Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  By late summer he was back at his desk, revising The Judgment of Paris for a new paperback edition. Hopeful about the Billy the Kid project, he worked on the script. Axelrod had at last raised enough money to schedule Visit for early 1957, part coming from an inebriated Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst’s mistress—whom a mutual friend, the screenwriter Charlie Lederer, had induced to sign a check for $10,000—and some coming from his Broadway friends, including Martin Gabel, the producer and actor, and his actress wife, Arlene Francis. Next year, whether the play succeeded or not, Gore hoped would mark his “uninvited return to the novel.” Two new dogs, also cocker spaniels, named Billy (the Kid) and Blanche (Du-Bois), gifts from Joanne and Paul, began to become dear to him. Late in the fall Howard, with Joanne and Paul, had seen a “pups for sale” sign at a nearby farm. “When Gore saw them,” Howard remembered, “he looked at them and turned around and walked away, and then he fell completely in love with them.”

  In New York he took his skinny, dark-eyed semi-relative, who in 1953 had married Senator John Kennedy, to a television studio, where he noticed Nick Dunne, an assistant director. The program in rehearsal probably was Robert Montgomery Presents. “The show started each week,” Dunne recalled, “with me standing in the middle of Studio 8H at NBC, and Robert Montgomery would be in a balcony looking down on us, and I would say, ‘One minute, Mr. Montgomery!’ And he would say, ‘Thank you, Nick, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen.’” Dunne’s job was to place set markers on the floor with masking tape. “While I was down there on the floor, Gore came in with Jackie Kennedy, and he said to me, in a really snobbish way, ‘What are you doing on the floor?’ … like I’d fallen to a lower station. He was making a joke for her. It wasn’t cruel. But it was just this side of cruel. Then we just started running into one another.” Everyone who knew her called the unprepossessing, doe-voiced, shy Mrs. Kennedy “Jackie.” Restless, vaguely ambitious, not yet ready to sacrifice herself entirely to her husband’s career, she hoped to become an actress. Some years before, she had thought that Gore might help her get into journalism. Now, with his television and movie connections, she hoped he would introduce her to some opportunities in that world, despite her husband and his family’s opposition. In late 1952 John Kennedy had become a senator. In 1956 he had made an unsuccessful run for the vice-presidential nomination. If he had won, he would have gone down to defeat on the Stevenson ticket. If Stevenson had won, Gore soon told him, his fate would have been worse. “He was amused when I suggested that he might feel more cheerful if every day he were to recite to himself while shaving the names of the Vice-Presidents of the United States, a curiously dim gallery of minor politicians.” In Georgetown that fall, Gore, visiting the Kennedys, found Jack “in a bathrobe. Nothing under it. Face swollen. Impacted wisdom tooth. ‘How can I speak tonight in Baltimore, looking like this?’ ‘Isn’t he vain?’ Jackie purrs.” Gore’s own repressed political ambitions rose to more than usual consciousness, the road not taken.

  Preparations for Visit now began to move more quickly, relentlessly. At Edgewater, putting what he thought were final touches on the script, Gore braced himself, he wrote to Edith Sitwell, “for a February debut in the theatre. It is odd that of all the things I have wanted to be in my life (Byron, Thomas Jefferson, Huysmans, Henry James, Petronius and United States Senator) playwright is the role which least appealed to me. I was born unstagestruck and, as a result, have had my better successes, recently at least, in that world. I suppose glory like love comes most quickly (though not most meaningfully) when unsolicited.” The money was at last in place. Reluctantly, Axelrod and Wilder had invested some of their own. Though Axelrod had great faith in Visit’s likely success, the rule was to invest only other people’s money. A quiet, capable man, who preferred working behind the scenes, Wilder complemented Axelrod’s gregarious flamboyance. Having had his eye on the Booth Theatre, Axelrod was delighted to get it beginning early in February. Out-of-town tryouts in Boston and New Haven were scheduled for late January, with Cyril Ritchard as star and director. In December, Gore attended auditions; in early January, intensive rehearsals where, sporty in an open shirt and sweater, serious in glasses, pencil in hand, he made changes in consultation with Cyril and George. Conrad Janis and Sarah Marshall had been chosen to play the young lovers; Philip Coolidge, Sarah Marshall’s father; the comic actor Eddie Mayehoff, an expert at blustering pomposity, the Air Force general in charge of dealing with the alien visitor. The best and best-known ballet and Broadway designer, Oliver Smith, Bowles’s cousin, whom Gore had known for years, a good friend of Sam Lurie and Miles White, did the sets. Inevitably, despite his hands-off directorial style, Ritchard found it difficult to act the major role and direct the play. “Cyril had a wonderful technique for directing,” Conrad Janis recalled. “He had the most lines, so he put himself in the middle. Then the people with the next-most lines were on either side of him, and the people with the next-most lines were on either side of them, and finally Cyril would look up and say, ‘Oh, we seem to have gotten ourselves into a line. Well, break it up, break it up!’ And that was how he directed us. Anyway, Gore would sit out front and watch this.” He could hardly believe his ears and eyes. “Cyril Ritchard was a sweet man,” Gore later remarked. “He was also easily the stupidest man I’ve ever met.” Soon, to everyone’s relief, Axelrod in effect became co-director.

  As Gore and others participated in the rehearsals, they realized that much was right about the play, especially the basic concept, the talented cast, the witty lines, the satiric edge. But there were obstacles as well. Gore soon worried that it would be an embarrassing disaster. No television play had ever been successfully redone for the Broadway theater. People in general simply did not believe it possible to do that. The cast was effective, except for Ritchard’s inability to learn his lines, perhaps because as director he had too much on his mind, mostly because some constitutional quirk resulted in his being unable to recognize that when his memory failed him, he had substituted an entirely different word of the same number of syllables for the word he had forgotten. Usually the new word made absolutely no sense in the context. His laggard memory worried everyone. Eddie Mayehoff seemed perfect as the pompous Air Force general, his plastic face a constantly redesigned gallery of funny but appropriate expressions, and the chemistry between Ritchard and Mayehoff worked wonderfully well, though Mayehoff, a difficult man with prima-donna pretensions, got on everyone’s nerves, the one discordant personal element in the company. Axelrod “sort of shoved Eddie Mayehoff down everybody’s throat. Cyril hated him, which was wonderful. We were able to use that. Their mutual loathing was splendid. It gave us some conflict that perhaps our drama didn’t already have.” All this seemed manageable. But when rehearsals graduated to trial performances in New Haven and then Boston, everyone immediately realized there was a serious problem. In the middle of January, in New Haven, where Thornton Wilder came to the performance, a blizzard kept many people away. The audience seemed cold, unresponsive. The play seemed not comic but menacing.

  For the Boston opening the house was sold out. People had come up from New York. Gene and Kit had driven from Avon. Howard was there. When the curtain descended, there was sinking uneasiness. There had been very little laughter. The audience had not seemed to like it. The critics enjoyed it even less. One Boston reviewer, who acerbically wrote that Visit to a Small Planet would have a short visit on Broadway, epitomized the general view. Word immediately got back to New York: the play was in trouble. Perhaps only Axelrod managed to be upbeat, telling funny stories to the cast, after the performance in Boston, about Jayne Mansfield’s auditioning for her role in The Seven Year Itch. But “the out-of-town tryouts were a disaster,” Sarah Marshall commented. Author, director, and producers pondered what to do. The problem seemed to be that the play was not comedic enough. The commercial theater required an imbalance, heavily titled toward humor, between comic entertainment and serious message. The funny lines, the witty situations, the co
mic paradoxes and entertaining tensions were being outbalanced by the serious satire, the scathing antimilitaristic indictment, and the discomfiting high stakes of the nuclear context. Sarah Marshall remembered “Gore saying at some point, ‘I wanted to write an antiwar play, and the only way to write an antiwar play is to write a prowar play.” Audiences were too uncomfortable, even too frightened, to laugh. The stakes were high. This was the commercial theater. Like the movies, it had its particular audience, its popular-culture necessities. Reluctantly, Gore saw the point. “Gore turned serious,” Axelrod commented, “when the audience didn’t want him to … and … he attempted to say something and, God forbid, you can’t do that. So I sort of persuaded him to have a hit comedy instead of a serious flop. He went for it, reluctantly.” More than anything, he feared failure. More than anything, he feared returning to California, which he had to do shortly after the opening, with the entire country knowing his play had been a failure. In fact, he most feared having to face the barbed wit of the writers’ table at MGM. There would be sharp humor and false sympathy at his expense. It was too painful to contemplate. Immediately he began to make changes, outwardly resigned, inwardly seething. But he was resolutely, triumphantly practical. Two scenes were dropped, one radically changed. A mushroom-cloud background was eliminated from one of the sets. The play he left behind in the earlier versions, “though hardly earth-shaking, was far more interesting and true,” he felt, than the one they were now performing. But “because it costs too much to put on a play, one works in a state of hysteria. Everything is geared to success. Yet art is mostly failure. It is only from a succession of daring, flawed works that the occasional masterwork comes. But in the Broadway theater to fail is death.” From the tryout in New Haven until the New York premiere, “I was more dentist than writer, extracting the sharper (and not always carious) teeth.”

  On the train ride from Boston to New York, as author, director, and producers mulled over their situation, they were still uneasy, mostly frightened. The cast was anticipating a fiasco. Sitting separately, Sarah Marshall said to Conrad Janis (they soon were playing lovers in real life also) that she thought she had detected a flaw in Cyril Ritchard’s performance the correction of which might make all the difference in the play’s reception. It seemed to her that Gore had intended Kreton to be childishly unaware of exactly what a nuclear bomb was and what the consequences of nuclear war would be. The original text had designed the role to be played as a child amusing himself with firecrackers. Instead Ritchard had transformed Kreton into a mustache-twirling villain. Therefore “everything he says takes on an almost Hitlerian meaning.” No wonder the audience was not laughing. Convinced she was right, Janis went immediately to the compartment where Gore and Axelrod were. “I said, ‘George, can I speak to you for a minute?’” So George sat down. I was the one who said to him, even though it was Sarah’s idea, ‘You know Cyril is playing it all wrong.’ This was absolutely an astounding thing for the juvenile to say to the producer and director. But George, who was no dope, sat there and said. ‘What do you mean?’ We proceeded to explain to him what it meant that the character understood what an atomic bomb was. If, conversely, he didn’t and thought it was a giant firecracker that made a lot of noise, the audience could then say, ‘Oh, well, he’s mistaken, and he’s not a bad person, and if he did know it was going to kill millions of people and pollute the air, he certainly wouldn’t do it.’ Which is exactly what happened. George told that to Cyril, who understood it immediately. We met the next day in the lobby of the Booth Theatre to rehearse the play in the men’s room, actually the lounge downstairs, because the stage was being used, in front of the washrooms with chairs posted instead of props. Cyril had changed the character, and it became Noël Coward in his hands.”

  As Visit opened in New York on February 7, 1957, the cast and playwright were still pessimistic. Sarah Marshall heard one of “the Shubert guys say to Clinton Wilder, ‘Do you want the moving-in bill put on the moving-out bill to save money?’” Most everyone concerned hoped, at best, to avoid embarrassment. If they had not laughed in New Haven or Boston, why should they laugh in New York? Before the performance Ritchard told the cast to go to Sardi’s and have an extra glass of champagne to loosen up. When the lights went down, the Booth Theatre was filled with critics and theatrical notables, with friends of the cast and production, with the glamorous first-night audience that characterized Broadway premieres at a time when Broadway was American theater and theater culturally important. Still, for the rest of the seats “we had to drag people in, because we had no advance at all.” As the first act progressed, the cast began to sense that this was different from New Haven and Boston. The audience was laughing. At the end of the first act Martin Gabel turned to his wife, Arlene Francis, and said, “‘Heh, you know this is pretty funny.’ And at the end of the second act he turned to her and said, ‘You know, I think this thing is going to be a hit.’ And in the middle of the third act, he said, ‘You know something, Jesus Christ, we have money in it!’”

  Sardi’s restaurant awaited, a cast party and the ritual of waiting for the early reviews, which would be out by the time people had finished their entrées. Nina was there with John Galliher. Gene and Kit had come in from Connecticut. Sally and Pick, stationed again at Mitchell Field, had attended the performance and came to the party. “The whole family was there,” Sally recalled. “About fourteen of us. We were his family. He had gotten the tickets.” Axelrod had been so desperate to get out word of mouth that he had arranged with a popular radio-talk-show host to read the reviews, even bad, over the air from Sardi’s as they came in. “When the first one was this tone poem by Walter Kerr to Eddie Mayehoff, I had him read it and he burst into tears.” Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times thought Ritchard’s performance “a comic masterpiece.” “The atmosphere was jubilant,” John Galliher recalled “Nina was very proud.” She seemed to Gene “to take full credit.” Every reviewer praised the play and lauded the playwright. The premiere was the first of 388 performances. Unexpectedly, Gore had a Broadway hit. The next day, as he flew to Los Angeles, he felt the relief of knowing that when he appeared at the MGM writers’ table, he would be on the receiving end of congratulations and jealousy.

  With the satisfaction and money from a Broadway hit, the spring and summer of 1957, spent mostly working in California except for June at Edgewater, were seasons of relative triumph. Gore’s grief at Alice’s and Latouche’s deaths subsided. He missed them both, especially Alice. But he had a healthy amount of the ordinary capacity for bearing loss. Perhaps the one loss he might not have borne, except at a cost almost beyond bearing, was the loss of Howard, who was becoming, gradually, the indispensable man. When there had been a brief scare in 1955 about a cancer on Howard’s ear, Gore, Isherwood noticed, was deeply worried. Fortunately, it turned out to be inconsequential. When MGM assigned him to work on a script with the working title Spectacular, he quickly saw that nothing would come of it. Since he was still paid $2,000 a week, it hardly mattered. I Accuse had finally gone into production, delayed mostly because of a casting problem. Zimbalist, frustrated, had not been able to obtain a major star for the main role and eventually settled on the talented José Ferrer, who was eager to play the lead and direct. At least it was being made. The filming, at MGM’s Ealing Studios near London, moved along fairly rapidly during late winter and early spring 1957.

  The one fly in the professional ointment that demanded immediate attention, much of it distressing, was Billy the Kid. Warner Brothers, prodded by Newman, had finaly made a commitment to do it. Before immersing himself in the Broadway production of Visit, Gore had agreed with Newman that Fred Coe, with no movie experience but great television success, would produce it and Robert Mulligan would direct. They thought it reasonable to assume that the same team that had been successful with the television production would be successful with the movie version. Gore would use his television script as the basis for an expanded, full-length movie version. He had alread
y given Coe a new script as the basis for his final draft. It would be his movie. When he arrived in Los Angeles in February, he learned that Coe had fired Mulligan and hired another director from television, Arthur Penn, whom Coe preferred. He had also brought in a journeyman scriptwriter, Leslie Stevens, to revise Gore’s screen version, now to be called The Left-Handed Gun. In effect, Gore would have almost nothing to do with the film. Coe, he felt, had self-servingly betrayed him. “To be fair to him—I don’t see why I should be—but to be fair to him, he was on his uppers. He was scared. There was no more of what he did, live television drama. Now he had to jump to the movies. He sees what he thinks is a stupid movie star in Paul Newman and a scatterbrained playwright who’s all over the place in me, and he has an opening to get in and take it over and did.” Penn, whom he thought Iago to Coe’s Othello, he despised. Paul, he believed, had done nothing to prevent this happening, partly out of inexperience, mostly because of an unwillingness to offend powerful people at a time when his own movie career was still at its beginning. Gore, in New York, had assumed that Paul was looking capably after both their interests. Under the circumstances it was not a realistic assumption. “I wish,” Newman remarked later, “Gore had written the screenplay. Maybe I should have pushed a little more for that to happen. But I didn’t know much about the politics of Hollywood.”