The Press: Old-Shoe Columnist

Some months ago a sightseeing American couple stopped in at the Paris offices of the New York Herald Tribune and was steered to a battered wooden desk behind which sat a Buddha-shaped, bespectacled newsman placidly puffing a $1 Upmann cigar. “We visited the Eiffel Tower this morning,” cried the woman tourist to Art Buchwald, 34, “and now we just had to meet you.”

The Herald Tribune’s Paris columnist accepted the intrusion with the cigar-flicking grace of a man who, after twelve years of casual association with celebrities, has become a celebrity himself. When he lunches at Maxim’s, 30% is deducted from the check—a tribute that Buchwald, who earns some $40,000 a year, does not require but does not disdain. His circle of acquaintances qualifies him for the upper rung of name droppers. He has played chess with Jose Ferrer, shopped with Zsa Zsa Gabor, once rushed his wife Ann out to dinner without bothering to tell her that their guest was Eleanor Roosevelt. “It’s not even a job,” says Columnist Buchwald. “I think I’d pay to do it.”

Yups & Nopes. Job or not, Buchwald’s tales of the royal, the renowned and other odd characters are syndicated in 100 newspapers in a dozen countries. At his best, Buchwald is an improbable blend of wry humor, showmanship and wide-eyed innocence abroad. “Some writers do these things to prove that they are brave,” he told a friend after returning from a big-game hunt in Africa. “I do them to prove I am yellow.” Pretending pique at not being invited to the Grace Kelly-Prince Rainier wedding, he explained the slight in terms of a longstanding family feud (“the Buchwalds and the Grimaldis have not spoken since Jan. 9, 1297”). When Gary Cooper paid him a visit, Buchwald recruited the compliant film star for a tongue-in-cheek dialogue, duly printed, in which Cooper did all the talking and Buchwald responded with Cooperesque “yups” and “nopes.”

His most spectacular effort, and his favorite, appeared during the 1957 NATO conference in Paris, attended by President Eisenhower. It dealt with an imaginary press conference at which reporters grubbed for inconsequential details from a spokesman identified only as “Jim.” Presidential Press Secretary Jim Hagerty, seeing red, called the parody “unadulterated rot.” Replied Buchwald mildly in a second column: “Mr. Buchwald has been known to write adulterated rot, but never unadulterated rot.” It took President Eisenhower, who thought the column funny, to calm down Hagerty.

Like Selling Cancer. Born in Forest Hills, L.I., Art Buchwald was brought up in a succession of foster homes, ran away at 16 to join the Marines. Told he would need parental consent, Buchwald rounded up a drunk who agreed, for a pint of whisky, to pose as Buchwald pére. “Most patriotic thing anybody ever asked me to do,” muttered the drunk. Discharged as a sergeant, Buchwald migrated to Paris in 1948, soon signed on as a night-life expert for Variety at $8 a week. Within three months, Buchwald parlayed this into a similar job on the Paris Herald Tribune. Before long, he was running in six stateside papers and well on the way to success.

Since then, Buchwald has produced four compilations of his columns that together have sold more than 100,000 hard-cover copies, and a novel. A musical revue loosely based on Buchwald columns is now playing to good crowds in London.

By ordinary journalistic standards, such success is mystifying. Buchwald’s humor is of a formless sort that vanishes in excerpts and paraphrase, and has its off and on days. The answer may lie in the fact that Art Buchwald is a combination of good journalist and good guy. Millions of his stay-at-home readers warm to the columnar image of an expatriate but ordinary American hobnobbing with royalty and living the Continental life without turning snob. Buchwald’s accounts of celebrity lunches are interspersed with columns about his wife and his three adopted children—who can lure him away from duty for bus rides to the end of the line.

On the job, Buchwald’s manner is so ingenuous and old-shoe that the subjects of his interviews are soon disarmed into chattering away like old friends. “The fact is that Mr. Buchwald is practically a blank.” says French Playwright Marcel Achard. “Most of the time he is simply looking at you with large eyes.” Though seemingly artless, Buchwald’s interviews usually make his subjects seem more amusing than they are, and though he may protect them from their indiscretions, he avoids both puffery and malice.

He intends to return to the U.S. shortly to test whether the presidential election can be taken lightly in print. In the last weeks of the campaign, this may require an excess of valor.