Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  In Miami, Gore enjoyed the sunshine, apparently by himself, though by early December he and Howard had decided on a European trip, among other reasons to spend Christmas in Paris with Joanne and Paul, there for Paul’s contribution to a movie, Lady L, co-starring Sophia Loren. Gore had accepted an invitation to be a judge at a television festival in Monte Carlo in mid-January. What to do next, in the larger sense, was on his mind. The director Frank Capra had approached him about making a movie based on The Best Man. “But if I do it,” he told John Bowen, “most of the acid will be retained undiluted, or so I hope.” CBS television had queried him about doing a series of four “Kultur television shows, acting as narrator, the Alistair Cooke kind of thing: I am big on television: ‘his rapier wit, his clarity’ (I have yet to say anything remotely intelligent on the small screen but the style suggests that I have greatness in reserve: I do smile quite a lot though, having had my two incisors capped with plastic).” The television idea appealed to him, at least to his sense of humor and his competitiveness. “All my life I wanted to beat Lennie [Bernstein] to his knees at his own game,” he wrote to Elaine Dundy, “and I will, and you know what, I’m going to be the first gentile President after LENNIE.” If he were to remain in politics, he could write essays and plays. But could he write fiction? “I fret about prose, torn between D.C. novel and Julian,” he wrote to Isherwood. “Nothing gets easier, does it? Not even for Mole’s ancient friend Rat who once cut to the cheese with such directness. But this is just despair before focussing the camera. Can never estimate distances, light meter broken. Ah, well.”

  As the author of a successful Broadway hit, he was being encouraged by producers, including Roger Stevens, to write another, though his experience with March to the Sea at the Hyde Park Playhouse had not been satisfying. After one week of mid-August 1960 performances Gore had prevailed on David Samples, the producer and director, to rearrange the repertory schedule and do a second week. The reviews had been mixed to poor, though it had done well at the box office, mostly because of Gore’s name. With Gore’s financial help Samples had taken over the Hyde Park Playhouse in 1960 and happily agreed to put on March to the Sea. Gore hoped that a successful week or two there would allow him to reopen the possibility of a Broadway production. Unfortunately, attendance dropped considerably the second week. “I’d started a newspaper, called the Hyde Park Townsman,” Gore recalled, “just because the Poughkeepsie paper was not covering me in the campaign. It was a weekly. Potentially it could do rather well. The critic on the paper didn’t like what Samples was doing and so my own paper was attacking my own theater,” especially March to the Sea, which the theater critic thought badly acted and ineffective. “I let everyone alone.” Gore never expected to and in the end did not get back his $6,000. It was from the first a slightly self-interested benefaction, not an investment. Money was not a pressing issue. His profits from the ongoing run of The Best Man were substantial, even more than from Visit. Some of it went into an annuity, some scheduled as deferred payments over numbers of years, a portion into savings and investments, including soon the purchase of another brownstone building on East Fifty-eighth street, almost directly across from 416. Howard, who managed both buildings, was charged with the renovation of an apartment at 417 East Fifty-eighth into their living quarters. In the meantime they continued to stay at the rented East Fifty-fifth Street apartment.

  Christmas and New Year’s in Paris helped put the election even further behind him. “Paul was working with Sophia Loren on Lady L,” Gore remembered. “Joanne and I were fascinated and would ask him what she’s like. ‘What’s who like?’ ‘Sophia Loren. You’ve been working with her.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘What is she like?’ We were dying to know. This was at the height of her beauty and sexiness. ‘Well, she was late for work this morning.’ ‘Oh, what else? Is that it? What’s she like?’ ‘She has this accent.’ We never got more than that out of him. Joanne always suspected the worst.” The Newmans had rented a dark, cold apartment in Montparnasse because Joanne had thought it romantic. Gore and Howard stayed comfortably at the Hotel Plaza-Athénée, and Gore made it a point not to return to Washington for the inaugural ball to which he had been invited. The actress Shelley Winters, making Lolita in London, reminded him that they had talked at the New York opening of Tennessee’s Sweet Bird of Youth about going together. Over lunch in Paris he teamed up with Art Buchwald for one of Buchwald’s funny columns, “Interview with a Gracious Loser.” “I was very depressed,” Gore told him, “until I started reading up on other great losers, and then I took heart. I think the greatest loser of our time—the one who has been an idol to all other losers—is Thomas E. Dewey…. Another inspiration to all losers is Harold E. Stassen…. He has given us all courage to go on…. I don’t dare put myself in the same class as these men. Obscurity is something you don’t lightly achieve.” Lucien Price thought he heard echoes of Gore’s prose in Kennedy’s inaugural speech. But, though Gore anticipated social and even political contacts with the White House, his Kennedy connection seemed an attractive ornament, not the major engagement. Before the campaign had begun, he had published in The Nation a provocative essay, “The Twelve Caesars,” whose graceful authoritativeness was witness to how far he had come as a Roman historian and as an essayist. Suetonius, he wrote, “in holding up a mirror to those Caesars of diverting legend, reflects not only them but ourselves: half-tamed creatures, whose great moral task it is to hold in balance the angel and the monster within—for we are both, and to ignore this duality is to invite disaster” Probably early in 1961 he wrote, though never finished, “On Campaigning.” What to do next as a writer and general recuperation were of more concern than the inaugural celebration.

  In February, soon after returning from Paris, he invited Norman Mailer and his wife and three-year-old daughter to Edgewater for a weekend, with Mickey Knox, a young actor and childhood friend of Mailer’s. When Mailer had published Advertisements for Myself in 1959, Gore had written a cordial review in The Nation, “The Norman Mailer Syndrome,” later reprinted as “Norman Mailer: The Angels Are White” and then as “Norman Mailer’s Self-Advertisements.” “I had written,” Mailer recalls, “that thing about him that he had half liked and half didn’t like, about his writing. I think it was called ‘Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room.’ He had written fairly well about the book, and we stayed reasonably friendly but not close, never close.” “The Talent in the Room” had given deep offense to two of Mailer’s closest friends, James Jones and William Styron. Gore, who had not been as egregiously savaged, shrugged off Mailer’s condescension as well within the bounds of their usual exchanges. In late November 1960, Mailer, destructively drunk, had made headlines greater than any of his books had or would. After a tense party at their New York apartment, he had stabbed his wife with a kitchen knife. Mailer fled. Fortunately, help came quickly. Adele’s life was saved, and Knox and other friends soon persuaded Mailer to turn himself in. Adele declined to press charges. They moved back in together. During the Mailers’ weekend at Edgewater, the Dupees came over; they talked about Gore’s campaign and about literary things. Gore’s Hudson River Valley friends were morally outraged. How could he have Mailer at his house? “It was a marvelous evening,” Mailer recalls, and Gore was very entertaining. “Here’s this couple—here’s the fellow who’s stabbed the woman, and now, my God, there they are in the house, something like that.” For a short time Mailer had become a social pariah. “But Gore was generous, and it really meant something, you know, that we’d be invited out socially like nothing had happened. He was really fulfilling—Well, I certainly thought of him as a friend at that point. It was a supportive gesture.” But even this occasion was not without the usual competitiveness. “At one point Gore said to me something to the effect of ‘Until you’ve known an Arab boy, you don’t begin to know what sexual pleasure’s all about.’ And I turned to him and said, ‘I am married to an Arab boy.’ Adele has a lot of Gypsy and Spanish blood and Indian blood and c
ould pass for an Arab lady. Gore did not have a rejoinder to that.”

  At his motel in Provincetown in late August 1961, Gore received a call from Jackie, who in July had written to invite him to the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport, preferably in August, as the weather was horrible at the moment. Gore had sent the Kennedys some of his books, which she looked forward to reading. The copy of Messiah they had both earmarked for Jack. Please promise, she insisted, to return to her what she felt was a ghastly picture of herself that she had given him. She was getting a better one taken in Paris shortly and, she assured him, when prints arrived she would send him a copy of the new picture to replace the old. Soon after returning from his Christmas trip to Paris, he had succumbed to the temptation to write another play. Roger Stevens had pressured him to capitalize on the success of The Best Man. But he had no compelling idea. Searching for something viable, he racked his brain and imagination. An admirer of the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, he decided that an adaptation-expansion of Romulus for an American audience might allow him to create a viable dramatization that would bring together Roman history and contemporary politics. A comedic dramatization of the fall of the Roman Empire had possibilties. Dürrenmatt’s Romulus had been a failure in Europe. Gore thought his English version might correct the faults of the original. Roger Stevens was enthusiastic, or at least committed enough to put the production in place. Joe Anthony again would direct. Cyril Ritchard, brilliant in Visit, agreed to play the title role. The play was scheduled for a late-December New York premiere. At the same time Gore’s idea for a Washington novel resurfaced with some force, prompted by his recent political experiences and also by recurrent autobiographical musings. With two chapters of Julian in place, he also wanted to give thought to when and how to carry on with that novel-in-progress.

  He had gone to Provincetown partly for a change from the steamy summer heat at Edgewater. But he also had gone to lose weight, one of his frequent flights into seclusion to cut himself off from the usual food temptations. Eating gave him great pleasure. It also rapidly swelled his face and figure. With his public image in mind, he found it practical to go on starving as well as eating binges. Excess came easily. So too did ascetic discipline. Soon after arriving, he had sent to nearby Hyannisport funny caricatures of the Kennedys drawn on cheap local souvenir plates. He had assumed that the Kennedys were in Washington, not to arrive until his stay in Provincetown was over. When the dinner invitation came, he drove his rented car to Hyannisport. As he approached the house, he was stopped at a number of guardhouses for security checks. It was a noticeable change from more relaxed earlier days. Over the next week he visited regularly with the Kennedys, the most sustained period he had ever spent with Jack. Jackie especially seemed eager for his company, so much so that on the last day of the month she drove to Provincetown, with Jack’s friend Bill Walton, to have dinner and go to the theater with him. Though she loved her national celebrity, she had discovered that being the wife of the President had its drawbacks, especially the limits on her personal freedom. Eager to get away from Jack’s family and Hyannisport stultification, that morning on the phone she had consulted Gore about what disguise she should wear. At his motel she bounced up and down on the bed in playful, semi-anonymous pleasure. With the Secret Service doing its best to keep up discreetly, they went to the Chrysler Museum, then to dinner and the playhouse to see Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Though the theater had no prior knowledge they were coming, everyone recognized her. Some may have recognized Gore. “The boy taking tickets was so overcome, he gave us all his programs.” When they came out, the street was crowded. Word had spread. Afterward, at a raunchy nightclub they were asked for identification, and a drunken lout “recognized Jackie and said, ‘So all the stories are true. Why don’t you come on in?’” They fled to a more sedate place. “Upstairs was another bar, frequented by lesbians. Jackie was fascinated but dared not look in.” The tense, long-standing difficulties of her marriage were evident. The tables had turned somewhat, Bill Walton told Gore. Before, Jack had regularly been “brutal to her in public.” Now that she too was a star, he teasingly called her “the sex symbol” and actually, perhaps for the first time, desired her. She had begun to needle him mercilessly. But the President still wanted to hear any and all sex gossip from Gore and everyone else. “‘He’s rather sad these days,’” Walton remarked. “‘Nothing happens except Jackie, maybe twice a week.’”

  In April the British Sunday Telegraph had published Gore’s portrait of Kennedy, and in June Life carried his interview-profile of Barry Goldwater. Kennedy had good reason to expect Goldwater to be his Republican opponent in 1964, though he and Gore also talked, as Kennedy regularly did, about Nelson Rockefeller, who he feared would be more formidable. He had no doubt he could defeat Goldwater, whom he liked. Gore’s casually devastating “Barry Goldwater: A Chat” is as much about the art of politics and the desire for power as about the likable Arizonan. “To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize,” Vidal had written. Insufficiently dodgeful, whatever his ideology, Goldwater was unlikely to defeat any artful politician. If the essay is condescending, its condescension is inseparable from its combination of the personal voice and the authoritative view. Goldwater, as he speaks for himself with laudable honesty, provides in his own words perfect examples for the essay’s main point. In “John Kennedy: A Translation for the English,” Vidal noted that Kennedy’s “face is heavily lined for his age” and that his smile “is charming even when it is simulated for the public.” The candid touches effectively strengthen an essay whose portrait of the pragmatic Kennedy translates into the archetype of the artful politician—sly, crafty, improvisational, aware of the conventions, intellectually “dogged rather than brilliant … icily objective in crisis,” perceptive about what the moment will permit and what the moment requires. His youthful energy, Vidal surmised, might indeed provide our civilization with a second and last chance to stir itself out of its torpor. Written immediately before the Bay of Pigs, it is a cautious portrait. The prospects are there, but the verdict is still out. To what extent Kennedy would become a Cold War warrior Vidal did not fully anticipate. The Bay of Pigs episode itself was hardly decisive, and transcriptions would later make clear that Kennedy had chosen the least confrontational of the proposed responses to the Soviet threat.

  In and out of the Kennedy house at Hyannisport for much of that week in August, Vidal had various casual conversations with the President, a shorthand record of which he made at the first opportunity, for him an unusual practice. Years later he made effective use of his notes in his memoir. Jack and he gossiped, dined, played backgammon, talked politics at length. Gore admired the President’s pragmatic intelligence, his powers of cold analysis, his self-serving ruthlessness. And it was a change and a delight to have a President who actually read books, who was interested in being knowledgeable and well informed. Gore saw the promise, the possibility, of such talent being put to national service on behalf of desirable changes. What he had begun to fear, quite tentatively, was Kennedy as heir of the foreign policy of Truman and Eisenhower. Thoroughly anti-Communist himself, Vidal feared anti-Communism as the excuse for excessive militarism, for potentially self-destructive commitments abroad. Khrushchev and tension over Berlin were very much in the air. Reservists were being called up. Gore and Arthur Schlesinger, who had become a full-time presidential adviser and who was very worried about the Berlin crisis, compared notes about the President’s mood. Bobby Kennedy came by numbers of times from his nearby house. Once the brothers went into a corner of the room, bending their heads together secretively over a letter from John McCloy about Russian-American tension. Less hawkish in private than in public, Jack seemed to agree with Jackie’s comment, “Yes, it would be better to be red than dead, not maybe for oneself, but for the children.” When the subject of his personal security came up, the President, who believed that a resolute assassin could always find his target and who had told Gore an ironic
story of how a British prime minister had been electrocuted by a telephone after he thought he had been safeguarded against a threatened assassination attempt, expressed his resigned stoicism. To Gore’s mind, Jack had already so often narrowly escaped death because of ill health that he had been conditioned to have no confidence in having a long life.

  Fortunately, there were also lighter subjects to discuss. Hughdie and Janet were a favorite topic, the dreaded in-laws, one of whom bored, the other tongue-lashed you to death. When Gore told Jack that he had in mind to position the President as a conservative in an article he intended to write to counter an article called “The Future of Liberalism” by one of Gore’s ambitious ultraconservative contemporaries, William F. Buckley, Jr., who had recently surfaced as a propagandist for the far right, Kennedy touchily objected. “Just talk to Eisenhower if you want to meet a real conservative,” he said. The most Hollywood-involved of American Presidents until Ronald Reagan, Kennedy pumped Gore about movies, theaters, starlets. They discussed Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Kennedy liked Gore’s view that Fellini’s movie, exploiting Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, pretended that “this was decadence when it was only life as it is lived,” and Jackie complained that her mother-in-law frequently reminded her that all the movies Jackie liked were on the Catholic Church’s proscribed Index. Though the presidential couple took this all rather lightly, Bobby did not. Gore noticed that the conversation was always serious when the more puritanical, rigidly Catholic younger brother was present. Clearly, Bobby had not forgotten Gore’s refusal to push harder for the national ticket during his congressional campaign. Unlike his brother, the Attorney General wore his grudges on his sleeve, and also unlike Jack, he had an uninflected sense of moral standards. Uncomfortable with those who were not straight arrows, he disapproved of Gore, whose sexual interests were beyond his comprehension or tolerance. Undoubtedly he believed that homosexuality was moral depravity, an illness of the soul that needed to be cured or damned. Salvation was at issue. When he walked into a room that contained Gore, one could feel his almost palpable antagonism. That he and Bobby did not like one another was of little consequence. They were publicly cordial. When Gore (with Eleanor Roosevelt) recommended Joe Hawkins for a position in the Justice Department, Bobby assured Gore “he will be given every consideration.”