Steve Sailer writes: Buckley didn’t age particularly well. None of us do, but he had been such a spectacular figure of boyishness during the youth-obsessed late 1960s that the inevitable tolls of aging took a particular toll on him. So it’s hard to explain to younger people who only knew him from late in life the role he played from, say, 1965-1975. It’s like how New York sportswriters who had been telling youngsters how great Willie Mays had been in the 1950s before the Giants moved to San Francisco, didn’t appreciate having the 40 something Willie traded to the Mets in the 1970s.
In strange ways, the Buckley phenomenon was related to the British Invasion phenomenon of 1964. Suddenly, American culture was overwhelmed by charming young men with a certain feline wit that was related to but refreshingly different from what Americans were used to. Buckley, an actual English public school boy, was a sort of John Lennon for American conservatives.
* I remember as a kid seeing him on daytime tv talk shows, and thinking he was really cute, and so English looking and sounding. He made “conservative” sound sexy. The host, Cavett, had uber-lib Jonathan Kozol on shortly after Buckley, and Cavett began to say something admiring of Buckley when the conversation turned to a certain topic. Kozol cut him off and spat something about privileged nincompoops (gist of it) who mock poor black people — the only kind Kozol cares about, although I think Buckley was referring as much as to poor whites — who have lots of children the taxpayers support and who grow up to make war on the hands that fed them. I thought if people like Kozol were as compassionate towards poor whites as they were toward blacks, maybe some sort of detente could be achieved in the lib-conserve dichotomy.
Something of Buckley’s charms were still in tact when he hosted Brideshead Revisited in the 80s but I hardly recognized him in his last decade. Still pretty sharp and made you think, but he probably wouldn’t impress many young people who hadn’t known of him when he was a younger man.
* Yeah, its rare you see a person with a high IQ really age in the face the way Buckley did. I’ve seen hillbillies who look, well, I mean the density of their wrinkles could not be greater and their only like 55 or so. But I was thinking, If Buckley took ritalin all his life, he would have to take a hell of a lot ritalin after twenty years, thirty years etc. to feel an effect at all, and his son did mention his doctor always kept him supplied with a stash. I think we can speculate that Bill Buckley may have taken as much ritalin in his life as anybody ever has. And no one has ever mentioned this: all of Buckley’s little quirky mannerism, the hyper pen in his mouth, the slouching, the tilting in the chair, the way he sped up his sentences and slowed them down and back up again—that is all absolutely the ritalin. Some people call the way their voice changes on adderall the adderall drawl. I’m wondering if that was the reason of his unique accent—which, also people don’t mention, his voice definitely deepened and “normalized” as he got really old, and the ritalin effect wore off, watch his last charlie rose interview for instance. Anyways, I suspect all that ritalin took that deep toll on his face. Though interestingly, Gore Vidal’s face aged about the same way too.
* Does that include his habitual lizard-like flick of the tongue?
* Buckley and Vidal wound up looking alike. It’s pretty weird. It might make an interesting movie: have one actor play two archrivals, but with enough makeup that you can’t initially tell he’s playing both roles.
* WF Buckley was a pilot during WWII. He didn’t fly in combat, but he trained other pilots. The Army Air Corp handed out a lot of speed to its pilots. I can recall WFB telling a story about him staying 5 days in a row at Yale in the late 1940s to take his finals, and then going for a flight to celebrate but falling asleep while soloing.
* He had a sailor’s face – wrinkled by sun/wind damage.
