Satirist Art Buchwald dies at 81
Columnist hit political targets, won Pulitzer Prize
With his trademark wit , Art Buchwald used his newspaper column to skewer politicians in the nation's capital, and over the decades millions of Americans began their morning by reading his unfolding chronicle of history writ small and satirical. At the end of his life ill health gave him a new subject, his impending death, and he wrote a series of poignant dispatches from a hospice center he later left after outliving his stay.
Mr. Buchwald died in Washington on Wednesday evening, according to his son, Joel, with whom he lived. The columnist was 81 and had published a book last year, "Too Soon to Say Goodbye," that celebrated the unexpected coda to his long life of achievement.
Early in February, he entered hospice care when his kidneys failed as a result of diabetes, and doctors gave him just weeks to live. After a year long respite that his son described as "a victory lap," Mr. Buchwald -- who had declined dialysis from the beginning -- began once again receiving hospice care at home 13 days ago.
"What was difficult was him almost dying and then not," his daughter Jennifer of Roxbury wrote yesterday in an online forum on the
Mr. Buchwald, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982, had lived in Washington nearly 45 years, dividing his time between the capital and a summer home on Martha's Vineyard for the past 35 years.
At its height, his syndicated column was published in hundreds of newspapers around the world, including The Boston Globe. He gathered columns into more than two dozen collections and many became bestsellers. In the past several months, Mr. Buchwald's columns about hospice and his impending death inspired renewed interest in a columnist whose career began long before many of his readers were born.
Rose Styron, a Vineyard Haven neighbor who had known Mr. Buchwald for 50 years, said yesterday that "his last year may have been his best. He was fondly fulfilled by the love and attention of all his friends and the recouping of his writing, both in newspapers and a final new book -- with a gorgeous cover of the smiling Art we knew and loved."
"He was absolutely a dear, wise, friendly, caring man. He was just the best," Mike Wallace, the "60 Minutes" correspondent and a Vineyard Haven neighbor, said yesterday. "We went through times of clinical depression together. When I didn't know what the hell it was, he would call me every bloody night, no matter where I was, to talk me through it and to tell me how to handle it."
Mr. Buchwald was first treated for depression in the early 1960s and helped Wallace and novelist William Styron when they, too, struggled with the illness. He dubbed the trio the Blues Brothers and they occasionally traveled together about a decade ago, speaking to groups to help raise awareness about depression. Styron, who published "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness" in 1990 about his own struggles, died in November.
In newspaper columns last year after entering a hospice center, and in last year's book, Mr. Buchwald confronted the topic of dying, though with the twinkle in his eye readers had come to expect -- especially when his health did not decline as predicted.
"So far things are going my way. I am known in the hospice as 'The Man Who Would Not Die,' " he wrote in his last book. "How long they allow me to stay here is another problem."
He added, "Dying isn't hard. Getting paid by Medicare is."
Mr. Buchwald's hospice room became a place where laughter -- usually his own -- often rang out as his bedside became a mandatory stopover for the bold-faced-name set. A headline for a March 26
Mr. Buchwald's health improved to the point that he was able to leave the hospice on July 1 and head to the Vineyard, where he had spent every summer for so many years.
"The whole point is I didn't expect to be here," he told the Globe in July at his gray-shingled house on Main Street in Vineyard Haven. "My plan was to leave the earth. And then I thought, to hell with it, I'll go to the Vineyard."
Though known for his political humor, Mr. Buchwald began his career in his 20s writing about restaurants and night life for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune. He expanded into writing about celebrities, and the column was syndicated as "Art Buchwald in Paris."
Against the advice of friends, Mr. Buchwald relinquished his status as perhaps the best known American in the City of Lights and relocated in the early 1960s to Washington, where he began writing political satire columns.
"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," US Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement yesterday.
Mr. Buchwald employed an approach to his work and a writing style that were deceptively simple. He would tear an article from a newspaper, tuck it in a pocket, and mull the subject -- sometimes for days -- before quickly pounding out a column in unadorned prose that often turned the topic of the day on its head.
Glib on the page, Mr. Buchwald had endured what, for many, would have been a lifetime's share of sadness, which he explored in a pair of memoirs published in the 1990s. "Leaving Home" chronicles a New York City childhood in the late 1920s and early '30s that veered toward the Dickensian. His mother was institutionalized for severe depression not long after his birth, and he and his two sisters were sent to a series of foster homes by a father who for many years was unable to support his children.
At 17, Mr. Buchwald joined the Marines. After his hitch was up, he spent three years at the University of Southern California, then moved to Paris -- ostensibly to study French on the GI Bill, though he coveted the expatriate writing life. He talked his way into the night life column at the Herald Tribune.
His second memoir, "I'll Always Have Paris," recounts a rich life that included showing Elvis Presley around the city and letting Gene Kelly dance with his bride, Ann McGarry , at their wedding. But it also touches on Mr. Buchwald's battles with depression. He was hospitalized in 1962 after returning to the United States and suffered recurring bouts, telling interviewers that he twice strongly considered suicide.
The illness contributed to the break-up of his marriage. Mr. Buchwald and his wife separated in the early 1990s, but he moved back in with her after she was diagnosed with cancer. Ann Buchwald died in July 1994.
Mr. Buchwald and his family first started going to Martha's Vineyard in 1971 to escape Washington's summer heat. Along with using the Vineyard as a retreat, Mr. Buchwald served for many years as master of ceremonies and auctioneer at an annual fund-raiser to benefit a consortium of island social service agencies.
"I don't know how it happened, but I've become the Jerry Lewis of Martha's Vineyard," he told the Globe in 1996.
In hospice care last year, Mr. Buchwald retained his sense of humor and took pleasure in being able to eat whatever he wanted after deciding to forgo dialysis treatment, which would have prolonged his life.
"The thing that is very important, and why I'm writing this, is that whether they like it or not, everyone is going to go," he wrote in a March 14 column.
"The big question we still have to ask is not where we're going, but what were we doing here in the first place?"
In addition to his son and daughter, Mr. Buchwald leaves another daughter, Connie Buchwald Marks of Culpeper, Va.; two sisters, Edith Jaffe of Bellevue, Wash., and Doris Kahme of Delray Beach, Fla., and Monroe Township, N.J.; and five grandchildren.
Mr. Buchwald's assistant, Cathy Crary, said he will be buried in Vineyard Haven Cemetery, where his wife is buried.
A memorial service is being planned for Washington, Crary said. 