James Brady on Vonnegut and Heller

Halberstam's Tab
James Brady, 05.17.07, 6:00 AM ET


The writers are dying off, guys my age or thereabouts, good guys I knew. Allen Drury and Capote and Peter Maas and Schaap a while back, Bill Manchester and Jim Michener. Joe Heller a couple of years ago; Art Buchwald exited laughing; Kurt Vonnegut, last month after a fall; David Halberstam, too young and too soon in a stupid car crash in California.

I'm tired of writing obits about them and about my own sense of loss. Intimations of mortality, we subjectify death, don’t we?

When Kurt died I went back to reread off the bathroom wall of my house the graceful little farewell he wrote Heller in the form of a 14-line poem published by The New Yorker two years ago, May 16. Vonnegut knew the value of brevity and said more in 50 words than most of us do in books. His poem was titled simply, "Joe Heller." Here it is, punctuated and indented just this way:

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.

I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel 'Catch-22'
has earned in its entire history?"
And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
Not bad! Rest in peace!

--Kurt Vonnegut

We all mourn in our own ways, and that was Kurt's, a bit of poetry.

I guess I've read all the obituaries about Halberstam, how he was big and powerful, a bit arrogant, but talented, courageous, passionate, a worker. How he wasn't afraid of the VC or his bosses at the Times or the generals and rear-echelon colonels in Vietnam force-feeding body counts and phony info to the reporters, very little of which David was buying and therefore making himself not very popular back there in Saigon.

Out in the field where the infantrymen lived and died, the attitude toward Halberstam may have been somewhat different. Which is, I think, what a correspondent wants, what a good writer deserves.

Here is one little anecdote about David Halberstam I don't think was in any of the important obits, one that reflects well on all parties. When I heard about his death last month on his way to interview Y.A. Tittle for a book about a single football game in 1958, I went up to Elaine's on Second Avenue to sit at the bar and have a glass in his memory.

Back in the late '60s and early '70s, after he won the Pulitzer for reporting and had come home to New York to work on books, he was one of the regulars at Elaine's. He and his then-wife Elzbieta, a Polish actress and I believe movie star he met while he was in Warsaw for the Times, were always there with other regulars, Nick Pileggi, Bruce Jay Friedman, Gay Talese and Jack Richardson and Ed Hotchner, and when the bill came, signing with a flourish.

He'd been given a healthy advance from his publishers for a book that would become his chef d’oeuvre, The Best and the Brightest, but the book was taking longer to write than he calculated, those big Hollywood roles for Elzbieta weren't coming along (her accent, maybe?) and David's advance was running out. Still, he continued to attend Elaine's with his chums, and, as a gentleman and a Harvard man does, signed his share of tabs.

Finally, it seemed interminably, The Best came out, an instant hardcover triumph! A paperback auction was swiftly arranged and suddenly, once again, Halberstam had some dough (the figure of three-quarters of a million was bandied about). Several weeks later, according to the story, David sauntered into Elaine's and said, "I believe I have a tab." Elaine dove into the cluttered register where she may still collect such things, pulled out a sheaf of rumpled receipts and said, "Yes, here." Halberstam studied the total, scribbled a check and handed it over. Elaine said, "Thanks." Nothing more.

I've heard various amounts, $25,000 or so (Elaine won't say), and years later I asked if the story were true. Yes, she said, issuing no detail. As for why she'd carry any patron that long, Elaine Kaufman just growled, "I bleeping knew him. He was one of the bleeping guys!"

An epitaph even shorter than Kurt's about Joe. "Not bad! Rest in peace."