Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  With the filming going better than they had hoped, Gore worked each day with Zimbalist and Wyler, reconceiving important scenes and writing new dialogue. “I am doing a fast rewrite of a mammoth epic called Ben-Hur,” he wrote to Paul Bowles. “I start at the beginning whilst my coauthor, Christopher Fry, a nice little man who looks rather the way Shakespeare must’ve looked starts at the end and works toward me. It is predicted that we shall meet during the chariot race, though I rather hope to see him in Pilate’s audience chamber. What fun art is!” The film’s ancient world became more anchored in historical reality. The dramatic conception sharpened. The dialogue had some rhythmic credibility. Though in the long run no revision could make the film either intelligent or interesting, Vidal’s and Fry’s work made the film believable for a mass audience, a Hollywood spectacular in which the basic emotional and technical scaffolding was strong enough to support its bombast, intellectual emptiness, and religious sentimentality. It was a film for its time. It would offend nobody. It would attract large audiences. It was good for MGM and Hollywood. And for Wyler, Zimbalist, and everyone connected with making the film, including Heston and Vidal, it was a triumph of sorts. For Gore it had, as he wrote and worked with his colleagues, the satisfaction of a challenge well met. He liked his colleagues and the experience. He was satisfying his last responsibility to his MGM contract. And it was a pleasure to be in Rome again, where he kept working on the script from the beginning of the last week in April to the end of the last week in May, a total of five weeks minus one day, at a salary of $2,250 a week and all expenses. Occasionally he even found himself contributing to the correction of little ludicrous things. “Luckily, I was on the set at the begining of the shooting and so was able to persuade the art director to remove tomatoes from Mrs. Ben-Hur Senior’s kitchen. Otherwise, [she] might have had Hannah prepare a tomato and bacon sandwich for her daughter Mary.” Zimbalist was delighted with Gore’s substantial contribution and on May 24, a few days before Gore’s departure, gave him a handsome briefcase as a personal token of appreciation. Zimbalist still wanted him to stay for the entire filming. Gore declined again. “This is not a going-away present,” Zimbalist wrote in the note that came with the gift. “This is only to keep me from worrying over your losing more pages of your goddam good play,” March to the Sea, which Zimbalist had recently read. “Thanks for helping out.”

  During the next weeks, as the filming proceeded, Gore’s friends on the set kept him abreast of progress. Morgan Hudgens, the MGM publicity director for the film, sent him photos and a report on the last day of May. “The horses began pounding around the Spina today—quite a sight,” and “the big cornpone,” a derisive nickname for Heston, “really threw himself into your ‘first meeting’ scene yesterday. You should have seen those boys embrace! … We miss you.” So too did Zimbalist, who early in June also reported on “our first big day of the race…. Willy [Wyler] has not read beyond the first 10–12 pages of the new script,” overworked and exhausted by the grinding daily schedule. “Again I want to thank you for helping out. My only regret is you couldn’t stay longer, which would have enabled you to work a bit more slowly. I think some of the scenes suffered because you had to rush to get them done before you left. Christopher has completed the ending…. It reads and feels very good…. Mary asked me to send her love. You also have mine.” At the end of July, Zimbalist, who expressed his hope that Gore would find time to do the script for his next film, brought him up to date again. “The new opening you wrote worked out well.” Gore’s main contribution had stretched from the opening to the chariot scene, as he wrote less than a year later to William Morris when the question of how many and whom of those who had contributed to the script should get on-screen credit.

  I rewrote the script from the first page through the chariot race; P. 180. Christopher Fry wrote the rest. I kept the construction of the old script (with one important change) but I rewrote nearly all of the dialogue, as I have indicated. After I left, perhaps a third of my dialogue was in turn rewritten by Fry. In any case, I should say a third of the picture shot is my dialogue. As for construction, in the scene where Ben-Hur first meets Messala, in the old script they quarreled and fell out. In my version, P. 19 to P. 31, I broke the scene into two parts. First, at the Castle Antonio; second, at Ben-Hur’s home. I also put in the business of the brooch for Tirzah, the horse for Messala, etc. From 12 to 31 the script filmed is all mine (I was there while it was rehearsed, while much of it was shot). The same goes for all dialogue in the chariot race sequence. Tiberius at Rome, and the other places indicated in the script. I was asked to stay on till the end of the picture but could not; we parted most amiably; and Willy Wyler will, I am sure, back me up as to authorship of the parts in question.

  When the arbitration panel of the Screen Writers’ Guild decided that Tunberg, one of its clubbable own, should have exclusive credit for the script, Wyler fiercely but unavailingly objected. Having become quite collegial with Fry, Wyler found it infuriating that Fry would get no credit for his work. Fry pressed Wyler to insist that Vidal be given credit for his substantial contribution. The Guild ruled that Fry had not contributed the minimum one third. Despite evidence to the contrary, they also concluded that Gore had not. Ironically, though later he was to fight numbers of times to have his name removed from association with a film, this was one instance in which he desired the credit he deserved. Unfortunately, Zimbalist was not there to make the case for Gore, though probably he also would not have been succcessful. At the last stages of filming, after Gore had returned to New York, Zimbalist unexpectedly died of a heart attack. “I was more upset than I thought I would be by Sam Z’s death,” Gore wrote to Isherwood that fall. “It almost doesn’t do to get to like anybody if he is going to die on you.”

  Despite his efforts during the rest of 1958 to find a producer for Fire to the Sea, Gore had no success. There were too many things wrong with the play, including the general assumption that even a good Civil War play would have difficulty attracting a sufficient Broadway audience. Producers wanted another comedy from him, not a historical dramatic play. “My career as a dramatist has come to a grinding halt,” he confessed to Isherwood in the late fall. “No star will do the Civil War play.” Before going to Rome in April, he had told Tom Driberg, “I should love a British visit, but I am deep in a play for the fall, and my novel about Julian.” In April he had published in the Nation, the beginning of a long association, an essay on satire, “The Unrocked Boat: Satire in the 1950s,” with some sharp analysis of American cultural and political distaste for satirical art, including the observation that “the Christian victory, though it did not bring peace on earth, did at least manage to put a severe leash on the satiric impulse…. If ever there was a people ripe for dictatorship it is the American people today. Should a home-grown Hitler appear, whose voice, amongst the public orders, would be raised against him in derision? Certainly no voice on television: ‘Sorry, the guy has a lot of fans. Sure, we know he’s bad news, but you can’t hurt people’s feelings. They buy soap, too.’” Even when he wrote on subjects ostensibly literary, his comment was now becoming increasingly political. Louis Auchincloss wrote to tell him he thought it his finest essay yet, a brilliant piece. Late in the spring he went out to Long Island for a week of brainstorming with librettist Howard Dietz and composer Arthur Schwartz at Dietz’s home. They had proposed he write the book for a new satirical musical based on a recent popular novel, The King from Ashtabula. Since the success of Visit he had had numerous such proposals, including from Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers. Each time his agent Harold Franklin urged him to do it. Each time he responded, “I have never read the press of any musical in which the book was ever praised. It’s always the weak point. You know, ‘Had it not been for a banal book by Gore Vidal this would have soared.’” Despite the attractive company of Lucinda Ballard, a theatrical costume designer and Deitz’s wife, the week did not prove productive. Each time Gore proposed an idea as they walked in Dietz
’s lovely garden, Dietz, full of energy though suffering from the onset of Parkinson’s disease, and Schwartz, “solemn, rabbinical, and rather humorless,” would shoot it down.

  At Edgewater through the summer and fall he returned to Julian, trying to set up the opening chapters. “No more movies for some time,” he had promised himself and Paul Bowles, “and perhaps, if things work as they ought, I shall be novel-writing next year. I find I miss prose. It has been four years since I have written anything but clattering dialogue. I persist for the money: in another year I shall be financially independent. Also, it is delightful to be patronized as a corrupted hack by the corrupt hacks. I have never been quite so pleased with myself.” Actually, the summer at Edgewater was dreary and wet. “I still have occasional attacks of my Roman fever—a spiritual fever, that is, and I could, I think, live there till the end. But I am disloyal to the house and the river: neither is at fault that it is in America.” Anaïs, eager to have his help, wrote a bitter account of her own Hollywood disappointments, to which he responded sympathetically, though he also teased her about the credibility of her diary. “No one will believe your diaries, you know, which will insure you an immortal niche amongst the fabulists: oh, to have it all ways! … Yes, Europe was wonderful. I had the best four weeks of my life in Rome, seeing people I’d not seen in ten years, recapturing that time, less the pain…. And I suddenly find myself longing to live in Rome … the first urge I have had in eight years to be any place but home. You are right about California. I tend to go mad there: eat too much, drink too much (I am now thin, abstemious and quite unconquerable in spirit.) I am out of the MGM contract at last and I have no plans for another picture.”

  By late 1958, despite his promise to himself and his general disinclination, he was working on another film. When he received a request from Sam Spiegel, an Austrian-born independent producer whom he already knew from Los Angeles, to write a movie version of Tennessee Williams’s Garden District, he could not resist. Spiegel’s 1954 production of On the Waterfront had been a commercial and artistic success. Tennessee had declined to do the adaptation himself. Soon after Spiegel telephoned Williams to buy the film rights for Suddenly, Last Summer, the second of the two Garden District plays, Gore, in early autumn 1958, joined Tennessee and Spiegel in Miami. “Sam was on a boat. I went to stay at the Dupont Plaza Hotel, and Tennessee was also there,” Gore recalled, “and it was just to have a chat about the script and so on. I was being auditioned, I guess. Tennessee had insisted on me.” When he received the assurance that he would be the sole scriptwriter, he agreed, partly as a favor to Tennessee. Julian went on the back burner again, as did a production of March to the Sea. A brash, aggressive producer whom some thought vulgar and undiplomatic, Spiegel soon signed Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Katharine Hepburn for the principal roles. Clift, a movie actor of great talent, with Oscar nominations for A Place in the Sun and From Here to Eternity, whose alcoholism and homosexuality had devastated his personal life, had an apartment on the Upper East Side and sometimes cruised in some of Howard and Gore’s circle. “Montgomery Clift was in love with the actor Kevin McCarthy, Mary McCarthy’s brother,” Gore recalled. Kevin “was seriously married but very fond of Monty. He was also upset because he thought Monty was killing himself.” Gore found Spiegel a fussy, domineering producer, “always destructive and generally pointless. He loved the power of ordering script after script. On Night of the Generals I wrote, at his demand, a thousand pages. On the other hand, Sam was very intelligent, somewhat unusual in films.”

  Tennessee he was happy to see. The friendship remained strong, based on affection and a shared sense of humor, refracted through their awareness that a decade ago they had been relatively young together, though they saw less of one another since Gore had stopped going regularly to Key West. When Williams had an opening and a party, Gore was likely to be there. In London, Maria Britneva was a bond between them. They shared a group of New York friends and acquaintances, mostly on the Upper East Side, at Café Nicholson and at the round of parties and happenstance meetings in the area of East Fifty-fifth and East Fifty-eighth streets. Frankie Merlo, Tennessee’s lover and still Howard’s and Johnny Nicholson’s friend, and Tennessee continued their relationship, though occasionally with great difficulty and some separations. Probably America’s most famous playwright, Williams was certainly its most notorious. The raw emotional power of his dramatizations and subject matter had risen to the level of a cultural incitement. Since the success of Streetcar Williams’s ascendancy had had simultaneously a complicated downward drift, mostly due to the fact that he could never again replicate that triumph, partly because American mainstream culture found his themes offensive. A deeply flawed craftsman and aesthetician who repeatedly dramatized versions of the same hysteria, by the late 1950s Williams, an addictive personality, sustained his nerves on a well-stocked pharmacopoeia of Seconal and sleeping, pills. Success and stability were slipping away. Hysterically, though not inaccurately, he believed that many critics, and society in general, were eager to bring him down. That Spiegel wanted to make a major movie of Suddenly, Last Summer was both daring and prescient. It dramatized both late-1950s cultural repression and the incipient countercurrents that would radically change sexual politics in the 1960s.

  Before returning to New York to work on the script. Gore went to Palm Beach with Tennessee to visit the Kennedys, vacationing at Joseph Kennedy’s Palm Beach estate. Jackie, who had heard that Gore and Tennessee were in Miami, eagerly invited them to lunch, excited about the opportunity to meet the famous playwright. The rather apolitical Tennessee, who had heard of neither of the Kennedys, took Gore at his word that Jack was likely one day to be President. “I hadn’t realized how long it was from Miami, so I drove. We were an hour late for lunch. The Bird was restive, blaming it on my driving. I said, ‘I’m certainly not going to let you drive.’ So we did a lot of quibbling on the way. Then we had a great lunch.” When they arrived, Jack was target-shooting on the lawn, apparently with results that indicated he was a poor shot. Tennessee asked for the rifle and immediately shot three bull’s-eyes. Jackie flattered the famous playwright, saying she was jealous of her half-brother Tommy, whom she mistakenly believed Tennessee had taken to Coney Island in 1951. As if already running for higher office, Jack, still a senator, praised one of Tennessee’s less successful plays, Summer and Smoke. In a good mood, Tennessee whispered to Gore as, going in for lunch, they walked behind Jack, “Look at that ass.” “You can’t cruise our next President,” Gore sternly said. To Williams the young couple looked far too attractive ever to qualify for the White House. If Gore had told Tennessee about the stirring of his own dormant political aspirations, the playwright presumably would have told him the same thing.

  In September 1958 Gore went to California, “to get a director and star for his … play,” Isherwood remarked in his diary. “I do like him. He is handsome, sad, sardonic, plump—quite Byronic in a way…. Gore’s favorite quotation ‘I am the Duchess of Malfi still.’ He sees himself as an exchamp, out of condition and punchy who still has a fight in him.” Some of his fight was with the Beats, particularly Kerouac, whose success he resented, partly because he thought Kerouac’s prose flaccidly antiliterary, almost incoherent. Also, if the public wanted to read Kerouac, why would they want to read him? “Gore regards me,” Isherwood observed, “also as a neglected writer of quality, so he feels a bond between us.” Gore also felt a bond, though of a thinner sort, with Mailer, at least in their mutual detestation of the Beats. Mailer had been unable to repeat the success of The Naked and the Dead. Both his second novel, Barbary Shore in 1951, and his third, The Deer Park in 1955, had been poorly received. Mailer had begun to redefine himself as a political and cultural critic, his new authorial persona soon to have its 1959 debut in Advertisements for Myself in which, as Gore had started to do, Mailer first found his distinctive nonfictional voice as an essayist. When Mailer, having decided to try for a theatrical production of his own adapt
ation of The Deer Park, looked for a helpful private audience for a reading of the play, he invited Gore and Montgomery Clift to join him and his wife, Adele, at their apartment on Perry Street in the Village. Gore’s opinion as successful playwright would carry some weight. When Gore asked if he could bring Elaine Dundy, Mailer said yes. The Tynans had moved to New York in September 1958, Gore delighted that Ken had accepted The New Yorker’s offer that he try a two-year stint as its theater critic. Soon after his return from England in March, Gore had queried Tom Driberg, “What news of Ken, et al? or did I dream these wraiths in a nodding winter?” Suddenly, six months later, the Tynans were part of the New York scene, Ken as flamboyantly distinctive as ever, Elaine as energetically explosive, now herself the author of a successful novel. Gore saw “a good deal of the Tynans,” he wrote to Driberg. “He has raised the level of criticism or rather indicated how it might be raised in New York, a hick town which attracts the world’s venality if not affection. But I don’t see the effect of his work lasting; we don’t like that sort of thing.” Eager to introduce them to his New York friends, he hosted a party in their honor in November 1958, guests shoulder to shoulder at the small East Fifty-fifth Street apartment, many of them theater distingués like Moss Hart, Ruth Ford, Zachary Scott, Adolph Green, and Betty Comden, eager to meet the West End’s enfant terrible who now was to have some of the fate of Broadway in his hands. “I gave a party for the Tynans,” Gore wrote to Tom Driberg, “and it all went well until Ken, goaded beyond endurance, took Norman Mailer apart at supper.”