Losing Mum and Pup (7 page)

B
y the Friday after she died, I found myself in the kitchen, blurting to poor Julian, “Jules, if I don’t get out of here soon,
there’s going to be another funeral in this house.”

Julian Booth (to whom this book is in part dedicated) is the kind, gentle, omnicompetent Briton who had been with my parents
almost thirty years as cook and house manager. The nickname “Jules” was bestowed on him by David Niven. Jules nodded through
his thick glasses and said quietly, “Yes, Christopher.” He is so even-keeled and sweet-tempered that he’d have responded exactly
as he did if I’d said to him, “Jules, I am going to detonate a fifty-megaton nuclear device and destroy all life on planet
Earth and usher in nuclear winter for a thousand years.”
Yes, Christopher.

A week after Mum’s death, the novelty—if that’s the right word—of it had worn off. Pup and I had run out of books to catalog,
papers to sort. Now there was the matter of Mum’s memorial service, and over this we clashed, filling the dining room with
the sound of dueling antlers.

But Pup, the New York apartment can only hold, what, eighty, ninety people? How can we possibly hold the reception there?
There are going to be
hundreds
of people at this thing. Mum was—

They don’t all have to come in at once.

[
Sighing.
]
But we can’t have people standing in
line
out on 73rd Street, for heaven’s sake.

Let me think about it.

This was WFB code for: I’ve made up my mind. Discussion over.

Well, let’s at least do it right, wherever we hold it. Serve champagne and—

I don’t want champagne.

But Mum—

I don’t like champagne.

[
Sighing
.]
Okay, but let’s at least have
nice
wine.

I
have
nice wine.

Arguable Pup had a fetish about not paying more than eight or nine bucks a bottle, a practice that, though economically sound,
did not always result in wine of lip-smacking quality.
^*

Two cases should do.

[
Spluttering.
]
Two
cases?
For… five hundred people?

People don’t drink much, anyway.

By the end of lunch, my fingers were wrapping around the fruit knife in a patricidal grip. It had been a long week. I’d been
attentively filial 24/7 to an old, ailing, heartsick (and somewhat high-maintenance) father. Now I was furious over what I
perceived as petulant small-mindedness.

For over a half century of unstinting and heroic (if not quite uncomplaining) effort, Mum had made my father’s various households—in
Stamford, New York, and Switzerland—paradigms of hospitality. She was (I boast) a great, even grand, hostess. The food, the
decor, the service,
everything
was impeccability and perfection. You don’t have to take my word for it: Pat Buckley was acknowledged universally as one
of the great ladies of New York, and all this she accomplished without the kind of bank account most other New York great
hostesses tend to have.
^*
But they lived well—very well—if always with a sharp eye to the marginal expense; whence Pup’s borderline Scrooginess in
the matter of the household grape. But now I simmered. Here she had put on the show for him for fifty-seven years, and here
I was trying to wheedle an extra case or two of indifferent plonk with which to refresh five hundred or more attendees at
her memorial service, the majority of whom he seemed perfectly content to let cool their heels out on the sidewalk. It was—too
much. Or as Mum would have said,
beyond comprehension.

“I’m going to kill him,” I said to Danny, escalating from my statement to Julian.

“I think you need to get out of here,” he said. Danny has been exquisitely attuned to our family reverberations since about
1965.

This I did. The next morning, safe in my New York apartment, I tapped out a come-to-Jesus e-mail to him.

Pup and I had been going at it with the verbal light-sabers—
vwhum vwhummmm
—since about 1966, when I was shipped off to the monks at Portsmouth Abbey. Pup never really, ever, yielded an inch of ground.
That was his victory. I ended up with a sharp sword and an attitude; that was mine. I don’t mean to make it sound as though
I grew up in ancient Sparta; Pup and I exchanged, over the course of a lifetime, letters of deep and abundant affection. But
we fought, and hard. Of the perhaps—I’m guessing—seven thousand or so letters and e-mails we exchanged, I’d estimate that
one-half were contentious. A lot of it was due to his having, about the early 1970s, turned me into a de facto marriage counselor—something
I would strenuously urge any parent against.

I wrote:

Dear Pup,

I don’t right now have the emotional reserves to argue with you over this. Suffice to say it wounds me when you bark at me,
after a rather trying week in which I was Cordelian in my filiality, “I don’t want champagne,” when Mum, who devoted her life
to making your homes paradigms of resplendent hospitality, drowned thousands of your guests in it, to say nothing of stuffing
them cross-eyed with caviar and every conceiveable sweetmeat. And if pari passu—as you might put it—you’re determined to hold
a reception for 500 guests in a space that at best holds 80, I don’t have it in me to argue about that, either, but it seems
to me a very queer way to memorialize one of New York’s great hostesses. But why don’t I step aside and let you arrange all
that as well. So over to you.

Love, Christo

I counted to ten—I’ve learned
that
much over a lifetime—and hit send. His reply came back. (I’ve cleaned up the typos.)
Dear Christo, Am absolutely astonished by what you say and have no memory of it. xxP

This wasn’t a disingenuous response, but neither did it move the ball down the field. At times I had to remind myself, by
way of autoconsolation, that I was dealing with William F. Buckley Jr., the legendary host of
Firing Line
, one of the great debaters of the twentieth century. He had not made his name for himself by yielding on the field of battle.
In this contest I was a chipmunk pitted against a rhino. I decided to let things cool for a day or so. Pup was not adept at
the cooling-off and the next day fired back with:
You’ve picked one hell of a time to abandon your father
. My fingers hovered above the Launch Missile button on the laptop, but I refrained. The chipmunk, confronting force majeure,
does what the chipmunk must—and calls Aunt Pitts.

If there was a single human being on the planet who exercised anything like authority over William F. Buckley Jr., it was
his older sister Priscilla, now eighty-six. She had been, for about a half century, managing editor of
National Review
and in that capacity was a beloved den- and godmother to generations—literally—of intellectual writer talent, from Garry
Wills to George Will; to say nothing of being a cherished aunt and surrogate mother to fifty nieces and nephews, a number
of them orphaned.
^*
I said to her,
Pitts—do something
.

Pitts called back within the hour and said,
It’s done
.

As the saying goes,
Be careful what you pray for, you might just get it
. I now found myself with carte blanche, in charge of Pat Buckley’s memorial service. This would take a month.

I
TURNED
,
FIRST
, to one of Mum’s great New York friends. It may not come as a huge surprise when I reveal that her closest friends were,
by and large, gay gentlemen. Pup was once asked in a published interview if he was aware of the statistical datum that roughly
10 percent of the U.S. male population is homosexual. He replied, “If that’s the case, then I’ve met them all.” I did, too,
starting in the 1950s when they were known as “confirmed bachelors.” They adored Mum and she them. Some of them didn’t bother
to hang around inside the closet, even in those homo-phobic days. One of them was Christopher Hewett, exquisitely memorable
as the flamboyantly homo director Roger De Bris in the original movie
The Producers
. One weekend at Stamford, he participated in a sixteen-millimeter silent home movie we shot called
Anesthesia
. (The dialogue appeared between scenes, written on a blackboard.) Christopher played—it goes without saying—the grand duchess
Anesthesia. Pup, wearing a plastic skullcap, played a Bolshevik (the only time WFB essayed a Commie role); Mum was a glamorous,
chain-smoking revolutionary named (as I recall) Natasha. I played, appropriately enough, the imbecile six-year-old heir to
the Russian throne. The climactic moment comes when Pup, in disguise as a servant in the royal household, is asked by the
grand duchess to “toss the salad.” Being a peasant, Pup misinterprets this as an instruction to reach into the salad bowl
and start throwing lettuce at the various guests. That was a fun weekend. I earned a whole dollar for my day’s work as an
actor.

In the 1960s, the term
walker
entered the language— that is to say, the society column newspaper word for a gentleman who escorts the wives of famous busy
men to Broadway first nights and balls and such. Mum’s great friend Jerome Zipkin was the walker of record in those days.
His most famous walkee was Nancy Reagan. When she became the nation’s first lady in 1981, various liberal publications had
a tricky time squaring their attempts to make her out to be a reincarnation of Marie Antoinette, with their vaunted tolerance
of homosexuality. (Zip, wearing his trademark homburg hat and fur-lined collar, just stuck his tongue out at them, and bravo,
Jerome. I was very fond of him and sad when the falling-out came between him and Mum. He had a bit of a mean streak, and she
had a low tolerance for mean streaks.) Another of Mum’s very close friends was Conservative Party apparatchik Marvin Liebman,
a confirmed bachelor until he spilled a very large can of beans in the form of a memoir entitled
Coming Out Conservative
.
^*
There were so many of them: Bill Blass, Peter Glenville, Valentino, John Richardson, Truman Capote, and others who prefer
still to be thought of as confirmed bachelors. At this pageant, I had a front-row seat. And though this may verge on truism
or overstatement, I grasped, at perhaps a precocious age, that no one truly appreciates a really great lady more than a gay
man, and vice versa. Whether this mutual valence is organically due to the liberating lack of sexual interest in each other
or to shared passions (decor, food, dress, whatever; Truman Capote and Babe Paley reportedly used to discuss moisturizers
in Talmudic detail), I don’t know, and don’t propose here to essay a half-baked master’s thesis on the subject. In Mum’s case,
it seemed to have more to do with laughter than moisturizers. At any rate, after a half century of hanging around Mum and
her pals, I knew where to look. Having exhausted various Protestant venues up and down the silky Rialto of Madison Avenue,
I placed a hopeful call to the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, whose annual galas Mum had administered for over a
decade, and was generously offered the Temple of Dendur, which is roughly speaking the coolest space on the planet.

“How did you manage to get the Temple of Dendur?” Pup said excitedly over the phone.

“Oh,” I said, “I have my ways, you know,” though it had absolutely nothing to do with my powers of persuasion. Mum had made
the Costume Institute hot, and now they were returning the favor.