Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  In early September, in Venice for a short holiday, he attended a masked ball where he had a wittily acerbic exchange with one of America’s peculiar variants on its own royalty, Clare Boothe Luce, who had been ambassador to Italy and whom Gore had known over the years through the Auchincloss connection with Henry Luce. The overheard conversation in 1942 in which Luce had proposed to Gore’s mother had stayed in his mind, an ironic subtext to his awareness of Clare’s successful careers as playwright, journalist, and diplomat, and the advantages of her husband’s power. “I said,” he wrote to his father, “I felt novels were finished. She said, ‘Yes, but there’s still a kind of fiction people love!’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Time magazine.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I meant fiction.’ ‘I know,’ I said, ‘I meant Time.’ ‘Don’t be naughty,’ she said, ‘I meant detective stories.’ Then she insisted we be photographed together in the room where Browning died.” Venice itself, though, seemed perfect, a city that transcended human affectations. “So it goes,” he wrote from both sides of the ironic divide to Fred Dupee, who, like Gore, would have felt the glamour and at the same time mocked himself for having felt it. “So it goes. A summer of Capri,” where he had visited Eddie and Mona, who at seventy-six still seemed “extraordinarily beautiful…. Sardinia, Venice, the life of the beautiful people, almost as tiring as Red Hook-Rhinebeck.”

  While the perfections of Venice occupied his eyes, his mind was partly on Myra. To Fred he sent a postcard the illustration of which was Carpaccio’s painting of St. Jerome leading a lion into a monastery, the monks fleeing in terror. “Old Gore leading Myra Breckinridge into the literary arena.” It seemed unlikely that many readers would flee in terror, and many might buy the novel anyway, though Little, Brown and he did anticipate moral disapproval from certain quarters and legal pressure from others. Censorship would not be an issue in the United States, where Myra seemed certain to meet the legal standard that judged a work in its entirety. Arthur Thornhill, encouraged by Ned Bradford, who thought Myra brilliant and funny, quickly overcame his squeamishness about associating Little, Brown with a novel some would define as pornographic. Brilliant at his business, he was soon to sell Little, Brown to Time Warner, which allowed Bradford, who had an interest in the sale, to write good-humoredly to Gore “from one millionaire to another.” Britain was another matter entirely. Some of the monks did flee in terror. Gore’s ongoing London publisher, Heinemann, declined to publish Myra, mostly because it feared that an association with the book would affect Heinemann’s reputation in a way that would damage sales. A smaller but less timid publisher, Anthony Blond, stepped in, provided that Gore would respond satisfactorily to pages of objections raised by its own lawyers, some of which had to do with obscenity, some with libel. Under pressure from an increasingly nervous Blond, Vidal made numerous changes to minimize the possibility of the government prosecuting publisher and author for obscenity. He resented the attempts at what he felt to be censorship, though he uneasily cooperated, to his lasting regret. The issue of libel was resolved quickly with Little, Brown via a request that Gore sign a statement holding the author entirely responsible if he and Little, Brown should be sued. Reasonably confident that America’s libertarian libel laws, especially in regard to public figures, made a suit unlikely, Gore agreed. Britain’s much narrower libel laws presented a different challenge. They regularly forced publishers into nervous self-censorship whenever manuscripts referred to living people. Blond feared that he would be sued. Undercapitalized, he might be driven into bankruptcy by legal fees even if he successfully defended himself. Blond’s lawyer’s objections, though, were comic. Would the publisher not be vulnerable to be sued for libel by Ava Gardner since Myra fantasizes having an affair with her? Apparently the lawyer did not know that Ava Gardner existed to be fantasized about. Otherwise, she and her Hollywood studios would soon be out of business. Most of the objections were of this sort. A few, though, had enough surface plausibility for Gore to agree to make some minor alterations that satisfied the publisher. Apparently the changes as a whole did not satisfy W. H. Smith, Britain’s largest bookseller, which refused to sell Myra except on special order. Legal censorship still existed, though by 1968, the year also of John Updike’s Couples and one year before Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, larger changes were occurring. In distant Australia, Myra itself became the text of a court case resulting in a ruling that allowed Australian readers to determine what books they would read. Extralegal voluntary moral censorship, like W. H. Smith’s, often in the form of economic pressure, increasingly became the major weapon of those who believed that elite ethical police should make decisions about what books could be available to the public.

  With Little, Brown there was another issue: whether or not Myra should fulfill the “third book” clause of their 1962 contract. “I’m trying to make up my mind whether or not we should include Myra Breckinridge in the old contract (the third book I’d always planned to be essays),” he wrote to Bradford in the middle of July, as he sent off the manuscript to New York. Actually, Little, Brown had no problem with Myra’s being counted as the third book or as part of a new contract that would include Myra and future novels. Vidal, in fact, had multiple agendas, and his major target was William Morris, not Little, Brown. “It may well be,” he told Bradford, “that if there is a large advance from paperback a separate contract should be drawn since I don’t look forward to my heirs getting 15 Gs per annum for the rest of the century,” the amount that Vidal and Little, Brown had agreed in the existing contract that Vidal would take each year under a tax provision allowing royalties to accrue and tax to be paid only on withdrawal of the funds. “Anyway, do give me figures so that I can brood.” His Little, Brown account contained over $100,000, royalties from Julian and especially Washington, D.C. It was reasonable to assume that the profits from Myra would be substantial. Little, Brown itself was uneasy about holding large amounts of his for more than a brief time. What he really had in mind was cutting William Morris out from any share in the profits from Myra. Having become a William Morris client for his television work through Harold Franklin, he had drifted into becoming a literary client as well. In Gore’s judgment the agency did little to nothing for its percentage of his royalties, and he increasingly disliked Helen Strauss, who constantly publicized the wonderful things she had done for him and at the same time paid no attention to his backlist, as if that were beneath her interest. Actually, the dislike was mutual, as Owen Laster, a young agent who had finally gotten his wish to move from William Morris’s television to its literary department, noticed and as Strauss later confirmed in her memoir. “Helen was ugly but she had presence,” Laster recalled. “She had a classy elegance to her and a touch of the tough lady. When she left William Morris, she was sixty-three years old and had been here for twenty-four years. She started the literary department. She was a powerful agent,” among her clients James Michener and Robert Penn Warren. “She always wore labels. If she had a fur coat, it was from a fancy place. Gore didn’t really respect her very much…. When he delivered Myra to Helen Strauss, she said to me, ‘This is his pornographic book.’” His anger at Strauss never subsided. “She couldn’t read a book,” he remarked years later. “She never read a manuscript. I only took her on out of pity because of Harold Franklin, and, my God, never do anything out of pity on this earth. Every time that I have been seriously damaged professionally and sometimes personally, it’s been because I was sorry for somebody. And now here I am being held up by what is essentially a non-agent. Then I read her memoir in which she dismisses me. I sold out to fame, she claimed, as if she knew anything about what I ever wrote. She had no idea.”

  To his delight, in 1967 Strauss was lured to Hollywood by a high-paying offer and California sunshine. Vidal’s agency contract with William Morris, scheduled to expire on August 15, was up for renewal. This seemed the perfect opportunity for him to leave. Sue Mengers, on the rise at Creative Management Associates, was eager to have her friend as a movie and televi
sion client. That would take care of that aspect of his work, though he insisted, despite her pressure, that Alain Bernheim still negotiate his European movie deals. For the time being he would handle his literary rights himself, except in Britain, which Graham Watson at Curtis Brown very capably arranged. He did not brood long and soon notified William Morris that he would not sign a renewal. He then told both Little, Brown and the agency that Myra would not be the third book in his 1962 contract. That would be a volume of essays. He requested that Little, Brown draw up a separate contract for Myra. Consequently, he maintained, the agency would not be entitled to any commission from its sales. William Morris disagreed. So too did Little, Brown, though it had no material interest in the change. Its priority was to keep Vidal on its list. If indeed Vidal had all along intended the third be a volume of essays, his intention was contradicted by the words of the contract, which stated it was to be “a novel on a subject to be mutually agreed upon.” Perhaps his anger blinded him to the contract’s language. More likely he chose to base his campaign to cut out William Morris on a purposeful misreading that would force the agency either to sue him or to compromise. An actual suit was unlikely. He could force the “novel” to be a novel other than Myra, but he could not offer a book of essays rather than a novel. Thornhill and Bradford got out of the line of fire. Gore agreed in writing that if the dispute went to court, he would assume full responsibility should the publisher be cited as co-defendant. In New York he met with Nat Lefkowitz, William Morris’s president, a tough defender of his agency’s rights. Lefkowitz argued that Myra was the “novel” the contract referred to, and consequently the agency had all rights of literary representation. In addition, Lefkowitz maintained that William Morris, not CMA, had the right to negotiate the movie deal, which meant an additional percentage. At first neither party would budge. Vidal proposed that the third novel “to be mutually agreed upon” be a reprint of the now-out-of-print Williwaw. That seemed ludicrous to everyone except him. Finally, after some months, a compromise was effected. Vidal agreed to give the agency its percentage of the royalties on the sales of Myra and its subsidiary interest in the movie deal, in effect acknowledging that it was the third book of the 1962 contract. William Morris agreed to relinquish its claim to represent Vidal in the sale of the movie rights, hardly a significant concession, since the negotiation did not begin until after the expiration of his agency contract. Little, Brown substituted the volume of essays for the third novel and drew up a new, separate contract for Myra, though this made no material difference to either Little, Brown or Vidal. In February 1968 Little, Brown published Myra Breckinridge. Within weeks it was a nationwide bestseller.

  While Myra soared, Gore’s hope that he would have a new Broadway success plummeted. Soon after finishing Myra in midsummer 1967 he channeled his restlessness into a new play, Weekend, which opened for tryouts in New Haven in February, in Washington for two weeks at the National Theater on February 18, and then premiered at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York in mid-March. The Best Man team of Roger Stevens and Joe Anthony produced and directed. John Forsythe played the leading role. The title was as innocuously misleading as that of the still-unproduced Drawing Room Comedy. Like The Best Man, it was a satiric attack on political morality, on ambition and prejudice, this time a dramatization of the Washington world of the mid-1960s, the realistic, sometimes harsh topical allusions to well-known figures, especially Lyndon Johnson, ummistakable. Washington reviewers and audiences responded enthusiastically, at least partly because of the notorious “inside the Beltway” syndrome. Here was a play about their favorite profession and their own recognizable world. At the Washington premiere one of Lyndon Johnson’s daughters, who with her husband had come as the guest of Washington Post theater critic Richard Coe, responded to a harsh reference to her father by ostentatiously walking out of the theater. When the reviewer gave the play a mixed to poor review, Gore angrily drew attention to the fact that he had expressed his prejudice against the play even before seeing it by bringing Johnson’s daughter with him as his guest. “At least begin by saying I came to the theater with Lynda Bird Johnson, who hated the play because it made fun of her father. She was raging as she went up the aisle. I was standing in the back and heard it all.” The play’s mode was realistic-ironic, the structure conventional, none of the characters especially riveting, the clash of ideas and prejudices effectively projected and recognizably part of the revolution in sex, race, and politics that by 1968 had become the visible wounds of a country in turmoil. The Vietnam War inflected national life. Bobby Kennedy and Johnson nervously confronted one another, one soon to be dead, the other to relinquish office, though the year’s tragic events were still to come. Hardly influenced by professional newspaper critics, the Washington audience was enthralled by Weekend. The play was a capital event in a city in which there were few such cultural performances. Notable Washington figures rushed to see it. Nini and Gore hosted a huge celebratory party, and Nini soon had a crush on the handsome leading man. In New York and Washington, then in Canada and on the West Coast, Gore combined appearances for Myra with publicity for Weekend, at least to the extent that two such simultaneous achievements made the drum rolls even more triumphal. There seemed good reason to expect that Weekend would have a long Broadway run. When the play opened in New York, the critics were devastatingly hostile, some for aesthetic, some for political reasons, perhaps even at some level uninterested in the ostensible subject. It was attacked for its conventional form. Much of the irony was missed. After twenty-two performances, Weekend closed.

  “My entire life is now devoted to appearing on television: a pleasant alternative to real life,” Gore quipped to friends in March 1968 as he began to bring to a close his intensive schedule of appearances for Myra. When he returned to Rome in April, he expected to spend a quiet spring and summer in Italy. Underexercised and overfed, he resumed his daily exercise regimen at the gym. He even began “to look muscle-bound,” he wrote to his father, “but one feels better—another week of the US and television and I could have reached the end.” Suddenly a new television opportunity became available, something more intensive than anything he had done before. ABC Television News offered him the opportunity to appear on a fifteen-minute prime-time slot each night at the national party conventions in August, seven or eight evenings in all. He would represent the liberal left. William F. Buckley would represent the conservative right. The veteran television newscaster Howard K. Smith would moderate. Unlike its rival networks, ABC had decided not to televise the conventions’ proceedings in full. Instead each night the network would provide an edited videotape selection of the days’ events, live coverage of the most important nighttime activities, and adversarial commentary by two well-known political entertainers who were already notorious adversaries. ABC hoped for a victory in the ratings war; Buckley and Vidal each hoped triumphantly to represent their views and themselves. Neither ABC nor the participants could know that their own face-off would be a small-scale version of larger, more dramatic, and more image-powerful battles in the Democratic convention hall and in the Chicago streets.

  When Gore accepted ABC’s invitation, he was unaware that Buckley had been approached as early as spring 1967. Buckley was the only spokesperson for the right who was well known, photogenic, and entertaining; the network needed him in place. In the six years since his ascension to television regularity, he had become a distinctive performer whose turns and tics created photo-compelling high TV political drama, marked by the success of his talk program, Firing Line, on which he appeared with guests chosen for the likelihood that the interaction would produce semi-intellectual entertainment. Firing Line existed to provide a forum for Buckley and his views. It instantly became a rallying focus for conservative opinion. Unlike Vidal, Buckley had committed himself to television as a propaganda weapon in the political-cultural wars. His career had been narrowly focused, devoted to argumentative political discourse, including running for mayor of New York in 1965 on a pl
atform guaranteed to make his views well known but to minimize his votes. His “self-appointed job, since graduating from college,” he later said, had “been to defend publicly my position on political matters.” Firing Line was an extension of the National Review, except that to attract a national audience it was necessary to structure the presentation as a clash between confrontational views. Supremely self-confident, Buckley generally gave the liberal devil his due. Formidable representatives of other viewpoints regularly appeared on the program. Vidal himself, though, had not been invited, partly because he had made it clear in public comments that he would not accept an invitation, mostly because he was the one person Buckley found so distasteful that he preferred to avoid the emotional provocation Vidal’s presence aroused. In Buckley’s view, as Louis Auchincloss surmised, Vidal was the devil, “Not the devil’s emissary but the devil himself.” Auchincloss had never seen Buckley lose his composure, ever. “Cool, bland, he rolls his blue eyes upward gracefully and calmly and dismissively in the face of provocation and attack. Always. Except with Gore.” With Buckley committed, ABC asked him if there were anyone from the left whom he preferred not to be paired with. Vidal, he responded, suggesting a half dozen or so other names, among them Norman Mailer, Arthur Schlesinger, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Sensing the likelihood of television drama, ABC of course selected Vidal, though it claimed to have eliminated alternatives on the basis of informal soundings, even research. When informed that Vidal had been selected, Buckley neither strongly objected nor withdrew. He apparently preferred to appear on national convention television with Vidal than for Vidal to appear with someone other than Buckley.