Atlantic High (12 page)

Tony touched, too, on some of the practical difficulties of life in an active sea, like eating: “…we clustered around the saloon table below. The table opens up but its surface is polished stainless steel and it has no fiddles (or ‘faddles’ as Dick calls them).
¹
Using gaffer tape and a roll of charts, one of our many on-board technicians put together a fiddle on the lee side. Bill, Van and I were directly adjacent to it. Since everyone had his bowl in his lap, its only function was to keep the wineglasses from spilling. But every few minutes, over one went, sending red wine all over the three of us, loosening up the gaffer tape and destroying the structural rigidity of the roll of charts. Eventually Van and I had to sit with our toes up against the charts, holding them in.”

But what the hell, there is also the (acknowledged) excitement. The rain notwithstanding, one is, if awake, usually better off in the cockpit, eye-to-eye with the elements. “Van and Dan”—Dan wrote in the log—“chilled to the bone, will wake Chris and Tony shortly. Log 401.5 wind 25 seas 7-12 feet at least, but very comfortable, exciting….”

Storms eventually abate. But there are always all those other dislocations. We were made conscious by our wives and publishers that we were sailing in the Bermuda Triangle, but Dick Clurman, in his journal, had a better explanation for the mechanical breakdowns:

“I’ve become fully convinced that Bill Buckley, who radiates such cheer and optimism, has his life blighted by one extraordinary downer. Above his head, invisibly circling, there must surely be the rarest bird of all: an albatross, loaded with electronic sensors, which jams, malfunctions, destroys and wipes out every battery-operated piece of his equipment on the boat surrounding him (on his own beloved
Cyrano
, it was characteristic that the following equipment was
not
working
at the same time:
the autopilot, air conditioning, high-seas radio, radar, generator, not to say the galley refrigerator and toaster).

“Well, Buckley’s electronic albatross arrived the second day aboard the perfectly functioning
Sealestial
. First the radio—and hence all two-way communication—went out. Then, in order, the weather-mapping printer wouldn’t work, along with, worst of all, Buckley’s navigational Plath computer marvel, his Olympic electric stopwatch, and the newly installed digital log. And a warning from Diane [our stewardess]—we would run out of ice before we got to Bermuda. That, the worst news of all, since both Buckley and I are ice junkies and just assume that any boat we travel on carries enough ice for a Dartmouth Carnival at sea.”

In a single entry in his log, Van was systematic on the matters at hand:

“Marinefax [also, Weathermax]— Captain tried for one hour. We read the manual jointly, and finally concluded that the printout mechanism was kaput. [Beard-McKie, under
Errata—
“On page 103, the steps for lighting an alcohol stove were printed out of order. The correct order is 4-2-1-8-3-5-6-7.”]

“Portable Radio—Works to a degree, after a lot of listening, but doesn’t pick up the designated weather reports as found in
Radio Signals
Volume 3.

“Panasonic—Worked for a while and to a degree but finally could get no voice on any frequency. Captain tried, Dick tried and I read the manual and tried. I think something is wrong with the antenna.”

Clurman: “In the middle of the night the engine bell goes off. Allen and our mate, David, established that the engine brake is gone and the heavy seas are turning over the flywheel…. Allen awakens me again to tell me the stuffing box is leaking. I say to him, ‘How come? We’ve been aboard the
Sealestial
three times and nothing ever went wrong?’ ‘I was saving it,’ he replied. Someone remarked to Captain Allen that there must be an easier way to travel. ‘Try American Airlines,’ he cheerfully shot back.”

A pleasure very nearly unique to life at sea is the transformation when the weather finally does settle down. It is as though the universe had grudgingly agreed to compose itself, the coy mistress to shed her coyness. Dan’s entry in the log read: “Moon fully out at 0340, clear skies, perfect sail. I’m rested and as relaxed as could be. Perfect morning.”

There is time now for routine preoccupations, concerns, crotchets. Dick wrote, “We have all brought our shore-bound interests to the boat and certainly, starting out, they prevail. We have our electronic toys, our timekeeping gadgets, our esoteric radios for various interests (time, news, weather, etc.), our books, our political disagreements and our land-based eccentricities.”

Among the eccentricities was epicureanism. Poor Judy tried very hard, but we had exacting eaters on board. It is necessary to keep one’s eye on discontents that have any likelihood of festering. Dick wrote, “Even more at sea than on land, Bill refuses to allow around him, not only by noncontribution, but by his very attitude, unpleasantness among his friends. Monday night, we had an inedible dinner of pork chops and mashed potatoes and went sog-gily to bed.” I suggested, via the captain, a less hearty approach in the galley…. It’s getting back to normal. From Van: “I had a good late watch with Reg, straightened out a few macro problems; discussed his future work about which he seems more tranquilthan I would be; and looked dumbly at the trillion stars.” Van at this point ventured a generalization about the crew: “It is really a pretty good mixture of types and ages with each individual having some charm. Bill must consciously have anticipated the integration of the four old friends with the two new mates. It has worked out well and our social hour sparkles.”

Danny, characterized by Dick as a man of action, not words, is intuitively shrewd as men of action need to be. I, for instance, had not at that point descried his own private drama, but he sensed that I had a private sorrow. He wrote in his journal:

“Aside, 14th afternoon thought:

“Bill, I’ve written a Sunday prayer and dated it with our latitude and longitude in my private journal, which, if you like—you may have.

“I wonder if I’ve been distant these last few days, sheltered in thought. Probably so; I’ll explain later. Concern is what I feel—for you. Have you ever failed yourself? You seem to question the ability to prove daily.”

At the end Dick Clurman—we
all
sensed—regretted that he would not be sailing with us. He took explicit pride, even, in the navigation that had brought us to Bermuda:

“Not remarkable, you say? Well, consider this. All day before, Bill had been doing running sun-shots. Contrary to our compass, contrary to our radar readings, our RDF and every other navigational aid, Buckley asserted we were way off course by his handheld sextant reckoning.
²
He was right. Had we continued on that course we would have missed Bermuda entirely.”

The documentary is, as I write, unconsummated, and it may all come to naught, though that disappointment I don’t expect. I dreaded the interference I knew would be caused by the presence, on a boat every bunk of which was already spoken for, of an additional set of people; but my curiosity in the matter was terminally engaged, and from the beginning I got on well both with the producer, Bob Halmi, and his splendid cinematographers Mark and David, described above. Bob Halmi’s name was given to me by Walter Cronkite after CBS turned down the documentary. Whether CBS did so out of sheer ennui at the very notion of a documentary on an Atlantic sail, or whether it was actually for the reasons Cronkite gave me isn’t absolutely ascertainable, because although Walter can be very direct, he will not hurt anyone’s feelings wantonly; and besides, he thought enough of the proposal to suggest on his own initiative that he turn it over to his documentary people for examination.

In any event, the verdict was No—based on the rather surprising datum that CBS only does a half-dozen special documentaries per year. And since they do only six, Cronkite said, “they want them to be more socially oriented.” I found this reasoning perfectly acceptable on purely rational grounds. There aren’t many slums aboard the
Sealestial
, no bilingual education (though David the mate is studying French, and we go through the motions of speaking to each other in French until we exhaust one another’s vocabulary, which happens after about fifteen minutes). Reggie and Tony were going through an Italian phrase book. I could, citing Dick Clurman’s skills as a sail handler, have argued that manifestly we practice affirmative action on board, but that, on reconsideration, was an oblique way to make a tenuous point. “No problem,” said Walter; “it’s a buyer’s market—you’ll get another network, or a syndicate, or cable.” He then gave me the telephone number of an old friend, Bob Halmi.

Halmi was a Hungarian freedom fighter, and has become a successful television producer, juggling a dozen balls at any given time (when he met us in Bermuda he was greatly distracted because that morning he had fired Joan Fontaine, and could any of us think of a suitable replacement?). Halmi is direct, but courteous; a nice sense of humor; probably a tough hombre in the business, though I greatly like his informal, nonprehensile approach-probably the documents we have exchanged would not fill a printed page. He is also very sure of himself, and was nice enough to read my then current novel
(Who’s On First)
and tell me he liked it. I told him I was especially glad to learn this because Professor John Lukacs, himself a Hungarian, and a brilliant historian, had teased me for giving the name of Frieda to the principal Hungarian dame in the book, on the grounds that Frieda is an unknown name in Hungarian, to which Halmi remarked that Professor Lukacs was clearly too innocent to have known of, let alone patronized, the most famous prerevolutionary whorehouse in Budapest, which was called Frieda’s.

I don’t know where it was—not likely at Frieda’s—that Bob Halmi acquired his big-think habits, but he was not only excited about the documentary I had in mind but about a second documentary, his own idea. He did a real L. B. Mayer “I-can-see-it-now!” bit, right in my office.

Nothing to it. I would, on the final leg, bring on John Kenneth Galbraith and David Niven (combination #1), or (combination #2) Senator Barry Goldwater and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. While we sailed across the irenic great circle route to Gibraltar, we would converse about the Important Public Questions facing the American people. “My idea,” said Halmi as I stared at him dumbly, “would be to run the program as you sail into Gibraltar. I’ll do the editing on board,
and the last ten minutes will be live”—
he was very nearly feverish with excitement. I told him it was a wonderfully provocative idea, but that I thought he should get the sponsorship before I approached Team A or Team B about the idea, and he said of course. Four weeks later he called me in Switzerland, utterly dejected. He had got the sponsorship—the money, everything. But he
couldn’t buy
an hour of prime time.
It was all spoken for
, the hours being especially congested with political broadcasting on the eve of the two national conventions. I told him I was really sorry about this, and much later, as we plowed, for the most part underwater, from São Miguel to Gibraltar, I wondered what it would have been like to have had Galbraith and Niven on board talking about social security, SALT 2, and abortion. David is a splendid sailor and would have managed, if not to discuss the issues, to survive the passage. Ken hates boats, and by the time he reached Gibraltar would have insinuated into the Democratic platform a plank calling for the nationalization of all pleasure boats—though he’d have found it hard convincingly to designate
Sealestial
a pleasure boat after that particular passage.

In any event, Halmi wasn’t himself present in St. Thomas for our departure, so I spent a little while with David and Mark talking about the documentary, and Mark confessed that it wasn’t clear to him exactly how the documentary would succeed in reaching a climax. “If you see first-rate tragedy,” he added helpfully, “you are looking at first-rate theater.”

I told him we hoped most earnestly not to see first-rate tragedy and that in any event if we did, the probability of its being filmed was slight. Mark is a highly educated and experienced movie man and began talking about various techniques available, one of which is something called “pixillation.” I didn’t, of course, know what that was, and he said it was a technique first used by Charlie Chaplin, and requires jumping frames about to cause exotic effects, as in the illusion of hecticness in the assembly-line sequence in
Modern Times
. “It is a standard technique, but there might be a place for it in an ocean cruise.” I told him my Chaplin story. It was two months after the assassination of President Kennedy, the hosts were my wife’s old friend Vivi Crespi, and James Mason. We met the Chaplins in a private room at a little restaurant at Vevey and, beginning immediately, Chaplin was on stage, giving me a hard time on the assassination, doubting strenuously that JFK had been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald acting on his own: Probably it was the work of CIA types, or Texan Birchites.

“I don’t trust the FBI. Do you, Mr. Buckley?”