For Art's Sake

"What!" wailed Director Charles Gom-bault of Paris' France-Soir. "This is awful. I'm shattered for him."

The intellectual weekly Nouveau Candide was desolated: "The Atlantic Alliance is disintegrating."

At the Hotel George Cinq, at Moustache's fragrant bistro on the Left Bank, and at the Hotel Californian bar, Parisians and Americans alike were equally incredulous. New York Herald Tribune (and 130 other papers) Columnist Art Buchwald was going home soon. From 3,000 miles across the Atlantic, Columnist Drew Pearson told an inside-out story: Tribune Publisher John Hay Whitney, still smarting at the loss of Subscriber John F. Kennedy (TIME, June 8), planned to cock Buchwald like a cannon straight at the Administration. Pearson was wrong. "I made my decision to go to Washington before the White House canceled the subscriptions," said Buchwald. "In fact, I understood one of my duties was going to be to deliver the paper to the White House."

Buchwald's decision, in fact, was ratified on St. Patrick's Day, on his 30th transatlantic air crossing. "I was huddled up front with the kids," recalled Buchwald's wife Ann. "Dawn was coming up. Art stood over me. He looked grubby. He'd lost $100 playing gin rummy with a stranger--a stranger to me anyway. 'You know.' he said. 'I'm thinking about going back. How would you like it?' I said I thought it'd be marvelous. I was thinking about the new curtains I was going to have to buy for the apartment in Paris. I was wondering if they'd painted the bathroom while we were gone.

They'd been promising it for seven years and never had.'' Too Many Humorists. "Well, it was my idea to go to Washington," said Art. "I'd been here in Paris 14 years, and I figured I needed a change of scenery. I went home on a lecture tour, and I suddenly realized that the United States to me was just a new country. So I decided then to go back for two years, a sort of reverse Fulbright. And I decided to live in Washington because I don't like New York. A lot of people are afraid that I'm going to become very serious when I go to Washington, and it's true. I think there's far too much humor being written out of Washington now. David Lawrence and quite a few guys are writing humor.

"I think it's the duty of every columnist who lives in Washington to tell the President how to run the country, and it's my intention to tell the President how to run the country, tell Rusk how to run the State Department, tell Freeman how to run the Department of Agriculture, and Bobby Kennedy to--you know, how to get the steel guys. Since I've been writing about quaint people in Europe, now it's my turn to write about quaint people in the United States.

"When I was last home I discovered that the executive secretary was taking over America, and that there were no bosses any more. The executive secretary was in charge of everything. She's the one who decided who saw the boss, how many minutes they talked. The bosses all live in fear of the secretary. She is the power behind politics, business, everything, and depending on how she feels, that's the way the country goes."

Not Enough Hands. "Another thing I discovered was that everything was automation now. You never saw any human beings any more. It's sort of discouraging, because I remember even in the Automat, when I was a kid, you at least saw a human hand come out once in a while. But you don't even see a human hand any more. And I'm more interested in things like that than in politics.'' Buchwald's replacement in Europe will be Trib Columnist John Crosby, 50, who switched in 1960 to writing about cosmic affairs after 14 years of criticizing radio and TV. but has lately begun to feel rather uncomfortable on cloud nine. Said the Trib's new Paris-based columnist: "I've lived in New York for 25 years. It doesn't stir me any more. I go to work and stare out the window. Not an idea in my skull.''

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