The Press: American in Paris

“When an American Citizen gets into difficulty in a foreign country,” wrote a reader to the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune, “they either go to the police, the American embassy or Art Buchwald. I prefer the last.” So do some 70 other travelers a week who write to chubby (196 lbs.) young (28) Columnist Art Buchwald seeking his expert advice on everything from what to do when the concierge turns off the heat in a Paris hotel (answer: “Go to another hotel”) to

“Is it all right to take a 15-year-old girl to the Folies-Bergere?” (answer: “Depends on the 15-year-old girl”). But Columnist Buchwald, who was born in suburban Mount Vernon, N.Y., owes his reputation as “the American in Paris” to more than giving out advice.

His Paris Herald column, “Europe’s Lighter Side,” syndicated to six other U.S. dailies by the New York Herald Tribune, takes the informal measure of a wide range of American travelers abroad from Paul Hoffman, Jim Farley and Henry Ford II to “Slapsy” Maxie Rosenbloom, Ernest Hemingway and Lana Turner. And Buchwald’s lighthearted guidebook, Paris After Dark, which has sold more than 60,000 copies, is one of the best sources of information for Americans on Paris restaurants and night life.

Last week Buchwald, smoking his customary cigar, was engaged in a typically unorthodox piece of legwork for his column. Decked out in fox-hunting pinks and astride a horse, he was uncomfortably riding to the hounds across the rolling greens of Ireland as the guest of Hollywood Director John Huston. In the last five years, he has gone to even greater lengths in the interest of his column. He has bobsledded at St. Moritz, dined at the pasha’s palace at Marrakech, French Morocco, and at the Marquis de Cuevas’ fancy-dress ball at Biarritz (TIME, Sept. 14), he turned up barelegged, bewigged and dressed as an American Indian with a sign on his back: “Us Go Home.” “It’s simply amazing,” says Buchwald, “to think I’ve been to all those many places.”

His Highness. Buchwald’s amazement is understandable. Since his mother took sick just after he was born, he spent his childhood being shifted back & forth from foster homes to orphan asylums. He had never traveled beyond the New York area until at 16 he ran away, lied about his age and joined the Marines. After 18 months in the Pacific, he was discharged, attended the University of Southern California for three years, then bought a one-way ticket to Europe with his $250 New York State serviceman’s bonus. In Paris, he lived on his $75 G.I. Bill allowance, finally talked Variety into letting him do occasional reporting. Three months later, he went to the Paris Herald Tribune, and last year persuaded the paper to run his column in its New York home edition.

In Paris, Buchwald sees “anyone who is in the news,” has become as much of a celebrity as many of the people he interviews. Once when he complained “how difficult it is to get into the Savoy in a dinner jacket borrowed from a waiter,” one of his readers sent him a hand-me-down tuxedo which he still wears (“It’s getting a little tight under the arms”). He drops names as easily as he gulps an outsize portion of pâte de foie gras. “We had lunch recently with the . . . Aga Khan,” writes Buchwald. “His Highness told us he eats only one meal a day—at lunchtime.” On a recent Pillsbury Mills press junket, Buchwald quipped that the president of the company was greeted in Paris with: “We knew you were coming so we baked a cake.” Buchwald, an unblushing user of the multiple pun, described the event: “The well-bread Ritz Hotel . . . was decked out like a wedding cake . . . Pillsbury spared no expense to see that there were flours on every table, whether they kneaded them or not.”

Price of Fame. Strange crusades are the lifeblood of his column. He has complained about dogs in restaurants (“I like animals damn it—but I draw the line there”), blasted the famed Cafe de la Paix for warning its customers not to kiss in public (“If you can’t kiss someone in a sidewalk cafe, where can you kiss her?”), and explained why French speak such tortured English (they use an English-made-easy guide, which offers such phonetic help as: “Pliize sho me ze boukigne off-ice for leug-guedge”). Occasionally he also picks up off-beat business news, like his report on Trans World Airlines’ Board Chairman Warren Lee Pierson: “When I first became chairman … I picked up a card in one of the offices which read: ‘Directions for making a Martini over the ocean: one part vermouth, two parts gin.’ My first company directive was that hereafter all Martinis made over the ocean were to contain one part vermouth and five parts gin. Heaven only knows how many customers we saved.”

Buchwald prefers to interview his subjects in their native habitat, has played a talkative round of golf with Bing Crosby, gone shopping with Zsa Zsa Gabor for a dress. “Interviewing Zsa Zsa in an office would turn out just like an interview with, say, Charlie Wilson,” explains Buchwald. Although he is known at nearly every good restaurant in Paris (“My chief vice is eating too much”), he rarely drinks more than a sip of wine, finds that Americans abroad are much more candid and willing to be interviewed than in the U.S. For his popularity, Buchwald pays a heavy price. Says he: “Every atrocity that’s committed by an American—or to an American—in Europe, I seem to hear about firsthand—they blame me.”