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Washington Post Columnist Art Buchwald
Columnist Art Buchwald
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Art Buchwald, who took humorous jabs at Washington politicians in syndicated columns for decades, died late Wednesday, January 17, according to close friend, CNN anchor Kyra Phillips. Buchwald was her mentor for 18 years, and she became a close friend of the family. The unofficial cause of death, she said, was kidney failure. He was 81.
She said Buchwald's son and daughter-in-law were at his side, "holding his hand. He passed away peacefully." "In the last few weeks, he knew it was his time," she said. "He said his good-byes to everybody."
That included his colleagues at the Washington Post, which published his columns after he moved to Washington in the 1960s. Buchwald suffered a stroke in 2000, and was plagued by kidney and circulation problems, which led doctors to amputate one of his legs below the knee.
He checked into a Washington Hospice on February 7 after he chose to quit life-prolonging kidney dialysis. His last treatment was February 1. However, Phillips said he continued to make hospital visits because of minor infections from the amputation.
Columnist Art Buchwald
He planned his funeral when he went to the hospice. "I went to the hospice to die," he told Phillips in November. But he defied the odds, and in July he was flown to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, to spend the summer.
"I had two decisions. Continue dialysis and that's boring to do three times a week, and I don't know where that's going, or I can just enjoy life and see where it takes me," he told writer Suzette Martinez Standring, who spent two days with him in late February.
He resumed writing, including a book about his near-death experience. "The last year he had the opportunity for a victory lap and I think he was really grateful for it. He had an opportunity to write his book about his experience and he went out the way he wanted to go, on his own terms." his son, Joel Buchwald, told The Associated Press
An American in Paris
Art Buchwald and Actress Audrey Hepburn in Paris
Buchwald launched his career as a columnist in 1949 in Paris, where he wrote about the light side of Paris nightlife in the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune. He returned to the United States around 1962 and moved to Washington, where he began writing columns filled with political satire for The Washington Post.
Some of Buchwald's observations:
During the Watergate scandal, Buchwald explained that the sound in the 18-1/2 minute gap in the White House tapes actually was Nixon humming.
"Just when you think there's nothing to write about, Nixon says, 'I am not a crook.' Jimmy Carter says, 'I have lusted after women in my heart.' President Reagan says, 'I have just taken a urinalysis test, and I am not on dope.'"
"Have you ever seen a candidate talking to a rich person on television?"
"Every time you think television has hit its lowest ebb, a new program comes along to make you wonder where you thought the ebb was."
Pulitzer Prize for Commentary
Columnist Art Buchwald
Buchwald won a Pulitzer Prize for Outstanding Commentary in 1982, and in 1986 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He began writing columns, later syndicated, for The Washington Post in the late 1960s.
The humorist authored dozens of books, including two memoirs, 1993's "Leaving Home" and 1996's "I'll Always Have Paris." He also wrote 1950's "Paris After Dark," 1961's "Son of the Great Society," 1976's "Washington Is Leaking" and 1983's "While Reagan Slept."
Buchwald and producer, Alain Bernheim, filed a lawsuit in 1988 against Paramount Pictures, contending the company used Buchwald's script idea as the basis for the Eddie Murphy movie, "Coming to America," without giving them credit or profits. Buchwald won the case.
Buchwald Family Life
Columnist Art Buchwald
Buchwald was born on October 20, 1925, in Mount Vernon, New York, the only son of Austrian American drapery installer Joseph Buchwald and his wife, Helen. The youngest of four children, he grew up in Hollis, a residential community in northeast Queens, New York. Buchwald never met his mother, who suffered from severe chronic depression and was committed to an asylum soon after he was born.
She spent most of her life in a state hospital. According to The Washington Post, His father, struck hard by the Depression, was forced to place him and his older sisters ? Alice, Edith and Doris ? in foster homes where they spent their youths. For a brief spell, Buchwald found himself in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum after being rejected by various foster families.
In 1942, Buchwald ran away to join the U.S. Marine Corps at the age of 17 and served in World War II. Buchwald, who came to love the armed forces, served in the Pacific theater until 1945. He was discharged in Los Angeles with the rank of sergeant. With a New York State veteran's bonus of $250 in hand, he followed an urge to sample the expatriate life and bought a one-way ticket to Paris to study French on the GI Bill.
A young Art Buchwald in Paris
He wound up skipping the classes, reportedly bribing the attendance taker to mark him present while he used the GI funds to live the Bohemian life in the Montparnasse area of Paris. Within three months, he maneuvered his way into the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune by offering to review Parisian nightlife.
Buchwald's work soon began to entice readers on both sides of the Atlantic. After a three-year courtship complicated by the fact that he was Jewish and she was a devout Roman Catholic, Buchwald married Ann McGarry, a former fashion coordinator for Neiman Marcus whom he had met in Paris, in 1952.
The Buchwalds adopted three children in Europe ? Joel, who is Irish; Connie, who is Spanish and Jennifer, who is French. Buchwald's wife, an author and former literary agent, died in 1994 at the age of 74. The couple had separated after 40 years of marriage but reconciled as she was dying of lung cancer.
Birthday Party at French Embassy
Despite his ill health, Buchwald enjoyed his friends and social events, and celebrated his 80th birthday in 2005 at the French Embassy in Washington. According to Standring, Buchwald hosted a parade of celebrity visitors after he went home from the hospice.
Buchwald's visitors included several members of the Kennedy family, and he still loved to joke with people. Standring visited Buchwald to present him with the 2006 Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, calling him the "patron saint of political satire."
Listed in the Phone Book
Columnist Art Buchwald
According to Buchwald's assistant, Cathy Crary, her boss wrote three columns a week until about 1995, and penned two weekly until January. Buchwald, she said, always has been humble and accessible.
"He's listed in the phone directory and always has been. People see his name and can't believe it's the real Art Buchwald, but that's how he is," Crary said. "Buchwald doesn't see himself as courageous"
"Nor does he feel shored up by supernatural spiritual strength," Shandring said. "To fade away naturally is the decision he made when faced with the alternative of being hooked up to a dialysis machine three times a week, for five hours at a stretch for the rest of his life."
Last year didn't start well for the writer. Kidney and vascular problems forced doctors to amputate one of his legs just below the knee in January, and Buchwald opted to not have dialysis. In February, he entered the hospice.
But by July, despite his physicians' predictions, Buchwald left the hospice. "Instead of going straight upstairs, I am going to Martha's Vineyard," he wrote. He finished his last book, "Too Soon to Say Goodbye," there, and it was published in November.
The Last Laugh
Columnist Art Buchwald
"Hi, I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died," he says on the startling video obituary he left for his friends and fellow newspapermen. "If I wanted to give myself any kind of thought," he went on in utterly false modesty, "it's that I was put on Earth to make people laugh."
And laugh they did. At his wicked portrayals of Richard Nixon bailing water INTO the sinking ship Watergate. At his early double takes over George W. Bush and those elusive weapons of mass destruction. And most recently, at his late-breaking end-of-life dispatches from the Washington hospice he called home - and refused to leave with anything like the swiftness his doctors expected.
"I am known in the hospice as 'The Man Who Would Not Die,'" he wrote. "How long they allow me to stay here is another problem. I don't know where I'd go now, or if people would still want to see me if I weren't in a hospice. But in case you're wondering, I'm having a swell time - the best time of my life."
Columnist Art Buchwald with Journalist Mike Wallace
Art Buchwald never tried to save souls in his newspaper column. If the truth be told, he really didn't even care all that much about politics. What he wanted most of all was to make the readers smile over their morning coffee and to take his shot at the biggest and most pompous targets he could find.
So, of course, he toiled in Washington. His goodbye video opens with several shots of Buchwald in a tuxedo. Having given thousands of after-dinner speeches, he understood that any guy, no matter how rotund, looks marvelous in a tuxedo.
But the video cuts immediately to Buchwald in all his come-as-you-are glory, dressed in short pants and a striped knit shirt. His voice is raspy and still sounds like Queens. His pace is halting. And no, the knees aren't fetching exactly. But Buchwald came again as he was, and he was leaving through the very same door.
Columnist Art Buchwald with Actor Robert Redford
In his final time on Earth, he wrote a last column to go along with the video. And he presided over the most prestigious salon in all of Washington. The people he'd been writing about, the people he'd delighted in lampooning, couldn't help but gather around the man who'd made such sport of them. He got something few people ever get in the final days of living. He got the last laugh.
"I never realized dying was so much fun," Art Buchwald said. Buchwald kept his sense of humor until he slipped into unconsciousness just before he died, said his longtime friend, Washington Post Vice President at Large Benjamin Bradlee. "I just don't want to die the same day Castro dies," Buchwald told his friends, Bradlee said.
Buchwald is survived by three children; one son, Joel, and two daughters, Conchita 'Connie' Buchwald Marks of Culpeper, Virginia and Jennifer Buchwald of Roxbury, Massachusetts. He also leaves behind two sisters, Edith Jaffe of Bellevue, Washington and Doris Kahme, of Delray Beach, Florida as well as five grandchildren.
Buchwald will be cremated and his ashes interned on Martha's Vineyard in the Vineyard Haven Cemetery, next to his wife, Ann, who died in 1994, his son said. A funeral is expected to be held in March. In "Leaving Home," he tried to explain his life's work: "People ask what I am really trying to do with humor. The answer is, 'I'm getting even.'" And, he did -- with style, dignity and humor.
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