Wry Martinis (29 page)

Fitter came with a bottle of Ringnes. The sight of it brought forth a shudder like a death rattle. I told him wanly, please, go away, but a tough Norwegian ship’s carpenter is a fair match for an enfeebled teenager from Connecticut and he poured the reviving, ice-cold golden liquid into me, and for the first time that Christmas, 1970, I thought that I might not end the day inside a stitched sack tossed off the poopdeck and committed to the deep; though to this day I still cannot drink Ringnes.

It was pneumonia that finished him off, not the room service hamburger or distress that the Late Night Adult Movie that he wanted to watch was “
UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME
.” But O’Neill’s last recorded lament will probably send a little shiver of recognition up the spine of the business traveler. J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot’s Common Man, measured out his life in coffee spoons. We measure ours out in check-ins and check-outs. Nearly a third of those who travel regularly spend a month a year in hotels. My uncle died in a hotel room. My father was once rushed to the hospital from his hotel room with an apparent heart attack that, thank heavens, turned out to be an “acute gastric episode,” the term hospitals use for five thousand dollars’ worth of heartburn. I spend maybe two months a year in hotel rooms. My only hope is if the Grim Reaper comes to me there, that he won’t empty out the minibar on his way out, driving my heirs and assigns into bankruptcy.

One rite of passage I had in a hotel: my first tryst. I was barely seventeen. It was the first time I had approached a check-in counter other than with my parents, and I was at pains to impersonate an adult. While my inamorata, an escapee from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, hovered tremulously behind a potted palm, I managed to secure a room for the night.

“Your luggage, sir?” the clerk enquired.

I gave him a deer-caught-in-the-headlights stare and mumbled pathetically that the airline had lost it.

“I
see
,” he said. Our night of dolce vita was interrupted by hangings on the door by phantom hobnail-booted, truncheon-wielding vice squad police shouting, “We know you’re in there, Buckley! Your parents and headmaster have been notified, along with all the colleges you’ve applied to.”

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

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.”