Art Buchwald kicks bucket - bucket bursts into laughter

Art Buchwald, 81, Columnist and Humorist Who Delighted in the Absurd -- by RICHARD SEVERO/NY Times

Art Buchwald , who poked fun at the follies of the rich, the famous and the powerful for half a century as the most widely read newspaper humorist of his time, died Wednesday night in Washington.. He was 81.. The cause was kidney failure, his son, Joel, said. Mr. Buchwald had been living with his son for most of the last eight years.

Mr. Buchwald’s syndicated column was a staple for a generation or more of newspaper readers, not least the politicians and government leaders he tweaked so regularly. His life was a rich tale of gumption, heartbreak and humor, with chapters in Paris, Washington and points around the globe.

But perhaps no year of his life was as remarkable as the last. It became something of an extended curtain call. Last February doctors told him he had only a few weeks to live. “I decided to move into a hospice and go quietly into the night,” he wrote three months later. “For reasons that even the doctors can’t explain, my kidneys kept working.”

He kept writing his column, and even published a book last fall, “To Soon To Say Goodbye,” keeping his humor even as he reflected on his mortality. He spent the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, attended a memorial for an old friend, the reporter R.W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times, and looked on as his life was celebrated.

“The French ambassador gave me the literary equivalent of the Legion of Honor,” he wrote. “The National Hospice Association made me man of the year. I never realized dying was so much fun.”

Once described as a “Will Rogers with chutzpah,” Mr. Buchwald found enthusiastic readerships on both sides of the Atlantic. Early on he became nearly everyone’s favorite American in Paris for his satirical column in the European edition of The New York Herald Tribune. When he returned from overseas to write a new column, from Washington, he became even more popular. At its peak it appeared in some 500 newspapers.

He delighted in stirring the pot — never maliciously, always vigorously. The world was mad (or at least a little nutty), he said, and all he was doing was recording it. He did it so well that he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982.

Across the world stage, he saw theater of the absurd, and he made an effort to immerse himself in it. He went to Yugoslavia to chase goats; he went to Turkey in search of a Turkish bath, writing that he was astonished when the Turks told him that they had no such thing.

During the Cold War he marched alongside missiles, tanks and troops in a May Day parade in East Berlin. Another time, he rented a chauffeured limousine to tour Eastern Europe. He wanted the people there to know, as he put it, alluding to his plump physique, what a “bloated, plutocratic capitalist really looked like.”

More often, though, he skewered targets closer to home. In the Watergate years he wrote about three men stranded in a sinking boat with a self-destructive President Richard M. Nixon . As the president hid food under his shirt, he bailed water into the vessel.

In the early 1960’s, Mr. Buchwald theorized that a shortage of Communists was imminent in the United States and that if the nation was not careful, the Communist Party would be made up almost entirely of F.B.I. informers.

“The joy of his column was not that it was side-splitting humor,” his friend Ben Bradlee, the former editor of The Washington Post, said earlier this year, “but that he made you smile.”

It was an amiable brand of wit that sprung from a man who had been reared in foster homes and an orphan asylum and who had decided, when he was 6 or 7, that his life was so awful that he should make a living making everybody laugh, even if he did not always laugh along with them. He had at least two serious bouts of depression in his middle years and regarded himself as occasionally suicidal.

Arthur Buchwald was born on Oct. 20, 1925, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., to Joseph and Helen Buchwald. His father, an Austrian, had fled to the United States to avoid service in the Austro-Hungarian army and opened a business making drapes and slipcovers. His mother, the former Helen Klineberger, had immigrated from Hungary.

Arthur, the youngest of four children and the only son, virtually never saw his mother. Suffering from delusions, she was admitted to a mental hospital a few weeks after his birth and was confined for the remaining 35 years of her life. Her son was not permitted to visit her when he was a child and decided not to after he became an adult. “I preferred the mother I had invented to the one I would find in the hospital,” Mr. Buchwald wrote in a 1994 memoir, “Leaving Home.”

By his own account he had always wondered if his birth had somehow been responsible for her illness, and when he sought help for his depression, he said, he confessed to his psychiatrist that he had conducted “a lifelong search for someone to replace her.”

Arthur soon parted from his father as well. Joseph Buchwald, unable to support his children after his business ran dry during the Depression, placed his son in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York. The boy was then shuttled to a series of foster homes, including a Queens boarding house for sick children — he suffered from rickets — run by Seventh-Day Adventists.

There, young Arthur, a Jew, was taught that eating meat, fish and eggs was sinful. Years afterward, he wrote, “There is still a tiny Seventh-Day Adventist inside of me screaming to get out every time I make a pass at a tuna fish sandwich.”

Arthur remained at the home until he was five. He and his father and sisters were eventually reunited and lived in Hollis, Queens.

With the outbreak of World War II, Mr. Buchwald, still in high school, ran away to join the Marines, hitchhiking to North Carolina. “The Marine Corps was the first father figure I had ever known,” he wrote. Assigned to the Fourth Marine Air Wing, he spent most of his tour on a Pacific atoll cleaning aircraft guns and editing his squadron’s newsletter while earning a sergeant’s stripes.

After the war, Mr. Buchwald went to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles under the G.I. Bill and became managing editor of the campus humor magazine. But he neglected to tell U.S.C. that he had not finished high school. When officials found out, they told him that he could continue to take courses but that he could not be considered for a degree. (Thirty-three years later, the university gave him an honorary doctorate.)

Mr. Buchwald decided to continue his education in Paris. “My dream was to follow in the steps of Hemingway, Elliot Paul and Gertrude Stein,” he wrote. “I wanted to stuff myself with baguettes and snails, fill my pillow with rejection slips and find a French girl named Mimi who believed that I was the greatest writer in the world.”

Not yet 23, he sailed to Paris on a converted troop ship and enrolled at the Alliance Française, also under the G.I. bill. Soon he talked his way into a job with The Herald Tribune’s Paris-based European edition writing a column about entertainment and restaurants for $25 a week.

The column, “Paris After Dark,” caught on, and by the early 50s The Tribune had syndicated it internationally. His own favorite, friends said, was a 1952 column in which he explained Thanksgiving to the French, using a liberal amount of French translation, even of English names like Miles Standish (Kilometres Deboutish).

Mr. Buchwald became the subject of headlines himself in 1957. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was in Paris attending a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization when Mr. Buchwald, weary of the soft questions lobbed at Mr. Eisenhower by the press, wrote a column about a fictitious news conference in which reporters demanded to know, among other things, when the president started eating his morning grapefruit. The column incensed the Eisenhower’s press secretary, James C. Hagerty.

“Unadulterated rot,” he called it.

Mr. Buchwald countered that he had “been known to write adulterated rot” but never “unadulterated rot.”

Readers seemed to find vicarious pleasure in following the adventures of an expatriate but ordinary American flirting with royalty and the jet set without becoming a snob. In one column, he told readers that he had not been invited to the Grace Kelly-Prince Rainier wedding because of a family feud: “The Buchwalds and the Grimaldis have not spoken since Jan. 9, 1297.” When Gary Cooper paid him a visit, he wrote a column of dialogue in which the famously reticent actor did all the talking and Mr. Buchwald replied with “yup” and “nope.”

Mr. Buchwald often wrote about his wife and their three children. He had met Ann McCarry, a publicist for the fashion designer Pierre Balmain, in Paris, and they were married in 1952. They adopted three children, each born in a different country, and all survive their father — Joel (born in Ireland), of Washington, Connie Marks Buchwald (Spain), of Culpepper, Va., and Jennifer Buchwald (France), of Boston. Five grandchildren also survive. Mrs. Buchwald died in 1994.

In his 14 years in Paris, Mr. Buchwald became as much a celebrity as those whose names he dropped in his columns. But it was in Washington, where he moved in 1962, that his fame took off.

By 1972 his column was appearing three times a week in about 400 newspapers in the United States and in 100 in other countries. His nearest rival was his friend Russell Baker of The New York Times, whose “Observer” column appeared in other papers as well. “Buchwald is incomparable,” Mr. Baker once said. “And he is brave, too, doing one of the hardest things in the world to do — to be funny, in exactly the same sort of way in regard to tone and technique, three times a week.”

Mr. Buchwald’s satire grew more biting in Washington. When President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 with the stated purpose of protecting Americans there during a rebellion, Mr. Buchwald wrote a column about the last remaining one, a tourist named Sidney, who was being detained by the Dominican authorities so that the American soldiers would not pull out.

Occasionally a Washington insider would grouse about a Buchwald column, but his victims rarely bled. And he never hinted at his own political leanings in his columns. “He was a people person and not much interested in politics,” Mr. Bradlee said.

Mr. Buchwald was as visible in Washington as he had been in Paris. He was often seen in sleek restaurants like the Sans Souci, holding court with a bevy of influential friends like Ethel Kennedy and Edward Bennett Williams, the co-owner of the Washington Redskins. On Martha’s Vineyard, where he had a summer home, one friend was the novelist William Styron. He played poker there with the journalists Carl T. Rowan and David Brinkley, the Johnson aide and later motion picture figure Jack Valenti , and the diplomat Llewellyn Thompson. He kibitzed with the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak , and he dressed in a flea-bitten rabbit suit to play the Easter bunny at a party he gave every year.

Another friend, the CBS correspondent Mike Wallace , said Mr. Buchwald could not escape his depression even at his summer retreat.

“Three of us — Bill Styron, he and I — suffered depression simultaneously, so we walked around in the rain together on Martha’s Vineyard and consoled each other,” Mr. Wallace said in a phone interview in February. “I traveled a lot on ‘60 Minutes,’ and no matter where I was, every single night I got a call from Art Buchwald to listen to the same tale of woe. He did the best to make life palatable, to help you be optimistic, to let you know he believed you would beat it. We both did, and so did Bill. We named ourselves the ‘Blues Brothers.’ ” Mr. Styron died in November.

Mr. Buchwald’s column was the cornerstone of a virtual industry. He recycled it in hard-cover anthologies and used it as the basis for radio and television appearances. He was always in demand on the lecture circuit or as a master of ceremonies, holding forth with mock-seriousness and a New York accent. He also had two novels published. One had its origins in Mr. Bradlee’s office.

“A guy showed up in my office covered with bandages and blood and told me he was a recent graduate of Sing Sing,” Mr. Bradlee said. “He had done time for murder and was broke. He became a thorn in my side, and I got sick of him, so I sent him to Buchwald, just to get him out of my office. Art locked him up in a room and wrote a book about him, ‘A Gift From the Boys.’ The guy had been deported and his mob friends gave him a girl as a goodbye present.”

The novel, published in 1958, became the basis of the 1960 movie “Surprise Package” with Yul Brynner.

Mr. Buchwald’s other novel, “The Bolo Caper” (1974), an ecological fairy tale for children and adults about a leopard hunted for his fur, was adapted as a 1985 television movie.

Mr. Buchwald’s also wrote a stage comedy, “Sheep on the Runway,” about a pundit named Joseph Mayflower. It had a Broadway run in 1970, delighting audiences but alienating the columnist Joseph Alsop, who felt the pompous villain of the piece had been modeled after him.

Almost 20 years later he sued Paramount Pictures, demanding to be paid for a script idea that he contended was the basis for the hit movie “Coming to America,” about an African prince (Eddie Murphy) who visits the United States and winds up working at a menial job. In 1990, a Superior Court in California ruled in his favor. Mr. Buchwald remained heavy throughout his life, avoiding exercise, he said, because it was dangerous to his health. He gravitated toward big cigars and rich pastries. He wrote a second memoir, “I’ll Always Have Paris,” in 1996. And he established a scholarship for “the most irreverent student” in journalism at U.S.C.

It was an irreverence rooted in hurt, his friends said. “No matter what went wrong in his life, he could make a job out of setbacks, out of things that had gone wrong,” Mr. Wallace said. Even after he had checked himself into the hospice and refused dialysis, his spirits remained up as he accepted a stream of visitors.

“I said to him the other night at the hospice, ‘What are you going to leave behind, buddy?’ ” Mr. Wallace said in February. “He said, ‘Joy!’ He almost shouted it.”

As he continued to write his column, he found material in his own survival. “So far things are going my way,” he wrote in March. “I am known in the hospice as The Man Who Wouldn’t Die. How long they allow me to stay here is another problem. I don’t know where I’d go now, or if people would still want to see me if I weren’t in a hospice. But in case you’re wondering, I’m having a swell time — the best time of my life.”