Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Returning to the daily grind of his campaign, the endless upbeat talks to every conceivable civic and political group in the face of formidable registration odds, Gore moved through the tedium of his July and August schedule. “Some days I do seven eight nine coffee hours with women with hats,” he wrote to Isherwood, his words coated with ambivalence and irony. “You cover an entire township or ward that way. They get maybe fifty women with hats in a room and you pop in and chat shyly about the Major Issues and then cut out. In addition, I address farm bureaus, labor picnics, party rallies…. Then there is the TV where recently on CBS I was quizzed just like the President on my Views. My answers were a lot like the President’s, too. I may not be very smart but I’m sincere and that’s come through which I think is a lot more important than making jokes or talking over people’s heads.” His assessment was mildly optimistic. “Jack, Jackie are doing well,” he told Elaine Dundy, “and he will win though the press has come out for Wm McKinley and will not back down, fearing the Democratic process’s great waiting goose. I am in terrible danger of winning myself. I’ve never worked so hard at anything.” His half-sister Nini came up to cover his labors for the Tennessee newspaper whose Washington correspondent she had become through the good offices of a well-known Washington journalist, a friend of the Kennedys. A conservative Republican, Nini “was reacting against her mother, a drunk, and her mother’s promiscuity and reacting against Jackie and Lee being fast,” Gore thought. “She was going to be the bluestocking. She was going to be the intellectual. She was going to be the one who read books and wrote books, the great brain…. I think she wrote rather viciously” about the campaign. “She never showed me, and I never asked. She was so right-wing, and I was a friend of Mrs. Roosevelt, and I introduced her to her, and she described Mrs. Roosevelt as the devil. It goes back to her own right-wing instincts, which come out of a battered childhood, and a battered child generally ends up trying to batter other people.” From Washington, Jackie, eager to provide practical help, sent Gore a copy of one of Jack’s pamphlets from his first campaign for the Senate and a detailed letter about what should go into his publicity material. She’d be interested to read it, as she knew everybody would, she wrote to him. She urged him to mail it to as many people in his district as possible and wait till nearer election time.

  In mid-August he finally succeeded, to the delight of local Democrats, in cashing in his most valuable celebrity chip. Kennedy came to Dutchess County. Newspaper photographs highlighted the two men standing together, identifying the congressional candidate as “a personal friend” of the presidential nominee. Joe Hawkins’s eyes worshipfully glittered with Irish pride. Actually, Kennedy’s determinative reason for coming to the 29th District was to mend fences with the still-unenthusiastic Eleanor Roosevelt. He knew he had little chance of carrying the area. But Mrs. Roosevelt’s approval would have national circulation. He wanted Gore to be his intermediary, which Gore was happy to be. In June he had kept Kennedy informed about his own campaign and about the attempts of people like Walter Reuther and himself to persuade Mrs. Roosevelt to be less hostile to Kennedy’s candidacy. “Needless to say,” he reported, “these sessions are always most interesting for what is not said. I have a hunch she was depressed by Stevenson’s waffling.” As to helping with Kennedy’s speeches, “I hardly have time to prepare my own … but if you want me to act as emissary to those liberal establishments to which I have a key (Ascoli, the Nation, PR, etc.), I’ll be happy to. I think at one point, if you have time, you should meet the various contiguous worlds of Norman Mailer, Philip Rahv, Trilling, etc. They view you with suspicion but I have a hunch you could win them around. If you like, I’ll set up something along those lines. Their influence is formidable.” They were, though, not votes or minds that Kennedy, at this point in his campaign, was interested in. But he did query Gore about how best to approach Mrs. Roosevelt, on which Gore gave detailed suggestions, including the necessity to keep Joe Kennedy out of the conversation if at all possible. On a mid-August Sunday, after a moderately successful lunch with Mrs. Roosevelt, Kennedy shared the platform at Hyde Park with Dutchess County Democrats, especially his “relative by marriage,” as the newspapers put it, at a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act. “Vidal has the will and the vigor and he understands the need for action in this changing world,” Kennedy told the press. The Hyde Park Independent headlined, “Kennedy Stumps for Vidal.” Because of a death in the family, Mrs. Roosevelt canceled her appearance at the rally. Kennedy praised her profusely. Later she issued a tepid endorsement.

  Wharton, meanwhile, at a self-confident, semiconcealed snail’s pace, kept to his sure-win, no-idea campaign. At their one appearance on the same platform, Wharton stolidly repeated his mantra, the solid true-red-white-and-blue American conservative versus the reckless-spending pinko-liberal. All Vidal had was personality, energy, and ideas, and sometimes a sharp tongue. Inevitably, both friends and enemies would stay in place. New York City newspapers, though, paid more attention to the 29th District than they ever before had to an upstate campaign. Gore could command press, a two-edged sword. When he excoriated the FCC for television’s low standards, particularly the prevalence of violence, Harriet Van Horne in the New York World Telegram devoted a full column in praise of his views. “As proof of how dreadful TV is, the Dutchess County candidate cited ‘14 Westerns in a row and rampant sadism.’” But Van Horne clearly saw the problem. “It was refreshing,” she concluded, “to meet Mr. Vidal, though his attitude toward the business of running for office seems to preclude his getting elected. You have to lust after the office, Mr. Vidal, act like Plain Folks, talk in platitudes, promise everything … and above all, pretend you’re a great fan of Westerns.” Wharton did not have to do any pretending. He was a natural. Gore was not capable of going far enough into pretense. Just before mid-September, the New York Times ran a sly but hostile feature article that capitalized on Gore’s penchant for witty observations and added distortions of its own. If he had indeed been “sprawled barefooted in a gilded fauteuil of his luxurious octagonal Empire study” and let “his cocker spaniel lick the Château d’Yquem off his fingers” in the presence of the reporter, which Vidal denies, highlighting such details among other possible details could only have been antagonistic journalism. So too the coded homophobic paragraph lead: “A bachelor, he lives in lonely splendor in an 1820 Greek Revival mansion.” Certainly he had made no pretense that he was just “Plain Folks,” and not to have anticipated hostility and effectively controlled the interview was characteristic of his general trustingness. In an unguarded moment he told the Times reporter, assuming the comment off the record, “If this were not a Presidential year, I might have a chance. As it is, every four years, about 20,000 extra people crawl out of the Hudson Gothic woodwork up here to vote for William McKinley.” The article’s author, Ira Freeman, Gore recalled, “giggled a lot and said, ‘I don’t know anything about politics.’ ‘So why were you sent here?’ He followed me around, polishing his misquotes. The usual New York Times ax job. Generally they didn’t cover campaigns that far north, but they made an exception in my case. They even went so far when The Best Man opened—it did get a very good review from Brooks Atkinson, and the Sulzbergers loved the play—but Lester Markell, who was in charge of the Sunday Magazine section, canvassed six writers to get an all-out attack on me. Rovere was the one I learned this from. They all turned him down except Douglass Cater, who’d been at Exeter with me. So he wrote this piece called ‘Advise and Dissent’ on The Best Man.’ Lester wanted to take care of the two fags—Allan Drury, who’d written a novel, and me. It was a fairly harmless piece, but the extent to which the New York Times will go to destroy people is to this day awe-inspiring. Look at their editorials on Clinton. But there comes a point at which you become so at home with your audience that there’s not much they can do about you.” Wharton and the Republicans widely publicized the insulting remark “about 20,000 extra peopl
e” crawling every fourth year “out of the Hudson Gothic woodwork up here to vote for William McKinley,” quoted by Ira Freeman in the Times. Whatever small chance Vidal had to attract non-Democratic votes evaporated. His campaign people knew it. Probably he did too, though it did not prevent his finishing out the campaign with a number of energetic flourishes, one of which was a quick trip to Berlin in early October, as the guest of Mayor Willy Brandt, for the opening of the German version of The Best Man as the lead play of the Festival of Berlin. It enabled him to publicize through banner headlines his anti-Communist beliefs and his support for protecting freedom in the divided city, including sending more American troops, perhaps the only instance ever in which he supported an American military presence in a foreign country. The Berlin trip would help counter the accusation that he was a pinko-liberal and demonstrate that, in contrast to Wharton, he had some interest in and knowledge about foreign affairs. He liked Brandt, who treated him as an American dignitary, and The Best Man, the only American play chosen for the festival, was warmly received. While in Berlin, he saw a number of existential symbolic plays, by Ionesco and Beckett among others, which gave him pause about his career as a playwright. Well-made realistic plays like The Best Man might be going out of fashion. Soon after his return, Harry Truman, a prototype for one of The Best Man’s main characters, came to nearby Fishkill to rally Dutchess and Putnam County Democrats in the best “Give ’em hell, Harry” style. A huge crowd came to Racine Manor, a handsome resort, to see the former President. A yellow fountain poured martinis, a red one Manhattans. Patsy Walsh was thinking, “Who would want to be a Republican?” As the well-known creator of a fictional portrait of the former President and as the local candidate for Congress, Vidal had the privilege of introducing Truman, whose old-fashioned integrity he praised. Infuriated at Nixon’s slurs against his patriotism, Truman attacked the Republican deficits and Nixon’s failures. The crowd loved it. Truman then returned the praise, introducing Gore, whom he strongly endorsed as “The Best Man.” “Hope I haven’t harmed you,” Truman said to Vidal at the end of the rally.

  Neither “The Best Man” nor even a respectable dark horse was to win in the 29th District. On Election Day Vidal voted the straight Democratic ticket. On election night, November 8, he drove to Democratic headquarters at Joe Hawkins’s office in Poughkeepsie with Elaine Dundy and his father, both of whom had come up to lend moral support. Still movie-star handsome, as always elegantly dressed and dignified, Gene drove. Howard sat with Elaine in the backseat. “When we got there and were just getting out of the car,” Elaine recalled, “Gene turned to Gore and said, ‘It’s just like another opening night, isn’t it?’ And Gore said in a really steely way, ‘With this exception, that it’s a fork in my life.’” They joined Joe Hawkins for the election-night ritual. Gore had brought with him signed copies of some of his novels to give as gifts to his campaign workers. Janet Caro’s copy of Messiah he had inscribed, “For Yallum—/Who plumbed the depths of human ingratitude and returned a finer person for her descent, in recognition of her organizational skill, her cunning on the telephone, her news-releases and her pluck—with the candidate’s homage and gratitude and love.” She had seen him at his articulate best and had felt the sting of his irritable worst.

  As the first returns came in and Gore carried Poughkeepsie, Elaine thought he might win. The experienced politicians in the crowded room knew better. He had carried Poughkeepsie by a moderate margin and lost the larger Poughkeepsie area. “None of the returns were any good, from the beginning,” Caro knew. “Poughkeepsie came in first, where he should have been doing well, and he wasn’t doing well enough.” Soon “the rural vote came in,” Elaine recalls, “and the room seemed to thin out considerably.” Though it would take a few days before the final vote was tallied, the results would not have been a surprise to anyone at Democratic election headquarters that night. He had done well, given the odds. With 43.3 percent of the vote, he had done better than any Democratic candidate in recent history and over 5 percent, or 20,000 votes, better than the Democratic national ticket. In the 29th District, Vidal was more popular than Kennedy. That he had failed to lure a large enough number of Republicans to vote for him surprised no one. Finally, “Gore said, ‘It’s over!’ and conceded it. We got into the car,” Elaine recalled, “came back to Edgewater. We all stayed up, except Gore, because the Kennedy thing was very, very close; we didn’t hear about California until the next day.” In his unhappy heart he was thinking, “‘Oh, no, not Jack also!’” Exhausted, he went to bed. “The next day he said—I heard him on the telephone—to his agent, ‘I’ve lost the election. Get me a job.’”

  With flashbulbs popping so frequently as to rival the neon signs, President-Elect Kennedy, greeted at the door by the proud author, swept into the Morosco Theater on December 6 to see The Best Man. Kennedy had barely won the election, probably only because he had been the beneficiary of some tainted Chicago votes that had enabled him to carry Illinois. Within a week after the election, from Miami where he had gone for some sunshine, Gore told the President-Elect, “If you had not won, I would have emigrated. I’m only sorry I won’t be in the House this January to help counter balance in some small way the powers of darkness gathering there. For the record, I did cut my Republican’s plurality by 54,000 votes; from 77,000 in ’56 to 23,000; I ran ahead of the ticket, carrying all the cities, losing all the countryside; a famous defeat, but still a defeat.” In fact, he had not been contemplating emigration, regardless of the results of the election. He had three suggestions for the inaugural speech: that the new administration challenge young people through the still-unnamed Peace Corps, that the administration energize the American people with a realistic but imaginative program for space exploration, and that the President give serious weight to the widespread anxiety that massive homogenizing forces in the culture threatened individualism. “I think a President who will openly recognize this fear for what it is, who shows a sensitivity to the origin of that fear will go a long way toward winning the sympathy and allegiance of the many.” As to himself, “If I can help you in any way, let me know. I am free as air. One request: my interest in elective office continues but I’m going to need some governmental experience to overcome the mysterious argument: what does a writer know about politics? If there is anything connected with education, foreign affairs and, God help us, culture (both Kultur and Kitsch) that I might do, in a general or specific way, remember me. Otherwise, I shall be branded forever as the candidate who wrote a movie for Elizabeth Taylor.” In his private mind he was dubious about running for office again. But he had not ruled it out, and his comparatively good showing gave him reason to believe he might be a successful candidate under more favorable registration circumstances.

  Jackie soon answered his letter to Jack. It was such a marvelous letter from you, she wrote to him, and she had been deeply touched. Most of all, she was sorry that he had not won, though he had been so brave to try, given what an incredibly unpromising district his had been. Don’t worry, she assured him. She was confident he would win the next time. She herself was so exhausted she had collapsed, she confided to him, especially under the burden of taking care of all the details that followed the election. Hurry back from Europe, she urged him, and please call the White House after the inauguration. It would be a joy for both herself and Jack to have him there as a guest. And she had some special good news: Jack was going to see The Best Man on the next evening. With only one night in New York, he had chosen to see that play rather than Camelot, she remarked with an exclamation point—and she did not blame him in the least! In fact, Gore had decided that if Kennedy were to offer him some suitable position, he would seriously consider it, though his letter was also a pro forma bow to the new leader of the party and the country. “Kennedy used to joke,” Vidal recalled, “‘I think the ambassadorship to Mali is open.’ He would come up with these grotesque ambassadorial assignments for me. It’s not a serious request for a job. It’s a polite acknowl
edgment that he’s the head of the party.” In the meantime, he found it amusing to observe the President watching The Best Man. At the moment when the dialogue alluded to the sexual promiscuity of the Kennedy-like character, the President laughed with what seemed a combination of pride and uneasy self-recognition. “He looked quite nervous…. He gave a lightning look at [his friend] Chuck Spalding and sat lower down in his chair.”

  Immediately after the election political friends and supporters urged Vidal to begin campaigning for the 1962 election, either for Congress or for the Senate, an office that had more appeal to him and which he now had more strongly in mind as a possibility than he could have had before the 1960 campaign. There would be both honor and pleasure in following his grandfather into the upper chamber. Still, he felt a deep-seated ambivalence, a fundamental hesitation. The campaign had been tediously all-consuming. Did he really want to do that again? And what would holding office be like? Except at the absolutely highest level, would it not demand a grind of legislative and constituent responsibilities that he had no special interest in, a life without serious ideas or intellectual content? Politics had been the family business. Politics was, so to speak, in his blood. But beyond that, why would he actually want to be elected? During the campaign, the skeptical Fred Dupee, who, Gore recalled, “was constantly sneering at my activism,” had expressed his disapproval numbers of times. Gore’s greatest talent was as a writer, Dupee believed. He should devote himself to that. At a party one evening at Edgewater the composer Virgil Thomson, an acerbic leader of the musical avant-garde who had collaborated with Gertrude Stein on the opera Four Saints in Three Acts and been for a decade the influential music critic of the Herald Tribune, and who had taken a liking to Gore who he hoped would write a libretto for him, rebuked Dupee. Novelists, he argued, needed to be involved in and know about the life of the world. On the morning after the laudatory reviews of The Best Man, Thomson had telegraphed his congratulations. “Call and come when you can. Would you maybe like a party? I have some good wine.” For Thomson there seemed no necessary reason to choose between politics and literature. Dupee, who thought them incompatible, may have been more right than Thomson. It would have been difficult if not impossible for Gore to have performed responsibly as an elected official and at the same time carry on as a writer of fiction. Political and literary ideas were compatible. Political office and a literary careeer were not.