RIP, Art Buchwald

[tommyp]

Columnist Art Buchwald dead at 81

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Art Buchwald, who took humorous jabs at Washington politicians in syndicated columns for decades, has died, a close friend said Thursday. He was 81.

Buchwald died late Wednesday, said CNN anchor Kyra Phillips. Buchwald was her mentor for 18 years, and she became a close friend of the family. The unofficial cause of death, she said, was kidney failure.

She said Buchwald's son and daughter-in-law were at his side, "holding his hand. He passed away peacefully."

"In the last few weeks, he knew it was his time," she said. "He said his good-byes to everybody."

That included his colleagues at the Washington Post, which published his columns after he moved to Washington in the 1960s.

Buchwald suffered a stroke in 2000, and was plagued by kidney and circulation problems, which led doctors to amputate one of his legs below the knee.

He checked into a Washington hospice February 7 after he chose to quit life-prolonging kidney dialysis. His last treatment was February 1. However, Phillips said Thursday that he continued to make hospital visits because of minor infections from the amputation.

He planned his funeral when he went to the hospice.

"I went to the hospice to die," he told Phillips in November. But he defied the odds, and in July he was flown to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, to spend the summer.

"I had two decisions. Continue dialysis, and that's boring to do three times a week, and I don't know where that's going, or I can just enjoy life and see where it takes me," he told writer Suzette Martinez Standring, who spent two days with him in late February.

He resumed writing, including a book about his near-death experience.

Buchwald launched his career as a columnist in 1949 in Paris, where he wrote about the light side of Paris nightlife in the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune. He returned to the United States around 1962 and moved to Washington, where he began writing columns filled with political satire for The Washington Post.

Some of Buchwald's observations:


During the Watergate scandal, Buchwald explained that the sound in the 18 1/2-minute gap in the White House tapes actually was Nixon humming.

"Just when you think there's nothing to write about, Nixon says, 'I am not a crook.' Jimmy Carter says, 'I have lusted after women in my heart.' President Reagan says, 'I have just taken a urinalysis test, and I am not on dope.'"

"Have you ever seen a candidate talking to a rich person on television?"

"Every time you think television has hit its lowest ebb, a new program comes along to make you wonder where you thought the ebb was."
Buchwald won a Pulitzer Prize for outstanding commentary in 1982, and in 1986 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He began writing columns, later syndicated, for The Washington Post in the late 1960s.

The humorist authored dozens of books, including two memoirs, "Leaving Home" (1993) and "I'll Always Have Paris" (1996). He also wrote "Paris After Dark" (1950), "Son of the Great Society" (1961), "Washington Is Leaking" (1976) and "While Reagan Slept" (1983).

Buchwald and producer Alain Bernheim filed a lawsuit in 1988 against Paramount Pictures, contending the company used Buchwald's script idea as the basis for the movie "Coming to America," without giving them credit or profits. Buchwald won the case.

Despite his ill health, Buchwald enjoyed his friends and social events, and celebrated his 80th birthday in 2005 at the French Embassy in Washington.

According to Standring, Buchwald has had a parade of celebrity visitors, including several members of the Kennedy family, and he still loves to joke with people.

Standring visited Buchwald to present him with the 2006 Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, calling him the "patron saint of political satire."

The writer acknowledged that Buchwald likely wouldn't be alive by June, when the organization's meeting will be held.

According to Buchwald's assistant, Cathy Crary, her boss wrote three columns a week until about 1995, and penned two weekly until January.

Buchwald, she said, always has been humble and accessible.

"He's listed in the phone directory and always has been. People see his name and can't believe it's the real Art Buchwald, but that's how he is," Crary said.

Buchwald was born in Mount Vernon, New York, where -- according to The Washington Post -- he and his two sisters spent their youths in foster homes. His mother was committed to an asylum soon after he was born.

The writer suffered two bouts of depression. The last episode, in the 1980s, resulted from the breakup of his long marriage. He has a son, Joel, and a daughter, Jennifer, who lives in Massachusetts, but has been staying in Washington.

"Buchwald doesn't see himself as courageous, nor does he feel shored up by supernatural spiritual strength," Shandring said. "To fade away naturally is the decision he made when faced with the alternative of being hooked up to a dialysis machine three times a week, for five hours at a stretch for the rest of his life."

 

[Columbo]

One of the waning true originals.....

 

[heyabbott]

A truely sad day.
But, having read his work and watched and listened to him through his illness, he would really rather have people celebrate his life than mourn his death. I will do both.

 

[EStreetJoe]

One of the greats has left us.... wonderful humorous insights on politics and the world.


did anyone have him as a death pool pick?

 

[Mystery_Meat]

One of the greats has left us.... wonderful humorous insights on politics and the world.


[glow=red,2,300][size=74pt][shadow=red,left]did anyone have him as a death pool pick?

Fixed for small font.

 

[Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!]

I assume the Post will run his "death" column tommorrow?
Can someone post it when it appears? I would love to read it.

 

[tommyp]

It's up now:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/18/AR2007011800616_pf.html

Newspaper Columnist Art Buchwald Dies at 81

By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 18, 2007; 10:10 AM

Art Buchwald, 81, the newspaper humor columnist for more than a half-century who found new comic material in the issues that come up at the end of life, died of kidney failure last night at his son's home in Washington, his family announced today.

Buchwald, an owlish, cigar-chomping extrovert, zinged the high, mighty and humor-challenged. His column, syndicated to more than 550 newspapers at one point, won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982. He also published more than 30 books.

Last year didn't start well for the writer. Kidney and vascular problems forced doctors to amputate one of his legs just below the knee in January, and Buchwald opted to not have dialysis. In February, he entered Washington Home and Community Hospices, which he described as "a place where you go when you want to go."

But by July, despite his physicians' predictions, Buchwald left hospice. "Instead of going straight upstairs, I am going to Martha's Vineyard," he wrote.

He finished his last book, "Too Soon To Say Goodbye," there, and it was published in November. Buchwald kept his sense of humor until he slipped into unconsciousness just before he died, said his longtime friend, Washington Post Vice President at-Large Benjamin C. Bradlee.

"I just don't want to die the same day Castro dies," Buchwald told his friends, Bradlee said.

A statement from the family said Buchwald will be buried on Martha's Vineyard in the Vineyard Haven Cemetery, where his wife Ann is buried. A memorial service is being planned in Washington, the family said.

Strategizing about how to land a big obituary became part of his repertoire of jokes, especially after news of the death of former Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet interrupted one of his book parties in New York.

Death and dying became fodder for the column that he continued to write through 2006, mining the topic as regularly as politicians, scandals and news of the day.

Shortly after he entered hospice last February, he organized his last hurrah by calling up gossip columnists and radio talk show hosts to declare "I'm still alive!" His March 7 column began "I am writing this article from a hospice. But being in the hospice didn't work out exactly the way I wanted it to. By all rights I should have finished my time here five or six weeks ago -- at least that's all Medicare would pay for."

Buchwald reveled in the parade of famous visitors who came to see him and dealt publicly with more serious aspects of wrapping up one's life. The existence of heaven and hell is possible, he decided, and if it provides comfort, people should believe in it.

"I have no idea where I'm going but here's the real question: What am I doing here in the first place?"

In December, he told admirers at Wesley United Methodist Church in the District that he did not want to be remembered as dying after a long illness. "I want to die at 95 playing tennis against Agassi -- because he couldn't handle my serve," he told the crowd.

Before death and dying presented itself as a topic for his columns, politics was a favorite jumping-off point. As a long-running observer of the nation's political scene, Buchwald said his favorite president was Richard Nixon, whose delusions made for rich satirical material. "I worship the very quicksand he walks on," Buchwald quipped.

Most of his books were collections of his columns, which were syndicated by the Los Angeles Times and appeared in The Washington Post. Two of his books "Leaving Home"(1993) and "I'll Always Have Paris!" (1996) were memoirs. They told the story of his journey from a lonely, impoverished childhood lived largely in foster homes, to the salons of the famous.

His entertaining, name-dropping memoirs -- published in a period when some said his column was losing its edge -- also won him new respect in the publishing world. Although he had been elected in 1991 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he said in a 1996 interview that "people don't take humorists seriously; they don't even call them writers."

"It was those two books that made me a writer," he said. "Now, I'm being reviewed seriously. That gives me great pleasure, because I want to be known as a writer, not a humorist. It's one step up, and that's the direction I want to be headed at this stage of my life."

Buchwald also wrote about his bouts with mental disorders with a frankness that won him new fans around the country. He had been hospitalized for clinical depression in 1963 and for manic depression in 1987. Both episodes nearly drove him to suicide, he said; drugs and therapy were his salvation. He joked to friends that if he had a third bout of depression, "I will be inducted in the Bipolar Hall of Fame."

After his subsequent appearances on television to talk about the chokehold these illnesses once had on his life, people would stop to thank him in airports and on the street for spreading a message of hope, he said. (continued)

 

[tommyp]

(continued) Buchwald was born with rickets in New York on Dec. 12, 1925, to a struggling, Austrian-born drape installer and a mother who suffered from chronic depression. Shortly after his birth, his mother was institutionalized. She lived for another 35 years but never saw her son again.

He lived his first year in a foundling home and then was sent to a Seventh-Day Adventist home for sick children. He stayed there until he was 5, with one of his three sisters. Their father, unable to support his children during the Depression, then placed them with the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in Manhattan. In "Leaving Home," Buchwald wrote that, at about 6 or 7, he realized he could deal with the loneliness and confusion of his life by becoming the class clown. He said he recognized that he could draw laughs by making fun of the people in charge.

"It was a dangerous profession I had chosen," he recalled, "because no one likes a funny kid. In fact, adults are scared silly of them and tend to warn children who act out that they are going to wind up in prison or worse. It is only when you grow up that they pay you vast sums of money to make them laugh."

The budding humorist lived in a series of foster homes, and he and his three sisters saw his father only on Sundays. When he reached age 17, Buchwald lied about his age and escaped into the Marine Corps. The Marines, he wrote, got "full credit for straightening me out." He served in the Pacific during World War II. He attended the University of Southern California for three years and then dropped out after learning that he could use the GI bill to study in Paris.

Once there, Buchwald conned his way into a glamorous, albeit low-paying, job as nightlife and entertainment columnist for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune. He knew nothing about haute cuisine, he later recalled, but got the job by claiming to have been a wine-taster in the Marine Corps. He said he faked his role as food critic by making sure to ask if the mushrooms were fresh.

His columns about Paris nightlife and jet-setting celebrities were carried in New York by the Herald Tribune under the name "Europe's Lighter Side." Ernest Hemingway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Gina Lollobrigida, Aristotle Onassis, Pablo Picasso, Elvis Presley, E.B. White and uncrowned heads of international society made their way into Buchwald's pieces, turning him into something of a celebrity expatriate himself.

The column for which he is best known managed to drop names from several centuries earlier. In 1953, with help from newsroom colleagues, Buchwald undertook to explain the meaning of the Thanksgiving Day feast to the French with laughable translations of the American tradition. It was the only day, he noted, that American families "eat better than the French."

Many newspapers ran it annually for years afterward.

Another of his favorites was a 1964 column that asserted President Lyndon B. Johnson could not ask J. Edgar Hoover to resign because the former FBI director didn't exist; he had been made up by the ultraconservative magazine Reader's Digest.

After the Eisenhower era ended and the Kennedy administration was in full swing, Buchwald decided to return to the United States.

"I knew if I didn't get out, I'd be there forever, and I didn't want to become an expatriate," he recalled. "I found myself duplicating myself, talking about the French and the Italians and the tourists. It was getting harder, not easier. And I knew that I could work off the headlines in America, but I couldn't in Europe."

He and his wife, Ann McGarry Buchwald, whom he had met in Paris, moved to Washington in 1963 with their three children, who were adopted from orphanages and child welfare agencies in Ireland, Spain and France.

After Paris, Washington turned out to be a city that had no soul, he later wrote, although it was a wonderful place to make a living off satire. He said it was relatively easy to compose his twice-weekly take on the news, often done in the form of an imagined dialogue between major players. (continued)

 

[tommyp]

Buchwald also wrote a play, "Sheep on the Runway," which was produced on Broadway in 1970, and did some screenwriting, including work that resulted in a major lawsuit against Paramount Studios. In 1992, he and producer Alain Bernheim won a $900,000 judgment after contending that they were not paid for their writing for the Eddie Murphy film "Coming to America."

The case, which centered around Paramount's definition of a movie's "net profit," led to what is known as the "Buchwald clause" in Hollywood contracts, protecting studios from having to compensate a writer for an original idea.

Buchwald, who gave up his trademark cigars when he was 59 years old, was much in demand as a toastmaster in Washington and on Martha's Vineyard, where he had a summer home and was master of ceremonies of an annual auction to benefit the island's social service agencies.

In 1998, he moved from Washington to New York. "After a certain amount of time, there's nothing new," he observed at the time. "I do think one of the purposes of my move was to keep going."

He suffered a stroke in 2000 and returned to Washington.

His wife died in 1994.

Survivors include three children, Joel Buchwald of Washington, Connie Marks of Culpeper and Jennifer Buchwald of Boston; two sisters; and five grandchildren.

His children, he said, were initially upset with his decision to turn down dialysis treatments last year, but he insisted that he preferred to control his last days, which lasted longer than even he expected.

"I don't know if this is true or not, but I think some people, not many, are starting to wonder why I'm still around," he wrote while in the hospice. "In fact, a few are sending me get-well cards. These are the hard ones to answer.

"So far things are going my way. 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."

Former staff writer Claudia Levy contributed to this article.

-30-

 

[Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!]

I didn't see his column - just is obit.
Butchwald penned his "death" column last year while in the hospice waiting to die. It (is) to run the day after his death.
When he was interviewed in the hosice center last year he talked about it and said it was pretty sad.
I am anxiously awaiting to read it.

 

[spnited]

The NY Times website has video of an "obit" interview Buchwald did with Tim Weiner in July, 2006.
It is funny, sad, moving and magnificent. (Sorry, I think you have to have Times Select to get it).

RIP to a truly funny man and a great political satirist.

 

[tommyp]

Sorry Orville...I was aware of this, but it was definitely way in the back of my head.

 

[PCLoadLetter]

One of the greats has left us.... wonderful humorous insights on politics and the world.


did anyone have him as a death pool pick?

Ummm... yes. (And Benny Parsons, too.)

 

[spaceman]

I don't have anything cosmic to add here.

The dude made me laugh, and he was one of those guys I'd look for in the Post.

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

My high school journalism teacher was really good. The year before I took his class he had each student pick a newspaper columnist to clip and critique over a few months. The girl who picked Buchwald got a C on her paper. A while later, Buchwald was speaking at a nearby college. The teacher arranged for his students to be able to go. After Buchwald was done talking, the girl brought the paper she had written so Buchwald could autograph it. Buchwald read the thing, autographed it and crossed out the C and wrote A+. The teacher told us the story the next year. "I changed the grade," he said. "I wasn't gonna argue with Art Buchwald."

 

[Del_B_Vista]

The NY Times website has video of an "obit" interview Buchwald did with Tim Weiner in July, 2006.
It is funny, sad, moving and magnificent. (Sorry, I think you have to have Times Select to get it).

RIP to a truly funny man and a great political satirist.

It was free this afternoon. His first appearance is "I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died." Pretty funny stuff.

 

[D-3 Fan]

I was in the doctor's office on Monday and I read his latest story in Reader's Digest that was about several months ago.

Art had a hell of a gift for words and for that, I will miss him.

 

[tommyp]

Found this in the Sac Bee:

Goodbye to his friends

EDITOR'S NOTE: Art Buchwald asked that this column be distributed following his death, which came Wednesday at his home in Washington, D.C. Buchwald had written the column on Feb. 8, 2006, after deciding to check into a hospice, suffering from kidney failure. He had discontinued dialysis and also had one of his legs amputated below the knee. He subsequently was released from the hospice, wrote a book about his experience and also resumed writing his syndicated newspaper column. He died surrounded by family members.
* * *

Several of my friends have persuaded me to write this final column, which is something they claim I shouldn't leave without doing.

There comes a time when you start adding up all the pluses and minuses of your life. In my case I'd like to add up all the great tennis games I played and all of the great players I overcame with my now famous "lob." I will always believe that my tennis game was one of the greatest of all time. Even Kay Graham, who couldn't stand being on the other side of the net from me, in the end forgave me.

I can't cover all the subjects I want to in one final column, but I would just like to say what a great pleasure it has been knowing all of you and being a part of your lives. Each of you has, in your own way, contributed to my life.

Now, to get down to the business at hand, I have had many choices concerning how I wanted to go. Most of them are very civilized, particularly hospice care. A hospice makes it very easy for you when you decide to go.

What's interesting is that everybody has his or her own opinion as to how you should go out. All my loved ones became very upset because they thought I should brave it out -- which meant more dialysis.

But here is the most important thing: This has been my decision. And it's a healthy one.

The person who was the most supportive at the end was my doctor, Mike Newman. Members of my family, while they didn't want me to go, were supportive, too.

But I'm putting it down on paper, so there should be no question the decision was mine. I chose to spend my final days in a hospice because it sounded like the most painless way to go, and you don't have to take a lot of stuff with you.

For some reason my mind keeps turning to food. I know I have not eaten all the eclairs I always wanted. In recent months, I have found it hard to go past the Cheesecake Factory without at least having one profiterole and a banana split.

I know it's a rather silly thing at this stage of the game to spend so much time on food. But then again, as life went on and there were fewer and fewer things I could eat, I am now punishing myself for having passed up so many good things earlier in the trip.

I think of a song lyric, "What's it all about, Alfie?" I don't know how well I've done while I was here, but I'd like to think some of my printed works will persevere -- at least for three years.

I know it's very egocentric to believe that someone is put on Earth for a reason. In my case, I like to think I was. And after this column appears in the paper following my passing, I would like to think it will either wind up on a cereal box top or be repeated every Thanksgiving Day.

So, "What's it all about, Alfie?" is my way of saying goodbye.

 

[D.Sanchez]

The NY Times website has video of an "obit" interview Buchwald did with Tim Weiner in July, 2006.
It is funny, sad, moving and magnificent. (Sorry, I think you have to have Times Select to get it).

RIP to a truly funny man and a great political satirist.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2007/01/18/obituaries/20070118_BUCHWALD_FEATURE.html

 

[DisembodiedOwlHead]

If he came along today, Buchwald would end up working 10 years at one of the Post's suburban bureaus, praying for a break.