Christopher Buckley Takes His Own Shots

As anti-smoking terrorists slap nicotine patches on every square inch of tobacco spokesman Nick Naylor’s body, it dawns on him that “a massive, probably lethal amount of nicotine is at that moment being delivered, through his skin, into his bloodstream.”

“Not that there is any scientific proof that nicotine is bad for you,” he reminds himself.

But soon, a wired and nearly dead Naylor is staggering through a Washington park, where he is rescued by police and ultimately transformed into the antihero of “Thank You for Smoking,” a dead-on parody of the cigarette industry, Congress and Hollywood.

It’s the kind of tale that could spring only from the mind of Christopher Buckley, former air conditioner repairman for Ella Fitzgerald, would-be corpse salesman at Lenin’s tomb and drug-addled interview subject on “60 Minutes.”

Buckley, 41, educated by monks and married to an ex-CIA staffer, is also the son of conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. He shares with his father the trademark Brahmin accent, keen intellect and, in the words of one writer, “eyes that pop wide open in moments of inexplicable startlement, as if some unseen source had dumped hot tea in his lap.”

But he doesn’t do the weird, lizard-tongue thing his dad is famous for--and his mission in life seems considerably less political.

“I just write what comes along,” he explains during a recent book-tour visit to Los Angeles. “I don’t have a detailed master plan.”

Shipped off to a boarding school run by Benedictine monks at age 13, Buckley used to sneak into the woods to smoke cigarettes and imagine himself aboard one of the freighters steaming out of nearby Providence, R.I. After high school, he ran away to work as a deckhand on a Norwegian liner sailing to “all the fleshpots of the Far East” (a similar trip after college was the basis for his first book, “Steaming to Bamboola”) and had an obscenity--later removed--tattooed on his hand.

His rebellious-son phase also included an LSD trip in which he stopped home for a sweater, tripped over a coaxial cable snaked across the foyer and “looked up into the face--the very interesting face--of Mike Wallace.” A crew from “60 Minutes” was taping a segment on Buckley’s father and Christopher was reluctantly drafted for an interview.

It was a bizarre encounter, he recalls: “All those lights. And Mike’s face. It looked a little like Picasso’s middle period.”

From there, he eventually followed his father’s footsteps to Yale, where he began writing for a campus publication and attracted the attention of legendary editor Clay Felker of New York magazine. Felker sent Buckley to Caesar’s Palace to try to interview Frank Sinatra. Buckley couldn’t get near Ol’ Blue Eyes, but he did corner Ella Fitzgerald, who warmed to his questions after Buckley agreed to fix the broken air conditioner in her hotel room.

Next, he worked at Esquire magazine, ascending to managing editor at 24. Then, in 1981, George Bush hired Buckley as a vice-presidential speech writer--after making him promise not to publish any kiss-and-tell memoirs. Buckley kept that vow, but he did write a spoof of such books, “The White House Mess,” which made the New York Times bestseller list.

“Everyone who works in the White House for more than five minutes writes a book about it,” he says. “And the theme is always ‘It wasn’t my fault’ and ‘It would have been much worse if I hadn’t been there.’ ”

In Washington, Buckley also met and married the daughter of Bush national security adviser Donald P. Gregg. She worked for the CIA at the time but now labors in the couple’s million-dollar D.C. estate raising their two young children. In other words, says Buckley, “she’s still dealing with terrorists.”

Son of William F., meanwhile, is now the editor of Forbes FYI, a quarterly leisure supplement to Forbes magazine. It was there that he concocted and published a hoax about cash-starved Russian officials auctioning off Lenin’s glass-encased corpse--and exulted when ABC News unwittingly broadcast the story.

Now, Buckley is basking in the serendipitous timing of “Thank You for Smoking,” which hit stores shortly after U.S. cigarette barons testified to Congress that their product hasn’t been proved harmful.

Mel Gibson has optioned the movie rights; favorable book reviews are piling up, and the publisher recently sprang for an author party at the Washington Ritz-Carlton featuring so many smoke machines that firetrucks showed up, plus a Marlboro-shaped ice sculpture, smoked meats, leggy cigarette girls with gas masks and a band that played “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” “Light My Fire” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”

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Buckley started the novel two years ago, after watching “one too many tobacco spokesmen on McNeil-Lehrer saying there’s no link between smoking and disease. . . . I thought, ‘What an interesting job that must be. Get up in the morning, brush your teeth and go sell death for a living.’ ”

He researched the book by hanging out with spokespeople from the tobacco, liquor and rifle lobbies.

In fiction, they become the Mod Squad (an acronym for Merchants of Death), consisting of cigarette PR man Naylor, liquor lobbyist Polly Bailey and gun spokesman Bobby Jay Bliss, a 220-pound, born-again, backwoods Southerner who, after the shootings at Kent State, “hitchhiked all the way into Meridian (Miss.) in order to sign up for the National Guard (so) that he, too, could shoot college students.”

The Mod Squad meets weekly to discuss its losing battle against neo-Puritanism and, on occasion, to commiserate with spokesmen from other politically incorrect lobbies, such as “the Society for the Humane Treatment of Calves, representing the veal industry . . . (and) the Land Enrichment Foundation, formerly the Coalition for the Responsible Disposal of Radioactive Waste.”

The book’s plot centers around the kidnaping of Naylor but takes hilarious detours through the halls of Congress, the Larry King show and California--”Reichland of the Health Nazis.”

It also offers a brilliant scene in which tobacco marketers, trying to make the best of a law requiring skull-and-crossbones emblems on every pack of cigarettes, come up with a computer rendering of Mister Rogers’ smiling skull.

“Say hello to your new friend, ‘Mr. Death’s Neighborhood,’ ” one ad man intones. “The focus groups loved it. Nonsmokers actually wanted to buy this pack. I took it home and tried it out on my kids. And they loved it.”

Another intriguing twist is that many of the novel’s characters are based on real-life celebrities and politicians.

Hollywood agent Jeff Megall, for example, who works out of a Creative Artists Agency-like mirrored building that cooks pedestrians with reflected sun rays, seems to be a spoof of Michael Ovitz. Bucktoothed Sen. Ortolan K. Finisterre, a “brown-noser who owed his political career to some nut who’d blown up his president-uncle 30 years ago at Disney World,” is arguably Massachusetts Rep. Joseph Kennedy II. And Lady Bent, a former British prime minister with “mongoose eyes and a helmet of hair that looked as if it could deflect incoming nuclear missiles,” could be Margaret Thatcher.

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Buckley, of course, “categorically denies” any resemblance to real persons, living or dead.

But that doesn’t mean everything in the book is fictional, he says. The claim that lung cancer was virtually unknown in the United States before tobacco companies supplied World War I doughboys with cigarettes is true, he says.

So is the story of Rodrigo de Jerez, a shipmate of Christopher Columbus who watched Native Americans “drink smoke” through pipes, brought tobacco back to Europe and was jailed by the Spanish Inquisition for promoting such a “devilish habit.”

“(Jerez) was the first tobacco spokesman,” Naylor’s boss tells him. “You think you have it bad having to deal with the Federal Trade Commission? How would you like to have to state your case before the Spanish Inquisition?”

In the book, Buckley presents Naylor as a sympathetic character, but in real life, he professes little love for tobacco flacks: “I gave up smoking the hard way, watching a friend of mine die of lung cancer. . . . I was with him the last three days (of his life). The desire left me.”

What is Buckley’s next target? He won’t say. “A new idea is like carbonated liquid in a bottle,” he explains. “You just sort of shake it until the cork pops, then you write and write.” Discuss it too soon, the theory goes, and the idea turns flat.

Besides, Buckley says, there are more pressing matters at hand. Daughter Caitlin, 6, has started asking questions about religion: If God is everywhere, is he in bubble gum? she wonders. And Buckley, a longtime Catholic who recently crossed over to “the agnostic camp,” isn’t sure how to answer.

“I’d rather she knew something of Moses and Jesus than of Barney and Lambchop,” he wrote in a recent newspaper essay. But it’s also important to “remain true to your convictions. If you lie, (kids) pick up on it and never trust you again.”

That’s why, when Caitlin asked what happens after death, “I looked her right in the eye and said, ‘You go straight to heaven.’ ”

A Sampler of Buckley’s Skewering Multi-Liners

A skewer sampler from Christopher Buckley’s “Thank You for Smoking”:

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On marketing cigarettes overseas: “Agglomerated Tobacco . . . was moving into the former Eastern Bloc in a big way, introducing a brand whose name translated as ‘Throat-Scraper.’ The Eastern Euros, who’d been brought up on cigarettes that tasted like burning nuclear waste, were old-fashioned about their smokes: they demanded more, not less tar. To them, lung cancer was proof of quality.”

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On foreign-born taxi drivers: “They only drive at two speeds, dangerously fast and really dangerously fast.”

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On Congress: “How proud the founders would have been of the senators before him: over 2,000 bounced checks between them, a seducer of underage Senate pages, three DUIs, one income-tax evader, a wife beater whose only defense was that she’d beat him up first, and a case of plagiarism, from, of all sources, a campaign speech of Benito Mussolini.”

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On the press: “He called the (newspaper) on his car phone to complain . . . (and) was put through to a recording. ‘You have reached the Washington Sun’s ombudsman desk. If you feel you have been inaccurately quoted, press one. If you spoke to a reporter off the record but were identified in the article, press two. If you spoke on deep background but were identified, press three. If you were quoted accurately but feel that the reporter missed the larger point, press four.’ ”

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On the White House’s fascination with celebrities: “There was a lot of traffic back and forth between D.C. and L.A. these days. He recognized Barbra Streisand’s issues person, whom he’d read had flown in to brief the National Security Council on Barbra’s position on the developing Syrian situation. Richard Dreyfuss’ issues person was also on board, having given a presentation to the cabinet on Richard’s feelings about health reform.”

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On fat-cat lawyers: “His only passion, aside from billable hours, was said to be wine, which he didn’t drink but only collected.”

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On giving to the homeless: “Being a lapsed Catholic, he would never be entirely sure, despite his certainty that it was a crock, that one of these wretches wasn’t the mufti Christ checking to see who was being charitable toward the least of his creatures, and who wasn’t and was therefore going to have such a hot time in the eternal hereafter as to make a Washington summer seem Antarctic by comparison.”

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On the cause of evil in the world: “Ninety-nine percent of everything that is done in the world, good and bad, is done to pay a mortgage. The world would be a much better place if everyone rented.”