Horowitz, Seipp, Breitbart

David Horowitz died last week. He was 86 and had been ill for a while. He recruited me from the very establishment American Film Institute to lead the American Cinema Foundation, which he co-founded with Academy Award-winning screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd. Its purpose was to be a fairer and more balanced version of the AFI. David was a wise man and a good friend. My first month on the job, I was invited to speak at one of his events at Disney Studios. (That’s how different things were 28 years ago.) On a panel I got into an argument with an open borders extremist. It wasn’t a screaming argument, but I punched back. While this was going on, I realized belatedly that this libertarian was one of David’s big financial supporters.

Although my ACF was now legally separated from David’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture, it wasn’t a good look for me to be tussling with my benefactor’s benefactor. So I wrapped it up and got offstage. When I saw David, I started to apologize. He cut me off with a smile. “Why did you back off? You almost had him in your sights.” I squirmed a little. “Well, yeah, but then I realized…” He shook his head. “You don’t work for the Left anymore, Gary. You’re a free man.” I never forgot that.

When I met Catherine Seipp in the mid-Nineties, she rather quaintly still called herself a newspaperwoman. She thought “journalist” sounded too pretentious. The local L.A. press was her employer, but also her prime satiric target, especially the then-lordly Los Angeles Times. Back when wokeness was political correctness, she made her mark as an early critic of everything connected with it.

One article that got noticed, big time, was titled “It’s Wednesday Morning in America.” It was one of the first widely read pieces about conservatives in Hollywood. Seipp named names of respected industry insiders who were part of the new movement, like Airplane co-director David Zucker, Cheers show-runner Rob Long, and studio chief Frank Price. She was a friend of David Horowitz, and that’s how we met.

Over the following eight years, the ACF often worked with Cathy, presenting panels, screenings, and tributes. She was one of Los Angeles’s first bloggers, along with her pal, Mickey Kaus. Cathy seemed to know everyone in TV, and anyone she didn’t know, Rob did. They got us top-flight, press-worthy people. One of them was the author of Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon – The Case Against Celebrity, Andrew Breitbart, a frequent guest on her American Cinema Foundation panels and talks. In retrospect, Andrew’s (well-deserved) prominence happened quickly.

Cathy, a lifelong non-smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002. For a couple of years, chemo kept it in check. She wore wigs and largely kept it a secret as long as she could. To her wry, sad amusement, her career took off during this time, with many more appearances in print and then, on camera, on CNBC’s Dennis Miller from January 2004 through May 2005. Cathy’s daughter, her only child, graduated from high school in the spring of 2006. She’s probably the only kid in the class who had Ann Coulter show up at her graduation party.

This isn’t very scientific, but Rob and I and a number of her other friends were convinced that Cathy was holding herself together with her usual steely self-discipline toward the goal of getting her daughter to the gates of college, which she did. After that, her health deteriorated sharply.

A bunch of her friends, many in and around the ACF, threw a lavish tribute/roast for her. She set a brutally honest, dark comic tone, tartly joking that she was pleased that dying of cancer was not making her a better person. Rob Long, the emcee, quipped, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When life gives you cancer, make cancerade.” Cathy wouldn’t have had it any other way. She was dead six months later.

For a couple of years, Gary Sinise organized a “secret” get-together for Hollywood conservatives at a lavish, 2000-acre estate north of Los Angeles. At the first one, in 2008, I think everybody was a little overwhelmed by the surroundings. Hollywood’s right-wingers don’t usually get settings and hospitality worthy of James Bond villains.

A couple of us fell into a group at one point, mostly related to Rob Long: ACF board member Tom Selleck, novelist and screenwriter Andrew Klavan, and Andrew Breitbart. Klavan asked about Sinise, who until then hadn’t been involved in anything like this. “So why is he doing all this?” Breitbart said, “Chuck Heston just died. Someone has to be the king of conservative Hollywood,” and we laughed in agreement. Within a couple of years, Breitbart was arguably the king of conservative Hollywood.

A year later, Mickey Kaus said, “We’ll be all working for Breitbart someday.” It’s true; he was not only a media daredevil, but a potential empire builder, the hoped-for future Walt Disney of creative conservatives.

In those days, Mickey hadn’t yet been practically blackballed from publications and organizations that once hosted him. He was nominally still a liberal, but he liked Andrew’s effect on the culture, and Andrew personally. Breitbart in person wasn’t a sneering caricature of the left’s imagination; he was secure enough to laugh off a timid “attacker” at a question-and-answer session and ask them to have a drink. If it took a fight, he won. But if it took charm, he could also win.

He was effortlessly cool. In 2011, during the Anthony Weiner scandal, Breitbart was one of his media tormentors. He conscientiously attended his press conferences, and when the congressman was late for one of them, the rest of the press began peppering Breitbart with questions. So he just stepped up to the mike and casually hijacked the “enemy” press conference. He courteously left when Weiner finally showed up, having “warmed up the crowd for him.”

Cathy and David died after long illnesses. Andrew died of a sudden heart attack. He was only 43.

I’ve never forgotten being angry at David Frum, a writer I knew and had respected, dismissing Breitbart’s death with “He won’t be missed.” He was a husband with small children who was liked by everyone*. It was a terrible thing to say, and wrong.

(*nearly everyone he hadn’t fought online, and even a few whom he had.)

Seipp. Breitbart. Horowitz. Not a shrinking violet in the bunch. However combative they could be in print, each one of them IRL was a thoughtful person with lots of friends. I’ll try to keep it in mind when someone in public life that I don’t like shows up in the obituaries.

And remember: we know not the day, nor the hour. Now, doesn’t that just send you out of the post with a spring in your step, whistling the theme song?