P.J. O’Rourke has died at age 74, after a couple of battles with cancer over the last 14 years.

He was the great conservative satirist of the post-Tom Wolfe generation, the single most brilliant of the many tremendous authors employed by National Lampoon in the 1970s.

This may seem petty, but I was rather proud of having noticed in October 2008 deep into the Presidential election campaign that it was likely that GOP candidate John McCain had broken up P.J.’s 1990-1993 marriage to McCain’s staffer Amy Lumet, the daughter of director Sidney Lumet (director of 12 Angry Men) and granddaughter of singer Lena Horne.

This struck me as highly interesting, what with McCain running, you know, for President.

But my review of the October 2008 Jonathan Demme movie Rachel Getting Married with a script by Amy’s sister Jenny Lumet for a movie in which Anne Hathaway was nominated for an Oscar in the role of Jenny’s attention-holic sister Amy, P.J.’s ex-wife, making a mess of boring Jenny’s wedding, attracted zero attention. From my 2008 review:

The movie’s better half stars a charismatic Anne Hathaway (a heretofore-bland leading lady whose dark eyebrows made most of the impression in “The Devil Wears Prada”) as Kym, an attentionaholic part-time model turned full-time drug addict who is furloughed from a posh rehab clinic for her sister’s wedding. Exactly as her levelheaded sister Rachel dreads, Kym’s self-destructive antics enthrall the multicultural throngs crowding the grounds of their father’s Connecticut estate to prepare for Rachel’s big day on which the Reform rabbi is to marry her to a tall, gentlemanly black man from Hawaii.

The highlight of the ceremony is the groom singing his bride a Neil Young ballad. White liberals critics have gone nuts over “Rachel” because the interracial marriage reminds them of a certain black Hawaiian’s promise that promoting “mutual understanding” is “in my DNA.” I fear, though, that even electing Obama President won’t get many black guys to understand the appeal of whiny Canadian folk rockers from the Sixties.

First-time screenwriter Jenny Lumet named the groom “Sidney.” She is presumably referencing both Sidney Poitier in Stanley Kramer’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” and her father, Sidney Lumet, director of 1957’s “Twelve Angry Men,” one of Kramer’s successors as a liberal warhorse.

Various shocking revelations about Kym’s culpability in the death a decade before of their little brother ensue, culminating in a confrontation with her mother (1980s legend Debra Winger of “An Officer and a Gentleman” making one of her myriad, but still welcome, comebacks). “Rachel Getting Married” has a decent little plot if you like upscale suburban family tragedies in the tradition of “Ordinary People.” Lumet handles the disclosures about the death of the child realistically and effectively. Rather than build up to stagey moments, jagged shards of information are blurted out before you can prepare your emotional defenses.

Still, a more entertaining screenplay could be written about the star’s off-screen misadventures. Hathaway was in the news in June when the FBI hauled away her suave Italian boyfriend, Raffaello Follieri.

Outfitted with clerical cassocks and a claim to be the Vatican’s chief financial officer, Follieri had wormed his way into a $100 million deal with Bill Clinton and Ron Burkle to sell off Roman Catholic churches in America to pay for sex scandal settlements.

On a rented yacht in Montenegro, the bipartisan cute couple also hosted the 70th birthday party of John McCain.

An equally entertaining movie could be made about the real-life Lumet sisters (who are granddaughters of famed jazz vocalist and beauty Lena Horne).

When their dad received his Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2005, screenwriter Jenny, the sensibly dressed old-fashioned leftist, had the global television spotlight stolen from her by the startling new cleavage of her sister Amy, a would-be model and 1992 National Review contributor (“Baby Cons of America, unite: You have nothing to lose but your parents’ guilt.”)

An article that sounds like it was ghostwritten by P.J.

Interestingly, Amy Lumet’s marriage to hard-partying conservative satirist P.J. O’Rourke broke up about when she is said to have worked for John McCain.

Now, Jenny / Rachel has taken sibling rivalry to a new level.

After all, who would be interested by the back story of a critically acclaimed movie that implied that the GOP Presidential candidate had slept with the quarter-black wife of the greatest conservative satirist?

Nobody, apparently.

In early 2008, P.J. wrote in The Weekly Standard about a visit to an aircraft carrier.

I was there to get a journalistic hook–a tailhook, as it were–for a preconceived idea. I wanted to say something about Senator John McCain…. I can speak to John’s honor, duty, valor, patriotism, etc., but I’m not sure how well his self-discipline would have fared if he’d been on an aircraft carrier with more than 500 beautiful women sailors the way I was.