Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  When rehearsals for The Best Man began in January 1960, Gore had already known for some months that the New York State Democratic convention, when it met in April, would offer him, and he would accept, its congressional nomination for the 29th District. The statewide party bosses would approve whatever candidate the leaders of the 29th District, which included Dutchess and parts of four neighboring counties, agreed on. The district had been heavily gerrymandered to favor the Republicans. In the late fall of 1959 Vidal met with Joe Hawkins, a ruggedly handsome Poughkeepsie politician, a traditional mainstream Democrat with a keen sense of practical politics, who had been alerted by mutual friends to their eminent young neighbor’s interest in the nomination. Probably the 29th District Democratic Party leaders knew that Vidal’s skills as a playwright and screenwriter had enough of a political dimension for him to have been invited in 1957 to the White House—an invitation he had accepted—by Eisenhower’s chief of staff to help prepare a draft of the President’s response to Governor Orval Faubus when he threatened to defy legal orders to desegregate Arkansas schools. Hawkins, whom Patsy Walsh, one of his colleagues, recalled as “a typical Irish politician, down to earth and cigar-smoking,” liked what he saw and heard. It was the beginning of a working friendship. Eight years older than Gore, with flashing bright-blue eyes, dark hair, and a cheerful sense of humor, a party loyalist who lived and breathed politics, Hawkins dominated the district’s Democratic organization. One of his political co-conspirators, William Walsh, who had known Gore since 1950, when he had served as the bank’s lawyer for the purchase of Edgewater, recalls that he brought Hawkins and Gore together for lunch at the Nelson House in Poughkeepsie in late fall 1959. Desperate for a creditable candidate to make a respectable run, Hawkins felt he had his man. Within a short time the arrangement was sealed. In return for the nomination Gore committed himself to do his honorable best. Hawkins had good reason to be impressed. The grandson of a famous senator, the young man looked impressively telegenic; he spoke vigorously and persuasively; and he knew, or knew people who knew, the elite of the Democratic Washington political world, from Eleanor Roosevelt to John Kennedy. Though knowledgeable on national issues, he would need to acquaint himself with the concerns of a district of dairy farmers, but that seemed easily within reach. If he had any liability, it was that he might not have or be able to simulate the common touch, to act on the wisdom that wit and intellect are counterproductive in American politics. Still, Hawkins had no doubt that Gore was the best that the 29th District Democrats could do, and Vidal in absolute terms had many attractions. Registration statistics, not the candidate, were the obstacle.

  Like millions of others, Hawkins probably saw in mid-December on NBC’s Sunday Showcase Vidal’s The Indestructible Mr. Gore, one of the last television dramas broadcast live, with Gore himself as narrator. With the help of the producer, Robert Alan Arthur, whom Gore had worked with before and whom he respected, he had created a script that was stunningly effective in conveying the character of young T. P. Gore in a dramatic presentation representing both the personal life and political hopes of the Senator-to-be. The Senator’s past and his grandson’s present were inextricably mixed into the foreground of the teleplay. As narrator, Gore appeared regularly on camera, himself a character of sorts in the drama, an emotionally engaged voice-over, the intermediary between the story and its audience. As much there as the characters, played by William Shatner, E. G. Marshall, and Inger Stevens, the narrator by association inevitably projected his own political credentials. The performers themselves were anxious, aware that this was live television, without the security of videotape. When he took Inger Stevens’s hands in his, he was surprised that they were dry. “‘Are you really calm?’ And she said, ‘I’m not,’ and she was trembling.” E. G. Marshall “kept trying to drive me crazy. It was live, and I had no cards. I was going to have a TelePrompTer, and it broke down. So there I had eight million people watching me, and I had no preparation because I hadn’t learned the lines…. Marshall, who never knew his lines, would always be seated at a table, and his dialogue would be in front of him. When we got to that technical run-through, they had patched up something. Not quite the cues I’d expected but it wasn’t too bad, only you could see me squinting, trying to read the lines from the thing…. Marshall said, ‘Don’t worry, Gore. It’s only television.’ When I got to my scene with him, E. G. went up on his lines. Very satisfactory.”

  In his teledrama Gore purposely exonerates his grandfather in the story of the blind girl’s pregnancy. Vidal presents the claim as false and T. P. Gore’s opposition to a shotgun wedding heroic and principled. Gore had multiple reasons for tampering with the truth. The most important was that his grandmother, increasingly ill, suffering from a debilitating case of Parkinson’s disease, would be watching the program. Also, it would not serve his own image to have his grandfather so depicted. With one exception, the Senator’s outraged brother Dixie, this was the official family version everyone wanted to hear and which Gore himself wished were true. Dixie let his nephew know he did not like the falsification. The program deserved and received superb reviews, in which Dot took great pleasure. In April 1960, during a short visit to Washington to publicize The Best Man, Gore saw her briefly. “She had two or three strokes and got over each one till the last,” he recalled. “She was shaky. She shook to death, literally. She couldn’t stay still. They wouldn’t give her enough drugs. So with the shaking, she had a heart attack. The doctor was the same one who used to give my mother morphine. Dot took some Demerol, but it wasn’t enough, and she wanted more. She would cry out for the Demerol, and the doctor would say, ‘Oh, no, it will be habit-forming.’ I did my best to try and get some black-market Demerol, but I didn’t know how. And she wanted to die.” Nina, who had seen the telecast, wrote from Southampton, “I loved the way Dad finally came off, and I loved how soaringly happy it made Mother—you should be very pleased and proud.”

  Soon, with Joe Hawkins’s encouragement, Gore had begun to accept invitations to speak at district events. Within four months he had made at least thirty appearances, mostly before business groups and fraternal organizations, especially when the word got out that the well-known playwright and television personality was available. The most frequent questions addressed to him were “What’s Jack Paar really like?” and what kind of sexual pervert was Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer, which had been released in December 1959 to reviews mostly hostile on moral grounds but to great box-office success. Jack Paar, he would answer, is the same off-camera as he is on. About Sebastian he would be good-humoredly evasive, on the assumption that anyone who asked the question already knew he was homosexual. Anyway, discussions of political ideas needed to be avoided until he declared his candidacy, though his appearance late in the year before a group of Dutchess County judges allowed him to deliver a cleverly argued, powerfully phrased speech in a debate on capital punishment whose conclusion declared that it “is nothing but the blood vengeance society takes upon one of its members. Society’s anger is often justified: there have been terrible crimes. But society’s vengeance merely compounds the crime.” The audience probably did not fully appreciate the self-reflexive humor of his example of how sorely most of us are tempted at one time or another to murder someone. “On the morning when I have had an unjustified bad notice in the newspapers (all my bad notices are unjustified), I have often drifted into a bloodthirsty reverie,” he told them. “Suppose I got on the train at Darien with Mr. Orville Prescott of the Times. I sit next to him in the club car. He doesn’t know what I look like despite his venomous attack. I engage him in conversation. We have a martini. I slip a tablet of deadly poison into his. He takes it. I get off at the next stop. He dies in horrible agony at home that night and no one suspects me because I was in New York. I have pulled off any number of brilliant crimes in my daydreams. But why don’t I do them in life? Because I am stopped by my moral sense.”

  Fortunately, Orville Prescott was not the New York Times dram
a reviewer. The Best Man opened at the Morosco Theater on March 31, 1960, to unanimously positive reviews, especially from the Times’s estimable Brooks Atkinson. From the moment the cast had assembled for rehearsals at an untenanted New York theater, the participants, especially co-producer Lyn Austin, knew it would be a success. “We were all sitting in this space, on the stage actually,” Austin recalled, “and we began the reading, and I had this sort of tingle. You could just tell that it was coming right off the page. You knew then.” Before he’d even had script in hand, Gore had gone the previous summer to the most powerful New York theatrical producer, Roger Stevens, partly because Stevens, a Democratic partisan, had a strong interest in politics. An active Stevenson supporter, in 1956 he had been chairman of the candidate’s finance committee. As a young man in the 1930s Stevens had made a fortune in real estate in Detroit and had become the leading sponsor of the Ann Arbor Drama Festival. From there, in 1949, he came to Broadway, where he co-produced a hit musical version of Peter Pan, the first of dozens of profitable hits during the next decade. In 1951 he became famous as the leader of a real-estate syndicate that bought the Empire State Building for $50 million, an astronomical sum then. Probably Gore had met Stevens in 1957, at the time of the Broadway success of Visit to a Small Planet, perhaps not until summer 1959. Usually Lyn Austin was the first reader of manuscripts under consideration by the Playwrights’ Company. But Stevens, she recalled, “had already read it and had pretty much decided to do it…. I guess he read it first, because it was a pretty prestigious offering and he respected Gore.” Actually, Gore and Stevens had had dinner at the Colony to discuss the idea of the play before a word of it had been written. A big, balding, soft-spoken, impressive man, Stevens immediately liked the idea. From Provincetown, in August, Gore sent him the first act. Stevens was enthusiastic. He felt the same way about the second and third acts. In New York in late summer there was an instant rapport between Stevens and Gore and between Lyn Austin and Gore. Excited about the play and its author, the producers were determined to do everything in their power to have the success they believed the play merited.

  There were the two usual major concerns—casting and financing. Austin took charge of the former, Stevens the latter. An experienced, highly-regarded director, Joe Anthony, whom Stevens approached in October, agreed to direct. Having decided that Melvyn Douglas would be perfect for the leading role of William Russell, the Adlai Stevenson—like candidate, Lyn pursued him relentlessly, despite his reluctance to take on the demands of a Broadway play. Everyone had assured her that she would never get him. Gradually she wore down his resistance, appealing to his political values as a liberal Democrat, married as he was to Helen Gahagan Douglas, the former congresswoman from California who had been savaged by Nixon as “the Pink Lady.” Finally, after a series of calls from her Swiss hotel that threatened to preempt her mountain holiday, Lyn persuaded him to sign on. With Douglas in place, Lee Tracy, a veteran Broadway and film actor who was to receive an Oscar nomination for his performance in the film version of The Best Man, agreed to play the Harry Truman–like character; Frank Lovejoy, the character loosely based on Richard Nixon; Leora Dana, the crucial role of William Russell’s estranged wife. When the cast and author met for the first time, mutual respect was high, camaraderie warm, the expectation of success strong. It seemed to all the participants time for a sophisticated play about American presidential politics that treated politicians as complicated human beings with multiple agendas, all of which embodied their strengths and weaknesses as people. None of the principals, the performers immediately saw, were either all good or all bad. The read-through went well. The lines were crisp, witty, intelligent, the characterizations interesting, the structure of the play logically and emotionally driven both by external events and inner necessities. A Stevenson supporter, Douglas felt he could do an inspired job with his role.

  If the underlying message was that American politics safeguarded the republic by excluding the worst candidates even if at the price of excluding the best, everyone recognized that the premise was plausible, perhaps even convincing. After reading the script, which Gore had sent him, Jack Kennedy said to Jackie, in regard to William Russell’s womanizing, “‘Is Gore writing about me?’” She passed the gist of the conversation along to the playwright. Gore’s depiction of Kennedy’s two rivals appealed to the presidential hopeful. When Kennedy told Gore that “in a campaign, we don’t have all that much time to talk about the meaning of it all,” Gore agreed but said that “no audience would understand the shorthand that politicians talk in.” Neither Douglas nor Roger Stevens seemed especially bothered by Adlai Stevenson’s objections, communicated through Stevenson’s good friend Agnes Meyer, the widow of the former owner of the Washington Post. Stevenson feared that audiences would identify him with William Russell, the excessively high-minded candidate who has great difficulty making up his mind about whether he should use damaging information about the private life of his chief opponent. “I have always felt that one takes a moral position about actions,” Gore wrote to a correspondent some years later, “but not about people since people are capable at any given moment of a wide variety of responses both good and bad, and the more deeply one examines a character the more difficult it is to give out marks to the whole. I learned this with The Best Man. No one liked the play when they read it. The good guy tended to be vacillating (not to mention promiscuous which is supposed to be a bad thing), and the bad guy was decisive and a good husband, full of love. It was all just too peculiar. As Adlai Stevenson wrote unhappily to Roger Stevens, ‘it is an ugly play.’” For Stevens the situation was awkward. He was again one of Stevenson’s chief fund-raisers. Still, he could not be pressured on the matter, and its timeliness appealed to everyone connected to the play, especially the producer, who added that to the other attractions he presented to potential investors. With his usual adroitness, Stevens began to raise the $105,000 necessary to bring it to Broadway. Vidal’s share of this was an advance of $500. If the play were to succeed, he would have 5 percent of the first $5,000 weekly gross and a larger percentage thereafter. If not, he would receive nothing more than the $500. Joe Anthony, who would also share in the profits, persuaded Gore to lighten the ending considerably. In the original version, the Nixon-like candidate gets the nomination. In revision, as the three men talked over the script through the fall and early winter, a dark-horse candidate, eventually triumphant, was introduced. Sharply critical remarks about Eisenhower and Stevenson were eliminated. All references to which party’s convention was being depicted were removed. When Stevens made a deal with the Sheraton Hotel chain that it pay for the sets, references to the Sheraton were substituted for “early Conrad Hilton.” At one of the rehearsals in January, to which Gore had invited Louis Auchincloss, Gore agreed immediately to a change in the dialogue prompted by the director, who thought a particularly witty remark about the Republican matrons of the country would offend some of the audience. Astounded, Louis, who did not know that Gore had decided to run for Congress, protested that such a witty remark should not be cut. Gore repeated, “Cut it!”

  In mid-March, after a week of fine-tuning in Wilmington, Delaware, the company of The Best Man, nervous but anticipating success, took the train to Boston, where Stevens put them all up at the luxurious Ritz. Despite Stevens’s efforts, the play was not yet fully funded. Partly because of its political content, mostly because Stevens’s usual investors had taken heavy losses in recent plays, investors had been slow to commit themselves. Fortunately, the Boston reviews were excellent, the word of mouth descending to New York favorable. Lucien Price wrote Gore a long letter of analysis and praise. “Never in my lifetime had I expected to see and hear American politics handled so without gloves.” Variety’s critic wrote that “by the time The Best Man reaches Broadway, it should be ready for the hit class.” Nervous, at dinner with Elaine and Ken Tynan one evening during the Boston run, Gore expressed his anxiety. Ken assured him, Elaine recalled, “‘I know it�
�s going to be a hit. I can tell.’ It was nothing about, ‘Oh, it’ll be a hit, and that’s that.’ Ken simply knew and wanted Gore to know that he knew.” Stevens quickly disposed of the rest of the shares, including an investment by Howard of $1,575, or one unit, which represented three fourths of 1 percent of the value of the play. Two weeks later, on March 31, The Best Man premiered at the Morosco, the theater that Stevens thought perfect because of its reputation as the classiest house for serious drama. The first-night audience applauded warmly, the buzz in the theater cheerfully enthusiastic. Experienced theater hands, though, knew that the audience at a premiere often has special reasons to seem delighted. Gore and Lyn Austin, behind the railing in back of the orchestra at opposite sides of the theater, worried and paced. As usual, Roger Stevens did things in high style. Everyone went to Sardi’s for a champagne dinner party, which the producer hosted. Kit and Gene were there. Howard’s parents came. Gore’s father, handsomely at ease in evening dress, “loved the success and the glamour,” so it seemed to Howard. Nina, with whom Gore had not communicated for over two years, had not been invited. When rumors about the early reviews began to arrive, the response was ecstatic. The Variety reviewer called Stevens to tell him he planned to give the play a superlative notice. “The room began to buzz with a report that Walter Kerr of the New York Herald Tribune was calling the play ‘a knockout.’ Several minutes later, copies of the New York Daily News and the New York Mirror were available, with rave reviews. The Herald Tribune appeared at about twelve-thirty, and the rumor about Kerr proved to be correct. When Brooks Atkinson of the Times also pronounced The Best Man a hit, it very plainly was.” Gore was euphoric. The play was to run for 520 Broadway performances.