two younger brothers: “With your acquaintances and large circle of friends in Texas, won by your own exemplary character and excellent behavior, you have nothing to dread in the future, provided that you do not change radically in your disposition and habits. With you or away from you I have every reason to be grateful to God for such a girl.”
It was not easy to forget that Big Jim was a politician, and some of his letters rang with flights of grandstand oratory: “Home! The center of civilization. Home! The pivot of constitutional government. Home! The ark of safety to happiness, virtue, and Christianity. Home! The haven of rest in old age, where the elements of better manhood can be taught rising generations by the splendid example of settled citizenship. Every man should have a home!”
A few years later, Miss Ima enrolled at the University of Texas. Here, while she continued to concentrate on music and piano, she allowed her interests to broaden, and took courses in German, Medieval English, and—a daring new field of study in 1900—psychology. It began to seem as though Miss Ima might be in danger of becoming a bluestocking, a woman who would devote her life to scholarship and pedagogy, which was certainly a far from fashionable career for a turn-of-the-century southern belle.
At the same time, though her father remained the center of her life, it was clear that Miss Ima was developing a strong sense of personal independence and becoming a woman with a will of her own—someone definitely to be reckoned with. She had also developed an interest in painting and the decorative arts, particularly in American antique furniture. This pursuit was not fashionable at the time either. (Affluent Americans furnished their homes with French, English, and Italian pieces, and the fine things that were coming from the workrooms of Newport, Philadelphia, and Charleston would be ignored by collectors for nearly another half-century.) Once a friend invited Miss Ima to lunch, and Miss Ima suggested that they drive to a “charming little restaurant” she’d heard of, which happened to be about a hundred miles away. Distances, of course, are as nothing in Texas, but still, a hundred miles for lunch was a bit extreme. Only when the two had reached their destination did the friend discover Miss Ima’s ulterior motive—a set of elaborately hand-carved Belter chairs that were going on a local auction block, and that Miss Ima had, as they say in Texas, “took a notion” to buy. “She was a hard woman to say ‘no’ to,” the friend recalled.
By the time she had reached her early twenties, Big Jim’s long-term plans for his only daughter were reasonably clear. The sunshine of his household, who had been his hostess in the Governor’s Mansion, was to become his guardian-caretaker-housekeeper-companion in his old age. Fortunately for her, she was able to escape that dreary domestic fate, which so often befalls the only daughters of widowed fathers. Big Jim died in 1906, when Ima was twenty-four. Though he had not acquired a huge fortune by any means, Ima and her brothers were left comfortably off. Jim Hogg and a group of other investors, betting that one day little Houston would become a big town, and that a stretch of woodland, threaded by bayous running inland from Galveston Bay, to the west of town, would one day become the town’s prime residential district, had bought most of what is now the superrich enclave of River Oaks. Jim Hogg’s share of River Oaks was some 1,500 acres. In 1901 he had also bought a 4,100-acre plantation near West Columbia, Texas, which contained a two-story house and several outbuildings. For this he had paid about seven dollars an acre. By 1910 Houston was already beginning its incredible expansion, and Miss Ima’s inheritance helped her to spread her wings.
Her first love was still music, and now she betook herself to New York City—unchaperoned, to the horror of her brothers and friends—where she enrolled at the National Conservatory of Music. The idea of a career on the concert stage still glimmered in her mind. After several months in New York she decided that the greatest teachers of piano were in Germany, and so, unchaperoned still, she sailed for Europe. There, when not studying or practicing or going to concerts and opera, she began buying works of fledgling painters whose names were unknown in America and barely known on the Continent at the time. Their names were Picasso, Klee, Modigliani, Matisse, and Cézanne. “Their paintings were cheap, but nice,” she said years later, with characteristic understatement, when she presented her collection to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.
Miss Ima was in Germany in July 1914 when the nephew of Emperor Franz Josef, the fifty-one-year-old Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated with his wife in their automobile at Sarajevo by a student terrorist named Gavrilo Prinzip, and when the “guns of August” signaled the beginning of the First World War. She was there to read the words of Sir Edward Grey, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” She was able to find a seat on the last train carrying foreign visitors out of Berlin, and to scramble aboard the last passenger steamer leaving Hamburg for the United States through the U-boat-infested Atlantic. “It was really very exciting,” she said later.
Rolled up in her grip, of course, were the cheap, nice canvases of the Post-Impressionists she had bought in Europe.
In addition to an eye for art and furniture, and a knack for getting people to do what she wanted—and not to forget spunk—Miss Ima possessed an almost uncanny ability to communicate with animals and to get them to do her bidding. There was her pet brown bear, for example, and her pet ostrich, both of which she rode bareback. But horses were her favorites. Miss Ima’s own horse was an elegant black Arabian stallion named Napoleon. Napoleon, she explained, was “proud cut.” A proud-cut horse is a stallion that has been half-gelded. He cannot reproduce, but he does not lose his sexual appetites. Proud-cutting is almost always the result of a veterinarian accident or, more accurately, oversight when the newly foaled colt is gelded, and proud-cut horses usually mature to be totally unmanageable. “It made him very lively,” Miss Ima liked to say. In fact, Miss Ima was the only person who could ride him.
Once, when she returned to Austin after an absence of nearly a year, Miss Ima asked to have her groom bring Napoleon around while she waited on the veranda. People used to horses point out that a horse is not like a dog, who will “remember” his master after years of separation and, seeing him, come bounding toward him with pleasure. Horses are not particularly intelligent creatures. And, in terms of personality, a horse is more like a cat—independent, and mostly loyal to the human being who has last fed him.
While Miss Ima waited on the veranda, her groom appeared around the corner of the building with Napoleon kicking and rearing and the groom struggling with his halter. Suddenly, seeing Miss Ima standing there, Napoleon, with one fierce jerk of his head, broke away from the groom altogether and, at full gallop, charged up the flight of steps onto the porch, laid his head on her shoulder, and nuzzled her.
Miss Ima, the groom said, “had powers.”