“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Miss Ima could usually find or invent historical reference points in her own life to justify her various enthusiasms as they came upon her.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.
With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the efforts of the Hogg Foundation abruptly changed direction—toward the problems of young men suddenly drafted into the armed services, their wives and children and their widows, as well as to the difficulties of people, women in particular, who were working in heavy industry for the first time.
Miss Ima was never one to spend the foundation’s money to finance an elaborate building in which to house it. Too many foundations, in her opinion, spent funds to create a luxurious “headquarters” that could be better invested in work in their fields. Just as she considered research “busy work,” as opposed to real work, she disliked trappings and apparatus, and the offices of the Hogg Foundation were kept deliberately Spartan. Once, when a memorial building to her brother Will was proposed, she opposed it, politely but firmly, declaring in writing that “he would prefer any investment this would entail to be directed toward mental health work which would more closely affect the lives of the people of Texas.”
When a piece of property became available to the foundation through a donation, on the other hand, Miss Ima was not averse to accepting it. Such an opportunity occurred after the war, when a prominent Houston family offered its mansion to the Child Guidance Center of Houston. It was decided that a new wing was needed, and this the Hogg Foundation offered to provide. As usual, Miss Ima supervised every detail of the construction, including inspecting the grade of concrete to be used to build the basement. Eventually, it was time to decide what color to paint the new addition, and an impromptu meeting was set up on the lawn. The architect first had his say, and then the various members of the board had theirs. Finally Miss Ima—for whom a special chair had been brought out onto the lawn, where she sat regally overseeing things—had hers. For several minutes she pondered the problem while the others waited silently. Presently a car drove by. It was, not surprisingly for Houston, a Cadillac. “Look,” Miss Ima cried, as the automobile rounded the corner, “that’s the color!” The car was beige with a pinkish cast and, as the Cadillac of the desired color disappeared from view, the entire assemblage rushed into the street to follow it and note its hue. “And of course,” said one of her trustees later, “she was right, and that was the color we painted the building.”
Miss Ima liked to keep up with the times. She had discovered that the secret of perpetual youth is not only perpetual motion but also perpetual enthusiasm. In the early 1960s, when Miss Ima had passed her eightieth birthday, four tousle-haired lads from Liverpool suddenly burst forth on the American musical scene. Most of Miss Ida’s contemporaries and peers, as well as a number of people somewhat younger than she, announced themselves appalled by the Beatles and by their music, which was dismissed as so much organized noise. Miss Ima, however, became an immediate Beatles fan, and announced that she found their Liverpudlian sound both intellectually interesting and melodically beautiful. All at once it seemed as though Miss Ima was the contemporary one, and her friends the old fogies. It was a situation, of course, which she couldn’t have enjoyed more.
In the 1960s she acquired still another enthusiasm, restoring old houses. In 1962 she acquired the “Honeymoon Cottage” in Quitman, Texas, which had been her parents’ first home, restored it and refurnished it, and presented it, along with the surrounding property, to the state of Texas to create the Jim Hogg State Park. Then, in 1963, at the suggestion of her friend Barbara Dillingham, she bought the Old Stagecoach Inn and its outbuildings in Winedale, Texas. Her original plan had been to move the inn, which dated from 1834, to Bayou Bend, but she then decided to leave it where it was, for Winedale had been the halfway-point stage stop between Houston and Austin, which gave its location historical significance. As usual, she was meticulous in her attention to details of the restoration of the old buildings, which had fallen into considerable disrepair, and to make sure that everything was being done properly she took a small cottage on the property where she could keep an eye on things. Ever the perfectionist, she journeyed to Massachusetts to buy square-cut nails for the floorboards. All timber for the restoration was cut from the Winedale property, to be sure it would match the original. Using a small but well-preserved fragment of wallpaper as a sample, Miss Ima commissioned a hand-printed replica at great cost, so that the living room of one of the buildings would be entirely authentic. Through it all, Miss Ima, using a cane now to get about, climbed over and around piles of construction materials on her inspection tours. The roof of one old building had a noticeable sag, and a carpenter, thinking it should be corrected, put up supports to straighten the roof line. That week end, checking on things, Miss Ima suddenly cried, “Where’s my sag?” When told what had been done, she issued instructions that the sag be restored immediately. In 1965, when the Winedale restoration was finally complete, Miss Ima presented the entire property, along with an endowment for its maintenance, to the University of Texas as the Museum of Cultural History.
While all this was going on, Miss Ima was quietly arranging Bayou Bend so that it too could eventually be turned into a museum. Each room of the big place was assigned its period and style of American antiques, and there would be rooms to contain the silver collection and the china collection, and one to contain her honors: the framed citations she had received, honorary degrees from colleges and universities, letters from United States Presidents, Texas governors, mayors, and other public officials and civic leaders; loving cups, ribbons, medallions; keys to cities and most-valued-citizen awards; and the first dollar bill run off under the signature of her old friend ex-Governor John Connally when he became Secretary of the Treasury, autographed to her. A very large room, fitted out with a great many illuminated glass cases, would be required.
In 1966 Miss Ima was eighty-four, and that was the year when, her collection finished and its contents arranged, she turned over Bayou Bend, its furnishings, and its fifteen landscaped acres of gardens to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, as its decorative arts collection. Along with the gift, as usual, went an endowment to maintain it. At the dedication she cheerfully announced that she was ready “to watch the sunsets from a high-rise apartment … free to pursue my other projects.” Still, though the property was technically no longer hers, Miss Ima managed to exercise a good deal of control over it. She used the house for parties whenever she wished, and she was allowed to “borrow” certain paintings and pieces of furniture for her apartment from time to time, which made the décor of her new home a moveable feast. She was forever popping in at Bayou Bend just to check on things, and once telephoned the curator to say, “A hurricane’s coming—check the windows!” And it was she who decreed that all the docents at the museum must take an intensive two-week training course under the curator, to assure that no visitor’s questions would go unanswered or incorrectly answered.
Today, Bayou Bend and its gardens can be enjoyed by the public—in small groups, on a reservations-only basis, but, as Miss Ima stipulated, at no admission charge.
In 1972 Miss Ima’s ninetieth birthday was celebrated with a special concert by the Houston Symphony Orchestra, highlighted by the guest appearance of her old friend Artur Rubinstein. She had, she liked to say, survived a number of serious illnesses, including gangrene (from a fall from her horse), spinal meningitis, typhoid and scarlet fever. And yet here she was. True, her cane was never out of her reach and she occasionally accepted a wheelchair, and her eyesight was failing. But at her birthday party she downed her customary quota of man-sized bourbon old-fashioneds, and sang and played the piano. In addition to extrasensory perception, she also believed in reincarnation and, in that sense, believed she was immortal. It was her hunch.
She almost was. In 1975, her ninety-third birthday behind her, she took off on a jet for Europe. She would visit London, and then fly on to Beyreuth where a very ambitious “project” awaited her. She planned to attend the Beyreuth Music Festival and to hear, uninterrupted, the full “Ring” cycle of Wagner operas. This four-work series—Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung, none of them noted for its brevity—would amount to some fifteen hours of opera. She had also considered touring Germany, where she had studied piano as a girl, but at the last minute decided against it. Her reasons were purely practical. “The mark,” she said, “is too inflated.” When a friend questioned the wisdom of such an extensive trip at her advanced age, Miss Ima replied, “Well, when you’re ninety-three, it doesn’t matter where you die.”
In London, outside her hotel, Miss Ima was stepping into a taxicab when the driver, thinking she was inside, pulled away. Miss Ima fell. Rushed to Westminster Hospital, she was admitted with a broken hip. Her condition complicated by pneumonia, she died a few days later, on August 19. But she had had her last words ready. To a group of concerned friends—including the remorseful cab driver—who gathered at her bedside, worried that she was so sick so far from home, she said, “Whatever happens, remember that it was the way it was meant to be. I’m doing what I want to do. I’m where I want to be. I have no regrets.” Then she smiled and closed her eyes.
Back home in Houston they said, “Well, she had a rich, full life.” “Nonsense!” says her old friend Barbara Dillingham, who worked with her on the Stagecoach Inn restoration and many other projects. “She had many years of active life ahead of her. If they’d had an intensive-care unit at that hospital, she could have been saved. But they didn’t.”
Among the many eulogies and tributes delivered at the time of Miss Ima’s death were these words from Nellie Connally, wife of the former governor: “The governor’s wife is usually called the first lady of Texas, but Miss Ima always has been and always will be the first lady of Texas.”
Miss Ima would have liked that. And would have agreed.