by Fred Kaplan
There was little sweetness to Vidal’s encounter in 1953 with Jack Kerouac. At the San Remo, a Greenwich Village coffeehouse, on a stiflingly hot night late that August, Kerouac hailed him, somewhat high, probably a combination of alcohol and sexual anxiety, and introduced him to William Burroughs, who was eager to meet and talk to Vidal. Gore had met Kerouac some years before at the Metropolitan Opera House, at a ballet performance starring Leon Danielian. Gore had gone with Nina and John Kelly, who was still in love with Danielian. In the club circle they met Kelly’s good friend, the publisher Robert Giroux, whose guest was a handsome, dark-haired young writer, three years older than Gore. According to Gore, Kelly had had sex with Kerouac, who half concealed behind a frenetically macho manner a nervous, uneasy attraction to men as well as to women. Gore thought him handsome, sexy. Often volubly confused and energetically self-hating, Kerouac had since that first meeting established close friendships with Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and the older William Burroughs. Though he had just written On the Road, he was still mostly unknown, the Beats not to coalesce into prominence as a movement until 1956 and the book not published until 1957. A fiercely competitive writer, Kerouac had read The Judgment of Paris with resentment, even contempt, an expression of the confused envy, oscillating between hero-worship and hostility, that he felt for Vidal’s celebrity. He and Burroughs liked nothing about Judgment except its “satirical queer scenes” and the book-jacket photograph of its attractive author. With his own self-defining barbaric yawp, Kerouac detested the fascination with stylistic elegance and classical balances Vidal had begun to reveal in Judgment. Such novels seemed to Kerouac “sophomoric imitations of Henry James,” an archenemy whom he felt needed to be erased as an influence on American literature. Novels like The Ambassadors he felt utterly worthless.
But the full range of their differences was not part of the encounter that evening at the San Remo, where Kerouac had “recognized him from the night I’d met him at the Met ballet when in New York in a tux I’d cut out with tuxed editor to see glitter nightworld New York of letters and wit.” Gore had no idea of the ambivalence or depth of Kerouac’s feelings toward him; his own antipathy to the Beats and his fear of the significance of their success were in the future. When they left the San Remo together to go barhopping, Burroughs soon became uncomfortable with, if not embarrassed by, Kerouac’s behavior. Fawning and assertive, sincere and mocking, the drunk Kerouac kissed Gore’s hand and said flattering things, which he later dramatized in his censored, parodic account of the evening in The Subterraneans. At that time neither Burroughs nor Vidal was aware they had both been students at Los Alamos Experimental Ranch School, that they had in common, among other things, A. J. Connell. Despite his manic years, his drug habit, his rebelliousness, his autobiographical first novel, Junkie, which had just been published, Burroughs dressed and acted publicly in a way that his St. Louis-Burroughs Adding Machine family would have found perfectly respectable. When Kerouac swung from a few lampposts, Burroughs said good night to both of them. Kerouac proposed to Vidal that they get “a room around here.” They went to the familiar Chelsea Hotel on Twenty-third Street, signing their names in the register. Gore told the clerk that “this register would become famous.” In Vidal’s account they first showered together, then went to bed. A red neon light flickered with a rosy glow through the shadeless window. Kerouac blew him. Then they rubbed bellies for a while. Then Vidal flipped him over and attacked him from behind. Years later he still remembered that he “stared at me for a moment … forehead half covered with sweaty dark curls—then he sighed as his head dropped back on the pillow…. The rosy neon from the window gave the room a mildly infernal glow.” In the gray morning, with hangovers, without much conversation, they prepared to leave. Kerouac, who had no money, needed subway fare. Vidal gave him a bill and said, “Now you owe me a dollar.” In Vidal’s account Kerouac was impotent. He slept on the bathroom floor, not in the bed. In his own account in The Subterraneans Kerouac left out the sexual details entirely so as not to offend his mother, Allen Ginsberg, whom Gore liked, later told Vidal. Apparently Kerouac boasted to friends later that day, “I blew Gore Vidal!”
How to make an adequate living in a depressed book market still perplexed Gore. He was neither Mickey Spillane nor Erskine Caldwell. Serious novelists were not doing well in general. One day on Fifth Avenue he ran into William Faulkner, to whom he had previously been introduced. Uncharacteristically chatty, Faulkner advised against Hollywood, his own gold-plated but still-sustaining egg. Faulkner’s novels had earned next to nothing in hardcover. Only now were Weybright’s paperback reprints, with their sensationalized covers, bringing in any money. For Gore there were the Edgewater bills. The cost of a car. Ordinary living expenses. To Howard, who had moved out of his shared Seventy-second Street apartment to a modest Lexington Avenue walk-up between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth streets, Gore now paid $20 a week as his secretary/assistant, soon raised to $40. When Gore was in Manhattan, he often stayed with Howard rather than at a hotel or his father’s apartment. Strenuous efforts to write pulp fiction for money were not sufficiently successful. In November 1949 he had accepted a fee of $2,500 to revise a badly written adventure novel set in Turkey, with the understanding that his name would not be associated with the published book. The revision may have destroyed its pulp-fiction credibility. No publisher would take it. In June 1953 he had published Thieves Fall Out under the name Cameron Kay—a Kay cousin’s Christian name and his grandmother’s maiden surname—a Gold Medal mass-market original for which he earned a little over $3,000. At a retail price of twenty-five cents a copy, not even the sale of about 300,000 copies could produce much income for the author. Not quite as revealing as A Star’s Progress, it nevertheless had many effective Vidalian touches, the setting drawn from his Egyptian experiences in 1948, a combination of hard-boiled suspense, a strong love story, and a political/social drama that pits the individual against a corrupt society. “You sneak!” the Gold Medal editor wrote to him. “Why didn’t you tell me you were that world-famous crescendo-making writer, Gore Vidal, instead of pussyfooting around with a cardboard alias?” In November 1953 he had signed a contract with Avon Publications for a mass-market novel called The Pursuit of Vice, for which he received a $1,000 advance. Later, when it was clear that he no longer had an interest in writing it, he reluctantly returned the money. The short stories published in New World Writing earned only a few hundred dollars. In January 1954 he delivered the second Box manuscript, in June the third, Death Before Bed-time. The money was already spent, partly in the twelve $450 monthly payments from the December 1952 agreement with Dutton, then in an emergency $1,500 advance in August 1953, and another $1,750 advance in December. Future earnings would probably at best pay off the advances. There was no more to be gotten from Dutton for the time being. When with sickening apprehension he saw realized his fear that Judgment and now Messiah, dedicated to Tennessee Williams, the first inklings of which had come to him in Egypt and which he published in early 1954, would at best earn back a little more than their advances, he pushed harder to engage with the only other two sources of writing income, television and movies.
Actually, he had been trying the movies since 1946. Nothing had worked out, neither an adaptation of one of his novels for the screen nor a studio contract for his writing services. He had not given up. Through Tennessee he had gotten access to the best-known theatrical and movie agent of the time, Audrey Wood, who handled Tennessee’s plays. That had started in 1948 when Henry Volkening, a New York literary agent who represented him for a short time, sent Wood The Different Journey, the play Gore had written in Egypt and, with Tennessee’s help, revised in Paris. Volkening accurately anticipated Wood’s response. They both thought the play awkward, amateurish, and censorable. Because of its homosexual theme, Volkening felt certain a producer would at least have to ”worry about the New York police.” Wood thought he needed “a good technician to work” with him. “Ideally you need that ugly w
ord a ‘dramatist collaborator.’” At the beginning of 1950 Gore had tried Wood again, though this time with an offer of his own writerly services. “I think,” she had responded, “that rightly agented you could become a successful Hollywood writer and that this might well balance your budget in times of a depressed book market generally.” It was a boulevard he had been trying to walk up since 1946, through Felix Ferry and other Hollywood studio people at Famous Artists, at Columbia Pictures, and in 1952 at Paramount. The Goldwyn office responded encouragingly to Wood’s overtures. “Mrs. Goldwyn thought you were ‘a very erudite young man’” and a possibility for the future. Nothing came of it. In November 1950 he had contracted with his semi-relative, the actress Ella Raines, to write a screen treatment, “a ski story,” which would have a starring role for her. It fizzled out. When Latouche and Vidal teamed up to write screenplays, Wood had wished them a “happy honeymoon.” In July 1950, in response to three ideas for screen treatments they had devised, she had admitted “I’m very fond of each of you but having read the three ideas for screen-originals you recently submitted to me, I don’t think either of you are taking the picture business too seriously these days…. Each of these three ideas seems very trivial, seems very forced, seems very phony to me…. Do either of you two ever go to see a motion picture?” The next year they got no place with their screenplay, Love Is a Horse Named Gladys. They had also tried to write a Broadway musical together. “I am trying to buy a house and write a musical comedy with La Touche, all at once,” he had written in June 1950 to Robert Halsband, a young eighteenth-century scholar and book reviewer for The Saturday Review. Wood kept trying, without success, to sell screen rights to his novels, particularly Death in the Fifth Position. Her sources told her that “it is very difficult to sell a mystery melodrama, a light comedy, or an average triangle drama, primarily because the TV channels are so full of this kind of thing…. I don’t think I am going to be able to help you on this” or anything else, she confessed. Wood’s assistant in charge of radio and television tried, at Gore’s request, to get him some television jobs. Nothing happened. “As you know,” she told him, “the competition is very keen these days.” Since he and the Liebling-Wood Agency were not getting anyplace, they parted company.
Whatever he had tried, no one particularly wanted his services. At best he had been able to scrape up a few television-writing assignments in 1951 and 1952. His Maugham adaptations had been an unsuccessful first effort. A quick learner, he had realized he needed to master the basic techniques of writing for television if he were going to have any chance of success. He hoped he could learn by practice and get paid at the same time. Luckily, in 1953 Ella Raines was starring in Janet Dean, Registered Nurse, “an eternal series. Mrs. Eric Ambler was in charge of this program,” Gore recalled. “She’s English and had been the right hand of Alfred Hitchcock. It was Ella who said, Why don’t you do one of these? So I worked with Joan,” who was “the producer of my first TV play, ‘The Jinx Nurse.’” The work was almost anonymous, but he could present it as a credential on his oral résumé, proof that he knew how to do this kind of thing successfully. Since he needed an agent who could influence network producers to hire him, he had gone to the top, to Jules Stein, the head of MCA and the husband of his mother’s best friend. Stein had been warmly avuncular over the years and, aware of his novels, thought him very talented. Ready to help, he sent Gore to John Forman and Tom Moser, two television agents at MCA in New York. For whatever their reasons, they declined to take him on. Stein “didn’t think when he sent me to them that they wouldn’t handle me, since he was the head of the firm. But that’s the way big hierarchies work. If your connection’s too high up, it’s useless. You can only deal with somebody who’s closer to where the work is. They thought he was so imperial and far away that he wouldn’t know or notice.”
Unwilling to give up, he went, late in 1953, to the head of drama in the television department at the William Morris Agency, MCA’s prime competitor. Harold Franklin, a balding, graying, handsome man in his late forties, bespectacled and dressed immaculately, immediately decided that he might be able to help and that he probably liked this young, attractive, articulate novelist. True, Vidal’s only experience was the unproduced Maugham adaptations and ‘The Jinx Nurse’ show. But Franklin, a shrewd and thoughtful man, an avid reader with a conservative, almost scholarly air, had both presence and intelligence. “He was vibrant,” a younger colleague recalled. “When he walked into a room, you knew he was there. He was not an insecure agent who had to be on all the time. He seemed to have strength.” Talent, Franklin thought, was more important than experience, especially in a young industry. He said to Gore, “‘just think of something, a one-paragraph idea.’ I thought of Dark Possession.” Franklin sent him to see Florence Britton, the story editor for CBS’s Studio One, sponsored by Westinghouse, one of the premier weekly one-hour television drama anthologies. At lunch together, eager for scripts, she commissioned him to write it. The fee would be $750. A few days later he had it done. “The year is 1904,” Dark Possession began, a story of schizophrenia or dual personality in which a woman, split into two people one of whom has murdered her husband, writes incriminating notes against herself. When, at the climax, her doctor tells her she has written the notes herself and that she is the murderer, she kills herself. Soon slotted into the insatiable weekly production schedule, revisions and rehearsals occurred quickly and mercilessly. Like all Studio One dramas, the script had to be exactly sixty minutes minus two commercial breaks. On February 15, 1954, Dark Possession, “written especially for Studio One by Gore Vidal,” starring Geraldine Fitzgerald, with Barbara O’Neill and Leslie Nielsen, produced by Felix Jackson and directed by Franklin Schaffner, had its premiere. The broadcast went coast to coast. Suddenly twenty-eight-year-old Gore Vidal had a much larger audience than he had cumulatively for all the novels he had published.
Chapter Eleven
Intolerable Absences
1955-1957
In may 1955, soon after the telecast of Visit to a Small Planet, flying overnight on the red-eye from New York to Los Angeles, Gore Vidal was a nationally known television dramatist. It had all happened in little more than a year. That he had published seven novels was fine and good, and there were many who waited for his next. But television success had begun to provide him with something that writing fiction had not, the glow of celebrity and the security of a good income. If he were a success in television, movies could not be far behind. One or the other or both would, he now had no doubt, provide him with the money to support Edgewater and himself. At least he would still earn his living as a writer, even if these collaborative media demanded craftsmanship more than art. As an art form, he still embraced the novel, and he felt certain that neither the networks nor the film studios would in the long run interfere with his commitment to writing fiction. It was clear to him that in his case at least he could separate the part of his brain devoted to craftsmanlike scripts and the part that created serious literature; he felt in no danger of cross-contamination. Good at compartmentalizing, it seemed to him better to earn his living, since it had come to this, writing for television or movies than working in advertising or teaching. At a minimum it was more interesting; the people more various, accomplished, and attractive; the stakes higher; the money better; the visibility greater.
Between his inaugural appearance with the production of Dark Possession in February 1954 and his departure for Los Angeles he had established a reputation and career in an industry that had already transformed American culture. With the end of the war, commercial television became a reality. By 1950 it had become a pervasive cultural presence. By 1953, 80 percent of American homes had television sets. Two national networks, CBS and NBC, with their affiliates, controlled the airwaves, distantly followed by ABC. In each major city there were numbers of unaffiliated local channels. Expansions, mergers, buyouts, new licenses, technical innovations—suddenly a highly profitable television marketplace existed. Po
wer was being grasped and consolidated, fortunes made. Remunerative protocols between American business and the networks were being worked out. Business discovered that it had a powerful new tool for selling products. Together the networks and business decided that that was what television would be about. Since government, a willing collaborator, determined who could legitimately cash in on the fortunes to be made, many legislators became shareholders in new stations. Advertising agencies became powerful players, intermediaries between advertisers and the networks. Talent agencies representing writers, actors, directors, and producers saw a profitable opportunity to package programs. At first there had been only nighttime television. Now, with daytime and late-night, a huge amount of salable airtime needed to be filled.