Musical Buddies Jimmy Buffett and Herman Wouk
How a Musical Led to an Unlikely Friendship
Aug 16, 2009
On September 10, 2008, a variety of distinguished guests and members of the general public gathered in Washington, D.C., at the ornate Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, directly across the street from the U.S. Capitol. They were there to honor the acclaimed author Herman Wouk, then 93 years of age, who was being presented with the Library's first Lifetime Achievement in the Writing of Fiction award.
Wouk, the author of such works as The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Caine Mutiny, was joined by guests that included a few members of Congress, as well as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, columnist William Safire, ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz, and . . . Jimmy Buffett?
While one might expect that Jimmy Buffett would be more at home on stage at a summer concert singing "Cheeseburger in Paradise" or barefoot on a tropical beach in the Caribbean, those who know the history and genuine affection between Buffett and Wouk would not be surprised that Buffett would travel to Washington to pay tribute to his friend. It was, after all, one of Wouk's books that brought them together in the first place.
Don't Stop the Carnival
In 1965, Wouk's novel Don't Stop the Carnival was published. The book is a comedy about a middle-aged New York press agent, Norman Paperman, who decides to give up the hectic pace of life in the big city and escape to a tropical island to run a hotel, where things don't quite go as planned. As Wouk described in his introduction to the 1999 reprint of the novel, the story was based on the real-life experiences of someone he knew, and Wouk ended up following in that man's footsteps, moving to the Virgin Islands for six years to run a hotel, where he encountered some of the same misadventures.
Enter Jimmy Buffett
Years ago, Jimmy Buffett read Don't Stop the Carnival and loved it, so much so that like Wouk and the fictional Paperman, he also went to a Caribbean island to run a hotel, and from there came the idea to create a musical from the book. In the mid-1990s, Buffett contacted Wouk and traveled to his California home to seek the rights to create the musical, and soon a friendship was born.
Wouk wrote in his 1999 introduction, "I have never met anybody more likable at first glance," and added that their agreement to collaborate on the new musical "was sparked no doubt by this shared susceptibility to the lure of the tropics, plus a flare of unlikely personal chemistry between two men thirty years apart in age, and worlds apart in background."
The musical was made in 1997 and played to sold-out crowds in Miami, but it never made it to Broadway, as Buffett and Wouk had hoped. Nonetheless, the experience was apparently worth it for both men. As Wouk says at the end of the book's introduction, "My sail with the pirate was a tonic. I wouldn't have missed it for anything." Buffett, meanwhile, released the soundtrack for the musical the following year.
The Friendship Endures
Wouk's impact on Buffett continues today. In an interview with Men's Journal magazine in July 2009, Buffett, who has written three books, including the New York Times #1 best-seller, A Pirate Looks at Fifty, was asked about the best piece of advice he ever received. Buffett responded by saying, "My old friend Herman Wouk gave me this advice: 'As a prose writer, just get a page a day done and don't try to do anything else.'"
"That seems to work," Buffett continued. "The task of writing a big book, it takes discipline, while writing a song is so refreshing it's like you're skipping along like a stone in the ocean. But after writing books I'm more conscientious about what I'm saying in lyrics. I take more time making that little bit of poetry better."
That love of words and lyrics and story-telling was evident on that late summer evening at the Library of Congress in 2008. After Ginsburg, Safire, and Raddatz read excerpts from Wouk's books, Buffett got up on the stage -- barefoot -- with Wouk and sang a few songs from Don't Stop the Carnival. Wouk, sitting in a high-back chair, soaked it all up like it was the Caribbean sun.
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