In almost every photo taken during the painting sessions, you can see David Niven, wearing his smock, painting seriously. He was good. Marc Chagall dropped by one night. Pup—he told this story with appropriate mortification—showed him one of his paintings. Chagall remarked, “Pauvre peinture!” (Poor paint!) Ken and Kitty Galbraith, Greek shipping magnates, various Romanovs, Charlie Chaplin, Nabokov, James Clavell, German Grafs, a Danish queen, King Constantine of Greece, Spanish ministers, English swells, Oxford dons, Swiss art dealers, the whole jumbo jet set—they all came to Mum and Pup’s château to be wined and fed and laugh. (In addition, that is, to the painting.) It was there, perhaps more than in New York and Stamford, that I saw most close up the binary energy that the two of them put out. People just wanted to be around them. They were the fun Americans: the cool intellectual who wrote spy novels on the side and his beautiful, witty, outrageous wife. They had—how to put it?—class.
One night, as they were getting ready for dinner, a chimney fire broke out and swiftly consumed the entire château. The Rougemont fire department arrived late, and drunk, and unable to cope. Mum lost everything, including her recently deceased mother’s jewels. Pup organized a sort of bucket brigade to rescue his book-in-progress and office library. David and Hjordis Niven, driving to dinner there from the town where they lived, noticed an orange glow as they approached and wondered, What could that be? Another guest, the painter Raymond de Botton, driving from the other direction, also noticed a glow above Rougemont. I still have the painting that he did of it. It’s called Château Brûlée. No one was hurt, but Mum went into a bad depression. Jerry Zipkin, staying in Paris, went out and bought her an entire new wardrobe and arrived on the train from Montreux bearing a zillion shopping bags.
The immolation was the second trauma of their Swiss days. In 1965, Mum broke her leg skiing—broke it badly. The bone splintered into a dozen pieces. The plate the surgeons installed was a foot long and contained dozens of screws. The X-ray of it, which I have just tossed into a Dumpster, looks like something they study in med school. She was on crutches for two years. The surgeon who did the operation became a friend. He was an avid mountaineer and many years later froze to death alone on a mountain after falling.
The last time I visited them in Switzerland, in 2000, Pup called me a few days before I was to arrive to say that he wanted to visit Auschwitz. He was writing a novel about the Nuremberg trials and needed to see it for himself. So we went, and my last memory of seeing Mum and Pup amid the beau monde of Gstaad is a confused one, mingled with images of the worst place on earth.
WORD CAME BACK from Fort Lauderdale that Julian and the first installment of WFB tonnage had arrived, but with the sad news that Sebbie, Pup’s devoted eight-year-old Cavalier and bedside defender, had suffered a heart attack on the way down and died.
CHAPTER 15
Blood of the Fathers
Iwould get reports from Julian and Danilo on how it was going down in Florida. There were good days and not-so-good days, the not-so-good days often following not-so-good nights, when Pup, frustrated at finding himself awake at three a.m., would reach for a fistful of sleeping pills. By this point, I found myself hoping that one night he would accidentally overdose. There was no guilt to the thought. I wanted him out of pain.
Pup revealed to me, in an unusually legibly typed e-mail, that he’d discussed the religious aspect with a local doctor—“un Católico” (a Catholic), he pointed out. The e-mail revealed nothing more, and I did not press. I wondered how their conversation would have gone. Lots of subjunctive, I should think, on Pup’s part, a lot of lawyerly subordinate clauses: Were one, say, to ingest a specific number of Stilnoxes… might that, under certain circumstances, bring about the necessary diminution of pulmonary functionality so as to frustrate, say, the cardiological imperatives? Tonight’s guest on Firing Line—Dr. Jack Kevorkian.
In other news, he was back to writing his column, and I rejoiced at that. Since 1962, his whole work metabolism had been set to the rhythm of the column. One particular column he wrote in Florida was, I thought, especially good, and I sent him a filial e-mail pat on the back, telling how proud I was of him that he could still muster the old skills. He responded instantly, and I could feel him glowing through the computer screen. Toward the end of his life, Joseph Conrad, grumpy over a bad review, said at the table with admirable ingenuousness—not always a trait in evidence among great writers: “I don’t want criticism. I want praise.”
One night—it would have been 1974 or 1975—before Pup launched twin new careers as a writer of sailing books and Blackford Oakes novels (both genres propelled him to the top of the best-seller lists), he was gloomy over a recent thrashing he’d taken from The New York Times Book Review. Pup was no stranger to bad reviews. Reviewing his first book, McGeorge Bundy, speaking for the Establishment, called him, among other unpleasant things, “a twisted young man.” And he’d been called far worse over the years. But after this umpteenth consecutive drubbing by the newspaper of record, he was hurting. As we sat in the sun-room at Wallack’s Point, he said to me, “They might at least say that I write well.” Some criticism did amuse him. Up until it changed ownership, Kirkus Reviews gave a hostile review to every single one of his books. Around our house, Mrs. Kirkus was referred to as “that-bitch-Virginia-Kirkus.”
He did, certainly, like praise. Not unusual in writers, but Pup had developed certain—shall we say—Conradian aspects in his declining years. During the posthospital convalescence, he would have me read to him e-mail “William F. Buckley” news alerts that he’d programmed Google to send him. There were mentions in cyberspace of “William F. Buckley” about every three seconds. By the time I’d read the one hundredth or so out loud to him, this had become a somewhat vexing aspect of my nursing shifts. I would come to groan upon opening his e-mail to see seventy-five WFB news alerts.
I called him in Florida one day. He sounded very down and said that he was having a “rough time” with his Reagan book. My eyes watered. I thought, Jesus. Eighty-two years old, founder of a political movement, author of over fifty books, nothing left to prove, barely able to breathe, and still beating himself over the head because the writing’s not going well.
He kept at it, and that book, his last, is going to press now as I write this. The first chapter ends with a speech he gave in 1985, in President Reagan’s presence, at the thirtieth-anniversary dinner of National Review. He addressed it directly to his old friend. It ends:
As an individual you incarnate American ideals at many levels. As the final responsible authority, in any hour of great challenge, we depend on you. I was nineteen years old when the bomb went off over Hiroshima, and last week I turned 60. During the interval I have lived a free man in a free and sovereign country, and this only because we have husbanded a nuclear deterrent, and made clear our disposition to use it if necessary. I pray that my son, when he is 60, and your son, when he is 60, and the sons and daughters of our guests tonight will live in a world from which the great ugliness that has scarred our century has passed. Enjoying their freedoms, they will be grateful that, at the threatened nightfall, the blood of their fathers ran strong.
His fifty-sixth and, given that he died while writing it, one might suppose, final book. I put it this way not to be coy, but because there seems to be a possibility, given enthusiasm in various publishing quarters, of bringing out another collection of his articles. So this might turn out not to be his last book. His book on Barry Goldwater has just come out. One month before, another book, a collection of his “Notes and Asides” from National Review, appeared under the really great title Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription. And here came yet another in the pipeline. Pup wrote more books dead than some authors do alive.
That his last book would be about Reagan struck me as a natural coda to his oeuvre, inasmuch as WFB was the founder and primum mobile of the movement that eventually put Reagan in the White House. As it’s been said more than once: If it hadn’t been for Buck
ley, there mightn’t have been Goldwater, and without Goldwater, there mightn’t have been Reagan.
Ronald Reagan was an elusive personality. His biographer Edmund Morris found him so elusive that he resorted, in his masterful but certainly controversial book Dutch, to confect a fictional character, simply in an effort to deconstruct his subject. But though Reagan tended famously to shy from intimacy, I think it’s possible that Pup may have gotten as close to him as any friend could. It certainly was a friendship. WFB was very close to Nancy Reagan, as the letters in the book attest. At various points, Pup became a mentor (that ghastly word again) to the Reagan children, Patti and Ron Jr.
I first met Reagan when Pup took me along with him to California in 1966 to do several Firing Line tapings. Honesty compels me to say that for this fourteen-year-old, the real excitement of the trip was the Firing Line taping not with the new governor of California, but with Robert Vaughn, star of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Vaughn was at the time an aspirant liberal eminence, which vocation turned out to be short-lived.
The Reagans gave a cocktail party for Pup at the governor’s mansion. Le tout Sacramento turned out. I was swiftly ignored amid the sea of grown-ups and wandered out into the garden and sat down by myself. A few moments later, I sensed the presence of someone next to me and, turning, saw the governor of California looming large and movie-star handsome in a white jacket. He had seen me go off by myself and, sensing that I must be feeling lost and out of place, had left his guests to come and talk. I never forgot that. If Reagan was capable of reticence, he was also capable of graciousness. He was a gentleman. In that capacity, he and WFB were made for each other.
Fifteen years later, quite by accident (I’d written something in Esquire that had impressed Vice President George Bush’s press secretary), I found myself working in Ronald Reagan’s White House. The Reagans kindly invited me to the odd social occasion. At one of these, I nearly caused a faux pas of national proportion.
The invitation was for dinner in the residence upstairs and a movie afterward. I had a big speech to write for Bush that night and pleaded urgently with Muffie Brandon, Mrs. Reagan’s social secretary, to be excused from the movie. She tsk-tsked but said all right, but that I must be discreet about leaving. I said of course. As I made my stealthy exit just before the lights went down in the family theater, I rounded a corner in the hallway and bumped smack into—Ronald Reagan, returning either from the men’s room or from ordering a richly deserved missile strike on some Middle Eastern despot.
He smiled that thousand-watt smile and regarded me curiously.
“Where are you going?” he said. “We’re about to start the movie.”
“Um,” I said, dissembling, “just going to the men’s room, Mr. President. I’ll be right there. Go ahead and start without me.”
He smiled and went off, phalanxed by Secret Service, including Tim McCarthy, who a few months earlier had interposed himself between the president and John Hinckley, taking a .22 slug in the chest.
I made my way down the long corridor in the basement and was about to exit the White House when I heard behind me a sibilant and frantic, “Psssst!”
Looking back, I saw Muffie Brandon gesticulating urgently.
“He just announced to everyone that we weren’t going to start without you.”
Oh dear. I skulked back, Muffie more or less leading me by the ear, to find fifty guests glowering at me and my seat saved—in the front row, next to the president and Mrs. Reagan.
I experienced many such acts of grace and favor during my time at the White House. Looking back on it, I realize—not that I didn’t at the time—that these were reciprocations for the kindnesses Pup had shown to the Reagan children.
A few years later, in 1985, I found myself—again, accidentally—ghostwriting David Stockman’s memoirs, under furious deadline pressure. (I use the term ghostwriting in the narrow, technical sense: My job was to turn a mountain—yea, a veritable Kilimanjaro—of manuscript into readable English.) There was a piquancy to this assignment, inasmuch as David Stockman had become famous mainly for an act of impertinence to Reagan while serving as his budget director. But a) Stockman’s beef was about policy, not in any way ad hominem against Reagan; and, well, b) I needed the dough.
In the midst of this death march fell National Review’s gala thirtieth-anniversary dinner at the Plaza in New York. I pleaded with Pup that I couldn’t attend—I barely had time to eat meals. No, he insisted, you have to be there, as he put it somewhat mysteriously, for reasons that will become apparent. I grumpily assented. Pup wasn’t someone to whom you could say no.
So I went and was seated right above the podium when he gave the speech that is reproduced earlier. Looking back on that moment, on those two amazing men, I reflect that, yes, the blood of the fathers truly did run strong.
CHAPTER 16
That Would Be a Real Bore
The lease on the Fort Lauderdale house was up mid-January, but with the Reagan book still unfinished, and January in Connecticut being January in Connecticut, I tried to persuade Pup to remain in Florida. But he was adamant about coming home, and I suspect now that he was coming home to die. With all due respect to the Sunshine State, when my time comes, I shouldn’t want to die there, either. I can see spending some of my senescence there, but I shouldn’t want the Reaper to find me on the golf course or in a condo. “I want death… to find me planting my cabbages,” wrote Michel de Montaigne. But to die in, say, Fort Lauderdale… there seems something—as Pup would say—contra naturam about that. In The Importance of Being Earnest, the Reverend Chasuble, informed that soand-so died in Paris, tut-tuts: “In Paris? I fear that does not point, at the end, to a very serious state of mind.” * New Englanders, growing up as we do with hot summer fields and frozen-over ponds, are hardwired to the seasons. Now it was winter in Connecticut, and I think Pup wanted to be back on native soil when it happened. It was time.
Time for someone else, too: his great friend Van Galbraith. They’d met on election day 1948, in New Haven. Best friends for six decades. They’d sailed across three oceans together (I was along); had seen each other through tragedies. Van’s were particularly awful: the loss of two daughters, one a little girl named Julie, age six. † Pup had maneuvered Van’s appointment as Reagan’s U.S. ambassador to France. Van—Ohio born, handsome, blond, brawny, broken-nosed, Yale football player, navy officer, CIA man, and Wall Street banker—was a gleeful cold warrior and a most unusual diplomat. He gave François Mitterrand’s Socialist government more heartburn than a dozen escargots. Did you see what Van did yesterday? It’s all over the news. Boy, oh boy, Shultz is going to recall his ass, he keeps this up. Van’s tenure in Paris was An American in Paris meets Day of the Jackal. He had the rare gift of being able to make almost any unpleasant situation funny. He was certainly the only person you could forgive for waking you in the middle of the ocean at two in the morning to go stand watch. Christo, good news. You don’t have to be asleep anymore. I loved him. Everyone did. I’ve not yet lost a best friend to death. I could only imagine what losing him meant to Pup.
HE CAME HOME. I started at his appearance. He could barely walk now. The breathing had worsened to the point where he would attach the oxygen tube to his nostrils without any preliminary Socratic dialogue about whether oxygen actually made a difference. At table, he’d hunch forward over his food and fall asleep. We’d get him upstairs, and then just as I was going to sleep, the intercom would buzz. He’d like a chocolate milkshake. So that would be made and brought, and having finished that, he wanted a beer. And after that, peanut brittle. I wondered, administering these surely lethal midnight snacks to a diabetic, whether this would be sufficient to send me off to jail. We have evidence that Christopher Buckley did knowingly provide chocolate milkshakes and beer to the late conservative icon William F. Buckley….
“Pup, do you think you ought to be having all this quite so late at night? I mean, with the diabetes and all…”
“It’s delicious.
Have some.”
[Patting my own protuberant belly in hopes that self-deprecation might inspire moderation on his part.] “Oh, no, no. Ha. Look at me. Jabba the Hutt.”
“Who?”
“The grotesquely fat alien in…” Never mind.
“Now,” he would say brightly, “what I would like, more than anything in the world, is a milk rum punch.”
We find the defendant, Christopher Buckley, guilty.
In the 1950s, Mum and Pup would hold the National Review Christmas office party in Stamford. Pup would make milk rum punch. I used to help him. Never one to waste time, Pup kept to a simple recipe: one quart milk, one quart rum, one quart ice cream. He might, just for the heck of it, empty an entire (large) bottle of vanilla extract into it. The effects of this milky elixir upon the conservative movement were quite galvanizing. Pup would play Handel’s Messiah at full blast on the phonograph. By the time the final joyous hallelujah trumpet blasts sounded, the entire conservative movement was passed out, comatose. The wonder is any of them made it home alive. How different history might have been.
He had begun to do odd things, like getting up at two in the morning, dragging himself to the shower, getting dressed, ringing poor Julian, and asking for breakfast to be brought. Julian, as demure and accommodating a soul as has ever lived, never thought to say to His Lordship, It is two in the morning, Mr. Buckley, but if you would like breakfast, I can certainly bring it. These scenes had a certain comic aspect to them, for Pup, having had his brekkers and declaring his intention to go to the garage study, would then look out into the darkness and see that it was now three a.m.
Except that it wasn’t really funny. One night, sleeping in my room down the hall, I heard a sound and went in. He was sitting cross-legged in front of the TV cable box and DVD player. The server of his computer, one of those heavy floor units, was knocked over, along with his chair. His wrist was swollen, the skin broken. It was subarctic. He’d lowered the AC to fifty-two degrees. His hands were roaming over the DVD player and cable box buttons.
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