Wry Martinis Read online

  Also by Chrístopher Buckley

  Steaming to Bamboola

  The White House Mess

  Campion

  Wet Work

  Thank You for Smoking

  Copyright © 1997 by Christopher Taylor Buckley

  Illustrations copyright © 1997 by Michael Witte

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Stephanie Mansfield for permission to reprint

  “Fax Fire: Tom Clancy Takes on Buckley over Pan of Book” originally published in

  The Washington Post, October 6, 1994.

  Most of the essays in this work have been previously published in the following periodicals: American Health, Architectural Digest, At Random, Chicago Tribune, Condé Nast Traveler, Esquire, Forbes, House and Garden, Key West Restaurant, Los Angeles Times, Museum and Arts Washington, My Harvard, My Yale, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Portsmouth Abbey Alumni Magazine, Regardie’s, USA Weekend, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Washington Post Book World.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Buckley, Christopher, 1952-

  Wry martinis/Christopher Buckley.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79987-6

  1. American wit and humor. I. Title.

  PN6162.B798 1997

  814′.54—dc20 96-8336

  Random House website address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.1

  For Mum and Pup

  No animals were harmed in the making of this book.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  My Title Problem

  Aperítífs

  House-Guest Hell

  The Three-Martini Debate

  An Unsentimental Education

  The Con Channel

  Yowl

  Royal Eavesdropping

  Best Sellers

  Stardate 12:00 12:00 12:00

  The Hemline of History

  The New Fly-Fishing Books

  The Siberian Candidate: The Hunt for Red in October

  Poprah

  Doing the McNamara

  The Landfill Tour Is Canceled, but We Are Offering

  Why I’m Running

  Summer Blockbusters

  Introducing Yourself to the Waiter

  You, the Jury!

  Apartment Hunter

  Hillary Pilloried

  Unaclient

  Répondez, Si Vous Payez

  Moodest Proposals

  Homaǵe to Tom Clancy

  The Ego Has Landed

  Tired Gun

  Megabashing Japan

  Fax Fire

  Spín Cycle

  How I Learned to (Almost) Love the Sin Lobbyists

  Blubber

  Ayes Only

  Whitherwater?

  Please Refrain from Breathing

  Confidential Memorandum

  Want to Buy a Dead Díctator?

  Lenin for Sale

  Premier Kissoff Is on the Line and He’s Hopping Mad

  Guy Stuff

  Driving Through the Apocalypse

  I Visitz the Nimitz

  How I Went Nine Gs in an F-16 and Only Threw Up Five Times

  Macho Is as Macho Does

  Hardly Rouǵhínǵ It

  Would You Belize?

  One Way to Do the Amazon

  Christmas at Sea

  Life Is a Hotel

  Babes

  Mom, Fashion Icon

  Really Something

  You Got a Problem?

  Formative Years

  Stoned in New Haven

  What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? Well, It’s Like This.…

  Incoming

  A Few More for the Road

  A.C. in D.C.

  Hot Hot Hot

  Explosions in My Skull

  The Passion of Saint Matt

  My Own Private Sunday School

  Mr. Robertson’s Millennium

  Remembrance of Mansions Past

  Sergeant Pepcid’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

  Bugging Out

  “Washington Writer”

  Wish I’d Said That

  About the Author

  My Title Problem

  This is my sixth book, and I’ve had a hard time coming up with titles for all of them. I thought it would get easier, but it hasn’t. I should be better at it, since I’m also a magazine editor and coming up with titles is a big part of that job. When I was a junior editor at Esquire in the ’70s, I would break out in a sweat trying to come up with clever titles. Esquire was famous for them: “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” “Las Vegas (What?). Las Vegas (Can’t Hear You! Too Noisy!). Las Vegas!!!!” “Hell Sucks.”

  One time I spent three days on one headline. I’m not going to tell you what I came up with, because you’d only say, You spent three days on—that?

  This is mostly a collection of my magazine stuff. Random House doesn’t want you to know that. Publishers flaunt the word “collection” on a book cover the way canned soup makers do the words “Tastes best if eaten before the year A.D. 2010.”

  I wanted to call it Oeuvre to You. Oeuvre is a classy French word. No one knows how to pronounce it, but if you make a sound similar to the one you’d make right before throwing up a plateful of choucroute garni, you’ve pretty much got it. I faxed the title to my father, to whom this book is dedicated, along with my mother. He faxed back “NO!!!” which I took to mean NO!!!

  Then I came up with Ruined Weekends, which sounded stately and grand. For some reason, most of the pieces in here were due on Monday. I tried it out on my editor, Jonathan Karp. With the sensitivity that is his trademark, Jon agreed that it was stately, even grand, but said it was “a kind of a downer.” Some people, he said, might have a hard time getting past the word “Ruined.”

  No comparisons intended, but you wonder if Gibbon today would be able to sell a publisher on Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. They would probably call it How Kinky Sex, Greed and Lead Goblets Caused the Collapse of the Roman Empire—And How It Can Rise Again!? Or Barbarians at the Gate.

  I came back at Karp with Want to Buy a Dead Dictator? It’s a reference to a hoax we undertook in the pages of the magazine I edit, Forbes FYI. We announced with a straight face that the Russians were so strapped for hard currency that they were preparing to auction off the corpse of Lenin. Peter Jennings of ABC’s World News Tonight went with the story and the Russians went intercontinentally ballistic. It became a big international story. Karp’s reaction to my brainstorm was, “We can’t have the words ‘dead’ and ‘dictator’ in the title. No one will buy it.”

  The book biz is littered with might-have-been titles. Andre Bernard wrote a fun book a few years ago called Now All We Need Is a Title, recounting some of the more resplendent clunkers. The Great Gatsby came close to being called Trimalchio in East Egg (Trimalchio being the rich patron in Petronius’s Satyricon). Waugh wanted to call Brideshead Revisited, The House of the Faith. On the other hand we might now be saying with equal incredulity, “Can you believe Woodward and Bernstein almost called At This Point in Time, All the President’s Men?”

  I noodled around and suggested Homage to Tom Clancy. I liked it. It had a certain je ne sais quoi, and there was the chance that five billion Clancy fans might mistake it for the real thing and make me accidentally rich. The background is that I got into a little pis
sing match with Mr. Clancy after I reviewed one of his books for The New York Times. I called him a racist and the most successful bad writer in American since James Fenimore Cooper. The comment was itself an homage to Mark Twain, whose essay “The Literary Crimes of Fenimore Cooper” is still the most hilarious literary evisceration in American letters. Oddly, Mr. Clancy didn’t like being called a racist and a bad writer, and my fax machine began humming with incoming missives from him. These were leaked to the press (not—promise—by me). Our pissy fit became gossip page grist for a few days. But in the end Karp and I decided it was a bit of an inside joke and, anyway, did it make economic sense to annoy five billion Tom Clancy readers?

  I suggested Dual Airbags. At first Karp did not click, being a New Yorker whose only experience with automobiles is riding in the backseat of taxis driven by people with names like Ibrahim Abouhalima (which in Arabic means “America will pay dearly for its support of Israel!”). So I explained that since these days, dual airbags are such a big selling point for car buyers, why shouldn’t the concept appeal to book buyers as well? There was, too, the rather nifty, self-deprecating double entendre implying that the author is not just a gasbag, but a real gasbag. He liked that, and we would have used it, except everyone else hated it.

  Then I came back with a title that I quite liked: Should I Have Heard of You? It’s taken from a typical airplane conversation:

  PERSON NEXT TO ME: And what do you do?

  ME: I’m a writer.

  PERSON (Perking up): Oh? What’s your name?

  ME: Chris Buckley.

  PERSON (Frowning): Should I have heard of you?

  ME (Bravely): Not really.

  PERSON: If you’re a writer, then you must know John Grisham.

  ME (Seizing the moment): Who?

  PERSON (After fifteen minutes spent recapitulating the plot to each entry in the Grisham oeuvre): I have all his books. Hardcover and paperback. I also have them all in audiocassette. I buy his books before they come out.

  ME (Pretending to be absorbed in an article called “What’s New in Newark?” in the in-flight magazine): Well, if you like that sort of thing.

  PERSON: Do you know, he’s got fifty million books in print.

  ME: Of course, the real test is, Will you still be in print a hundred years from now? That’s more what I’m aiming for. But I’ll certainly give this fellow Grashman a try, on your recommendation.

  Fans of One-upmanship will recognize that exchange for what it is: Homage to Stephen Potter (1900—1965). It is, of course, completely disingenuous on my part. I know all about John Grisham and his fifty million books in print, and I hate him. He probably also has a wonderful sex life, too, damn him. At any rate, Should I Have Heard of You? was rejected as too precious.

  By now I was getting sullen and resentful, which, being an only child, I frequently tend to get. “Give me my own way exactly in everything,” said Thomas Carlyle, “and a sunnier, more pleasant creature does not exist.” When I read that quote to my wife, she laughed, bitterly.

  Karp manfully suggested that he give the title a go on his own. A few days went by and my fax machine disgorged his suggestion: The Ten Commandments. Catchy as it was, I demurred. Let me say for the record: Jon Karp is an excellent editor, smart, funny, eager, hardworking, generous, returns-your-phone-calls, serious. (The man spends his summer vacations in the library at Brown University, rereading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. I am not kidding.) And now that we’ve got that out of the way, let me say that The Ten Commandments is, arguably, THE WORST BOOK TITLE SINCE Trimalchio in East Egg.

  It crossed my mind that it might part of a sinister promotional plan by Random House to turn me into an American version of Salman Rushdie. Publishers strive to get their books turned into news stories.

  AUTHOR IN HIDING AMIDST

  CONTROVERSY OVER BOOK

  There’s nothing resembling blasphemy in here. There is a piece about the Pope going on Oprah to promote his book, but it’s hardly worth an excommunication. There’s also a piece about being an agnostic dad, running my own private Sunday school so my seven-year-old daughter will grow up with the kind of firm grounding in Judeo-Christian tradition that enables you to slam the door in the faces of pesky Jehovah’s Witnesses. That did get a response, but not quite what I was hoping for. It ran in a Sunday newspaper supplement with a combined circulation of forty million. For one bright, shining moment I had almost as many readers as John Grisham. And they hated me. For months I was deluged with prayer books, Bibles, and letters telling me that unless I repented, I was going to burn in hell for all eternity. I did think it a bit harsh, considering the piece was about trying to raise your kids to know who Moses and Jesus were. In any event, we were still stuck for a title.

  We came up with FedExLax and Other Mergers. It’s a title that needs explaining, and quickly. It’s from a Headlines of the Coming Year thing I did for The New Yorker. My wife told me she would divorce me if I called it that. And it did occur to me that my parents might not appreciate being the dedicatees of a book named after a famous laxative. Karp loved it, but then he has a very crude and unsophisticated sense of humor. This is why we work so well together. But back to square one.

  Bassholes. This too requires some explanation. It’s from a New Yorker piece in the book, a parody of brief reviews of new books on fly-fishing. One of the books is titled Bassholes, a vituperative attack on bass fishermen and -women by a fly-fishing purist professor at the University of Vermont. After it came out, The New Yorker got a lot of frustrated phone calls and letters from people who couldn’t find the books in stores. One person actually called up the University of Vermont to track down the author of Bassholes, and was annoyed to learn that there was no one on the faculty by that name. I wrote them all to explain. I sort of wanted to tell them, “Do you really think that Peter Benchley has written a book called Gills about a vengeful Dolly Varden trout?” (Having recently caught ten minutes of the TV movie of his book The Beast, I’m willing to admit Gills is not so far-fetched.) But I took their confusion as a kind of compliment, as I did when the press rose to my Lenin fly. Effective satire doesn’t show stretch marks.

  On the other hand, it’s presumptuous to take credit for living in a world in which pretty much anything is plausible. What would surprise you to see on TV? The chief executive officers of the Big Seven American tobacco companies, testifying under oath before the Congress, “I do not believe nicotine is addictive”? Would you believe me if I said that the head of that same congressional committee was replaced a year later by a tobacco-friendly congressman from Richmond, Virginia, who, before he went to Washington, was a mortician? I wrote a comic novel about the tobacco lobby, and I wouldn’t have dared go that far. But a few days ago, O. J. Simpson said that he never beat up Nicole. No, no. She was trying to beat up him. See? Those bruises she had in the photographs were makeup. It would take a satirist with balls of stone to come up with that.

  On the back page of FYI we run a feature called “The Bull Board,” a gathering of recent news clippings, a first rough draft of absurdity. I’d count it a good day indeed at the word processor if I came up with any of the following on my own:

  “Russian Public Television has cancelled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s talk show.”

  “Everybody knows that I have tougher ethics rules than any previous president.” (Clinton.)

  “Alert Customs official noticed ‘something weird’ about a woman’s bosom. And on further inspection found 65 baby snakes in her bra.”

  “A Greenwich, Connecticut, CEO plead guilty to defecating on the food cart on a flight from Rio to New York. His defense was that he had been barred from using the first class toilet.” If that was the defense, the plea was wise. (Bonus point: the gentleman’s no doubt proud wife runs a company of her own called The Moving Experience.)

  “A Wilmington, North Carolina, neurosurgeon’s license was suspended after he left a patient’s brain exposed for 25 minutes while he got lunch.”

  “A
n airliner heading to South Africa was forced to turn back and make an emergency landing in Britain after 72 flatulent pigs triggered its fire alarms.” Heathrow, we have a problem.

  Some years ago, after watching a forest fire annihilate thousands of hectares of southern France, the sky buzzing with military airplanes ferrying water from a nearby lake, I was told a story utterly harrowing, yet —forgive me—ineffably comic. After this fire had burned itself out, they found the remains of a man, snorkel, goggles, and flippers in the upper branches of a charred tree. One minute, you’re looking down at little brightly colored fishies in the water, the next you’re being dumped out of a plane onto a forest fire. What did they say at this poor guy’s funeral? That God loved him?

  “French inventor Yves Renault has fit oysters with pop-open tabs and a French firm expects 50 million ‘ringed’ oysters to be sold in France this winter.” My parents call this sort of thing Problems of the Idle Rich.

  Finally:

  “Three janitors trying to freeze a gopher to death caused an explosion that injured 19 people.” The last paragraph reads, “The gopher survived and was later released in a field, unharmed.” Here one discerns the hand of God. Wherever you stand on the Problem of Job, you have to admire the way He intervenes when the least of His creatures are threatened by cretins armed with freon and lit cigarettes.

  You could add to the above items any statement made by any lawyer on behalf of any Menendez brother since August of 1989. I’m thinking in particular of that woman—I cannot bring myself to say her name—you know, the one with the hair, who complained after hanging the first jury that it was an outrage that bail was being denied these two angels who had shotgunned their parents to death, pausing to reload while Mom crawled across the carpet with her brain exposed. “These are terrific kids,” she said.

  Hypocrisy is the night soil of satire. I say, Thank God for defense lawyers, politicians and cigarette lobbyists. They keep people like me in business. I don’t flatter myself that my worst shots at them accomplish anything more than a transitory rouging of their cheeks. (If that.) The chairman of Philip Morris, the international tobacco company, was asked by Business Week if he had read Thank You for Smoking, an “exquisitely vicious” (Washington Post) novel about the tobacco industry. He said he’d found it “very amusing.” His surname, by the way, is Bible, not that I would have dared to use that, fictionally. But—smart fellow, clever answer. Never complain, never explain. Give Mr. Bible a little legal wiggle room, and he might even quote Claud Cockburn at you: “You cannot satirize a man who says, ‘I’m only in it for the money and that’s all there is to it.’ ” If he and his ilk were allowed by their lawyers to say, “What do you take us for, morons? Of course we know cigarettes kill you, but they’re legal, people love them, and we can make a killing selling them.” Try to distill an “exquisitely vicious” satire out of that.