Outside Looking In (20 page)

John Leonard, another “
National Review
apostate,” as Bill called us, told his biographer: “When Garry said what was happening to blacks was more important than what was reflected in the magazine, and it hurts me personally, he spoke to the best part, that most vulnerable part, of the Buckleys. It [the disagreement] went from blacks to Nixon to Vietnam.”
¹⁰
Sobran, comparing me with another “defector,” said: “I don't think Kevin Phillips got anywhere near his heart the way that Garry Wills had. He didn't covet Phillips's esteem the way he had Garry′s.”
¹¹

When Bill went to speak at Yale, on one of his innumerable visits there, my son, Garry L. Wills, was in the host line of students receiving him to shake hands. When my son gave his name as Garry Wills, Bill said, “No relation, I hope.” Garry, who can be as pixieish as Bill, serenely said, “None at all”—which left Bill turning back with puzzled looks as he moved on down the line. On another occasion, Bill's son, Christopher, whom I had met years before as a boat boy on Bill's yacht, and who was now a student at Yale, invited me to come speak at the annual
Yale Daily News
dinner. I suspected that Christopher was in one of his moments of conflict with his father, and I declined to take part in that drama.

But Bill's wonderful and selfless sister Priscilla, who always kept me in her loving circle, trusted to the real regard Bill and I still had for each other. She called me in 2005 to say it was silly for two people who had been such friends not to be talking to each other. She set up a dinner at our old restaurant, Paone, where Bill and I resumed our friendship and, after that, our correspondence. Bill wrote to tell me he had given my
What Jesus Meant
as a Christmas gift to friends. It was clear that our disagreements had been transcended. Bill even ended up a critic of the Iraq War—unlike the Vietnam War he had once defended, leading us to part company so many years before. When Bill suggested on
Charlie Rose
that he was ready to die, I found his words heartbreaking, and I wrote to tell him so. When Priscilla told me that in his last days, weakened by emphysema, he could not move across the room without her pulling him up and supporting him, I thought of the figure—lithe, athletic, prompt—who brought his sailboat to rest with one deft turn of his foot on the wheel, and I grieved for one who brought so much excitement into my life.

1
William F. Buckley Jr.,
Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith
(Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997), pp. 9-10.

2
Christopher Buckley,
Losing Mum and Pup
(Twelve, 2009), pp. 57-58.

3
Ibid., pp. 65-67.

4
John B. Judis,
William F. Buckley, Jr., Patron Saint of the Conservatives
(Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 128.

5
Ibid., p. 191.

6
William F. Buckley Jr.,
In Search of Anti-Semitism
(Continuum, 1992).

7
Judis, op. cit., p. 164.

8
Ibid., p. 359.

9
Richard Brookhiser,
Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement
(Basic Books, 2009), p. 32.

10
Judis, op. cit., p. 325.

11
Ibid., pp. 379-80.

T
hough Bill did not succeed in matching me with his sister Maureen, he inadvertently proved a matchmaker after all. He sent me where I met Natalie. When I arrived at
National Review′
s office in 1957, invited there because of an article I had sent “over the transom” about
Time
magazine, I told Bill I was doing my graduate-school work in Greek tragedy, and he offered me a job as the magazine's theater critic. I turned him down—I meant to return to classes at the end of the summer. He had called me up at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where I was serving as an assistant to a patristics scholar, collating Chrysostom manuscripts. I had left the seminary so suddenly that I had no time to apply to graduate schools—my seminary Greek teacher had hastily arranged for me to attend Xavier, a Jesuit school, while applying to other graduate programs.

Bill, as usual, tried to help me in my quest for a scholarship. He invited the classics scholar Revilo Oliver to come with us for a day sail, and asked Revilo if he could offer me financial support at the University of Illinois. Revilo said he would be glad to. “We can give you a first-rate education, but you will not have the first-rate chances at a good position you would get by coming from an Ivy League school.” He recommended that I apply to them, and if I could not get a scholarship that would support me there, then he would take me on at Illinois. Luckily, I got a McCormick Fellowship at Yale.

When I said I could not accept Bill's offer of regular employment, he asked if I would stay for the rest of that summer, living in his father's suite at 80 Park Avenue (since the senior Buckley was out of town), and doing odd jobs for the magazine. I reviewed the plays that were still running that summer:
Auntie Mame
with Rosalind Russell,
New Girl in Town
with Gwen Verdon,
Long Day's Journey into Night
with Jason Robards. I wrote about books for Frank Meyer, the literary editor. Then Bill had the typically wild idea of sending me briefly down to Washington to write about the Senate hearings into Jimmy Hoffa's mob connections. I said that I knew nothing about labor unions. Bill swept my objections aside. “Go see Suzie, she knows all about unions. Then I'll call Murray Kempton and ask him to give you some information.”

Suzie was Suzanne La Follette, the feminist and libertarian who had edited the
Freeman
with Bill's hero Albert Jay Nock. A vinous lunch with her taught me little, so I went over to Kempton's office at the
New York Post
. He was working on his column when I arrived, but after Bill had called him he had laid out all his newspaper clip files on Hoffa. He told me to browse through them and we could talk later on. When he finished his column, he invited me to take the train with him to stay the night at his home in Princeton, where he could cook me dinner (his wife was away for the week). After listening to his favorite recording of
Don Giovanni,
we talked (and drank) late into the night. Among other things, he said he always had trouble criticizing Hoffa because he was the only labor leader he knew who was faithful to his wife.

The next morning we overslept and ran for the train. We were running for it as it started to move. Younger and nimbler, I jumped on board, only to learn it was the wrong train, one that was being shunted to a siding. Murray had to have the station-master pull it back. This gave me just enough time to catch a plane for Washington. Sam Jones, the first Washington editor for
National Review,
gave me lunch at the Press Club, caught me up on the state of the Senate hearing, and got me into the press gallery, where I watched the Kennedy brothers grill Hoffa—John as a committee member, Robert as the staff investigator. Robert said Hoffa had the opportunity to be a great benefit or a great burden for society. Hoffa said he would try to live up to both responsibilities. The hearings were unexpectedly suspended at the end of the afternoon. I called Bill and asked what I should do. He told me to fly back to New York and take the train for Stamford, since he was throwing a party for the magazine's editors.

On the Eastern Airlines plane, a flight attendant (then called stewardess) offered to hang up my heavy suit jacket—I had only one suit, the winter weight the seminary gives to any person who leaves. I said it had my pens and notes, and hung on to it. The flight's landing was delayed for a long time as we were stacked up over LaGuardia. There was an empty seat beside me. The stewardess sat down and told me I was too young to be reading Bergson. She had read (as had I) Walter Kaufmann's description of Bergson in
Existentialism
. Later, when we met Kaufmann in Acapulco at a Young Presidents' Organization conference, we told him he had been our Galahalt. The stewardess had a pretty Italian face of the
mandorla
(almond-shaped) sort Modigliani liked to paint. And mischievous chocolate eyes.

We shared, as it turned out in our talk, things other than an interest in Walter Kaufmann—especially a love of opera. Since our landing was so delayed, I told her I was missing a party in Connecticut. Where? she asked. Stamford. “I drive by there on my way home to Wallingford—I'll drop you off.” She told me where to wait while she checked in and picked up her car. She said the car was a convertible blue Alfa Romeo Spider, a thing I had never heard of. On the drive to Stamford, we had more talk. She was a Catholic and we differed on some Church teachings. She was Italian-American, and we talked of Italian art. She had been a sociology major at Sweet Briar (which is why she read Kaufmann), and I told her about my seminary studies. Her mother owned a bridal shop, and she knew clothes. She said she had wondered at my blue serge suit in summer when she asked for the jacket.

I thought she would come into the party, and our talk had continued to the arrival at Bill's house. She said she was still in her stewardess uniform and did not want to go in. From my recent-seminary ineptness, I let her drive off without getting her phone number. When she got home and told Lydia, her mother, that she had met an interesting guy on the plane, Lydia asked if she would see him again. No, Natalie said, and Lydia went “
Ha
-ha.”

At the end of Bill's party, one of the editors drove me back to 80 Park. In the morning I called Eastern Airlines and said I wanted the phone number for a stewardess called Natalie, with an Italian last name beginning C (I had already forgotten her family name, Cavallo, though we had joked about its meaning “horse”). I reported that she had been on flight number (whatever it was) from Washington, as if that would give me the key to her identity. I was too naive to realize that airlines do not give out such information. I was informed of official policy, emphatically. Despite this hard rebuff the first time, I got up nerve to call back and say that I had left in her car a marked-up advance copy of a book I was reviewing, which I had to get back immediately. “Don't give me her number,” I said. “Give her mine, and tell her to call me only if she finds the book in her car.” She got a sardonic morning call: “Did you give some guy a ride last night?” I did not realize what trouble I could have got her into.

She went out to the Alfa, searched it thoroughly, found there was no book, smiled, and dialed my number. “Did you really leave a book in my car?” she asked. “No.” “Then why did you say you did?” “Because I want to see you again.” “When?” “How about today?” She went to her mother's shop, got a new dress, told her
“Ha
-ha,” and caught the train for Manhattan. I said on the phone I would wait for her at the clock desk in the middle of Grand Central Station (one of the iconic spots of our history). We went to the big 1957 Picasso exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, and I put her up at a hotel around the corner from 80 Park so we could spend the rest of the weekend together. Throughout that summer she was with me whenever she was not flying.

She told me she could not figure me out at first—I was clearly a rube from the Midwest, newly arrived in New York with only one out-of-season suit to my name, yet I was living in a luxurious Park Avenue suite. The suite was so large that it had an entire wing I had not discovered till I went into the kitchen one morning and found a beautiful young woman there—she was the wife of Reid Buckley, Bill's brother. She and Reid had come in while I slept, and settled for a brief stay in the other wing of the suite. Natalie said she wondered why I knew and took her to some “in” restaurants of the time (Mercurio, Charles à la Pomme Souffle, Paone, the Black Angus)—they were all places where Bill had taken me. She thought it odd I rode cabs everywhere and never the subway—I did not yet know how to take the subway. I had tickets to the best plays in town. I explained, step by step, how I knew these things, and said she must meet Bill.

She did meet him, in the best of circumstances—on a day sail in his boat. (Sailing with Bill was one of life's great experiences.) She was charmed by Bill, of course. But after we left the boat, she said, “Be careful.” Why? “He's dangerous.” Why? “He absorbs people.” I knew then what a wise person I was dealing with in Natalie. Her quick judgment was confirmed, over and over, as I got to know Bill and his effect on others, his matchmaking, his religious proselytizing, his favors done and lives arranged. When I was writing my book on Bill, I met with the woman who had been the Buckley family's music teacher in his childhood, Marjorie Gifford. Though she was a young performer and scholar in her twenties when she went to the Buckley home in Sharon, commissioned to teach all the younger children, Bill and his siblings called her “Old Lady” and grew very fond of her. Bill was her best pupil (though she said he never got the harmonies straight).