Art Buchwald dead at 81

[RebLem]

Humorist Art Buchwald dies at 81

By Carl DiOrio | Hollywood Reporter

Jan 19, 2007

Art Buchwald, the beloved, Pulitzer Prize-wining satirist whose work in Hollywood was marked by landmark legal wranglings, has died. He was 81.

Buchwald died Wednesday at his home in Washington. He had been in failing health, and his prolonged physical decline provided him opportunity to turn his biting wit on his own mortality.

A celebrated humor columnist, he won the Pulitzer for newspaper commentary in 1982 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986. Buchwald also was a screenwriter and playwright, but he mostly will be remembered in Hollywood for the legal showdown over profits from the Eddie Murphy film "Coming to America."

A judge ruled that Paramount stole Buchwald's idea and in 1992 awarded $900,000 to him and a partner. The case established that the studio based the movie on a film treatment Buchwald had written for Paramount, which had refused to acknowledge his role in the development of the 1986 comedy.



The ruling is considered watershed in establishing the legal rights of profit participants in Hollywood, infamous for its Byzantine accounting practices.

"The money was irrelevant to him, as he was well-established financially," said Pierce O'Donnell, the Los Angeles attorney who represented Buchwald in the court battle with Paramount. "He said time and time again that if they could steal from Art Buchwald, they could steal from anybody. So for him, it was a very important cause celebre. Art wasn't worried about his next movie deal or who he might offend; he was very principled."

Not that Buchwald wasn't possessing of his own impish ability to bend the rules. In later life, he confessed to having had a street bum pose as his father so Buchwald could get into the U.S. Marines when he was only 17.

"Paramount spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years on PR, and I had one guy -- but his name was Art Buchwald," chuckled O'Donnell, who remained good friends with the satirist. "He once said, 'I can't believe that the studio that made "The Ten Commandments" cooks its books.' I mean, you just can't train a guy to come up with stuff like that."

Buchwald's son, Joel, said his father passed away quietly at the younger Buchwald's home, where he had been living. He had refused dialysis treatments for his failing kidneys a year ago and was expected to die within weeks of moving to a hospice Feb. 7, where he held court as a parade of luminaries and friends came by to say farewell.

"I'm having a swell time," he said of his dying. "The best time of my life."

Joel Buchwald said, "The last year he had the opportunity for a victory lap, and I think he was really grateful for it."

His father spent the year writing a last book, "Too Soon to Say Goodbye."

When death didn't come nearly as quickly as expected, Buchwald wrote that he had to scrap his funeral plans, rewrite his living will, buy a new cell phone and get on with his improbable life. "I also had to start worrying about Bush again," he deadpanned.

On Thursday, he was seen in a prerecorded video on the New York Times' Web site saying, "Hi, I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died." The clip was part of a video obit prepared for the site.

Buchwald was called the "Wit of Washington" during his years there, and his name became synonymous with political satire. He was well known, too, for his wide smile and affinity for cigars.

Among his more famous witticisms: "If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it."

Former MPAA chief Jack Valenti recalled Buchwald's humor. The two had been friends since 1964.

"What Art had was the gift of laughter -- that's a rarity today," Valenti told the Associated Press on Thursday. "He could take simple, ordinary things and make you laugh. God knows all of us need that. I've been with him in all kinds of situations -- good and bad, triumph and tragedy -- but Art always was able to see a little wisp of humor in everything."

Born on Oct. 25, 1925, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., Buchwald had a difficult childhood. He and his three sisters were sent to foster homes when their mother was institutionalized for mental illness. Their father, a drapery salesman, suffered Depression-era financial troubles and couldn't afford them.

He spent 3 1/2 years in the Pacific during World War II, attaining the rank of sergeant and spending much of his time editing a Corps newspaper. After the war, he enrolled at USC, where he became managing editor of the campus humor magazine and a columnist for the student paper.

"He was a unique American institution," O'Donnell said. "He was in the tradition of Mark Twain and Will Rogers, but he was a very unique guy."

In addition to son Joel, of Washington, 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 Monroe Township, N.J.; and five grandchildren.

A family spokeswoman said Buchwald would be interred at the Vineyard Haven Cemetery in Martha's Vineyard, Mass., where his wife Ann is buried.

The Associated Press contributed to this report
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/con ... 11ed252b06

[RebLem]

Art Buchwald left all of us laughing

January 19, 2007 | Newsday
By Ellis Henican

Hi, I'm Ellis Henican, and I'm not dead yet.

To that extent at least, I have Art Buchwald beat. And I'll bet he wouldn't mind me saying so. In most other ways, he's still miles ahead of the rest of us.

If you are in my business, which is writing newspaper columns, it is impossible to go to work in the morning without toiling beneath the large and portly shadow of Buchwald. As much as anyone in the last half-century, he taught his younger colleagues - and millions of newspaper readers around the world - that covering powerful people didn't have to mean sucking up to them.

You could treat presidents, celebrities and kings as the rough social equals of diner waitresses and cab drivers - or even better, the clear inferiors. Ideally, you should always try to poke fun at them. These haughty people are unlikely to enjoy it. But there usually isn't squat they can do about it, and the writer ends up as the one who told the truth.

On that solid insight, Buchwald became the first-string writer of funny columns for the op-ed pages of American newspapers and a few abroad. He had fans everywhere.

He is dead now at 81. Kidney failure. He departed even better than he hung around: with a twinkle in his eye and not an ounce of shyness from the balls of his bare feet to the tip of his famously rubbery nose.

"Hi, I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died," he says on the startling video obituary he left for his friends and fellow newspapermen.

Good lede, huh? Definitely worth stealing.

"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. "

Art Buchwald never tried to save souls in his newspaper column, which ran in hundreds of newspapers over the years, including this one. 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.

In his final time on Earth, he refused dialysis. He lost a leg. He published a book, "Too Soon to Say Goodbye. " 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.


Email: henican@newsday.com

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ ... columnists

[jbuck919]

Has anyone noticed what a good death he died? It doesn't happen very often, and I hope in his case it was not one of his jokes.

[Ralph]

I am sad.

[jbuck919]

That dinde column encore (souffle):

By Art Buchwald:

One of our most important holidays is Thanksgiving Day, known in France as le Jour de Merci Donnant.

Le Jour de Merci Donnant was first started by a group of Pilgrims (Pélerins) who fled from l'Angleterre before the McCarran Act to found a colony in the New World (le Nouveau Monde) where they could shoot Indians (les Peaux-Rouges) and eat turkey (dinde) to their hearts' content.

They landed at a place called Plymouth (now a famous voiture Américaine) in a wooden sailing ship called the Mayflower (or Fleur de Mai) in 1620. But while the Pélerins were killing the dindes, the Peaux-Rouges were killing the Pélerins, and there were several hard winters ahead for both of them. The only way the Peaux-Rouges helped the Pélerins was when they taught them to grow corn (mais). The reason they did this was because they liked corn with their Pélerins.

In 1623, after another harsh year, the Pélerins' crops were so good that they decided to have a celebration and give thanks because more mais was raised by the Pélerins than Pélerins were killed by Peaux-Rouges.

Every year on le Jour de Merci Donnant, parents tell their children an amusing story about the first celebration.

It concerns a brave capitaine named Miles Standish (known in France as Kilomètres Deboutish) and a young, shy lieutenant named Jean Alden. Both of them were in love with a flower of Plymouth called Priscilla Mullens (no translation). The vieux capitaine said to the jeune lieutenant:

"Go to the damsel Priscilla (allez tres vite chez Priscilla), the loveliest maiden of Plymouth (la plus jolie demoiselle de Plymouth). Say that a blunt old captain, a man not of words but of action (un vieux Fanfan la Tulipe), offers his hand and his heart, the hand and heart of a soldier. Not in these words, you know, but this, in short, is my meaning.

"I am a maker of war (je suis un fabricant de la guerre) and not a maker of phrases. You, bred as a scholar (vous, qui êtes pain comme un étudiant), can say it in elegant language, such as you read in your books of the pleadings and wooings of lovers, such as you think best adapted to win the heart of the maiden."

Although Jean was fit to be tied (convenable à être emballi), friendship prevailed over love and he went to his duty. But instead of using elegant language, he blurted out his mission. Priscilla was muted with amazement and sorrow (rendue muette par l'étonnement et las tristesse).

At length she exclaimed, interrupting the ominous silence: "If the great captain of Plymouth is so very eager to wed me, why does he not come himself and take the trouble to woo me?" (Où est-il, le vieux Kilomètres? Pourquoi ne vient-il pas aupres de moi pour tenter sa chance?)

Jean said that Kilomètres Deboutish was very busy and didn't have time for those things. He staggered on, telling what a wonderful husband Kilomètres would make. Finally Priscilla arched her eyebrows and said in a tremulous voice, "Why don't you speak for yourself, Jean?" (Chacun a son gout.)

And so, on the fourth Thursday in November, American families sit down at a large table brimming with tasty dishes, and for the only time during the year eat better than the French do.

No one can deny that le Jour de Merci Donnant is a grande fête and no matter how well fed American families are, they never forget to give thanks to Kilomètres Deboutish, who made this great day possible.

© 2004, Tribune Media Services

[piston]

Hilarious! Kilomètres Deboutish!! Merci Donnant! This man deserved a Medal of Honor (Médaille pour son Honneur) and a Nobel prize (Prix de la Nobilité).

[Corlyss_D]

That dinde column encore (souffle):

By Art Buchwald:

Absolutely the only Buchwald column I can recall laughing at. I never thought he was that funny.