Humorist got last laugh on death

ART BUCHWALD, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political satirist, columnist and author of more than 30 books who built deceptively simple spoofs of modern life on foundations of indignation, has died. He was 81.

Buchwald, who had seemed to literally laugh in the face of death over the last year, succumbed to kidney failure Wednesday while surrounded by family members at his home in Washington, D.C., according to his son, Joel.

After his right leg was amputated in February as a result of diabetes, Buchwald decided to accept the inevitability of death over the prospect of dialysis for the rest of his life.

As his kidneys started to fail, he entered a Washington hospice for what his doctors expected would be a two- or three-week stay. But as word of his condition emerged, scores of politicians and celebrities that he had known over his decades as a writer rushed to his bedside. The two- or three-week stay turned into months.

Buchwald told Times columnist Al Martinez that “I’ve put heaven on hold,” and laughed at his own joke.

The New York Times wrote that Buchwald’s deathbed had become the “hottest salon” in Washington.

The lead of one Associated Press story summed it up best:

“Art Buchwald is dying and enjoying every minute of it.”

He continued to write his column and hold court with visitors that included members of the Kennedy family, former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, singer Carly Simon, former Washington Post Executive Editor Benjamin C. Bradlee, former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and television host Phil Donahue.

Through it all, his health inexplicably stabilized. Before being discharged from the hospice July 1, he finished his final book, a reflection on his time in hospice care: “Too Soon to Say Goodbye,” which was released in November.

He complained in print last year that living meant he had to scrap “all the plans for my funeral” and “start worrying about Bush again.”

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) reflected the thoughts of many of Buchwald’s fans Thursday when he noted: “For decades, there was no better way to start the day than to open the morning paper to Art’s column, laugh out loud and learn all over again to take the issues seriously in the world of politics, but not take yourself too seriously.”

“As Art said, ‘Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, it’s the only time we’ve got.’ The special art of Art Buchwald was to make even the worst of times better,” Kennedy said in a statement.

Announces his own death

Buchwald, who first touched fame in the U.S. in the 1950s as a Paris-based columnist, loved being the center of attention and continued to manage to do that with the news of his death.

He “announced” his death on video on the New York Times website Thursday by saying, “Hi, I’m Art Buchwald and I just died.”

Tribune Media Services, which syndicated Buchwald’s work, released a final column Thursday from the humorist, which he wrote while in the hospice in February.

One of the nation’s best known and successful writers of humor, Buchwald’s satirical style was compared with that of H.L. Mencken. Like Mark Twain, he was a comic American observer of the European scene who was equally fascinated by the American system and its shortcomings. At the height of his career, his column appeared in more than 500 papers worldwide.

Yet, unlike almost all of his colleagues, during his more than three decades as a Washington-based correspondent, Buchwald rarely, if ever, so much as placed a telephone call to gather material. “I never talk to anybody. Facts just get in my way,” he told the New York Times in 1972.

Instead, the pudgy, 5-foot, 8-inch, cigar-chewing writer with owlish horn-rim glasses preferred to scan television news programs, newspapers and magazines such as Time and Newsweek. Occasionally, he clipped articles and filed them in folders or stuffed them into his shirt pocket for safekeeping.

In his early years as a columnist in Paris, however, Buchwald would go almost anywhere and do almost anything to gather raw material. He interviewed celebrities such as actresses Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman and shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. He chased goats over mountains in Yugoslavia and marched in a May Day parade in East Berlin. He searched for Turkish baths in Turkey and made a three-week trip to the Soviet Union in a limousine driven by a uniformed chauffeur.

One of his most famous inventions was an American tourist who vied for the “six-minute Louvre race.” Buchwald’s tourist dashed through the Paris museum, viewing the “Mona Lisa,” “Winged Victory” and “Venus de Milo” in record time “under perfect conditions, with a smooth floor, excellent lighting and no wind.”

Buchwald enjoyed turning situations around for satiric effect. In a 1971 column, for instance, he claimed, “I can now reliably report that Vice President Spiro Agnew has no intention of dumping Richard Nixon.... A spokesman for the vice president told me that Agnew was very satisfied with the job his president was doing and that he even intended to give him more responsibilities than any vice president has ever given his president before.”

Of the United Nations, he said: “I believe that we should get out of the United Nations. I think it should be made into an apartment house or the headquarters for a company like General Motors or AT&T.; It galls me every time I go to New York and think that building is being used for peaceful purposes.”

As for his own career, the educational magazine Geo said Buchwald was fond of saying, “Everyone thinks I have one of the best jobs in the world. But, if you look at it objectively and examine it from all sides, I do.”

Buchwald was at his best when he was morally indignant at some new hypocrisy or outrage. His work, he admitted, operated as an escape valve for the frustrations he experienced when faced with such issues as the arms race, drug abuse and inept foreign policy.

“What I do is always a challenge,” he told Geo in 1984. “It’s not like I broke the home-run record. I have to go to bat [every] week, so I can never relax. Whatever people say about me I accept, but I know I’m only as good as my last column or my last book or whatever I do. I think that anybody who’s worth his salt is always walking a tightrope.”

Buchwald’s comedic gifts -- expressed in characteristic short, declarative sentences -- belied a childhood that was anything but funny.

He was born Oct. 20, 1925, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., 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, N.Y. He never met his mother, who suffered from severe chronic depression and spent most of her life in a state hospital. His father, struck hard by the Depression, was forced to place him and his older sisters -- Alice, Edith and Doris -- in foster homes. For a brief spell, Buchwald found himself in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum after being rejected by various foster families.

Known for school pranks

“I am not certain how Pop found the Hebrew Orphan Asylum,” Buchwald recalled in his poignant memoir “Leaving Home,” published in 1993. “Gaining admission was harder than getting into Princeton. They didn’t take just anybody. My father had to appear before a judge with us since it was required that we be declared neglected children by the court before we would be remanded to the home. This was a bad rap for him, because we weren’t neglected.”

At his elementary school in Queens, he was remembered as a nonstop jokester.

“In the seventh grade, we girls were all wearing bows in the back of our hair,” former classmate Olive Maidment recalled a few years ago. “Art came to school wearing a bow on the back of his head just to spoof us. We all laughed and the teacher sent him to the back of the room.”

By the time Buchwald was 16, his father had saved enough money to reunite the family in an apartment in Forest Hills. An indifferent student, Buchwald attended Jamaica High School and Forest Hills High School, both in Queens, but did not graduate.

When he turned 17 in 1942, he ran away to join the Marines. Told that he would need parental consent to become a leatherneck, the underage Buchwald reportedly enlisted a drunk who, for a pint of whiskey, agreed to pose as his father.

Buchwald, who came to love the armed forces, served in the Pacific theater until 1945. Most of the time, he was stationed on Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands, where he edited his outfit’s newspaper. He was discharged in Los Angeles with the rank of sergeant.

“I felt that the Marines were the only ones I had ever cared about or who had ever cared for me,” he once told an interviewer, the New York Times reported in 1972.

Shortly after his return to civilian life, Buchwald enrolled at USC to take liberal arts courses under the GI Bill. When the university discovered that he did not have a high school diploma, he was allowed to continue his studies but was ineligible for a degree, the 1972 story recounted.

He was managing editor of the Wampus, the campus humor magazine. Also on the magazine’s staff was his friend -- later Oscar-winning producer -- David L. Wolper. Buchwald wrote a column for the Daily Trojan and scripted a play called “No Love Atoll.”

After three years at USC, and 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.

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. To supplement his income, he landed a job as Paris stringer for Variety.

Launches career as columnist

Within three months, he maneuvered his way into the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune by offering to review Parisian nightlife. His weekly salary was $25.

In January 1949, he took a sample column to the offices of the Herald Tribune’s European edition. Titled “Paris After Dark,” it brimmed with scraps of offbeat information. Buchwald was hired.

The four-times-a-week column caught on swiftly and Buchwald started writing a second column, “Mostly About People,” in 1951. A year later, the two columns were combined and began running stateside as “Europe’s Lighter Side” and then “Art Buchwald in Paris.”

His work soon began to entice readers on both sides of the Atlantic. The 1953 column in which Buchwald explains Thanksgiving to the French is reprinted with ceremonial regularity every November.

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.

In the summer of 1957, Buchwald placed an advertisement in the London Times classifieds: “Would like to hear from people who dislike Americans and their reasons why. Please write Box R. 543.” The ad drew 209 replies, ranging from the most terse of answers to lengthy tributes to Americans, according to “Current Biography” (1960). He got two columns out of the replies.

The same year, he made headlines when President Eisenhower was visiting Paris to attend a NATO treaty conference. Buchwald spoofed the detailed reports given each day by the president’s press secretary, James Hagerty. Reporters in Buchwald’s fantasy sessions posed questions such as “What time did the president start eating his grapefruit, Jim?”

Outraged, Hagerty blasted Buchwald’s work as “unadulterated rot.” Eisenhower, however, enjoyed the column and advised his press secretary to “simmer down,” the New York Herald Tribune reported in 1957.

Buchwald had the final word in a column in which he replied to Hagerty: “I have been known to write adulterated rot, but never unadulterated rot.”

Wins Pulitzer for commentary

Even as Buchwald’s popularity soared, he surprised adoring readers and colleagues in 1962 by returning to the United States to poke fun at American political and social life.

In Washington, his satirical observations became more popular than any of his work from Europe. He hit the lecture circuit, commanding up to $3,000 per speech. Speaking in a booming voice, he would tell his life story, which he regularly updated and punctuated with gags.

In 1970, a play Buchwald had written called “Sheep on the Runway,” about American foreign policy, ran for three months on Broadway.

In 1982, he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

He dabbled in screenwriting, an effort that landed him in a four-year, $2.5-million courtroom battle against Paramount Pictures in the early 1990s. Buchwald maintained that the 1988 hit movie “Coming to America” had come from an idea he had submitted.

A judge ruled in Buchwald’s favor, and he and his partner Alain Bernheim received $900,000 in the settlement.

After more than 8,000 columns and 37 years of stinging observations from Washington, Buchwald sought fresh perspective in the late 1990s and moved into New York’s Regency Hotel, and later the Wyndham.

In March, at his Washington hospice, he was presented with the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He apologized for not being able to attend the formal ceremony in July saying, “Sorry I couldn’t be there. My theory is that dying is easy, parking is tough.”

Like his good friends “60 Minutes” correspondent Mike Wallace and the late author William Styron, Buchwald was prone to depression. But the satirist managed to find humor in that too.

Styron “and I had depressions at the same time,” Buchwald said in a 1998 New York Times interview, “and the only difference is he made a million on his, and I didn’t make a dime on mine. We argued who had the worst depression. He says his was a 9.9 on the Richter scale and mine was a rainy day at Disneyland.”

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.’ ”

In addition to his son, Joel, Buchwald is survived by daughters Jennifer Buchwald of Roxbury, Mass., and Connie Buchwald Marks of Culpeper, Va.; sisters Edith Jaffe of Bellevue, Wash., and Doris Kahme, of Delray Beach, Fla.; and five grandchildren.

He will be interred at the Vineyard Haven Cemetery in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. where his wife is buried.

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louis.sahagun@latimes.com

Times staff writer Valerie J. Nelson contributed to this report.