PJ O’Rourke: talkin’ ’bout his generation

HE took drugs, dodged the draft and became a father at 50. Now, writer PJ O’Rourke has turned his wit on his own generation.

PJ O’Rourke, talking from experience, says the baby boomers are ‘the most self-conscious generation on the face of the earth’.

PJ O’Rourke nudges a joystick with his thumb and a white drone lifts from the grassy hillside into the sky. It resembles an aero­dynamic drinks table. In a few moments it is merely a white indentation in the bright-blue heavens, then it disappears completely.

“Now what?” O’Rourke asks.

“It’s at 320ft (97.5m),” says Marty Del Vecchio, the proud owner of the drone, pointing to a screen above the joystick. Del Vecchio, a software engineer, is serving today as an assistant to Jason Grow, the photographer who is here to take O’Rourke’s portrait. He thought the drone might come in handy for the shoot.

“I wonder if I can use it to chase the dogs,” O’Rourke says, once he has worked out how to bring the drinks table down to 15m. It swivels and rushes after his labrador. “That is beyond cool,” he says.

And he is not an easy man to impress. Patrick Jake O’Rourke is a humorist and bestselling author who once served as foreign correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine, where he made it his business to put himself in the middle of wars, rebellions and other awkward situations.

His 1989 travel­ogue Holidays in Hell offered guidance on how to vacation in the sort of places 007 typically visits at the start of a Bond film. He has a well-nourished reputation for fast living and hard drinking (and, in the case of his fam­ous 1979 essay How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink, for doing both at the same time).

He is a conservative beloved of liberals and appears regularly on public radio, where listeners laugh at his grumpy-old-man schtick.

In his latest book, The Baby Boom: How I t Got That Way, O’Rourk­e seeks to offer an apol­ogy for his entire generation, the 75 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 who grew up in a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity; who gave us punk rock, electronic communication devices and political gridlock; and who will leave a stupendous bill for their welfare and pension benefits.

“Which should keep those Generation X slackers busy and maybe take their minds off Kurt Cobain dying,” he writes.

O’Rourke, 66, had originally wanted to write a book about parenting: he has two daughters, Liz­zie, 16, and Olivia, 13, and a son, Cliff, 10. His publisher suggested there was no particular shortage of books about rearing children.

“He said: ‘You realise that in 2014 the late baby boomers turn 50. And you’re one of those voices of the baby boom.’ ”

It’s said that O’Rourke is the most-quoted living person in the Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations, and The Baby Boom will surely extend his lead. Nearly every sentence looks as though it may one day be written on a coffee mug.

It is at times a little exhausting. Some may also have preferred to read a more straightforward memoir, rather than one that tries to speak for an entire generation, to be all things to all men.

O’Rourke says he wanted to leave himself out of the book altogether but “realised that for the most self-conscious generation on the face of the earth it needed some sort of personal side”.

So he took selected memories, scrubbed them of local details and used them as a template. According to O’Rourke, the baby boomer generation that credits itself with “creating a kinder society” spent its early years shooting squirrels with slingshots and tormenting the elderly. At least, this is what he was doing. He discusses “sail cats” — felines that had been run over so many times that they were as flat as Frisbees and could be “peeled up” from a hot road and “sailed through the air”.

I’m not sure this makes them better or worse than the present crop of American teens, to judge from some of the things they post on YouTube. O’Rourke disagrees.

“I would say there has been a considerable improvement in public morality. It’s probably been going on since the anti-slavery movement at the beginning of the 19th century.” He gives the example of his own son, Cliff.

“Admittedly, he goes to a little private day school. You know, a gentle place. I don’t think he’s ever been in a fight nor shown any desire to be. Nor have I seen his friends get in fights; it’s not just him. It’s definitely a less violent world, a more tolerant world.”

We’re inside now, in the building O’Rourke refers to as his office. It stands at the top of a ridge overlooking a forest that rolls away towards the New Hampshire horizon then swoops up the side of Mount Monadnock, a 915m peak that is apparently one of the most-climbed mountains in the world.

“Office” must be a term of art too. There is a desk, but there’s also a living room, a vast kitchen and a suite of guestrooms. “It started out being an office over a garage,” he says, but once they had dug a well and built a septic tank, “we thought we might as well literally go for broke”.

Down the hill you can see the main O’Rourke homestead: a glor­ious white colonial pile. We sit down in two cream-coloured armchairs overlooking a fireplace. O’Rourke pulls out a cigar and offers one to me. By now, I think I might be in a James Bond film; we lack only a fluffy cat.

He was born into a family of Irish-American car dealers in Toledo, Ohio, and his childhood was darker than the rosy pictures of squirrel-baiting and cat-hurling he paints in his book.

“My father died when I was not quite nine,” he says. “My mum just broke down terribly, visited his grave every day. It was a mess and she remarried not wisely.” His stepfather “wasn’t an evil beast, he had moments of conviviality. Perhaps a few too many. He wasn’t an ugly drunk. I could make it sound much more hellish than it was.”

O’Rourke left this out of his book. “It didn’t suit what I was trying to do,” he says. “Nor am I sure that I would be comfortable writing about it.” I suppose it wouldn’t be terribly funny. “Well, that’s another thing. It wasn’t very funny,” he says, and laughs heartily. “Plenty of people are willing to explore that, more than enough. It doesn’t need to be explored by me.”

Far more promising material is provided by O’Rourke’s early adventures in journalism, when he worked for anti-establishment magazine Harry. The most compelling pages recount how he dodged the draft.

A former captain in the army medical corps who wrote a column for Harry wrote a letter outlining O’Rourke’s “deep-seated psychiatric problems”, which the journalist took to the draft induction centre in a large manila envelope. Looking down the line of recruits standing in their underwear, he noticed that the men in upmarket Y-fronts were mostly carrying man­ila envelopes. The men in cheap pants were empty-handed.

“I saw this horrible social injustice that I’d been yelling about for years,” he says. “Then I’m actually confronted with it and I participate in it. And I don’t even blink.

“A girlfriend once accused me of going off to become a war corres­pondent because of guilt about Vietnam. I didn’t feel it was that simple, but I did have a bit of guilt. You know, it was a zero-sum game and because I didn’t go someone else had to ... I wouldn’t say I was very proud of that.”

Interviewed by an army doctor, he posed as a drug-addled hedonist. This made me wonder about his longstanding reputation as a drug-addled hedonist. Was it true?

“I think I played the part a little bit, you know,” he says. Being a foreign correspondent ensured that he maintained a respectable level of alcoholism, he says. But having come through a diagnosis of anal cancer in 2008 (“I mean, how embarrassing,” he said at the time), nowadays he likes nothing better than an evening spent “in my basement workshop sorting a coffee can full of screws into small trays according to size and whether they are slotted or Phillips head”.

He “will confess to drinking and smoking too much, but at the age of 66 going on 67 that’s about the limit these days. I have always liked to have a good time, but I bow to Christopher Hitchens.”

Through the years, Hitchens offered some of the most trenchant criticisms of O’Rourke, describing him once as “a jeer-leader for the fat cats and the overdogs on the winning side” and doubting if he “ever took a courageous political position before the umbrella of Reaganism opened over his head”.

Well, says O’Rourke, they had their differences.

“That never kept me from liking him, you know. As he grew older he grew closer to my position and perhaps I grew closer to his.”

Fatherhood may have had an effect. “Oh Christ, yes, especially because it didn’t come until I was 50,” he says. His first, brief, marriage was to Amy Lumet, the daughter of filmmaker Sidney Lumet. He met his second wife, Tina, in Washington, DC, where they lived in the same building.

“We met in a bar across the street. I asked her if she’d like me to walk her home and it turned out to be my house. It was like a dormitory romance.”

What’s next? Are we teetering on the edge of the age of Hillary? “I think America’s kind of had it with the baby boomers,” he says.

“I just don’t think Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are going to end up in the running. Everyone is going to say: ‘Enough!’ ”

THE TIMES