Keywords: manners; Nieman-Marcus; Pierre Balmain

Abstract: Literary agent and author Ann McGarry Buchwald was born in Warren, PA in 1920. While working as a publicity director in Paris, she met and married columnist Art Buchwald. Upon her return to America, Buchwald became a literary agent and an author of three children’s books on manners. She published her memoirs in 1980. Ann McGarry Buchwald died in 1994.

Biography:

Ann McGarry was born in Warren, PA on April 18, 1920. Her parents were Paul and Marie Beam McGarry. She grew up in Warren, attending the local schools before heading off adventurously to Paris with only $1000 in traveler’s checks in her pocket, a one-way airplane ticket, and no ability to speak French. While in Paris, she met and married Art Buchwald, then a correspondent for the Paris Herald-Tribune, now a legendary columnist. After their 1952 marriage, Ann and Art had three children: Connie, Jennifer, and Joel.

Ann McGarry Buchwald’s career with words had many dimensions. From her arrival in Paris in 1949, she began to write, but in what one would hardly call a “literary” fashion. McGarry became the publicity director for the French couturier Pierre Balmain. She had already learned about the fashion industry while employed as a fashion coordinator at Dallas’ famed department store, Nieman-Marcus. Her experience with Balmain gave her the expertise to open her own public relations firm, another unconventional “literary” forum. Upon the couple’s return to the United States in the early 1960s, Buchwald struck up a friendship with her collaborator, Marjabella Young Stewart. Buchwald and Stewart wrote three books intended for children on the subject of manners. While she periodically wrote books on manners, Buchwald also took up a career as a literary agent, working first with New York agent Roslyn Targ, and then Hollywood agent Irving Lazar. Lazar and Buchwald would have a falling out in 1974 when Lazar agreed to represent former President Richard Nixon. Buchwald believed that her husband’s columns lampooning Nixon caused a conflict of interest and triggered her resignation from the partnership. Later Buchwald, with commentary inserted into the text by her husband, would write a memoir of their time in Paris, Seems Like Yesterday, recalling the atmosphere of post-war Paris and their famous friends Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Lena Horne.

Ann McGarry Buchwald died on July 3, 1994, in Washington, DC from lung cancer.

Works:

• (With Marjabelle Young) White Gloves and Party Manners. Washington: R.B.Luce, 1965.
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• (With Marjabelle Young Stewart) Stand Up, Shake Hands, Say How Do You Do. New York: D. McKay, 1969.
• (With Marjabelle Young Stewart) What to Do When and Why. New York: D. McKay, 1975.
• Seems Like Yesterday. New York: Putnam, 1980.

• “Ann Buchwald.” The Gale Literary Database: Contemporary Authors Online. 28 Oct. 2003. 27 July 2005. <http://www.galenet.com>.
• “Ann Buchwald, 74, Writer and Ex-Agent.” New York Times 5 July 1994: D14.
• “Literary Agent Ann Buchwald Dies at 74, Wife of Newspaper Columnist.” Washington Post 5 July 1994: B4.

This biography was prepared by Alan Jalowitz.