by Art Buchwald
After I wrote a column about our little game of “Five People,” I heard from a lot of readers who picked up on the game.
Everybody seems to have a different list of people they want to meet in heaven. Some of the most popular choices are Abraham Lincoln, Cary Grant, Napoleon, and Madame Curie.
A friend of mine, Albert Prendergast, asked me why we couldn’t list the people we do not want to meet in heaven. He pointed out it’s a game people would love to play, and, of course, the list is much longer.
Now, get a yellow legal pad and a pencil. Start writing down the names of people you don’t want to meet in heaven. (You can eliminate people you don’t believe would make it to heaven in the first place, for example, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Jack the Ripper, and Al Capone.)
If you’re serious about playing, it is much more fun to select people that have been involved in your life.
I’m still working on my list of the “Five People I Don’t Want to Meet in Heaven.” There is the USC coed who dumped me in college for a fraternity jock; the person who devised the new SAT test, making it so my grandson couldn’t get into college; the lady who hijacked my parking place at the shopping mall and laughed when she got out of her car; the insurance claims adjuster who wouldn’t pay for damages to my house; and the Japanese soldier whose life I spared in the South Pacific during World War II and later sold me a Honda.
Prendergast pushed the game a little farther. You not only have to list the people you do not want to meet in heaven, but also explain the things you won’t do for them. For example, you would not share a golf game with them, not give them tickets to a rock concert, or, if you want to be cruel, not show up for a date you had made with the person.
If they serve drinks in heaven, the people on your list would have to pay for their own. Also, in case there are jobs in heaven, you would make sure someone on your list doesn’t get a job and is not entitled to health insurance.
One of the things you have to find out when you get up there is whether the person you don’t want to meet has also arrived. There is a database called “People I Don’t Want to Meet in Heaven.” In it you can look up names. It makes no sense to try to avoid running into people if they never got to heaven in the first place.
It’s obvious that there are far more people you don’t want to meet in heaven than those you do.
Another rule is that you are allowed to list only one ex-wife. For example, if your first wife is going to bug you, you have to avoid her at all costs.
The perfect game is when your name is on the lists of all the people you likewise don’t want to meet. That is even more fun than winning at Scrabble.
Warning: If you don’t want to meet someone in heaven, don’t pick him up at the airport.
While we’re on the subject of going to heaven, there’s another game we play.
QUESTION: If you had only six months to live, how would you spend them?
I’ve asked several friends the question. Two said they would like to spend their last months with their children. And one said, “I don’t even know where my children are.”
Another friend said, “If I had only six months to live I’d go to Las Vegas and put up a million dollars at Binion’s poker table.”
One lady said she’d go to Prada and get a decent pair of shoes. “You can’t walk around in loafers for six whole months.”
A male friend said he would watch every basketball final from courtside.
There was one man who was very surly, and he said that he would spend his last months getting even with all the people who had been mean to him. What makes him a real sourpuss is that he said, “There is no one in heaven I want to meet—I might not even want to go there. If a doctor tells me I have only months to live, I’ll get a second opinion.”
Afterword
Too Soon to Say Goodbye
This is the first day of my life, after nearly five months of living in the hospice.
The purpose of the hospice is to help you pass away gently when all else fails. You are supposed to do it with as little pain as possible and with dignity.
It didn’t work out that way for me.
In spite of the fact that I’ve been staying in a hospice, I’m not going to heaven immediately. My doctor informs me that I can stop over on Martha’s Vineyard on the way there.
For many months I have been waiting to go quietly into the night.
For reasons that even the doctors can’t explain, my kidneys kept working, and what started out as a three-week deathwatch turned into five months of living, eating, and laughing with my friends.
The more publicity I got, the more attention my kidneys got, and so instead of going quietly into the night, I was holding press conferences every day.
Since I was expected to die soon, the French ambassador gave me the literary equivalent of the Legion of Honor.
Because of the publicity I had gotten, the National Hospice Association made me their Man of the Year.
I have had such a good time at the hospice. I am going to miss it.
I never realized dying could be so much fun.
Then a few weeks ago my doctor said I had to change course. He advised me to go to Martha’s Vineyard instead. So that’s where I am now.
Things that I had stopped caring about because I was going to die, I now had to start caring about again. This included shaving in the morning and buying a new cell phone that works. I had to rewrite my living will and scrap all the plans for my funeral. I also had to start worrying about Bush again.
But I’m glad to be back on Martha’s Vineyard. The Vineyard is part of my life and has been for the last forty-five years. In the early sixties, I rented a house from the town dentist. After five years of renting different places, I finally bought my own home on Main Street in Vineyard Haven. The house is on what we call “Writers’ Row,” because John Hersey, Bill Styron, Mike Wallace, Lillian Hellman, and others have lived there.
I am surprised but happy to have the chance to say, “You can take me out of the Vineyard, but you can’t take the Vineyard out of me.”
Over the past months, many people have asked me, “What is it like to die?” I’ve had to answer, “I don’t know, because I haven’t died. I thought I was going to, but things have changed.”
Alas, the people who come to visit me now look at me with great suspicion. They want to know if the whole thing was a scam. They can’t believe after I said goodbye that I wound up on Martha’s Vineyard instead of going to paradise.
I called up the TV stations and the newspapers and asked them if they would make a correction and retract the original story. They said they never correct stories about people who claimed they were dying and didn’t.
So, this is where I am now. I’m still seeing friends, but instead of saying farewell, we discuss what the Redskins are going to do.
I don’t know how long I’ll be around on Martha’s Vineyard. But if nothing else, I know I made an awful lot of people happy.
So, dear reader, I hope you don’t feel you were duped. The moral of this story is, never trust your kidneys.
Epilogue
I planned my death very carefully and was quite concerned about my memorial service. I asked eight people to be my pallbearers and they all accepted.
Then I remembered that if I died I couldn’t hear myself being eulogized, so I got the idea to print their eulogies at the end of my book. Instead of being memorialized after my death, I get to read what they were going to say now. It’s very rare that someone has the chance to hear his own eulogies.
March 11, 2006
To: Tom Brokaw, Mike Wallace, Ben Bradlee, George Stevens, Jr., Ken Starr, Dr. Michael Newman
My dear comrades in arms,
You have been chosen by Publishers Clearinghouse to be one of the speakers at my memorial celebration. I can’t give you a date, but whenever it is, we’re going to have a celebration at the Washington Hebrew Congregation on Macomb Street.
The date will be abou
t ten days to two weeks after I’m gone. We’re planning on a 7:00 P.M. starting time. While I can’t give you an exact date, I can tell you how long we’d love you to speak. I think three minutes would be a perfect amount of time to tell me how wonderful I am. This is not a joke. I would love you to be a speaker at my memorial celebration.
Please RSVP to this letter if I’m still here. If not, tell Joel. He and Jennifer will be speaking for the family. The rest of you are dear friends.
Love and kisses,
Art
By Tom Brokaw
We all know how Art valued his friends, that he was generous to them, thoughtful and, to the very end, protective of their best interests and reputation. It was in that spirit that he authorized me to disclose here that he arranged for and financed ghostwriters for the eulogies submitted by Mike Wallace, George Stevens, and Ben Bradlee.
The touching sentiments, witty construction, and evocative memories are all very nice, and certainly worthy of the occasion. But they were bought, paid for, and edited by Artie.
As he explained the arrangement to me, it wasn’t just that Mike, George, and Ben needed the help, although that was a concern. He said if his memorial ever became a movie, he wanted his estate to own the rights. “Look,” he said, “I already got a book out of dying. Why not a movie? And this time I don’t want to sue for my share.”
I was excused from the ghostwriter exercise because I had already written how he was the greatest Marine of his generation, a fearless and highly decorated editor and publisher of a one-page mimeographed South Pacific newsletter, an assignment he received after dropping a bomb while attempting to load it onto an airplane.
Art won the war and then came home and conquered the world.
His loyal subjects stretched from the sunny pathways of USC to Parisian boulevards, from the nation’s capital to Manhattan’s canyons and Vineyard beaches to every home with a newspaper and every lecture hall with an adoring audience.
As Meredith and I ascended through the layers of life in Los Angeles, Washington, and New York, family and friends back in the Midwest were not much impressed—until Artie started using our names as part of the cast of characters in his column.
Now, that was validation.
He loved his celebrity but he wore it lightly, like one of those odd hats or garish jackets he was so fond of. To walk through an airport or into a restaurant with Artie was never a private matter. “Hi, how are ya?” he greeted everyone.
He just knew everyone wanted to say hello, and he was right. One night in Florida, patrons at a popular restaurant, most of them Jewish and Art’s age, hit the lottery: Buchwald and George Burns at side-by-side tables.
I’m not sure if George and Art had met before, but it didn’t matter. They got along famously. After all, they belonged to the same club. They were once poor and obscure but they always loved to make people laugh. It wasn’t just that they made people laugh. They had such a good time doing it.
That made them rich, famous—and beloved.
Everyone in that restaurant went home that night thinking they had spent the evening with two old friends.
Art was best known for his column and books, but his other genius was on the lecture circuit, a sideline so lucrative I once called it “white collar crime,” to his dismay.
His appearances defied all the rules of public oratory. He’d amble to the podium clutching a fistful of three-by-five cards filled with topical one-liners and begin to read them one by one, pausing only to join in the roars of laughter as he nailed one punch line after another. It was never clear who enjoyed his humor more, Art or his audience.
He owned the audience, except one time during President Reagan’s first term when Art was having sport with the Gipper before a high-powered business group. There were some grumbles. Art picked up the mood of the room and said, “Okay, how many of you here will vote to reelect Ronald Reagan?” Every hand went up, defiantly.
Art grinned and then said, “And how many of you here would hire Ronald Reagan to run your company?”
There was a stunned silence and then gales of laughter.
Art was always on, but never tiresome. And he transcended generations. During visits to San Francisco he’d call our daughter Andrea, then a Berkeley student, and invite her to dinner with friends, fellow humorists Art Hoppe and Herb Caen, all men old enough to be her grandfather. She’d show up in her Cal student wardrobe and laugh all night long.
Uncle Artie was just that to the children of his friends and whenever he appeared before student audiences. In his many commencement speeches, Art liked to tell the graduates, with great mocking solemnity, “We have given you a perfect world. Don’t screw it up.”
He has given his friends, their families, and his audiences so many laughs and so much joy through the years that that alone would be an enduring legacy. But Art was never just about the quick laugh. His humor was a road map to essential truths and insights that might otherwise have eluded us.
Over the years I’ve “borrowed” Art’s best lines for my own use. I cherished those dinners and lunches when he would hold forth about the foibles of politicians and even friends. I never tired of the stories of those days in Paris. (I once asked when he knew it was time to leave there and return to the U.S. He said the night Sinatra called and wanted to go out and Art made up an excuse to stay in.)
But I’ve never had a richer appreciation of his friendship and presence among us than during the final passage of his life, when, facing death, he taught us anew lessons in courage, grace, friendship, family, and the mysteries of the human body, laughing all the way.
In turn, Art, we have given you a perfect sendoff.
Don’t screw it up.
By Mike Wallace
The individual at issue is, plain and simple, a fraud, a publicity-seeking, lying, greedy fraud. Greedy enough to ask his old friends to sign his new prosthetic leg at a thousand dollars a clip, and we damn fools are lining up to do it.
Truth is, he used to be genuinely sick: bad kidney, couldn’t pee, didn’t want to bother with dialysis because it was too boring, didn’t want an organ transplant—he was too content at the prospect of dying.
I remember his phone call vividly. “Look,” he told me. “I’m eighty years old. I’ve had a happy and productive life. The folks at the hospice where I’m at, here in Washington, have made me very comfortable getting me ready to call it quits. My family are here saying goodbye, and that’s why I’m calling you. I’m planning a couple of memorial services and I want you, along with a few others, to speak at both of them: the formal one in Washington and the informal one on the Vineyard. I’ve decided to go quietly. Happily.”
The news was stunning. Mary and I have known and loved the man for over fifty years, admired him. We were fans of his column, his books. If he was difficult or cranky occasionally, well…who wasn’t? Ninety percent of the time, he was a joy. Ten percent, he was a pain in the ass.
But then came the deluge.
Newspaper articles. Television interviews. Gossip columns that hadn’t been paying a lot of attention were now full of news of what he’d decided to do. Old girlfriends were showing up to console him. You’ve never seen a happier man at death’s doorstep.
Suddenly, he began writing his column again for anyone willing to print it. And of course, predictably, book publishers began skulking around, offering him huge advances.
So, he decided that—sure, he’d write that book. Everything but the last chapter, which you’re reading now.
The folks who have written for this last chapter were each asked for about a thousand words and to please get it in quickly (no fee, of course) because Random House would like to bring it to the market in time for the Christmas season and make Art (on the New York Times bestseller list again) the happiest fraud alive.
By Ben Bradlee
We should have known it was coming, another Buchwald book, and never mind all this stuff about terminal illness. Artie can squeeze a book out of
a busy signal.
Close to forty years ago in Paris some creep came into my Newsweek office one day with a bandage around his head and bloodstains all over his gabardine suit, claiming to be a deported mobster fresh out of Sing-Sing on a murder rap. His name was Frank Frigenti, and he was after a bunch of French francs. I couldn’t get rid of him, no matter how I tried. So I told him to try Buchwald, a couple of floors down, and I figured I’d learn what happened next day when we played an hour or two of gin rummy.
What happened was this: Art sat him down for a couple of hours, fed him once or twice, and interviewed him some more. Got him a hotel room and interviewed him still more. Frigenti got one more night at the hotel, and then a plane ticket to Naples to rejoin his fellow deportees. (Still wearing the bloody suit.)
Artie got $50,000 for a book called A Gift from the Boys, which he then sold to the movies (Surprise Package, starring Yul Brynner and Mitzi Gaynor) for more thousands. They got a lot of money for the movie by telling everyone that Cary Grant was interested. He really was, Art says now, but “he didn’t like the treatment.” Whatever. Big deal!
As you can tell, I admire Art Buchwald. A lot!
In Paris more or less fraudulently after the war on the GI Bill of Rights, Art first caught the world’s notice as the Paris Trib’s restaurant critic, then as a feature writer about the more or less famous people who went to those restaurants and nightclubs. He made everyone sound interesting and funny, even when they weren’t.
I don’t think any of us understood how nervous he was about coming back to America, especially to Washington, which he did not know well—to put it charitably. He could have gotten in line behind Leonard Lyons, or Earl Wilson, and achieved unique status that way.
The really great funny men of that time had all gravitated to television: Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Ed Wynn. And Art spotted the slot that he eventually occupied virtually by himself: the man who used humor to place current events in a perspective all his own. Laughing at the man-made predicaments that preoccupied the politicians and voters.