Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Though he missed American friends and Edgewater associations, many of them came regularly that spring and summer. Rome seemed on everyone’s itinerary. Close friends stayed in the guest bedroom at Via Giulia. In June, Kit and Gene came for a brief stop on a monthlong European trip, father and son pleased to see one another, though Gene felt overtired from travel and depressed at having too little interesting professional work to do. Despite appointments to various military and aviation-industry committees, he felt put out to pasture. Late in the spring Fred Dupee, traveling with Andrew Chiappe, stopped by for a visit en route to an academic conference in Yugoslavia. Roman life appealed to Fred immensely. In the summer, when Gore and Howard were away, Andy Dupee and her daughter, having a European summer, stayed at the Via Giulia apartment, which they found comfortable enough except for the mess Blanche and Billy made each night in the kitchen. Elaine came from London, with her ten-year-old daughter, Tracy. Unfortunately, the enchanting Tracy had “a hacking cough which has nearly sent us all riding on ahead: the viruses of childhood are fatal to adults: King Herod’s gesture was no doubt a sanitary one.” Also, that week the heating system at Via Giulia failed, so “the last week has been hell.” “Everyone seems to be visiting Rome and it is just like the country: I am an inn-keeper, which I mind only about half the time.” Mostly, the guests were welcome, including the always amusing Sam Lurie, with his companion and colleague Stanley Kaminsky. “We will arrive in Rome June 1 and will stay till the 4th, then on to Positano, etc. Will you be there? Would you like us to stay with you? … Why does Bobby Kennedy only stare when I mention your name?” “Dear Maureen O’Hara,” Gore replied, “Yes, you … will be welcome…. You had better have a lot of gossip and better than your meagre letter suggests. Meanwhile I remain as always a Great American.”

  At a Roman dinner party early in June, Sam and Stan met a new friend of Gore’s, the attractive Alice Boatwright, known as “Boaty,” a Southern-born New York- and London-based movie publicist. Her extensive sociability and her familiarity with an ever-widening circle of well-known people had been elevated into a professional art. Boaty “was very amusing,” Stanley recalled. “But a name-dropper, and even that’s funny, unintentionally…. We all had dinner together at a restaurant in the ghetto area, in an old firehouse. Sam and I decided that we would try to stump her. While we were talking, with all these names flying around—we had a client for a short time named Mark Brandel, whom nobody really had ever heard of whom we knew. He was English. I said to Sam or Sam said to me, ‘Oh, by the way, have you heard anything from Mark Brandel?’ We expected Boaty either to say nothing or to say who was Mark Brandel or to react in some way. Boaty said, ‘Do you know Mark Brandel? I talked to him not two weeks ago when I was in London. He’s fine. You know his book is doing very well, etc., etc.’ And on she went. She knew exactly who he was, which was rather remarkable…. Then later, in New York, at a party, she was there, and I said, ‘Boaty and I know each other from Rome, where we met.’ Before I could get another word out, Boaty said, ‘Stanley and I met at Gore Vidal’s the day Pope John died.’ It was true. When we were there, Pope John died. And I thought, how wonderful! Even I couldn’t put together in one sentence Pope John and Gore Vidal.” Later in June, in a Rome crowded with participants in the papal conclave, Gore, at 3 A.M., with one hundred thousand other people, saw Pope John XXIII lying in state. With so many American newspaper people in town, it felt like home. There were also Americans who were in town permanently, or at least, like Gore and Howard, for long residences. One stellar friend, in the tradition of Gore’s “old ladies” for whom Dot was the prototype, was the American popular novelist, Grace Zaring Stone, whom Gore had met in New York in the late fifties and who regularly spent part of the year at her Greenwich, Connecticut, home and three or so winter months happily in Rome, often accompanied by her daughter, Eleanor. Frank Capra had turned the best-known of her novels, The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1930), into a successful Hollywood movie. A witty, self-confident woman with a strong sense of presence and international sophistication, she found Gore an attractive companion whom she loved to have join her for tea or dinner, often at her hotel near the Parliament buildings. They shared a sense of humor, an enthusiasm for language and life. Both were perceptive analysts who turned gossip into wit and wisdom. She “was kind of divine in her own way,” Howard thought. “Funny, funny, funny. She was so crazy about Gore then that she resented my presence, but I didn’t mind. Gore and she had a wonderful relationship…. We’d take her to the opera, we’d take her to dinner. She was just wonderful company. First of all she was a writer and knew everything about writing. She and Gore would spend hours talking.”

  Two Americans on the scene when Gore arrived quickly became friends. Mickey Knox, the young actor and Norman Mailer’s childhood friend, whom Gore and Howard had met in New York and who had been a guest at Edgewater, had recently moved to Rome. He had had difficulty getting jobs in America either because of an early Communist Party affiliation or because of an affair with a Hollywood movie executive’s wife. Married to Mailer’s ex-wife’s sister, Knox had moved from Paris to Rome to do a movie. Short, handsome, he was a down-to-earth, fun-loving friend, frequently hustling for work, whose unmistakable New Yorkishness was part of his charm. As the center of a flourishing European movie industry, Rome attracted many Americans, including Clint Eastwood—whom Gore regularly saw at his daily workouts at Ed Cheever’s—revivifying his dormant career in what came to be called “spaghetti Westerns.” More important, Gore soon met George Armstrong, an American journalist from Little Rock who had gone to Harvard and had fallen in love with Italy in the summer of 1948. In 1950 he had enrolled at the University of Florence under the G.I. Bill. On his return to New York, Italy seemed the blessed place. When his landlord offered to buy him out of his $28-a-month subleased apartment, he used most of the money to purchase passage to Naples via Tangier. For a long time he did not, so to speak, look back. Life in Rome was cheap. Entertaining companions, good food, and nonpuritanical sex were readily available. A movie enthusiast, he enjoyed the interaction of Cinecittà and Hollywood. Earning a living, though, was sometimes a struggle. He did a daily column for an American-run English-language daily, then “air-mailers” for American newspapers, and soon articles for the London papers, especially The Guardian, and also The Economist. In June 1963 a friend told him that Gore Vidal was staying in Rome. He soon stopped by the apartment. When Howard opened the door, Armstrong noticed piles of yellow legal-size papers stacked on a hallway table. “That looks like manuscript,” he said. “Yes, Gore’s new book.” “I guess that’ll be a lot of work for you.” “Are you kidding—I don’t do typing! Not on your life!” It was the start of a friendship, with Gore, not Howard. Later, George was to do some of the typing, for which Gore paid him. Over the next decades he was to be, among other things, a traveling companion, especially to the Italian cities they both were enchanted by. “He was all of what was left of my Exeter world,” Gore remarked. “He was at Harvard when all of my Exeter classmates were there, and he knew them all. He didn’t hang out with them, but he knew them, and it was all the same generation. We knew many of the same people from the forties. He was a great fan of the movies. Had Roman fever too, as I had. So we had a confluence of interests.” A thin, somewhat delicate-looking man of medium height, diplomatic in manner though an assertive conversationalist, alert to social nuances and interested both personally and professionally in political and cultural life, he was happy to match Gore’s late hours drinking wine at outdoor cafés, a regular part of Gore’s Roman life.

  To his delight Gore soon discovered that Claire Bloom, with her husband Rod Steiger and their three-year-old daughter Anna, had taken an apartment in Rome, which they were to occupy for part of each of the next five years. Bloom and Steiger had married in 1959. Rome became their headquarters, to which they returned and from where they left in the usual traveling life of the actor. Movies were being made in Italy, England, Spain, and North A
frica, as well as Hollywood. Rome was the perfect place to be. Gore and Claire quickly intensified their friendship, a combination of deep but mostly unspoken affection and mutual respect. In Rome over the next years Claire was a constant companion. “Those were great days,” she recalled. “We did marvelous, wonderful things. Day trips. I remember going with him to some place associated with Coriolanus, and it was unbelievably hot. Gore insisted that we climb up to the top despite the heat. I almost got sunstroke. And he just goes on. I never wanted him to feel that he was with a woman and that it was boring. We wanted to keep up with him…. We were climbing up to see a Volscian ruin…. We had lots of Etruscan expeditions. Gore always said that my great excitement was to find the Cloaca Maxima. He’s right. It was built by the Tarquins, a Tarquin king of Rome, the oldest kings of Rome. I found it very exciting. We had lots of wonderful expeditions.” Steiger, trained at the Actors Studio in New York, where Mickey Knox had gotten to know him, and who in 1954 had received an Academy Award nomination for On the Waterfront, was busy doing a series of international films at Cinecittà. At dinners and parties, often with other movie people, Gore and Howard found Steiger’s aggressive self-involvement tolerable but unattractive, “the kind of actor,” Howard recalled, “who’d take out his wallet and show you his last review, which he actually did one night…. He was overwhelmingly egotistical.” Mickey Knox also found Steiger difficult to like. “He was full of mannerisms, the actor. He’d get serious and heavy. He was no fun at all.” In an unguarded moment Gore told Knox that he had been in love with Diana Lynn, whom he had seen less and less of in the late 1950s, though they remained on good terms, their pleasure in one another undiminished, though now mostly in recollection. Lynn had married Mortimer Hall, a wealthy New York newspaper heir, exchanging her acting career for a family and comfortable domesticity.

  One of the attractions of Italian life was the availability of wonderful places to visit beyond Rome, both to the south and north, with even Greece relatively nearby. Though he had no special feeling for Egypt, when Harold Hayes proposed he write about Nasser and Soviet-American rivalries there, Gore was sufficiently tempted by the thought of again visiting the ancient sites to accept Hayes’s offer. He flew from Rome to Cairo. April in Egypt shocked him. “This was the hottest spring in years,” he discovered, “in the Valley of the Kings where the temperature [was] over a hundred and the blaze of sun on white limestone blinding.” Egyptian politics seemed emblematic of the Arab mind, structured on coordinates totally out of the rational Western framework. The Suez Canal conflict of 1956 had even further embittered Arab-Israeli relations. When Vidal asked a prominent Arab if the Israelis did not have reason to feel threatened by the announced intention of the Arab countries to drive them into the sea, he got the usual unsatisfactory answer. What he did see clearly as his own view of the American-Soviet conflict was evolving into a strong conviction that America vastly overestimated the Soviet threat was that, with its technological level abysmally low, Russia had real reasons to feel threatened. With such friends as Russia, Egypt hardly needed enemies. Soon after returning to Rome he wrote “A Passage to Egypt: A Sophisticated Traveler’s Adventures and Observations in a Most Curious Country,” which Esquire published in October. He was much more interested, though, in seeing more of Italy than Egypt. Eager to view at leisure places he had visited only in haste or had been dreaming about since his first visit in 1939, he could hardly wait to get going, despite the bothersomeness of his ulcer, and despite his commitment to finishing Julian. With a hired car and driver, he took a six-day excursion to Naples, Cumae, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Amalfi, Paestum, Agropoli, Lecce, Brindisi, Foggia, Lucera, Troia, Caserta, and back to Rome. “This was to me the greatest joy of living in Italy, like driving to Cremona, a city that I didn’t know, going to the best hotel, to a marvelous restaurant, getting to know Cremona for two or three days, and then we’d go home.” In late April, with Rome unseasonably cold and his bones chilled, he took the train to Taormina with Howard and Maria Britneva, his first visit to Sicily, where he ran into Nan and Gay Talese, the former an enterprising young editor, the latter a rising journalist especially interested in cultural issues, both of whom he knew about but had not met before. Sicily, he wrote to Fred Dupee, “is splendid just now, very rich, green, wild flowers, and bunnies romping among the ruins of worse as well as better days.” He toured the island in a rented car, Blue Guide in hand, then flew back to Rome, where, refreshed, he immediately returned to Julian. “All in all a quiet time though people keep coming, expecting to be amused and I am at that part of the book where I don’t want to see anyone,” he wrote to Alice Dows. In early June he was traveling again, this time to Spoleto, where he enjoyed Menotti’s company and stayed with him overnight, then to Assisi, Perugia, and Orvieto, a short but pleasurable trip. A longer trip late in June gave him even more pleasure, but at a price. “Please come, please come!!!” Elaine Tynan had urged, signing her letter with hearts and cupid arrows. As another reclamatory effort in the late stages of their tumultuous marriage, the Tynans had planned an eating tour in France, to start from Paris, where Gore joined them on June 22 for “a pleasantly bloating” experience, which soon left him with pounds to work off at Cheever’s gym. From Paris they went mostly to three-star restaurants in Lyons, Vienne, and Lac d’Annecy. “I did the driving,” Gore recalled. “Ken couldn’t drive…. He would sit with a map, and I would do the driving and he would direct.” Ken and Elaine managed to do only a little sniping. The Tynans went on to Spain. Gore returned, via Switzerland, to Rome.

  With Howard in late June he came back to Paris, where for $3,000 he bought from the actor Robert Wagner a jet-black 1961 Jaguar, the cost of which he asked his accountant in New York, the well-known Bernard Reiss, to deduct as a business expense. A self-important cultural entrepreneur very much involved in the arts, who had collected a fortune’s worth of modern paintings, Reiss years later was to be involved as executor in the contentious disposition of Mark Rothko’s estate. Since Gore’s work was his pleasure, his pleasure his work, and he used the car to go places he might write about or to see people he had business with, it seemed a deductible expense. When Gore was audited, as Gene Vidal also was at about the same time, he suspected it had more to do with Robert Kennedy than with questionable deductions. The audits were almost always resolved in his favor, though a large part of his income still went to taxes, and his residence abroad did not entitle him to any special tax arrangements. As he worked on Julian, with one eye on his bank account, he suspected he might soon have to accept one of the lucrative screenwriting proposals he was regularly sounded out about. “I begin to think I shall never finish Julian. It has got very long but I hope another month will see it in shape,” he told Alice Dows. For the time being, his answer was no to film offers. He kept writing Julian, and with Howard or with George Armstrong, occasionally with both, he went on excursions. In the fast, graceful Jaguar, they drove in mid-July first to Spoleto again, then to Florence and Siena, then up to Lugano and back to Rome, the pleasure of the adventure only partly marred by their different driving temperaments. Howard “couldn’t stand Gore’s driving.” “And I was a good driver,” Gore insisted. “That was your opinion.” Howard admitted he was “very conservative. I didn’t have the competitiveness on the road that Gore did.” “Yes, but you also didn’t have the accuracy.” “Maybe not, but I wasn’t as bad….” “If the important turn was to the right, he doesn’t really know right from left, so he’d make a left turn. I would be steaming. My blood pressure would be tripling. He would defend his position, no matter how incorrect. He’d say, ‘Well, it said to go to the left.’ I was not stoical about his driving. I generally drove. We drove all over Europe with me at the wheel.” The black Jaguar performed well, though both drivers’ blood pressures boiled. Passengers were often shocked at how intemperately they railed at one another, though the minute they arrived some place it was as if they had not been fighting at all. Soon, when Gore proposed motoring tours, Howard
declined to go, for both their sakes.

  With Julian written but not quite finished by early summer 1963, Gore did not in the least mind having to fly to New York and then Los Angeles at the beginning of August to put in two weeks on the preparation of The Best Man for filming. In mid-July, Fred Dupee came by on his way back to New York. “I doubt if he will ever be able to live in Rhinecliff again,” Gore wrote to Alice Dows. “He is quite euphoric in Italy. I do a lot of sightseeing, very little social life; and regular exercise (I have become mad on the subject: one feels so much better).” As much as he himself loved Rome, he missed Edgewater. While at Via Giulia, Dupee read much or all of the manuscript of Julian. “I listen to him (he was a great help on the first part),” Gore wrote to Ned Bradford, his editor at Little, Brown. He is “the only critic I can listen to with profit.” With his flight home imminent, he confided to Dows that he did “miss the country but the vacation from the U.S. was needed,” alerting her to his return to Edgewater and to American scenes in general, though only for the summer and early fall. Howard, with Blanche and Billy, would stay on at Via Giulia. Gore would rejoin him as soon as The Best Man filming permitted. Distressed at the awful Hollywood mess that had been made of Visit to a Small Planet, he wanted to make sure The Best Man film had some reasonable resemblance to the wit and vision of the play. Its critical and financial success had been gratifying. Even Howard’s tiny investment had been rewarded tenfold; within three months of the opening, he had received a check for $15,750 to add to his annual $6,000 salary from Gore, an arrangement that had made the business part of their relationship explicit and provided a modest independence. Gore’s profits had been put immediately into a Lehman Brothers Profit Sharing Plan. The income from the plan provided about $10,000 a year.