Funny Letters From Famous People Read online

  ALSO BY CHARLES OSGOOD

  Kilroy Was Here (edited by Charles Osgood)

  Nothing Could Be Finer Than a Crisis That Is

  Minor in the Morning

  Osgood on Speaking: How to Think on Your Feet

  Without Falling on Your Face

  See You on the Radio

  The Osgood Files

  There’s Nothing That I Wouldn’t Do If You

  Would Be My POSSLQ

  FUNNY LETTERS FROM FAMOUS PEOPLE. Copyright © 2003 by Charles Osgood. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Visit our website at www.broadwaybooks.com

  First edition published 2003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Funny letters from famous people / edited by Charles Osgood.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Letters. 2. American wit and humor. I. Osgood, Charles.

  PN6131 .F86 2003

  826.008′017—dc21 2002034214

  eISBN: 978-0-7679-1177-1

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to

  Those dauntless men and women who,

  Sometimes by truck, sometimes by feet,

  In spite of snow and rain and sleet,

  And heat of day, and gloom of night,

  And dogs that bark and sometimes bite,

  And handwriting that’s hard to read,

  Complete your rounds with all due speed,

  Brave couriers, hats off to you

  Who get those funny letters through!

  —CHAS. OSGOOD

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  I. POLITICIANS

  George Washington

  Thomas Jefferson

  Abraham Lincoln

  Ulysses S. Grant

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  Benjamin Harrison

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Woodrow Wilson

  Winston Churchill

  Herbert Hoover

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt

  Harry Truman

  Adlai Stevenson

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  John F. Kennedy

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  George Bush, Sr.

  William Proxmire

  Bob Dole

  II. AUTHORS

  Joseph Addison

  Charles Lamb

  Benjamin Franklin

  Washington Irving

  Gustave Flaubert

  Charles Dickens

  Lady Isabel Burton

  Lewis Carroll

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

  Horace Greeley

  Mark Twain

  William Dean Howells and Mark Twain

  Oscar Wilde and James Abbott McNeill Whistler

  Oscar Wilde

  Editors

  Sherwood Anderson

  James Joyce

  George Bernard Shaw

  William Dean Howells

  H. L. Mencken

  Carl Sandburg

  P. G. Wodehouse

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writers in Hollywood

  Eugene O’Neill

  Alexander Woollcott

  Dorothy Parker

  Carl Sandburg

  Robert Benchley

  James Thurber and Samuel Goldwyn

  James Thurber

  William Faulkner

  E. B. White

  John Cheever

  Flannery O’Connor

  Isaac Asimov

  S. J. Perelman

  Quentin Crisp

  Andy Rooney

  III. DENIZENS OF THE FINE ARTS AND SHOW BUSINESS

  Mozart

  Beethoven

  Chopin

  George M. Cohan

  Groucho Marx

  Fred Allen

  Groucho Marx and Fred Allen

  Hermione Gingold

  Bob Hope

  Eddie Cantor and Florenz Ziegfeld

  Andy Rooney

  Aaron Copland

  Julia Child

  Permission Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  Letter writing is close to becoming a lost art in this day of e-mail, the Internet, word processing, cell phones, and answering machines.

  Many people today seldom if ever sit down and write actual letters anymore. On those rare occasions when they do try to write a letter, they often find that their letter-writing skills have atrophied. Besides, they can’t find anything decent to write with.

  If they find a ballpoint pen, it does not work. Somebody left the cap off and it dried up. Even if they do find a pen that works, something to write on is also a problem. Writing on a paper bag or the back of a junk-mail ad is considered bad form.

  They can’t remember where they put the stationery. No point in looking in the stationery drawer. It was never kept there. If they do find letter paper, they can’t find a proper envelope.

  If they do find a suitable envelope, they can’t find the address book. If they do find the address book, it turns out to have only the old address, not the new one. Or, if it does have the current address, it doesn’t include the Zip Code.

  Even if all the foregoing somehow turn up, something else will be missing; the half-roll of postage stamps that used to be in the middle drawer over the desk. This drawer now contains nothing but old paper clips, thumb tacks, four pennies, the cap that belongs to the dried-up pen, a loose blazer button, etc. etc. No stamps.

  In the unlikely event that a stamp of the correct denomination is found (if, indeed, they know what a first-class stamp sells for these days), and they remember what they wanted to say and manage to write it down, and put it in an envelope and address and seal and put a stamp on it, there is still one more crucial step, which is often overlooked.

  To get a letter delivered, it is necessary to mail it—i.e., drop it in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. The stamped, addressed envelope is not going to drop itself into a mailbox. You have to go out in the rain, sleet, gloom of night, or whatever, and do it yourself. If you leave the letter on the kitchen counter, assuming that somebody else in the family will mail it for you, you will find it at least a year later with the stack of old magazines you are throwing out.

  All this is very time consuming, and everybody is so busy nowadays watching television that we have neither the patience nor the inclination to go through it. So we don’t exchange letters the way people used to, once upon a time when every letter was answered by another, which in turn required a response. This would go on and on for years, decades, lifetimes. And these letters were carefully saved!

  These saved letters, preserving thoughts, feelings, and experiences, have been a gold mine for biographers of famous people over the centuries. (Most biographies are about high achievers, aren’t they? Why would anyone take all the time and go to all the trouble of researching and writing a big thick book about somebody nobody ever heard of or cares about?)

  Where would David McCullough be without all those letters between John and Abigail Adams? Pity the poor biographer two hundred years from now having to rely on the collected e-mail exchanges of George W. and Laura
Bush, or of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Not that it wouldn’t be interesting, of course. Reading other people’s mail is always fascinating. But is e-mail saved anywhere except on your own hard drive and in the secret files of the National Security Agency?

  Speaking of the NSA, which eavesdrops on the electronic transmissions of the whole world, we now take it as given that Big Brother has every e-mail ever sent—however frivolous—digitally stored, probably in the same gray government facility at Fort Mead, Maryland, that houses the grapes of wrath. But nobody will ever be allowed to see it. It’s written STRICTLY OFF LIMITS to everybody.

  As far as e-mail humor is concerned, the only way you can tell whether anything is supposed to be funny is via the punctuation .

  But a real letter about a real situation from a real person, especially a real politician, author, or show business celebrity? Now that can be funny!

  —CHARLES OSGOOD

  I

  POLITICIANS

  Politics is never far from a politician’s mind.

  And in almost every politician’s letter you can find

  Pointing with pride while at the same time viewing with alarm,

  As with wonderful dexterity he almost breaks his arm,

  Spinning contradictions with such gymnastic knack

  That with all humility he pats himself upon the back.

  He often makes us laugh out loud; but what is most mysterious

  Is why he’s at his funniest when trying to be serious.

  CHARLES OSGOOD

  George Washington

  WHEN IT CAME to the subject of marriage, George Washington certainly was of several minds, all of them witty.

  A thirty-eight-year-old bachelor, one Tench Tilghman, wrote to General Washington to explain that he had gotten married while on his overstayed leave.

  Washington wrote back:

  Dear Tench:

  We have had various conjectures about you. Some thought you were dead, others that you were married.

  Washington sent a congratulatory if slightly bizarre message to Governor Henry Lee of Virginia on the occasion of his marriage:

  My dear Gov. Lee:

  You have exchanged the rugged field of Mars for the soft and pleasurable bed of Venus.

  About the marriage of his friend Colonel Ward, Washington wrote to a mutual friend:

  I am glad to hear that my old acquaintance

  Colonel Ward is yet under the influence of vigorous passions. I will not ascribe the intrepidity of his late enterprise to a mere flash of desires, because in his military career he would have learnt how to distinguish between false alarm and a serious movement. Charity therefore induces me to suppose that like a prudent general, he had reviewed his strength, his arms, and ammunition before he got involved in an action. But if these have been neglected, and he has been precipitated into the measure, let me advise him to make the first onset upon his fair Del Toboso [a reference to the title invented by Don Quixote for his ladylove] with vigor, that the impression may be deep, if it cannot be lasting, or frequently renewed.

  Thomas Jefferson

  AT NINETEEN, Thomas Jefferson spent a most unpleasant night sleeping—or trying to sleep—at a friend’s house. He wrote to a mutual friend on Christmas Day in 1762, describing his tribulations. The letter, in part:

  The cursed rats ate up my pocketbook which was in my pocket within a foot of my head. And not contented with plenty for the present, they carried away my jemmy-worked silk garters and half a dozen new minuets I had just got.

  Of this I should not have accused the devil—because you know rats will be rats.

  Jefferson had a good friend, a Mrs. William S. Smith, who wrote him while he was in Paris to ask him to determine the disposition of some corsets she had ordered there some time before and had yet to receive. Jefferson bought two corsets and sent them to her with a letter explaining that he had no idea whether they would fit, because she had not sent her measurements:

  My dear Mrs. Smith,

  … If too small, then lay them aside for a time. There are ebbs as well as flows in this world. When the mountain refused to come to Mahomet, he went to the mountain.

  Abraham Lincoln

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN was always prepared to joke about himself—especially when it came to his physical appearance. By the standards of the day, he was indeed considered quite ungainly. He wrote to a friend:

  One day … I got into a fit of musing in my room and stood resting my elbows on the bureau. Looking into the glass, it struck me what an ugly man I was. The fact grew on me and I made up my mind that I must be the ugliest man in the world. It so maddened me that I resolved, should I ever see an uglier, I would shoot him on sight. Not long after this, Andy [naming a lawyer present] came to town and the first time I saw him I said to myself: “There’s the man.” I went home, took down my gun, and prowled around the streets waiting for him. He soon came along. “Halt, Andy,” said I, pointing the gun at him, “say your prayers, for I am going to shoot you.” “Why, Mr. Lincoln, what’s the matter? What have I done?” “Well, I made an oath that if I ever saw an uglier man than I am, I’d shoot him on the spot. You are uglier, surely; so make ready to die.” “Mr. Lincoln, do you really think that I am uglier than you?” “Yes.” “Well, Mr. Lincoln,” said Andy deliberately and looking me squarely in the face, “if I am any uglier, fire away.”

  In a similar vein, Lincoln later wrote to a friend:

  I have one vice, and I can call it nothing else: it is not to be able to say “No.” Thank God for not making me a woman, but if He had, I suppose He would have made me just as ugly as He did, and no one would ever have tempted me.

  Upon hearing the news in 1841 that his good friend, Joshua F. Speed, had just gotten married, Lincoln offered these words of advice:

  Dear Joshua:

  My old father used to have a saying that “if you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter”; and it occurs to me that if the bargain you have just closed (marriage) can possibly be called a bad one, it is certainly the most pleasant one for applying that maxim to, which my fancy can, by any effort, picture.

  A. Lincoln

  Not surprisingly, at twenty-eight years old, Lincoln was still a bachelor. A friend told him she would bring her sister to Springfield, Illinois, if Lincoln would consider marrying her. So queried in a confused and embarrassed moment, Lincoln agreed to this plan. The result was disastrous, as Lincoln demonstrates in this wry letter:

  … Although I had seen her before, she did not look as my imagination had pictured her. I knew she was oversize, but she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff. I knew she was called an “old maid,” and I felt no doubt of the truth of at least half of the appellation, but now, when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother; and this, not from withered features, for her skin was too full of fat to permit its contracting into wrinkles—but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy and reached her present bulk in less than thirty-five or forty years; and in short I was not at all pleased with her.…

  But what could I do? I had told her sister that I would take her for better or for worse … and was now fairly convinced that no other man on earth would have her, and hence the conviction that they were bent on holding me to my bargain.…

  At once I determined to consider her my wife, and this done, all my powers of discovery were put to work in search of perfections in her which might be fairly set off against her defects. I tried to imagine her handsome … tried to convince myself that the mind was much more to be valued than the person.…

  After I had delayed the matter as long as I thought I could in honor do (which by the way had brought me round into the last fall) … I mustered my resolution and made the proposal to her direct.

  But, shocking to relate, she answered No. At first I suppose she did it through an affectation of modesty, which I thought but ill became her
under the peculiar circumstances of her case, but on my renewal of the charge I found she repelled it with greater firmness than before. I tried it again and again, but with the same … want of success.

  And I then … for the first time began to suspect that I was really a little in love with her.…

  I have now come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason—I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.

  A.L.

  Strong examples of Lincoln’s famous brevity and wit—and stubbornness—are demonstrated in the following exchange of notes between Lincoln and his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. The notes refer to a certain individual whom Lincoln wanted as an army chaplain, but whom Stanton found lacking, and apparently matters ended in a stalemate.

  Dear Stanton:

  Appoint this man chaplain in the army.

  Lincoln

  Dear Mr. Lincoln:

  He is not a preacher.

  E. M. Stanton

  Dear Stanton:

  He is now.

  Lincoln

  Dear Mr. Lincoln:

  But there is no vacancy.

  E. M. Stanton

  Dear Stanton:

  Appoint him chaplain-at-large.

  Lincoln

  Dear Mr. Lincoln:

  There is no warrant in the law for that.

  E. M. Stanton

  Dear Stanton:

  Appoint him anyhow.

  A. Lincoln

  Dear Mr. Lincoln:

  I will not.

  E. M. Stanton

  During the Civil War, General George McClellan proved to be more of a hindrance to President Lincoln than a help. He continually pestered Lincoln for more men, more guns, and more horses, and he made each demand seem more urgent than the previous one. Lincoln constantly urged the general to provide more detailed reports of his battles and activities along with his demands for more supplies. This angered McClellan, who then began to focus on trivia. One dispatch read:

  President Abraham Lincoln

  Washington, D.C.