by Gore Vidal
41
Where are my breasts? Where are my breasts?
42
What an extraordinary document! I have spent all morning reading this notebook and I can hardly believe that I was ever the person who wrote those demented pages. I’ve been debating whether or not to show them to my wife but I think, all in all, it’s better to let the dead past bury its dead. As it is, neither of us ever mentions the period in which I was a woman and except for my agent, Miss Van Allen, we deliberately avoid seeing anyone who knew me in those days.
For over three years now we have been living in the San Fernando Valley on what they call a ranch but is actually just a few acres of date palms and lemon trees. The house is modern with every convenience and I have just built an outdoor barbecue pit which is much admired by the neighbors, many of whom are personalities in show business or otherwise work in some capacity or another in the Industry. Ours is a friendly community, with many fine people to share interests with.
At present I am writing a series, currently in its second year on ABC. I would of course like very much to do feature films but they are not that easy to come by. Miss Van Allen, however, keeps submitting my name so who knows when lightning will strike? Meanwhile, the series is a good credit and I make good money.
While cleaning out the attic, I came across this notebook along with all the manuscripts I wrote back in New York. Frankly I can’t make head or tail of them. I certainly went through a pretentious phase! Luckily everything is now stabilized for me and I have just about the best wife and marriage I know of. Mary-Ann still sings professionally from time to time as well as appearing locally on television with her own children’s program five days a week in the early A.M. She is quite a celebrity with the small fry in the Valley.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Buck Loner but he’s doing O.K. with the Academy, I gather, and every now and then one of the students actually gets a job in show business. So my work wasn’t entirely in vain. The most famous alumnus is Ace Mann who used to be Rusty Godowsky. After mopping up in that television series, he promptly inked a multiple nonexclusive contract with Universal and is now the Number Four Box Office Star in the World, according to Film Daily. He is also, I’m sorry to learn, a complete homosexual, for which I feel a certain degree of responsibility and guilt. But Dr. Montag, whom I ran into last week outside Wil Wright’s on Santa Monica Boulevard, said he thought it was probably always in the cards for Rusty and what I did to him just brought his true nature to the surface. I hope he’s right.
Dr. Montag seems happy, although he now weighs over three hundred pounds and at first I didn’t recognize him, but then he didn’t recognize me either. Well, none of us is getting any younger. I am now almost entirely bald, which I compensate for by wearing a rather dashing R.A.F.-style moustache. Needless to say, it is a constant sadness that Mary-Ann and I can never have children. But ever since we both became Christian Scientists we tend to believe that what happens in this life is for the best. Although I nearly lost my mind and tried to kill myself when I learned that my breasts had been removed (Dr. Mengers had been forced to take this step because my life was endangered by the silicone which, as a result of the accident, threatened to enter the bloodstream), I now realize that it was the best thing that ever happened to me if only because once Mary-Ann realized that I was really Myron Breckinridge, her attitude toward me changed completely. Two weeks after I left the hospital where I spent my long convalescence and rehabilitation, we were married in Vegas, and so were able at last to settle down and live a happy and normal life, raising dogs and working for Planned Parenthood.
Incidentally, I noticed a quotation scribbled in one of the margins of the notebook. Something she (I hate to say “I”!) copied from some book about Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I don’t suppose it’s giving away any secrets to say that like so many would-be intellectuals back East Myra never actually read books, only books about books. Anyway the quotation still sort of appeals to me. It is about how humanity would have been a lot happier if it had kept to “the middle ground between the indolence of the primitive state and the questing activity to which we are prompted by our self-esteem.” I think that is a very fine statement and one which, all in all, I’m ready to buy, since it is a proven fact that happiness, like the proverbial bluebird, is to be found in your own backyard if you just know where to look.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gore Vidal was born in 1925 in West Point, New York. Aside from being the well known author of many novels (Myra Breckinridge is his eleventh), he has also written for many television programs and was the screenwriter for the following movies: The Best Man, The Catered Affair, I Accuse, The Scapegoat and Suddenly Last Summer. Mr Vidal wrote Visit to a Small Planet, which was first a television and then a Broadway play. He is presently living in Rome.