Pup was no fan of détente with the Soviet Union and China, which in the Buckley household was always referred to as “Red China.” After Nixon’s China opening in 1972, Pup commented wryly in a Playboy article that upon receiving the news of Henry’s secret visit to Mao, “I broke wind, with heavy philosophical reservation.” But through it all, Pup’s devotion to and respect for Henry never flickered, and he defended him fiercely against those on the Right who wanted Henry Kissinger’s Commie-coddling head on a pike. One of Pup’s formulations, which I thought artful, was: How can Henry Kissinger be, simultaneously, their [the Left’s] enemy and our enemy? That usually shut them up, though not for long.
There were one or two moments when Pup did come close to exasperation, as he did the day the news broke that Henry’s new boss, President Gerald Ford, had declined to meet with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. To Pup, Solzhenitsyn was a secular saint. He stood in awe of him—and there were not that many men who inspired such awe in my old man. That the president of the United States had been too busy—the laughably pathetic excuse offered by the White House spokesperson—to meet with someone Pup called “the voice of baptized humanity” was, well, just a bit… too… much. *
I pestered Pup to find out from—as I put it with callow truculence—“your pal Henry Kissinger” why President Ford was cold-shouldering the author of The Gulag Archipelago. Pup sighed at the lunch table. He eventually reported that he had had a little come-to-Jesus with his pal Henry and that Henry had sounded a bit sheepish about it all. As memory serves, he told Pup, What can I tell you, Bill? It was a busy day, the call came in, I had five seconds to make the decision. It was a mistake and I regret it. Pup shrugged. He had a mantra that he trotted out when confronted with a situation not to his liking but beyond his control: “And there it is.” † There were other contentions between the two of them over the years, some of them acute, but they loved each other deeply. I promised Henry that if there were any spectacular developments urine-wise, he would be the first to hear.
One night about two-thirty a.m., Margaret, Pup’s sweet and pleasingly taciturn night nurse, shook me awake to say that he wanted to see me right away. I staggered down the hall, heavy-lidded. He was lying athwart his bed, which had become an eagle’s nest of printed matter—newspapers, magazines, books—CDs, tissue boxes, and sundry detritus. I could hear Mum’s ghost: Bill, look at this bed. It is dis-gusting. The lights were blazing, the TV blaring, oxygen machine chugging. His Cavalier King Charles spaniels, Sebbie and Daisy, yapped stridently at my approach. We had known one another, these doggies and I, for—what?—three years, but they still felt the need to treat my arrivals in their master’s bedroom as if I were Charles Manson. They are the most beautiful dogs in God’s kingdom, Cavaliers, and almost certainly the dumbest.
Pup had on his bata (bathrobe). His hair was all over the place. His faux tortoiseshell glasses, perched askew on his nose, gave him a sort of mad-professor look. I relaxed. He didn’t seem in extremis.
“Yes, Pup?” I yawned.
“Christo,” he said, “I have something very important to discuss with you.”
Uh-oh, I thought. You’re leaving all your money to National Review?
“All right,” I said cautiously, “I’m listening.”
“I think we ought to invite to lunch—tomorrow—some very important players in the conservative community.”
Relieved as I was that my patrimony was not going to NR, I was somewhat at a loss. “Well,” I said, “gosh. I think that’s a really… wonderful idea.”
I lay down wearily across the foot of his bed, Daisy lapping at my face, Sebbie demanding to have his tummy scratched, their having decided I had come in peace to their master’s nocturnal levee.
“But I mean,” Pup emphasized, “only serious players.”
“Absolutely…” I yawned. “So, who’d you have in mind?”
“Well,” he said, “we have to have McFadden.”
I nodded. Jim McFadden, National Review’s long-time associate publisher, had died in 1998.
“Right,” I said. “We can’t not have Jim. I’ll, uh, see if he’s available.”
Pop dictated to me his list of invitees. Some of them were alive. After five minutes of dictation, perhaps punchy, I suggested—inasmuch as he had been working on a memoir of his friendship with Barry Goldwater—that we invite Goldwater. Pup appeared to weigh this, then stared at me querulously.
“Christo,” he said, sounding faintly annoyed, “Barry Goldwater is dead.”
“Right,” I said, yawning, “good point.”
HE WASN’T READY FOR VISITORS, so for company it was just me and Danny. Danny lived in my old apartment above the garage. For twenty years, Mum and Pup had rented it out to tenants, to help pay the taxes. One tenant, in the 1950s, was a man named Charles Blair.
One fine summer day in the early 1970s, we were having lunch on the terrace, Pup, Mum, me, one or two guests. A car pulled up the driveway. “I wonder who that could be?” Mum said. A tall, lean, handsome man approached. My parents peered, then exclaimed almost in unison, “Charley! For heaven’s sake!”
It was Charley Blair, their old tenant. He was in the neighborhood and thought to stop by. What makes this otherwise quite dull story of interest is that Charley, while living over our garage, had been a top pilot for Pan American. On the side, he was working for the CIA, training Francis Gary Powers how to fly the U-2 spy plane. (Powers was shot down by Soviet missiles, resulting in one of the more embarrassing episodes of the cold war.) Charley, meanwhile, continuing to cut a dashing figure, had gone on to marry the actress Maureen O’Hara (my personal platonic ideal of womanhood). After that, he started an air-boat service in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Not quite end of story. Meanwhile:
Charley sat and reminisced with us over iced teas for, I suppose, forty-five minutes or so, at which point Pup said, “How’s Maureen?”
“Oh, fine,” Charley said. “She’s in the car.”
“In—the car?” my mother said, appalled. “Do you mean to say, all this time you left her in the car?” It was a warm summer day.
“Yeah.” Charley shrugged. “She’ll be fine, really.”
Mum and Pup protested vehemently that he must ask her to come in. Charley shrugged reluctantly, as if asking one of the world’s most famous actresses—his wife, incidentally—to join us at the table would be an intolerable imposition. My parents would have none of it, and at length Charley was prevailed upon to fetch his suffocating wife. He returned with the radiant, if slightly wilted, Maureen O’Hara. Eudosia, our ancient beloved, toothless Cuban cook, word having reached her in the kitchen of the arrival on la terraza of la grande estrella Señora O’Hara, rushed in her slippers to the window that looked out onto the terrace and remained there, watching intently for the duration of the visit.
I gathered, from things I read here and there in later years, that the two of them were inseparable, to the point where Ms. O’Hara got a pilot’s license so that she could accompany Charley as co-pilot on his flights. One day, picking up my New York Times, I saw on the front page that Charley, unaccompanied by his wife, had been killed in the crash of one of his boat planes.
CHAPTER 10
You Can Imagine How Pleased Your Mother Was
We settled into a routine of sorts, which somewhat depended on how many sleeping pills Pup had self-administered during the night.
I did not, as a young bacchante in the sixties and seventies, absent myself from the garden of herbal and pharmacological delights—far from it—so I found myself in an ironic position, lecturing a parent about drugs. The child/parent relationship inevitably reverses, but to this degree I had not anticipated.
Pup, I would say, eyeing the half-empty blister pack of Stilnox by his bedside, how many Stilnoxes did we take last night?
I don’t know. One and a half? Two?
Two? [Examing the pack, which looked as if it had been half eaten by wolverines in the night.] Two. Okay.
I may ha
ve taken another.
Another. So—three, say?
[Becoming annoyed.] There might have been one more.
How many Rits * did we take yesterday?
[Fully annoyed.] What does Rit have to do with not sleeping?
I still can’t say, a year later, whether this stunner of a rhetorical statement was simply denial or a Firing Line– quality countergambit. I’d made the (really pretty obvious) point to Pup, perhaps, oh, fifty times over recent years, that Ritalin, which he took as a stimulant, was not a means toward a good night’s sleep—especially if you took your final one of the day at dinnertime and washed it down with coffee. (While living in Mexico in the early 1950s, my parents acquired a taste for coffee so strong, it could revive a three-thousand-year-dead Egyptian mummy and make it run the Boston Marathon; and win.) Oddly, Pup found it difficult to get to sleep after these postprandial attachings of jumper cables to his cortex, and sought to counteract them with “one or two” Stilnoxes. These would knock him out for an hour or so, at which point he would awaken, and, semistuporous, gnaw open the blister pack and swallow God only knows how many more. It did not make for the kind of night’s rest you see in the TV ads, with butterflies fluttering above the pillows; more like Night of the Living Dead.
It occurs to me that in this increasing dependence, Pup had come to resemble another great Catholic author: Evelyn Waugh. I don’t mean to adduce a tropism to sleeping pills among aging Catholic apologists, but—there it is. Waugh’s addiction to paraldehyde, a popular “sleeping draught” of the 1950s, combined with his alcoholism, drove him to the breakdown he limned fictionally in his late-career novel The Ordeal of Gil-bert Pinfold, a story of one very hairy ride through the subconscious. In any event, Pup’s reliance on uppers and downers was not hastening his recovery. But short of tying him down and confiscating his meds, there wasn’t a whole heck of a lot I could do about it. His youngest sister, my aunt Carol, was adamant that he be “detoxed,” to which I responded, “Be my guest.”
Pup’s self-medicating was, I venture, a chemical extension of the control he asserted over every other aspect of his life. The term control freak is pejorative. I’d put it this way: Few great men—and I use the term precisely, for Pup was a great man—do not seek to assert total control over their domains. Winston Churchill, to pick one, wasn’t the type to shrug, “Oh, well, whatever. Go with the flow.” I revere Mark Twain, but I’d say that for all his devotion to his family, he was moderately impossible as a father and husband. * Great men (and yes of course by that I include women) tend to be the stars of their own movies.
Some years ago, I came across a quote that could serve as the solipsist’s definitive credo: “Let me have my own way exactly in everything, and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.” (Thomas Carlyle) † Pup never plunged into bad moods or became grouchy if things didn’t go his way, perhaps for the reason that they always went his way. He was invariably the sunniest and most pleasant creature in the room. The moods of those in attendance upon him—Mum’s, mainly—did not always match his in the sunny and pleasant departments. Point is, great men tend to want things to go their way.
A remote control, say, in the hands of an autocrat of the TV room becomes a Star Trek phaser gun set on stun. Evenings, if Pup was up to it, Danny and I would bring him down in the electric rail chair and then, slowly—he had to stop every three feet and gasp for air—to the music room. The three of us would eat one of Julian’s delicious meals on trays and watch a movie. I say “movie,” but “movies” would be more accurate, since five minutes in, he would, without bothering to say, “Let’s watch something else,” simply change the channel. One day, when I called from away, Danny reported with a somewhat strained chuckle, “We watched parts of five movies last night.”
This was not a new habit of his. He and Mum might be watching with half a dozen guests Murder on the Orient Express when, just as a key plot point was being introduced, suddenly the screen would fill with a documentary on Che Guevara or the Tuareg nomads of the sub-Sahara. I wonder: Does the FBI keep crime statistics on murder committed by family members of serial channel changers?
All this seems very trivial now, but at the time, Pup’s death grip on the remote took on a sort of proxy significance, emblematic as it was of the control he exerted over the solar system he inhabited. Once or twice during the convalescence, I became so splutteringly frustrated, after the fourth or fifth channel change, that I silently stormed out of the room, leaving poor Danny to cope. He’s sick, I would tell myself, fuming off to my room. But halfway up the stairs, my inner noodge would whisper, Well, yeah, but it’s not quite that simple, is it?
For my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary in 1990, I did a video in the form of a mock episode of 60 Minutes. I taped interviews with thirty or so of their friends and even persuaded a sporting Mike Wallace to play along with an ambush interview of himself in which he flees the interviewer (me), protesting, “I find these kinds of interviews distasteful!”
One of the interviews was of Pup’s great friend Dick Clurman (“the perfect Christian”) and his wife, Shirley. Dick and Shirley had accompanied my parents on perhaps a dozen Christmas cruises aboard chartered sailboats in the Caribbean. In the interview, Dick, standing in his Manhattan apartment dressed in yellow foul-weather gear, describes how it was one Christmas Eve on one of the cruises.
Everything was perfect. Mum had brought and wrapped presents for everyone, placing them around a Christmas tree she had contrived. (God, she was brilliant at Christmases, Mum.) She’d even brought and strung up little twinkly lights. Drinks were served. “Silent Night” was playing on the CD player. The boat was anchored in the most charming, lovely, beautiful, protected cove in the entire Caribbean. (You see where this is going?) Everything was perfect.
At which point Pup suddenly decided that it would be even more perfect if they up-anchored and moved across the way to a different cove. Mum said, Bill, just leave it. But leaving it was not Bill’s way. No, no. Ho, ho, ho. Dick’s recitation of what followed is quite hilarious, but I imagine it was very far from hilarious at the time.
Pup ordered the anchor up, and as they proceeded across the bay, a sudden squall hit, drenching everything, washing presents overboard, shorting out the Christmas lights, knocking over the tree; whereupon, in the dark and confusion, the yacht went aground. So instead of spending a lovely, calm Christmas Eve in the protected cove, listening to “White Christmas” with the twinkly lights, they spent it in the dark, at a forty-five-degree angle atop a sandbar, in a rainstorm. All because Pup had insisted that it would be “much nicer over on the other side.” Great men are not content to leave well enough alone.
“So that was Christmas Eve,” Dick concludes in the interview. Shirley, next to him, is at this point convulsed with laughter. “You can imagine how pleased your mother was,” he says.
Yes, I could. I’d been there many times.
CHAPTER 11
My Old Man and the Sea *
Pup was an avid sailor. He had learned to sail as a child in upstate Connecticut, on a not very large lake. Now we lived on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound and kept a thirty-eight-foot wooden sloop. It was named Panic, a name my mother found all too apt.
In his garage office study, there is a framed photograph of Panic. It was taken by a news photographer at the start of the 1958 Newport–Bermuda race. In it, Panic is lying on its side at a more or less ninety-degree angle, its mast submerged in the water. This undesirable nautical posture is called a “knock-down.” It was thrilling for me as a six-year-old to hear my father’s crewmates describe the sensation of thousands of gallons of the Atlantic pouring into the cabin at the start of a five-day ocean race.
I now “get” that Pup’s greatness was of a piece with the way he conducted himself at sea. Great men always have too much canvas up. Great men take great risks. It’s the timorous souls—souls like myself—who err on the side of caution; who take in sail when they see a storm ap
proaching and look for snug harbor. Not my old man. Or as Mum used to put it, “Bill, why are you trying to kill us?”
Great men are also impatient. This particular aspect showed up most vividly in my father’s manner of docking his boats.
Most people, when guiding, say, a ten- or twenty-ton vessel toward a dock, approach slowly. Not my old man. His technique was to go straight at it, full speed. Why waste time? This made for memorable episodes.
At one point in his life, he owned a seventy-two-foot-long schooner. It had an eighteen-foot-long bowsprit. With my father at the wheel, going hell-bent for leather toward a pier, that long bowsprit became a jousting lance. What vivid memories I have of people scattering like sheep at our approach. One time, someone actually leapt off the dock into the water in an attempt to escape. Over the years, my father took out entire sections of docks up and down the eastern seaboard. His crew bestowed on him the nickname “Captain Crunch.”
When I was six, he contrived a treasure hunt. He bought an antique wooden chest and filled it with silver dollars. Also with some of my mother’s jewelry. He and a friend sailed across Long Island Sound one weekend and buried it on a sandy spit called on the chart Eaton’s Neck but which I will always call “Treasure Island.”
He told me that he had come into possession of an old treasure map. It was something out of Robert Louis Stevenson, scratched on thick parchment in bloodred ink. The location of the treasure was indicated with compass bearings. I couldn’t sleep the night before we set out, I was so excited.
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