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 exampl
e 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.”
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BAYOU BEND
Miss Ima may not necessarily have had “powers,” but she did believe in ESP, or in what she called her “hunches.” It ran in the family, she said, and she had some mighty peculiar stories to back it up. Once, when she was a little girl, she said, she was on a trip to Hawaii with her father. The Hoggs were about to board the ship that was to take them back to San Francisco—their luggage and a maid were already on board—when suddenly and for no apparent reason Ima began to cry. “Something awful is going to happen!” she insisted. Showing remarkable patience, her father finally agreed to unload the maid and the baggage and book passage on a later sailing. The ship sailed with its passengers, and was never heard from again. Her aunt had had the same clairvoyant knack. She had been on a stagecoach to Dallas when she experienced an overpowering sense of urgency to get home. She had ordered the driver to turn around, and arrived home just in time to pull her baby brother out of a well. Miss Ima claimed she had had a hunch about her French paintings, too—that they’d one day be considered important and valuable.
Her father had had a hunch about his West Columbia plantation property. Not long after he purchased it, oil had been struck at Spindletop—and in far greater quantities than even the speculators had dreamed—and Spindletop was not far from the Hogg acreage. In his will Jim Hogg had stipulated that the West Columbia property could not be sold until fifteen years after his death. Thirteen years later, in 1919, a rich, oil-bearing deposit of sand was brought up, and, two years later, the West Columbia oil field was producing 12,000,000 barrels of oil a year. At last Miss Ima, at the age of thirty-nine, and her brothers were Texas-style rich.
So, at about the same time, were a great many other Texans, and Houston was rapidly becoming the hub of the state’s petroleum industry. The oil-rich Houstonians w
ere looking for places to build expensive houses, and, as Big Jim had guessed, the River Oaks section seemed to be the logical spot. Realizing that River Oaks would be more attractive if it included a park, Miss Ima, her brothers, and the other River Oaks investors deeded 1,486 River Oaks acres—nearly twice the size of New York’s Central Park—to the city of Houston for the creation of Memorial Park, in memory of the fallen in the First World War. Miss Ima and her brothers Will and Mike kept fifteen acres on which to build a place of their own, and the rest of the land was sold off for development.*
Since 1909 Miss Ima and her brothers had made their principal home in Houston, where they shared a comfortable house on Rossmoyne Avenue. After the First World War, Ima had a definite hunch that she was not cut out for a career as a concert pianist, and no doubt realized that she was getting a little old to embark on such a venture. Instead, she began giving private—and free—piano lessons to promising students and, with her new wealth, established several music scholarships at the University of Texas. She had also, as early as 1913, decided that Houston deserved a symphony orchestra, and that was the year she founded the Symphony Society. Houston, of course, was not New York, and Miss Ima could not collect the imposing roster of nationally known names to decorate her committee that Eleanor Belmont would later do with the Metropolitan Opera Guild. Miss Ima’s approach was of necessity more simple and direct. She knew everybody in town, as well as pretty much what everybody was worth, and so she simply, as she put it, “went calling.” Armed with a blank-paged blue-covered notebook, she rang the doorbells of her rich friends. After explaining her mission she would say, “Now, just sign your name in the book, and next to it put how much you will give to the Symphony.”
The Grandes Dames Page 30