A week after Mum’s death, the novelty—if that’s the right word—of it had worn off. Pup and I had run out of books to catalog, papers to sort. Now there was the matter of Mum’s memorial service, and over this we clashed, filling the dining room with the sound of dueling antlers.
But Pup, the New York apartment can only hold, what, eighty, ninety people? How can we possibly hold the reception there? There are going to be hundreds of people at this thing. Mum was—
They don’t all have to come in at once.
[Sighing.] But we can’t have people standing in line out on 73rd Street, for heaven’s sake.
Let me think about it.
This was WFB code for: I’ve made up my mind. Discussion over.
Well, let’s at least do it right, wherever we hold it. Serve champagne and—
I don’t want champagne.
But Mum—
I don’t like champagne.
[Sighing.] Okay, but let’s at least have nice wine.
I have nice wine.
Arguable Pup had a fetish about not paying more than eight or nine bucks a bottle, a practice that, though economically sound, did not always result in wine of lip-smacking quality. *
Two cases should do.
[Spluttering.] Two cases? For… five hundred people?
People don’t drink much, anyway.
By the end of lunch, my fingers were wrapping around the fruit knife in a patricidal grip. It had been a long week. I’d been attentively filial 24/7 to an old, ailing, heartsick (and somewhat high-maintenance) father. Now I was furious over what I perceived as petulant small-mindedness.
For over a half century of unstinting and heroic (if not quite uncomplaining) effort, Mum had made my father’s various households—in Stamford, New York, and Switzerland—paradigms of hospitality. She was (I boast) a great, even grand, hostess. The food, the decor, the service, everything was impeccability and perfection. You don’t have to take my word for it: Pat Buckley was acknowledged universally as one of the great ladies of New York, and all this she accomplished without the kind of bank account most other New York great hostesses tend to have. * But they lived well—very well—if always with a sharp eye to the marginal expense; whence Pup’s borderline Scrooginess in the matter of the household grape. But now I simmered. Here she had put on the show for him for fifty-seven years, and here I was trying to wheedle an extra case or two of indifferent plonk with which to refresh five hundred or more attendees at her memorial service, the majority of whom he seemed perfectly content to let cool their heels out on the sidewalk. It was—too much. Or as Mum would have said, beyond comprehension.
“I’m going to kill him,” I said to Danny, escalating from my statement to Julian.
“I think you need to get out of here,” he said. Danny has been exquisitely attuned to our family reverberations since about 1965.
This I did. The next morning, safe in my New York apartment, I tapped out a come-to-Jesus e-mail to him.
Pup and I had been going at it with the verbal light-sabers—vwhum vwhummmm—since about 1966, when I was shipped off to the monks at Portsmouth Abbey. Pup never really, ever, yielded an inch of ground. That was his victory. I ended up with a sharp sword and an attitude; that was mine. I don’t mean to make it sound as though I grew up in ancient Sparta; Pup and I exchanged, over the course of a lifetime, letters of deep and abundant affection. But we fought, and hard. Of the perhaps—I’m guessing—seven thousand or so letters and e-mails we exchanged, I’d estimate that one-half were contentious. A lot of it was due to his having, about the early 1970s, turned me into a de facto marriage counselor—something I would strenuously urge any parent against.
I wrote:
Dear Pup,
I don’t right now have the emotional reserves to argue with you over this. Suffice to say it wounds me when you bark at me, after a rather trying week in which I was Cordelian in my filiality, “I don’t want champagne,” when Mum, who devoted her life to making your homes paradigms of resplendent hospitality, drowned thousands of your guests in it, to say nothing of stuffing them cross-eyed with caviar and every conceiveable sweetmeat. And if pari passu—as you might put it—you’re determined to hold a reception for 500 guests in a space that at best holds 80, I don’t have it in me to argue about that, either, but it seems to me a very queer way to memorialize one of New York’s great hostesses. But why don’t I step aside and let you arrange all that as well. So over to you.
Love, Christo
I counted to ten—I’ve learned that much over a lifetime—and hit send. His reply came back. (I’ve cleaned up the typos.) Dear Christo, Am absolutely astonished by what you say and have no memory of it. xxP
This wasn’t a disingenuous response, but neither did it move the ball down the field. At times I had to remind myself, by way of autoconsolation, that I was dealing with William F. Buckley Jr., the legendary host of Firing Line, one of the great debaters of the twentieth century. He had not made his name for himself by yielding on the field of battle. In this contest I was a chipmunk pitted against a rhino. I decided to let things cool for a day or so. Pup was not adept at the cooling-off and the next day fired back with: You’ve picked one hell of a time to abandon your father. My fingers hovered above the Launch Missile button on the laptop, but I refrained. The chipmunk, confronting force majeure, does what the chipmunk must—and calls Aunt Pitts.
If there was a single human being on the planet who exercised anything like authority over William F. Buckley Jr., it was his older sister Priscilla, now eighty-six. She had been, for about a half century, managing editor of National Review and in that capacity was a beloved den- and godmother to generations—literally—of intellectual writer talent, from Garry Wills to George Will; to say nothing of being a cherished aunt and surrogate mother to fifty nieces and nephews, a number of them orphaned. * I said to her, Pitts—do something.
Pitts called back within the hour and said, It’s done.
As the saying goes, Be careful what you pray for, you might just get it. I now found myself with carte blanche, in charge of Pat Buckley’s memorial service. This would take a month.
I TURNED, FIRST, to one of Mum’s great New York friends. It may not come as a huge surprise when I reveal that her closest friends were, by and large, gay gentlemen. Pup was once asked in a published interview if he was aware of the statistical datum that roughly 10 percent of the U.S. male population is homosexual. He replied, “If that’s the case, then I’ve met them all.” I did, too, starting in the 1950s when they were known as “confirmed bachelors.” They adored Mum and she them. Some of them didn’t bother to hang around inside the closet, even in those homo-phobic days. One of them was Christopher Hewett, exquisitely memorable as the flamboyantly homo director Roger De Bris in the original movie The Producers. One weekend at Stamford, he participated in a sixteen-millimeter silent home movie we shot called Anesthesia. (The dialogue appeared between scenes, written on a blackboard.) Christopher played—it goes without saying—the grand duchess Anesthesia. Pup, wearing a plastic skullcap, played a Bolshevik (the only time WFB essayed a Commie role); Mum was a glamorous, chain-smoking revolutionary named (as I recall) Natasha. I played, appropriately enough, the imbecile six-year-old heir to the Russian throne. The climactic moment comes when Pup, in disguise as a servant in the royal household, is asked by the grand duchess to “toss the salad.” Being a peasant, Pup misinterprets this as an instruction to reach into the salad bowl and start throwing lettuce at the various guests. That was a fun weekend. I earned a whole dollar for my day’s work as an actor.
In the 1960s, the term walker entered the language— that is to say, the society column newspaper word for a gentleman who escorts the wives of famous busy men to Broadway first nights and balls and such. Mum’s great friend Jerome Zipkin was the walker of record in those days. His most famous walkee was Nancy Reagan. When she became the nation’s first lady in 1981, various liberal publications had a tricky time squaring their attempt
s to make her out to be a reincarnation of Marie Antoinette, with their vaunted tolerance of homosexuality. (Zip, wearing his trademark homburg hat and fur-lined collar, just stuck his tongue out at them, and bravo, Jerome. I was very fond of him and sad when the falling-out came between him and Mum. He had a bit of a mean streak, and she had a low tolerance for mean streaks.) Another of Mum’s very close friends was Conservative Party apparatchik Marvin Liebman, a confirmed bachelor until he spilled a very large can of beans in the form of a memoir entitled Coming Out Conservative. * There were so many of them: Bill Blass, Peter Glenville, Valentino, John Richardson, Truman Capote, and others who prefer still to be thought of as confirmed bachelors. At this pageant, I had a front-row seat. And though this may verge on truism or overstatement, I grasped, at perhaps a precocious age, that no one truly appreciates a really great lady more than a gay man, and vice versa. Whether this mutual valence is organically due to the liberating lack of sexual interest in each other or to shared passions (decor, food, dress, whatever; Truman Capote and Babe Paley reportedly used to discuss moisturizers in Talmudic detail), I don’t know, and don’t propose here to essay a half-baked master’s thesis on the subject. In Mum’s case, it seemed to have more to do with laughter than moisturizers. At any rate, after a half century of hanging around Mum and her pals, I knew where to look. Having exhausted various Protestant venues up and down the silky Rialto of Madison Avenue, I placed a hopeful call to the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, whose annual galas Mum had administered for over a decade, and was generously offered the Temple of Dendur, which is roughly speaking the coolest space on the planet.
“How did you manage to get the Temple of Dendur?” Pup said excitedly over the phone.
“Oh,” I said, “I have my ways, you know,” though it had absolutely nothing to do with my powers of persuasion. Mum had made the Costume Institute hot, and now they were returning the favor.
CHAPTER 6
Dude, What’s With Your Dad?
Isuppose one way or the other I’ve spent a good deal of my life, despite my protestations to the contrary, trying to measure up to my father, so it was refreshing—or novel, anyway—to find myself now trying to measure up to my mother, by throwing her a worthy memorial service.
There was a lot to do: designing the program, arranging with caterers, florists, the audiovisual guy, preparing a PowerPoint presentation, lining up eulogists, making sure the invitations got out. I was a novice in this field of endeavor, but I now feel that I could with confidence arrange a wedding or, for that matter, a state visit by the queen of England. (Did I mention that the queen’s father and mother used to stay with us whenever they were in town?)
With the food and booze and the flowers, all I needed to say to Mum’s old friend Sean Driscoll of Glorious Food was: What would Pat do? Sean got it; that was all the guidance he needed. The audiovisual subcontractor, a competent and agreeable man named Tony, presented his estimate. I whistled silently at the $7,000 price at the bottom of the e-mail, but I thought, Well, we’re only going to do this once. A month later, my learning curve took a sharp turn upward when Tony presented his final bill and I realized that I hadn’t read quite all the way to the bottom of his e-mail attachment. The $7,000 was for equipment. The labor cost came to an additional $13,000 on top of that. As I type this a year later, I’m able to chuckle—finally—at my ineptitude at e-mail attachment reading. I can hear Mum’s ghost muttering, Twenty thousand dollars? For a few television screens and a microphone? Have you completely taken leave of your senses?
That said, I think she would have approved of the reason I needed eight humongous plasma-screen TV monitors placed about the Temple of Dendur. They were to display the opening and closing PowerPoint presentation (what we used to call in the old days a “slide show”), consisting of a photo-montage set to Michael Feinstein’s “Isn’t It Romantic?” and “Where Do You Start?” Preparing these photos had occupied several full days of standing over them spread across the living room floor, arranging them and timing the music, the whole time sobbing. (This presented a deplorable spectacle for my son, Conor, and his fifteen-year-old pals as they traipsed in and out of the room. Dude, what’s with your dad? Is he like a total retard or something?) But I couldn’t help it. She was so, so beautiful, Mum. Among those hundreds of photos, there wasn’t one bad one. She made love to every camera that came her way. Well, it was probably good therapy in the end. By the morning of the memorial service, I had—quite literally—cried myself dry.
Some people, no matter how dear and good their hearts, just aren’t adept at eulogies; still, they have to be asked to give them. This presents the memorial service impresario with a conundrum: how to square his obligation to the bereaved with the dramatic requirements of the service. And this can be tricky.
One of the people I asked to give one—a longtime friend of Mum’s—said he would be honored to do so, then phoned me a day or two later to ask a bit sheep-ishly if I might provide “a few notes” to help him. I sensed this might be code for “Could you write it for me?” I was happy to oblige.
I’d asked my daughter, Caitlin, if she might speak. Cat was nineteen and in the throes of approaching final exams, and very pressed for time, so I volunteered to do some talking points for her. I sat down during a train ride to sketch these out and found myself quickly and utterly stymied. I couldn’t think of a single warm and fuzzy grandmother anecdote. (The Skakel story, warm and fuzzy as it was, might—I felt—not be quite appropriate to the occasion.) I phoned Cat from the train and with genuine pain in my heart said, Honey, you don’t have to do this. She loved you in her own way, but let’s face it—she was not a hands-on granny. Dear, sweet Cat said, No, no, Dad, I want to do it. This somehow liberated me, and I was able to give her some ideas, the gist of which was that while “Nan” may not have been a typical grandmother, she was never (God knows) dull. She had taught Cat such useful skills as never buttering your bread in midair; taught her, age four, to air kiss, telling her that this would come in handy when she grew up and moved to New York City. Cat’s eulogy ended up being the high point of the entire show. She ended it with blowing an air kiss to her Nan. It was a total home run. I did little after the service other than kvell and accept compliments on behalf of my dazzling daughter. Anna Wintour of Vogue was so impressed, she offered Cat a job. This was very generous of Ms. Wintour and presented Cat with an interesting dilemma inasmuch as The Devil Wears Prada had just opened.
Neither Pup nor I trusted ourselves to get through a eulogy. He wrote one for the program. Mine took the form of the memorial service itself, along with my weepy PowerPoint show.
The key to eulogist wrangling—bear this in mind when you find yourself doing it—is Draconian enforcement of the time limit! In fact, to heck with Draco: Imagine yourself as the Time-Limit Nazi. This may seem an obvious point, but you’ve probably attended one or two funerals and memorial services where the fine-hammered steel of woe was turned to Brillo by incontinent eulogists. This species can be easily spotted: They almost never prepare ahead of time, preferring instead to “go with the moment” or to “speak from the heart.” They will then prattle on—from the heart—for at least twenty minutes, causing those in attendance to forget all about the deceased and start praying that a dislodged gargoyle will fall from above and smite the speaker. *
A twenty-minute eulogy, unless composed by a) William Shakespeare, b) Winston Churchill, or c) Mark Twain, is sixteen minutes too long. Technical note: It is better to tell a eulogist to speak for four minutes, not five minutes. “Five minutes” to the modern ear sounds like “around five minutes,” whereas “four minutes” means “four minutes.” Just before the service began, I said to my eulogists (including Henry Kissinger), “I have snipers positioned up there”—pointing to the temple—“with orders to shoot to kill anyone who goes over four minutes.” I smiled as I said this, but smiled in a certain way. And it worked. They were all splendid, moving, and brief. No one went beyond his or her al
lotted time—except for the Catholic padre (Pup had insisted on him) who gave the opening benediction. It was brilliant, subtle, amusing, intellectually elegant, and seven minutes long.
So it all went very well and was worthy of Pat Buckley. And it had taken a month to arrange. When on that May morning I walked into the sunlit Temple of Dendur—a two-thousand-year-old Nubian temple to the goddess Isis, enclosed within a vast, stippled glass atrium and reflecting pool—and saw the huge spray of pink apple blossoms, the chairs smartly lined up, my programs, Tony’s $20,000 worth of TV screens and technical people, saw the dozens of Sean Driscoll’s smartly attired catering staff, I took it all in and gave myself a little pat on the back and thought, Yes, Mum would approve.
Pup arrived as I was having this quiet little moment of self-congratulation. I winked at him and spread my arms as if to say, So—whaddya think? He looked about the room and grimaced. “It’s awfully bright, isn’t it?” He was used to seeing it at night, during Mum’s Costume Institute galas. I suppressed the urge to hurl him into the reflecting pool. After it was over, I looked over and saw him lurching on unsteady legs to embrace Henry Kissinger. Poor Pup, poor desolate man—his face was flushed, livid, scarlet with grief. This is the eulogy from the program that he couldn’t bring himself to deliver a cappella in the shadow of the old Egyptian goddess:
By any standard, at near six feet tall, she was extraordinary. She shared a suite with my sister Trish and two other students at Vassar, and on that spring evening in 1949 I was the blind date she had never met. When I walked into the drawing room the four girls shared, I found her hard pressed. She was mostly ready for the prom but was now vexed by attendant responsibilities. I offered to paint her fingernails, and she immediately extended her hand, using the other one on the telephone. The day before, she had given the sad news to her roommates that she would not be returning to Vassar for junior and senior years. She was needed at home, in Vancouver, to help her mother care for a dying family member. My own parents had gone to their place in South Carolina for the winter and the house in Sharon, Connecticut, was closed. But I would dart over from Yale for an occasional weekend in the huge empty house, and Trish brought her there once, and we laughed all weekend long, and Trish promised to visit her in Vancouver during the summer.
Losing Mum and Pup Page 5