Wry Martinis

by Christopher Buckley

  Many years later, while staying at a splendid, multistarred Caribbean resort that caters to the well-heeled, I fell to talking with one of its employees in a bar off premises. After a couple of rum tonics he loosened up sufficiently to tell some delicious out-of-school stories. Quite a few people, he said, bring their mistresses there. In some cases, they like it so much they return with their wives. To avoid embarrassment, the hotel discreetly puts in the computer record of such clients the letters DNR, standing for “Do Not Recognize.”

  “Last month,” the employee chuckled, “one of the staff really messed up really good. At check-in, he said to the guest, standing there with his wife, ‘Good to see you again, Mr. Jones!’ ”

  His warm and hearty Caribbean welcome turned Mr. Jones’s week in paradise into twenty-four hours of inferno. Mrs. Jones demanded a separate suite, at a cost of thousands per day. And this was only the beginning of Mr. Jones’s pecuniary woes. The next day she chartered the most expensive plane she could to come and pick her up, and flew back into the arms of New York’s most expensive divorce lawyer, resulting in the eventual reduction of Mr. Jones’s net worth by half. I wondered if upon check-out the cashier chirruped pleasantly to Mr. Jones, “We hope you enjoyed your stay with us!”

  What is it about hotels that invites people to indulge the lesser angels of our nature? John Belushi ate and snorted himself to death in L.A.’s tony Chateau Marmont. Margaret Sullavan committed suicide at the Hotel Taft in New Haven, where my own mother stayed during the senior prom. Every day it seems you pick up the paper to read that some rock star or tormented Hollywood bohunk has trashed, torched, or in some cases, utterly demolished his hotel room. Is it the rootless loneliness of finding themselves, yet again, in a hotel room? Is this reason enough to set fire to the carpet and hurl the television out the window?

  Yet even quite respectable, stable types do strange things in hotels. Some years ago I was on a swing through Europe with then-Vice President Bush. There were eighty or so of us in the entourage, staffers and Secret Service, and we were installed in the Hotel Crillon, one of the great hotels of the world, right there in the center of Paris on the Place de la Concorde. What a jewel it was. I was a lowly speechwriter, but my room seemed grand enough to have been used by a minister negotiating the charter for the League of Nations, which happened right there.

  I took a long hot shower in the marmoreal immensity of the bathroom; turned off the water and reached for a towel. No towel. Odd. I looked about. Nothing, nowhere. Not so much as a hanky. Grumbling and rehearsing my outrage in rusty French, I dripped my way to the phone and gave the housekeeping staff to understand that this was an affront not merely to me, but to the dignity of the United States of America.

  A few minutes later I was brought a towel by a distinctly unapologetic maid. A single towel, not even a big towel, barely enough to dry my delicates, and this in a hotel known—esteemed throughout the monde—for its huge, fluffy, monogrammed terry cloth bathrobes.

  I sat down moistly to see if I could work in a caustic aside about the Crillon’s lack of towels in the vice president’s speech about deploying Pershing missiles. But as a procession of damp and disgruntled White House personnel came through the staff room it transpired that every single member of the VP’s entourage had met with the same, towelless fate. This was no casual negligence.

  Eventually we learned that a month earlier, Secretary of State George Shultz had been through the Crillon with his staff. In the best tradition of maintaining good relations with the allies, they had looted the Crillon of monogrammed terrycloth robes, towels and other absorbent mementoes. Indeed, said one of my colleagues, who had dried himself with toilet paper, patches of which still clung wetly to his neck, it was a wonder they had not made off with the drapes.

  Other than that the Crillon was the kind of hotel that makes la vie en roads tolerable, even worth it. Perhaps if he’d checked out for the last time there, O’Neill wouldn’t have been so bitter, though his last words would probably have been less piquant. “Where are the Goddamn towels?” doesn’t quite have the same éclat.

  —Forbes FYI, 1996

  Babes

  Mom,

  Fashíon Icon

  I wasn’t aware that my mother was much different from other mothers until one day at boarding school, when I was fourteen. It was the Monday after Parents’ Weekend. One of the older boys said to me, in front of some other older boys, “Hey, Buckley, your mother’s a piece of ass.”

  I stood there with my face burning, trying to figure out what, exactly, the correct response was. I wasn’t even sure that what he had said was an insult. There was no higher accolade at Portsmouth Abbey School, Hormone High, circa 1967, than “piece of ass.” But when it was applied to one’s mother it had the whiff of fightin’ words. The ensuing scuffle was over in five seconds, with me on my back on the floor and the older boy kneeling on my chest, explaining that what he’d been referring to was “her clothes.”

  Further evidence that my mother was different came from the school switchboard operator—a fat, gossipy woman who regularly pored over the “Suzy Says” society column in the News. “Your mutha went to a big party last night for Walter Cronkite!” she would yell out into the crowded mailbox room as I tried to disappear. “She wore an Eves Saint Lawrent dress! Musta cost a fortune!”

  It was around then that the phrase “the chic and stunning Mrs. William F. Buckley” entered my family’s life. Typically, my mother would use it when she was coming in from the garden—dirty, in jeans and a black T-shirt, her hair pulled back, no makeup. “So much for the chic and stunning Mrs. Buckley,” she would say to the house guests.

  “Where did that phrase originate?” I asked her a few weeks ago. We were having lunch at an expensive Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. She was wearing a knockout Oscar de la Renta beige suit, pale stockings, bone-colored pumps, huge costume-gold bracelets and ear-rings. Her hair was freshly coiffed. She had on makeup.

  She didn’t remember, except to say that she was pretty sure it hadn’t come from Women’s Wear Daily, the trade journal that, along with its glossy cousin, W, has been covering her intensively for the last quarter century or so. (Headline, 1977: “AN ORIGINAL: PAT BUCKLEY”; 1985: “THE POWER OF PAT.”) In 1975, two years after she first made the best-dressed list, the Times headline read, “BEST-DRESSED PATRICIA BUCKLEY: PROUDER OF ROLE AS HOUSEWIFE.”

  “This linguine,” she pronounced, “is inedible.” I had to keep coaxing her back onto the topic of fashion throughout the lunch. She kept getting off it, giving me new recipes. “Oh,” she interrupted herself at one point in the midst of a discussion of French versus American designers. “I have made the most extraordinary discovery. Knorr fish stock. It comes in cubes, like bouillon. It has changed my life.”

  Chic and stunning, I pressed.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Probably in. ‘Suzy’ Call Aileen. She’ll know. Your father has invited sixty-two people to this concert Friday. Where am I supposed to seat them all—on my lap?”

  Eventually we decided that it was Suzy. There was another phrase much in Suzy’s repertoire then: “belle poitrine.” As in, “Mrs. Buckley, of the belle poitrine.” For years, I laughed along with it; then, one day in French class, we got to body parts, and I discovered it meant “great tits.”

  Over the linguine alle vongole (which I found quite good), we did a sort of Recherché du Hemlines Perdu, going back over all the different fashion phases she has gone through. For the last twenty years or so, it’s been mostly Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta, with a little Donna Karan, Isaac Mizrahi, and Calvin Klein thrown in. Before the era of Blass and de la Renta, there was the era of caftans (the mid-seventies), and, before that, maxis. (Never midis: “that ugly creation,” she told the press at the time.) Before that—the sixties now—there was her “Native American period. Beaded headbands, long buckskin skirts, high boots. There is no broth in this pasta at all. Big silver jewelry. If I was feeling particularl
y frivolous, a feather. I loved Mary Quant. When was she? I fell for her clothes in a big way. I think I started wearing short skirts before almost anybody, mainly because of my beauteous legs. Who wants to read this kind of crap? Does yours have any broth? The mid-sixties, Pucci. All my bathing suits, pants, tops were Pucci.” And back in the fifties, before her New York life began—before she had friends named Nan, Mica, Jerome, Chessy, Estée, Slim, Rocky, and Pano—she was a suburban Connecticut car-pooling housewife and mom. “Classy country clothes, probably from Lord & Taylor. But I always had my sort of hooker side at night.”

  Who taught her about fashion?

  “Me. I think I’ve always had an eye. For my own kind of style. Mind you,” she added heavily, “there have been many mistakes made.”

  This part took no coaxing. She relishes stories in which she is the figure of run. “About four years ago. It was a Blass, made like an Austrian shade, all wired and pleated. When I was having my fitting, no one said, ‘Sit down.’ The minute I went out in it, I sat down, and the whole thing came up over my head. People were in total hysteria. I had to stand up to eat.”

  She went on, “Bill Blass was the first designer I took very seriously. I adored him. It was because I became enamored of—how would you call it?—the classic American look with a tweak to it. Maybe ‘tweak’ isn’t the right word. There’s a certain casualness, but there ain’t no grunge there. Have you seen the latest Chanel outfits? Please. Bill is a classic American designer. He never loses sight of taste. I didn’t mean ‘tweak,’ I meant ‘twist.’ A little added … If he’s dressing you somberly, there’s always something to take the somber out of it. And his evening clothes are very romantic.”

  My mother’s parents were Canadian. Her mother was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba; her father was from Toronto. They lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, where my mother was born and reared. Her father was a mountainous, gruff self-made man who at various times made his money in timber, cattle, gold mines, oil, gas, and racehorses. His name was Austin Taylor; his wife’s name was Kathleen. She had soft Irish skin, beautiful red hair, a great, matronly bosom. She was called Babe. They were always well turned out, in a classic sort of way, but they never would have thought of themselves as fashionable.

  “One time,” she said, “the Province or the Sun ran a picture of Daddy on the front page and the caption underneath said, ‘Sartorial Gem.’ He was in such a rage that he went out to the farm and stayed there for three days.”

  I think this is where her profound ambivalence about the big-city part of her life comes from. Many times, I’ve heard her describe herself as “a simple country girl from a frontier town in British Columbia, whom my father named after his favorite hunting dog.” To put it politely, this is total bullshit. There is nothing simple about my mother, and it’s been a long time since she left Vancouver. The part about being named for a springer spaniel may be true. But something in her upbringing—I can hear my grandmother’s voice admonishing her (“Pat!”), and even when she was in her late thirties I noticed that she wouldn’t smoke in front of her father—has kept her grounded throughout many a New York vanity bonfire.

  In 1975, Enid Nemy wrote in The New York Times:

  Sometimes she describes herself as a jolly green giant. Other times, she thinks she looks like a pregnant stork. She hates shopping, and her closets wouldn’t give anyone an inferiority complex.… She likes fashion, but it isn’t a passion. It’s more in the nature of an evanescent flirtation, fun when there is nothing else to do. In Mrs. Buckley’s case, there’s something else to do most of the time.

  From her mother, she inherited civic-mindedness. In Stamford, when she wasn’t carpooling, it was the Junior League. In New York she got involved with the Institute for Reconstructive Plastic Surgery, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and, more recently, St. Vincent’s Hospital, the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, and many other institutions. The “most of the time” referred to above is spent taking care of my father—a job that would keep all of Brigham Young’s twenty-seven wives busy. “I guess the only thing I really do well is run a house,” she once told a reporter. That is complete bullshit, but she has the gift of self-deprecation.

  My father has the fashion sense of a Romanian country-parish priest, but he appreciates beauty on a woman, and has always done his best to be encouraging. When she made the Best Dressed Hall of Fame, the Valhalla of Seventh Avenue, he called me up to tell me, “Be sure to make a fuss. This is apparently a very big deal.” I called her and made a big fuss. She changed the subject, if memory serves, to the dog’s bladder infection.

  Does my father still make a fuss?

  “Yes. I don’t understand why the food is this way. I had exactly the same thing here last week, and it was delicious. Whenever I come out in a new dress, he always makes a point of saying, ‘A new dress. I think it’s absolutely divine.’ The other day, I came out in a fifteen-year-old Madame Grès, and he said, ‘Ducky, that’s absolutely divine. Who is it—Bill or Oscar?’ He’d seen it twenty times.”

  At last, she is slightly warming to the subject. She likes fashion more than she will admit. Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta are two of her best friends. At some point in the late seventies, their photographs, framed in silver, turned up on her crowded bibelot tables. For more than thirty years, she has been very close to Nan Kempner, whom she calls “probably the best-dressed woman I know.”

  Yes, thank you, she’s finished with the linguine alle vongole. “Fashion is fun. As long as you don’t embarrass your husband. I remember last year coming down the staircase at the apartment in an outfit that I thought was absolutely, startlingly gorgeous, and your father said, ‘You look absolutely gorgeous. Where’s the rest of the dress?’ It was up to the kazoo. Don’t use the word ‘kazoo.’ ”

  Another time: “I remember it was a Victorian show, and Blaine”—Blaine Trump—“got herself rigged out in some fancy-dandy outfit, and I was standing with Robert”—Blaine’s husband—“and some other man. Blaine was wandering around in bustles and furbelows and God knows what, and this man said, ‘My God, did you get a load of that?’ And Robert said, ‘I not only got a load of it, I’m married to it.’

  “Espresso, please. I won’t tell you what designer it was, but I went about a year ago to order my fall outfits down on Seventh Avenue, and out comes this dress with cutouts here.” She points to just below her still-belle poitrine. “Black velvet, with net. And I said, ‘My God, I think I’m too old for this.’ And the designer said, ‘But Brooke Astor’s just ordered it in four different colors.’ Do you want dessert? I really shouldn’t. I can’t fit into any of my clothes.”

  I have been hearing her say this since the mid-nineteen-fifties, when my memory began.

  “The Italians are not good at pastries. Do you want more cappuccino? I don’t know what else to tell you about fashion. Except what I’d really like to do. My wildest fantasy would be to dress like Cher.”

  Pat!

  “Just dreams one has. Although, much as I’d like to go around looking like Cher, I can’t. Why? Well, Cher and I, shall we say, share different ages. No no no, this is my treat. Where are my glasses? I can no longer see anything. You’ll have to calculate the tip. I’m sorry it was so dreadful. It must not be their regular chef. I’m sure all this will be riveting. Just remember that I never take myself seriously about fashion. In fact, I never take myself seriously at all. Given my taste in clothes, I’ll probably come back as RuPaul.”

  —The New Yorker, 1994

  Really

  Something

  If the end of George Bush’s presidency marks a generational shift in American politics—the last time the office will be held by someone who fought in the Second World War—his mother’s death could be said to mark the passing of an American era, all the more poignantly for her having died so close to the precise moment when the baton was passed. Dorothy Walker Bush died at her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, just after five o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, No
vember 19th. She was ninety-one years old. Since Mr. Bush had lost the election little more than two weeks earlier, it was not surprising that he should say, when he spoke to us by telephone from Camp David the day before the funeral, “Well, it’s been a kind of emotional time for all of us.”

  Much has been said and written about the way young George Bush strove to live up to his father, the late Senator Prescott Bush. Yet, by all accounts, Dorothy Bush was a much more dominant force in his life. Barbara Bush once told an interviewer that her mother-in-law had “ten times” the influence on her son that his father had.

  Dorothy Bush was the daughter of Loulie Wear Walker and of George Herbert Walker, a well-to-do Midwestern investment banker named for the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet and Anglican priest George Herbert. She grew up in St. Louis and attended finishing school at the Farmington School Academy, in Connecticut. At Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1921, she married Prescott Bush, a handsome young Yale man, who went on to become a partner in Wall Street’s extension of Skull and Bones—Brown Brothers, Harriman & Company—and, in 1952, United States senator from Connecticut. She reared four sons and a daughter, was active in civic and volunteer work, excelled at sports and games, and divided her time—as they say of those who have more than one house—between Greenwich, Kennebunkport, and Jupiter Island, in Florida. She was a matriarchal American aristocrat.

  The impulse toward what her president son once referred to as “noblesse noblige” came, perhaps, from her faith. Her father was an Episcopalian, her mother a Presbyterian. She herself was an Episcopalian—indeed, so much of one that the designation “Anglican” seems almost more appropriate. Dorothy Bush was a deeply religious woman, and she read from the Bible to her children every morning of their young lives. Two days before the funeral, Jonathan Bush, the president’s younger brother, recalled, “She went through life with Dad and Christ. Those were her two great companions, and she believed that all things were possible with prayer.”