Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  With Nina gone, their spirits lightened as if the plague had been lifted, the curse for the moment inactive. London pleasures resumed, the household now a temporary Dickensian domestic bower, including the dour English butler, Tattersall, whose stereotypical name, as if out of a Victorian novel, made up for his grimness. In late January the honeymooning Newmans arrived, Joanne four months pregnant. After a week at the luxurious Connaught, then a week in Paris and Switzerland, they moved into the Chesham Place flat. It “was very dark and, my God, was it cold,” Joanne remembered. “There was no central heating, and we used to run from fireplace to fireplace, from room to room.” As she woke up after her first night, she sensed someone’s eyes on her. “I looked up, and there was this man looking like Uriah Heep, saying, ‘And what can I …?’ He was terrifying.” A Dickens enthusiast, she had recently been given a complete set of The Inimitable’s works by Gore, who told her, admiringly, that she was “the only person he knew who read that kind of thing.” Despite the chill, they had a convivial time, and Howard soon fired the butler. While the others were off someplace for the evening, “I was giving a dinner party on my own. I don’t know why. And I fired him during dinner and then said, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done? Gore and Paul and Joanne are going to come back, and there’s no butler, no servant.’ When he told them what had happened, all three “gave such a sigh of relief. These three strong characters: none of them had the strength to fire Tattersall, which they all wanted to do.” For Joanne, with her interest in art and culture, experiencing London in Gore’s company was pleasurably enriching. Eager to teach, especially his friends, as well as learn, he provided historical descriptions, a running commentary about things he thought would interest them. They took numbers of short London excursions together, including one to Hampton Court, where Paul, for whom this was a first European visit, kept saying, “I’ve never seen anything like this before!” It seemed “tender and sweet” to his companions. “It was the beginning of a thoughtful life, particularly for Paul,” Howard remarked. “Joanne wanted always to dedicate her life to culture. It’s not that Paul was against it. It was like this is sissy stuff. But at Hampton Court he was saying, this is grabbing me. I’m so impressed.” For Newman, his relationship with Gore in general was, among other things, an exposure to ideas and activities he had not had an opportunity to experience before. “I was very much from the provinces, and Gore’s familiarity with literature and other things set off a constant buzz in my head,” Newman later remembered. “I think I realized what a great opportunity I had to get educated when I met Gore.”

  Soon after the Newmans arrived at Chesham Place, the bitter aftertaste of Nina’s visit became foul. Though out of sight, she was not out of mind. There was probably some discussion with the guests or at least offhand comment about Nina’s visit. Gore was aware that “Joanne didn’t like her mother, and Paul hated his mother, and Joanne hated Paul’s mother, so we were in the bad-mother sweepstakes, all three of us. We used to argue competitively whose mother was the worst. I’m happy to say that I won hands down. They knew my mother, and I knew theirs.” Whether or not they retold together their woes, the sad tale was intensified by a letter from Nina that came as they were planning a grand party, for February 20, to celebrate the Newmans’ wedding and Joanne’s birthday. At length, Nina presented her formal indictment of her son and his companion, her litany of woes and accusations that she had been preparing in fragmentary bursts throughout her visit. Her life had been ruined, she wrote, by her son and particularly his companion. “It was this venomous letter,” Gore recalled. “She attacks Howard as the reason why Jock Whitney and her other grand friends couldn’t come to the house, and her failure to connect with her grand friends she blamed on him, and on his presence.” Something snapped shut in Gore, permanently. Nina’s nasty words about Howard were the occasion, not the reason. She had said so many harsh things already, had for so long made so many exculpatory excuses that blamed him for much of what had gone wrong in her life, that blaming Howard now for her London disappointments seemed no more than another in a long list of self-justifications. Howard himself did not take her rantings personally. This was not about him. It was about Nina and Gore. Gore refused to show the letter to Howard; he showed it only to Joanne. Then he burned it. It was the only time in his life he destroyed a document. Then he wrote a letter to Nina. “I’ll never see you again as long as you live.” He kept his word.

  The subdued lighting threw a warm glow across the elegant room. By 9 P.M. on February 20, 1958, the large eighteenth-century salon at Chesham Place embraced about a hundred guests. The party was in full blaze, in honor of the Newmans and also an informal farewell party for Gore, who planned to return to America early in March. American and London theater and movie people drank, ate, talked. When the Tynans arrived, Claire Bloom, whom Gore had asked to come early to help with preparations, looking radiantly beautiful, walked over to Ken and said, “You swine!” so Claire recalled. “Fuck you!” Joanne saw her lips pronounce. Tynan had written harshly about Claire’s performance in her London play Duel of Angels. Though Gore’s discussions with Morley about a British production of Visit were not going anyplace, Morley came, as did Ralph Richardson, Peter Hall, and John Gielgud. Gore’s former publisher, John Lehmann, and Lehmann’s formidable sister Rosamund were there, along with Edward Montague, whom Gore had also met in 1948. Now that Lehmann was no longer his publisher, whatever they had to talk about they discussed less tensely, and Gore had a chance to provide recompense for all the parties he had been invited to years before at Edgerton Crescent. The young John Bowen, pursuing a career as novelist and dramatist, whom Gore had not seen for some time until a recent dinner, happily moved, though at first paralyzed with shyness, among the famous faces. So too did Maria Britneva, who in 1956 had married a British minor aristocrat, Peter St. Just, and recently had given birth to a daughter. People Gore knew from the Ealing Studios came. Later in the evening, sitting drunk in the middle of the floor, the American actress Kim Stanley, celebrated for her prominence in “The Method” and idolized by Joanne Woodward, had an attack of what she called “the frankies” and told Robert Anderson what a terrible play Tea and Sympathy was. Stanley was in London to star in the first British production of Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Anderson began to cry. Gore and Howard thought it a memorable party.

  The script for The Scapegoat had been completed. Pleasurable as London had been, Gore missed Edgewater, and the longer he stayed on, the longer he perpetuated his absence from writing fiction, though the problem was less London than his contract with MGM. Despite high taxes, the stage and movie income from Visit and what he had saved from his MGM salary began to provide breathing room if not security. The final installment of his debt to Nina had been paid by his business agent in New York. The East Fifty-eighth Street building, where Gore and Howard still hoped to have an apartment for themselves, was sustained by the rents. Edgewater now cost much less to maintain in relation to the size of his income, and he felt increasingly confident that he could, if necessary or if he had the inclination, at any time replenish his bank account by freelance scriptwriting. But the MGM contract obligated him through 1959, perhaps longer, if one added on the weeks he had been on suspension plus any future suspensions if he chose not to accept an assignment. Walter Wanger had wanted him for Cleopatra. Fortunately, he had already been committed to The Scapegoat. The casting problems for Ben-Hur had been resolved, with Charlton Heston to play the lead role, though Sam Zimbalist and William Wyler, the director, had initially preferred Marlon Brando or Paul Newman, neither of whom was available. But the script problem remained.

  Suddenly, as Gore and his houseguests were approaching the end of their London stay, they were jolted out of all other preoccupations by Joanne’s suddenly becoming ill. She was in the process of miscarrying. Gore immediately got in a well-known London doctor. Joanne was quickly out of danger, grateful to her “wonderful” doctor, who had her moved to nearby St. George’s Hospita
l. Committed to be in Los Angeles for the filming of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Paul left reluctantly. Gore and Howard flew back to New York early in March. “And there I was in London in the hospital,” Joanne recalled. Claire Bloom, who thought her “very much alone, and, after all, it was my city,” came to see her every day. “That very nice doctor then put me on a plane and sent me home. It was a terrible end to a lovely honeymoon.”

  At Edgewater, what to do next was much on Gore’s mind, especially in light of the MGM contract and his expansion of Honor into a full-length play now called March to the Sea. So too was Nina, though with a willful finality that at least encouraged him to feel that that part of his life was behind him. In response to her hateful letter he had written, before leaving London, the last letter he was ever to write her, his own counterbrief to her accusations. “She carried it around with her for years…. She carried it with her everywhere. Showed it to my father. He said it was almost worn out…. It was falling apart. My letter made quite an impression on her, as it was intended to. And why shouldn’t it? She was an Alibi Ike, as she used to call others. It was always the fault of other people. And now what better card to play than that her son has turned on her after she invented his career, saved his life, paid for his publicity, made him a star, and then he rejects her.” Nina’s lament he kept at a distance, though just as she retold repeatedly the story of his rejection of her, he repeated often enough, and savagely in his memoir, his version of her treatment of him. If one wins “the bad-mother sweepstakes,” one never fully recovers. But this final turn simplified things for him. The essential damage had long been done and in place. This, now, was damage control. As a strategy it suited him well, among other reasons because of its efficiency. He saw no hope for recuperation, for redress, or even for cessation. As long as he associated with Nina, he would be subject to her damaging behavior. Better to put an end to it, forever. On the sidelines, careful not to say a word, Howard watched and wondered. As someone brought up to view the parent-child bond as unseverable, no matter what the provocation, he could not imagine a permanent break.

  Before Gore could do more than catch his breath at Edgewater, the opportunity arose to terminate his MGM contract on favorable terms. On the outskirts of Rome, the Italian government’s 148-acre Cinecittà Studios, with its nine sound stages, had been rented by MGM for the construction of huge sets representing ancient Rome and Jerusalem, including a hippodrome for Ben-Hur’s climactic chariot race. The cast, the director, the technical crew, the thousands of extras, the huge supply and logistics enterprise, all under Sam Zimbalist’s control, were rapidly moving into place, budgeted at $15 million, then the most expensive film ever to have been made. With the studio system collapsing, the movie producers now prohibited by law from owning movie theaters, television eroding its audience, MGM hoped to save itself from bankruptcy with a blockbuster spectacular, the first of its kind, at a time before the hyperbolic vocabulary of blockbuster and special effects even existed. Suddenly the remake of Ben-Hur seemed like a last chance to regain the mass audience lost to television. This heavy responsibility was placed on Zimbalist’s shoulders. An MGM loyalist, like everyone in the movie industry he believed, as he wrote to Gore, that television was “monstrous to give entertainment away for nothing, even if most of it is pure mediocrity.” For five years the major obstacle to making Ben-Hur had been the script. Zimbalist thought Karl Tunberg’s unshootable. Two well-known playwrights had been brought in, serially, as script doctors—Maxwell Anderson, the venerable but radical author of What Price Glory? and Winterset, and S. N. Behrman, a witty author of Broadway comedies and a long list of successful Hollywood films. Behrman had spent about a month attempting to “polish” it, the verb an all-purpose Hollywood euphemism that often meant salvaging through extensive revision. How much Behrman did is unclear. Anderson, who soon realized he was too ill to work, returned the script, terminating the assignment.

  In spring 1957 Gore had declined Zimbalist’s request that he help with the rewrite, though it meant temporary suspension. Now, in late March 1958, with the hammers pounding at Cinecittà, Zimbalist and William Wyler began to panic. The Tunberg-Behrman script still needed substantial revision. Its grasp of the ancient Roman world was modest to minimal. Much of the dialogue varied between flat Americanisms and stilted formality. The crucial relationship between Ben-Hur and Messala seemed senselessly formless, ineffectively motivated. Without a sharper, more cohesive script, producer and director feared a disaster, a nail in MGM’s coffin rather than Lazarus brought back to life. Zimbalist, though, had great confidence in Vidal. As a scriptwriter, as Sam Spiegel remarked, “he’s not half as good as he thinks he is, but he’s twice as good as the others.” If there was anyone at MGM to whom Gore owed a favor, it was Zimbalist, whom he had allowed himself to like, who had liked and treated him paternally. When Zimbalist now called, Gore said yes, with one condition. In exchange for agreeing to work on the Ben-Hur script, would MGM release him from the remainder of his contract? Zimbalist agreed to take the request to the MGM executives. It must have seemed like chutzpah to them. He was, after all, required by that very contract to work on Ben-Hur, his only leverage his willingness to go on suspension, which would have unhappy consequences for him. Zimbalist, eager to have him work on the script and motivated by personal affection, apparently did his best to make the case. MGM soon agreed. At the end of the third week of April, Gore flew to Rome, a destination resonant with his own previous visits and the special place it had held in his imagination since childhood; this unexpected confluence of events now brought him back to a city he had always cherished to work on a film set in ancient Rome. Work was to start on April 23. At the same time he was also writing, in the early, formative stages, a much-pondered novel, to be narrated in the first person, about the life of the fourth-century Roman Emperor Julian.

  Still, the formidable challenge of revising the Tunberg-Behrman script was not any easier for its being met on a Roman site, and since Gore’s last visit to Rome had been almost ten years before, he did not have any certain anticipation of how the city would strike him now. With Zimbalist and Wyler he flew overnight from a chilly, late-winterish New York into a Roman spring. On the plane Wyler, who had been a production assistant on the silent version of Ben-Hur almost thirty-five years before, read the latest version of the script. “As we drove together into Rome from the airport, Wyler looked gray and rather frightened. ‘This is awful,’ he said, indicating the huge script that I had placed between us on the backseat. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘What are we going to do?’ Wyler groaned. ‘These Romans…. Do you know anything about them?’ I said yes, I had done my reading. Wyler stared at me. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘when a Roman sits down and relaxes, what does he unbuckle?’” As Gore caught his first sight in ten years of Rome, mostly recovered from its wartime devastation, it seemed to them all that it might take as long to repair the script as it had to repair the city. Rome, though, appeared as lovely, as mysterious, as richly warm as it had each time he had been there before. Walking the well-known streets to his favorite familiar ancient and modern sites, he began to have “Roman fever” again, the feeling that it was a place in which he could be happy.

  At Cinecittà he joined Zimbalist and Wyler, both anxious about the script and desperate to make it workable. Final touches were being put on the expensive sets. Actors were rehearsing, hammers pounding, art and design people sketching, costumes being stitched, hundreds of tons of camera equipment moving into place, everyone being paid. Wyler spent days watching every Hollywood film set in ancient Rome that could quickly be flown to him, probably by courier from New York or Los Angeles, as if he could learn what he needed to know about ancient Rome from Hollywood’s prior versions. Between daily conferences with Zimbalist and Wyler, Gore began to rewrite the script from the beginning. His expectation, part of his agreement with Zimbalist, was that he would spend four to six weeks working on the script. Zimbalist hoped he would stay and work, as needed, throughout the entire
filming. Always rapid, Gore felt that whatever good he could do would be done in five weeks or so; anyway, he wanted to be back in New York for what he hoped would be a deal for a Broadway production of March to the Sea. With so much riding on improving the script as quickly as possible, Zimbalist had hired the sophisticated British playwright Christopher Fry, though he had no movie experience, also to work on the script, with the notion that Gore, since he was there first but would not stay throughout, would start at the beginning and Fry would begin at the end, so they could expeditiously meet in the middle. Somewhere about the halfway point they would sink the golden spike.

  In the meantime, with Gore each day providing pages for shooting, the filming began, Heston in the title role, the British actor Stephen Boyd in the other crucial part, Messala—Ben-Hur’s Roman friend from childhood, by now his enemy—much of the rest of the cast well-known movie veterans like Sam Jaffe, Hugh Griffith, and Jack Hawkins. “When I was finished with a scene,” Gore later wrote, “I would give it to Zimbalist. We would go over it. Then the scene would be passed on to Wyler. Normally, Wyler is slow and deliberately indecisive; but first-century Jerusalem had been built at enormous expense; the first day of shooting was approaching; the studio was nervous. As a result, I did not often hear Wyler’s famous cry, as he would hand you back your script, ‘If I knew what was wrong with it, I’d fix it myself.’” The crucial problem that needed fixing was the absence of creditable motivation for Messala’s punitive hatred of Ben-Hur. Political differences alone seemed insufficient. Gore suggested to his colleagues that he write into the script by indirection that Messala’s fury is that of a lover scorned, that the Roman who has loved Ben-Hur since childhood turns against him because Ben-Hur declines to respond. For a Roman there would be nothing shameful about such feelings. For Ben-Hur, a Jew, they would be anathema. Wyler was shocked, frightened. That might make the problems they were confronting even worse. Gore reassured him. There would be no overt discussion, let alone depiction, of love between men. Messala’s love for Ben-Hur would be presented indirectly, almost subliminally. Zimbalist hesitated. If it were done effectively, he realized, they might get away with it, and at least it would focus some of the emotional intensity between the men in a way that would make Messala’s motivation credible without ever being explicit. Wyler reluctantly agreed to try it. They agreed not to say a word to Heston, whose cooperation had no relevance. Messala was the key. When they spoke to Boyd, he grasped the point immediately. His performance quickly embodied Gore’s vision and revision. When they watched the daily rushes of the early scenes, all of which Gore wrote, they liked the results, including Heston, who viewed their power simply as the result of his and Boyd’s fine acting of what in his mind was a straightforward political disagreement. Heston, smiling, in costume, with his friendly hand on Gore’s shoulder, happily posed for a photograph with Gore, Wyler, and Christopher Fry.