by Fred Kaplan
Chapter Sixteen
From Chicago to Ravello
1969-1972
In February 1969 a telephone call to Rome from Harold Hayes, the editor of Esquire, alerted Vidal that the Buckley affair was not over. Except for some minor consideration, Vidal had given little thought in the intervening months to the mutual name-calling the previous August. He abhorred Buckley’s politics, he thought little (and badly) of him personally. When his father had expressed concern that Buckley’s condemnation of him as a “queer” before millions of listeners might harm his public image, Vidal played down its significance. “I said, ‘Forget it, Buckley’s considered a far greater creep than I am. This is the way the world goes.’” Reviewers had widely noted the inflammatory exchange. Most, forbidden from printing the homophobic epithet, concluded that Vidal had gone far but Buckley too far, that the association of Buckley with Nazi-like views, strained as the comparison might seem, had a basis in the widely held view among liberals of Buckley’s political philosophy and consequently was not totally inappropriate in a polemical argument. Immediately after the telecast, ABC canceled the planned time-delayed West Coast broadcast of the segment. Static was used to cover the word “queer” in its archival tape. Clearly the network wanted to distance itself as much as possible from Buckley’s epithet and the possibility of being named a co-defendant in a libel suit. Vidal’s public attitude was flippant, dismissive, though with an edge of allusion to his own (and others’) view that Buckley’s manner had about it something of the queen, as if to call attention to the ironic implication of someone who considered it the height of condemnation to call someone a “queer” himself seeming somewhat suspect. “I’ve always tried to treat Buckley like the great lady that he is,” Vidal told the Chicago Sun-Times in a morning-after interview. “He’s given to neurotic tantrums and I feel sorry for him. He doesn’t make much of a point. It’s mostly rabid insults and very little substance.” So the phone call from Harold Hayes came as a sharp surprise.
Buckley had had no intention of letting go. “I don’t want to talk about him,” he had told Newsday the day after the broadcast, referring to Vidal. “I’ll write about him myself when I get around to it.” He had been brooding on the event since its occurrence, and in November 1968 he called Hayes, with whom he had a personal as well as a professional friendship. “‘Mon vieux,’” he began, Hayes later wrote, “‘I have something to ask of you. I want to write about that row I had with Vidal on television last summer. Would you be interested?’ Sure, I said, but in light of the embarrassment to everyone concerned, including 10 million viewers—why?” Buckley responded, “‘I have been hounded at every turn about my part in it. I think if I were to try and write about it I might be able to work out why I said what I did. I will need some length, and I must be assured that your lawyers will allow me to call Vidal a homosexual in print. Otherwise there is no point in my undertaking it.’” That Buckley was interested in justifying himself and punishing Vidal must have been clear to Hayes. Otherwise, private opportunities “to work out why” would have sufficed. Hayes, who “preferred Buckley as an individual over Vidal and Vidal’s politics over Buckley’s,” responded with cautious eagerness. As an editor he felt the attraction of famous names and lively controversy. Esquire, though, had two concerns: its professional responsibility to be fair to both disputants and its potential liability in case one or both should sue for libel. Two questions had to be addressed before Hayes could respond. Would Buckley accept that Esquire had to give Vidal the opportunity to respond? Yes, Buckley agreed, as long as it was not in the same issue. Hayes consented. And what would Esquire’s lawyer say about Buckley’s insistence that he be allowed to call Vidal a homosexual? Would Vidal have the basis for a legal suit against the magazine? Esquire’s best protection, advised its attorney, Harold Medina, was to make certain that whatever it printed was “true in fact and fair in comment.” Was Vidal, in fact, a homosexual? If so, Esquire could accept Buckley’s condition. Hayes immediately set two staff researchers to search for corroborating information. Though the result indicated that Vidal had never himself admitted the applicability of the description, there seemed enough support for the claim to protect Esquire in the event Vidal should sue. Medina suggested that Buckley be encouraged to go forward, though the lawyer reserved final judgment pending his reading of the full article. “I told Buckley to proceed,” Hayes wrote, “and then I called Vidal in Rome. ‘Why are you giving space to that dimwit? He’s mad. He exists in the mind of the public only because of his attacks against me. I won’t dignify his dreck with a formal answer. But I’ll tell you more when I see his manuscript. I might write my answers in the margins.’ I told him Buckley’s condition that he could not respond until the subsequent issue. ‘In that case,’ said Vidal, ‘I’ll wait and see what he writes.’”
When Buckley’s article arrived at the Esquire office in late February, Hayes, after Buckley revised an unsatisfactory ending, sent a copy to Vidal in Rome, another to Medina. “He’s pretty rough on you, but you would have expected that,” Hayes wrote to Vidal. “In what form would you like to respond and can you meet the schedule we have in mind?” he asked, as if there were some certainty that the publication process would move forward. Actually, the editor, his publisher, his managing editor, and Esquire’s lawyer had serious reservations. If they published Buckley’s article alone, Vidal might sue. But if Vidal chose to reply in print, Esquire, they decided, would proceed only if it could publish both articles after each author had seen and stated his objections to the other and only after Esquire had arbitrated “whatever differences remained.” In Rome, Gore read Buckley’s article. When Don Erickson, Esquire’s managing editor, called to get his response, Vidal said, “How does the word ‘injunction’ strike you?” He was coming immediately to New York for a consultation with his attorneys and for discussion with Esquire. This was now a serious matter about which he could no longer afford to be flippant. Buckley’s article seemed not only inaccurate in fact but whiningly self-serving and viciously homophobic. It was a theodicy of sorts, a justification not of God but of Buckley, an egomaniacal self-projection so vast that it seemed satanic, the devil in the guise of infinite self-righteous rectitude. The only thing about his conduct for which Buckley felt he needed to apologize was that he had lost his temper. “Once at my office,” Hayes reported, Vidal “argued at great length against our going forward under any circumstances. It was exactly what Buckley wanted, Vidal insisted; Buckley would be the only one to gain, all others would lose, for Buckley’s only purpose was to call attention to himself. Moreover, Esquire’s risk was the greatest of all, for Vidal had never acknowledged—‘Never once,’ he emphasized—that he was homosexual. It was a dirty business, he concluded, and we—Esquire—should have no part of it. I tried to counter each point he raised in the interest of clearing the air between both men once and for all and then, finally, I asked if he seriously wanted me to abandon the project altogether. To his great credit, he answered: ‘I wish you would, but if you decide to go ahead I won’t try to stop you. I’m not in the practice of censoring by any means. If you do go on, I will sue you only if you refuse to print my response.’” Hayes thought he could control the process and satisfy both authors. “And so we went on.”
In Rome, as Gore reread Buckley’s apologia, he saw there was a cosmic politics at work here larger and more important for Buckley than the usual polemics about left and right, liberals and conservatives, though that of course had its importance. On the personal side, Buckley thought it unforgivable that Vidal had attacked his family. The attacks consisted of the few remarks in 1962 about his reactionary father and the cryptic reference in the August 28 telecast to the 1944 incident at Sharon. That Vidal seemed to him regularly to distort his political views and to have engaged in a systematic campaign to deflate his reputation was barely this side of tolerable, as long as he had his chance to respond. Of all his political opponents, Vidal seemed most to get under his skin, partly because
one of his strategies was to help an opponent to self-destruct. And Buckley had done just that on the convention broadcast. Dissatisfaction at his own public intemperance may have given special force to his need to justify himself. Apparently he had in mind some cathartic self-analysis. Political differences alone, Gore realized, could not satisfactorily account for Buckley’s vehemence. Vidal’s attacks on his family had been unpleasant but muted, though Buckley’s sensitivity to the subject made it personally explosive, an issue of honor and empathy. In fact, one of the sisters who had participated in desecrating the church he saw almost every day in her capacity as managing editor of the National Review. Still, neither political differences nor the family references seemed to warrant another full-scale engagement with Vidal. The “pro- or crypto-Nazi” remark had been the only statement that it might be argued was personally defamatory. The Sharon incident had never been discussed in public. What Buckley seemed now to want was some version of public confessional, the point of which would be that not he but Gore Vidal was the real sinner, apparently even at the cost of a response that had the potential to spotlight what he wanted most to keep out of public discussion. His essay, both Hayes and Vidal immediately saw, was not self-analysis at all. It was not a defense of family honor. It was not especially a re-airing of their political differences. It was the avenging sword of religious rectitude striking down the heathen. For Buckley, the proper action was a full-scale attack on Vidal’s character, epitomized by two unforgivable elements, one a sin, the other a sickness. Vidal, Buckley argued, was a money-grubbing pornographer whose immorality was purposeful, self-conscious, and self-serving. That was a sin. He was also a sexual deviant, and that was an illness. But unlike most sick people, he did not want to be cured. In fact, “the man who in his essays proclaims the normalcy of his affliction, and in his art the desirability of it, is not to be confused with the man who bears his sorrow quietly. The addict is to be pitied and even respected, not the pusher.” By characterizing Vidal as a “pusher,” like Socrates corrupting the youth of Athens, the logic of the argument was that the society would be better off if the pusher were somehow destroyed.
Within the month Vidal had drafted an essay in rebuttal. If Buckley felt free to attack his sexual life—which, though Buckley continued to make homophobic comments in private, had not been a part of their initial public discussions—Vidal would feel free to attack Buckley in similar ways, the first of which Buckley’s essay gave him the opportunity to do. Buckley had begun the essay with a lengthy excursus on an accusation made by a journalist that Buckley frequently used “faggot logic,” whatever that was. The journalist apparently meant that he had been bitchy in an ad hominem way. At some length Buckley referred to numbers of such references to him in the press and asked why it was acceptable to refer to his “faggot logic” and not acceptable for him to call Gore Vidal “a queer.” Vidal had an opening he could not resist, part of which he used to clarify what he thought the obvious protocols in the use of prejudice-laden references and part of which to discuss the possibility that, in regard to Buckley’s sexuality, where there was smoke there might be fire. Perhaps there was some reason he struck so many people as queenlike. Since Buckley had insisted he have the right to discuss Vidal’s sexuality in his essay, why should Vidal not have the right to discuss Buckley’s? And Buckley himself inevitably had to bring back to public attention, by quoting the exchange, the phrase he had found so offensive. He could hardly exculpate himself without reference to what had triggered his explosion. Since Vidal’s reference to Buckley as a “pro- or crypto-Nazi” was part of a political argument, that seemed to Vidal to justify his making one of the organizing principles of his rebuttal essay the history of anti-Semitism in the Buckley family. The Sharon incident would help elucidate Buckley’s prejudices and some of his politics. With the help of researchers, Vidal obtained the evidence about the participation of Buckley’s sisters in the church desecration. Though she requested that her name be kept out, Jayne Meadows provided some of the details. Since Buckley was claiming the moral high ground, it seemed appropriate to reveal that some of it was below sea level.
Esquire’s response to both essays was to try to protect itself against the possibility of either author’s suing it for libel. Buckley’s response was to attempt to force Esquire to force Vidal to eliminate the parts of his article that Buckley did not like. The issue was initially engaged on the level of fact. At Esquire’s request, Buckley and Vidal were required to provide corroboration for claims of fact. Whatever they could corroborate, Hayes accepted as publishable. But much of the tension was about opinion, and there the lawyerlike phrase “fair in opinion” came in as the standard to be upheld. Inevitably, opinions about “fair in opinion” differed. Vidal made demands of Buckley’s claims of fact. Buckley did the same of Vidal’s. The adjudication process seemed to go on endlessly. Finally, after two months of attempting to serve as honest broker, Hayes was exhausted, almost ready to rue the day he had decided to proceed. Medina was regularly consulted. Buckley kept his lawyer busy. So too did Vidal keep his, William Fitelson, a successful entertainment lawyer who seemed from the start noticeably out of his usual waters. The antagonists received the customary cautionary lawyerly advice. Vidal removed certain provocations. Buckley removed some as well. More inclined to let Buckley have his say than Buckley to allow him his, Vidal mainly forced corroboration for claims of fact and defended his own, including getting additional evidence to support his account of the Sharon incident. With a low-threshold libel detector, including declaiming that he would sue if Vidal repeated what Buckley now regularly referred to as the libelous August claim that Buckley was a Nazi, Buckley pressured Hayes and Vidal with threats. When Hayes pointed out that since Buckley himself had quoted it in his essay, Vidal could hardly be expected to respond without quoting it also, Buckley seemed to withdraw his objection. When Hayes argued that as long as Vidal had corroborative evidence for his claims of fact about the Sharon incident, it was not libelous for him to interpret the incident as anti-Semitic, he thought he had reason to think Buckley did not disagree or at least would not make his disagreement the basis of a libel suit. Vidal was not as convinced, aware that Buckley over the last decade had sued for libel in roughly analogous situations in which the suit seemed intended to stifle free speech, especially criticism of Buckley. In 1966 Buckley’s lawyer, C. Dickerman Williams, a civil-liberties attorney who had defended numbers of freedom-of-speech cases, had successfully so defended Buckley in a libel suit brought by Linus C. Pauling, whom the National Review had described as a Communist fellow traveler. Williams was now carrying Buckley’s repressive libel banner against Vidal’s free-speech defense. In the Pauling case Williams had won dismissal on the grounds that Pauling was a public figure, one of Vidal’s defenses against Buckley.
Gore now revised his article to meet what Esquire, prompted by Buckley and its own attorney, considered “true in fact and fair in comment.” Hayes felt confident that Buckley would recognize that Esquire had acted in good faith, that it had followed the agreed-upon procedures, and that unpleasant interpretations of accurate facts were constitutionally protected speech acts. Finally, at the end of April, unwilling to protract the vetting process indefinitely, already months behind schedule, Hayes called a stop to the cross-commentary. Buckley had stated unequivocally that he would sue Esquire and Vidal if Esquire published the last draft that he had seen. “You understand, I hope,” he told Hayes, “that I am driven to making this statement because I wish to prevent the publication of libels, rather than merely to punish the author of those libels.” Hayes then went through Vidal’s article again, making changes he believed eliminated or at least substantially decreased Buckley’s grounds for complaint. On April 28 Buckley responded to Hayes’s request that he now allow both articles to be published, “Dear Harold, You ask, would I, as a favor to Esquire, permit Esquire to publish about me things that aren’t so? Yes, I will—assuming that Vidal’s piece is otherwise corrected, and that
I am satisfied that he will not attempt to publish his libels elsewhere.” Hayes made further changes in response to Buckley’s directions and to conform to Esquire’s lawyers “minimum libel restrictions.” At that point, as far as Esquire was concerned, it could now publish unless one or both authors withdrew his essay. Vidal detested Buckley’s article. But he had no further objection to its being printed in the August issue. His own was slated for September. Buckley did not withdraw his essay. If he had, Esquire would not have published Vidal’s. Apparently much of Buckley’s strategy had been to pressure Esquire to publish his alone. Shortly after Hayes’s decision to publish both, Buckley’s lawyer informed Vidal that his client was suing Vidal for libel. The suit had already been initiated in United States District Court. The legal papers were in hand.