Art Buchwald Dies With Funny Bone Intact Elisabeth Eaves, 01.19.07, 4:15 PM ET
Columnist Art Buchwald, who began his career satirizing French foibles and Americans abroad, remained irreverent to the end, posthumously releasing a video in which he announced, "I'm Art Buchwald and I just died." His death of kidney failure on Wednesday at the age of 81 followed a remarkable battle with the disease. After he turned down dialysis treatment, doctors told him last February that he had only a few weeks left to live, so he moved into a hospice to die. But five months later, he was still there, so he moved out and turned the experience into a book published in November, Too Soon to Say Goodbye. In it, he quipped, "Dying isn't hard. Getting paid by Medicare is." It was the last of more than 30 books, including a best-selling 1994 memoir, Leaving Home, and Beating Around the Bush, released in 2005, in which he wrote, "President Bush keeps referring to the discovery of Iraq's missiles as 'the tip of the iceberg.' There are some, not many, who feel that if weapons are the tip of the iceberg, then Mr. Bush is the captain of the Titanic." As one of the most widely-syndicated columnists of his era, Buchwald's writing was at one point being published in more than 500 newspapers, including the Washington Post. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982, and also published two novels and wrote a Broadway play, Sheep on the Runway. His most famous collision with the movie industry came in 1992, when a judge ruled that Paramount Pictures, now a unit of Viacom, had stolen Buchwald's idea for the Eddie Murphy film Coming to America, awarding him $900,000. After serving in the Marine Corp during World War II, Buchwald headed for Paris, where, at the age of 23, he talked his way into a job covering nightlife for the New York Herald Tribune. For 14 years, he mingled with and wrote about the likes of Elvis Presley and the Aga Khan. He moved to Washington in 1962, where he began a four-decade run skewering U.S. politicians. A chronicler who was often chronicled, Buchwald continued to make waves with his death video, the first of a regular New York Times feature called "The Last Word," in which the newspaper is collaborating with subjects to create video obituaries prior to their deaths. In the video Buchwald said that his greatest "hurt" was never having made Richard Nixon's list of enemies. "When I tried to find out why I didn't, one of his people told me, 'you're not important enough. And that really hurt me,'" he said. It's not as though he didn't try: In the midst of the Watergate scandal, he wrote a column depicting Nixon as one of three men in a lifeboat, with Nixon bailing water into the boat. Buchwald, who was born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and spent some of his childhood in New York City orphanages and foster homes, said in his obituary video, "If you can make people laugh, you get all the love you want." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Upgrade to Adobe ColdFusion MX7 Experience Flex 2 & MX7 integration & create powerful cross-platform RIAs http:http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;56760587;14748456;a?http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/flex2/?sdid=LVNU Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/message.cfm/messageid:225254 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
