MADRID, SPAIN–I ask my (many) children, “Who are the most deadly boring people in the world? ” Dog people, horse people, hunters and fishermen, golfers, or environmentalists?
My children never get the answer right. It’s the anti-Semite, neo-1920s variety. Recrudescence of which Europe is rife. I return from a Spanish luncheon at a charming wayside restaurant, where some ten friends and I ate exceedingly well (and much too much) over the course of 21/2 hours. The hostess is a petite and most attractive woman whose particulars I will disguise because they would drive you crazy trying to come up with her name. (She’s wealthy, titled, and well known on two continents.) She leaned toward me confidingly at coffee time, saying, “You know what I mean, Reid. What can be more awful than to be surrounded by Jews?”
I hadn’t been paying attention; but the ready imputation of class-collegial anti-Semitism irks me beyond measure. “Well,” I retorted, “what about WASPs?”
She said, “I was speaking of Jews . . . you know, when you are surrounded by them . . .”
I said briefly, “I am an Irish-Catholic of southern extraction who was raised in white Protestant New England, which I fled when I was 28 years old because of the terminal boredom I had endured since getting out of the Air Force and going home. I left for Spain, where I resided ecstatically for 15 years. When circumstances obliged my return to the States, I shunned New England and took up my abode in South Carolina. I tell my student public speakers: “Shun Pennsylvania, where to laugh is like breaking the Sabbath. For that matter, shun Minnesota and the Dakotas and the entire northwestern tier of states.” (Remember what Gov. Adlai Stevenson quipped about trying to tell a joke in Wisconsin.) “Above all,” I say to them, “shun the Northeast. Pray that you may be blessed with audiences consisting of Jews, Latins, Irishmen, blacks, homosexuals, and rural southerners.”
She was puzzled. So I said further to her, who is a right-winger, “If it weren’t for reformed Jewish Marxists and neoconservatives, most of them Jewish, the renaissance of the conservative movement that my brother Bill ushered into being would never have come to pass.”
She remained puzzled. “But Reid, you know the type I mean . . .” she said.
Since I am a poor dialectitian, I did what is congenial for me: I recounted an anecdote. “Many years ago,” I told her,
a partner and I visited eleven cities in nine days from the Los Angeles to San Juan de Puerto Rico, endeavoring to entice investors into a fabulous real-estate play southwest of Madrid. Fruitlessly. We flew into New York at the end of our hegira, exhausted, broke, and discouraged, having failed to raise a cent. My options were fast expiring. This was the sorry pass when a successful entrepreneur I had known in college suggested that I make my pitch to a Mr. Jordan, whom he described as a “big operator” with headquarters in lower Manhattan, below Wall Street.
He arranged for an interview, kind soul. I was told to arrive at 4:30 sharp, which I did. The building was impressive, just east of the park with Hamilton’s statue. Even more impressive was the bored blonde anaconda of a receptionist coiled a liver-shaped glass-topped table. She was Diana Dors with a Bronx accent.
“I have an appointment with Mr. Jordan.”
“So?”
“‘I was told to be here at 4:30. It’s 4:15.”
“Mr. Jordan’s got a lot of people wanting to see him.” But she plugged into the executive suite, telling me to take a seat in one of several spartan aluminum chairs ranged against a wall.
Presently a gray-flannel suited Ivy League functionary with thinning hair and lashless blue eyes approached from across the foyer, asking me my name, bidding me to follow him. We walked (or took the elevator, don’t recall) one floor up, emerging on a gallery that went round an open office space below us that was half the size of the old Polo Grounds, with dozens of men and women in cubicles shuffling papers, consulting one another, typing furiously, or at the telephone. “Those are every one lawyers,” he said warningly, adding, “like me. Mr. Jordan has 50 lawyers working for him full time, just in case anybody tries to pull a fast one on him.”
“This, it was clear, was for the purpose of impressing me with the exalted station of Mr. Jordan and (also, by imputation) my lowly rank. On the next (or the third) floor, I was ushered through several ante-parlors directly into the handsome executive digs of the Great Man himself.
His private office had a spacious bay window out which I glimpsed the Statue of Liberty on its island in the bay. The room was crowded with cronies and business associates. Mr. Jordan lounged in his shirt and galluses behind a mammoth desk, speaking on the telephone–barely glancing my way as I was brought in and then abandoned by my escort.
I told my hostess at this point, “I studied him. This was my last ditch pitch. If we didn’t raise the capital we needed within ten days, we were through. Mr. Jordan was a large balding corpulent man with a clayey complexion and a large, pitted, and fleshy Jewish nose.”
“Oh,” she inserted eagerly, “I know the type you describe. I can just see him!”
“Well,” I said to her,
I was left standing there in the middle of that swanky office for ten or fifteen minutes, feeling like an idiot. I was just 31 years old, understand: Everybody was in his mid-forties or -fifties. The Great Man continued to ignore me, jabbering loudly to an intimate from Chicago or the upper Bronx or maybe L.A. about a coming out party that he was organizing for his daughter in Miami. Intimate. Five hundred guests. “Yeah,” he bawled over the phone, “I’ve got Harry coming, Perry couldn’t make it.” I filled in the surnames: James and Como. At length slamming the receiver down on its carriage and saying to me in disdainful tones, “So you’re Buckley. Whaddayouwant?”
I explained rapidly that my friend and his acquaintance had set up the appointment, telling him my purpose.
“O.K.,” he said, “you got ten minutes . . . and Buckley, don’t give me any bullsh*t, I got people to protect me from bs artists.”
I unpacked my brief case, spread out my maps, and explained that I was looking for $1 million U.S. to match $1 million in Spanish money to buy options on 5,000 hectares of the choicest real estate on the outskirts of Madrid. He listened. My pitch took not ten but fifteen minutes.
“What’s in it for me?” he asked, when I had ended.
“You come in as an investor on the capital side. I manage the deal and get a 16.67 percent carried interest.”
“You’re not listening, to me, Buckley. What’s in it for me?”
I was puzzled for some moments. “Well, depending on the position you take in the working partnership, that: less my 16.67 percent carried interest.”
He leaned impatiently over his paper-strewn desk toward me. I cannot swear that he was smoking a cigar, but I now imagine he was. “What’s in it for me,” he repeated in heavy, phlegmy, distinct tones.
I got the drift at last. “Nothing but your slice of working capital,” I said to him; at which he laughed, as did several other of the sycophants in the office, like a chorus. “You got a lot to learn kid,” he then said. “Leave the maps and stuff with me. If I’m interested, I’ll give you a call.”
I could see at this point in my tale that my luncheon hostess was enthralled by the anecdote. It played to the stereotype of her bigotry. “He was a Jew of course,” she said. “I know the type. Oh, I know them!”
“Yes,” I told her, “he was a Jew. They were all Jews in that room except for the lawyer who escorted me in. He was a WASP out of Yale or Harvard or Columbia.”
“Of course,” she said, “-front man, gentile. They always have one. What did you do?”
“I went back to our family offices in lower mid-Manhattan and burned all afternoon,” I told her. “There was nothing I could do, I was the petitioner.”
“Did he call you?”
“No.”
“Of course not!”
“I waited until noon next day for his call. Then I went to Tiffany’s.”
“What for?”
“I had a slim, a very chaste, visiting card in those days. [One uses dozens of them every day in Europe.] It was not a half-inch wide nor two inches long. It was bordered. In the center, in small Gothic caps, it read, Fergus Reid Buckley. On the back, in smaller italics, it read, Espalter 2–my [elegant] address in Madrid. Nothing more.”
“So?”
I took the card to Tiffany’s and asked how much it would cost to replicate it by next morning in 18K gold. The price the salesman quoted, after consultation, was sobering. At noon next day, I picked up that solid gold card. It was wafer-thin, but oh . . . how it reflected the light. How it shone. Hied myself down to Mr. Jordan’s impressive butt-of-Manhattan offices. Same top-heavy blonde at the same glass-topped desk. “I want to see Mr. Jordan.” “Lotta people want to see Mr. Jordan. You got an appointment?” “No. Just tell him Reid Buckley called and wants to see him.” “You kidding?” “O.K.,” I said, “give him this card.”
And I flipped it into the air, like a coin, with my thumb, off my bent index finger. It made the prettiest loop, somersaulting and catching the light several times before landing with a tinkle-tinkle-tinkle on the glass surface of her desk.
She was spellbound; but I had turned on my heel and was already half way to the enormous glass portals before she cried, “Hey, hey–wait a mih-nut. Where can Mr. Jordan reach you?”
“He knows,” I said, “or should,” pushing the portals wide and walking
outside to the taxi I had kept waiting.
My hostess was creaming with satisfaction. “What happened then?” she said excitedly. “Did that awful man call you?”
“His offices. Three times that afternoon, twice next morning, twice that next afternoon–two or three times a day thereafter for the balance of the week, and Monday and Wednesday of the next week.”
“And you . . . ?”
“I instructed the receptionist to say that I was unavailable.”
“Well,” she said glowingly, “so you do know what I mean when I speak of the Jews.”
I told her, “I know what you mean when you speak of the obnoxious nouveau riche vulgarian from the lower classes of any ethnic origin. Four months ago I spent three hours as the guest of a Masai chieftain on the lower lip of Ngorongora Crater, in Tanzania, who was Mr. Jordan in scarlet toga and dung-plaited hair dyed orange. Instead of a battery of lawyers, he had at beck ephebes wielding lances and carrying razor-sharp simis under their woolen cloaks. The enemy is the vulgarian, of all tribes, nations, ‘religious persuasions’ (as the saying once went), and upper-crust classes.”
Which is the end of my story. I am steaming still.
–F. Reid Buckley is founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking.