Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  At the beginning of March 1956 The Catered Affair opened nationwide to great praise, particularly for Vidal’s script, which the reviewers greeted as an original screen version, not a narrow adaptation of a teleplay. Even the somewhat carping, generally annoyed Chayevsky thought Vidal’s approach desirable. “I think you were very right in making The Catered Affair into your own script instead of trying to mimic my approach. I am sure it will be a much better picture that way.” Later there was to be some genuine warmth between them. Now it was muted respect, and anger on Chayevsky’s part, especially at the change of name to The Wedding Breakfast for the British version. “Everywhere Chayevsky went, they only knew Wedding Breakfast. Nobody mentioned The Catered Affair. It was Wedding Breakfast with Bette Davis. And he kept trying to explain that, well, it wasn’t his, it was mine. You can’t get very far with that with the press, which never gets anything right. There was a lot of resentment. Then we became friends eventually.” From Hollywood, Newman kept him up to date about his effort to persuade Warner Brothers to make a full-length film from Gore’s Billy the Kid teleplay. Gore would expand it into a movie script. Newman would star. The same team, Robert Mulligan and Fred Coe, who had done it for Philco would direct and produce. Newman was doing his best, with the help of MCA and William Morris, their respective agents, to make it happen. Fortunately, they were making progress, he told Gore, and the only thing holding them up was Jack Warner attending Grace Kelly’s wedding.

  As Gore worked on the Dreyfus script, his salary from MGM continued. Since he could now afford it, he and Howard decided to give up Howard’s small Lexington Avenue walk-up and get a larger apartment. In the fall Howard, with Nina’s assistance, found a one-bedroom fifth-floor apartment they liked in an attractive prewar building at the corner of Fifty-fifth Street and First Avenue. They already knew 360 East Fifty-fifth Street through friends. Miles White had the apartment down the hall. In November 1956 Gore signed a two-year lease at a rent of $175.70 a month and, though he lived more at Edgewater than on East Fifty-fifth Street, it became his New York City residence, where he and Howard (who stayed there during the week) entertained and lived when not in the country. Nina and Howard decorated the apartment. Gore paid for the furnishings. It was at Edgewater, though, that he felt most at home and worked best. In January, Zimbalist, who soon went to London to produce a remake of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, reported that everyone concerned at MGM, including Dore Schary, liked the Dreyfus script. “They definitely want to go ahead with the picture.” In March, Vidal proposed to Manulis that he do for CBS’s Playhouse 90 a project he had “been saving for many years … the story of my grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore,” focusing on the Senator’s early life. The script would end with his election to the United States Senate, “the excitement of an underdog victory, his father and mother with him from Mississippi, astonished and delighted at their son’s success when they had always, secretly, feared he would end his days in a home for the blind.” Manulis loved the idea. “GO AHEAD WITH GRAND-DADDY,” he telegraphed Vidal in London, where he had gone after a brief visit in Los Angeles to join Zimbalist to consult with him about the Dreyfus script and prepare it for filming.

  His six weeks in London were mostly a delight. Claridge’s, which he could not have afforded had MGM not been paying his expenses, was elegantly posh. Judy Montagu was around. Edith Sitwell invited him to her club, where her comic eccentricities amused everyone. He met his Heinneman editor, Dwye Evans, whom he asked to send copies of the British editions of Messiah and Death Likes It Hot to Mona Williams, now the Contessa Bismarck, living mostly at her villa on Capri. After Harrison’s death it had seemed an intelligent convenience for Eddie and Mona to marry. At dinner at the 120 Mount Street apartment of Mike Canfield, the son of the eminent Harper & Row editor Cass Canfield, on leave from publishing to work as the American ambassador’s social secretary, and his wife—Jackie Kennedy’s sister Lee who had married Canfield in 1953—Gore met a vivacious, outspoken American actress and writer, Elaine Dundy, and her British husband, the well-known drama critic Kenneth Tynan. His own date was the actress Ella Raines, his quasi-relative, who was in London to do a play. Elaine and Ken, who lived immediately above the Canfields, had been invited down for drinks. Elaine was at work on a novel; Ken, the drama critic for The Observer, had recently become script director for Ealing Studios, newly purchased by MGM. Soon Gore and the Tynans were on a first-name basis. They had friends in common, and Elaine recalled that he had been pointed out to her in New York at the opening of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “The next day we talked on the phone. Gore said, ‘What are you doing? I just had a good bowel movement, and now I’m just lying here looking at the ceiling. What are you doing?’ ‘I’m reading the Sundays. What does the ceiling look like?’ ‘Tidy.’” It was the start of a friendship.

  One day he went to Southwark Cathedral with another new friend whom he had met briefly before in New York, the British journalist and left-wing Labour Member of Parliament, Tom Driberg, twenty years older than Gore. Driberg, who had already had a controversial career advocating the legalization of drugs and homosexuality, was a flamboyantly expressive gay man in the London social-political world. Both great talkers, they delighted in endless banter and gossip about politics, people, art, sex. Driberg, a member of the Labour National Executive Committee who under the pseudonym William Hickey had for fifteen years written a column in the form of a diary for the Daily Express, knew everyone of consequence in British public life. Soon after sailing to New York in May, Gore, at Edgewater, read a volume of Driberg’s columns. “I very much enjoyed your diary which I read on the return trip: I liked the war reporting and the king’s funeral and I think you come through in those casual pages much better than you think … that does sound patronizing but it’s not; none of us really has much admiration for himself and I think your remarkable duality which we discussed at the entrance to Southwark cathedral has put one part of yourself in flight from the other.” American politics were on Driberg’s and Vidal’s minds as an election year approached its early summer. Eisenhower would be running again. Adlai Stevenson would again oppose him. “The political world here is looking up as the firm hand at the tiller seems to be faltering even in the eyes of Republican newspapers,” Gore wrote to Driberg, “though they will doubtless run the great warrior dead or alive; Stevenson’s chances are bright and if I can possibly find the time I will work on the campaign.” He did not have the time and would not find it. He was still on assignment with I Accuse, “though the movie business is staggering again and I am told there is panic in Culver City: what fun to have worked in the movies just at the end … what a Byzantine time this is! The novel declining, the movies, at least phase one, stopping, and homosexuality, once our nation’s pride and source of strength (oh, pioneers!), become unfashionable … well, let it come down.”

  Live television had not only come down but was coming to an end. Having agreed to do for Fred Coe, the producer of NBC’s Playwrights ’56, a new television play he thought might well be his last, during May 1956 Gore wrote Honor, a drama about a wealthy Southerner who faces a vital decision during the Civil War: whether to allow Yankee troops to occupy his mansion or destroy it by fire. Gore asked for and got what he believed the largest sum ever paid for an original television drama, $5,050. With Coe he had “amiable relations.” Directed by Victor Donohue, with a cast led by Ralph Bellamy and Leo G. Carroll, Honor was telecast in mid-June, a powerful antiwar play that was as sophisticated and as emotionally compelling as anything yet produced on television. Some of its force came from the author’s personal world, from the death of Jimmie Trimble, from the North-South conflict and the importance of the Civil War in Gore family history, and especially from his preoccupation with the clash between social pressure and individual self-determination. With the television play about his grandfather on hold, he thought this might be his last appearance on the small screen for some time. That suited him well. The pay from MGM was sub
stantial, and he hoped he might soon start preparing to write Washington, D.C. or turn to his long-standing desire to do a novel based on the life of the Roman Emperor Julian.

  At Edgewater a full, delightful summer was ahead of him. With his new affluence, despite the heavy taxes, he and Howard had done enough fixing up so that the house looked lovely, though still sparsely furnished. “Wooden chairs. The kitchen had a table, and there was little or nothing in the dining room,” Paul Newman recalled. “There was some soft stuff, but it was sparse. I liked going up there. It was a good way to get out of the city. Stayed overnight, long weekends.” The roses were in bloom. Gore expected Paul and Joanne together and separately, especially Joanne, who had committed herself to doing The Two Mrs. Carrolls in July at the nearby Hyde Park Playhouse. Later in the summer, once rehearsals began, Joanne moved to Edgewater. Gore looked forward to a visit from his grandmother and soon had a brief visit from Sarah Moore, whose father was collaborating with Latouche on The Ballad of Baby Doe, to be premiered that summer in Central City, Colorado. Latouche, now at work on the lyrics for the Leonard Bernstein–Lillian Hellman musical, Candide, was his usual manic self, unstoppably talkative, always amusing, with a thousand ideas. There was soon good news that cheered both Gore and Alice Astor. The premiere of The Ballad of Baby Doe had gotten rave reviews. Alice and Latouche, though, had ceased to be lovers. She had taken up with a professional parapsychic researcher—partly scientific, mostly far-fetched—whose institute she handsomely supported, a relationship that her friends worried about. To Gore she seemed much the same, always happy to see him in New York, warmly welcoming at Rhinebeck, where he and Howard went regularly for lunch or dinner.

  Dot soon came for one of her annual visits. When, at the same time, Joanne’s mother visited New York, Gore invited her to join them at Edgewater. In preparation for the visit, he and Joanne agreed to suggest to the ladies that they were going to get married. “Somehow we decided that it would be a wonderful idea if my mother and Gore’s grandmother thought we were engaged. It would make them very happy. I don’t think I got to the point of telling my mother that we actually were. I kind of intimated. I don’t know whether or not Gore told Mrs. Gore that we were engaged. I remember we had a delightful weekend. And the ladies really did like each other, being two Southern ladies.” Actually, at a restaurant in New York they had a more serious discussion about marriage. For Gore the question had arisen before, most seriously with Rosalind. Occasionally rumors circulated that Gore, charming and flirtatious with women he was attracted to, was going to marry, usually, so the speculation went, to provide marital cover for a political career. Sometimes he himself raised the possibility, usually ironically or humorously, sometimes with a touch of sincerity. For Joanne, in despair at what seemed Paul’s disheartening slowness in divorcing his wife, the thought was not implausible. “Why not marry Gore?” Then “we decided that there was no way we could ever go to bed together because we would laugh. So that was not possible. I was thinking, ‘Oh, God, if I’m never going to marry Paul, I might as well marry Gore.’ And I remember saying, ‘What would we do about Howard?’ That’s when we decided that the answer to life was for Gore to run for President. He would win the election, and we would overrun the government and create a constitutional monarchy. I would go to the White House and be the First Lady. And once again we said, but what about Howard? I think if we had gotten to that point and Gore had said, ‘Let’s get married,’ I might very well have done so. Because I was very fond of him. Many people have had that sort of marriage. I can’t imagine how long it would have lasted. I would have driven Gore crazy, or he would have driven me crazy.” Gore, in this case or in any other after Rosalind, never made the fatal proposal.

  But it was a “hilarious couple of weeks,” Joanne remembered. It seemed to her that Gore had a wonderful life at Edgewater, with work, friends, visits, family. Dot’s presence was a beneficent one, the old lady plainly dressed, mostly in dark clothes, with her sharp tongue, her Southern accent, her wry sense of humor, her obvious delight in her grandson. “It was sort of a mutual admiration society,” Joe O’Donohue recalled. O’Donohue thought her delightful and enjoyed her stories about the Gores’ early days in Oklahoma. Gene and Kit, who had moved to Montevideo—the estate in Avon, Connecticut, Kit had inherited from her father—stopped by a few times. Dot and Gene chatted amiably on the front porch, old friends with much shared family history behind them, particularly a daughter and a wife. Pick and Sally, driving to West Point with their daughter and her friend, visited on a Sunday afternoon. They were introduced to Joanne and her mother. Gore, indicating Joanne, told them that Mrs. Gore had said, “‘That’s a nice girl. Why don’t you marry her?’” By mid-July the summer guests were gone, the house quiet. Gore, as always, was at work in the octagonal study, reading, answering correspondence, polishing Visit, thinking about strategies for Julian and Washington, D.C. One evening, soon after her birthday, he had dinner with Alice at Rhinebeck, the two of them alone, formally dressed and handsomely splendid.

  Two mornings later, sleeping late, Gore and Howard were awakened by Alice’s butler Stanley shouting up to them. In the warm air Stanley’s voice rose with horrible news. Alice had been found dead that morning in her town house in New York. The shock was chilling. It seemed unbelievable that fifty-four-year-old Alice Astor, so quietly alive at dinner at Rhinebeck a few nights before, could suddenly be gone forever. “She couldn’t stand the heat, Gore commented, “and she was worn out and had to pack to go to Lake Placid to be lady-in-waiting to Lady Ribblesdale, her mother, and she was grim at the thought of packing in all that. She was found dead in the bathroom. She had fainted and hit her skull on the toilet bowl. The medical examiner certified she had died of a heart attack.” Latouche soon called from Central City, Colorado, which he was about to leave. Having heard the devastating news, he suggested they arrange a special memorial service. He would call again from his summer cottage in Vermont. The call never came. Horton Foote, the well-known television dramatist and Latouche’s friend, telephoned early in the second week of August. The news was grim, the timing uncanny. On August 7, soon after his arrival in Vermont, Latouche had suffered a massive heart attack and died almost instantly. Rumors quickly circulated that each had been murdered. Then that Alice had committed suicide. “Some thugs appeared at my Uncle Vincent’s apartment,” Romana recalled, “saying that they would get it to the press that my mother committed suicide if Vincent didn’t pay them off. He refused and had the butler throw them out of the apartment.” Coroners’ reports apparently produced nothing suspicious. Latouche’s fatal occlusion may have been facilitated by his usual brandy and drugs. Fainting in the heat, perhaps medicated, Alice’s fall split her skull. She may have had an exacerbating angry argument with someone earlier that evening. There was suspicion of foul play, apparently unfounded, and a police investigation. Some hint of mystery remained in both instances.

  Latouche’s death stunned his friends. “He never could sleep,” the novelist Dawn Powell wrote, “lights on all night—so there were sleeping pills and for the grim collaborators demanding the real work, he must have Benzedrine, Miltown tranquilizers, Nembutal, dex. I’m sure this was a desperate, hysterical escape from Lillian Hellman and others waiting for his output to finish up Candide. Like George Gershwin—a natural gusher that grim syndicates tried to harness for the stock exchange. Ending up now an incorrigibly sweet, indestructible little ghost.” For Gore, Latouche’s death was a wrenching loss. Alice’s, though, stunned him, then destabilized him, sent him into a heart-protecting numbness whose inverse, a few weeks later, was a sudden, dangerous rise in his blood pressure. His doctor preferred not to tell him how frighteningly high it was. His four grandparents had all had high blood pressure, his father had suffered a life-altering heart attack at a relatively early age. He was soon on Sepersil to keep his pressure down. He felt and looked distraught. “It was the first time that someone I was close to had died.” When Alice’s body was brough
t up to Rhinebeck for burial, Joanne came from New York to be with him during the funeral. “I remember walking away from the grave site with Gore and looking over at him, and there were tears running down his cheek. I couldn’t say anything, so I took his arm. It must have been terrible, terrible for him.” Within a short time there was another unexpected death. The New York Central demanded a blood price. Tinker, their exuberant black cocker spaniel who had become a happy member of the small Edgewater family, a daily presence for over five years, made a fatal error. A train slashed him badly, cutting him almost in two. There would be no more Goreish-Tinker babytalk. He and Howard were again devastated. After some weeks he began to get a grip on his pain. “I have lost, in order,” he wrote to Edith Sitwell, “my publisher of ten years, Alice, Latouche and, introducing the maudlin Anglo-Saxon note, my dog was killed last week … all of which darkened the sun to say the least. Alice was worst of all and I know you must have felt it, too. Most friends when they die don’t, I think, if one is entirely honest, too much upset one by their departure … after all, we shall follow too, but there are rare ones like Alice who are simply missed, whose presence was wanted, whose absence is intolerable.”

  However deep his sadness, he soon began to absorb it, to disguise it. If he could avoid going to a funeral, he always would, as he had his grandfather’s. When friends died, he preferred to write his consolation letters from a distance. The measure of the impact of Alice’s death was how little he resisted standing by her grave site. His tears for her were spontaneous, incalculable. But what he feared most he usually found ways to avoid. There was something irrepressible about his own evasive energy, the purposeful denial, the unwillingness to position himself close enough to death’s work to concede his own vulnerability except as mordant humor, sharp wit. Since the Sepersil created a chemical depression and made it difficult to work, he stopped taking it. His blood pressure soon returned to normal. What he enjoyed and embraced most was personal energy, his capacity for cathartic work, his commitment to work for his own and the world’s sake. In the face of obstacles, even deep grief, he would assert his desire, discipline his concentration, even the more intensely. To him that meant life, his own especially, the experience of his strong will to support the highest assertion of the value he placed on being alive. Each day at Edgewater reminded him of Alice. He would need to live with that. But it did not make the house any less dear to him, any less the place where he did what made him feel most alive. Perhaps indeed Alice’s death entwined Edgewater even more deeply into his dreams. Comparatively immune to depression, he felt a sadness that did not sap his energy. His ability to work continued and sustained him through loss.