Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  To make more attractive Little, Brown’s edition of the expanded stage version of Visit, Gore wrote a brief preface, which he disarmingly began with the confession that he was “not at heart a playwright. I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer.” Though he lamented his absence from prose fiction, explaining that he had undertaken dramatic tragedy and satire as an expediency in a world that had made earning one’s living as a novelist difficult, the preface itself was an excellent example of another genre, the prose essay that he had eased into as well. A number of brief reviews he had done had provided limited opportunities for literary analysis, though it was not literary analysis in any formal sense that especially interested him. When he looked at a literary work, his interest was in its nature, the relationship between its virtues and his capacities as reader, some combination of wit, lucidity, the conversational voice, and the integrity of the reading experience. “Writing Plays for Television,” his foreword to the 1956 volume of television plays, caught some of the emerging essayistic tone. In the preface to the 1957 edition of Visit, the focus is on the process of creating a Broadway hit, the central self at issue is his own. It was this prose essay, brief as it is, in which he first found his voice as an essayist. When the New York Times declined to run it as a separate piece, he sent it to Bob Bingham at The Reporter, who had urged Gore to do reviews for him and who now had the bright idea of inviting him to be The Reporter’s regular theater critic. The essay appeared in July, the first of numbers of essay-reviews on drama he was to write for Bingham, whom he now saw occasionally in New York, a brief revival of a less intense version of the friendship they had had in their Exeter days. Married, a father, still hoping to establish himself as a novelist, Bingham had settled in as a hardworking, modestly paid editor at The Reporter, later at The New Yorker, resigned to behind-the-scenes anonymity in his daily work, ambivalent about Gore’s success, bitter about his own failures, especially critical of what he considered Gore’s self-promotion. To Gore, Bingham seemed to have lost the ambition he had had at Exeter, perhaps, Gore wondered, a casualty of Bingham’s brutal war experiences, a victim of some existential burnout. He was “a very good writer, a good journalist, and he wrote a novel which wasn’t very good but it wasn’t bad either and when it got rejected he gave up. I said,” Gore recalled, “that’s not how you do it.” Some failure of nerve, perhaps of self-esteem, seemed at issue. “We worried about his character, that anybody could be so broken in spirit as to work for Max Ascoli,” the owner of The Reporter, “a real tyrant. Bob got on with him very well, which worried us, because nobody of mettle put up with him…. I remained fond of Bob. But I didn’t see him much. A classic case of marriage parting old friends.” But there was still affection between them, and some teasing good spirits. When Bingham named his son Thomas Truman Bingham, the Thomas for Tom Riggs, one of their favorite teachers at Exeter, the Truman for Harry Truman, “I always accused him of using it for Truman Capote, as he knew that I disliked Truman. ‘At least call him Tru-Gore Bingham,’ I said.”

  With his weekly salary from MGM and his royalties from the continuing run of Visit, he was more concerned with finding ways to keep a larger portion of his income than with making more. When he had hesitated for some weeks about taking an unattractive script assignment, MGM had suspended him, and he worried about the fact that his contract required his weeks on suspension be added as additional weeks of contractual responsibility, extending its life beyond its original terminus in 1959. Often enough, a contract writer who unexpectedly had a Broadway success demanded to be released or that his studio contract be renegotiated. Hollywood executives generally still bowed before the prestige of the New York theater. When Gore had returned to MGM in February 1957, after Visit’s glowing reviews, Sam Zimbalist, with paternal pride, had taken him for the first time into the executive dining room, where he was greeted with congratulatory handshakes and backslaps. He had not thought, though, to try to change or break his contract. After a brief suspension he agreed to work on the script for Spectacular, but the length of his contract already was beginning to have some of the feel of a prison sentence, especially since he had to keep postponing work on Washington, D.C. and Julian. Deductible expenses against income helped fend off the worst depredations of the high income tax, but, still in the highest tax bracket, with the advice of his accountant, Leonard Strauss, he looked to two strategies to soften the annual blow: the first a retirement annuity that sent all his royalties for Visit, about $300,000, directly into an annuity account with Massachusetts Mutual; the second the purchase of rental property as an investment that would produce income against which there would be deductible management and maintenance expenses and possibly residence for himself in part of the building.

  In late June he agreed to purchase for $90,000 416 East Fifty-eighth Street, a four-story brownstone with floor-through apartments. Paul Kent, one of his neighbors in Barrytown and a friend of Alan Porter, was happy to sell it to him. Short of immediate cash, Gore borrowed $9,500 from Nina, probably for the binder, and then went to contract in September, when he paid in cash a sizable portion of the purchase price, the rest partly a personal mortgage from Kent, partly a bank mortgage, a portion of the payments to be covered by the rental income. It was a sensible purchase. Unfortunately, there was some confusion with an inconsistent, sometimes incoherent Nina about whether he was supposed to repay her immediately or whether he was to repay over a period of time or whether she had actually intended to lend him the money at all. Apparently it had been a loan, to be repaid at mutual convenience. In October, in a panic, Nina claimed she should have been repaid long before. Suddenly, but not for the first time, she seemed to be irrationally lashing out at him. Their business communciations now went through Leonard Strauss. From Southampton, Nina wrote to Strauss, “I have told Gore, and I wish to tell you so that there will be no misunderstanding, that his first financial must is to pay off the 9500 dollars that I put into the fifty eighth street place…. I also think that Gore needs to learn a business lesson, one does not use other peoples money in any way without their consent. I would never have agreed to a loan, I do not have the cash to operate the way I wish, to be able to, when conditions are the way they are going to be, and have that much on loan.” Gore had Strauss immediately send her a check for interest at 6 percent for three months, two weeks later a check for $3,500. The remainder followed shortly. Whether Nina in October had forgotten the terms of late June, or whether she had misunderstood, or not been in a position to understand, what they had agreed to, she transformed what was at worst a misunderstanding into another painful experience for her son, who had to have felt the punitive nastiness of the claim that “Gore needs to learn a business lesson.” After a period of some modest good feeling, it felt, for Gore, like old times again.

  In spring 1957 Sam Zimbalist, appalled at the awful script he had for the remake of Ben-Hur, sounded out his young writing star about doing a thorough revision. Drastic changes were needed to make it filmable. The successful 1925 silent Ben-Hur had become one of MGM’s signature films, a totemic invocation of the studio’s glory days. With profits continuing to decline, MGM executives hoped that a remake of Ben-Hur would revivify if not the studio system then at least the financial bottom line. Karl Tunberg, a well-established, well-connected journeyman scriptwriter, had, implausibly, been given the assignment. His specialty was light comedy, his most successful movie Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Zimbalist, with some anguish, immediately realized that Tunberg’s unwieldy, undramatic script would have to be redone by someone who knew something about first-century Rome. It would be more than ordinary polishing. Well read, interested in history, with a practical pen for dramatic economy, planning to write a novel about the Emperor Julian, Gore seemed just the right person. The assignment, though, did not appeal to him. Spectacular was dud enough. Ben-Hur might be worse. If he had to earn his living writing movie scripts, then he preferred at least to write the script, even if an adaptation, from scratch. With no wish
to offend his paternal supporter, he tactfully begged off the assignment, leaving Zimablist to find someone else to solve his problem. Gore suggested Isherwood. The three of them had lunch together. After some deliberation, Zimbalist backed away from hiring Isherwood. From Vidal’s perspective, that was that. It was not his problem.

  When the Malibu arrangement ended in late September, he was delighted to have some time at Edgewater. The Newmans, among others, came to visit, the river was attractive, the autumn weather lovely. As usual, by himself and with guests, as long as the warm weather lasted, he swam out to the island and back, eager for the exercise. Oscillating between slim firmness and noticeable expansion, he worried about his weight. He had bought an exercise machine, kept upstairs in his bedroom, to help him keep fit, which he soon declared a resounding failure.

  From the bedroom window, from the octagonal study, from the perspective of the French doors that looked out on the lawn, from almost every angle and position, the river was there, the hazy blue Catskills in the distance. Friends came up by train from New York, for the day or overnight. Jean Stein, ten years younger than Gore, Doris and Jules’s daughter, whom he had last seen as a young girl in Los Angeles, stayed overnight. Claire Bloom visited. She was astounded at how Gore seemed simply not to hear the train roar by. Sam Lurie, who had briefly been on retainer as Gore’s press agent, came up with his companion and co-worker, Stanley Kaminsky, who recollected “being awakened at about two in the morning after having gone to bed and suddenly being … terrified. I thought it was an earthquake.” In the octagonal study Gore labored on a new play, a development of his Civil War teleplay Honor, which he began to revise for full-length stage presentation, somehow preferring to do that than to work any further either on Washington, D.C., or Julian, perhaps because he expected that MGM, to whom he was still under contract, would soon give him a new assignment. The telescript about his grandfather that he had promised Manulis was still on hold.

  In Manhattan, Howard and Nina had made the one-bedroom apartment at 360 East Fifty-fifth Street comfortable, a place where both men stayed and where they sometimes entertained. It was considered Howard’s apartment. Miles White down the hall had windows facing their bedroom window across the courtyard. When Gore hosted a party, they often made room by putting the coats in Miles’s apartment. Oliver Smith, with his tall, lithe, handsome figure, his blond—now white—hair, was regularly in sight with Sam Lurie and other ballet people. Paul Bowles still occasionally came to New York. One evening Gore and Howard went to a party hosted by Cecil Beaton at which naked, muscular young men had been hired to serve drinks and exhibit their bodies. Theater and movie friends were around, and Gore began now to be a regular at “The Party,” the gatherings of the elite of the New York and Los Angeles entertainment worlds, a movable celebrity feast, the world that Latouche had introduced him to, the world to which his television plays, his Broadway success, and his Hollywood status now gave him full entrée. His youth, his handsomeness, his wit were welcome, the attraction of his being both an intellectual and a celebrity. The Party’s shifting and simultaneous forms flowed to both sides of the continent, many of the people the same. Doris and Jules Stein in Los Angeles were one of the focal points. The actress Ruth Ford’s apartment at the Dakota in Manhattan was another. In New York the partygoers always gathered for Noël Coward’s regular visits from London. Gore was delighted to meet him. Visit to a Small Planet was still running. The expectation was that he would write another play, that he would compete with George Axelrod (and, at some remove, with Coward himself) for Broadway’s crown. As a successful playwright, he now began to make television-talk-show appearances, mostly to push Visit, among them Today with David Garroway, Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, and David Susskind’s various talk programs.

  The unavoidable assignment from MGM came late that fall. It had the advantage, unexpectedly, of requiring his presence in London, where his adaptation of the bestselling novelist Daphne Du Maurier’s The Scapegoat would be filmed, under the aegis of the head of MGM’s British production at their Ealing Studio, Sir Michael Balcon, the man who had given Hitchcock his start and also who had been responsible for what came to be known as the Ealing comedies. The well-known director of Kind Hearts and Coronets, Robert Hamer, would again have his friend Alec Guinness, who in Kind Hearts had proved himself the master of multiple roles, for the dual-character starring role; Bette Davis, whom Gore persuaded to take the part, and Irene Worth were set for the important female leads. MGM had wanted Cary Grant for the film. Du Maurier and Guinness, whom Du Maurier insisted on because she thought he resembled her father, had formed a limited partnership to do the film. Soon thinking better of doing it themselves, they persuaded MGM to back and release it. When a first screenplay proved unsatisfactory, MGM decided that Gore would be the right person for the task. Kenneth Tynan, whom Balcon had hired early in 1956 as his script director at Ealing Studios, had probably either raised Vidal’s name or added his enthusiasm when MGM had queried Balcon about assigning Vidal to the script. It was a far better, more interesting, and prestigious assignment than anything he had been offered before, a sign of MGM’s confidence that the thirty-two-year-old writer could hold his own in such company. In early November he sailed to England, first for consultations, then for work. On the Queen Mary, his first-class ticket paid for by MGM, he dined regularly in the Grill, undeterred by the stormy weather, on what seemed to him the best food he had ever eaten. Just before leaving, he had gotten a copy of the novel and read it for the first time.

  As usual, as soon as he arrived in London, he quickly got to work creating a script, which he felt confident he could do successfully, though he soon discovered that Du Maurier had strong ideas about how it should be done. The author of Rebecca, a novel Gore had thought “ravishing” at thirteen and which had been made into a successful movie, Du Maurier exercised considerable influence on the filming and was “unconsciously condescending” to him. “I came to know what an experienced butler must feel in a stately home. I was, she would say to others, ‘the hack from Hollywood,’ which was not too far off the mark.” On the side, Gore and Hamer made parodic fun of Du Maurier’s prose. But he managed to create a workable screenplay that, when it opened the next spring in New York, was praised more for its successful moments than for its overall achievement. In the editing Bette Davis’s role was gradually cut to an extended cameo appearance, for which she blamed Guinness. Guinness himself had his hands full with the domineering Du Maurier and with his gradual assumption of Hamer’s responsibilities as the director’s heavy drinking, which everyone on the set tried to cover for, eventually disabled him. With the droll, cynical Hamer, during one of his better weeks before the filming started, and with Maria Britneva, whom Gore had invited along, he went to France, searching for a filming location. They spent some icy, wintry days in Le Mans. Maria was her usual manic, effervescent company. They ate well, and Hamer drank, pulling a flask from his pocket as they drove, toasting the “winter wonderland.” Though Gore was to leave before the actual filming began, he and others covered as best they could for Hamer, and when later Hamer made some changes in the script, Gore did not mind, partly because he had little enthusiasm for the script in general. “I would have been delighted if Robert got all the credit.”