I sometimes have a hard time describing why I continue to be fascinated by the speechwriting community that I’ve been convening all these years.
Delivering a litany of quirky and iconoclastic speechwriters doesn’t get it across. Nor, quite, does pointing out the inherent strangeness of a bunch of powerless, obscure, not-rich English majors writing things for a bunch of powerful, prominent, mostly rich people to say to mostly powerless, obscure, not-rich people.
From now on, I’m just going to tell this single story, from PSA World Conference last month:
A George H.W. Bush White House speechwriter had to back out of a panel a couple weeks before the event. She recommended that I replace her with a Bush speechwriter I’d never heard of, named Ed McNally. She said he was the funniest of all the Bush 41 speechwriters, and thought he’d be great.
I reached out to him and he generously moved some things around in his schedule and wound up making the show.
Along the way, he sent me an article from the Chicago Tribune that made a strong case that he was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Director John Hughes’ inspiration for Ferris.
McNally and Hughes grew up on the same block in the Chicago suburb of Northbrook. Their whole families were close neighbors. From the Trib piece: “In the film, Ferris skips nine days of school. McNally skipped 27 days. On one of those days off, he ‘borrowed’ his father’s prized possession—a purple Cadillac—and put 113 miles on it, then, as the fictional Ferris does with a red Ferrari, McNally lifted the car onto jacks and ran it backwards, hoping to reverse the odometer.” Etcetera.
The panel’s moderator Robert Schlesinger had some fun with that in introducing McNally, and McNally was fun and lively and cheerful and good-humored. One of those guys who has a permanently impish, Jerry Seinfeld-ish look on his face that says he expects something funny to happen, or to come out of his own mouth, any minute. But somehow also earnest and wanting to be helpful. I saw him do a little life-coaching that he didn’t have to do, for a very young writer not yet out of grad school.
The session let out straight into a cocktail party before a pretty sunset over the Washington Mall. McNally, who is now a trial lawyer and wore the only cufflinks at the conference, seemed to meet two dozen people in 90 minutes.
Eventually he and I settled into a conversation. I was really curious about Hughes, whose movies changed my life. I told McNally that I was 15 when I saw The Breakfast Club over spring break. I spent the rest of the week gathering determination that when I went back to high school the next Monday, I was going to be free. I was going to be me.
But I couldn’t think of exactly what I might do, to express that freedom and me-dom. In a closet, my dad had an old green felt hat with a feather in it that he probably hadn’t worn since the 1950s. I decided to wear that dumb old hat to school on Monday and I not to care what anybody said about it. And by God, I did. (Placing it in my locker, of course, in accordance with a no-hat rule at the school.) No one said anything about it.
Still: That John Hughes film stirred something inside me, just at the moment that thing needed stirring.
I also remember showing that movie to my parents, and them hating it. I couldn’t understand why, and they didn’t try very hard to explain.
I can understand now. The parents in Breakfast Club and all Hughes films were so awful. Negligent, uncaring, out of touch, unavailable, materialistic, humorless and dumb. Their only good quality was that they mostly stayed offscreen.
I told McNally that those parents don’t resemble the parents my generation became. That our relationships with our kids are, if anything, too enmeshed.
I expressed curiosity about Hughes’ relationship with his own parents. The old family friend basically demurred. And then the trial lawyer redirected, asking me if maybe my generation was influenced by all those movies, unwittingly implanted with a quiet determination to be the opposite of those useless monster parents Hughes portrayed.
At that instant I realized two things: 1. I’d never considered that before. I always chalk all my parenting influences up to my own parents, not popular culture, but maybe Ed had a point. 2. I was standing on a patio in Washington D.C. drinking beer, eating passed hors d’oeuvres and discussing parenting styles with Ferris effing Bueller.
Anyway, I like Ed McNally very much, and we both enthusiastically agreed to get together next time he’s back in Chicago with a couple of hours on his hands.
And anyway, I like these speechwriters.
