But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  Then, always too soon for me, it was time to go. These partings wrenched, for a full year might pass before I saw my cousins again. The good-byes in the crepuscular gloom of late November afternoons were, I now understand, rehearsals for later, more final, partings.

  —Boston, October 2002

  HOW TO BREAK INTO THE MOVIES IN ONLY TWELVE YEARS

  The Wall Street Journal reported a while back that Tom Clancy went as ballistic as a Red October submarine because—brace yourself—the director filming one of Mr. Clancy’s novels placed a reef in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, for reasons of plot.

  My first reaction was that this was surely so much Sturm und Drang in a teacup. But then I realized I was only being churlish. And worse, jealous. I had just recently gotten word that one of my novels had run aground—yet again—on a reef somewhere in Hollywood. It had been languishing nearly a decade in what is euphemistically called “development hell.”

  The novel was called Thank You for Smoking. Mel Gibson had optioned the rights to it in 1993, before it was published. It would be more accurate to say—as we Hollywood types do—that “Mel’s people” had optioned it.

  Mel’s people couldn’t have been nicer. In our first phone call, they could barely contain their enthusiasm. “This will be Mel’s next movie. Absolutely.” This was an assertion I would hear many times over the coming decade. Eventually the thrill somewhat wore off.

  The problem, see, was that Mel and his people got themselves hopelessly sidetracked with two absurd and inconsequential projects. One was called Braveheart—I’m told that it sank without a trace at the box office. What was the name of the other? . . . The Passion of the Christ. Another commercial stinkeroo. Crater City.

  I felt sorry for Mel, but at the same time couldn’t help thinking, You have only yourself to blame, my friend. We never actually met, but as an honorary Mel person, I feel justified calling him “friend.” The real tragedy, of course, is that if we actually had become friends, I might have been able to stop him getting into the car that night and getting arrested for driving while anti-Semitic.

  So on reconsideration, I now feel Mr. Clancy’s pain over that reef-mad director. Really, the gall of these so-called auteurs. Philistines. Let’s hope he never gets to direct Proust’s Remembrance of Time Past. He’d probably put a reef in the Seine next to the Ile de la Cité.

  The Wall Street Journal article used the occasion of this artistic outrage to examine other books that were turned into movies. Remember Louis L’Amour, the great western novelist? L’Amour was the real deal, one of the most successful writers of his day. The Journal noted that he wrote more than one hundred books, of which nearly fifty—fifty!—were sold to the movies. One of the first was a western titled The Broken Gun. When it arrived on the big screen it was called Cancel My Reservation and starred Bob Hope.

  Unlike Mr. Clancy, Mr. L’Amour was philosophical about it all. He just shrugged. He likened the process to selling a house to a new owner. The new owner, he said, had every right to redecorate. Take the money and let it go.

  Ernest Hemingway, a writer of no small ego, was so embittered by his experiences with Hollywood that he formulated what could be called Hemingway’s Rule for Dealing with those Celluloid SOBs. It goes like this: You drive your car up to the California state line. Take your manuscript out of the car. Make them throw the money across first. Toss them the manuscript, get back in the car, and drive back east as fast as you can.

  I had pretty much given up all hope of Smoking ever being made. Mel and his people seemed hell-bent on their economically suicidal obsession to make a movie about some minor fracas in Palestine two thousand years ago.

  And then one day I got a call from a twenty-four-year-old named Jason Reitman. He said, “I’m the guy they hired to f— up your book.” He had me at hello.

  Jason had not only read the book, but had also written a screenplay on spec (i.e., without commission). He sent it to Mel over the transom.

  A few weeks later, Jason’s phone rang. It was—Mel! Calling from his private jet. (Presumably while flying from the Braveheart bankruptcy hearing to the Passion of the Christ bankruptcy hearing.) Mel told Jason that his script was “brilliant.” That it was exactly the script he’d been hoping for all these years. They would make the movie together. Absolutely. And that was the last Jason ever heard from Mel.

  Some years passed after my call from Jason. Then one day a friend of mine from my White House days rang.

  “There’s this guy I know from Stanford Business School,” he said. “He became chief operating officer of something called PayPal, which was sold to eBay for one-point-four billion. Now he wants to get into moviemaking and really wants to make Thank You for Smoking. Would it be okay if he called you?”

  I told my friend that my rule has always been to accept phone calls from people worth some portion of $1.4 billion and who want to turn one of my novels into a movie.

  David Sacks called the next day. I said I was tickled and please, be my guest. But I said he must first call Mel’s people. And so David spent the year and a half on the phone with Mel’s people trying to wrestle back the rights.

  Mel’s people explained that they had spent vast sums developing it, paying endless screenwriters to write unusable adaptations. Then there were all the Fed Exes and the photocopying and coffee and electricity and feeding the parking meter and the mocha frappuccinos and wheatgrass smoothies and cosmetic surgeries and all the rest. (In Hollywood this is called “overhead.”) David told me that they seemed to be under the impression that he had pocketed the entire $1.4 billion himself.

  They weren’t being greedy. No, no. That doesn’t happen in Hollywood. As David saw it, deep down they didn’t want to sell it because—what if they did and David and Jason made it into a good movie? Mel would look like a schmuck. And if there’s one thing Mel hates, it’s looking like a schmuck. (Too Jewish.)

  To make a long story slightly less long, David deployed all the skills he’d learned at Stanford Biz. And what do you know, he did it. He got the rights back.

  Time went by, as time does. Nothing. I went back to assuming nothing would ever happen. Then one day I got an e-mail from a Washington friend who’d moved to Park City, Utah, to become a masseuse. The e-mail said, “Hey, great news about Aaron Eckhart!”

  I wrote back, “What news about Aaron Eckhart?”

  She e-mailed back: “He’s been cast in the lead in your movie.”

  Shortly later arrived an e-mail from David: “Pigs are flying, snowballs are forming in hell! Thank You for Smoking is finally in production!”

  Each day brought more cool news. They’d signed Rob Lowe. Robert Duvall. Sam Elliott. Katie Holmes (much in the news then, what with her fiancé Tom Cruise leaping up and down on Oprah’s couch). Maria Bello. William Macy. Actors of the first caliber. I was impressed.

  I serially relayed these names to my teenage children. They were . . . politely enthusiastic. That’s nice, Dad. (Yawn.) Until another e-mail arrived, announcing that someone named Adam Brody had been cast. Upon hearing this, my sixteen-year-old daughter, Caitlin, began to hyperventilate. In the medical sense.

  “Adam Brody?! Oh my God. Oh. My. God. Adam Brody!”

  I had to look him up. He was in a TV show called The O.C.

  A year later, I found myself at a dinner at the Toronto Film Festival sitting next to Adam Brody. One of the nicest young men I have ever met. Gracious, poised, natural, unassuming.

  I told him how my Caitlin had ho-hummed at the names of the other cast members but that his had caused a call to 911. He smiled self-effacingly. He’d heard it before, surely.

  I am by nature reticent. I would sooner chew off my right arm at the elbow than accost a celebrity or ask for an autograph. It took three martinis to screw up the courage. I reached into my pocket for my cell phone.

  “I . . . don’t suppose . . . ?” He nodded, sure.

  I dialed and got Cat’s voice mail. My heart sank like a Tom Clancy submar
ine. But it turned out even better, for now Cat could play the message for her friends: “Hi, Cat, this is Adam Brody. I’m just calling to say hi.” God bless him, he did not add, “Your dad is drunk and totally annoying.”

  So it was all worth it in the end, even if it took twelve years. Sometime later, at one of the movie events, I was prattling on to an industry person about how Hollywood had certainly taken its time making the movie, blah blah blah. (Looking back, I wonder: Was this an unconscious attempt to bore him in just the right way?)

  He listened patiently, then said with perfect deadpan, “It took over a hundred years to turn Moby-Dick into a movie.”

  To which all I could think to say was “Good point.”

  —Time, March 2006

  INTO THIN HAIR

  You need to do something when you turn fifty. What made me think this was losing three friends in the space of one month: one to AIDS, one to cancer, another to Lou Gehrig’s disease. The eldest of these sweet souls was fifty years old. And now, weirdly, sadly, as I type these words, comes the phone call that my cousin Lee has died. She was fifty-one.

  My father celebrated his demicentennial by sailing a schooner across the broad Atlantic. One friend of mine celebrated his by climbing the Grand Teton. Lacking a schooner and uneager to dangle from rocks, I sought a kinder, gentler way of marking the occasion.

  Mulling this, I came across a piece in The New York Times about hiking the Tour Monte Rosa: a roughly eighty-kilometer oval trek around the Matterhorn. The article described how, with a bit of advance planning and a detour here and there, you could do the trek in comfort and style and not have to sleep in the spartan mountain huts alongside a lot of smelly Swedish backpackers. (As you approach fifty, other people’s sweat becomes less appealing.) It takes seven or eight days, with just one longish thirty-kilometer day. I wouldn’t return home with a tale to rival Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. But I would come back.

  I proposed to my friend and fellow soccer dad Elan that he come along. Elan is superb company and can say “My friend has fallen into a crevasse, please dispatch a rescue helicopter” in five languages. “Why not?” he said.

  We made multiple trips to the outfitters. I showed him the seven-dollar emergency space blanket that the prudent hiker brings along. He looked at me as if I had just presented him with a nuclear-biological-chemical-warfare suit.

  “You never know,” I said.

  I urged on him a headlamp.

  “Are we going mining?” he asked.

  “You never know.” I shrugged.

  When I showed him the collapsible walking sticks, he became convinced he was the victim in a bait-and-switch exercise. What next? Ropes and crampons? In fact, we would need those for the short schlepp across the glacier on the first day. I decided to let the guide explain about that when we got there.

  “Now,” I said, “you’ll want a knife.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve seen Deliverance, haven’t you? It’s even worse in the Alps.”

  Finally we arrived in Zermatt. There we arranged for the guide, bought more maps, entered emergency rescue numbers (Swiss and Italian) into Elan’s cell phone, immersed ourselves in local knowledge, packed and repacked our backpacks, bought energy bars and extra batteries for the GPS. I’d been practicing my GPS navigation all summer. A year after we had first discussed the idea, we were ready.

  The night before we were to set off, Elan announced, “I can’t feel anything in my big toe.” He said this was the familiar prelude to a spinal disc that periodically herniates. Manfully, he offered to press on with Plan A. I imagined the scene, somewhere at 10,000 feet along the Tour Monte Rosa, kneeling beside him as he was wrapped in his shiny space blanket like a ball park hot dog, telling him, “The radio says there’s a storm moving in, so the helicopters aren’t flying. Is the Advil working yet?” I imagined explaining to his wife and three children why I had crippled him for life with my insistence that we stick with Plan A.

  There are few crises that cannot be improved with multiple bottles of wine. So it was that we hatched Plan B: Stay in Zermatt, sleep late, hike by day, swim afterward at the health club, then sauna and steam, followed by leisurely dinners, followed by Armagnac and Cohibas and billiards. Wake up the next morning and do it all over again, for ten whole days. Plan B actually sounded pretty good.

  I hadn’t been to Zermatt in forty years. This is one disadvantage of being fifty: being able to say, “I haven’t been here in forty years.” To the pretty young women behind the desk at the Hotel Monte Rosa, I wittily said, “Why, you weren’t even born when I last stayed here!” Being professional, they reacted as if I had let loose an Oscar Wilde–level bon mot. This is one advantage of being fifty: young people humor you.

  The Hotel Monte Rosa has been around since 1855, when it belonged to a man named Alexander Seiler. It was from this hotel that the twenty-five-year-old Englishman Edward Whymper and his six companions set off, at 5:30 on the morning of July 13, 1865. (Not July 14, as the bronze plaque on the front of the hotel proclaims. But then, bronze typographical errors are expensive to correct.) Seven of them made it to the summit. It was the first successful ascent. Three of them made it back to Zermatt alive.

  In Whymper’s book, Scrambles Amongst the Alps, he describes the scene: “Seiler met me at his door, and followed in silence to my room. ‘What is the matter?’ ‘The Taugwalders and I have returned.’ He did not need more, and burst into tears; but lost no time in useless lamentations, and set to work to arouse the village.”

  Our rooms on the second floor had balconies with flowers and looked out onto the main square and the little splashing frog fountain across from the Grand Hotel Zermatterhof. If it hadn’t been for the casino they were building, I’d have been able to see the alpinists’ cemetery next to the church, where Michel Croz is buried. Croz was one of the men killed on the way down on July 14. I remember as a child standing in front of his gravestone and reading the inscription on it, marking

  the loss of a brave man, beloved by his comrades

  and esteemed by travelers. He perished not far from here,

  a man of stout heart, faithful guide

  It’s only a matter of time before they put slot machines and a craps table near the grave of a man like that. This is a disadvantage of turning fifty: coming back to a fairyland of your youth and finding that they’ve added a casino.

  But the Matterhorn has not changed. It still takes your breath away when on the train ride up into Zermatt you look out the window and bang, there it is, the world’s most recognizable mountain. Horace Bénédict de Saussure, a scientist and Alp-scrambler from Geneva, gave it its modern French name in 1789 when he crossed the St. Théodule pass into Zermatt and described in his book “the great and superb pyramid of Mont-Cervin which rises to an immense height in the form of a triangular obelisk of living rock, and which has the appearance of being carved by a chisel.”

  This living rock has killed almost three times more climbers than Everest, about five hundred, by one estimate. This sounds like a tragic accumulation, and of course it is, though the figure is equal to about five days of U.S. auto deaths.

  I remember as a child being fascinated by the mountain, by Whymper, by Gustave Doré’s engraving of the tragedy. I remember reading James Ramsey Ullman’s The White Tower under my blanket with a flashlight and seeing the movie Third Man on the Mountain. My dashing uncle Reid—a four-pack-a-day smoker at the time—actually climbed the mountain. One of the people in his group refused to leave the summit, and remained, a suicide.

  One day Elan and I were lying on our backs in the shale at the base of the mountain and looking up at the north face, thinking the identical thought (“No f— way”). Through binoculars, we made out two human flyspecks four-fifths of the way up, making their way to the top v-e-r-y slowly.

  Wandering amid the tombstones in the alpinists’ cemetery where the noble Croz was buried after they reassembled his remains, I came across the grave of a seventeen-y
ear-old from New York City. He was killed on the nearby Breithorn in 1975. His ice ax is mounted on his gravestone, along with the words I CHOSE TO CLIMB.

  Later that same day, as Elan and I strolled Zermatt’s main street, we heard the buzz of a helicopter. People craned their necks upward at the cliffs looming above the town. We watched a man being lowered by a cable from the helicopter 500 meters up and leap—leap—onto the cliff face, where, through binoculars, we made out three more bright dots clinging to the rock face. For the record, my tombstone will display not an ice ax but the TV remote control changer and the inscription I CHOSE NOT TO CLIMB.

  We did, on the other hand, choose to hike. Over ten days our aggregate came to 55 kilometers and 6,700 vertical meters. It doesn’t sound like much, but we returned sweaty every day. We calculated our vertical as amounting to about eighteen Empire State Buildings, which sounds a bit more impressive.

  The trails around Zermatt take you through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. To the little village of Zmutt, to the Schwarzee (Black Sea, an immodest name for the pond near the base of the Matterhorn), the Mettelhorn, the Gornergrat. Soon the click-clack of our collapsible walking sticks on the rock seemed as natural as breathing.

  One day we hiked up to Edelweiss (population: 2), perched on a cliff almost 360 meters above Zermatt. It’s a bit of a hump. Before you reach Edelweiss, you come to a sheer vertical rock face. At the foot of it are little shrines, with battery-operated votive candles. One crucifix bears the words,