Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  After finishing the first draft of Myra, Gore, with Howard, Joanne, and Paul, sailed out of Piraeus on a hired yacht with four staterooms, for what they expected to be ten days of lovely Adriatic sunshine. The isles of Greece were before them, Rhodes their destination. The four of them had now been friends for over ten years. When she had finished Judgment of Paris, Joanne had telegraphed Gore, “AM AT YOUR FEET ARTISTWISE SUCH A BEAUTIFUL MIND BETWEEN THOSE FLAPPING EARS.” She regularly remembered to send him birthday greetings. Howard usually sent celebratory greetings to Joanne and Paul, and Howard and Joanne had grown especially fond of one another. But the Edgewater and Los Angeles days of regular companionship were behind them. Inevitably they saw less of the Newmans. In general, their Dutchess County life seemed mostly over, though they still saw and wrote to their friends. “Edgewater,” Fred Dupee wrote to him that July, “is pretty enough to break your heart—yes, even yours—with the willows still shimmering demurely despite all they have seen and heard over the years. I told them you had only gone away for a while and were on the best-seller list and would be back sometime and everything would be all right.” But Edgewater seemed more and more in the past. Margaret Shafer and her husband had been spending the year on a sabbatical in Rome. For the first time they got to know her well and found her company lively, an attractive lady whose beauty they enjoyed and whose worship of Gore, Gore enjoyed. The Dupees they always saw on their visits, and Fred’s Roman holidays were holidays for them as well, an opportunity for Gore and Fred to talk about books. Dupee still had no equal as a critic in Gore’s mind. He rarely saw the Roveres now, though he was usually happy to see them. Clearly, Gore’s high valuation of his Roman life made it inevitable that he would have less frequent and less sustained time with his American friends. “I am getting sentimental in my dotage,” Newman had written to Gore in 1965, that he longed to crack a bottle with him. It had been long, he joked, since he had seen him facedown in a urinal. Whatever direction they were facing, they were usually at a distance from one another.

  When they sailed out of Piraeus, they looked forward to a happy holiday together. The external omens, though, were not good. Gore had done all the arranging. “That is not Gore’s strong point,” Joanne remarked. It turned out that the crew spoke no English or French. The captain seemed not to know quite what he was doing. Some of the worst storms of the decade, rarely seen in May, kept the seas high and rough. Despite the obstacles, some things went well, and both Paul and Joanne enjoyed Gore’s accounts of the relevant mythology and literature, especially on Rhodes. As usual, he delighted in being charmingly tutorial. To the Newmans his knowledge seemed breathtakingly encyclopedic, and they blessed their good fortune in having such a superlative personal guide. But the weather was recalcitrant throughout. As soon as they sailed, Athenian sunshine turned dark over the rising seas. Soon they were sloshing around in wind and water. Gore and Paul played chess and read. Joanne embroidered and read. Howard nervously watched waves and crew. The captain, alas, seemed uncertain. “We got on ship and we took off … and ran right into another boat,” Joanne recalled. “Instantly. This was the first thing we did. And then I discovered … that this was the first time that the skipper had ever skipped, as it were.” But Gore felt he had reason to believe that the Greek captain was an old salt. To deal with the storm that first night the captain shut off the engine. It made matters worse. In the dark, he anchored in a bay off an island, probably afraid to bring the boat in. In the morning, hungry, they wanted to eat. Apparently, though, there was no food aboard. And “nothing on the boat worked,” as Paul quickly noticed. “The motorboat wouldn’t work. We went into the island in a three-man dinghy … looking for food, since the skipper wouldn’t sail out because of the weather. We bought bread and cheese and vegetables and had all these groceries in bags. Howard stepped onto the outside gunnel as we were getting into the boat. We all went immediately overboard. By this time the word had spread on the island that some American movie stars were on board, so I surfaced to the polite applause of certain onlookers. The food was gone. Everything.”

  When the weather briefly became calm, they sailed on. After a number of island stops in just-bearable weather, they were detained by the Greek Navy. The skipper had sailed into a sensitive military area. There had recently been a military coup. Greece was under martial law. “The Greek Navy fired a cannon at us and stopped us. We had to follow the Navy ship out away from that island and to another island. I thought Gore was asleep. Once they started firing at us, I said to Joanne, ‘Jesus, get downstairs! Lock yourself in the bathroom.’ I thought it might be guys from the other end of the political spectrum who might want hostages or might want the boat.” Gore came up on deck. He seemed perfectly calm about what was transpiring. “It never occurred to Gore,” Joanne surmised, “that anything would happen to him, especially in that day and age. How dare it! We were so young. He was perfectly happy and went back downstairs and back to his book. Howard and I were sitting clutching each other, saying ‘Oh, God!’” Soon a stocky captain came on board. Newman, who had been in the Navy during World War II, did not like the look of it. “The captain had some guys with machine guns with him. I like mature guys if they’re holding machine guns. These were young kids who stood with their guns ready on each side of the rear gunnel. They demanded to see our passports. They looked at them and us very suspiciously. Perhaps they thought we were political activists looking to create an incident. The Navy captain, after looking at all the papers we had and reading them slowly, finally grabbed the document I had from the American embassy stating who I was. I had lost my passport. On the day we were leaving Athens, we ran to the American embassy, which issued a temporary visa saying, This is Paul Newman, the actor. The captain kept reading it over and over. Then he stopped abruptly, looked around, and saw me. He looked at me for what seemed a long time. He put the document down and seemed to think for a moment. Then he went to the two machine-gunners and said, ‘Off!’ We surmised that he realized that we were American movie stars and that he didn’t want an international incident. That got us off the hook, just barely.” Actually, Gore soon told Fred Dupee, “the only real diversion” on the entire trip “was when an idiot captain brought us too close to the island where 10,000 political prisoners are kept and we were fired upon and boarded by the Greek navy. Fortunately the face of the international film favorite saved us from arrest as potential Pimpernels.” By this time Joanne had had enough. She was getting “grumpier and grumpier,” especially when the steward didn’t close a porthole and the rain soaked one of her favorite dresses. Feeling a little claustrophobic below, she decided to spend some time on deck, despite the weather. “As I was sitting on a trunk, a wave hit us broadside, the whole ship went that way, and the trunk with me on it came careening down and hit the side of the deck. I almost went overboard. At that point I was—Ahhhh! ‘Get me out of here! I’m going to drown! My children are going to be orphans! Ay, ay, ay!’ I was really getting hysterical. Paul said, ‘Wait a minute, wait, wait! We’ll get into someplace.’ So we convinced the skipper that we had to go into the lee of some island nearby.” But she had had enough. She was quietly emphatic in her most ladylike way: “Get me off this fucking boat!” When a ferry on its way to Piraeus came by, she jumped ship. Happy to be back in Athens, she had some delightful days there on her own and then flew to London. The three men finished their island tour. Howard and Gore returned to Rome, the Newmans, via Rome, to sunny California. “Greece was depressing,” Gore wrote to his father, “bad weather, worse politics. The Newmans just left. Finishing a new novel and waiting for war. Not a pleasant time.”

  As Vidal reworked his first draft at the beginning of June, war broke out in the Middle East. The British novelist Elizabeth Bowen stopped by at the Via Di Torre Argentina to visit. “She was writing Eva Trout, which proved to be her last novel, and I was working on Myra, and we were talking about the war. I remember sitting there, very friendly on the sofa, and I said, ‘Well, this war could es
calate and be nuclear and it could be the end of everything.’ She said, ‘Yes, I’ve considered that. I only hope they wait until I finish my new book. I’m so pleased with it.’ I said, ‘That’s exactly my feeling. I don’t care what they do after the war. I want to finish the book.’” With Rome blazing in the July sun, he finished Myra and mailed it to Little, Brown, where he expected that Arthur Thornhill, who had objected to the depiction in Washington, D.C., of two boys masturbating, would find it offensive and that Ned Bradford would immediately see its value. He was not concerned, though, that Thornhill’s inhibitions would influence his business judgment. He believed he had written a work of both literary distinction and commercial value, especially if its sales were not undermined by the usual narrow-minded, moralistic newspaper reviewers whose standard of “common decency” was one of the philistine mentalities that Myra existed to challenge. Still, he realized that Myra demanded an imaginative engagement and a suspension of middle-class prohibitions that might damage its sales. He had in mind suggesting to Little, Brown that they not send out review copies at all but have the book suddenly appear in bookstores with a publisher-created and -driven publicity campaign that would preempt any damage reviews might do. To Fred Dupee, for whom bestsellerdom was suspect, he wrote that “it is really very extraordinary and will save me from becoming a Mary [McCarthy] novelist bestseller-fate. I seem to have spent my life in getting into categories which, with some ingenuity, I get out of.” Of course, both Little, Brown and Myra’s author preferred that it sell every bit as well as Julian and Washington, D.C. With Dupee he promoted a consanguinity of literary sensibilities. With Little, Brown he wanted a bestseller. “I think the book absolutely riotously funny,” he wrote to Bradford. “But it will be a bit tough to sell to the middle aged ladies who buy novels. That’s why I hope the store clerks are well bred and the price sufficiently low to appeal to the young who don’t ordinarily buy hardcover books, and men who don’t either. If the paperback people are not afraid of censorship, I think we can extract a pleasant fortune from them.”

  At the end of July he sent the revised manuscript to Christopher Isherwood, who immediately telegraphed back, “I AM HONORED AND DELIGHTED TO HAVE ANY BOOK OF YOURS DEDICATED TO ME.” Myra, among other things, continued the discussion on sex and gender the two writers had begun in 1947. Isherwood was the appropriate dedicatee. Whatever their differences about the degree to which ideology and political action should influence aesthetic matters, it was a subject essentially embedded in both their sensibilities. In August, having read Myra twice, Isherwood expressed his total admiration. “In my opinion it’s your very best satirical work. It’s wildly funny and wildly sensible. Even when I was laughing most I was overcome by your wisdom and seriousness.” As Vidal had reason to know, Isherwood rarely gave compliments. But he did share perceptions, one of which Vidal probably both by nature and by inclination (if nature ever succumbed) had nothing to say about, to himself or anyone else. And even the usually frank, self-confident Isherwood provided a hesitant, qualifying, perhaps even self-protective clause. “What makes the book so truly remarkable is that—I know I’m not going to be able to express this as well as I should like, especially in the haste of letter-writing—behind the apparently fantastic doings and behaviour of Myra-Myron there is an entirely realistic and very subtle psychological self-portrait. The doings and the behaviour are seen, by the time one has finished the book, to be a symbolic play or ballet.” If it was a point the author preferred not to traffic with, it was an important key to the power of the novel that none of the reviewers, even those who had high praise, were to perceive. Beyond the fantasy, the realities the novel grapples with are brilliantly defined.

  As soon as the manuscript was in the mail to Little, Brown, Gore and Howard drove northward to Milan, then through the Black Forest—which he had never seen before, though he had written about it in Julian (and gotten it wrong, he now realized)—“then by slow degrees to Paris, destroying the liver enroute,” then across to London to participate in publicity, mainly television appearances, for the publication of the British edition of Washington, D.C. To his surprise, the British reviews were uniformly better than the American. It soon appeared on British bestseller lists, readers eager to have what appeared to be the inside story of Washington life and American politicians. “Still a good deal of, oh, people can’t be that bad!,” he reported to his father. “To which I respond that I regard my characters as, generally, more good than bad, pointing out that it was fate not I who created LBJ, a figure far more lurid than anything a novelist would be allowed to get away with on the page.” Artistic license seemed impossible in what was now becoming, artistically and politically, a licenseless world. The escalation of the war in Vietnam and Johnson’s obsession with a disastrous policy sickened Gore. The positive letters he had received in response to his television attacks on the President gave him hope that perhaps the American people had more sense than they were credited with. “I have never in my life had such a strange sensation of being trapped in a nightmare and knowing that there is nothing one can do but, in the dream of falling, wait for the crash. I suspect it is all biological; too many people—war and famine. We have the second; the first approaches.” It was the front-page, real-life version of what Myra-Myron dramatized.

  From London he returned to Rome, the depressing Aegean rains now almost evaporated from memory, for two memorable late-summer holiday excursions. Howard did not accompany him for either, which was often the case when Gore did high-social things of the sort he had begun to do regularly in Rome with the Crespis and Pecci-Blunts, Italian and Anglo-Italian aristocratic families who eagerly solicited him to have a “palace life.” Beginning in 1966 he had more invitations than he had time or desire to accept. They usually did not include Howard, which neither of them corrected or opposed. It was easier that way, and behind Howard’s response was the thought that he might not or would not feel comfortable with such people anyway. If it was the path of least resistance, at least there was little tension about it between them. The early-August quietness in Rome had its self-generated counterpoint, as if no sooner had Gore finished one flurry of activity than he experienced a combination of emptiness and eagerness to be busy at something again. Success rarely bred self-imitation. By personality he desired variety, and boredom frequently seemed an evil to be fled from or worked out of at almost any cost. “I’m now happily in Rome,” he told Nini, “heavily air-conditioned, writing some pieces to go into the next book of essays. If only some kind muse would say, stop, please. You don’t need to write any more. Such relief.” The alternative to writing, always available in his thoughts, was, of course, politics. It regularly came to mind, even if its focus had an impracticality evident even to him. As soon as he returned to Rome, he confessed to his father, whom he urged to visit them at the new apartment, “I am becoming restless, bored with being (as of last Sunday’s Times) the #2 bestseller [with Washington, D.C.]. Perhaps I should go into the N.H. Primary! Life is so short, temptation so great, satiety so swiftly arrived at.” His two late-summer holidays dramatized other people’s satiety, or at least how they overfilled their own personal worlds. With Diana Phipps, whom he saw almost whenever he visited London, he went to Sardinia on a ten-day holiday with British royalty. Through Judy Montagu he had been readily accepted into Princess Margaret’s Anglo-Italian circle, the London end of which Diana Phipps had become a part of. The young girl he had met with her parents at “Aunt Mona’s” New York mansion just as she was entering adolescence had become an attractive, full-figured, dark-haired young widow with a daughter, who, despite working as an interior decorator to provide income, managed to live a glamorous life with no shortage of eager companions and ready entrée into London society. She entertained regularly with her mother, the Countess Sternberg, now widowed, who lived with her. She bore her own aristocratic background and her personal impressiveness with dignity and freedom. In London she was someone desired and desirable, “stunningly beautiful,
dark haired, with a graceful figure, long arms,” as her friend, the writer Antonia Fraser, recalled. Diana introduced Antonia to Gore, the start of another, though less intense, friendship. Ten years younger than Gore, Diana was one of the most attractive women he knew, and she soon became one of the four or five women in his life to whom he felt an attraction that rose to the level of a serious, even if mostly speculative, interest.

  At first they had agreed to spend time together in August at a house in Salzburg that Diana planned to rent. When she made other travel plans, that fell through, but in late August, when she took a house for herself and her daughter on the Costa Esmeralda in Sardinia, next door to where Princess Margaret and her husband were staying, Gore joined her for ten days. Sardinia he thought a ghastly island, “a terrible place, made worse by the quarreling Snowdons. On the evening of the princess’s thirty-seventh birthday she and Tony had a splendid row,” he wrote to his father. “They’re both nice separately but together hell.” The four of them would go out to dinner every night. “Like so many good-looking women, Princess Margaret likes plain-looking women like Judy,” he remarked years later. “Tony was flipping lighted cigarette butts [at Margaret] at a nightclub on her birthday. Then he got up to dance with Diana. Margaret said, ‘Let’s dance.’ I said, ‘I don’t dance.’ Finally, I paid the bill, and Diana … swept a curtsy such as you’ve never seen since Marie Antoinette and marched out without a word. The next day we went to lunch with Annie Fleming, a witty, rather nasty woman. Political hostess. Widow of Ian Fleming. Before that Lady Rothermere. At lunch was Princess Margaret. She was in good form. She said, ‘I want to apologize to you for our behavior last night. It was intolerable, and I’ve been trying to write a letter of apology all day. Thank God we meet at lunch and I can say it.’ She’s well brought up.” Diana herself he thought “in good form.” But, shortly afterward, reading Saint-Simon, he thought that only the French master of social cynicism could have done the royal bickering justice.