Art Buchwald, 1925-2007

His columns about Paris nightlife and jet-setting celebrities were carried in New York by the Herald Tribune under the name "Europe's Lighter Side." Ernest Hemingway, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Gina Lollobrigida, Aristotle Onassis, Pablo Picasso, Elvis Presley, E.B. White and uncrowned heads of international society made their way into Buchwald's pieces, turning him into something of a celebrity expatriate himself.

The column for which he is best known managed to drop names from several centuries earlier. In 1953, with help from newsroom colleagues, Buchwald undertook to explain the meaning of the Thanksgiving day feast to the French with laughable translations of the American tradition. It was the only day, he noted, that American families "eat better than the French."

Many newspapers ran it annually for years afterward.

Another of his favorites was a 1964 column that asserted that President Lyndon B. Johnson could not ask J. Edgar Hoover to resign because the former FBI director didn't exist; he had been made up by the ultraconservative magazine Reader's Digest.

After the Eisenhower era ended and the Kennedy administration was in full swing, Buchwald decided to return to the United States.

"I knew if I didn't get out, I'd be there forever, and I didn't want to become an expatriate," he recalled. "I found myself duplicating myself, talking about the French and the Italians and the tourists. It was getting harder, not easier. And I knew that I could work off the headlines in America, but I couldn't in Europe."

He and his wife, Ann McGarry Buchwald, whom he had met in Paris, moved to Washington in 1963 with their three children, who were adopted from orphanages and child welfare agencies in Ireland, Spain and France.

After Paris, Washington turned out to be a city that had no soul, he later wrote, although it was a wonderful place to make a living off satire. He said it was relatively easy to compose his twice-weekly take on the news, often done as an imagined dialogue between the major players.

Buchwald also wrote a satirical play, "Sheep on the Runway," that was produced on Broadway in 1970. He also did some screenwriting, including work that resulted in a major lawsuit against Paramount Studios. In 1992, he and producer Alain Bernheim won a $900,000 judgment after contending that they were not paid for their writing for the Eddie Murphy film "Coming to America."

The case, which centered on Paramount's definition of a movie's "net profit," led to what is known as the "Buchwald clause" in Hollywood contracts, protecting studios from having to compensate a writer for an original idea.

Buchwald, who gave up his trademark cigars when he was 59, was much in demand as a toastmaster in Washington and on Martha's Vineyard, where he was master of ceremonies of an annual auction to benefit the island's social service agencies.

In 1998, he moved from Washington to New York. "After a certain amount of time, there's nothing new," he observed then. "I do think one of the purposes of my move was to keep going."

But after he had a major stroke in 2000, he returned to Washington.

His wife, from whom he was separated, died in 1994.

Survivors include three children, Joel Buchwald of Washington, Connie Marks of Culpeper, Va., and Jennifer Buchwald of Boston; two sisters; and five grandchildren.

His children, he said, were initially upset with his decision to turn down dialysis treatments last year, but he insisted that he preferred to control his last days, which lasted longer than even he expected.

"I don't know if this is true or not, but I think some people, not many, are starting to wonder why I'm still around," he wrote while in the hospice. "In fact, a few are sending me get-well cards. These are the hard ones to answer.

"So far things are going my way. I am known in the hospice as The Man Who Wouldn't Die. How long they allow me to stay here is another problem. I don't know where I'd go now, or if people would still want to see me if I weren't in a hospice. But in case you're wondering, I'm having a swell time -- the best time of my life."

Former staff writer Claudia Levy contributed to this report.