Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  With rivals Gore was both self-asserting and accommodating, even for a brief time with Truman Capote, whom he saw more of in New York during the fall of 1948 than ever before or again. “Truman is everywhere,” Gore wrote to Lehmann, “giddy and mad and not working but rather charming I think (young writers who don’t write always charm me).” He was still friendly toward Capote, though there was no real friendship. Frederick Buechner’s A Long Day’s Dying, about to be published by Knopf “with much fanfare,” reminded him of “the way Truman would write if he had a prose style instead of that peculiar interior decorator’s way he has of constructing a Saks Fifth Avenue window and calling it a novel,” he wrote to Lehmann. The day after Gore’s twenty-third birthday, Vidal and Capote concluded a night on the town by going together to the Everard Baths. “It was strictly voyeur time,” Gore recalled. “Lights were dim. But each of us was sufficiently well known so that we did not particularly want to be recognized.” Truman babbled on about how wonderful Tallulah Bankhead had been that evening in the premiere of a revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives. Wrapped in white towels, they went about their separate activities, probably literally, in the case, looking over one another’s shoulders. As they slunk along the corridor, someone who knew them both, “the greatest gossip in town,” rushed up and shouted, “Ah see you! Ah see you!” Gore occasionally declined to say harsh things about his competitor, perhaps influenced by the companionable atmosphere promoted by “parties and gatherings” at Tennessee’s apartment and by the excitement of the Broadway premiere in October of Summer and Smoke. The barbs between Vidal and Capote were often mediated or amplified by third parties, though Williams had no favorite to play when he wrote to his own and Capote’s good friend, the novelist Donald Windham, “I think you judge Truman a bit too charitably when you call him a child: he is more like a sweetly vicious old lady.”

  Gore had found amusing Capote’s performance at Williams’s apartment one August evening, soon after Truman and Tennessee had returned from Europe on the Queen Mary. Capote lived nearby with Johnny Nicholson, who had just opened his café on Fifty-eighth Street. Tennessee and Gore came back to Tennessee’s flat with an actress, Jane Lawrence Smith, to find Truman and Carson McCullers’s young cousin “in the apartment undergoing questioning by a detective.” Earlier, after waiting for Capote, who was late, Williams had gone off. When Capote had finally turned up, frustrated at not finding Williams at home, he had climbed in through a ground-floor window. Two policemen, seeing him in the act, assumed they were about to catch a burglar. “By the time we arrived,” Gore remembered, “Capote had matters well under control.” The police “were listening bug-eyed to Capote, who was telling them everything about the private lives of Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Chaplin.” Truman, delighted when Walter Winchell reported the incident in his gossip column, had made sure Gore’s name was not included in the report. Gore evened the score twice, the first simply a practical joke, as he told it to Paul Bowles. While working on the score for Summer and Smoke for which he was writing incidental music, and anticipating spring publication of The Sheltering Sky, Bowles was staying in grand comfort at the Sixty-first Street town house of his friend, the torch singer Libby Holman, to whom he and Latouche introduced Gore. With his usual marvelous mimicry, Gore called Williams on the telephone, pretending he was Capote, and induced Tennessee to make “uncomplimentary remarks about Gore’s writing.” When, a few days later, Gore next saw Tennessee, he made “oblique but unmistakable allusions” to comments Tennessee had made to the person he thought Capote. “To Tennessee it seemed quite obvious,” Bowles wrote in his memoir, “that Truman had run to Gore and maliciously repeated the telephone conversation. As a result he was angry with Truman, which had been the object of the ploy.” In November, Life, on the occasion of a New York visit by Edith and Osbert Sitwell, had invited a group of America’s most famous poets to appear in a celebrity photograph to be taken at the Gotham Book Mart, New York’s best-known high-literary bookstore. Its energetic owner, Frances Stelloff, frequently held book parties and hosted literary people. Both Sitwells, Gore wrote to Lehmann, “have taken their social success with the ease and the calm of Plantagenets among colonial gentry.” Surrounding the royal couple were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Horace Gregory, Charles Henri Ford, among others, and Tennessee Williams. While the group was not strictly limited to poets, Williams was poet enough. Gore had managed to get himself included somehow, though even less a poet than Williams. Capote was furious. “You’re not a poet at all!” he said to Gore. “What right do you have to be there?” More to the point, he was furious that he had not been included in the august company.

  At ease with and attractive to members of his mother’s generation, that fall Gore had met three extraordinary people with whom he was to remain friends until their deaths. Eddie Bismarck—handsome, slim, clear-eyed, fair-haired, a grandson of the nineteenth-century German chancellor—came from two families of aristocratic distinction in the Austro-Hungarian and German empires. By 1948 he had for a decade been closely associated with Mona and Harrison Williams. From Kentucky, Mona Strader had risen to the pinnacle of international society through beauty, charm, good taste, and three useful marriages, the last to the wealthy Harrison Williams, twenty-three years her senior. By the early 1930s, New York, London, Palm Beach, and Riviera society celebrated her, as did the prestige fashion magazines, as the best-dressed woman in the world. Her glamorous parties and personal splendor expressed “perhaps the first private life to be shaped and pitched for public consumption.” An attractive homosexual, Eddie Bismarck shared with Mona Williams, starting in the late thirties, a life of good taste and fine society. As companion, secretary, and adviser, he was perfectly acceptable to Harrison Williams. An outspoken anti-Nazi, the only member of his family to oppose the National Socialist regime, Bismarck had lived some golden years between the two world wars, a benign aristocrat supported by his wealthy brother Otto. A world traveler of exquisite taste, Eddie collected antiques and occasionally took on clients whose homes he redecorated. When he fled the Nazis, he found himself penniless. With the domination of Central Europe by Communist regimes, the capitals of his youth were again closed to him. A comfortable life with the Harrison Williamses in New York, Palm Beach, and Capri became his fate.

  Bismarck invited Gore to one of the many grand dinners at the Williamses’ thirty-room Georgian mansion on Fifth Avenue and Ninety-fourth Street, a few blocks from Gene Vidal’s apartment. Though loved for himself alone, on this occasion Gore was loved also for his friendship with Tennessee Williams, now at the height of his fame. Streetcar had been running on Broadway for almost two years, arguably now the most famous American play by the best-known, most widely publicized living playwright, though his most recent play, Summer and Smoke, Gore wrote to Lehmann, had “received, for the most part, hostile and bitter notices.” Through Gore, Eddie invited Tennessee to the dinner. Unconventionally, Mona sat the dramatist on her right, Gore on her left, surrounding her bejeweled elegance with two handsome young writers who, like everyone else, dressed formally for the occasion. Among the thirty or so guests was Eddie’s cousin, Countess Cecilia Sternberg, a witty, unconventional aristocrat who had been brought up in Vienna. At seventeen she had married Count Leopold Sternberg, the heir to estates in Bohemian Czechloslovakia. Having lost everything to the Nazis before the war, he had had his property expropriated a second time, by the Communist government. Without resources, the Sternbergs had recently arrived in New York with their eleven-year-old daughter, Diana, exiles once again, reliant for the time being on their personal attractions, their distinguished names, and their large network of European connections, which included, through Eddie, “Aunt Mona,” as Diana called her.

  Wandering out of one of the maid’s rooms upstairs where she had been put to bed, Diana, on the balcony above the marble staircase, heard voices, laughter, a voice singing Russian songs. In his dressing gown, H
arrison Williams, who had declined to attend the party, joined her. The singer was one of the guests, the actor Yul Brynner. In the salon they all enjoyed his handsome good looks, his striking visage, his deep romantic voice. Prince Serge Obolensky, a New York society celebrity of White Russian origin who was divorced from the wealthy Alice Astor but ran the St. Regis hotel for Alice’s brother Vincent, sat near Mona and chatted with Cecilia, who soon turned to Tennessee. At first she assumed he must be a relative of Harrison Williams. She had never heard of Streetcar. Within a few minutes of conversation she was convinced that he disliked her and had turned away. “You’ll like Gore Vidal much better,” Eddie assured her. “He’s brilliant, but in a way more like us. Suffered as much from family tradition as we did in our youth.” “Is he by any chance the boy who looks like an archaic Apollo?” Introduced to Gore, she thought him “charming and amusing,” his eyes “alive with humor, and so was the smiling mouth.” Gore thought her exotic, beautiful, fearlessly herself, an embodiment of an aristocratic world that had its own rules, its own freedom, liberated from the constraints of middle-class life, distinctly its own thing, possessed of a certain laissez-faire wisdom about life. With Mona, Eddie, and Cecilia, in New York and then in London and Capri, he was to become a good and caring friend. Later, eleven-year-old Diana was to become a close friend.

  He was more likely to be found, though, at the equally festive but less elegant parties of ballet and theater people, at gatherings of editors and writers, with Sarah Moore and Connie Darby, with whom he continued to have good times, at various popular bars that artistic people frequented, and especially at the Astor Bar, which he still visited often. He went regularly to the well-known Blue Angel on Fifty-fifth street off First Avenue, the most popular club for classy entertainment, for high spirits, for adventuresome socialites, rubbing shoulders with those of accomplishment and celebrity. At the Astor he met the Columbia University Shakespeare scholar Andrew Chiappe, also there to pick up trade, accompanied by his good friends Bob Giroux and John Kelly. Kelly introduced Gore to the impressive Chiappe, who knew most of Shakespeare by heart and had “a rather penetrating very beautiful voice, a Shakespearean actor’s voice.” With a sharp critical mind, Chiappe could not only recite but interpret Shakespeare with a brilliance that immediately impressed Gore. “He looked Dickensian,” Jason Epstein, later to be Gore’s editor, recalled, “a set of spheres, a big round head and round body. He walked like a ballet dancer and was very fastidious.” Gore found him striking. It was the start of a friendship. Sam Lurie, the publicist for the Ballet Theatre, whom he already knew, he now got to know better. “Dorothy Parker, when she needed a joke,” Gore recalled, “would go to him. She thought he was the wittiest man in New York.” One day a group that included Sam and Gore were trying to remember where the phrase “always be kind to strangers … for they may be angels in disguise” appears. “We were talking about trade, I suppose. Well, Sam says it’s in the Bible, and somebody said, ‘Yeah, it’s in the Book of Hebrews.’ And this guy goes over to a Bible and riffles the pages and says, ‘There’s no book of Hebrews here.’ And Sam says, ‘That’s the Racquet Club edition.’” At the exclusive Blue Angel a sailor somehow got in. “Sam went over and sat beside him and tried to open a conversation with him. The sailor was surly. Sam rolled off the stool and onto the floor, where he lay on his back like a turtle. As waiters moved in, Sam, from the floor, said to the sailor, very quietly, ‘You don’t seem to realize that I could ruin you socially!’”

  During the autumn of 1948 the ballet world engaged Gore even more than it had in spring 1946, partly because some of its major figures were his friends, from his upstairs neighbor Nora Kaye to Antony Tudor, the choreographer for the Ballet Theatre; to Leon Danielian, a lead dancer first at Ballet Theatre and then at the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo; to his former lover Harold Lang; his occasional companion Johnny Kriza; and the witty Sam Lurie. Like others in that golden period when ballet flourished and three or four companies circulated from one city to another in Europe and America, Gore attended the ballet regularly, sometimes numbers of times a week, occasionally with John Kelly, who was madly in love with Leon Danielian, to whom he had created a small shrine in his bedroom at Cismont. Dressing rooms were open to Gore, ballet-world parties embraced him. Tudor, whose ballets he admired, lived nearby on Fifty-second Street with his companion, Hugh Laing. Though no longer sleeping together, Gore and Harold remained friends, though Gore worried about Harold’s increasingly dangerous sexual escapades, which began to threaten his career. Gore and Johnny Kriza had become good friends. “Gore liked Johnny,” Sam Lurie, one of Kriza’s close friends, recalled, “but I don’t think he was passionate about him the way he was for a while about Harold.” A character dancer with a flair for acting, the short, dark-haired, craggily handsome Kriza, son of working-class Czech immigrants from Chicago, had been the protégé and lover of Ballet Theatre dancer Anton Dolin, who in 1941 had danced the first Bluebeard with Alicia Markova, Antony Tudor, and Nora Kaye. With Lang and Robbins, Kriza became famous as one of the three sailors in Fancy Free and performed brilliantly in Billy the Kid, a role with which Gore strongly identified. “Copland’s music certainly flowed through that strong body, particularly the percussion.” In that role Kriza may have seemed to Gore an alter ego. “He was absolutely fun to be with,” Lurie remarked, “terribly bright, humorous…. He and Gore may have had sex, and I would say if it was important to Gore they would have…. Promiscuity was Johnny’s middle name…. Johnny was very attractive as a personality. Not beautiful as some people are, but he was an extremely personable, attractive, bright, humorous companion, a beautiful body…. Great charisma…. By today’s standard he certainly was not a great dancer. And his success as a star should be attributed to the war, because many of the best dancers were in the service and he was not. I think because of the homosexual thing…. Because the company toured a great deal, he had friends all over the country. No matter what city you went to, if you mentioned John Kriza among the ballet crowd, they not only knew him but they adored him. Even the people who didn’t think that he danced that well. He was so likable and endearing.”

  So too was John Latouche, known to everyone as “Touche.” By fall 1948 he was becoming one of Gore’s regular companions, partly because of his wickedly funny, widely talented irrepressibility, also because in the postwar decade he had become a pervasive presence in New York artistic circles. Latouche immediately liked Gore. They made plans to collaborate. Why not write a play together, a comedy or a drama, particularly a screenplay, where there was money to be made quickly? Everyone knew and many loved Latouche, if not for himself alone, then for his talent and his high-spirited zaniness. Immensely but idiosyncratically social, he was everyplace, at artistic-social dinners, at the ballet and theater, in Virgil Thomson’s high-art musical circle, at Leo Lerman’s and Peggy Guggenheim’s salons, in the nightclub world of the Blue Angel and Libby Holman, with New York society and artistic celebrities like Joe O’Donohue and the novelist-photographer Carl Van Vechten, with Greenwich Village friends like the novelist Dawn Powell. Sleeplessly, from dusk to dawn, at openings, parties, dinners, bars, clubs, he was part of a New York nightlife that dressed for dinner, partied in tuxedos in Harlem, embraced high musical culture and the latest jazz, and for a while seemed to have revivified its own version of the high-kicking spirit of the 1920s. That Latouche was usually broke made no difference. Constantly abuzz with schemes for musical comedies and dramas, enamored of the Broadway musical theater, he had had a number of fame-creating successes as a lyricist, from Flair Flair the Idol of Paree as an undergraduate at Columbia to the patriotic cantata Ballad for Americans, which Paul Robeson made famous in 1939, to the Broadway musical drama Cabin in the Sky. If as an artist he was, as the composer Ned Rorem remarked, “a sort of preface to Sondheim,” someone who “mingled with the upper crust but catered to the middlebrow,” he was a preface with a distinctively unforgettable personality, “the most irresistibly quick man in
the world,” witty, funny, perceptive, generous.

  A heavy drinker and, by the late 1940s, regularly dependent on a pharmacopoeia of pills and injections in the Max Jacobson age, Latouche had been born in 1919 in Richmond, Virginia, to a fractured family with an absent father and a strong mother, to whom he remained devoted. He had won a scholarship to Columbia, embraced a New Masses—Communist phase, discovered poetry, musical lyrics, and sex with men, married in 1940 and quickly divorced the daughter of a former United States ambassador to Spain, spent fourteen months in the Congo ostensibly to make a documentary film but producing a book instead, served in the Navy in the Pacific, and ultimately returned to New York to pursue art, good company, infinite fun, and high fame. He knew how to amuse himself and other people, though not everyone was amused. He “thought he was a Communist,” Joe O’Donohue recalled. “He’d go to dinner parties in a black shirt rather than in evening dress. He was attractive to hosts at these fancy parties as an oddity. He was a short man, tending to pudginess. Not good-looking at all. He’d try to dominate conversation.” To Johnny Nicholson, an admirer, “he looked like a frog. A great friend of his was named Spivey. She was an entertainer. She worked in Tony’s East Side. She opened her own club called Spivey’s Roof. She was just called Madame Spivey. If you met her, you would know you had met somebody. She and John Latouche were very good friends. He wrote songs for her. One night after the club we all went up to Harlem to have spareribs. It was about four or five o’clock in the morning, and he was talking about his hometown and how the dogs used to bark in the morning. Before you knew it, he was on his hands and knees like a dog, howling, showing us. It was enchanting.” Like most everyone else, Gore was enchanted.