Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  At Edgewater in summer 1958 the Dupees introduced Gore to two of their younger friends, a married couple, both in publishing, Barbara Zimmerman and Jason Epstein, well-educated children of successful, assimilated Ashkenazic Jewish families in the Boston area. Barbara had come to New York in 1950 at the age of twenty-one from a literary education at Radcliffe. In 1951 at Doubleday, where they both worked, she had met Jason Epstein, a recent Columbia University graduate who was serving as a publishing intern. At sixteen he had entered Columbia during one of its most expansively exciting times, when the combination of older students whose educations had been delayed by the war and an exemplary literary-intellectual faculty created one of the golden moments of American higher education. With Columbia his campus, New York City his world, Jason flourished. His four years at Morningside Heights had been the most formative of his life, exposing him to great minds and great books, filling him with enthusiasm for the continuing education of the mind. “The best years of my life,” he recalled. “I never got over them.” Publishing, in the still-old-fashioned world of the fifties, seemed the perfect venue, a world in which literary and intellectual values maintained their traditional prominence. Bestsellers supported but did not dominate editorial decisions. A bright intern could rise quickly. “I thought I’d go to work for a week in publishing. I didn’t want to write a Ph.D. I didn’t want to be a teacher.” At Columbia his favorite teacher, among figures like Lionel Trilling, Richard Chase, Mark Van Doren, and Quentin Anderson, had been Andrew Chiappe, whom Barbara thought “a slightly tragic, slightly comic figure and a nice man…. He was hard to be fond of because he was a very isolated, lonely, needy guy. Very dandyish, rather arch and very funny.” Through Chiappe, the best man at the Epsteins’ wedding in 1953, they met Fred Dupee, whom Jason found “enchanting, indescribable. One of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known.” Soon Jason published Dupee’s Henry James in the new Anchor-Doubleday paperback series which, with Chiappe as consultant, he initiated. “Fred was wonderfully attractive, very, very good-looking, and brilliant. The mind was wonderful. I wish he’d written more. What he wrote was wonderful, but he should have done more. That was the pity. The essays were so good. If he had had a little more edge to him, he could have been Orwell or someone like that. He had the right sensibility. Something held him back.” By the mid-fifties the Epsteins and Dupees were warm friends, and both couples, intensely literary, had connections to people who were already part of Vidal’s world. Gore, Barbara Epstein remembered, “had movie-star looks…. He had already published quite a number of books. We all fell in love with him…. We were all so young. I was twenty-eight, Gore thirty-three, Jason twenty-nine. We were all very adorable.” With the Dupees they went regularly to Edgewater, usually in the afternoons, each couple with a young child whom Gore mostly ignored. “Jason and Gore liked one another and were very good friends. They had similar temperaments in the sense of being very anarchic and funny and smart.”

  Working on the script of Suddenly, Last Summer at Edgewater into the winter of 1958-59, Gore was happy to escape the cold weather for a Florida visit to consult with Tennessee and Sam Spiegel. Filming soon began in England, the outdoor scenes shot in Spain, the locations partly determined by Elizabeth Taylor’s tax considerations. Gore kept away from both filming locations. He made some progress with Julian, whose completion, he realized, would take at least two, perhaps three years of concentrated writing. But his focus on the novel was partly undermined by his increasingly revived interest in doing something political, both in literature and in life, though soon the two could not be separated. With something political in mind, he soon revived discussions of a television drama based on episodes in the early life of his grandfather, which Manulis had encouraged years before. The possibility of a brief, in fact singular, revival of his career as a television dramatist he found appealing. He was soon at work on a script that he had ready for performance by late fall 1959. As a dramatist, scriptwriter, and novelist, he had opportunities to be in the public eye, some of which he regularly took, particularly appearances on radio and television talk shows. By late 1959 he had appeared numbers of times on the most widely viewed, Jack Paar’s Tonight Show. At best, talk-show hosts thought him good for their ratings, at worst a class act mixed in with the talking chimpanzees, with one of which, the infamous J. Fred Muggs, he literally found himself paired early one morning on Dave Garroway’s Today. Handsome, articulate, distinctively himself, the camera liked Gore. Despite the occasional butterflies in his stomach, he enjoyed the opportunity to be famous, or at least notorious. Though he made such television appearances as an author-dramatist, his remarks, especially with the wide-ranging Paar, were often political. And he and Paar liked one another. With the young David Susskind, who courted controversy in a pioneering, issue-oriented talk show on local New York television, he was even more at home, welcomed regularly for long discussions. Producers and talk-shows hosts liked his charm, his wit, his good looks, his ability to talk casually and interestingly about well-known people, and his talent for the acceptably irreverent, effectively expressed. If such entertaining talk was ultimately about very little or even nothing, that hardly mattered. It cost him little. He simply talked, with professional self-projection, his presence and ego expansive, gratified. A public figure of sorts, it made sense to stay in the public eye, if the price were small. Like a professional performer, he kept his nerves and nervousness behind the curtain.

  That summer, in late August and September, he spent three weeks in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, which he had never visited before, thinking through a new play on a political subject. He had conceived the play in its basic outlines while strolling on an abysmally hot day in July on the lawn at Edgewater, having just reread Henry James’s The Tragic Muse. He imagined the structure of the play as a Jamesian series of reversals and exposures. The main characters came fully to mind. Soon after his return from the Cape, he wrote the first draft of The Best Man with his usual swiftness. Hoping to have it on Broadway early in 1960, he began to push the wheels that would make it move into place, the first step getting the play into the hands of the producer Roger L. Stevens. When Stevens’s young assistant, Lyn Austin, read it and immediately told her boss, “We must do it,” the production assessments and process began, with the target an early-1960 Broadway premiere. Gore himself had in mind the possibility of being before the public not only in literature but in life. The visit with Tennessee in 1958 to the Kennedys at Palm Beach had begun to stir his dormant political ambitions. If Jack Kennedy could be a senator, why could he not be something equal or even better? Why should he not carry on his grandfather’s legacy? By early 1959 it had become clear that Kennedy would be a formidable candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. The television drama based on T. P. Gore, to be called The Indestructible Mr. Gore, and to appear as a live broadcast on the NBC Sunday Showcase in December 1959, with Gore himself as narrator, had originated in his mind three years earlier. But his decision to proceed with it now may have been inseparable from his burgeoning political preoccupations.

  At Hyde Park he visited Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom he had a connection through his father and whom he now admired considerably more than he had ever admired her husband. When in spring 1959 he purchased for a modest sum the Hyde Park Playhouse, a summer theater, in an effort to save it from extinction, he got Mrs. Roosevelt’s attention. Interested in local cultural affairs, she invited him to her home, where he quickly discovered he had a cool, perceptive, and amiably patronizing great lady with whom to discuss politics. Why not consider running for Congress from the 29th Congressional District? he mused in her presence. Heavily Republican, it had not elected a Democrat in fifty years. It might be worth a try. She did not at first encourage him, suspicious that his views might still be more T. P. Gore than FDR. She soon let him know that she would support his candidacy, which, as he thought about it, began to seem to him feasible. His face and name were familiar to many from TV. His political b
ackground and instincts were strong. He was an excellent public speaker. With his handsome house at Edgewater, he was very much a Dutchess County resident. With the Democratic Party so used to defeat, the power brokers might find him attractive enough to carry the banner, if not to victory then to an advantageous loss. Perhaps he could revive the political career he thought he had relinquished when he had published The City and the Pillar. If it was wishful thinking, it had some solid basis in the reality of the moment. If it was incompatible with his resumption of his career as a novelist and if it would certainly put on hold again the writing of Julian, this did not seem sufficient deterrent. If the question of how his sexual identity might affect his political opportunities and what such a change in career would mean to Howard ever arose, the answers made no difference to his decision. After some discussion with the crucial people, particularly Joe Hawkins, the Democratic Party county chairman, it was clear to him that the nomination was his for the asking. During the late fall of 1959, when The Best Man went into rehearsal, Gore had a secret known only to a very few: he had decided to run for Congress.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Something to Say

  1960-1963

  Suddenly only two things were on his mind—politics and the theater. They were inseparable, though. The Best Man had been conceived as an expression of political ideas. If it were successful, it would provide him with all the advantages of a Broadway hit and a highly visible platform from which to pursue the Gore passion for practical politics. No matter how hard he had tried to be just literary, financial exigency had forced him to be literary in an extraliterary way. He had no intention of living in a garret. Life without a certain modest amount of freedom and comfort seemed unacceptable, and comfort was readily obtainable. His “hack” writing had provided that. Though there was only a middling equity in reserve, he had no special desire to be rich, his highest fantasy of wealth that he would never again have to worry about the cost of having his manuscripts typed. He was confident that if necessary he could always knock out a screenplay assignment. A Broadway hit, as Visit had been, would take care of some years of financial need and provide him security for the three years he needed for Julian, the first two chapters of which he had written at last in April 1959. Victor Weybright soon agreed to publish in a Signet paperback original, to be called Three, a reprint of Williwaw, A Thirsty Evil, and the first appearance of the Julian fragment, scheduled for spring 1962. When Gore showed the chapters to Louis Auchincloss, he got strong encouragement. “It is now your bounden duty to drop everything … and get on with Julian. It is just as good as your own outrageous conceited estimate of it.”

  But the political siren sang, the temptation to try to metamorphose into an actual officeholder suddenly more strongly felt than it had been since his discussions years before with his grandfather about the New Mexico option. His attempt to go to Washington to fight for justice had begun, at least as an idea, as early as 1956, during the Stevenson campaign against Eisenhower. Gore attempted to help Stevenson and the local Dutchess County Democrats by getting Kennedy, a contender for the vice-presidential nomination, to make an appearance in the district. “DEAR GORE,” the Massachusetts senator had telegraphed, “AS I AM OBLIGED TO MAKE TRIP TO THE WEST AT REQUEST OF STEVENSON HEADQUARTERS IT WILL BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO COME TO POUGHKEEPSIE. I HOPE YOU WILL EXPRESS MY REGRETS TO THE PEOPLE THERE WITH BEST WISHES JACK KENNEDY.” The Dutchess County Democratic leaders knew Vidal as an enthusiastic supporter with friends in the highest political places. He had sometime late in the fall confided to Jackie his plan to run for Congress. Jack thinks it’s a marvelous idea, she wrote to him, urging him to consult with her husband. The two of them could decide when would be the best time for Jack to speak in his behalf, probably, she thought, nearer to the election than March or April. She had been Gore’s guest for an evening in New York and gratefully appreciated his having taken her to a party at the Scotts’ and introducing her to the Tynans. It had been a great thrill for which she thanked him effusively and signed with her usual XO (hugs and kisses) Jackie.

  Though he had supported Stevenson in two previous elections, he admired Kennedy. He had no doubt that Kennedy would win the nomination and election, and saw himself running quite compatibly, both ideologically and temperamentally, on the same ticket. Also, familiarity bred a desire for power for himself. Perhaps his own turn was coming, at least his opportunity for some high office. Why should not the Exeter schoolboy who had been “the senator from Virginia” be the congressman from the 29th District? Of course there were obstacles. His private life might be used against him, and the district was heavily Republican. Both, he thought, could be managed, if not overcome. After a brief discussion with Kennedy about Jack’s promiscuous sex life, Gore felt reassured. They don’t dare, Kennedy told him. Otherwise you’ll do the same to them. Gore himself saw that the best way to deal with voter-registration odds was to be famous or at least widely recognized. His television appearances on network talk shows helped. If he were to have another Broadway success, he would be in even greater demand. If the play dramatized contemporary American national politics, the propinquity between that subject and his own congressional campaign had to be noticed.

  Besides, he now felt he had something to say. The message was slightly to the left of liberal, to be measured less in relation to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party than by the great distance he had come from his grandfather’s conservatism. Though some radical ideas and impulses were simmering within him, his intent was to provide reasonable new ideas, a mixture of common sense and intellectual perception. Philosophically he was now closer to Franklin Roosevelt than to T. P. Gore, particularly on economic issues. If the government were going to take such great sums in taxes out of his pockets, he felt it should at least spend the money on reasonable programs that would benefit the public, the most important of which, he believed, should be federal funds for education. Except for its small Northeastern liberal establishment, the Republican Party still defined itself in opposition to the New Deal. Except for local porkbarreling, so too did T. P. Gore’s heirs, the Southern Democratic oligarchy, whose major concern was to keep power in white hands. Civil rights was the enemy at home. Abroad, for the right and center of both parties, and for the Republican liberals, the enemy was international Communism. Vast portions of the government budget went with bipartisan support to military defense, to the great profit of the powerful defense industry. In Korea we had fought a war to an embarrassing stalemate to prevent Communist expansion. At home we had experienced Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign to keep the Communist conspiracy from turning America red. Adlai Stevenson had lost the two most recent presidential elections to Dwight Eisenhower, a bland, hands-off President who kept the Republican right and left in perfect anti-Communist, pro-defense, cool-on-civil-rights balance. It was a winning formula John Kennedy admired for practical reasons. If he could add to it youth, “vigor”—a favorite Kennedy buzzword—and the assertion that it was time for a change, he might be able to defeat the likely Republican candidate, Vice President Richard Nixon.

  Kennedy, who had few ideas, let alone new ones, looked to charisma and political organization. Vidal would have been happy to rely on charisma and political organization. He had some of the first but little of the second. He also was challenging a well-entrenched Republican incumbent, J. Ernest Wharton, a colorless, fifty-year-old, semiarticulate archconservative dentist and dairy famer from Columbia County, in an overwhelmingly Republican district. And, though he hoped to win, Gore had no doubt that, to whatever extent he was in the race for personal satisfaction, he was also there because he believed that ideas counted and that he had an invaluable opportunity to contribute to a public discourse in which the commitment of the Founding Fathers to open discussion would be realized in political debate. Unlike Jack Kennedy, he had a strong residual idealism, especially on issues of justice, partly an expression of his intellectual honesty and his determination never to falsify ideas. Intel
lect and ideas were sacred. So too were first principles. It was not a self-definition that even in the best of practical circumstances offered much hope for political success. Kennedy knew what had to be done to get votes, including manufacturing a nonexistent “missile gap.” Vidal knew how to articulate with witty precision ideas and arguments he believed in. He was to put his strongest emphasis on advocating federal aid for education and American recognition of China. In broader terms he advocated dialogue with one’s enemies, the movement toward eliminating nuclear weapons, a smaller defense budget, strong antipollution measures, and the abolition of capital punishment. If these were not necessarily winning views in the 29th Congressional District, they were certainly provocative ones. If they were not radical ideas, they were definitely to the left of much of the party that would nominate him. Whatever the reasons to be pessimistic about the electoral process, he was not. Something within him, perhaps beyond reason, had shaped him to believe that it was his moral responsibility to try to improve things, and that Americans, with better leadership, would respond to a call to justice and common sense.