Ben Stein's Diary: Death of a Friend
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY by Benjamin J. Stein Death of a Friend Friday Aterrifying phone call from Burdette Feierabend, former wife of my pal Peter Feierabend, at about 9:3o p.m.—just as I was pulling...
...I asked Glenn...
...One hit and you were a zombie for an hour...
...I laughed out loud...
...Both of his parents had died young—the father when Peter was only twelve and the mother when Peter was in his twenties...
...He had fought in the armor with Patton in World War II and been repeatedly decorated...
...First, a meeting at a studio that is going to do a game show with little moi as the host...
...About thirty dollars' worth...
...You could count on Peter to have a good word no matter what else was happening in the world...
...Now, he's missing and presumed drowned...
...With no money, no social position, nothing but love and the will to be there for them, Peter made himself into a perfect father...
...There are beguiling wooden totems pointing the way to Schweitzer ski resort...
...But he looked sad and his eyes were even more sunken than usual...
...Who knows if it will ever air, but we are sure going to try...
...Tommy insists on having his own room so he can watch specials about dinosaurs while I watch CNN...
...Then, to pick up Tommy at school...
...Peter was all alone in that room with the cheap veneer he would have hated...
...He has also been the best friend I have had in Hollywood for a really long time, in fact since I got here...
...Two nights before he left, we had dinner at the new Thai place in Sandpoint...
...But I got to spend my life doing things I wanted to do...
...Peter was raising Alexander and Rachel pretty much by himself...
...I saw that it did not really look a lot like Peter, but it was...
...When I came back to North Idaho a few months later, I brought Tommy, who was then five...
...But he was happier, less worried, more ready to leave his cabin and go out...
...I should say we are going to do a pilot of a game show...
...I'm reasonable...
...I keep thinking that I want to tell him about this giant loss I have suffered and that he'll say something that will make it all right...
...I have a number of excellent friends, but life just seems lonely without Peter...
...A large part of the reason was Peter Feierabend, who at the time was the caretaker for Mark Story's elegant home in Hope, near Sandpoint...
...We just wanted to feel good," I said...
...My wife said she thought the children had to see the body or else they would never believe he was really dead...
...He still suffered terribly from diabetes, but he dated and even traveled to L.A...
...Now, I can't sleep without them...
...For most of the time I knew him, Peter had almost no money...
...That was his favorite place to be...
...It's the job Peter paid us to do with his friendship...
...I went to Wal-Mart to buy batteries for my disc player...
...Tommy hugged Alex and went with him to play some video game...
...I hugged both kids and then Burdette...
...He had an extraordinary gift with his hands and eyes...
...Now," I said, "we look to the future...
...There was a light breeze...
...In a voice drained of affect, Glenn said, "The sheriff just called...
...National Review "Moderate Republican wet smacks, pinko-thinking Democrats, useful idiots of the media, lickspittles in the State Department, the compost heaps of tenured academia, and the candy-pants Clinton Administration all need exposure to this book...
...Alex, 12, is good-natured and fantastically affectionate — a fine example for our spoiled, aloof (but loving) Tommy boy...
...They were just empire builders living off the taxpayers, he would say, and we would argue the point...
...To his credit, The Sheckster laughed and took out a little pad for me to help him give his highly paid speech...
...On Peter's pond, two women in red dresses rowed themselves leisurely across the pond and swayed their heads to the music...
...When he beat me by less than he had predicted, he paid me by cleaning my windshield as clean as it had ever been...
...Tommy and Alex talked about video games and went out to Second Avenue to play...
...Peter on the river looking happy...
...The summer season is short, and the winter ski season at Schweitzer is dicey...
...We all cried for a long time and then went over to Ivano's for dinner...
...I fell in love with Sandpoint, as I have written before...
...A lengthy schedule of spectacularly well-paid lectures...
...Is that reasonable...
...A little girl mounted the stage and sang "Imagine" a cappella...
...It was a magnificent Fall day, as we watched Peter's ashes drift away into the lake, to go out the Pend'Oreille River, and then into the Columbia, and then out to the mighty Pacific...
...His hands look like him...
...That was Peter...
...BENJAMIN J. STEIN iS a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Hollywood and Malibu...
...Glenn, Dana, and Malcolm, three of Peter's close friends, came by to visit...
...One of them is a puzzle I've had on a table next to my bed for years...
...The valley of the dolls meets the god on the water...
...When the hostess asked me if I wanted smoking or non-smoking I got very upset...
...Often the kids have kids of their own, who are usually more neatly dressed than the parents...
...How are you doing...
...They were crooked, but still powerful and artistic looking in death...
...He could swim that hardest of all strokes, the butterfly, like a rocket ship...
...The producers are amazingly young, lively, and enthusiastic...
...ly by offering himself as a model of how to be a father...
...I told him I would cheerfully pay the liens, but he said he would go into the IRS office and blow his brains out with a gun before he let them take his house or let anyone else bail him out...
...This summer, his diabetic condition deteriorated badly...
...He had a natural, easy way with kids...
...That was what got so many of us into trouble...
...As I was standing looking out at the marina, racked with my own sobs, Burdette, Alex, and Rachel appeared at the door...
...There is nothing that happens to me that I cannot either profit from or learn from," said a smart friend...
...Peter's son is playing the new Nintendo gizmo in the workshop studio Peter built about ten years ago...
...It was formed, he said, by a gigantic water backup behind a glacier as other glaciers melted...
...Peter's been missing in the river for about twelve hours, and the sheriff says he's probably drowned...
...We know," Burdette said, and then they all burst into tears...
...They are so filled with imagination they take my breath away...
...Glenn spoke for just a minute about Peter's spirit being in each of us...
...The just completed comedy work at Vegas...
...He slept large parts of the day, and he was often irritable when I saw him...
...But I feel optimistic...
...It was a favorite spot of Peter's because of that house, almost like a lighthouse, built into the living rock shore of the lake that had been formed in the Great Flood long ago when the glaciers broke...
...He flew there and signed papers and collected a sum about equal to half of the price of a good house in the Hollywood Hills...
...He was too gentle for the larger world, but was perfect for Sandpoint...
...I spoke about how Peter had taught me that the only thing that mattered was family...
...I went into my room and closed the door...
...The hippies know it...
...My pal Peter was an integral part of the movement...
...I've met you on the beach many times with Peter," she said...
...So, the decision has been made...
...The deal was that my life was basically a failure," Peter said...
...It's not right at all...
...Then we headed across the lake to Bottle Bay, then northwest to a spot before a rocky ledge where a woman named JoAnne had built a house long ago and then had gone to Alaska and died of a drug overdose...
...ANSWER: "FREEDOM BETRAYED is the sort of book that Alexis de Tocqueville would write if he were alive today: crisp, hardheaded, and utterly brilliant...
...Burdette, usually so healthy and robust looking in black jeans and T-shirt, looked tiny and shrunken...
...He always had the killer stuff...
...Craig, Glenn, and Dana have taken down the trampoline and laid out tables and a tent...
...We talked about the benches that did not fit with the tables, and then we talked about our lives when we were younger...
...Kids in their teens and twenties...
...The party went on until after dark...
...On land, I'm nothing," he often said...
...In front of the curtain was a rudimentary catafalque or bier on which lay the coffin of Peter Feierabend...
...Wonderful," he said, "just wonderful," as he looked at the starlets and the billionaires...
...That's pretty good, isn't it...
...I took him, in his T-shirt, to Morton's...
...of photos of the raft trip...
...He told the story as if it had happened yesterday, in complete awe for the power of nature and the elemental forces of physics...
...They're doing an autopsy now...
...The only ones who don't know it are lost souls out in the darkness at gyms, lifting weights obsessively and walking ever faster on the Stairmaster with empty apartments to come home to...
...Ott-i 64 December 1996 • The American Spectator...
...It's an incredibly perfect Fall day here, and I am riding my bike back and forth on the bridge, looking at the sunset...
...Above all, there are perfect, beautiful docks that Peter and his partner, Dana, built for restaurants and houses on Lake Pend'Oreille...
...There are homemade cakes, brownies, cookies, salad, ribs, and tea...
...Floating downstream two miles from where he fell in...
...But I like it more on the other side of Sandpoint's Long Bridge...
...Far out on the lake, towards Contest Point, I could see a lone sailboarder...
...She's holding a bottle of Cuervo and she's sobbing as she's talking...
...She missed a few lines, but she sang perfectly on key in her little girl's soprano...
...He was wearing one of his jerseys he had bought in Switzerland last year...
...He laughed and said he would do fine...
...Shecky asked...
...He taught Tommy how to thread a fishing rod with line, how to tie a knot on a lure (or "loor," as he pronounced it), how to assemble models...
...We all sobbed for a really long time, and then we signed some forms that I don't really recall, and left...
...He grewup in Corona, in the San Gabriel Valley, and then in Newport Beach...
...Wednesday T H ommy," I asked as we headed over this morning to the funeral home where Peter's body lies, "Mommy and I might like to give some money to name a bench or a small park after Peter...
...Peter liked Miles Davis and jazz, and when he liked rock, it was likely to be Stephen Stills more than Jose Feliciano...
...Rachel, 15, is second in her class at Sandpoint High School...
...It was night one of the Jewish High Holidays, a time that has often been marked by death and disaster for my family and friends...
...Peter and I always had a good-natured argument about that because he smoked...
...We approached the open coffin slowly, with a lot of sobbing and crying...
...He was the greatest...
...The farmers know it...
...He was a hippie in the only good sense of the word...
...I asked...
...He drove me all around the town, and told me the history of the second biggest fresh water lake west of the Mississippi, Lake Pend'Oreille...
...He had once broken some fingers while woodworking, and they were not set properly, if at all...
...Peter when he was a transporter of sailboats to Vancouver and the nearby islands.44 My wife said she thought the children had to see the body or else they would never believe he was dead...
...My wife talked about how she still can't believe her mother is dead after all these years...
...Then about ten, men and women went out to drink and reminisce...
...They have radios...
...I had expected to hear from Peter some time ago, and I was worried—which was why I called Burdette...
...He rapidly went through his long list of triumphs: a sitcom starring him, created by him, in the works at Fox to be on They bought lakefront lots and built cabins, turned themselves into woodworkers or artisans, made lives...
...Sunday This afternoon, Glenn, Dana, and my friend Jill, an Idahoan, went out on my boat to lay Peter into his beloved Lake Pend'Oreille...
...Sunday We arrived in Sandpoint and checked into the Edgewater Inn...
...I would call him to ask how he was feeling...
...She just sat there on the edge of Alex's bed and looked hollow...
...About a year ago, Peter came into an inheritance in Switzerland...
...As I spoke, I saw Dana slumped against a tree shaking with tears...
...It's where Mark Fuhrman moved when his police work was done...
...They found his body...
...When I came back, the house was empty except for one little boy from the neighborhood who was watching TV on Peter's favorite chair while outside his mother helped clean up from the party...
...He always liked to be happy...
...I went off to Morton's to have dinner with a comedian I will call Shecky...
...I'm reasonable," he would say...
...BEN STEIN'S DIARY by Benjamin J. Stein Death of a Friend Friday Aterrifying phone call from Burdette Feierabend, former wife of my pal Peter Feierabend, at about 9:3o p.m.—just as I was pulling onto the Hollywood Freeway after a modest RoshHoshana dinner...
...We sat in silence for the rest of the ride down Cedar Street, left on Division, and then into the parking lot for the funeral home...
...The hair on the back of my neck started to stand up...
...When Alex graciously insisted that she pay the bill right on the spot, the mortician was greatly relieved and literally beamed and rubbed his hands together...
...What if you get sick...
...But the face looked more like Peter as we looked at him longer...
...I did not get to the call until much later...
...J. O'Rourke, author, All the Trouble in the World GET YOUR COPY NOW: FREEDOM BETRAYED How America Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away By Michael A. Ledeen $24.95 cloth ISBN 0-8447-3992-8 AEI THE AEI PRESS AVAILABLE IN BOOKSTORES OR CALL TOLL FREE 1-800-269-6267 E The American Spectator • December 1996 63 To the people who live in Sandpoint, this is a joke...
...The mourners nodded enthusiastically, and I suddenly realized that thisfamily thing cuts across all lines...
...He made toys for Tommy on his woodworking equipment—a pair of pistols, a puzzle, an airplane...
...Rachel, an alert 15, had a better idea of what was happening...
...It's down the road from the notorious Aryan Nations compound in lovely Hayden Lake...
...He moved in with his wife, Burdette...
...I just got a call from the people on the trip," she said...
...As I listened to Shecky I realized how difficult it is to like anyone who brags to you so consistently about his life...
...My pay...
...We sat in the car in silence for most of the way back to Spokane, and then we got on the plane...
...Dana and Glenn asked...
...The soldiers and sailors definitely know it...
...There were no seatbelts...
...The truck was a 20-year-old Ford flatbed with wooden stakes and a wooden bumper Peter made himself after an accident...
...Peter's friends have arrived: tall, thin men in middle age with beards...
...With his newfound money, Peter determined that this past summer, he would do something he had long wanted to do: Go on a raft trip with some of his friends, over a wild river near Riggins...
...He had driven 600 miles along with Dana the day before to 62 December 1996 • The American Spectator fetch the body...
...Can you think of a favorite place where he used to like to hang out that we might name after him...
...Use it to change their minds or swat them like flies, as you wish...
...I have been in Hollywood long enough to count on nothing as certain...
...A woman read a poem, and then the band played an old Beatles song...
...Now they were back to keep us company in the viewing...
...But by pure ESP, I picked up the car phone and called Burdette exactly one minute after she had called me...
...A total failure by the standards of your friends in L.A...
...The people who are policy wonks at the AEI know it...
...His father had been from the stock of German settlers in America...
...We would take long drives up to Kootenai Bay, Canada, across the bay on the world's longest free ferry ride, into Montana, around the Hope Peninsula, to Ruby Ridge...
...Then, Mommy came to take him for a play date with some little ruffian...
...Monday An incredibly busy day back here in L.A...
...A man named John who was on the trip says, "There is no way he could have drowned...
...I got to spend my days watching my kids grow up...
...We crawled out of Sandpoint Marina...
...Many the time I saw Peter, obviously suffering from the effects of diabetes and a hefty night of dining well, standing unsteadily but determinedly at the kitchen range, making a huge breakfast for his kids, dressing them, and making sure they had done their homework...
...and New York to see old friends...
...And it's just a few minutes' drive from Ruby Ridge, where Randy Weaver hung out until the FBI killed his wife and son...
...Still, he was Peter...
...Wives in granny skirts...
...Imagine all the people, living life in peace...
...That being cool meant nothing and being rich meant nothing and being famous meant nothing...
...Saturday To the extent that it is known at all to the outside world, Sandpoint, Idaho is probably known as a hotbed of racism and Aryanism and reactionary life...
...What's funny...
...Rock me on the water...
...Where the god on the water would be at home...
...If it clicks, it will be a very funny show...
...But he made sure his kids had plenty of food, warm clothes, and even the things kids must have in North Idaho, like snowboards and mountain bikes...
...In that booth, just a few weeks before, Peter had said something very smart about my pal X., the call girl, and how people in my position could never understand the position of people in need...
...Alex and Tommy would climb all over him, wrestling, pulling his head and neck, and he would just pick them up, throw one over each shoulder, say, "I've got you, 60 December 1996 • The American Spectator you sack of potatoes," and then carry them off to his truck and throw them in the back with his golden lab, Chazzy Boy...
...The sky is a brilliant gray and orange down over the river...
...But in the water, I'm a god...
...Peter had diabetes but otherwise had been a fairly ordinary young man—until he got into a swimming pool...
...It's surprisingly shallow, an eddy, a backwater off the main creek, water no more than a couple of inches deep...
...They bought lakefront lots and built cabins, turned themselves into woodworkers or artisans of another kind, and made lives...
...He was a man who had turned his back on civilization, commerce, and cities to eam his own living, create beautiful woodwork, and read the classics...
...There were about ten rows of pews and a little curtain...
...He did not exactly go crazy with his money...
...His hands," Alex said...
...He hit it off immediately with Peter's son, Alex, and we all became pals...
...Peter had gone away on a rafting trip about ten days before on the wild Salmon River, near the Frank Church Wilderness of No Return, and I wanted to see how his trip was going...
...He showed the three of us into the chapel...
...Burdette wants to have it in about three weeks," he said...
...1 NBC...
...It's three sticks, and only if you fit them together perfectly will they stand up...
...In 1992, I first came to visit North Idaho on the advice of my friend and frequent director in commercials, Mark Story...
...The people who make TV in Hollywood know it...
...My wife bet me that you would ask for help on a speech, and she wins the bet," I said...
...Sandpoint is, in fact, a hippie town combined with a lumber town and a summer and winter recreation town...
...The mortician had shaved his face into a goatee, a device that Peter would not have used if you gave him a new pickup truck...
...He was visibly worried about who was going to pay for the embalming and the coffin liner...
...When I feel the urge to brag, I must bite my tongue and stop myself...
...His mother was Jewish, which made him Jewish by Jewish law, a descendant of well-to-do Swiss lawyers...
...Alex's sister Rachel hung with us too, and we had a little family in North Idaho...
...I think he must have had a heart attack...
...Alex wanted to sleep, so I took Tommy and Alex Feierabend to dinner at the Pizza Hut...
...When I walked back outside, a lean woman stopped me...
...Tuesday Arally to protect Lake Pend'Oreille from pollution by a giant gold mine in Montana is underway on the Long Bridge...
...What stuck to your bones was family...
...I have never seen him so happy...
...The sun was glittering on the water near the marina...
...The hippie life, though, is continuous and steady, part of the warp and woof of Sandpoint now for twenty-five years...
...All around Sandpoint, there are beautiful, Japanese-style wooden lights that Peter designed for hotels and motels and private homes...
...Not too good," Burdette said and started to cry...
...I think I'll tell you about Peter Feierabend now, so you'll understand why I started to pound the dashboard and pray and sob and scream...
...Peter when he was a young woodworker...
...It was a long, narrow room with thin pine veneer walls...
...When is the memorial...
...The lumber business is slowly fading...
...In a few hours we were back in the center of the universe...
...He paid for dinner...
...Glenn appeared...
...Nissan truck, on our predetermined routes...
...He thought for just a moment and said, "How about the bar at the Edgewater...
...I sat silently taking it all in, occasionally tugging respectfully at my forelock...
...I can recall riding in my boat with Peter near Priest River in July, telling him that no amount of money would make me go on a trip like that, without air-conditioning, TV, telephone, or nearby doctors...
...We would talk, and Peter would tell me about his life...
...Once he got on the river, he was Huck Finn," she says...
...The new edition of his diet, exercise, and 12-step book—no, 13-step, the thirteenth step being "I am the center of the universe" — coming out...
...They cleared about a half-acre in front of the house, and when children came, they put in a huge octagonal trampoline, a tree-house, and a pellet-gun range...
...He was even more of a soul mate than I realized...
...That's a good life...
...It's produced by my pal, Al Burton, who helped to invent two of the best shows in history, "Mary Hartman" and "Femwood 2Night...
...At dinner, we ran into a friend from the rafting trip who told us that Peter's body was undergoing autopsy at that moment...
...In the workshop, Robin, who was with Peter the night he died, lays out hundreds C The house was built into the living rock shore of the lake that had been formed long ago when the glaciers broke...
...A two-man band is performing from a music book called "Songs of the Sixties...
...Three people...
...I've been a ski patrolman for most of my life, and I would guess it was a heart attack...
...Glenn and Dana and Jill and I held hands and in tremulous voices we said The Lord's Prayer...
...For the entire summer I spent in Idaho, even with the noisy kids on the dock, even with the heat, I never took one sleeping pill, a lifetime record for me...
...Peter bought five acres on Baldy Mountain Road outside Sandpoint about twenty years ago, and built a house with a zinc bathtub, exposed shower, sleeping lofts, and the delicate, airy, light-and-shadow woodwork that became his trademark...
...Indeed, they did...
...I got to spend my life with my kids, and how many men can say that...
...To give people from the Midwest and the east time to come...
...It was impressive, with its dark hardwood floors, its spectacular lake views, its indoor pool, shooting range, and wine cellar, but I was most impressed with Peter...
...So what can she know about what good is: Little Perfect grabbing my arm and telling me he has to go get a candy bar and a soda and a hot dog and licorice all at once...then jumping up on my back for me to carry him — that's good, not lifting crappy old weights at a gym...
...Glenn and Dana and Robin swapped stories...
...I never amounted to much...
...My new exercise trainer-nutritionist, Mary Margaret, tells me I spend too much time with Tommy...
...Peter met me at a tiny market called Hi-Hopes and showed me the house...
...Just before the dessert, Shecky asked me for help on a speech he was going to give to a group of junk-bond salespeople...
...Our beginning is to be parents to Rachel and Alex, dear friends to Burdette...
...The owner of the funeral home was a rumpled-looking, middle-aged man...
...He was on his high school swim team, then all-California, then All-American at Brigham Young...
...He and Glenn and Dana moved here almost a quarter-century ago from Newport Beach to find a rural haven where land was cheap and they could make their own rules...
...Today we are having the memorial for Peter in this same aspen, birch, and pine shaded bower...
...Once, after arguing needlessly with me about the best route to Priest Lake, he and I raced there, Caddy vs...
...If not, we will keep trying...
...Then he stood back, admired his handiwork at the Priest River gas station and said, "There...
...Plus, there was no water in his lungs...
...Then, as he often told me, he was "a god...
...Three rooms...
...A woman on a crutch is talking about Peter's last days on the raft trip...
...They lived in a cabin a little ways outside town, and they lived modestly, but well...
...When the autopsy is done, should we have Peter cremated down there or bring back his body...
...I took the smoking section for old times' sake...
...I could hear the chains— halyards, lanyards, whatever they are— hitting the masts...
...As recorded in ancient Indian lore and confirmed by geologists, the resulting flood swept from what is now Western Montana to the Pacific Ocean, and the glaciers gouged out Lake Pend'Oreille...
...How many mornings I awakened in my bed at the Edgewater, looked out, and saw Peter zipping through the water on his catamaran with his dog, Chazzy Boy, by his side...
...Peter on the shore looking happy...
...At his most broke he was behind in his taxes, and got cruel letters from the IRS telling him they were going to seize his house and evict him and his kids...
...At home there was a major struggle to make him do his homework...
...He was probably dead before his face hit the water...
...Always a new beginning, as my old boss said...
...Peter changed my life in a big way, partly by opening Sandpoint and a peaceful, small-town way to live to me, but most-44 Peter hated the government, and would curse whenever he saw a sheriff's boat out on the lake...
...WHAT WOULD ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE WRITE IF HE WERE ALIVE TODAY...
...I asked...
...She shows photos of the spot where he was last seen alive...
...Peter hated the government, and would curse when he saw a sheriff's boat out on the lake...
...No problem," he said...
...Killer...
...He bought a new mountain bike and a used Nissan truck and a few new shirts...
...There were days when I didn't have anything to eat but The American Spectator • December 199 6 61 beans...
...Naturally, she's single and lean and tough and has no kids...
Vol. 29 • December 1996 • No. 12
