New York
Their memorials were held five days apart, each in one of Manhattan’s most hallowed venues, each one attended by more than 2,000 worshipping fans, both attracting A-list mourners as well as the poor and the humble. William Buckley and Norman Mailer had great send-offs, the former, as a devout Catholic, in St Patrick’s Cathedral, on Fifth Avenue, natch; the latter, as a non-practising Jew who called himself an atheist, in Carnegie Hall, where art and imagination have flourished for decades.
As both men had been mentors of mine, their families kindly sent reserved-seat tickets, but it was not to be. Death unites the fallen and abjures snobbery and privilege. Paying homage to the dead means first come first served. One does not tell an old Jewish lady from Brooklyn, or a Catholic for that matter, that they’re sitting in one’s seat. I was in the next-to-last row in St Patrick’s and on the third tier in Carnegie Hall. Never mind. Both the service for Bill and the eulogies for Norman were once-in-a-lifetime occasions. Tom Wolfe, sitting in the last row in the cathedral, whispered that the hymns were out of this world. ‘Yet the Muslims have passed us in numbers,’ I whispered back, ‘and all they listen to are screams.’
Only Kissinger and Bill’s son Christopher spoke in St Patrick’s, a conservative number for the man who actually invented modern conservatism in America. This was not the case with Norman’s eulogists. There were 27 of them, including his nine children, all of them talented and smart, all of them in the arts; plus writers, actors, directors and Muhammad Ali’s wife. Never have I been less bored by listening to 27 speakers.
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