It has been a most precious pleasure to have temporarily strolled in the garden of your affection.

I told him I had a connection in New York who was very wealthy and asked him, "Would you be willing to sell a piece of yourself to somebody for cash?" And he said, "You are my manager from now on. Do what you think is right."

So I called this guy, Harold Humes, and he said, "Oh yes, we love Lord Buckley. We love his album. In fact, we play it all the time." And he eventually bought thirty percent of Buckley for three thousand bucks and arranged the gig at the Jazz Gallery.

We drove the VW van to New York but he wanted to stop off in Cleveland and borrow some money from a disc jockey friend of his. I said, "No, we’re not going to do that. Be prepared: we’re going to start you off and get you famous again."

This was like the worst time of his life. But he did that to himself. He alienated himself from the mainstream of show business. Like Van Gogh. Nobody bought Van Gogh’s paintings. The only person who bought Van Gogh’s paintings was his brother and now they sell for $43 nillion.

So we get to New York and the first person we meet is Harold Humes who took us out to dinner and got us in a nice little, inexpensive hotel for which he footed the bill until we got our first week’s pay from the club. He agreed to give us the three thousand. He drew up the contract which I still have in my possession.

Without me having to ask, Buckley said, "Being my manager, you get one-third, we get two-thirds." I said fine and immediately sent my money home because I had five children.

The next day I got on the phone and looked in the ads and we got an apartment from this woman who was going to Florida for six or seven weeks, which we rented at 39 Gramercy Park for a month and a half for five hundred dollars and fifty dollars security. He sent five hundred dollars home to Elizabeth and we had five hundred dollars to live on until the first week’s six-hundred-dollar check, which I made him send home to Elizabeth. And I had Prince Lewis promise me that he would have Buckley send half his check back home because I had to return to Chicago.

It must have been 1955 when I first heard Lord Richard M. Buckley’s recording of "The Boston Tea Party." It was the first thing of his I ever heard and still remains one of my all time favorites. I have collected two extant versions of "The Nazz" as well as all the other products of his fantastic imagination only to have them repeatedly slip through my fingers into the hands of beggars, borrowers and thieves. Somehow I never regretted losing a Buckley record because I knew most of them by heart, and besides, they were made to be stolen. So what the hell.

(There is absolutely no way to get the juice out of Buckley’s work except to hear it, although if you have a passable ear for oral rhythms you may be able to reconstruct some of his verbal handsprings from close reading of the text. But text is to sound as a roadmap is to landscape, it tells you how to get there but not what you’re going to see.)

In any event, Buckley remained for me sort of a legend. I didn’t know whether he was black or white, straight or stoned, dead or alive, until I tracked him down to do the voice-over soundtrack on a film I was doing. It took several cross-continent telephone calls but we finally found him working in the Gate of Horn in Chicago. He agreed to do the soundtrack and arrangements were made for him to come East. Coincidentally, he was booked into the Jazz Gallery in New York City at the beginning of October.

A few days after these arrangements were made he arrived in New York on a Sunday midnight. He arrived in a red Volkswagon Microbus with his aide-de-camp, Lew Foremaster, a remarkable guy in his own right, and Rex Benson, his business manager from Chicago. I was pleased and rather honored that before they checked into their hotel, they came directly to my place where my wife set out a midnight spread for us. I was immediately struck by Buckley’s immense personal dynamism and charm, and he kept us up into the wee hours with bits and routines he’d recently invented. Meeting Buckley in the flesh was an experience.

I was an admirer of Buckley’s recordings and became very enamored of what he did. I appreciated his particular talent. I use the word sparingly but I believed that Buckley had a special touch of genius. Consequently, I used to play his records on the air with some regularity.

One night around in 1959, he stormed into my studio wearing an ankle-length lavender suede coat as only he could do. He was a most flamboyant personality. At the top of lungs he introduced himself, embraced me and said that my message had reached him in the desert and that he came to let me know that he appreciated my efforts on his behalf. He sat down and proceeded to recite "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" in rhyme. One of the great regrets in my life is that I didn’t have my engineer record this.

The consequence of this encounter and my playing his records was that my interest in Buckley precipitated an engagement at the Jazz Gallery.

Originally my brother Iggy and I opened the Five Spot on Cooper Square between Fourth and Fifth Streets. The name Five Spot came from the address of the original bar which was at Five Cooper Square. The old customers used to call it "Number Five." Prior to that it was just a neighborhood bar, something our father owned before us. We took it over after World War II and got very bored with the whole thing. Some of the neighborhood guys talked us into having jazz and I guess we were pretty good at it because the Five Spot ran from about 1956 to 1975.

After a while we moved to a bigger location on the corner of St. Mark’s Place and the Bowery. Thelonious Monk liked the place so much that for seven years it was the only club in New York he’d work. Most of the original customers were painters and writers and we wanted to keep them so I never raised the prices too much. We never had a cover charge.

One of the customers, Doc Humes, talked me into hiring Lord Buckley. Doc said, "He’s really funny. You should take a crack at him."

At that point I was ready to try something different because we mostly presented jazz. So I took his advice and hired him. Doc was a very exuberant fan. He loved the music and would come down often. He really loved the whole scene.

We were probably paying Buckley about seven hundred dollars a week. The money in those days was nothing compared to today. When Aretha Franklin performed she got about five hundred dollars a week but she was a kid just starting out. This was big money to me at the time. It’s probably equivalent to about two thousand dollars a week today. One of the reasons Buckley got as much as he did was because he was from out of town and I figured he had to check into a hotel. If he had been local he probably would have been paid four hundred dollars.

Presenting him was something different for the Jazz Gallery or the Five Spot. We ran both clubs at the same time for a while, but the Jazz Gallery lasted for about two years. It was a financial disaster so we got out of it. But in the meantime we tried everything: the Basie Band, Joe Williams, and Aretha Franklin when she was a kid.

We took a chance with Lord Buckley. He was a very likable gentleman and I thought he was funny too. But he did nothing for us financially. He really wasn’t drawing in that much of a crowd.

When he came in the first time I gave him a big hello. Everything with him was "Your Eminence." I, as the owner of the Jazz Gallery, was "Your Eminence" but everybody had a title. It was "Sir This" and "Prince That." And, of course, the Jazz Gallery to him was a "Cathedral of Joy." He was half-kidding. He was very florid.

Don Peyote was a movie I began making. I was down on Macdougal Street and saw a lad named Ojo ride by on a bicycle. He reminded me of Don Quixote. I went to the Café Figaro with some other people and we cooked up a modern film version of Quixote, calling it Don Peyote.

A few days later we started improvising scenes. But I needed a narrator. I’d been collecting Lord Buckley’s records for years so I helped get him a New York job and planned to use him on the film. Then we started having trouble obtaining shooting permits.

The movie was to be improvisational, like jazz. Sometimes scenes would have no background continuity. We might start in a vacant lot and wind up in an excavation without explaining the shift. I put down the idea that art has to communicate. It’s basically an effort to impose order on chaos: you have to explain things first. Then it can communicate.

I had a friend in the advertising business who was looking for a British character to be a salesperson for Coca-Cola. It was going to be a $100,000 a year contract for two or three years. So I told Buckley that I had an audition set up for him. I told him to be at the offices of BBDO at ten o’clock the next morning. I said, "Richard, please don’t go out tonight. I’ll be here to pick you up in the morning."

Well, I left him about eleven p.m. I called him back at twelve and they were just getting to sleep. I said, "Good. I’ll see you in the morning." I told him to just take a cab and meet me there at ten.

I got there at nine-thirty. At ten the executives came in. The bird dog on this was that one of the executives had seen Buckley perform, loved him and thought he’d be perfect for this character.

So ten-fifteen, ten-twenty, ten-twenty-five, ten-thirty. Finally, Buckley walks into the boardroom with two hookers—gorgeous ladies. He was introduced to everybody and he introduced the women: "These are my beautiful princesses. Darling ladies, take off your clothes and give all these men a blow job."

The girls started to disrobe and the men yelled, "No! Stop! Stop! We don’t want this! This is not what we’re here for!"

And Lord Buckley said, "But gentlemen, there’s no charge."

After the first week he wasn’t drawing any people. In the middle of the second week, the guys called me in and laid it on the line. They said: "Listen, you got to cut his deal in half."

I said, "I don’t think he’s gonna do that."

They said, "Then you better make him do it or you’re both gonna end up in trouble."

I said, "What do you mean by that? Is that a threat?"

He said, "You can take it for whatever you want."

I said, "I’ll relay that information."

I went to Buckley that night in the apartment and told him that they wanted to cut his money. He said, "I’m not going to do that."

I said, "You better because these guys are bad guys and they threatened me and they threatened you and they’re gonna do something about it."

He said, "Well I’m not going to do anything about it. Nobody can push me around. They know who I am."

"They know who you are," I said. "But you’re not drawing. Let’s face that fact. You’re not drawing."

So I told him I had to leave and that he better make some deal with them.

He was there a couple of weeks when, in the middle of a show, the vice squad cops came in and said that Buckley couldn’t work there because he didn’t have a cabaret card and they pulled him off the stage. I tried to get them to wait until the end of the set but they made me stop the show and pull him off the stand right then and there. There was really no need for it. The cops were just showing their power. They could have waited twenty minutes for the set to finish. There wasn’t much anybody could do. They shut us right down. You didn’t yell at the cops in those days.

Apparently he had gone down to get a cabaret card and they checked him out and they found that years before he had got into a fight when he was drunk.

Lord Buckley was pretty downcast about the whole thing. There was no confrontation between him and the cops.

The next day I was watching the news and Doc Humes and then Police Commissioner Kennedy, who was a hard-nosed, no-nonsense guy, were going at it toe to toe. Doc Humes was waving his finger in the Commissioner’s nose and saying, "You mean to say that because this man got drunk and had a fight fifteen years ago that he can never work in this city?"

I was shocked. I thought that all hell was going to break loose and it did. The cabaret card commission went on a rampage throughout the entire city closing down any and every restaurant and club in town that had any violation, not above and beyond the legality of the performers working there.

I don’t remember the cops pulling Lord Buckley off stage but I do remember them telling him not go on.

Lord Buckley was a beautiful nut. He believed we should all treat each other like royalty. I can say he was a decent, generous man, and I liked him. After he was gone it was evident to everyone who had wanted to help him that something had to be done about Cabaret Bureau. Their card system is a real cancer. I think the police have arrogated tremendous power to themselves in the past two decades. And that’s how the committee got started.

That whole period around November 1960 has to be looked at in terms of pathology. It was crazy beyond belief—the cabaret card scandal centering on Lord Buckley, the trouble the Village coffee houses were having and, of course, the big folk singers’ riot in Washington Square Park, which was the first anyone saw the TPF, the Tactical Police Force in fatigues instead of uniform. I was chairman of the Citizens Emergency Committee which was attempting to deal with the repressiveness being brought down on Buckley. Since the days of Prohibition the New York police had been mugging and fingerprinting artists before they could do club work. Thelonious Monk had to pay ten thousand dollars to get his card back. It was a real racket—out-and-out harassment.

That’s when the cabaret card thing blew up. Actually it was Buckley’s trip east that blew the cabaret card scam sky-high. When Nina Simone burned her card everybody else decided they would burn theirs and a lot of stuff in the newspapers came out about the cabaret cards and the scandal that went on around them.

The cabaret card scandal was a scandal that went back to the twenties and Prohibition days. If nothing else they should have put that on Lord Buckley’s tombstone: "The guy that blew the cabaret card scam sky-high." That was a major achievement.

The ironic thing is that they had a good reason for originally instituting the cabaret card laws. During Prohibition they had these bust-out joints where girls worked nude or semi-nude. When a tourist walked in a nice-looking girl would come over, sit down and say, "Do you want to buy me a drink?" And the next thing you know she’s ordering champagne and the guy is getting hit with a bill of fifty dollars which is the equivalent of three hundred dollars today. If there was any complaint the bouncer would come over and beat the hell out of the guy. There was no use in calling the cops because they were in on the deal and they might give the guy a second whacking to boot. It was such an abusive thing and, with the racket guys who were running those businesses, the cabaret card laws were instituted in the hopes that it might keep out some of the fringe criminal elements.

So the cabaret card laws started out as a good thing but it turned bad. A guy like Buckley was faced either with paying a lawyer who specialized in those cases five thousand dollars to work for him or slipping a few hundred dollars under the table to the cops downtown. Either way he was taking his chances.

In those days the police were very poorly paid. If the guy in charge of the chicken coop is hungry all the time you know what’s going to happen. In fact, shortly after the cabaret card law was rescinded, they gave the police a nice raise which is what they should have done in the first place. When you got a man in a responsible position like that he’s got to be well paid. If he loses a job like that he’s going to lose a real good job.

The system was so corrupt back then it was ridiculous. All of us had problems with that. It was terrible. But even though I had a police record I could pay twenty-five hundred dollars and get one. It was a bribe. The inspector got the twenty-five hundred dollars. It was a law allowing the police to put money in their pockets.

The night I arrived was the night the police pulled him off the stage right in the middle of his performance at the Jazz Gallery. They walked right on stage and asked him if he had his police card and he said, "No."

Well, the next night we were uptight because he wasn’t working. He couldn’t go back on stage until he got his police card back. All you had to do to have trouble with your card was to have been arrested, not even convicted, and Lord Buckley had been arrested on the most insignificant of trifles. They hated Lord Buckley because they thought he was a threat to their sanity or something.

We needed some money and Sir Laurence Olivier was at the St. James Theater doing Beckett. Prince Lewis and I went down there with a note that Lord Buckley had written him. The note was an invitation for Olivier to appear at the Royal Court that night and pleaded with him to come over after the show and grace us with his presence. And, if he couldn’t grace us with his presence, could he please give Lord Buckley a hundred dollars.

When we got there we just walked right through the stage door like we owned the place and ran right into Olivier and handed him the note. He read it and he roared—he absolutely roared. He immediately called Lord Buckley and while he was talking with Lord Buckley, he began roaring all over again. I don’t know what the other end of the conversation was but we got a one hundred dollar bill.

But when we got back Lord Buckley was very disappointed that Olivier hadn’t come over. He called Olivier back late that night and said: "Sir Laurence, you’re backsliding. How come you’re not here at the Royal Court?" But Sir Laurence never did make it over.

There was just a tremendous amount of melancholia after he lost the police card. He felt the police were harassing him and, in fact, they would come up to the apartment every day and search the place. The harassment was truly terrible. And, naturally, he was very brought down by the whole thing. He was very upset. It was his renaissance and they just cut it right in the middle. He was doing so well at the Jazz Gallery.

It just seemed unfair. Everybody that knew the man liked him. He wasn’t hurting anybody. He was building bridges between black and white. That was one of the reasons why some people got on his case. After eventually abolishing the cabaret card system, the Citizen’s Emergency Committee went on to do things like make it possible for the folksingers to continue singing in Washington Square Park. The Citizen’s Emergency Committee did an awful lot to keep freedom in this country.

Prominent New York City attorney Maxwell Cohen was a key member of the Citizen’s Emergency Committee which rallied to Lord Buckley’s defense after his cabaret card was revoked. Cohen fought on after Lord Buckley’s death to eliminate the antiquated restrictions that thwarted His Lordship. His following discussion originally appeared in Michael Ullman’s Jazz Lives published by New Republic Books in 1980 and is reprinted here with their permission.

I learned that the system got started accidentally. There was around 1939 a Presidential Directive to the FBI instructing them to prepare a list of those whose presence might be adverse to the security of the United States. It was thought that many of the unions were dominated by Communists, particularly the waiters’ union. The list was prepared. Later when the police department was helping in an attempt to break a strike, they became involved in passing on the qualifications of waiters and chefs to work in restaurants. If they had any previous criminal offense, even as minors, they could not work. This was seen as a way of weakening the unions. In the course of time, like any other uninhibited authority, this began to stretch horizontally, and in the process it began to take in musicians and performers. And so a "law" never passed by legislation (and so never intended to restrict musicians and artists) became a tremendous factor in their lives. There was one decision in 1941 that sustained the law and said that the police had the right to such an authority because of the number of cabaret robberies, none of which was committed by musicians or performers. It was an outrageous decision, but it gave some degree of legal coloration to what the police department was doing.

I knew some of the musicians who were suffering because of the law. The very distinguished J.J. Johnson was denied a card. He had committed an offense as a juvenile delinquent. The law was, and is, very firm that delinquency can never be a legal disqualification against a man after he became of age. Johnson’s was the first test case. It was successful to the extent that the court directed the police department to give him a card. The court avoided the issue of whether the police department had any rights in respect to the establishment of the card as a criterion for employment, but the very fact that the police department had been challenged successfully was important. There were several test cases after that.

Lord Buckley was managed by a well-known novelist and former editor of The Paris Review by the name of Doc Humes, Harold Humes. Harold went down to the police department with a tape machine hoping that in the course of arguing for Lord Buckley’s card someone would approach him for a bribe. No one did, but the policeman in charge referred to the fact that there was very little difference between a performer and a criminal anyway. That brilliant observation was taped and I made much of it later. Humes introduced me to Buckley at the suggestion of Dorothy Schiff, publisher of the New York Post, and I asked the police department for a hearing. Now these hearings were usually before an inspector who was sympathetic. They were simple hearings. I would produce the applicant and he would testify that he was married and that he had not committed an offense for a number of years. In other words, that he was rehabilitated. And that would have been the routine in Lord Buckley’s case except Doc Humes was a very effervescent individual with a tremendous amount of energy and a sense of drama. So instead of one witness he came with eight noted writers and with reporters from the New York papers. It was a Friday afternoon. We didn’t finish the testimony, and the hearing was postponed for two weeks. Lord Buckley died one week later. He died on a Saturday night. Then an amazing thing happened—seventy-eight of the foremost writers and publishers in New York formed a citizen’s committee to fight the police department on this issue. The New York papers made this front page news.

At the scheduled hearing, at which I planned to ask for a card, even posthumously, at the Buckley family’s request, I appeared with one witness. When I came to headquarters I was surprised to see a number of television cameras, reporters and high officials in the police department. I was told by the officer in charge [Officer Lent] that the Police Commissioner, Stephen Kennedy, was going to sit in. He was a feared political power, a man who would throw his weight around in the city. During the hearing, which was very simple, the Commissioner handed the Inspector in charge a note. I asked to see it, but the note was torn up. We knew from the Inspector’s apologetic demeanor that it instructed the Inspector to deny the card. Then Commissioner Kennedy took over, and began harassing my witness. He asked his name, and then whether the witness was known by any other names. I pounced on the Commissioner. "You don’t have the right to offend a witness by that question." And then we went at each other as the cameras began to grind. The Commissioner had made a tactical mistake: a powerful individual should not start up with a small man. Later Doc Humes came in and it became a shouting match between the two of them. Finally at about three o’clock we finished.

That was the beginning of the end of the police card.

Author, essayist, Paris Review publisher, television personality, and fireworks connoisseur, George Plimpton has carved a unique niche for himself in American letters.

Lord Buckley was a legendary bohemian to all of us. There was something about him. He became a sort of mythological figure even though I don’t think many of us had been down there to see him or hear him at the Jazz Gallery. We appreciated him as a real pioneer. Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce came after him. Bruce, who had many more troubles than Buckley, to put it mildly, was the most highly regarded comic of that iconoclastic tradition.

The Citizen’s Emergency Committee was part of the big attempt to change things. And it was all through the arm-twisting of Doc Humes as I recall that they came together. Doc had chattered a lot about a film he was working on, Don Peyote, in which he said he planned to use Lord Buckley, though I don’t know what happened to it.

Perhaps because Doc was a novelist, got the bit in his teeth about the confiscation of Buckley’s cabaret card because the performance had to do with words rather than music. Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker were musicians whereas Buckley was a monologist. He dealt with words. Doc himself was a writer—the author of two novels, The Underground City and Men Die.

The thing I always thought was so remarkable about the Citizen’s Emergency Committee was that Doc had pulled together quite a high-powered group of people. It was quite an eclectic conglomeration. Mark Lane, Robert Silvers, who was then an editor at Harper’s, Daniel Ogden Stewart of The New Yorker, the Grove Press’s Barney Rossett, Norman Podhoretz of Commentary and the composer David Amram, to name some of the members of the group when they first formed.

The funny thing about the Citizen’s Emergency Committee was that it seemed to be mostly social. There used to be meetings but I don’t recall any petitions. I don’t recall what the force of the thing was. It was a Citizen’s Emergency Committee but how much power it had I really don’t know. I think it just voiced a lot of complaints and tried to get the press involved. There were a lot of news stories that came out during the cabaret card investigation. John F. Kennedy had been elected president just a week before Buckley’s death so the times were rife with controversy and change. But the committee did succeed on bringing the issue before the public. Eventually, the cabaret card licensing ceded. It was, by edict, eventually done away with, and I like to think the Citizen’s Emergency Committee (what a grand sounding name!) had something to do with it.

I remember nothing of the specifics of Lord Buckley’s death and though Doc and other members of the Citizen’s Emergency Committee suggested that it was hastened by the police harassment, I tend to doubt it.

It was an exciting day for the "fuzz" last Thursday when a whole slew of reporters and a couple of novelists showed up at a hearing at the Police Department Division of Licenses. The ink-stained contingent appeared on the scene to find out why the police had lifed the cabaret card of Lord Buckley, the "Hip Messiah."

Buckley, who had been playing at the Jazz Gallery as a "mass pantomimist," had been relieved of his card earlier in the week, without prior notice or hearing.

The police claimed that Buckley had falsified a statement on his application for a car when he denied he had ever been arrested. Buckley later told the police that he was confused in his mind as to whether the question had meant "arrested" or "convicted."

Dangerous Extension

Maxwell T. Cohen, Buckley’s attorney, told Deputy Chief Inspector Francis W. Lent that the question of arrest was "inherently prohibitive in any court," and that it was a dangerous extension of power for the Police Department to be able to ask such a question.

The Police Department produced an FBI file at the hearing which showed that Buckley had been convicted for being drunk in Reno 19 years ago, and that he had been arrested in Indianapolis 17 years ago for assault and possession of marijuana. There was no record of conviction in the latter case.

Cohen argued that Buckley’s record "was too remote in time to have a bearing on his character," and that his cabaret card had been removed without prior notice—a violation of Police Department rules.

The high point in the hearing occurred, however, when Cohen informed Inspector Lent that the defense had a tape recording an interview involving Police Sergeant Frank Nolan, novelist Harold Humes (author of "Underground City"), and Lord Buckley.

Cohen began to read a transcript of the interview with Nolan and to question the officer on what he had said at the time. Humes, Cohen pointed, had, at the interview, charged the Police Department of "depriving a man of his livelihood without due process of law." To this Sergeant Nolan had allegedly replied: "There are some people who say we are depriving them of their livelihood when they are selling narcotics." Humes then said: "This is a different thing—he’s an entertainer." According to the transcript Nolan replied: "It’s not a different thing."

Inspector Lent called a hasty recess in the hearing at this juncture.

At one point in the hearing, the court reporter seemed unable to believe his ears and asked Lord Buckley to sit closer to him. Buckley switched seats obligingly with novelist Norman Mailer and the stenographer said: "You mentioned Jesus Christ."

Buckley proceeded to explain his form of entertainment. "I teach the words of Christ" in night clubs, he exlained cooly. Buckley has appeared on nine Ed Sullivan shows, and his lawyer elicited from him the fact that he had been seen by possibly 100 million viewers "without any complaint from any municipal or state authority."

It was later brought out in court that he had been an entertainer at the Police Department Honor Legion’s dinner the previous Monday night—and without a cabaret card. "It was a work of love," Buckley told the hearing. "Love for the Police Department?" his lawyer asked. "Yes," Buckley replied.

Later, Lord Buckley, whose name is Richard M., explained: "I believe all ladies and gentlemen are Lords and Ladies." He told The Voice that his act for the Police Department had been "mass pantomimicism" (a word he coined himself). I got four policemen to stand up and I projected four voices through them in sequence," he said. Did the fuzz like the act? "They were really swinging," Buckley replied.

Some of the people Buckley brings into his act are Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Confucius, and the Marquis de Sade "translated into hip talk."

At the beginning of this week Buckley was still without a cabaret card, and still unable to go back to work at the Jazz Gallery.

I took him to his opening in a Rolls. A week and a half later, without notice or hearing, without even giving a reason, the police picked up Lord Buckley’s so-called Cabaret Identification Card. Three weeks later, after living through the exquisite Chinese torture that passes for the standard operating procedure of the Police Cabaret Bureau, Lord Buckley was dead. According to the two doctors who attended him in the last hours of his life, he died of a stroke; and this was the cause of death noted on his hospital chart at the time of his death. The police, however, after hurried consultation with the autopist, said he died of an old "kidney ailment."

The last conversation I had with His Lordship was on the telephone at two o’clock in the morning on the day of his death. He called me to chew me out for not being with him—almost as though he had a clear premonition of what was coming. I remember the conversation vividly because it was the first time I ever heard Lord Buckley talk about the fear that must have been in him those last weeks of grinding anxiety when each day he called the cabaret bureau and each day was told to "call tomorrow." (He once said that a performer who couldn’t perform might as well be dead.) Toward the end of that last conversation between us he told me that they’d been living on spaghetti all week and that he needed five or ten dollars to buy food. I was so shook that I immediately called Art D’Lugoff at the Village Gate and asked him if he could get some money to Buckley right away, since he was in his neighborhood. To his eternal credit, D’Lugoff asked no questions, but immediately sent money over.

The last thing Buckley said to me over the telephone before he hung up forever was: "I’m sorry, I’ve got to find help somewhere, they’re bugging me to death. In fact I got the Bugbird in me right now."

The Bugbird, as anyone who has heard his version of Poe’s poem knows, is the Raven, symbol of impending death. The last thing he was working on before he died was a wall plaque; I have it in my possession. He was hand-lettering a quotation from Mencken, but he didn’t get to finish it. Only half the letters are colored in. It reads as follows: "The best and clearest thinking of the world is done, and the finest art is produced, not by those who are hungry, nagged and harassed, but by those who are well-fed, warm and easy in mind. It is the artist’s first duty to his art to achieve that tranquility for himself."

But it’s useless to carry on this way. I’m still sore that he’s dead, because he should have died laughing. He was a religious man in his orbital way, and he believed deeply in what he was doing. He called the cabarets where he worked "atomic age cathedrals," and he meant it. In an age of insanity he carried grace with him wherever he went, and had the knack of conferring it on whomever he met. He believed that if everyone treated each other as sovereigns, as lords and ladies, the world could be made livable again. He carried this out in his personal life to the extent that I have seen him make a lady out of a three-wheeled cadmium-plated bitch merely by punctiliously kissing her hand as he left her. And it was completely typical of him to tell the police—this was during his first hearing after losing his livelihood—that he thought the police needed more love. This was a deadly truth. For this man there is no choice but death.

In 1960 I was invited to this party at George Plimpton’s house. I had known George from Paris in the early 1950s when he was starting up the Paris Review. When I moved to New York and wasn’t working I would go over and play piano at these literary parties George gave at his apartment on East Seventy-second Street. This was before he was on television or anything like that. He was a wonderful host and party-giver. He liked to hang out with different people so he’d just have a book party for someone, and then enjoy himself and make everybody feel at home.

The thing is, no one would know whose book it was. It was so low-keyed that you never knew who the author was. Everybody tried to be so low-keyed when they were there since the parties were always presented in this kind of subdued style. Even people who were there on the hustle were trying to pretend that they weren’t because they wanted to be invited back again so they could then hustle again in that low-key way. But many people like myself were there to party, look for romance, enjoy a wild assortment of people...and see George.

I’d sit there and play the piano and I met a lot of people I’m still friendly with. I met all these fantastic writers, professional athletes and could, since I was single at the time, meet all these real intelligent women who were mostly interested in writers and not in struggling musicians. But still, it was stimulating being there. And George was always friendly and fun to be with.

I got to the party and saw Lord Buckley. He said, "Prince David, welcome to the Royal Court of hip New York happening. You can hippify these cats with some sacred sounds. You’re Oscar’s French horn player."

I was writing music for Shakespeare in Central Park when I was at Birdland with Oscar Pettiford, the great bassist. Oscar used to tell everybody, "My man, Dave, my French horn player is writing Shakespeare in the Park," meaning that I was writing the music. He knew that Shakespeare had written the plays.

So when Lord Buckley mentioned Oscar and the music I’d written for Shakespeare, I said, "That’s right," and told him how much I enjoyed everything that he’d done over the years, how he gave me a new insight into Shakespeare, and how Dizzy and Dick Leith and so many other musicians had introduced me to him.

Since Shakespeare in the Park was free, a lot of people who didn’t go to the theater would go to see the performances. So there were a lot of beboppers there as well as Shakespeare fans.

Lord Buckley had seen some of the plays I had written the music for and he said, "Play me some Shakespeare in the Park and we’ll turn these cats on to the sweet sounds of the groovy bard."

So I began playing a kind of Elizabethan piano and he went over in the corner and was just standing there. He was such an incredible-looking person that some of the people who were there didn’t know if he was a famous author or maybe some eccentric multimillionaire. No one was sure. He had such a strong presence that some of the literary types actually stopped talking to one another and began eyeballing him.

The room quieted down and George Plimpton said, "We have a very special guest this evening who we’d really like you to hear. He’s a wonderful protagonist of spontaneous prose and he’s quite original. I think you all will really enjoy hearing Lord Buckley."

So Lord Buckley looked at everyone and got that gleam in his eye and said, "My Lords and Ladies, welcome to the royal court of his holiness George Plimpton."

All the guests looked dumbfounded and didn’t know what to do because they’d never heard anything like this before. He gave me a nod to play some more and raised his hands like Moses recieving the Ten Commandments.

Buckley then started going into this fantastic improvised routine about Harvard Yard and the ghetto. He was kind of summing up everything in the room interspersed with some stuff that I’d never heard him do before. The people in the room were spellbound, and he launched into a new version of Julius Caesar done in street style.

Just in the middle of it a loud, garrulous voice said, "Is this supposed to be humor? Doesn’t sound very spontaneous to me and it doesn’t sound like prose."

It was Norman Mailer who was at the party and imbibing heavily at that time. In retrospect he was obviously in the throes of some personal difficulty. It was odd because Norman was usually the first person who would take the side of anybody who was considered off the track and defend them and go out of his way to try make everyone else appreciate them and even start a fight to quiet people down if they were bothering anybody.

So Lord Buckley said, "My Lord, that was a beautiful thought," and he continued rapping away and about every other minute Norman, who was really blasted out, would start heckling him. This made it even better for Lord Buckley who was really a master at dealing with hecklers, including people who were gangsters and people with murder raps and everything. He did it in such a humorous way that Norman really got into and became part of the program.

We continued for about forty-five minutes. But what I didn’t know was that George Plimpton and novelist Doc Humes had invited some people who worked in television who they thought could help Lord Buckley out. See, I wasn’t aware of the cabaret card troubles that Lord Buckley was having. I knew about the cabaret card law and that Billie Holliday couldn’t get a card and all the troubles that Lenny Bruce had. But I didn’t know that it was such a terrible thing for Lord Buckley. As a result he couldn’t work any clubs in New York. George and Doc Humes hoped perhaps he might get booked on T.V., where you didn’t need a cabaret card.

And we kept on going, not knowing that most of the guests were expecting to hear five minutes. Once Lord Buckley got started he could do five or six hours and go over to someone’s house and do another five or six hours because he was really into what he was doing.

Doc Humes came over to me while I was playing and said, "Man, he’s going on too long. He’s going to lose the T.V. execs."

And I said, "I don’t think he cares about that."

Lord Buckley then asked me to play some blues and then he just started making up all kinds of wild poetry and scat—incredible material. And then I saw he was just going to have some fun. He’d done his performing and he was just going to perform for himself like a jazz musician in the traditional sense, as if to say, "I’m really doing this ’cause I want to do it and you’re welcome to enjoy it."

Well, at that point, I think he expected people to just wander around and two or three people to hang out by the piano that wanted to hear. But they all stayed there because they were all people who I guess were trained to show that they had good manners. It was still a literary type scene where everybody wanted to act proper. But they had been standing for over an hour.

So, after about an hour and a half Doc Humes finally came over and said, "That was Lord Buckley—isn’t he fabulous!" And everybody applauded and immediately refilled their drinks and went back into their socializing and literateuring.

And Doc never really got a chance to tell all the guests about the cabaret card law because Lord Buckley had gone on so long—he was having such a good time and, being a guy who lived for the moment, he really wasn’t concerned about the gathering being some sort of a benefit for him or some kind of literary showcase for his talents. So they never really got around to explaining to the people who were there that he was a man who couldn’t perform in New York because of an antiquated law.

And I think at that point Doc wanted to take him home. But Lord Buckley was having too a good a time to leave. He went over afterwards and he was talking to Norman Mailer and kind of cheered him up giving him a big hug to show that he didn’t mind—that he enjoyed the heckling.

I would always stay at the parties till George was ready to go to bed because I didn’t want to miss anything. Since I hadn’t written a book at the time I really had nothing to sell. I just wanted to hang out and have a good time. And Lord Buckley was the same way—he was just hanging out and enjoying himself. So we were drinking and eating up everything in sight—all the canapes, little sandwiches, the cheese and all the stuff that was there. After we scarfed up everything and had a few drinks, we played some music and then he called out different tunes. Duke Ellington tunes and Charlie Parker tunes. We started talking about music, all the great jazz literature and the structure of music too. Almost all the guests had gone, and Lord Buckley was still wailing.

And, finally, he said, "Well, let’s go down to my pad and hang out. I think His Lordship George should cop some Zs."

So I left with Lord Buckley and Doc Humes. There was also a young man from the Southwest whose name I don’t remember. He was kind of a fan and disciple of Lord Buckley’s. He was a very nice, young guy not more than twenty years old and he drove us all downtown.

So we got in this little Volkswagon minivan and started driving. George’s place was over by the East River on Seventy-second Street and we drove over to and down Second Avenue to the place Lord Buckley was staying on Gramercy Park. As we started going down Second Avenue Lord Buckley started this fantastic rap—like an incredible saga and, as he was rising to a crescendo, we were going through these staggered traffic lights. The driver was going faster and faster so, finally, since the lights were timed at twenty-three miles an hour, we went through the yellow lights and then the red lights with Lord Buckley maniacally urging him on: "Go on, man! Get it! Go! Wail! Go! Go! Drive the chariot faster, my son. The Holy Grail is nearing!"

The young man kept going through the red lights, with Lord Buckley driving him on: "Go on, man! Go! We’re going to hit the greens again! Go! Beautiful! Beautiful!" Meaning that we would eventually catch up with the green lights again.

So we were roaring through all the red lights while I’m thinking we’re going to get hit by a car except it was about two in the morning so there wasn’t much traffic coming cross town.

Well, just as we were about to catch up to the green lights, I saw those flashing red lights from behind and I looked around and there was a police car.

I yelled, "Oh my God, man, we’re all going to get busted!"

And he said, "Go on, man! Go on! Go! Don’t worry about that cat! Go! Go!"

So the driver kept going faster.

Finally, the police car veered over to the side of the van and looked like he was going to force us off the road and I moaned, "Oh boy, we’re all going to spend the night in jail!" I had just finished writing the music for the film Splendor in the Grass that summer. I was thinking that I was going to get a chance to do some really great stuff and now I wouldn’t be able to go to the preview because I was going to be in jail.

Anyway, the driver stopped the van and both the policemen came over with their hands right next to their guns and these huge flashlights shining in the windows.

But Lord Buckley said, "Don’t worry. Everything is cool. Everything is beautiful. God loves us. Everything is cool. Don’t get upset. Everything is beautiful. Just stay cool."

They came around to the driver’s side of the van and said, "Let me see your license and registration. Don’t move your hands. Go into your pocket very slowly."

So this young driver went very slowly into his pocket. The cop flashed his light around the car and he saw Lord Buckley and the most incredible thing happened. The cop said, "Oh." Then they turned from the side of the van, got into the police car and drove off.

That was all the cop said: "...Oh."

Now, I never understood whether or not he was a bigger Lord Buckley fan than anybody or Lord Buckley had put some kind of cosmic whammy on him. I believe he had the power to do stuff like that. I had the impression that he didn’t even know Lord Buckley. On the other hand, being a professional policeman and all that we’d done...well, I’ve never to this day been able to figure out why he didn’t bust us right on the spot. Not that Lord Buckley ever said anything like that, it’s just that I never experienced such a situation like that in my life—especially with a policeman. Anyway, the policemen walked back in front of the van, got into the car and drove off. They didn’t say anything but "Oh."

Doc Humes and I didn’t even say a thing because we were afraid they might come back again.

After the cops drove off Lord Buckley said, "Come on, let’s get up to the pad" and urged the young driver to start racing the lights again. "Go man! You got it! Beautiful! We’re free!"

This time the driver was as terrified as we were and wouldn’t go through another red light.

So we got down to Gramercy Park, parked the van and went up to this place where Lord Buckley was staying and the four of us just sat around talking until dawn.

He started telling us about the cabaret card problem and what a tremendous strain it was because all he really wanted to do was to be free to do what he was doing. New York was one of the places especially where he was really appreciated and accepted by everybody that knew about him. There were an enormous number of people that appreciated him and a tremendous number of black people that appreciated him in New York.

Most white people thought that Lord Buckley was black from listening to his records. Black people didn’t really care if he was black or white—it didn’t make any difference to them. That was just a technicality because in his spirit and his soul and his delivery and his life he had so much love and appreciation and reverence and respect for that tradition that he just transcended all the racial barriers because what he did wasn’t done in a racist way. It was done in a loving way, in a cultural way. Just like anybody can play Beethoven regardless of what their background is. You don’t have to be German to play Beethoven if you devote your whole life to it. And if you devote your whole life to jazz or what Lord Buckley did, eventually you can learn that and it can become a part of you if you do it with humility and reverence. And he talked about that too.

I always felt I loved Shakespeare as much as Lord Buckley did and I loved the English language and respected all that but I also felt that there were other traditions that were just as equally valuable and equally important. Lord Buckley was that way just as Dizzy and Charlie Parker had been in the respect that they were multicultural people. They all encouraged any musicians or people I knew to try to learn and glean to the beautifulness of the world’s people and the world’s culture. And Lord Buckley was talking about that too. The whole idea of the global concept was very important to him. He thought that comedy was a way to get people thinking and feeling and to see the humanness in themselves that they share with other people.

He said, "It’s just like blowing, man." Just like when you’re improvising or playing—you’re free but you’re dealing from a cultural perspective or a style that comes, in the case of jazz, from African procedures that have gone back thousands and thousands of years combined with European techniques and stuff that is specifically American and then being able to improvise on the spot and combine everything.

He said, "We do the same thing in comedy you do when you’re playing. We play off the cash register too."

That was an old expression because in the little clubs that he used to play, what Lenny Bruce called the "toilets," there was always a cash register with a big ring. So in the middle of some gorgeous ballad or some great joke of his you’d hear the cash register ring. The other side of that coin is that when the cash register hit or somebody flushed a toilet or a gun shot went off you, as a performer, had a chance to do something to relate to that—use that as part of the arrangement. He said he would use that as part of the comedy. So, when a heckler came like Norman Mailer, he enjoyed that because that became a whole new vista, a new whole new cast of dramatic characters that he would put into whatever he was doing. Because he was so amazing he could do so many different characters and voices that if someone was heckling, that just added a character to expand the ones he already had.

He talked about playing in the Capone-owned clubs back in the Chicago of the thirties. That was part of his routine too and he had a lot of fans, of course, who were gangsters—everybody did. When I played with Charles Mingus at the Bohemia, some of the people that used to come down there were pretty wild. I don’t think they were big figures but the interesting thing was that the Mob-connected people always were the nicest to the musicians, the most respectful, and treated you very well as long as you didn’t make any outrageous demands. But Lord Buckley had a lot of fans who were in that...everybody did at that time. That’s who owned the clubs.

I finally left, went home and crashed. A few hours later, Doc called and told me that he had died. That always stayed in my mind. I always had a special place in my heart for him since then. Whenever I would hear Shakespeare or hear jazz, not just hear his records. Whenever I would meet people from any of those places that would talk about leaders or meeting world leaders I would think of him. When I would see Duke Ellington or Count Basie I would think of the idea of royalty in a much more refreshing way. I saw that true royalty, like Lord Buckley, is something that is not just passed along through marriage and is not something that you’re born with. It’s something that you acquire and earn by your conduct and your excellence of spirit and your humanity and your willingness to share what you have with others and the gift that you can bring to other people. That’s a truly royal person—one who is generous and magnificent and enormous in spirit and achievement which he was.

I was with Buckley the day before he died or a couple of days before he died. I was up at his place at his invitation. And he had some underage mulatto chick up there running around naked. He had a bottle of vodka into which he was dropping mescaline tablets from time to time. They were dissolving the mescaline into the vodka and he was swigging this bottle. He offered me a swig and at first I said, "No, no, that’s a little scary to me." So finally, on his dare, I took one little sip of the goddamned thing and I was up for three days and nights seeing everything in Technicolor.

I really think that’s what kicked off his heart. He had this chick running naked around the joint and the both of them were swigging this vodka. Supposedly, the semiofficial version was that he had had a heart attack while making it with her.

But there’s another story that went around. Somebody that was with him when he died said that the last thing he said was, "Spo-Dee-O-Dee," and then he died.

Spo-Dee-O-Dee was a black comedian who I think was based in Chicago. And the story is that a lot of Buckley’s material or his approach to material was taken from Spo-Dee-O-Dee. It’s also said that a lot of the black musicians hated Buckley because they felt he was ripping off Spo-Dee-O-Dee. I never saw Spo-Dee-O-Dee perform myself.

Spo-Dee-O-Dee was in the black entertainment world when there was a color line. There were places that whites worked and places that blacks worked like the Cotton Club. They were in other cities, too, like Chicago. I think Spo-Dee-O-Dee worked in clubs like that but he might have also worked in clubs that white people wouldn’t go near.

There was some suspicion that he was murdered by Spo-Dee-O-Dee or by people who were close to Spo-Dee-O-Dee. My understanding was that some of the musicians, or some of the patrons of the club he was working in before he died, were threatening him and had a thing going against Buckley because they felt he had ripped off the black man in general and Spo-Dee-O-Dee in particular.

I was shocked by his death. The man seemed indestructible, invincible somehow. He was like one of those people that inspired you to believe he was going to live to a hundred and sixty. Because he was a powerful man, a big man. There was so much energy coming from him that you couldn’t believe it could all of a sudden get shut off like that.

There are several theories about his death. One was that he tangled with some Black Muslims who beat him up very badly. The other, and the one that I subscribe to, was that after he had his cabaret card taken from him the cops started harassing him in shifts night and day. They wanted five hundred bucks for the card and Buckley would not pay it. They wouldn’t let him get any sleep and it put a terrible and, ultimately, fatal strain on him.

He came to my house in New Rochelle for dinner on the Thursday night before his death, accompanied by two members of his court, Prince Lewis and Lady Bunny.

On Saturday morning Bunny called me up in an absolute panic saying that he was sick. I told her to call a doctor in their apartment building but apparently they didn’t get much satisfaction. They ended up taking him to Columbus Hospital where I suppose they didn’t have a lot of ancillary equipment to take care of him properly.

There was always a cloud over the circumstances of his passing. It has been said that in his apartment the night before his passing there was a heated discussion between Buckley and some militant blacks. There was also a rumor about a bottle of tainted wine found under a sofa in Buckley’s apartment.

All I know is that the cops took him off his gig and put him in the back of a police car and a couple of guys back there just whacked him around, punchin’ him in the belly, bangin’ him where you can’t see. Yeah and they drove him home! They do something like that where they don’t leave too many marks, whatever it is, but they just beat the shit out o’ ya like that and they took him and like dropped him off at his place and he went up there and went to bed and he never woke. That was it. Aced out. He sure didn’t deserve to go out that way. That’s a royal bringdown.

There are a lot of stories about Lord Buckley’s last days and although there was some strange stuff going on, I think he probably died of natural causes.

He was shacked up with a black chick for about a week before he died. In addition, he had a falling out over something with these people who had an engraving place in the Village. I remember they left in a huff. There was tension.

It was a martyrdom. That was one of the sad things about the whole thing. This country has a way of making martyrs out of its best people. The aged seer is a revered figure in folklore. They didn’t go putting them out in the cold.

He got poisoned and that’s that. There’s not much else to say. It was a group that played in-between. That’s neither here nor there: everybody knows he was done-in.

He did get back to sipping wine and that might have hurt his liver. It might have been some sort of an attack that gave him paralysis that he died from. Others have said that it could be...special karate-type blows to the vital organs that would render him paralyzed and unable to express himself.

We saw him perform at the Jazz Gallery right before he died. It was really something to see. He was electrifying. I never saw him that good. But then he had his cabaret card taken from him.

That last night at the Jazz Gallery he put a joint on me. I put it in my pocket and I forgot all about it.

A couple of days later an owl flew right in front of our car. I’d never seen an owl fly but those two big eyes stared at me for half a second. It nearly hit the windshield of the car.

When we got home I found the joint. We decided to invite him for breakfast, smoke it and then he’d be in rare form.

Sure enough, the next morning I woke up and I called Buckley. This guy Prince Lewis answered the phone and told me, "His Lordship passed during the night."

When they took away his ability to work in New York they killed him. He just died from a broken heart.

He was a wonderful, decent man. During the war he was part of my troupe that entertained in hospitals all over the country. Nobody found it necessary to screen him then or have him carry a police card.

You know, we never really thought Lord Buckley would die. We thought he had it from his mouth to God’s ear.

When I heard he had passed on, I thought: "There is a man who’s lived seven lifetimes in this one experience." He had a strong self-image. He was a rare, gifted man who had an individual brilliance—an aura about him. He could enjoy paupers or kings and be equally at ease.

He died in character. His death was ironic.

Prince Foremaster told me that he had a heart attack while they were in a taxicab in Manhattan. Buckley always called the shots and said, "Take me back to the apartment." He said he didn’t want to go to a hospital. So they went back to the apartment. He lay there complaining: "The Bugbird is eating my heart." This went on for a few hours and then he died.

Anyway, that’s what he told me. People can judge it any way they want. So to me, being a physician, that was the great tragedy because he might have possibly been saved.

Sometimes when I think about his death I burst into tears right on the street and hang on to a parking meter. It still gets me.

It just happened so fast. He was waiting for the hearing where he was going to plead his case to get the police card back so he could go back to work and he died the night before we were to go to court.

I had been away for a night or two doing a photo shoot and I got a call from Prince Lewis who told me that some people from the Village Church were over to visit Lord Buckley. Lord Buckley had a very mystical thing about these people coming from the Village Church to visit him. But Prince Lewis said they kind of put him down. They also brought Lord Buckley some whiskey which had made him ill. He had gone to sleep but when he woke up he couldn’t move.

When I got there Lord Buckley was in his bed stretched out stiff. At first I thought he was dead. But when I went up to him I could see that his eyes were moving, that he was breathing and still alive. He couldn’t talk, he just uttered a few sounds.

Lord Buckley was desperately ill and we had to get him to a hospital immediately. We didn’t want to take him to Bellevue—he was very upset with the thought of going to Bellevue because I could see the reaction in his eyes when I mentioned Bellevue.

But we did call Bellevue because we had no money and no choice. Somehow, though, we got magically mixed up and had called Columbus Hospital instead, which was about four blocks from where we were living.

And then something very strange happened. Along with the two ambulance doctors came the ambulance driver who was a magical little man. He was the size of an elf, about three-foot-six and he looked like one too. He was charming but absolutely ridiculous looking in his ambulance hat with the little red cross on it. They put Lord Buckley on the stretcher and all the time I’m admonishing them: "Be careful with this royal man. He’s a beautiful, talented, loving gentleman."

I sat in the back with Lord Buckley and held his hand. When we got to the hospital I looked around for this elf to thank him but he wasn’t there—he just disappeared.

In the emergency room I was still warning everybody to be careful with Lord Buckley and instantly there were about ten doctors and surgeons around him putting tubes and things in his arm and mouth. We got him up to his room and I said, "Hang on. Hang on Lord Buckley. Please hang on."

I began recalling his thing about Gulley Jimson from The Horse’s Mouth when Gulley Jimson was dying and commented that laughing and praying were the same thing. And Lord Buckley began to laugh. I was holding his hand and I told him, "Well, I’ve got all the monologues, everything you’ve done. Now all I need is a little help."

And the one hand that he used was in mine. Somehow he managed to take his hand out of mine and wrap it around mine. I held on to it and I felt a little tingle going through his body to mine. And that was it. He flipped out. He just left.

Richard M. Buckley, an entertainer known as Lord Buckley, died last night in Columbus Hospital. He had suffered a stroke earlier in the day at his apartment, 39 Gramercy Park West. He was 54 years old.

Mr. Buckley, who was known as the Hip Messiah, often had appeared on the Ed Sullivan television show. His only cafe appearance here in many years, at the Jazz Gallery, 80 St. Marks Place, was halted last month.

His license was suspended by the police, who said he had falsified information on his license.

Mr. Buckley, who sometimes performed wearing tails and sometimes wearing a sweater, often recited Biblical stories in the rhythmical jargon of hip, a purer form of the semi-secret language identified with the so-called Beat Generation. His stage name was derived from his height and regal bearing. During World War II he performed extensively before armed services audiences.

Mr. Buckley is survived by his widow, Elizabeth; a daughter Laurie, and two sons, Richard Jr. and Frederick.

Richard (Lord) Buckley, the San Francisco comedian who rose to prominence on his "hip" version of the classics, died last night in New York City.

Mr. Buckley, 55, was in the East on a series of nightclub engagements. Until about two months ago, he and his wife and children had made their home in San Raphael.

A native of Tuolumne, Mr. Buckley had an entertainment career for more than three decades. He was at one time a Shakespearean actor and during World War II, toured extensively as a vaudeville performer.

He appeared with Fred Allen and Ginger Rogers in the movie "We’re Not Married" and was in the Broadway musical "Passing Parade" in 1946.

Recently, he had appeared on the Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marx and Steve Allen television shows and was seen with Don Sherwood on his local program.

Mr. Buckley became best known for his "bop talk" renditions of Biblical, Shakespearean and other tales. He had recorded albums of these performances for RCA Victor and World Pacific.

City Lights bookstore had recently published a collection of these performances titled "Hiporama."

In addition to his wife, a daughter and two sons survive.

The coffin was open from the waist up as far as I could see and he was wearing his white tie and tails. But it was propped up a little bit and he was just lying there, looked like Lord Buckley asleep. You know he was only 54 years old but he died of old age.

J. Fred Coots, composer of such great American standards as "You Go To My Head," a man who was held in very high esteem on the popular music domain, was supposed to deliver a eulogy. At the last minute, Elizabeth came up to me and said he couldn’t do it, would I? Christ...every hipster in town was there.

He was laid out stiff and stark virtually at my feet as I was talking. There was a quote on the back of one of his Vaya albums, the one about people being flowers, which I thought was particularly appropriate to the occasion and which The Great Architect in His infinite sympathy allowed me to remember.

There was a great bond between us even though I knew him a for a comparatively short time. And I feel really privileged to have had the opportunity to speak at his funeral. I’d had no time to prepare my remarks, so I’m so I’m convinced that Lord Buckley was whispering in my ear as I concluded my homage with this wonderfully appropriate quote of his, "The flowers, the gorgeous, mystic, multicolored flowers are not the flowers of life, but people, yes people, are the true flowers of life. And it has been a most precious privilege to have temporarily strolled in your garden."

I hadn’t seen His Lordship or Lady Lizbeth for some years when I walked into Campbell’s Funeral Home. I’m sitting there thinking to myself, "How is Elizabeth going to come in? Is she going to come in mourning wearing black? Or is she going to remember what Buckley told her: "Always wear colors like flowers." She came in through the door wearing the brightest red Chinese dress with yellow and red palms in her hair. She came over to me and said, "Prince Charles, His Lordship is waiting." And we walked in.

And if anybody looked like they were ready to get up and do a performance, it was Lord Buckley. He looked so majestic in death, just as he did in life. I expected him to sit up and say, "Lily! Good God, you came!"

Cannonball Adderly and his band played at the ceremony.

And I watched one of the most touching things. A comedian named Sid Gould walked over to the casket, bent down, stuck a joint in Buckley’s breast pocket, kissed him, and said, "When you get there, here’s a little thing for you."

Afterwards, a few of us drove in a limo out to the crematorium with a supply of joints. All the way out there we smoked reefer, including the driver of the limo. And we talked about all the beautiful things that had happened in our life with Lord Buckley.

Lady Buckley looked up and said, "He’s here in the car with us, you know. He’s enjoying this."

And you could feel that he hadn’t left yet. He wasn’t about to go anywhere. He was still digging the scene.

Love is the international understanding that each and every one of us have exactly the same problems to fight.

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