Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  The response had no effect in taking Gore’s mind off his own dissatisfactions, among them the scheduled publication of City in January 1948. It was not an unmixed blessing. He resented that two other novels on the same topic were appearing, to some extent stealing his thunder, as he had worried might happen. He also feared adverse responses. Some might connect the topic and the life of the author. He had done his best to make the novel as objective, even as clinical, as possible. It would be unreasonable, though, not to expect the connection to be made. That he would not have the stage entirely to himself seemed Dutton’s fault. He blamed them for the delay. In early June he was the beneficiary of another mixed blessing. Life magazine ran a visually impressive photo article titled “Young U.S. Writers: A Refreshing Group of Newcomers on the Literary Scene Is Ready to Tackle Almost Anything.” Three quarters of the first page consisted of an attractive photograph of the youthful Truman Capote, elegantly dressed, cigarette in hand, seated casually but dramatically in an artfully arranged portion of a prebellum Southern living room. Then followed two pages with modest-size photos of Jean Stafford, Thomas Heggen, Calder Willingham, and Elizabeth Fenwick, then two pages of mostly text on the second of which appeared three small photographs, one of them an awkward depiction of “Gore Vidal, 21, [who] writes poetry and Hemingwayesque fiction. He was in the Aleutians, now lives in Guatemala.” In the text the smaller half of a paragraph said some obvious and uninteresting things about him. Since the article was mostly its visuals, anyone with no special interest in the other writers would be likely to remember only the very large eye-catching photo of the “onn-font-tarribul” who, for reasons Gore could only imagine and perhaps fulminate obsessively about, had been given undivided star billing. It would have been even worse if he had not been included at all, but “how absurd to feature Capote—instead of you,” Anaïs loyally wrote to him.

  In a short while he began to feel ill, a low-grade feverish discomfort with assorted aches and some listlessness. His stomach bothered him. Perhaps, he thought, he had a spastic colon. Having finished The Season of Comfort, he speculated with a kind of bilious good humor, that so much imaginative exposure to Nina had made him feel sick. Working in the garden or in the back room, he began to fiddle in a desultory way with some early jottings for the book on King Richard’s troubadour. In a while he felt better but still not quite right. Anaïs, who had already crossed the country twice since they had last seen one another in New Orleans, was now in Acapulco, close to the Guatemalan border, a short plane trip or a day’s bus ride from Guatemala City. Still unresolved about whether she would stay with Rupert in California or Hugh in New York or neither, she accepted, in July, Gore’s long-standing invitation to visit him in Antigua. Though they were still closely intertwined, there was now a distance between them others could sense, an almost antierotic aura. But the emotional alliance was strong. When Anaïs, broke, had become pregnant in June, probably by Poole, Gore sent her $1,000 to pay for an abortion, insisting she keep the leftover money for travel expenses to Guatemala. “I should like it if you can come down here and spend July or earlier whenever you’ve recovered.” On the one hand, she liked the idea. “Maybe when I come down you’ll get a little second hand car and I will drive you around everywhere. It gives such freedom.” On the other, on the assumption he was happy in Guatemala, she stressed that “the less we are together the better for both of us … for it will help you find THE relationship—someday.” She then decided to go to France instead, which seemed a good idea to him. “We will always have each other, and continuity in our bond.” Anaïs insisted, “but at the present moment I could not stay at peace anywhere, and would not make you happy. I have only a short time to find a permanent passion—and my quest must continue. As you know, sex is not just sex for me, but the sun, moon, earth, sea, and salt of life, the impetus to creation—the only form of life for me…. Our bond has no need of the physical presence except now and then.” Bored with Antigua, somewhat ill, he flirted with the idea of going with her. When her European plans fell through because of money, she decided to go to Mexico. “Perhaps if you’re tired of Guatemala you might like to meet me there,” she wrote to him. “If you still feel lonely and need me or don’t sell the house and don’t want novelty I will fly to Guatemala for a few days…. Cheri, I love to be with you, you know that, but under ideal conditions for both of us, which means Romance [with others].” She had another idea. “We could meet in Mexico City for excitement, and … I can present you with a blond boy 20…. We don’t like each other physically (we tried!) but he wants to drive me around devotedly and he is h.s. and I’m sure would love you.”

  Anaïs loved the Antigua house, the marketplace, the town itself, the magnificent scenery. With her usual flair, she dressed attractively in colorful combinations of Greenwich Village and Guatemalan styles. She wore open sandals, braided her hair with “pink and green and orange yarn.” In the eyes of one American visitor, she was still in love with Gore. They managed in the house quite nicely, with Pat, with two servants, with meals of delicious shrimp paella and dinners at the homes of Gore’s Antigua friends. In the hot summer weather they swam in his neighbors’ pools. He took her on excursions to the top of one of the nearby volcanoes and to Lake Atitlán. One day, walking alone along one of Guatemala City’s main streets, he turned in response to a voice that said, “Gore!” It was Andres Devendorf, his East Hampton friend, accompanied by a friend of his, Dominick Dunne. Between their junior and senior years at college they had come to Guatemala City ostensibly to study Spanish, mostly to get away from home and have an adventure. Gore immediately invited them to visit him in Antigua. Though he was not at his best with the visitors, Anaïs was, delighted to have companions. Devendorf and Dunne immediately quit their Spanish classes and came regularly to Antigua. Much of the day Gore kept to his study, trying to make progress with A Search for the King. But he still did not feel well. He had a recollection of having eaten something weeks before that seemed viscerally related to his sense of being ill, though he could not make any direct connection. Nonetheless he managed to be hospitable to both young men, whom he liked. A short, bright-eyed, somewhat innocent youth of twenty-two from a well-to-do Connecticut family, Dunne had served admirably in the Army and been awarded the Bronze Star for bravery in the Battle of the Bulge, what he later remembered as one of the proudest achievements of his life. “I was this shy, sissy, stuttering, hopeless kid, in my family hopeless, in the Army hopeless.” But he had saved some fellow soldiers’ lives. Eager for the company of talented, successful people, he had the immediate sense that Anaïs was a famous person simply by her bearing, her attitude. Gore, he knew, was already famous. An avid reader, Dunne admired Williwaw, envied the publicity surrounding its publication, wondered what he might do to become famous also. In Antigua, Dunne had his “first view of people I always knew I was going to be with, artistic, bohemian, rich people. They weren’t only society people going to parties. They were people who seemed to be writing books or painting pictures or doing something artistic also. But they all seemed to be comfortably incomed. One way or another I was going to be a part of that world.” He liked Pat, who was funny. “He was hilarious, in fact, and he was kind of campy in wit.”

  Gore graciously included the visitors in his social activities. Dunne noticed that here was someone of his own age who owned a beautiful house, ran it with servants in an orderly, grown-up way, knew everyone of interest around, and had a manner that seemed totally self-possessed. “He’d already finished The City and the Pillar, and I had inside knowledge of it and bragged about it later. I was aware of it and of the topic of it and Anaïs had read it…. She talked about it. We were there to have fun. We were just kids. On top of which, Gore had attitude…. That’s what gives famous people this thing so that when they walk into a room you look.” Not everyone always found the attitude attractive, but that was not the point. It was a phenomenon, a projection of energy, of self-regard, of presence. One had it or one did not. Mesmer
ized by Anaïs, who found it pleasurable to hypnotize him, Dunne had long talks with her, enchanted by her exotic sophistication, her foreign beauty, her glamorous stories. “I didn’t even know who Henry Miller was, and she was talking about Henry Miller. She seemed to know everyone. I was just riveted by her. It’s like she knew every moment that the camera was on her. If she caught you—and she knew she had got me—she played the part.” Flattered that she seemed to prefer him to the handsomer Andres, Dunne was infatuated. Busy in his studio, slightly ill, Gore took no notice. On a hot night they “took a plunge in somebody’s swimming pool…. We didn’t have clothes on, but there was nothing improper about it,” Dunne recalled. “I swam over her. She was doing the backstroke and I was doing the breaststroke. And it was sort of sexy.” As usual, Anaïs had found “romance.” When she left to return to Acapulco, Nick and Andres followed. “Things clearly had gone sour between her and Gore … and she left and I went with her. And Andres went with us. I wanted to go with her. Not that this was some great romance. We had a little fuckette for nine days or so, and then she left me for a kid younger than me,” a Mexican beachboy.

  Still feeling unwell, Gore nevertheless joined Anaïs in Acapulco, unaware that Nick, who had left to return to Williams, had even been there. Anaïs had urged him to come to the seashore, where they both thought he might recover from whatever had been making him sick. On his way he stopped in Guatemala City to say good-bye to Olga Vasquez Bruni, who noticed how unwell he looked. When he arrived in Acapulco in the late-summer heat, his face was yellow from jaundice. That night at dinner he ate “oily chicken served in half a coconut full of nauseous yellow cream.” As he collapsed with fever and nausea, he wretched from his memory that about six weeks before he had eaten something equally dangerous from a large cauldron in the Antigua marketplace. It now seemed inseparable from the indefinable ill feeling he had been having for so long. Unable to do anything but stay in bed, he read the only book he had with him, a volume of Blake’s poems. Thereafter he always associated Blake with insufferable heat and “longed-for death.” He had never before felt so physically miserable. “A Swiss doctor fed me charcoal and corn flakes. The diagnosis was hepatitis A…. They didn’t know what to do in those days.” Between her visits to the beach Anaïs nursed him, though for a short while she (and the doctor) thought that nothing would save him. Within two weeks he lost thirty pounds. Gradually, with medical attention and rest, he began to get better. When well enough to travel, he and Anaïs went to Mexico City, partly because it was on his route back to the United States, partly to consult with a specialist who told him his blood tests showed that he had had hepatitis for some time, that he had been suffering from it through much of the summer in Antigua, and that he had had an acute attack when he had arrived in Acapulco. He was lucky to be alive.

  Chapter Eight

  The Golden Age

  1947-1948

  Suddenly his life took an unexpected leap into passion. In late summer 1947 he was recuperating at East Hampton. The hepatitis had gradually disappeared. As his appetite returned, he began to reclaim some of the lost thirty pounds. Morose and unfocused, he was happy to have Anaïs at a distance. Over the last year, in Guatemala and New York, he had complained that his life lacked a grand romance, while at the same time he had strong reservations about the value in general of any kind of “romance” at all. Whether he wanted or felt capable of an affair with anyone was a consideration. “Have you the temperament to secure and hold a lover?” a friend had asked him the previous winter. The answer had been the same as it had been to Anaïs. But he now gave a different response to twenty-two-year-old Harold Lang, the California-born ballet and musical-comedy dancer, famous for his pirouettes on- and offstage. “We met,” Vidal wrote in an unpublished 1947 short story, in “a wood-walled bar in the beach town, the bar where the people in the summer theater gathered.” Lang was performing in Look, Ma, I’m Dancing, one of his many musical-comedy roles, as he alternated between the Ballet Theatre (later renamed the American Ballet Theatre) and Broadway musicals, a lead dancer in the movement that narrowed the gap between classical ballet and American popular-theatrical dance. “Harold was a magnificent dancer,” a balletomane recalled. “He wasn’t a perfect dancer. But he was witty, and vivid, and so intelligent onstage. He didn’t have a beautiful body, but a handsome one.” With a throaty, effective singing voice, Lang reached musical-comedy stardom in Kiss Me, Kate in 1948 and in the long-running 1952 revival of Pal Joey. His first great success had been in Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein’s Fancy Free in 1944, the ballet soon transformed into the musical On the Town. At East Hampton that summer Lang was having sex with the male author and the female lead of Look, Ma. His friend Joe O’Donohue, a high-society habituée of Manhattan nightlife and later a friend of Gore’s, recalled that “Harold and I used to go off on the town. I took him to nightclubs and especially to Harlem. Harold and I had sex together, but it was a casual thing. Harold was very easy about that sort of thing.” Sometimes mooningly romantic, often promiscuously unstable, Lang ranged from carefree to compulsive. Notoriously randy and random, he had affairs, usually brief, with both sexes. As much a sexual athlete as a ballet dancer, to the young Gore Vidal he “was just extraordinary to be with…. It was really the sexual life force. I’ve never seen anything like it and never saw anything like it again…. It was ‘the greatest ass in history,’ as Bernstein said, and Lenny was a true authority.”

  After their first flirtation in the bar, Gore went to watch Harold at rehearsal. Dark-haired, a few inches shorter than Gore, with whitish-blue eyes, a trimly muscular body, lithe strong thighs, a boyish face, and roguishly attractive smile, Harold had wonderful elevation as a dancer and riveting stage presence. Gore himself had become a minor balletomane the previous winter and spring. At the Chafee Dance Studio he had enjoyed his own restricted athleticism, therapy for his rheumatoid arthritis. Hanging around Manhattan bars frequented by dance people, he met numbers of young dancers, began to attend performances, particularly of the Ballet Theatre, and met its director of public relations, Sam Lurie. After a few more nights at the same East Hampton bar, they left together and cycled to the dancer’s boardinghouse. Lang invited Gore up to see his room. “It began then.” That first night Lang was the pursuer, Gore emotionally reserved, hesitant. The next day they argued. “I wasn’t capable of an affair, he thought…. I seemed so much like so many other people he knew. I couldn’t answer him. If he couldn’t see how different I was…. Then, as suddenly as before, just when I was about to leave, he said, ‘Let’s go to bed’; that was the way the loving started.” As Gore’s fictional surrogate confessed, “I had never known anything like this and in the dark he whispered to me, don’t louse me up; and then I loved him and, since he was afraid of me, I removed all my armor to show that I was the one vulnerable, that he was safe. I knew that night of something he needed that I couldn’t give, and that gave me anxiety…. But now I was loving for the first time and everything was new.” For the first time he was actually making love with the intent to give as well as get pleasure. It was a new experience. Unfortunately, it was soon less than idyllic. Lang was moody, erratic. After that first week at East Hampton, he put Gore off with the story that he had an ex-lover staying with him, from whom he was in the process of trying to extricate himself. Each day at the beach, Harold mostly absent, Gore diverted himself with Ethel Merman, the Broadway star with the stentorian singing voice “who was quite intrigued with the idea of her voice resounding in a monastery. She has,” he wrote to Pat Crocker, “very likely, the worst figure of any woman in the world but she is amusing and loves to discuss things in terms of male genitalia. We got on quite well and she can’t wait to read the C and P. ‘Don’t read much but love books about homos,’” she said.

  Eager for a holiday and a retreat, Harold suggested they take a trip together, preferably out of the country, when Look, Ma, I’m Dancing closed. Soon after Labor Day they flew to Bermuda. All was well again. They loun
ged together in the sun, enjoying the stillness, listening to the waves, swimming in the reef-protected bay. Lang decorated their attractive four-room cottage, inexpensive in the off-season, with large pink hibiscus flowers. At night they gazed at a star-white sky. On bicycles they enjoyed pedaling up and down hills to the nearby village, where they watched ships coming into the harbor, enjoyed the sunsets, and went to the movies. To help pay for the trip Gore wrote a brief, perfunctory travel article about Bermuda, which he hoped Town & Country would take, though the editor soon responded that it is “a bit dry and stereotyped for us.” Lang, who sometimes drank too much, kept away from the bars for the first week. “We stayed at home and read, played cards, made love, and tried to talk to one another, but he thought I was bored, and I knew he didn’t understand what I said to him.” Great gossips, they talked about the few people they both knew. Beyond that there were vast gaps. Tension developed. Insecure even as an entertainer, Lang felt disappointed in himself and in his insufficiently responsive one-person audience. “One night he decided he was going to drink…. After that, every evening, there was a tug-of-war; should we go into town and go to a bar or not. I never wanted to…. And then one day everything went wrong: he decided he didn’t want any more sex for a while; I didn’t satisfy him. He didn’t want to talk about this; he didn’t want to talk about anything, only to repeat the jokes, the chatter of the theater world…. The nights were more terrible for I slept beside him and could not have him. I knew he hated making someone else happy, and I could understand this since I was the same way but not with him…. Finally, one morning, I took him against his will and he was angry and hurt. We fought and I was ready to fly back…. He asked me to get him an analyst when we got back, he felt that he would go to pieces soon. He’d never believed in analysis but now he’d try anything.”