The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  She was a Republican, always a surprising thing in show business, and in a New Yorker, but she was one because, as she would tell you, she worked hard, made her money with great effort and didn’t feel her profits should be unduly taxed. She once said in an interview that if you have 19 children, she will pay for the first four but no more. Mostly she just couldn’t tolerate cant and didn’t respond well to political manipulation. She believed in a strong defense because she was a grown-up and understood the world to be a tough house. She loved Margaret Thatcher, who said what Joan believed: The facts of life are conservative. She didn’t do a lot of politics in her shows—politics divides an audience—but she thought a lot about it and talked about it. She was socially liberal in the sense she wanted everyone to find as many available paths to happiness as possible.

  * * *

  I am not sure she ever felt accepted by the showbiz elite, or any elite. She was too raw, didn’t respect certain conventions, wasn’t careful, didn’t pretend to a false dignity. She took the celebrated and powerful down a peg. Her wit was broad and spoofing—she would play the fool—but it was also subversive and transgressive. People who weren’t powerful or well-known saw and understood what she was doing.

  She thought a lot about how things work and what they mean.

  She once told me she figured a career was like a shark, either it is going forward or it is dying and sinking to the ocean floor. She worked like someone who believed that, doing shows in houses big and small all over the country, hundreds a year, along with her cable programs, interviews, and books. She supported a lot of people. Many members of her staff stayed for decades and were like family. Because of that, when I visited the hospital last week, I got to witness a show-business moment Joan would have liked. A relative was scrolling down on her iPhone. “Listen to this,” she said, and read aloud something a young showbiz figure who had been lampooned by Joan had just tweeted. She said it was an honor to be made fun of by such a great lady. “Joan will be furious when she sees this,” said the relative, shaking her head. “She won’t be able to make fun of her in the act anymore.”

  It was Joan who explained to me 15 or 20 years ago a new dimension in modern fame—that it wasn’t like the old days when you’d walk down a city street and people would recognize you. Fame had suddenly and in some new ways gone universal. Joan and a friend had just come back from a safari in Africa. One day they were walking along a path when they saw some local tribesmen. As the two groups passed, a tribesman exclaimed, “Joan Rivers, what are you doing here?!”

  She couldn’t believe it. This is Africa, she thought. And then she thought no, this is a world full of media that shows the world American culture. We talked about it, and I asked, beyond the idea of what might be called Western cultural imperialism, what else does the story mean to you? “It means there’s no place to hide,” she said. They can know you anywhere. At the time, the Internet age was just beginning.

  Her eye was original. Twenty years ago, when everyone was talking about how wonderful it was that Vegas had been cleaned up and the mob had been thrown out, Joan said no, no, no, they are ruining the mystique. First of all, she said, those mobsters knew how to care for a lady, those guys with bent noses were respectful and gentlemen, except when they were killing you. Second, she said, organized crime is better than disorganized crime, which will replace it. Third, the mobsters had a patina of class, they dressed well and saw that everyone else did, so Vegas wasn’t a slobocracy, which is what it is becoming with men in shorts playing the slots in the lobby of the hotel. The old Vegas had dignity. She hated the bluenoses who’d clean up what wasn’t meant to be clean. No one wanted Sin City cleaned up, she said, they wanted to go there and visit sin and then go home.

  * * *

  Joan now is being celebrated, rightly and beautifully, by those who knew and loved her. They are defining her contributions (pioneer, unacknowledged feminist hero, gutsy broad) and lauding the quality of her craft.

  But it is a great unkindness of life that no one says these things until you’re gone.

  Joan would have loved how much she is loved. I think she didn’t quite know and yet in a way she must have: You don’t have strangers light up at the sight of you without knowing you have done something.

  But we should try to honor and celebrate the virtues and gifts of people while they’re alive, and can see it.

  She was an entertainer. She wanted to make you laugh. She succeeded so brilliantly.

  * * *

  America’s First Lady

  Few people get to symbolize a world, but Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis did, and that world is receding, and we know it and mourn that, too.

  Time Magazine: May 30, 1994

  She was a last link to a certain kind of past, and that is part, but only part, of why we mourn so. Jackie Kennedy symbolized—she was a connection to a time, to an old America that was more dignified, more private, an America in which standards were higher and clearer and elegance meant something, a time when elegance was a kind of statement, a way of dressing up the world, and so a generous act. She had manners, the kind that remind us that manners spring from a certain moral view—that you do tribute to the world and the people in it by being kind and showing respect, by sending the note and the flowers, by being loyal and cheering a friend. She was a living reminder in the age of Oprah that personal dignity is always, still, an option, a choice that is open to you. She was, really, the last aristocrat. Few people get to symbolize a world, but she did, and that world is receding, and we know it and mourn that, too.

  Those who knew her or watched her from afar groped for the words that could explain their feeling of loss. A friend of hers said, with a soft, sad voice, that what we’re losing is what we long for: the old idea of being cultivated. “She had this complex, colorful mind, she loved a turn of phrase. She didn’t grow up in front of the TV set, but reading the classics and thinking about them and having thoughts about history. Oh,” he said, “we’re losing her kind.”

  I echoed the sentiment to another of her friends, who cut me off. “She wasn’t a kind, she was sui generis.” And so she was.

  America continues in its generational shift; the great ones of the ’50s and ’60s, big people of a big era, are going, and too often these days we’re saying goodbye. But Jackie Kennedy’s death is different. No ambivalence clouds her departure, and that leaves us feeling lonely. America this week is a lonelier place.

  She was too young, deserved more time, and the fact that she didn’t get it seems like a new level of unfairness. She never saw her husband grow old, and now she won’t see her grandchildren grow up.

  But just writing those words makes me want to break out of sadness and reach back in time and speak ’60s-speak, or at least how the ’60s spoke before they turned dark. So I guess I mean I want to speak Kennedyese. I want to say, Aw listen, kid, don’t be glum. What a life she had.

  She herself said something like this to a friend, in a conversation just months ago, when she first knew she was sick. She told him she was optimistic and hoped to live 20 more years. “But even if I have only five years, so what, I’ve had a great run.”

  They said it was a life of glamour, but it was really a life of splendor. I want to say, Listen, kid, buck up, don’t be blue—the thing about this woman and her life is that she was a patriot, who all by herself one terrible weekend lifted and braced the heart of a nation.

  That week in November ’63, the weekend of the muffled drums, was the worst time for America in the last half of this century. We forget now the shame we felt as a nation at what had happened in Dallas. A president had been murdered, quite savagely, quite brutally, and the whole appalled world was looking and judging. And she redeemed it. She took away the shame by how she acted. She was young, only 34, and only a few days before she’d been covered in her husband’s blood—but she came home to Washington and walked down those broad avenues dressed in black, her pale face cleansed and washed clean by trauma. She
walked head up, back straight and proud, in a flowing black veil. There was the moment in the Capitol Rotunda, when she knelt with her daughter Caroline. It was the last moment of public farewell, and to say it she bent and kissed the flag that draped the coffin that contained her husband—and a whole nation, a whole world, was made silent at the sight of patriotism made tender. Her Irish husband had admired class. That weekend she showed it in abundance. What a parting gift.

  A nation watched, and would never forget. The world watched, and found its final judgment summed up by a young woman, a British journalist who had come to witness the funeral, and filed home: “Jacqueline Kennedy has today given her country the one thing it has always lacked, and that is majesty.”

  To have done that for her country—to have lived through that weekend and done what she did from that Friday to that Monday—to have shown the world that the killing of the president was not America, the loving dignity of our saying goodbye was America—to have done that was an act of supreme patriotism.

  And a lot of us thought that anything good or bad she did for the rest of her life, from that day on, didn’t matter, for she’d earned her way, she deserved a free pass.

  In a remarkable interview she gave Theodore White the following December, she revealed what a tough little romantic she was. “Once, the more I read of history the more bitter I got. For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But then I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way—if it made him see the heroes—maybe other little boys will see. Men are such a combination of good and bad. Jack had this hero idea of history, this idealistic view.” And she spoke of Camelot and gave the world an image of her husband that is still, for all the revelations of the past three decades, alive. She provided an image of herself, too, perhaps more than she knew. The day before she died, a young schoolteacher in New York City who hadn’t even been born when she spoke to Teddy White told me of his shock that she was leaving us. “I thought she would be like Guinevere,” he said. “I thought she would ride off on a horse, in her beautiful silence, and never die.”

  Her friends saw a great poignance in her, and a great yearning. Behind her shyness there was an enormous receptivity to the sweetness of life and its grace. A few years ago, friends, a couple, gave a small dinner party for two friends who had just married, and Mrs. Onassis was among the guests. It was an elegant New York gathering, a handful of the renowned of show business and media and society, all gathered to dine on the top floor of a skyscraper. The evening was full of laughter and warm toasts, and the next day her hosts received from Mrs. Onassis a handwritten, hand-delivered letter. “How could there be an evening more magical than last night? Everyone is enhanced and touched by being with two people just discovering how much they love each other. I have known and adored [him] for so long, always wishing he would find happiness… Seeing him with [her] and getting to know her, I see he has at last—and she so exceptional, whom you describe so movingly, has too. I am so full of joy for both—I just kept thinking about it all day today. What wonderful soothing hosts you are—what a dazzling gathering of their friends—in that beautiful tower, with New York glittering below…”

  With New York glittering below. The world, I am told, is full of those notes, always handwritten and lucid and spontaneous—and always correct. “The notes were the way she was intimate” with outsiders, said a friend. The only insiders, really, were her family.

  There was always in her a sense of history and the sense that children are watching—children are watching and history will judge us, and the things that define our times are the great actions we take, all against the odds and with a private valor of which the world will little note nor long remember. But that’s the big thing—the personal struggle, and the sense that our history day by day is forged from it. That was her intuition, and that intuition was a gift to us, for it helped produce the walk down the broad avenues of Washington that day when her heart was broken.

  She was one sweet and austere tune. Her family arranged a private funeral, and that of course is what she’d want and that is what is fitting. But I know how I wish she would be buried.

  I wish we could take her, in the city she loved or the capital she graced, and put a flag on her coffin and the coffin on a catafalque, and march it down a great avenue, with an honor guard and a horse that kicks, as Black Jack did, and muffled drums. I wish we could go and honor her, those of us who were children when she was in the White House, and our parents who wept that weekend long ago, and our children who have only a child’s sense of who and what she was. I wish we could stand on the sidewalk as the caisson passes, and take off our hats, and explain to our sons and daughters, “That is a patriot passing by.” I wish I could see someone’s little boy, in a knee-length coat, lift his arm and salute.

  “Tennessee Williams Died a Week Ago Today”

  CBS News, “Dan Rather Reporting”: March 4, 1983

  Tennessee Williams died a week ago today and he’ll be buried tomorrow. And I think there’s one more thing to say about his life. It’s not about writing or genius, not art or the theater. It’s about work.

  Up until the end, Tennessee Williams got up every morning and wrote. He was 72 and long past his prime, long past his great moments. But he got up every morning and sat at the typewriter and wrote.

  That was his work. He wrote. And in the last 20 years of his life it couldn’t have been easy for him because his great triumphs were behind him and he knew no one was going to applaud when he got up.

  He knew what they’d say about his newest plays. They were going to say “Ah, his genius has abandoned him, he’s lost it, he’s not up to par.” He knew the critics would say this because he’d written masterpieces, Streetcar and Glass Menagerie, and his name had grown so big and the expectation had grown so heavy. Every play had to be a masterpiece. And of course that was not possible because talent is finite; it is not endless. Even a genius gets only so much genius. And if you live a long life, as he did, you will probably use your genius up.

  Other artists have reached this point and picked up a rifle, jumped off a ship or opened the oven door. Others have hung on to become talk-show intellectuals or sit in fat chairs and sell wine on TV. But Tennessee Williams never sold out, and he didn’t check out early. He got up every morning and wrote.

  For this alone you could call his life a triumph. But some people—a lot of people—played his life as a tragedy. You could see it in the papers—all that talk about his dark disturbed life, the booze and the drugs, the breakdowns and the whole sweaty morass of family fights and broken love. The most prestigious newspaper in New York found it necessary to say in his obituary that he’d grown “seedy and portly” in his later years. Which were tragic, remember, and full of failed talent.

  Tragic my foot. That life was a triumph. And I will argue that it was most triumphant when his youth had left him and his audience had left him and his great gifts had dulled and he got up every morning and worked.

  The other day I went to a service for a man named Jack Bolter, a modest quiet man who was a writer here. Jack loved words, and every day he’d show up at the desk in the newsroom and go through the wire copy and put together a brisk and informative news broadcast. It wasn’t our biggest broadcast, not our most important one. Just a good solid report in the middle of the day. Jack showed up and put it together even when he was sick and even when he was tired. I think he knew what Tennessee Williams knew. That yes life is rich and wonderful and to be enjoyed, but one of the big things, one of the enduring things is the work you do and the work you leave behind you.

  I just keep thinking of Jack and Tennessee Williams and of all the people who don’t whine and don’t cry and show up and do their work. Even when they’re not in the best shape, even when it’s n
ot as good as they want, even when they know that no one will applaud when they get up. They’re the best.

  * * *

  The wake for Tennessee Williams was held in the Frank E. Campbell funeral home, on Madison Avenue in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I had never known him but knew and admired his work, thought The Glass Menagerie a masterpiece. “Blow out your candles, Laura…” So I decided to go to his wake, to be part of what I assumed would be a throng, which is what he deserved, to swell the crowd saying goodbye. And when I got to the funeral home, early, on a bright late-winter afternoon, I was shocked to see there was no crowd to swell. A few friends of his and some family members were standing in the room, ready to greet the crowd, and they had no one to greet but me. I shook everyone’s hand, feeling embarrassed and sorry. They asked if I’d worked with him, been a friend. No, I said, “I’m just an admirer and feel he should be thanked for his work.” I stayed a few minutes, until a few others came in, and left.

  Here is the odd part. Thirty years later I told that story to Terry Teachout, the theater critic of the Wall Street Journal. Terry immediately asked, “Was the casket open?” It was a journalistic question, but it also had some theological significance. Williams had converted to Catholicism in the years before his death, and Catholics even to this day tend to have open caskets for viewing.

  But I couldn’t remember. I just had no memory of it. Which was odd because that’s exactly the kind of thing I would remember, and be able to describe.

  A year or so after that conversation with Terry I was reading John Lahr’s new biography of Williams. I was at the end of the book. Suddenly my mind presented to me a fully formed memory of how Tennessee Williams looked in his casket. His face seemed swollen, uniformly, like someone on medication. He was in a dark suit. His dark hair was combed back from his forehead almost severely. It was eerie how complete this picture came to me. But… what was it? Was it a recovered memory, or was it something that bubbled up from imagination? I didn’t know.