The irrepressible.(Remembering WFB)(William F. Buckley, Jr.)(In memoriam)

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER, the creator of Perry Mason, is said to have kept four secretaries busy at once taking his novels in dictation and transcribing them. That wasn't Bill's story, but only because he kept his book-writing to an average of less than one a year (and typed his own first drafts). But at the long height of his career--roughly, the Firing Line years, 1966 to 1999--Buckley Diversified kept far more than four people busy: a secretary; one, sometimes two, typists; and four researchers (shared with NATIONAL REVIEW)--not to mention the NR staff, the Firing Line production staff, and a driver so that he could work in the car while going from place to place.

And these weren't neat, 9-to-5 jobs. In the glory years, he would occasionally wake his secretary with a 3 A.M. phone call from, say, Copenhagen asking her to change his next day's plane reservation. There were no wee-hours phone calls in recent years. But if he finished revising a draft of his current book on Friday, it wasn't exactly that he told his assistant (by that time, yours truly) to work all weekend--it was just that he wanted the clean copy ready to distribute to publisher, agent, and a couple of friends by the following Thursday, and there was only one way to do that.

Nor was it that the publisher had said: Get it to me Thursday or our contract is off. It was Bill's self-imposed ...