Buckley - Wry Martinis

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, Cond 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, Regardies, 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
814.54dc20 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.

This is my sixth book, and Ive had a hard time coming up with titles for all of them. I thought it would get easier, but it hasnt. I should be better at it, since Im 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 (Cant Hear You! Too Noisy!). Las Vegas!!!! Hell Sucks.

One time I spent three days on one headline. Im not going to tell you what I came up with, because youd only say, You spent three days onthat?

This is mostly a collection of my magazine stuff. Random House doesnt 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 youd make right before throwing up a plateful of choucroute garni, youve 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 EmpireAnd How It Can Rise Again!? Or Barbarians at the Gate.

I came back at Karp with Want to Buy a Dead Dictator? Its 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 ABCs World News Tonight went with the story and the Russians went intercontinentally ballistic. It became a big international story. Karps reaction to my brainstorm was, We cant 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 Petroniuss 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 Presidents 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 pissing 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 didnt 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 (notpromiseby 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 shouldnt 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? Its taken from a typical airplane conversation:

P ERSON NEXT TO ME : And what do you do?

M E : Im a writer.

P ERSON (Perking up