A Torch Kept Lit

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  “Allard Lowenstein, RIP”

  Remarks at memorial service for Allard Lowenstein, Central Synagogue, Manhattan, March 18, 1980; published in National Review, April 4, 1980.

  Possibly, as a dissenter, my own experience with him was unique, in that we conservatives did not generally endorse his political prescriptions. So that we were, presumptively, opponents of Al Lowenstein, in those straitened chambers in which we spend, and misspend, so much of our lives. It was his genius that so many of those he touched—generally, arriving a half hour late—discovered intuitively the underlying communion. He was, in our time, the original activist, such was his impatience with the sluggishness of justice; so that his rhythms were more often than not disharmonious with those that govern the practical, banausic councils of this world. His habits were appropriately disarrayed. He was late to breakfast, to his appointments; late in announcing his sequential availability for public service. He was punctual only in registering (though often under-age) for service in any army that conceived itself bound to righteousness.

  How did he live such a life, so hectic with public concern, while preoccupying himself so fully with individual human beings: whose torments, never mind their singularity, he adopted as his own, with the passion that some give only to the universal? Eleanor Roosevelt, James Burnham once mused, looked on all the world as her personal slum project. Although he was at home with collectivist formulations, one had the impression of Allard Lowenstein that he might be late in aborting a Third World War—because of his absorption with the problems of one sophomore. Oh, they followed him everywhere; because we experienced in him the essence of an entirely personal dedication. Of all the partisans I have known, from the furthest steppes of the spectrum, his was the most undistracted concern, not for humanity—though he was conversant with big-think idiom—but with human beings.

  Those of us who dealt with him (often in those narrow passages constrained by time-clocks and fire-laws and deadlines) think back ruefully on the happy blend of purpose and carelessness with which he arranged his own career and his own schedule. A poet might be tempted to say, “If only the Lord had granted us that Allard should also have arrived late at his own assassination!”

  But all his life he was felled by mysteries, dominant among them those most readily understood by more worldly men—namely, that his rhythms were not of this world. His days, foreshortened, lived out the secular dissonances. “Behold, Thou hast made my days as it were a span long: and mine age is even as nothing in respect of Thee; and verily every man living is altogether vanity.” The psalmist spoke of Al, on Friday last—“I became dumb, and opened not my mouth; for it was Thy doing.” To those not yet dumb, the psalmist also spoke, saying, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; and those who are crushed in spirit. He saves.” Who was the wit who said that Nature abhors a vacuum? Let Nature then fill this vacuum. That is the challenge which, bereft, the friends of Allard Lowenstein hurl up to Nature, and to Nature’s God, prayerfully, demandingly, because today. Lord, our loneliness is great.

  For six weeks each year, Pat and Bill Buckley decamped to their chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland, where WFB would knock out one of his spy thrillers between skiing runs and dinners with friends. The Buckleys’ Swiss social circle overlapped with their New York set, but Gstaad and the friends who vacationed there annually, as the Buckleys did, held special significance for them. One such friend, on the slopes and for hours on end in the converted playroom where WFB set up a painting studio, was the Scottish-born actor and novelist David Niven. A veteran of the British Army in World War II, Niven was slight of build and dashing of mustache, good company and a lively wit. He appeared in more than 100 plays and films, including Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), Separate Tables (1958)—for which Niven won the Academy Award for best actor—Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960), The Guns of Navarone (1961), Casino Royale (1967), and several installments of the Pink Panther franchise. Niven also published two best-selling memoirs of Hollywood’s Golden Age, The Moon’s a Balloon (1971) and Bring on the Empty Horses (1975), the latter of which, in a New York Times review, WFB hailed as “a masterful self-portrait.” Across two decades of friendship, Buckley delighted in Niven’s storytelling. In a 1991 article on gift giving published in Playboy, WFB recounted the tale Niven told of a 1940s Christmas spent, as a recent widower, sharing an apartment with fellow Hollywood star Errol Flynn, a recent divorcé. As the holiday approached, the two decided not to open the pile of wrapped gifts they had received but to replace each label and card addressed to them with one from them to another recipient. “A tidy operation,” WFB wrote, “except that [MGM studio chief] L. B. Mayer received from Flynn a silver cigarette case on which was engraved, TO DAVID NIVEN, FROM HIS DEAR FRIEND, L. B. MAYER.” For his eulogy, published as a column and again in National Review, WFB drew heavily on an earlier essay, about ten of his best friends; the portion of that essay relating to Niven is reprinted here in its entirety.

  Excerpted from “10 Friends,” Forbes FYI, September 2000.

  The first time….On the telephone was John Kenneth Galbraith. He had under his wing Jacqueline Kennedy, who was trying to get a week’s vacation, skiing. It had been more than three years since the assassination but she was followed everywhere and now Professor Galbraith had undertaken her protection, and looked out, too, for her social life. Did I want to join them for dinner at the chalet of David Niven and his wife Hjordis?

  That’s when I met him. He was a radiant host, attentive to every need and whim; indeed after a while my wife (who became, arguably, his closest friend) suspected that his magic was to induce a whim, so that he could gratify it. What Jackie most needed, during that extended period of shock, was to laugh. Making people laugh was a specialty of his. I remember the evening with him years later in Monaco. We’d have drinks in the palace with Prince Rainier and then dinner at a restaurant as guests of David Niven.

  There was one problem. We had hit Rainier in one of his grumpy moods. That kind of situation was, for old friend and neighbor David Niven, a challenge.

  Waiting for the first course to arrive, David launched into an autobiographical account of his seduction at age fifteen by an accomplished lady of the night. He imitated sundry accents. The words spoken were lightly ribald, amusing, evocative. Before the second course was served, the prince was a rollicking companion. In Niven’s company, nobody had a chance to live very long as a wallflower.

  He continued, in the eighteen years of our friendship, to make movies, of uneven quality, but his life was heavily involved in domestic traffic. He would drive his two little girls to school and bring them back to their chalet after skiing in the late morning. Every two or three days he would come to our place, with its huge playroom, one half of it my writing quarters, the other half an improvised studio built around a ping-pong table.

  He was greatly skilled, and seldom spoke during the hour or two he devoted to the canvas at hand. His six paintbrushes were carefully positioned in his left hand. He washed and cleaned them meticulously and proudly recalled that he had bought them in his earliest days in Hollywood, even before his first wife was killed in that crazy accident playing hide-and-seek. In the last winter he came over to paint more frequently, because what he mostly didn’t want, at that point, was to have to talk: His disease (Lou Gehrig’s) was creeping up on him and it was a strain to talk through its strangulations. He would just come, set up his paints and leave after about an hour because, he explained to me, the turpentine fumes soon overcame him.

  I remember one afternoon, coming back from skiing to go to work. He was there with his paintbrushes and hailed me. He wanted to tell me something.

  His face choked up with laughter. It was hard to make out what he was saying, but I managed. He had been in his car when stopped by the red light in Gstaad. An old friend who knew nothing about the illness was coincidentally stopped opposite him, headed in the other direction.

  He leaned out the window. “What have you got?” h
e asked David.

  “I tried to get out to him,” he had a problem with the words, “that I had amytrophic lateral sclerosis. He could hear me well enough but couldn’t make out what I said. He yelled back just as the light changed. ‘Oh? Well I’ve got a Lamborghini 500S!’ ” It hurt David to laugh, and that was the truly unbearable burden.

  The most overlooked figure in the story of William F. Buckley—his way with words, his good looks, his multimedia celebrity, the long reach of his influence—was Warren Steibel: producer of virtually every episode of Firing Line. From my 2000 interview:

  ROSEN: Which was more important in advancing conservatism, and bringing it to where it is today: the forming of National Review or Firing Line?

  WFB: Well, there’s an eleven-year difference. National Review began in 1955, Firing Line in 1966. I think that Firing Line had enormous influence in suggesting to people—who were alert to the question—that liberals weren’t simply dispositively correct on all issues, because they all appeared on Firing Line and were contested. Now it had, of course, a much, much larger audience, television does, than a magazine. But probably the staying power of an essay in a magazine, or a column every week for a few years, has a greater resonance. It’s an interesting question; I’ve never pondered it before.

  The fact that Buckley couldn’t rule out that Firing Line was his most influential vehicle spoke to the centrality of Steibel to his life. Peers in age, the two were otherwise a study in opposites: Where WFB was Catholic, conservative, lean, elegant, and patrician, Steibel was Jewish, liberal, pudgy, and volatile. What they shared was a love of laughter and a commitment to high standards. Where WFB’s aim was ideological, Steibel’s was to produce good TV—and each reveled in the other’s contribution to the winning alchemy that made Firing Line an Emmy winner and the longest-running single-host talk show in TV history (1966–1999). For Steibel that meant booking interesting guests; lighting, wiring, and shooting them correctly; fostering lively discussion; and—it must be said—herding cats, of which the largest, and dearest to the producer, was the host. How poorer we are for the absence of a Steibel memoir! That the man who knew most intimately how Bill Buckley approached the making of thirty years of iconic television never talked about it, never wrote an account of it, leaves Firing Line at once the most public and well-documented segment of WFB’s professional life and the most obscure and unchronicled. Theirs was a genial two-man conspiracy, a long-running buddy movie that was equal parts Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Odd Couple. The closing lines of this brief yet deeply moving eulogy show how hard WFB took the loss.

  “Warren Steibel, R.I.P.”

  National Review, January 28, 2002.

  Warren Steibel, producer, friend, character, died on January 3 in New York Hospital after a miserable week. The cause of death was cancer.

  Warren’s offices were at National Review, an arrangement that began when he took over the production of Firing Line, a few months after its launching in April 1966. Neal Freeman, sometime Washington correspondent for NR, had at age 24 acted as de facto producer, but left town to work out his destiny in Washington, where he thrives. Steibel, age 40—disheveled, corpulent, dogged in his views about how the program should be produced—came to us after having done work with Andy Rooney at CBS, as also with others at NBC and ABC. Firing Line was still something of a problematic enterprise—its original commission, by RKO, had been for 13 weeks, and it was running on its second or third renewal when Steibel took it over.

  That seems many years ago, because it was. Warren had produced a movie, The Honeymoon Killers, which is now recognized as something of an art classic. He took time, that summer of 1966, to do an hour’s documentary featuring Nancy Reagan, whose husband was running for governor of California. In the ensuing 35 years, he dabbled in sundry enterprises, but until Firing Line ended, with the millennium, he gave it most of his time. After we closed shop, he continued his fascination for exchanges of opinion with a program called DebatesDebates, the singular feature of which is the absence of a referee. His manner, in approaching guests to appear, was forthright. I don’t really know at first hand what techniques he used over the telephone, but it seemed to me that everyone whose last name was other than Kennedy or Rockefeller acceded to his invitations, or importunities. He was unique, and unforgettable; stern as regarded duties, but enormously thoughtful in small ways (he never made me appear at the studio more than 15 minutes before air time). He made thorough and fruitful use of his assistants, first Paul Sweeney and then George Kahookele. Every now and then he had a quite extraordinary fit of temper, one of which, coming in in medias res, I witnessed, wondering that the object of it would ever speak to him again, let alone continue to work with him.

  But everybody stayed friends with Warren Steibel. His extravagant kindnesses, his comprehensive seizures of laughter, his love of the races and of the casinos, of music and opera, roped everybody in. He liked to tell journalists (he won an Emmy award for Firing Line) that he was a dedicated liberal, notwithstanding his prolonged exposures to alien thought (1,504 episodes of Firing Line, 45 Firing Line debates). I never challenged him (or cared, really). I was never entirely convinced that his liberalism was anything more than attitudinal.

  What mattered was the sense of substance one had in associating with him. His was a very large presence, and when he died, there was stillness at National Review that day, the measure of a true sense of loss.

  In July 1972, a writer named Charles Wallen debuted in NR with an article titled “Hoffa—Baptized,” arguing that the civil rights of former Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa had been “trampled all over” by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and that the restrictive terms President Nixon set when he commuted Hoffa’s prison sentence in December 1971—forbidding him from engaging in any union activities until 1980—were “cruel and unusual.” The article’s byline noted only that its author “has been in the trucking business for thirty-five years.” How did such a person, his background so unusual for an opinion journal, come to write for National Review? The previous year, Wallen had met WFB during the latter’s visit to San Francisco for a speech before bank executives; their friendship would extend twenty-six years, until Wallen’s death. It took the form of infrequent get-togethers, WFB’s gift to the older man of a dog, and a correspondence so regular, extensive, and heartfelt, so marked by what WFB called “Biblical lyricism,” that it plunges the reader—even when sampled in small doses, as in WFB’s eulogy—into melancholy. It is noteworthy that Buckley accepts the description of himself as Wallen’s “best friend” without any nod toward reciprocity; however, the length and tone of the eulogy surely reflect WFB’s love for the man, and equally noteworthy is that it is the loss of Wallen that sets Buckley to ruminating, for the first time, on his reasons for publishing eulogies of personal friends unknown to the general public: namely, to wring “catharsis” from “pain.”

  “Charles Wallen, RIP”

  National Review, January 26, 1998.

  Most of our friends aren’t listed in directories that record eminence. When the loss is of a public figure, public attention is expected, and obituaries are published and read. But of course the pain is no less when the death is that of a personal and private friend. Then there is no catharsis, no public or semipublic mourning, no public tributes. The consolation, in this corner of National Review, is the accessibility of this page. I have treated it, over the years, most exploitatively—as something akin to personal property; yet always aware that its longevity depends entirely on its capacity to engage your interest. From time to time I use my half-acre of space to recall a friendship purely personal, as I do now, on learning of the death of Charles Wallen, Jr.

  Three days after he died I had a letter from Bill Gillen, of Novato, California, whom I’ve never met. He wrote of his own grief and added, “I am writing to you because I know you were his best friend, and I know that because he told me so in his last letter.”

  It was so, I am honored to
reflect. Charles died at seventy-seven in San Mateo, just out from San Francisco; silver-haired, slightly stooped, quick to laugh and smile, engrossed in whatever book he was reading. When did we meet?

  I was thinking this morning about one of your trips to San Francisco in 1971…26 years ago. I had joined you in your suite at the St. Francis Hotel and you had been engaged to speak before a meeting of Bank of America employees and there were several hundred of them there….Then we went on to Trader Vic’s and had a happy lunch. Memories—memories—you have provided me with so many happy memories over the years.

  Charles Wallen was a purebred American whose interests were books, letters, and friends. He spent the great body of his time reading and rereading his books, which he stored in the huge cellar in his house in Millbrae, overlooking the airport at San Francisco and the surrounding hills and mountains. He was born in Tennessee, wandered about the country, and settled down for most of his professional life in San Francisco as a minor executive in a trucking company. His friends never knew what exactly he did for the DiSalvo Company, and we assumed, I’d guess correctly, that DiSalvo was not much more for him than the office where he worked to provide for his wife and three sons and to gain the leisure time to read his books and write his letters to his friends.

  He wrote tenaciously, but I have to suppose that he wrote most often to me, as the laws of time & space make it unlikely that there are others who received two or three letters from Charles Wallen every week for 27 years. And this on top of the memoirs he began a few years ago. “The narrative goes on now way beyond the 1,214,000 words I mentioned to you last month….” That would be about three times the length of Gone with the Wind.