BOOKS: FRANGLAIS SPOKEN HERE

(2 of 2)

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 and Rosemary Clooney toasted the groom.

Eventually, some of the bleakness of the first memoir reasserts itself in the story. The catalog of celebrity names passing through town loses its electrical charge. Returning to the U.S., Buchwald had to be hospitalized for clinical depression. Much later, his marriage of 40 years fell apart.

But in 1994, as Ann was dying of cancer and Buchwald was writing the 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.