Art Buchwald

Based on Wikipedia: Art Buchwald

The Man Who Died Twice

"Hi. I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died."

This video greeting, posted on The New York Times website the day after his death in January 2007, captures everything you need to know about Art Buchwald. He was a man who found humor in the darkest corners of human experience, including his own mortality. He had recorded the message months earlier, while living in hospice care—care he eventually walked out of, to everyone's astonishment, including his own.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

An Orphan's Beginning

Arthur Buchwald came into the world in New York City in 1925, the youngest of four children in an Austrian-Hungarian Jewish immigrant family. His father Joseph manufactured curtains. His mother Helen suffered from depression so severe that she was eventually committed to a mental institution, where she would remain for thirty-five years.

When the Great Depression arrived and demolished the family business, Joseph Buchwald faced an impossible choice. Unable to care for his young son, he placed Art in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. The boy was soon shuffled through a series of foster homes, including a Queens boarding house for sick children run by Seventh-day Adventists. Art had rickets—a bone disease caused by malnutrition, which softens bones and can cause permanent deformities.

He was five years old.

Eventually, the family reassembled in Hollis, a residential corner of Queens. But the wounds of those early years never fully healed. Buchwald never graduated from Forest Hills High School. At seventeen, he ran away from home.

The Marines Don't Need Humorists

What do you do when you're a teenage runaway in 1942, with no diploma and no prospects? If you're Art Buchwald, you join the United States Marine Corps. There was just one problem: he was too young to enlist without parental consent.

His solution was pure Buchwald. He bribed a drunk with half a pint of whiskey to sign the papers as his legal guardian.

From October 1942 to October 1945, Buchwald served with the Fourth Marine Aircraft Wing in the Pacific Theater. He was discharged as a sergeant. Years later, he would summarize the experience with characteristic dryness: "In the Marines, they don't have much use for humorists. They beat my brains in."

The Impossible Student

After the war, Buchwald enrolled at the University of Southern California using the G.I. Bill—the federal program that paid for college education for returning veterans. This was remarkable because, remember, he had never finished high school. The G.I. Bill didn't check these things as carefully as it might have.

At USC, something clicked. Buchwald became managing editor of the campus magazine, Wampus, and wrote a column for the Daily Trojan, the student newspaper. He was finding his voice.

Then the university discovered he lacked a high school diploma. They let him continue studying but declared him ineligible for a degree. It was a compromise that satisfied no one, least of all Buchwald.

He left in 1949 without graduating.

Four decades later, after winning the Pulitzer Prize and becoming one of the most widely read columnists in America, USC invited him back as a commencement speaker and awarded him an honorary doctorate. The universe has a sense of humor too.

Paris After Dark

With no degree and no particular plan, Buchwald bought a one-way ticket to Paris. It was 1949. The city was still recovering from German occupation, but it was also electric with possibility. American expatriates were flooding in, drawn by favorable exchange rates, cheap wine, and the romantic notion of being a starving artist in the City of Light.

Buchwald got a job as a correspondent for Variety, the entertainment industry trade publication. But his real break came in January 1950, when he walked into the offices of the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune with a sample column under his arm.

He called it "Paris After Dark." It was stuffed with quirky tidbits about Parisian nightlife—where to eat, where to dance, which clubs were worth the cover charge. The editors liked what they saw. Buchwald was hired as a restaurant and nightclub reviewer.

The column caught on fast. By 1951, he had launched a second column, "Mostly About People." Eventually the two merged into one under the title "Europe's Lighter Side." Readers on both sides of the Atlantic were hooked.

The Expatriate Circle

Postwar Paris was crawling with American writers, artists, and eccentrics. Buchwald found himself at the center of it all. He went about with Janet Flanner, the legendary New Yorker correspondent who wrote the magazine's "Letter from Paris" for fifty years. He crossed paths with E.B. White, author of Charlotte's Web. He drank with the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. He knew Thornton Wilder, who had won the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and drama.

And then there were the brief, dazzling encounters: Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, Audrey Hepburn. Even Roy Cohn—the ruthless attorney who had served as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel during the anti-communist witch hunts—turned up in Buchwald's orbit.

It was a heady time. But Buchwald wasn't just rubbing elbows with the famous. He was developing a distinctive style: wry, absurdist, and unafraid to puncture pomposity wherever he found it.

Le Merci Donnant

In November 1952, Buchwald wrote what would become his most beloved column. To amuse his linguistically sophisticated readers, he retold the story of the first Thanksgiving using fake French translations. Thanksgiving became "Merci Donnant." The Mayflower became "La Fleur de Mai." The Pilgrims were "Les Pelerins."

It was silly. It was learned. It was perfect.

Buchwald considered it his favorite column. He ran it every Thanksgiving for the rest of his life.

Adulterated Rot

In the late 1950s, Buchwald wrote a satirical piece about a fictional press conference in which reporters grilled officials about President Dwight Eisenhower's breakfast habits. It was obviously a joke—a gentle poke at the triviality of political journalism.

James Hagerty, Eisenhower's press secretary, did not get the joke.

Hagerty called his own press conference specifically to denounce Buchwald's column as "unadulterated rot."

Buchwald's response became legendary: "Hagerty is wrong. I write adulterated rot."

By August 1959, Time magazine reported that Buchwald's column had achieved "an institutional quality." He had become, in other words, an institution himself.

The Only Interview

One of the more improbable moments in Buchwald's Paris years came when he became the only correspondent to conduct a substantive interview with Elvis Presley.

This requires some context. Elvis had been drafted into the United States Army in 1957, at the absolute peak of his fame. The Army stationed him in Germany, which the military hoped would both serve the country and prove that even rock and roll royalty had to do their patriotic duty.

During a weekend pass, the soon-to-be Sergeant Presley stayed at the Prince de Galles Hotel in Paris. Buchwald tracked him down. He later wrote about what happened at Le Lido nightclub, where Elvis gave impromptu performances at the piano and sang for the showgirls after most customers had left.

The details appeared in Buchwald's 1995 memoir, I'll Always Have Paris. By then, both men had become legends—though of very different kinds.

Coming Home

In 1962, Buchwald returned to the United States. He settled in Washington, D.C., and began writing a political column for The Washington Post.

When asked where he got his ideas, Buchwald had a simple answer: he read the newspaper every day. He couldn't make up situations more absurd than what was actually happening.

At its peak, his column appeared in more than 550 newspapers across the country. He was syndicated by Tribune Media Services, which meant that papers large and small could license his work. For millions of Americans, opening the morning paper meant starting the day with Art Buchwald.

He wrote more than thirty books during his lifetime—collections of columns, memoirs, and other works. He even contributed fumetti (photo comics with speech bubbles) to Marvel Comics' Crazy Magazine, satirizing 1970s campus life.

Hollywood Interlude

Buchwald had a curious relationship with Hollywood. He made a cameo appearance in Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief in 1955. Near the beginning of the film, a close-up shows an issue of the Paris Herald Tribune with a column, bylined by Buchwald, about jewel thefts on the French Riviera. The column sets up the entire plot.

He contributed to the English dialogue for Jacques Tati's Playtime, the 1967 avant-garde comedy that took years to film and nearly bankrupted its director. He had a cameo in a 1972 episode of the television series Mannix. He appeared in Frederick Wiseman's 1983 documentary The Store, delivering a tribute to Stanley Marcus, the legendary owner of Neiman Marcus.

But his biggest Hollywood moment came from a fight.

In 1988, Buchwald and his partner Alain Bernheim sued Paramount Pictures, claiming the studio had stolen Buchwald's script treatment for what eventually became the Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America. The case dragged on for years. Buchwald won, was awarded damages, and eventually accepted a settlement.

The lawsuit became the subject of a 1992 book called Fatal Subtraction: The Inside Story of Buchwald v. Paramount. It remains a landmark case study in how Hollywood accounting works—or doesn't.

The Darkness

Behind the wit, Buchwald struggled with mental illness his entire adult life. In 1963, he was hospitalized for severe depression. In 1987, he was hospitalized again, this time diagnosed with bipolar disorder—a condition characterized by extreme mood swings between manic highs and depressive lows. Doctors believed he had probably been living with it for years.

Buchwald went public about his mental health struggles in 1999. This was brave. In the 1990s, admitting to psychiatric hospitalization still carried significant stigma, especially for a public figure whose entire persona was built on being funny.

His willingness to speak openly about depression and bipolar disorder helped reduce shame for countless readers who saw their own struggles reflected in his.

The Final Act

In 2000, at age seventy-four, Buchwald suffered a stroke. He was hospitalized for more than two months.

Then, in early 2006, things got worse. Doctors amputated his leg below the knee due to poor circulation caused by diabetes. His kidneys were failing. He was admitted to Washington Home and Hospice.

And then Art Buchwald did something remarkable.

He invited the radio host Diane Rehm to interview him. During the show, which aired on February 24, 2006, he announced that he had decided to discontinue dialysis. He called it his "last hurrah."

"If you have to go, the way you go is a big deal."

He reported that he was very happy with his choices. He was eating at McDonald's regularly. He was at peace.

In the following months, Buchwald gave interview after interview. He spoke with Miles O'Brien on CNN about his living will. He discussed his impending death with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. He was still writing his column.

In one interview, he described a recurring dream in which he was waiting to take his "final plane ride."

The Comeback Nobody Expected

And then something inexplicable happened.

His kidney started working again.

In June 2006, Buchwald walked out of the hospice. He was interviewed again by Diane Rehm and cheerfully reported on his unexpected recovery. "I bless him every morning," he said of his kidney. "Some people bless their hearts, I bless my kidney."

He got a prosthetic leg. He went back to his summer home in Tisbury, on Martha's Vineyard, where he and his late wife Ann had spent decades of summers. While there, he wrote a book called Too Soon to Say Goodbye about his five months in hospice.

The book included eulogies that his friends, colleagues, and family members had prepared—eulogies they had expected to deliver at his funeral but now, awkwardly, had to shelve.

In November 2006, when CNN's Kyra Phillips interviewed him, Buchwald described himself as "a poster boy for hospices—because I lived."

In December, in what would be his final interview, he told a nurse and writer named Terry Ratner that he was also a poster boy for nurses.

The End, For Real This Time

Art Buchwald died of kidney failure on January 17, 2007. He was at his son Joel's home in Washington, D.C. He was eighty-one years old.

The next day, The New York Times posted that video obituary—the one he had recorded months earlier, while still in hospice, fully expecting to die any moment.

"Hi. I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died."

He had gotten the last laugh, as usual.

The Measure of a Life

Art Buchwald's accolades tell part of the story. In 1977, he received the S. Roger Horchow Award for Greatest Public Service by a Private Citizen. In 1982, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Outstanding Commentary. In 1991, he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and received the World Humour Award. In 1994, he received the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement.

But awards can't capture what made Buchwald matter.

He was, in many ways, an improbable success story. An orphan. A high school dropout. A Marine who got his brains beaten in. A man who battled depression and bipolar disorder in an era when such admissions could end careers.

He found his voice by refusing to take the powerful seriously. Presidents, press secretaries, Hollywood studios—all of them were fair game. His weapon was laughter, and he wielded it for half a century.

By the end of his career, some critics called his column "hackneyed" and "tiresome." When the Dallas Times Herald canceled it in 1989, the editors didn't receive a single letter of protest. (By contrast, when the same paper canceled the comic strip Zippy the Pinhead, readers complained so loudly that the editors brought it back.)

But Buchwald kept writing anyway. He wrote through depression, through divorce, through stroke, through amputation, through kidney failure. He wrote from hospice.

In the end, perhaps that's what matters most. Not whether every column was brilliant, but that he kept showing up, kept finding humor in the absurd, kept reminding us that even death can be faced with a wink.

"If you have to go," he said, "the way you go is a big deal."

Art Buchwald went out laughing.