Art Buchwald - LA Times Obiturary (with video)
aka Bob
Columnist Art Buchwald dead at 81
By Louis Sahagun - Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
12:33 PM PST, January 18, 2007
Art Buchwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political satirist, columnist
and author of 34 books who built deceptively simple spoofs of modern
life on foundations of indignation, has died. He was 81.
Buchwald, who had seemed to literally laugh in the face of death over
the last year, died of kidney failure, surrounded by family members at
his Washington D.C. home, according to his son Joel.
After Buchwald's right leg was amputated in February as the result of
diabetes, he made the decision to accept the inevitability of his
declining health over the prospect of dialysis for the rest of his
life.
As his kidneys started to fail, he entered a hospice in Washington. It
was supposed to be a short stay — perhaps two or three weeks — his
doctors said. But as word of his condition emerged, Buchwald began
playing host to scores of politicians and celebrities that he had
known over his decades as a writer. Visitors included members of the
Kennedy family, former CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, singer Carly
Simon, former Washington Post Editor Benjamin C. Bradlee, former
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and television host Phil Donahue.
The New York Times wrote that Buchwald's deathbed had become the
"hottest salon" in Washington.
The two or three week stay turned into months as Buchwald continued to
write his column, hold court and sit for interviews with reporters
from around the country.
The lead of one Associated Press story summed it up best.
"Art Buchwald is dying and enjoying every minute of it."
Through it all, his health inexplicably stabilized. He left the
hospice in July and spent some time at his home in Martha's Vineyard.
He also finished his final book, a meditation on the last year of his
life: "Too Soon to Say Goodbye," which was released in November.
"For decades there was no better way to start the day than to open the
morning paper to Art's column, laugh out loud and learn all over again
to take the issues seriously in the world of politics, but not take
yourself too seriously," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said today
in a statement reflecting on Buchwald's death. "As Art said, 'Whether
it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time we've
got.' The special art of Art Buchwald was to make even the worst of
times better," Kennedy said.
One of the nation's best known and successful writers of humor,
Buchwald's satirical style was compared with that of H. L. Mencken.
Like Mark Twain, Buchwald was a comic American observer of the
European scene who was equally fascinated by the American system and
its shortcomings.
Yet, unlike almost all of his colleagues during his more than three
decades as a Washington-based correspondent, Buchwald rarely, if ever,
so much as placed a telephone call to gather material. "I never talk
to anybody. Facts just get in my way," he once said.
Instead, the pudgy, 5-foot-8, cigar-chomping writer with owlish
horn-rim glasses preferred to scan television news programs,
newspapers and magazines such as Time and Newsweek. Occasionally, he
clipped articles and filed them in folders or stuffed them into his
shirt pocket for safekeeping.
In his early years as a columnist in Europe, however, Buchwald would
go almost anywhere and do almost anything to gather raw material. He
interviewed celebrities such as actresses Grace Kelly and Ingrid
Bergman and shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. The writer chased
goats over mountains in Yugoslavia and marched in a May Day parade in
East Berlin. He searched for Turkish baths in Turkey and made a
three-week trip to the Soviet Union in a limousine driven by a
uniformed chauffeur.
One of his most famous inventions was an American tourist who vied for
the "six-minute Louvre" race. Buchwald's tourist dashed through the
Paris museum, viewing the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory and Venus de Milo
in less than four minutes "under perfect conditions, with a smooth
floor, excellent lighting, and no wind."
Buchwald enjoyed turning situations around for satiric effect. In a
1971 column, he claimed, "I can now reliably report that Vice
President Spiro Agnew has no intention of dumping Richard Nixon A
spokesman for the Vice President told me that Agnew was very satisfied
with the job his President was doing and that he even intended to give
him more responsibilities than any Vice President has ever given his
President before."
Of the United Nations, he said: "I believe that we should get out of
the United Nations. I think it should be made into an apartment house
or the headquarters for a company like General Motors or AT&T. It
galls me every time I go to New York and think that building is being
used for peaceful purposes."
As for his own career, he said, "Everyone thinks I have one of the
best jobs in the world. But, if you look at it objectively and examine
it from all sides, I do."
Buchwald was at his best when he was morally indignant at some new
hypocrisy or outrage. His work, he admitted, operated as an escape
valve for the frustrations he experienced when faced with such issues
as the arms race, drug abuse and inept foreign policy.
"What I do is always a challenge," he told the education magazine Geo
in 1984. "It's not like I broke the home run record. I have to go to
bat [every] week, so I can never relax. Whatever people say about me I
accept, but I know I'm only as good as my last column or my last book
or whatever I do. I think that anybody who's worth his salt is always
walking a tightrope."
Buchwald's comedic gifts - expressed in characteristic short,
declarative sentences - belied a childhood that was anything but
funny.
He was born Oct. 20, 1925, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., the only son of
Austrian American drapery installer Joseph Buchwald and his wife,
Helen. The youngest of four children, he grew up in Hollis, a
residential community in northeast Queens, N.Y.
He never met his mother, who suffered from severe chronic depression
and spent most of her life in a state hospital. His father, a drapery
installer struck hard by the Depression, was forced to place him and
his older sisters - Alice, Edith and Doris - in foster homes. For a
brief spell, Buchwald found himself in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum after
being rejected by various foster families.
"I am not certain how Pop found the Hebrew Orphan Asylum," Buchwald
recalled in his poignant memoir "Leaving Home," published in 1993.
"Gaining admission was harder than getting into Princeton. They didn't
take just anybody. My father had to appear before a judge with us,
since it was required that we be declared neglected children by the
court before we would be remanded to the home. This was a bad rap for
him, because we weren't neglected."
At his elementary school in Queens, he was remembered as a nonstop
jokester.
"In the seventh grade, we girls were all wearing bows in the back of
our hair," former classmate Olive Maidment of Covina recalled. "Art
came to school wearing a bow on the back of his head just to spoof us.
We all laughed and the teacher sent him to the back of the room."
By the time Buchwald was 16, his father had saved enough money to
reunite the family in an apartment in Forest Hills. An indifferent
student, Buchwald attended Jamaica High School and Forest Hills High
School, both in Queens, but did not graduate.
When he turned 17 in 1942, he ran away to join the Marines. Told he
would need parental consent to become a leatherneck, the underage
Buchwald enlisted a drunk who, for a pint of whiskey, agreed to pose
as his father.
Buchwald, who came to love the armed forces, served in the Pacific
theater from 1942 until 1945. Most of the time he was stationed on
Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands, where he edited his outfit's
newspaper. He was discharged in Los Angeles with the rank of sergeant.
"I felt that the Marines were the only ones I had ever cared about or
who had ever cared for me," he once told an interviewer, the New York
Times reported in 1972.
Shortly after his return to civilian life, Buchwald enrolled at USC to
take liberal arts courses under the G.I. Bill. When the university
discovered that he did not have a high school diploma, he was allowed
to continue his studies but was ineligible for a degree, the 1972
story recounted.
He was managing editor of the Wampus, the campus humor magazine, wrote
a column for the college newspaper, the Daily Trojan, and scripted a
variety show called "No Love Atoll."
After three years at USC and with a New York State veteran's bonus of
$250 in hand, he followed an urge to sample the expatriate life and
bought a one-way ticket to Paris to study French on the G.I. Bill.
He wound up skipping the classes, reportedly bribing the attendance
taker to mark him present while he used the G.I. funds to live the
Bohemian life in the Montparnasse area of Paris. To supplement his
income, he landed a job as Paris stringer for Variety magazine.
Within three months, he maneuvered his way into the Paris edition of
the New York Herald Tribune by offering to review Parisian night life.
His weekly salary was $25.
In January 1949, he took a sample column to the offices of the Herald
Tribune's European edition. Titled "Paris After Dark," it brimmed with
scraps of offbeat information. Buchwald was hired.
The four-time-a-week column caught on swiftly and Buchwald started
writing a second column, "Mostly About People," in 1951. A year later,
the two columns were combined and began running stateside as "Europe's
Lighter Side" and then "Art Buchwald in Paris."
His work soon began to entice readers on both side of the Atlantic.
The column in which Buchwald explains Thanksgiving Day to the French
people in 1953 is reprinted with ceremonial regularity every year in
late November.
After a three-year courtship complicated by the fact that he was
Jewish and his girlfriend was a devout Roman Catholic, Buchwald
married Ann McGarry, a former fashion coordinator for Neiman-Marcus
whom he had met in Paris, in 1952.
The Buchwalds adopted three children in Europe - Joel, who is Irish;
Connie, who is Spanish; and Jennifer, who is French.
Buchwald's wife, an author and former literary agent, died in 1994 at
74. The couple had separated after 40 years of marriage but became
friends as she was dying of lung cancer.
In the late summer of 1957, Buchwald placed an advertisement in the
London Times classifieds: "Would like to hear from people who dislike
Americans and their reasons why. Please write Box R. 543." The ad drew
209 replies, ranging from the most terse of answers to lengthy
tributes to Americans. The replies furnished Buchwald with material
for two columns.
The same year, he made headlines when President Dwight Eisenhower was
visiting Paris to attend a NATO treaty conference. Buchwald spoofed
the detailed reports given each day by the president's press
secretary, James Hagerty. Reporters of Buchwald's fantasy sessions
posed questions such as, "What time did the President start eating his
grapefruit, Jim?"
Outraged, Hagerty held a special news conference and blasted
Buchwald's work as "unadulterated rot." Eisenhower, however, enjoyed
the column and advised his press secretary to "simmer down."
Buchwald had the final word in a column in which he replied to
Hagerty: "I have been known to write adulterated rot, but never
unadulterated rot."
Even as Buchwald's popularity soared, he surprised adoring readers and
colleagues alike in 1961 by returning to the United States to settle
in Washington and poke fun at American political and social life.
"As soon as I found out that French taxes were going to be higher than
American taxes, I decided to come back to this great country of ours,"
he said in a 1966 interview with Playboy magazine.
In Washington, his satirical observations became more popular than any
of his work from Europe. He hit the lecture circuit, commanding up to
$3,000 per speech. Speaking in a booming voice, he would tell his life
story, which he regularly updated and punctuated with gags.
For decades, his column was distributed to more than 500 newspapers
around the country.
In 1970, a play Buchwald had written called "Sheep on a Runway," about
American foreign policy, ran for three months on Broadway.
In 1982, he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
He also dabbled in screenwriting, an effort that landed him in a
four-year, $2.5-million courtroom battle against Paramount Pictures in
the early 1990s for his contribution to the 1988 hit Eddie Murphy film
"Coming to America." A judge ruled in Buchwald's favor and he was
awarded $825,000 in the settlement.
In the late 1990s, after more than 8,000 columns and 37 years of
stinging observations from Washington, Buchwald sought fresh
perspective and moved into New York's Regency Hotel, and later the
Wyndham.
In 2000, he suffered a serious stroke during a Father's Day visit to
his son's home. By September he had rebounded enough to enjoy the
release of his first novel.
In March, at his Washington hospice, he was presented with the 2006
Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of
Newspaper Columnists.
Like his good friends "60 Minutes" correspondent Mike Wallace and the
late author William Styron, Buchwald was prone to depression. But the
satirist managed to find humor in that, too.
Styron "and I had depressions at the same time," Buchwald said in a
1998 New York Times interview, "and the only difference is he made a
million on his and I didn't make a dime on mine. We argued who had the
worst depression. He says his was a 9.9 on the Richter scale and mine
was a rainy day at Disneyland."
"People ask what I am trying to do with humor," Buchwald wrote in
"Leaving Home." "The answer is, 'I'm getting even.' "
In addition to his son Joel, Buchwald is survived by daughters
Jennifer Buchwald of Roxbury, Mass.; Connie Buchwald Marks of
Culpeper, Va.; sisters Edith Jaffe of Bellevue, Wash. and Doris Kahme
of Delray Beach, Fla.; and five grandchildren.
He will be interred at the Vineyard Haven Cemetery in Martha's
Vineyard, Mass., where his wife is also buried.
--
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Wax-up and drop-in of Surfing's Golden Years: <http://www.surfwriter.net>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~