He returned to Edgewater, wrote more essays, more political journalism, and worked on other screenplays before he returned to Rome to finish his Washington novel. The succinctly named Washington, D.C. is a family saga about political life from the New Deal to the McCarthy era. Published in early 1967, it was a step backward, a surprisingly clunky novel written mostly in expository dialogue. (“Then Enid was right. You do love Clay. And you are mad.”) There’s a promising subplot in the homoerotic bond between a newspaper publisher and his son-in-law, a young politician, but Vidal was limited by the conventions of third-person fiction and his tendency to express strong emotion in the language of trashy melodrama. The book received mixed reviews, but it too was a best seller, doing even better than Julian. Many people thought it was a roman à clef about the Kennedys.
He wrote far better about politics as an essayist. He also spoke about it well. During this time he not only covered the 1964 political conventions for Esquire, he was a regular guest on the Jack Paar and David Susskind shows. “My entire life is now devoted to appearing on television: a pleasant alternative to real life,” he wrote to friends. He found a new vocation as an articulate political insider, even though his only real political experience had been to run for office and lose. But Vidal was rare in literary circles in being fascinated with the dirt of party politics. He claimed to have picked up his cynical wisdom from his mother’s family, in particular his grandfather, Senator T. P. Gore, but I suspect he learned more from his father, Eugene, who’d been badly burned by the government in his work with the airline industry. Vidal picked up much more political experience later when he lived intimately with Aaron Burr and Abraham Lincoln while writing fiction about them.
The question of homosexuality almost never came up on TV. However, in March 1967, a news special was broadcast, CBS Reports: The Homosexuals. Hosted by Mike Wallace, it featured talking heads in silhouette discussing their unhappiness, and several pontificating psychiatrists, including fiercely antigay Charles Socarides. Gore Vidal appeared not as a homosexual but as a cultural expert to debate with Albert Goldman. Goldman, who later wrote a positive biography of Lenny Bruce and negative biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, argued that homosexuality was one of the “things tending toward the final erosion of our cultural values.” Vidal replied, “I think the so-called breaking of the moral fiber of this country is one of the healthiest things that’s begun to happen.”
Vidal and Austen returned to Rome in May 1967 to live in a rooftop apartment near the Piazza Navona with a large sunlit terrace. Both men loved the city for many reasons, including the availability of young men for sex. Austen could be quite friendly with his Italian visitors, while Vidal’s relationships remained strictly professional. Rome was an excellent place to write, and he concentrated on his work.
Kenneth Tynan had asked for an erotic sketch for a show he was putting together, Oh! Calcutta! One morning on the terrace, while exploring a possible orgy scene, Vidal hit upon a line: “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess.” His imagination took off in a new direction and he followed it, forgetting Tynan and starting a novel. He wrote the first draft of Myra Breckinridge in a monthlong burst of creativity.
A wildly inventive comic fantasy about a movie scholar who changes his sex and goes to Hollywood, Myra Breckinridge is half parody, half lyric celebration. It suggests an American Orlando, but where Virginia Woolf’s cross-gendered fantasy is soaked in British literature, Vidal’s is soaked in American cinema. There are witty descriptions of old movies, prose poems about studio backlots, and comic homages to eccentric gay film critic Parker Tyler (who was still alive at the time). The book takes the form of Myra’s first-person journal, which enables Vidal to mix narrative, social analysis, movie lore, and blatant erotica. There is not only an orgy but two extended scenes where Myra literally plays doctor with straight blond stud Rusty Godowsky, and sodomizes him with a dildo. The literate voice of the essays is pushed into the absurd, but it’s serious as well as playful. “The novel being dead, there is no point to writing made-up stories. Look at the French who will not and the Americans who cannot. Look at me who ought not, if only because I exist entirely outside the usual human experience.” The book is more about voice than story, and it doesn’t entirely live up to the promise of its voice. But the same has been said about Orlando.
This was the book Vidal dedicated to Christopher Isherwood. “I AM HONORED AND DELIGHTED TO HAVE ANY BOOK OF YOURS DEDICATED TO ME,” Isherwood telegraphed in reply.
Myra Breckinridge was published in February 1968 with no advance copies being sent to reviewers. Little, Brown wanted to keep Myra’s transsexual identity a secret (it’s difficult to imagine a time when people didn’t already know) and present the book as a classy underground novel in the tradition of Lolita and Candy. The cover featured a photo of the cowgirl statue Vidal had seen from his room at Chateau Marmont when he first arrived in Hollywood. The initial printing was 55,000 copies, and the book was an instant best seller. Reviewers slowly caught up with it. “A funny novel, but it requires an iron stomach,” said Eliot Fremont-Smith in the daily New York Times. The Times Book Review was terribly coy in describing the book’s probable audience: “the pokerfaced jacket art manages to be both sexy and epicene; even the dedication will be a tip-off to the In-group.” It’s safe to assume gay readers made up a large proportion of the first buyers, but the book soon crossed over and remained on best-seller lists for thirty weeks. The other literary best seller that year was John Updike’s hotly heterosexual novel, Couples. Writers needed to offer something new and outrageous to hold their own with what was happening in the outside world in 1968.
It was a year of politics and violence. The country was torn apart by Vietnam and race. Lyndon Johnson declared on March 31 that he would not seek the nomination for president, leaving the upcoming election wide open. On the night of April 4, Martin Luther King was murdered by a sniper in Memphis. Riots broke out in black neighborhoods across the country. In June Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles immediately after winning the California primary. Then, at the end of August, the Democrats met in Chicago.
CBS and NBC provided full coverage of both the Republican and Democratic conventions, but ABC decided to give only evening wrap-ups. They hired Gore Vidal to deliver fifteen minutes of commentary each night. Appearing with Vidal to offer the conservative point of view was William F. Buckley.
The editor and founder of the National Review had fully established himself as the spokesman of American conservativism. Author of God and Man at Yale and other books, he also had a syndicated newspaper column, “On the Right,” and a TV show, Firing Line. Erudite, witty, and unearthly, he was famous for his elaborate sentences, breathy delivery, manic eyebrows, and reptilian tongue. He is now remembered as a representative of an age when conservatives could be civilized and reasonable. But Buckley was ahead of his time in many ways.
His exchanges with Vidal during the Republican convention in Miami were testy but without serious mishap. TV journalist Howard K. Smith served as moderator. Buckley supported the war in Vietnam, Vidal opposed it, but neither man liked the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. Buckley was more excited by the governor of California, Ronald Reagan.
But the Democratic convention in Chicago was different. The situation was far more tense. The Democrats were bitterly divided over the war, with pro-war delegates supporting Vice President Hubert Humphrey and peace delegates supporting Senator Eugene McCarthy. The division was echoed outside the convention hall in the streets, where anti-war demonstrators—National Mobilization Against the War (MOBE), Yippies (Youth International Party) and others—faced Mayor Richard Daley’s army of police. Allen Ginsberg came to town, not to read poetry but to chant for peace. The author of “Howl” had become less literary and more spiritual in recent years, going deep into Eastern thought. He still wore a necktie but let his bushy hair and beard grow out. In Chicago he saw his old friend William Burroughs and the French
gay writer Jean Genet. Burroughs and Genet were covering the convention for Esquire. Norman Mailer was there, too, covering the convention for Harper’s. Mailer had published an odd novel the year before, Why Are We in Vietnam? about two boys on a hunting trip in Alaska who love each other as friends, but each is afraid to show his love for fear his pal will then sodomize him. Mailer continued to have weird issues about homosexuality, but he remained alert and curious about gay writers.
Vidal and Buckley had their first TV exchange on Sunday, and it went badly. Sometime during the two weeks since Miami, Buckley had read Myra Breckinridge. He hated it. He attacked Vidal for being no better than a pornographer. A pornographer, he said, had no business calling the Republican Party immoral. Vidal was amused, but their conversations remained on edge.
During the day Vidal visited the convention floor as both a journalist and a McCarthy supporter. It was the familiar world of his play, The Best Man. But he also visited the new world of student protesters several miles away in Lincoln Park on the lake. The police cleared the park each night so nobody could sleep there, using billy clubs and tear gas. Mayor Daley hated the protesters and encouraged his cops to do whatever they wanted. Mailer visited the park, too, and in his excellent book Miami and the Siege of Chicago, describes meeting Ginsberg and his friends there on Monday evening: he thought they looked like infantrymen, but Genet reminded him of Mickey Rooney. Late Monday night the police attacked the park again and Ginsberg was badly gassed. For the rest of the week his voice was hoarse from tear gas and chanting.
On Tuesday night, the police came through the park one more time. The students resisted and threw rocks; the police became angrier. The students fled south and regrouped in Grant Park, which was closer to the convention and the hotels where the delegates stayed. It was also closer to the TV news crews. There were no live video feeds on the street, only 16mm movie cameras whose footage needed to be rushed to TV stations and developed before it could be broadcast. The Chicago police were more restrained, for a while.
The climax came on Wednesday, August 28. In the convention hall that afternoon, the anti-war Democrats attempted to get a peace plank into the party platform. They failed. Up in Grant Park, there was a major disturbance when somebody climbed a flagpole to take down the American flag and raise another—some said a Vietcong or Vietnamese Liberation Front flag, others a red scarf. A couple of cops tried to stop it and rocks were thrown. The police then formed a wedge and attacked the crowd, indiscriminately slamming people with nightsticks. Camera crews raced behind the wall of helmeted cops, capturing the mayhem in broad daylight.
In another corner of the park, Ginsberg calmed a group of protesters by teaching them how to chant “om.”
As the hot summer afternoon turned into evening, protesters crowded out of Grant Park and moved toward Michigan Avenue. They hoped to march down Michigan to the convention. But at the intersection of Balbo Avenue, outside the Hilton hotel, they were blocked by the police. Boxed in on three sides, the protesters were unable to move. Everybody waited—for thirty minutes. Then, at 7:57 p.m., as if on command, the police charged into the crowd. Columns of cops tore through the massed bodies, swinging clubs and fists, stampeding people left and right, knocking down individuals and dragging them across the pavement to paddy wagons while still beating them. They went after journalists, too, spraying them with mace or smashing their equipment. But the TV cameras on the canopy of the hotel were out of reach and continued filming. Recognizing what the cameras meant, protesters began to chant, “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.”
Within an hour, the film was processed and broadcast raw with minimal commentary, seventeen minutes of police violence. People across the country saw cops brutally beating up unarmed students. It was as shocking as seeing Alabama cops attack civil rights marchers with dogs and fire hoses. This time the faces were white, but some became black with blood on black-and-white TV sets.
In the ABC studio that night, Howard K. Smith opened the broadcast with clips of the police attack in Grant Park. Buckley defended the police and blamed the demonstrators, saying they were breaking the law. Vidal defended the demonstrators, saying they were practicing their constitutional right to assemble. The exchange became more heated and incoherent. Buckley cited Oliver Wendell Holmes—“whom you must despise.” Vidal cited the Constitution. Buckley interrupted:
Buckley: And some people were pro-Nazi.
Vidal: Shut up a minute.
Buckley: No, I won’t. Some people were pro-Nazi and the answer is that they were well-treated by the people who ostracized them, and I’m for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers. I know you don’t care—
Vidal: As far as I’m concerned, the only pro or crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that—
Howard K. Smith: Let’s not call names.
And Buckley delivered the insult heard around the world.
Buckley: Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face.
Howard K. Smith: Let’s stop calling names!
Buckley: And you’ll stay plastered. Let Myra Breckinridge go back to his pornography and stop making any allusions of Nazism. I was in the infantry in the last war!
Vidal: You were not in the infantry. As a matter of fact, you didn’t fight in the war.
Buckley: I was in the infantry.
Vidal: You were not. You’re distorting your own military record.
The two men sat side by side, half turned toward each other, Buckley in a gray suit, Vidal in a dark one. Both remained seated the entire time. Buckley had a finger pressed to one ear, presumably to keep his earpiece in place so he could hear how he sounded. Vidal broke into a smile when Buckley called him a queer, an oddly gleeful, boyish smile. Then he understood how angry Buckley was and his smile wavered. Buckley bared his teeth and leaned forward as if to hit Vidal, but his finger remained stuck in his ear.
A sixteen-year-old boy in Virginia watched the exchange with his mouth wide open. I was home from a summer at Boy Scout camp and I was amazed that two grown men could attack each other like angry adolescents. I suspected Buckley meant queer in the nastiest sexual way and wondered if it were true. I was impressed by how cool and unflustered Vidal remained.
“What happened at Sharon—,” Vidal began before Smith cut him off. Smith proposed that the protesters may have provoked the violence by raising a Vietcong flag, as if that justified all the beatings that followed. Vidal insisted that even a Vietcong flag was an act of speech. “We are guaranteed freedom of speech. We’ve just listened to a grotesque example of it.” The session ended with Smith declaring that Buckley and Vidal had given “a little more heat and a little less light than usual,” but it had still been interesting.
Newspapers discussed the exchange the next day, but could only refer to “the disgraceful language”; they couldn’t quote it. Besides, there were more important things to talk about. Nobody had been killed on Michigan Avenue, but many were injured and hundreds were arrested. A shouting match had broken out at the convention when Abe Ribicoff of New York condemned Mayor Daley for “gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” Americans were disgusted by the violence, but many blamed the protesters, not the police. This was an age when the country still trusted its police. In the middle of this chaos, Hubert Humphrey was nominated as candidate for president.
Vidal and Buckley appeared again on the last night of the convention and were subdued, professional, and dull. In November they were called back for postmortems on the election. Nixon won, in part because the Democratic convention had been so disorderly; Nixon represented law and order. Yet the third-party segregationist candidate, George Wallace, attracted many white conservatives, and the election was surprisingly close. Buckley insisted a screen separate him and Vidal so he wouldn’t have to look at his antagonist while they spoke.
That should have been the end of it, but Buckley continu
ed to brood about Vidal. After their last TV exchange, he contacted Esquire magazine and said he wanted to write about the televised fight. He told them he needed to be able to call Vidal a homosexual in print. Esquire enjoyed controversy and, after discussing it with their lawyers, they accepted but insisted Vidal be allowed to respond. Buckley agreed. Vidal hesitated—he had never acknowledged he was a homosexual (after all, there was no such thing)—but eventually he agreed, too. Each man wrote his article and drafts were exchanged. Lawyers were consulted and the articles were rewritten. Then, after both sides agreed on what could be printed, three months before either piece ran, Buckley sent a telegram to twenty magazines and newspapers declaring that Vidal had libeled him on TV and now wanted to libel him with an article in Esquire. He didn’t mention his own article. Two days later he sued Vidal for libel. He still expected Esquire to publish his piece but threatened to sue them as well if they published Vidal’s.
One cannot read about Buckley’s actions without feeling one is dealing with a crazy person. But the very idea of homosexuality can turn some people temporarily insane.
Buckley’s piece ran in August 1969. “On Experiencing Gore Vidal” appears with a subhead, “Can there be any justification in calling a man a queer before ten million people on television?” Which is what part of the essay is about—the part that makes sense, anyway. It’s a long, obsessive, tedious piece. It’s difficult to understand why Esquire went ahead and printed it—it’s clearly not what they hoped for. It’s even harder to figure out what Buckley hoped to prove. He begins by quoting an old article in the East Village Other that attacked him for practicing “faggot logic.” He complains that other people can call him names, and protesters can call Lyndon Johnson names, so why can’t he call Vidal a queer? He quotes his TV exchanges with Vidal in great detail. He talks about Vidal’s writing and his “almost obsession with homosexuality,” which is as close as he comes to actually saying that Vidal is a homosexual. The lawyers must have made him remove anything more direct. Buckley seemed to think that if he could identify Vidal as an actual pervert then he would prove that he himself was more moral and would win the argument. He closes with a strange paragraph on how “faggotry is countenanced, but the imputation of it—even to faggots—is not…. But the imputation of it in anger is not justified, which is why I herewith apologize to Gore Vidal.”
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 15