by Fred Kaplan
Except for a two-week visit to London and Rome in early fall to push the British edition of Julian and perhaps to look into an apartment for January, Gore spent the rest of the year at Edgewater and in New York. In November, in New York, he voted for Lyndon Johnson, the last time he was ever to vote, though later he happily declined to attend the inaugural ball to which Vice-President-Elect Humphrey had invited him. Johnson had promised a New Society. Having gotten through Congress the Civil Rights legislation Kennedy had failed at, Johnson was infinitely preferable to Goldwater, who had threatened the use of nuclear weapons in Asia. At a minimum Goldwater would expand the Vietnam War. Johnson promised peace. Gore also voted for Kenneth Keating for the Senate from New York, the only time he had ever voted for a Republican. Gore strongly preferred the liberal Keating to Robert Kennedy, whose movement toward the left Gore thought calculatingly self-serving. His personal reservations about Kennedy would have precluded his supporting him under almost any circumstance. Perhaps he could distinguish between personal hostility and objective judgment. Perhaps not. In this case there was no need to, though the fact that he actively campaigned for Keating, something he had done for no political candidate other than himself, spearheading the “Democrats for Keating” committee, suggests the degree to which personal feeling and political disagreement coalesced. Robert Kennedy was nevertheless elected the junior senator from New York. Gore found the election result so distasteful that he said very little about it, though before the voting he had had his say in various forums, including numbers of television shows: Susskind’s, as usual, and also the popular Steve Allen Show, where his remarks about Buckley prompted Buckley to write to Allen that Gore Vidal “lied last night on your program.”
Since finishing Julian, Gore had done a few essays, the form increasingly congenial, his voice more noticeably elegant and conversational. One appeared in the Herald Tribune Book Week, on the television blacklist, the other in The New York Review of Books, about the magical children’s-book author, Edith Nesbit. “As an adult writing of her own childhood, she noted, ‘When I was a little child I used to pray fervently, fearfully, that when I should be grown up I might never forget what I felt and thought and suffered then.’ With extraordinary perceptiveness she realized that each grown-up must kill the child he was before he himself can live.” For Gore, the shadow of Nina lurked in those sentences. Actually, Nina had tried to materialize again as a presence in his life but he kept her at more than arm’s length, dealing with her claim that he owed her money through his accountant, whom he instructed to give her something, as he was to do numbers of times over the years. He did not feel generous. He did not believe he owed her anything. And a condition of anything he would give would be that the contact be through an intermediary. His father he saw with reasonable and happy regularity, at Edgewater, in New York City, even a few times in Avon, Connecticut.
Gore still had reason to hope that the play he had worked on since its first conception at Delphi and recently completed, ironically called Drawing Room Comedy, would have a Broadway production. The powerful producer David Merrick had made a commitment to do it; preliminary discussions had reached the reading and casting stage. Then, suddenly, Merrick had canceled the plans. His justification was that the play was too depressing, that Broadway audiences would not flock to see the protracted depiction of a man dying of a coronary thrombosis. In London, in January, Gore sounded people out about a British production. “If you can come up with a production and a cast that might have a chance,” he told the actor Jerome Kilty, who was interested, “then I see no reason for not trying it out in London.” For a short time there was a Berlin opportunity at the Schiller Theater, perhaps with some of the same people who had done the successful German version of The Best Man. Neither London nor Berlin worked out. To Gore’s disappointment, the play was never performed. Without a performance, he had no interest in pursuing publication. The manuscript went into his storage chest, which now had an additional drawer. He had recently been approached by the University of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin State Historical Society at Madison, which, in the process of building a television and movie archive, urged him to deposit his papers there. Ironically, his prominence as a television and movie dramatist had brought him to Wisconsin’s attention. Though they were somewhat aware of his novels and essays, his achievement as a dramatist was foremost in their minds: that was what they were specializing in. To get that material they would have to ask for everything, which they assumed would be, in the future, predominantly movie scripts. No other library had asked for his papers. The tax laws provided that the fair market value of such material, as ascertained by an expert, was deductible against gross income, very much like a business expense or loss. It seemed sensible to Gore to accept the invitation. Soon Howard was sending, on an irregular basis and later quite regularly, cartons of manuscripts and personal papers to Madison. The library gradually realized that it was getting more than it had initially expected. Later, Gore realized he was locked into a relationship he had made without adequate consideration of other possibilities. Still, it was a practical advantage to have an archive for his papers, though the tax advantage would not last long, and it also had some of the feel of a date with posterity.
In the meantime, his datebook for 1965 quickly became filled, primarily with movies, four of which he worked on between the beginning of the year and his fortieth birthday in October. He was well under way with Washington, D.C., as he told Louis Auchincloss, and by summer he had done about half the novel, though “I cannot tell yet what I am doing or how well I am doing it. The subject is slippery. And I have so many themes, having to do with those changes in time which affect us all humanly while affecting, quite as dramatically (but hardest to dramatize) the Republic which became reluctant empire, or was it so reluctant? Also I am having difficulty with the whole moral aspect of our lives, privately and publicly. What is a right action? What means may be used safely to achieve what ends, no matter how temporary?” The subject was more ostensibly autobiographical than any fiction he had written since The Season of Comfort. With his fortieth birthday on the horizon, family history was so much on his mind that, on one of his trips between Rome and Paris, he drove to Feldkirch, the Alpine home of his Vidal ancestors, from which he sent postcards and longer reports to his father about what he had seen and learned, the beginning of what became a lifelong interest in discovering just who the Vidals originally were. It was also on his mind that his father had just had his seventieth birthday. “It doesn’t seem thirty years since your 40th birthday [April 13, 1935] which I recall almost as vividly as my tenth. I suppose the only thing worse than being 70 is not being 70, so there is something to be said for healthy survival. Apparently we are fairly long-lived.” His father’s seventieth birthday, among others things, had made Gore even more palpably anxious about the history of heart disease on both sides of the family. As a writer he was drawn to the subject of time’s passage. Unlike his father, he searched for some anchor for his present consciousness in his connection not only with his personal past but with his family’s, both the Gores’ and the Vidals.’ Feldkirch he found “charming but gray and rather gloomy, dominated by Jesuit schools…. I spent an hour with the priest of St Nicholas Church in Feldkirch, going through the records. He knew only German but I did figure out that your great grandfather Joseph Felix Vidal had a long life and at least 2 wives, though it is just possible that the 2nd mother of his second batch of children might not have been a wife…. I’m going to put someone on the records to find when he family came to Feldkirch from Venice.” Apparently the last Vidal had left Feldkirch in 1947. Later, when Gore told Gene that there was some possibility, so local rumor and other considerations suggested, that the family had once been Jewish, Gene thought the speculation slightly amusing and mostly uninteresting. Gore found it fascinating.
In January, Gore and Howard moved back to Rome, this time to an adequate apartment dominated by red wallpaper, at 29 Via de S. Elena, a small
street in the old city close to the cat-filled ruins of the Templi Republica and not far from the Bernini tortoise fountain near the Palazzo Mattei. The slanted street was protected on both sides from the busy traffic in the nearby Piazza Arenula and the frenetic Corso Vittorio Emanuele by small buffer streets. Like the apartment at Via Giulia, it was a sublease, a furnished convenience, a home base in Europe in the city they preferred to any other, though Gore soon left Rome for two weeks in Athens for discussions with the director Jules Dassin—an American filmmaker who had established himself in Europe after he had been blacklisted and whose recent Never on Sunday had been an international success—about a movie based on the life of Pericles that they had agreed to do together. Washington, D.C. he worked on steadily though not quickly, expecting to make a major leap forward in the summer. Roman life he found as restful, as congenial, as ever, and he resumed his usual Roman schedule, including the gym and evenings with friends. Howard made the adjustment rather easily, and so too Billy, though Blanche, not unexpectedly, died in February. The Roveres sent Billy their condolences. “He is now an only dog but incredibly brave,” Gore responded. “I am so completely content on this side of the Atlantic,” he told Fred Dupee, “the sight of the Campidoglio once a day is all I need to remain stable. The novel goes well, though I must go back to Washington soon and remind myself of what I am recalling and what inventing and what has gone right through the perfect sieve my memory is.” In mid-February he flew to Washington to lecture to a large audience at the Library of Congress on “The Novel in the Age of Science.” His half-sister Nini hosted a well-attended party for him. “It was Guermantes with enough Madame Verdurins to lend vivacity to the revels,” he later wrote her. It was also material for his Washington novel. With a new Paris-based agent for movie assignments, Alain Bernheim, Gore had offers for more scripts than he could possibly do, and the four offers that he did accept he did partly because he could not resist keeping busy, partly for the money and his unwillingness to cut off future offers by creating the impression he was never available. Pericles helped keep him occupied during the first half of the year, as did rewriting the scripts of Is Paris Burning? and Night of the Generals, then late in the year The Doctor and the Devils, from a script by Dylan Thomas.
“I don’t know whether or not this sort of caper is a sign of masochism,” he wrote to Fred Dupee about movie rewriting, “but I do like the plunge into something difficult and different; also novels that flow too swiftly from the pen usually end up sounding like Mailer.” Francis Ford Coppola was his assistant scriptwriter for the disastrously bad, multilanguage Is Paris Burning?, which had innumerable problems, including the French-language part of the script. “I was stuck there five weeks trying to rewrite an unactable script. The guy directing didn’t know any English. My dialogue was already written for the crucial stuff. It was cut, cut, cut.” But the Paris weather was lovely, the food wonderful. Mary McCarthy was also in Paris. Although she and Gore had many friends in common, particularly the Dupees and Phillip Rahv, they were not friends, and McCarthy’s usual contentiousness brought out his own. At dinner they argued mildly about something inconsequential, and it seemed to typify for Gore the unsatisfying busyness of his Paris schedule. “Paris was too much, too many people from Aunt Mary to the D. of Windsor. I told him what you really felt about him,” he joked to Fred Dupee. “He said ‘What?’ That Hanoverian will always hit the NAIL on the head.” The more intelligent of the Hanoverians he now met in Rome at Judy Montagu’s, whose dinners for Lady Diana Cooper and the American newspaper publisher Kay Graham, he attended. In the summer “Princess Margaret arrives to stay with Judy and we are all alerted to amuse her. But will she amuse us? That is royalty’s last function.” He now spent two evenings with her and found her attractive. She “turned out to be quite splendid, droll, with at least 3 manners, all beguiling. One: gracious interested lady visiting the troops. Two: bitchy young matron with a cold eye for contemporaries. Three: a splendid Edith Evans delivery in which she plays at Q. Victoria with slow measured accents: ‘We are not partial to heights,’ she intoned gravely over a chicken wing, ‘not partial at all.’ That took care of Switzerland.”
Pericles soon proved a total disappointment. In February, Gore expressed his perplexity about it to Rovere. Pericles is “a vast undertaking and whenever I get nervous at the thought of writing dialogue for Socrates, I think of Shakespeare who took on everything and didn’t seem to mind—or know that most of the facts were wrong. The nightmare is introducing characters: ‘Sophocles, I want you to meet Euripides, a promising young playwright.’ Margin for error is luxurious.” The well-known Dassin, Gore wrote to Dupee, who was always interested in movie people, “is a cheery man who has entirely forgotten why it was that he became a Communist. I suspect it was the result of a desire to conform. Already a small power struggle is beginning. He wants Melina [Mercouri, his wife] to play Aspasia. I suspect this casting could easily sink the project. Anyway, every film is a war and I hope to be back to the novel by summer.” Gore liked his script. But Dassin was not satisfied. “It was too tough for him. After all, Pericles was a politician and Jules was a sentimental leftist. He wouldn’t have been any good at making that film anyway. We were still going ahead with it with Melina Mercouri and then the colonels came and that was the end of the project.” In February he returned to Delphi, a source of deeper things than movies, and in June, with Howard and Boaty Boatwright and a new friend, Sue Mengers—an ambitious, raunchy, blond New Yorker who had gotten her start as a William Morris mailroom clerk and had just begun her rise to Hollywood power as an agent—he took a ten-day cruise of the Greek islands and Turkish coast. “Boats … are hideously expensive, so Howard’s friends had better kick through with their share,” he had told Dupee in February. By the end of the trip they were all still speaking to one another, and Gore, though they were still Howard’s friends more than his, had found the two entertainment-business ladies entertaining. After Paris and London in the late fall to work with Sam Spiegel on Night of the Generals, and even to Portofino for discussions on Siegel’s yacht, Gore confessed to Dupee that so much moviemaking had been hard on his nerves. He had done “4 films in a year which was to have been spent on the novel, further aggravated by ratcheting about from London to Paris to Rome, eating and drinking too much and talking too much to Sam Spiegel.” But it was the tick of the clock, the rustling of the turn of the calendar page that he heard involuntarily and tried in his art to turn to some sort of advantage. “Being 40 has not thrilled me—symbolist that I am—and various malfunctions of the body though not serious fray the edges,” he wrote to Fred, as at Via de S. Elena he looked out through the terrace window in the November sunshine. But at least “today the sun is shining; there was rain last night; the terrace chairs are wet; I sit inside; do some pages of script; read Harold Acton’s Bourbons of Naples; worry about my health; wonder why I drink so much wine (particularly last night); deplore the slackening of the waist-line despite the gymnasium; and see this page end, like all things.”
Chapter Fifteen
Trapped in a Nightmare
1965-1968
From the terrace of Gian Carlo Menotti’s palazzo at Spoleto, Gore watched the cascading fireworks against the dark sky. “Rome in August has been perfect. Cool weather. Superfluous people gone,” he told Louis Auchincloss. As he worked, during the summer of 1965, on Washington, D.C., he was happier in Rome as a place to live than he had ever been anyplace else. It was a pleasure to escape New York’s claustrophobic literary bickering. Since jet travel now rose almost to the level of commutation, he could be “home” quickly enough whenever he wanted or needed to be. Edgewater still drew him back, though selling it came to mind. He settled for ambivalence. In late February an old literary nemesis, Truman Capote, showed up in Rome, “wreathed in friendship which I almost take to be sincere.” In the last decade they had seen one another infrequently, only in passing. Though Gore preferred distance and indifference, some of the old rancor still e
xisted. “We had a pleasant drunken evening recalling who had said what about whom and I must say my blood pressure began to rise all over again, but then all ended well. He has apparently finished that book [In Cold Blood], though the last two times I saw him he had just finished the book on each of those occasions. I can’t get over how his appearance has changed (I can hear him on the subject of me), but he is an interesting brickish color now, rather lined, with a jaw worthy of Somerset Maugham. For the first time in twenty years I suspect that he is intelligent.”
Capote’s friendliness worried him. “I found him positively affectionate, which is sinister,” he told Nini. “What can he be up to? He even spoke disparagingly about the court-in-exile, about Jackie’s continual ‘vale of tears.’” Despite Gore’s inclination to be trusting, he still feared Capote’s instability. When in early 1966 Dupee published in The New York Review a long essay on Capote, Gore responded privately that “I thought you said all the right things most subtly and though the first impression was perhaps too admiring (from my icy point of view) it struck, doubtless, as you say, a proper balance….” Gore had further refined his own hesitant view about Capote’s intelligence. “What I find perennially discouraging in Truman’s work: the same quality that I find always in him, a profound silliness at every level; he is mind-less in the purest sense; but an animal shrewdness has made him succeed in the jungle, like those silly lizards which can take on any shade and so avoid becoming dinner.” It was a reminder of what life would be like in New York.