Go back to Words & Wit pageOAKLAND -- Michael O'Donoghue didn't have illusions about a lot of things, but he did believe that the best dope came from California. "You're from California," he said, soon after meeting me. We were sitting in his living room; there was a three-foot plastic flamingo by my left elbow.
"I am," I said.
"Maybe you can bring me some of that Mexican stuff," he said. "Wuh-hawk-en. Sounds like a town in Illinois, only it's spelled with three x's."
I was sitting in his living room because I was trying to convince him to write for a magazine I was editing. This was at the time when Phoebe Zeitgeist had just finished its run in Evergreen. I was smart enough to know that I should sign up O'Donoghue while I could still afford him.
In New York humor circles, he was already The Man, the fastest gunslinger in town, the dude you didn't mess with if you had some investment in the notion that you were the cleverest person in the room. Every conversation was a competition, and he always had to win. A minor-league wit- monger like me could only feed him set-up lines; I had no chance in the Big Game.
He won fair and square, though; his meanness was always exquisitely impersonal. He was still entirely a creature of New York; he never felt he had to explain anything. This was before television, before Hollywood, before a little of this and a lot of that. He didn't understand then that his talent was too pure for easy packaging, and that both compromise and failure to compromise would be bad career choices.
He lived in a wonderful townhouse at 23 W. 16th Street (just off Fifth Avenue and just north of Village), cluttered with camp and kitsch, including some multi-hundreds of porcelain salt-and-pepper shakers, collected from God knows where and for God knows what reason. That was the thing about O'Donoghue -- if he did it, you assumed it was cool. Fine. Salt-and-pepper shakers. Send the rest of my generals a dozen pairs.
At the time, he was living with the writer Anne Beatts, not to be confused with Ann Beattie, although she often was, much to her irritation. Beatts had a mouth on her too, and the relationship embodied a kind of Catskill tension, as one- liners flew, sometimes collaboratively, sometimes not.
Beatts broke up with Mr. Mike a few years later, and still later moved to Los Angeles. I still get cards from her every Christmas. She has dyed her hair blonde and likes to pose in glamorous postures as a gesture of holiday cheer.
I got him the dope, of course. He was The Man. I bought it in New York, but I lied about that. I didn't want to diminish its aura. Oh, be fair: I didn't want to diminish my aura. I wanted to be the editor who provided the perfect forum for Michael O'Donoghue. When I read this week that he had died, at age 54, of a cerebral hemorrhage, I was glad that I had been smart enough to recognize his unique genius, and lucky enough to pay him the compliment of trying to hire him.
He never did write for me, because, just about that time, he signed on as a head writer for a weird new television show called "Saturday Night Live," which he firmly believed would last "about eight minutes." We had dinner about six months after the show started; he still really didn't have a sense of the tiger he was riding.
"It's a cult out there," I told him as we were walking up Sixth Avenue after dinner. "It's the funniest thing anyone's ever seen. It's almost impossible that it's actually on network television."
"I guess," he said. It was winter; he was dressed, as he often was, like William Burroughs made over by GQ; he had on the tailored overcoat. I was wearing a pea jacket from California. He fingered its lapels.
"You going to be OK in that?" he asked. Like a lot of ironists, he was never sure what to do with his voice when he was being sincere. It came out tentative, with a rising inflection not usual in his voice.
"Sure."
"Good." He looked around. "It's cold out," he said.
Then he turned and walked up the street, seeming almost to glide on the dark sidewalk.
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