• Christopher Buckley is writing a tell-all book about his parents William F. and Pat Buckley. "This book is going to land hard in some quarters," he said. Not unlike endorsing Barack Obama. [P6]
• Alex Rodriguez and Madonna aren't even pretending it's just a coincidence they were in Mexico City at the same time. [AP]
• The Brits are very disillusioned the Britney Spears sullied the good name of televised music competition by lip-syncing on X Factor. [Daily Mail]
• Sean Penn doesn't want to be cast in gay kissing scenes when he could be cast in full-on gay sex scenes. [P6]
• No record labels signed up to buy Paris Hilton's second album, but that didn't stop her from recording it. [Scoop]
• Peaches Geldof's husband: "I'm bored of all this." [Sun]
• Amy Winehouse's husband feels bad about turning her into a junkie. [National Enquirer]

“You are for the first time, I think, fully your own man,” he added. “It’s also awful. I miss him every day. But I can now write about things I was not terribly comfortable writing about.”

And as for that asshole father:

As to his own father, it was “a complicated relationship,” he said. Early on, the elder Mr. Buckley was enthusiastic about his son’s writing. But as the son racked up one best seller after another, the father grew deeply critical. Mr. Buckley can quote word for word: “Sorry, this one didn’t work for me,” or, “As regards your new book, my views are negative.” When his father inscribed books to him, he signed them, “Bill.”

So. Buckley's going to be on The Daily Show this week, and oh, hey, he's written a memoir about his parents that's due out next year. He's also selling an apartment, and, according to Stolberg, he lives just outside Washington with "his wife, Lucy." That would be Lucy Gregg Buckley, with whom he has two in-wedlock children.

But, you know, in New York, Buckley's lady of interest has been, for some time, Ms. Jolie Hunt. She has rather openly been his girlfriend for more than a year now!

Honestly we don't know what's up with Chris Buckley but his life seems complicated.

In his will, William F. Buckley Jr. leaves the contents of his estate to Christopher and the two children he fathered with his wife — and leaves no doubt that Jonathan will get none of the money.

"I intentionally make no provision herein for said Jonathan, who for all purposes ... shall be deemed to have predeceased me," wrote William Buckley, who died in February.

What an asshole! "The language seems a little over the top; almost mean-spirited," said Greenwich lawyer Patrick R. Gil, who is not afraid of vast understatements.

And so the Buckley family name continues to represent wit and unconscionable dickery. Hooray!

Update: Oh, we should at least point out that Chris Buckley has been separated from his wife for some time. He's currently dating another publicist, named Jolie Hunt.

If Sam Tanenhaus' forthcoming "definitive" biography of Buckley teaches you nothing else about American conservatism, it should teach you two things. The first is that it drew its historical sense of urgency from ex-radicals and recovering revolutionaries, particularly Whittaker Chambers, Tanenhaus' first big subject. Chamber was the Dostoevskian figure who thought that by abandoning Communism he was joining the losing side of history. He also warned National Review not to take up the cause of McCarthyism, which he correctly foresaw would do more harm than good to fighting Soviet infiltration. The warning went unheeded. The second thing the bio should teach is that the mannered and cultivated right-wing sensibility — pinstripes and Masterpiece Theater — is specifically rooted in the English tradition of P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. (Rosen would probably call Wodehouse the "Master.") That makes the following letter Waugh wrote in 1960 so much more delicious to behold:

Can you tell me: did you in your researches come across the name Wm F. Buckley, Jr., editor of a New York, neo-McCarthy magazine named National Review? He has been showing me great and unsought attention lately and your article made me curious. Has he been supernaturally "guided" to bore me? It would explain him.

Some literary types would pay good money to be whipped and tortured like that, and not all of them went to Eton. Buckley had written Waugh, whom he idolized, repeatedly during National Review's infancy, asking him to reconsider his negative opinion of McCarthy, and to please, please, please become a columnist for the journal, a position for which Waugh would be compensated at a rate "higher than what we have paid to Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Whittaker Chamber..." Perhaps not the best enticement for the dreamcatcher of well-born English snobbery to be baited with more money than was offered to a bunch of ex-Reds. Sure enough, Waugh was unmoved. "Until you get much richer (which I hope will be soon) or I get much poorer (which I fear may be sooner) I am unable to accept," he wrote back. More solicitations arrived in the mail, including favorable reviews of his own books (one by Joan Didion, who, some would be legitimately shocked to learn, used to write for National Review). Eventually, Waugh submitted and did allow himself to be published in Buckley's pages, despite looking on America, as so many crusty British reactionaries still do, with scorn and lordly condescension.

Waugh's correspondent in the above letter, by the way, was Tom Driberg, a university chum in a class that must still rank as one of the most extraordinary every graduated from Oxford: other students included Cyril Connolly, John Betjeman, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell. Driberg was known in his day as one of the most promiscuous and out-and-about homosexuals of literary and political London. He served as a Labour MP in the House of Commons and, to hear Christopher Hitchens tell it, used to dash into parliament to deliver a robust and witty speech on the need for colonial independence, having just sucked off a member of the proletariat in a squalid men's room. "Tom Driberg," remarked Churchill, "is the sort of person who gives sodomy a bad name," yet that didn't preclude his becoming a peer — Baron Bardwell — shortly before his death in the mid-70's. Nor did his own Communist past and ultra-left sympathies prohibit a deep and abiding friendship with nasty curmudgeons who thought the Tories hadn't done enough to wind back the clock. Driberg was also the only witness present when Waugh was received into the Catholic Church—religion being the other twitch upon the thread which bound much of the trans-Atlantic Right.

Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited, now in theaters as a badly adapted Edwardian Cruel Intentions, must have been at least in part based on Driberg (a scene at a "pansy bar" has Blanche and Charles Ryder fending off advances by "Tom" and "Cyril"), and of course any mention of that novel furnishes another irony about stateside conservatism, which has taken it as a kind of imported stylesheet for nostalgic living. Yes, a movement born out of opposition to flagging education standards, rampant secularism, the decline of puritanical values, and the sexual revolution sees a kitsch portrait of drunken spendthrift bisexuals as the artistic complement to standing athwart History and yelling "Stop."

Is it really so shocking, then, that the archdeacon of postwar conservatism found himself writing often for the gentleman's spank-rag of choice? The ideologically hidebound glory in the "languors of youth" and the "hot spring of anarchy," all right. But they thrill at how guilty it makes them feel.

[Real Clear Politics]

• Anne Hathaway's Italian ex-boyfriend, accused con-man Rafaello Follieri, originally had planned a big spontaneous "vacation" to Italy for his "birthday" Wednesday, but of course he's in jail now, so no "dining patio, huge cellar of expensive wines, pricey pastas and locally caught seafood" for him. [Post]
• A recent memorial service at Pat and William F. Buckley Jr.'s former home turned into a brokerage pitch to buy the place. That did not go over well. Ed Koch left quickly. "I felt like we were props in a real estate event," someone remotely affiliated with National Review said. [Times]
• Beastie Boy Adam Yauch screened a film he is distributing about how large companies, including Nestlé, are privatizing water supplies in the U.S. and around the world. It turns out Nestlé was a sponsor of the film festival where the screening was held. Their rep "stormed out." [P6]
• Ben Affleck is reporting for Nightline in the Congo. Which is great, just please don't turn into Sean Penn. [OK!]
• Ha: Nelson Mandela personally uninvited Naomi Campbell from appearing on stage at his 90th birthday party after the supermodel was sentenced for assault on two police officers, who she had supposedly also called "honkeys." Also, Campbell reportedly wore a baseball cap with Mandela's prisoner number on it when she was arrested. [Showbiz Spy]

We're glad these two didn't die like Jefferson and Adams, on the same day, long having made up with each other. The other nice thing is that now that Buckley's dead, he can't sue Vidal for libel anymore, as he did when Esquire published Vidal's prose account of their most famous televised battle. ("Esquire cravenly agreed to settle with him for a few paragraphs worth of free advertising for his weird little magazine," Vidal reports.)

(That battle took place on ABC during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, a scene of civil disobedience and gross police brutality as Mayor Daley's cops beat the shit out of the yippies and hippies assembled to witness the party's coronation of miserable old Hubert Humphrey. The violence escalated, Buckley and Vidal's arguments became more heated. Buckley defended the cops, someone compared the demonstrators to Nazis, and Vidal said that the only crypto-Nazi he knew of in the room was Buckley. Over the cross-talk, Buckley called Vidal a "queer" and threatened to punch Vidal in the "goddamn face." The video is readily available.)

Vidal has, it seems not forgiven Buckley; either for the insults or for his role in ushering in the 20th century's conservative ascendancy. The accusations pile up: "Although Buckley was often drunk and out of control, he was always a spontaneous liar on any subject that his dizzy brain might extrude." That's how you remember the dead.

Vidal is unsatisfied with Newsweek's characterization of that television event, in which he is painted as one in a series of "bullies" that Buckley would not suffer. The offending passage, with Vidal's annotations in brackets:

Buckley bridled at bullies [we are assured]. But one of the rare times he lost his temper was debating Gore Vidal, who "got under his skin," says son Chris. When Vidal called Buckley a "crypto-Nazi," Buckley responded, "Now listen, you queer, you stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered." But usually his public manners were genteel [I think they mean gentile]. With "Firing Line" guests who seemed nervous or over their heads, Buckley was gentle. Behind the scenes, he could show remarkable kindness. In 1980, a rising conservative star, Congressman Bob Bauman, was soliciting a 16-year-old [male] for oral sex. Bauman had been a gay-basher, and he instantly became a pariah. The next day, knowing what lay ahead for the disgraced congressman, Buckley quietly gave him an envelope containing $10,000. "He was a knightly man," says Chris.

And Vidal's response:

Next, the loyal son, suspecting that the pejorative use of "queer" is politically incorrect in mag-land, Christopher rambles into a story about his father's kindness to a Mr. Bauman who had lost his seat in Congress after the congressman had been caught while soliciting Oral Sex from a 16-year-old male (note how prurient Newsweek's prose is, in describing undesirable people). Chris weeps into his computer as he describes how Dad gave the poor sinner of the flesh an envelope containing $10,000 (I bet?) in cash adding, mysteriously, "He was a knightly man": Who was—the cocksucker recipient of Buckley's charity? Or his admirer, Mr. Buckley himself?—Bauman was very right wing, it is said. RIP WFB—in hell.

"RIP WFB—in hell." Not quite epigrammatic, but decidedly economical.

If you're thirsting for more, the Vidal article that got Esquire sued is, naturally, available on the internet, despite being wiped from the Esquire archives. (The portion that led to the libel suit is when Vidal accuses a young Buckley of vandalizing a church as payback for the minister allowing Jews to move into their neighborhood.) It's chock-full of quality zingers, such as this, from when Vidal recounts how Buckley accused him of being a degenerate due to the outrageous content of Vidal's Myra Breckenridge: "Simply to go by their books, Agatha Christie is a mass murderess, while William Buckley is a practicing Christian."

Hah. It's too bad all of Vidal's enemies are now dead. President Bush is scarcely a worthy adversary. It's a shame how he seems to get along with Christopher Hitchens.

Gore Vidal Speaks Seriously Ill of the Dead [TruthDig]

Buckley was “anti-fashion in the original sense of the term,” says designer and style expert Alan Flusser, author of “Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion.” “He came from an era and background where if you looked like you spent too much time thinking about clothes, then everything else was suspect….I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those Shetland sweaters actually had holes in them.” At social functions, men of Buckley’s era and class were content to serve merely as backdrops for their wives. By contrast, Buckley’s wife Pat, who died last year, was almost a caricature, one of William Hamilton’s New Yorker cartoon WASPs come to life.
In the end, beyond a general notion of the preppy staples that have been replicated by everyone from Ralph Lauren to the latest designer-of-the-hour since Buckley’s Millbrook days, it’s hard to remember exactly what he wore during his many years in the public eye. Which was precisely the point.

Times: A Style Salute | William F. Buckley Jr.

Buckley was born in New York City, to a wealthy Irish Catholic and a Southerner. The family moved to Connecticut, he was schooled in Paris and London, and he attended Yale—the perfect resume for a man who'd become a caricature of condescending East Coast snobbishness before that was turned into a Liberal trait. It was a caricature Buckley happily lived up to, dropping ten-dollar words into his prose with obvious obnoxious glee, tempting lesser writers to imitate his parody-of-erudition style at their peril. It's a perilous task because few can match his skill with a biting quip:

Ten years ago [Gore Vidal] wrote in The Nation an essay denouncing pro-Israeli activity in the United States as divided loyalty. The article and its implications were denounced by Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, as "the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II." Mr. Vidal retorted by questioning the patriotism of Mr. Podhoretz and his wife, the author Midge Decter, and reacted to another critic of his article, a rabbi, with the sigh, "Luckily, I am used to being lied about." I commented at the time that anyone who lies about Mr. Vidal is doing him a kindness.

ZING, Gore!

Buckley zinged liberal-leaning author/essayist/blue-blooded creep Gore Vidal many times in his lengthy career, though not always with such class. In what is still arguably the greatest live TV moment ever, Buckley and Vidal got into a heated exchange on ABC news in 1968 that quickly turned personal (and AWESOME):

Listen to that dueling received pronunciation! In case you missed the meat of the debate in the crosstalk, Vidal called Buckley a "cypto-Nazi" (which Vidal later, accurately, corrected to "crypto-fascist"), and Buckley responded with, "listen you queer ['quee-ah'], stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll pop you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."

Buckley and Vidal later repeatedly sued and counter-sued each other for libel and such, which was the style at the time.

Buckley founded The National Review in 1955, when the New Deal and World War II had basically made "true" conservativism temporarily obsolete in American letters and thought. He championed the candidacy of MAVERICK ARIZONA SENATOR Barry Goldwater, a dangerous nut who lost in a landslide, but whose followers and ideas would eventually come to dominate the nation's political scene.

The National Review still exists, Goldwater Republicans are still enjoying the fruits of their eventual success, and the conservative movement as a whole has seized upon the culture wars with such fervor that a high-falutin' fancy-talkin' New York college boy like Buckley would never, ever achieve such prominence in the movement he nurtured, should he come around today. Because he'd obviously be a big stupid quee-ah.

So fuck him for foisting upon us this anti-intellectual bullshit mess of a nation we've become, but we're glad that his followers helped destroy the intellectual heart of his ideology.

Buckley is survived by his hip satirical novelist son Christopher, his pale imitation of its former self magazine, and George Will's wardrobe and middle initial.

William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead At 82 [NYT]