Real Lace (28 page)

And, in another, he wrote:

Memorandum to the Buckley children:

I have been much concerned of late with the apparent inability of any of you, at any time, to go anywhere on foot, although I am sure your mother would have informed me if any of you had been born without the walking capacity of a normal human being.

A few of the older children, notably Priscilla, occasionally walk a few hundred yards behind a golf ball, but all the others “exercise” exclusively by sitting on a horse or a sailboat.

Concurrently, I have noticed that the roads around Sharon are crowded with Buckley cars at all hours of the day and night, and it has been years since any of you has been able to get as far as the Town Clock, much less the Post Office, without a car, or if under 16, a car and a chauffeur.

All the cars are left out every night in all kinds of weather, undoubtedly because of the dangerous fatigue involved in walking from the garage to the house.

I think that each of you should consider a course of therapy designed to prevent atrophy of the leg muscles if only for aesthetic reasons, or you might even go to the extreme of attempting to regain the art of walking, by easy stages of course. The cars might then be reserved for errands covering distances of over 50 yards or so.

Affectionately,

F
ATHER

In his penchant for memo-writing, Will Buckley was matched only by his contemporary, John B. Kelly of Philadelphia, whose grandfather had emigrated to Vermont, where he had been arrested for stuffing a ballot box. (He had been the only registered Democrat in town, but when the votes were counted there were two Democratic ballots.) Kelly, who had started out as a bricklayer, and had built his business to what was eventually the largest bricklaying concern in the United States, left a will when he died in 1960 that was close to a Buckley memo in both wit and paternal sentiment. To his chauffeur, Kelly bequeathed $1,000 with instructions that the man was to be kept on the family payroll “so long as he behaves himself well, making due allowances for minor errors of the flesh.” His unusual will continued:

For years I have been reading last wills and testaments and I have never been able to clearly understand any of them at one reading. Therefore I will attempt to write my own will with the hope that it will be understandable and legal.

Kids will be called “kids” and not “issue,” and it will not be cluttered up with “parties of the first part” or “per stirpes,” “perpetuities,” “quasijudicial,” “to wit” and a lot of other terms that I am sure are used only to confuse those for whose benefit it was written.

Some lawyers will question this when they read my will; however, I have my opinion of some of them, so that makes it even.…

I don't want to give the impression that I am against sons-in-law. If they are the right type, they will provide for their families and what I am able to give my daughters will help pay the dress shop bills which, if they continue as they have started out, under the able tutelage of their mother, will be quite considerable.…

I can think of nothing more ghastly than the heirs sitting around, listening to some representative reading a will. They always remind me of buzzards and vultures awaiting the last breath of the stricken. Therefore, I will try to spare you that ordeal and let you read the will before I go to my reward.…

As for me, just shed a respectful tear if you think I merit it, but I am sure that you are all intelligent enough not to weep all over the place. I have watched a few emotional scenes at graves, such as trying to jump into same, fainting, etc., but the thoroughbred grieves in the heart.

Not that my passing should occasion any “scenes,” for the simple reason that life owes me nothing. I have ranged far and wide, have really run the gamut of life. I have known great sorrow and great joy. I have had more than my share of success.

In this document I can only give you things, but if I had the choice to give you worldly goods or character, I would give you character. The reason I say this is that, with character, you will get worldly goods, because character is loyalty, honesty, ability, sportsmanship and, I hope, a sense of humor.…

After ticking off the various bequests to his wife and children, and making it clear that Prince Rainier of Monaco was not to get his hands on any funds inherited by the daughter Kelly mischievously referred to as “Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace,” he added:

If I don't stop soon this will be as long as “Gone With the Wind.” So just remember, when I shove off for greener pastures or whatever it is on the other side of the curtain, that I do it unafraid and, if you must know, a little curious.

He signed his will in green ink. It was all perfectly legal.

Because he had waited until the age of thirty-six to marry, Will Buckley was regarded, particularly by the younger children, more as a grandfather than a father, and this fact contributed to the awe he was able to inspire among them. The words “I'd like to see you in the Empire Room after lunch” were sufficient to strike cold terror in the heart of an errant child. The meeting in the Empire
Room at “Great Elm” would inevitably begin, behind closed doors, with a few general questions: “How are you doing at school?” and so on. Then the senior Buckley would get right to the point: “Reid, I've called you in for this talk because I was very sorry to hear that you lost your temper again last week and hit Maureen over the head with a golf club. Did you?” “It was a croquet mallet, Father.” “I am not going to put up with that kind of behavior,” he would begin, and continue with a long, stern lecture on the inadvisability of boys hitting girls, and the importance of manly self-control. At dinner that night, the chastised child would sit in shamefaced silence, so deeply felt was a Buckley's guilt at having offended the patriarch. But the children loved their father. Within a few days after one of these sessions in the Empire Room, there usually came in the mail, addressed to the errant child, a large check.

In order to avoid huge inheritance taxes, Will Buckley had managed, over his final years, to distribute nearly all of his wealth among his wife and children. From their father's actual estate, in fact, which was said to be well over $100 million, each Buckley child received exactly seventeen dollars. After his death in 1958, at the age of seventy-seven, the children got together and prepared a charming book called
W.F.B
.—
An Appreciation
, which was privately printed and distributed to some fifteen hundred of his friends and relatives and business associates. The book is full of warm anecdotes about his early adventures, but most of all it bears witness to his devotion to his family. His family came before anything else, and this was one of his strongest principles. The chapter on Father Buckley's memos begins, “There was nothing complicated about Father's theory of child rearing. He brought up his sons and daughters with the quite simple objective that they become absolutely perfect.”

The Buckley sons and daughters have been famously true to the principles which their father implanted within them, and to his
right-of-center political beliefs. Most famous of all has been William F. Buckley, Jr., whose book
God and Man at Yale
caused a great flurry of controversy in the academic community when it was published in 1951. That book, as many recall, mounted an attack against the liberal politics and the all but socialist economics being propagandized, the author felt, and advocated at Yale a renewed emphasis on the virtues of the American free-enterprise system. William Buckley has gone on to become a controversial author, political essayist, lecturer, and television personality. Since 1955 he has edited the conservative-minded
National Review
, and his sister Priscilla Buckley serves as the magazine's managing editor. Another sister, Carol Buckley Learsy, also works for
National Review
. Not long ago, at a family party honoring the joint birthdays of their mother and brother Reid, a two-decker London bus was hired to carry the guests to dinner at New York's “21” restaurant, Carol looked at the vehicle and said, “There goes my year's salary at N.R.”

With his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell—who, in turn, edits a right-wing Catholic publication in Virginia called
Triumph
—William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote a book called
McCarthy and His Enemies
, defending the ideas and tactics of the late Communisthunting Senator from Wisconsin. The younger Buckley has also inherited his share of the Buckley Irish temper, as was demonstrated dramatically in a celebrated exchange between himself and writer Gore Vidal before millions of television viewers in 1968. Vidal had called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” to which Buckley replied, “Shut up or I'll smash you in the mouth, you queer!” This was followed by a vituperative and extended exchange of insults in
Esquire
, which in turn led to Buckley's suing Vidal and
Esquire
magazine, and to Vidal's filing a countersuit.

Equally hot-tempered is brother-in-law Brent Bozell, a zealous Catholic convert and the husband of Patricia Buckley, who is the
managing editor of
Triumph
. In 1970, when a number of Buckleys—there were by then forty-nine grandchildren of old Will Buckley—were gathering at “Great Elm” for one of their periodic reunions, Bozell was arrested in Washington for his vehement role in a demonstration protesting abortions in a local clinic.

Bozell and Bill Buckley used to be the best of friends (they were classmates at Yale), but recently there has been a falling-out. Their differences have been political as well as religious. Bozell feels that Buckley's
National Review
is, of all things, too liberal. Buckley feels that Bozell's Catholicism is too strict. Family friends, while conceding the Buckleys' charm and intelligence and wit, often get annoyed with
all
the Buckleys for their right-wing political attitudes and opinions. “They're all right as long as they're on Mozart,” says one friend.

Oddly enough, though James Buckley has become New York's Conservative U. S. Senator, the only one of his sons whom William Buckley, Sr. encouraged to enter politics was Bill. “I have the feeling that you will inevitably be drawn into politics, or alternatively catapult yourself into this field,” the father wrote in one of his famous memos after
God and Man at Yale
was published. “What this country needs is a politician who has an education, and I don't know of
one
. There hasn't been an educated man in the Senate or House of Representatives since Sumner of Texas quit in disgust three or four years ago.”

Since his father's death, his eldest son, John Buckley, has been president of Cawtawba (named after a river near the Buckley winter estate in Camden), the family corporation which runs the Buckley holdings. Cawtawba owns large blocks of stock in seven oil companies all over the world, and these companies lease drilling contracts to other companies. Cawtawba takes care of what the Buckleys call “what little we have,” and what little they have permits all the Buckleys to live in considerable comfort.

Aloise Buckley still divides her year between her two large places. When, in 1967, she and Rose Kennedy were honored by
Harper's Bazaar
as America's foremost Catholic matriarchs, Mrs. Kennedy commented, “My greatest accomplishment has been bringing up our children to make full use of their talents and resources for a notable purpose: benefiting the community, not themselves.” Aloise Buckley is reported to have said, “My great accomplishment is not having one single child who has been a failure.” Presumably she meant that her children had held fast to their Catholicism.

But, as with the Kennedys, there have been deeply disturbing personal problems in the Buckley family, none of which their father lived to see. Two of his daughters, Maureen and Aloise, died young of similar causes—an aneurysm—within two years of each other. When John Buckley's wife died in 1966, he suffered a deep emotional crisis. “I underwent two years of the most severe unhappiness,” he told the
New York Times
. “I even lost my faith in God.” But, he says, “I finally realized if I was ever going to see Ann again, I had to make my peace with the Church, which I did.”

Carol has been divorced, and has since remarried Raymond Learsy—”He's a broker, an operator”—who is Jewish. (His uncommon name is a variant backward spelling of “Israel.”) Her sister Jane has also been divorced, and lives alone just a mile down the road from “Great Elm” in Sharon. In 1972 the Reid Buckleys were divorced. Of the ten children, only the oldest daughter, Priscilla, has never married.

The three divorces and the two remarriages must have given the Buckleys almost as much pain, perhaps, as the deaths of the two girls, since, to a believing Catholic, death is not just a loss but a removal of the loved person to a more peaceful, ordered place. If William Buckley, Sr. had been able to live forever—as everyone had always taken for granted that he would—might the marriages have stuck? It is possible that if one has had an overpowering father
like Will Buckley, who saw to it that the strands of family remained securely knotted, and if then one loses him abruptly, the whole family fabric begins to come apart.

Chapter 20

THE UPWARD CLIMB

One reason the emergent Irish families placed so much emphasis on their sons' and daughters' getting into society, asked to the best parties and dances, and invited into the best clubs was based on their special feelings about their faith. The “nice” people of Boston, by whom Rose Kennedy so desperately wanted to be accepted, might be Protestant, but in her opinion, and in the opinion of others like her, the Irish Catholic families were every bit as nice, or even nicer, because they were more pious and more strict about their religion. Their piety made them more moral, more stable and secure, and didn't this add up to niceness? It was easy for the Irish Catholic rich to see that their Protestant counterparts were much more casual about their religion, going to church whenever they felt like it and, presumably, seldom receiving Communion. Nor were the wealthy Jews, on the whole, particularly observant. As the Jews became Americanized and affluent, they tended to abandon the strict
orthodoxy of their parents and grandparents, and to visit their synagogues and temples only on certain High Holy Days.