Word: dragoman
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Soon, Buchwald set himself up as the laughing dragoman to American celebrities. The foster home boy became Our Man in Paris. He took Elvis Presley to the Lido. He asked James Thurber what it was like to be blind. Thurber replied, "It's better now. For a long while, images of Herbert Hoover were the only thing that kept popping up in front of me." He got to know Orson Welles, Audrey Hepburn, Lena Horne, Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Somerset Maugham, Danny Kaye, Humphrey Bogart. At Buchwald's wedding to Ann McGarry in 1952, Gene Kelly danced with the bride...
...book, they made peace by way of shared memory: "Paris brought us together in the beginning," Buchwald says in his dedication to Ann, "and it brought us together at the end." Buchwald's old smartass merriment and his depressive undertow set up an interesting resonance in this volume. The dragoman was a more complicated man than the long-ago celebrities knew...
...also an element of happenstance. Boat No. 1, which could have held 40 people, departed with only twelve. While John Jacob Astor went stoically to his death, Henry Sleeper Harper managed to find lifeboat room not just for himself but for his Pekingese, Sun Yat-sen, and an Egyptian dragoman he was bringing home on a whim. Benjamin Guggenheim changed into evening clothes for the occasion, and so did his valet. "We've dressed in our best," Guggenheim said, "and are prepared to go down like gentlemen...
while in the lee of the Great Pyramid, a bearded dragoman told the Irishman's fortune: "Here in your hand I see nine rivers that you must cross . . . When you have reached the last river, you will . . . find what you have been looking...
Nine Rivers from Jordan is the strange and tempestuous tale of how Irishman Denis Johnston, war correspondent and scholar, maverick and mystic, fulfilled the dragoman's prophecy in three years of bitter fighting that carried him and his BBC microphones from the Jordan to the Danube. Half-diary and half-confession, it is a story of one man's war, but with this difference: where others wrote of battles with an end in view-victory-Johnston was an outsider, an Irish will-o'-the-wisp who happened in on the holocaust not caring-at first...