Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  has now sustained my suit against Esquire and correlatively against Vidal, by ruling that notwithstanding recent Supreme Court decisions, Vidal’s article was defamatory and the case would have to go to trial. Having lost its motion, Esquire has agreed to publish in its November issue a full statement totally disavowing the views of Vidal. And has agreed to compensate me for the legal expenses involved in bringing about a judicial determination satisfactory to me. One hundred and fifteen thousand dollars is the cash value of the settlement. Having disposed of Vidal’s lawsuit, I am instructing my attorneys to take the necessary steps to discontinue my actions against him to avoid the time and expense of trial. In the long period between the publication of the libel and the disavowal of it by Esquire, I have learned that Vidal’s opinions of me are of little concern to the public. A fortiori, they should be of little concern to me now that the publishers have disavowed them. Let his own unreimbursed legal expenses … teach him to observe the laws of libel. I hope it will not prove necessary to renew the discipline in future years. There are limits even to my charity.

  Esquire of course had not agreed to and did not in November “disavow” Vidal’s charges against Buckley. They simply said they did not share Vidal’s opinion of Buckley, but since it was “fair in comment,” they were perfectly within their rights to publish it. Esquire’s publisher wrote to Newsweek, which had taken Buckley’s claim at face value, that “Newsweek quite incorrectly characterizes the statement in our November issue concerning the settlement of Buckley’s suit against us as a ‘disavowal’ of Vidal’s article. On the contrary, it clearly states that we published that article because we believed that Vidal had the right to assert his opinions, even though we did not share them.” Esquire had not libeled Buckley, and neither had Vidal, as far as the court was concerned. The court had not sustained Buckley’s case against Esquire and had not sustained his suit “correlatively against Vidal.” These were falsehoods, apparently an attempt to manipulate public opinion and the historical record. The court had not ruled that Vidal’s article was “defamatory.” It had ruled that the case would have to go to trial in order to determine as a matter of fact whether or not it was defamatory. The cash value of the settlement with Esquire represented only Buckley’s legal expenses, under the circumstances hardly a triumph for the plaintiff. Since Judge Levet’s analysis of Vidal’s alleged libelous statements about Buckley implied that Buckley might have an impossible time proving to a jury that they were technically libelous, Buckley’s implication that of course he would win the suit, that he had in fact won it already, was casuistic at best. Even the simplistic headline of the New York Times account of Buckley’s press conference was more truthful than Buckley’s inaccurate press release: “Buckley Drops Vidal Suit, Settles with Esquire.” Medina was furious. The press release was in direct “contravention” of his agreement with Rembar. When Esquire privately protested to Buckley, Buckley wrote to Hayes, “I do not propose to reopen the controversy…. I presume you are writing to appease Gore Vidal,” certainly an accusation that Hayes did not at all deserve. As if endless repetition of a falsehood would somehow make it true, Buckley willfully repeated his claim, as he was to do ever afterward: “You are incorrect in saying that the court did not find Vidal’s article defamatory.” Perhaps Buckley had been able to convince himself that it had.

  In the 1960s ultimate truths had been impinging on Gore’s life with an irremediable finality that had begun with the death of his grandmother in 1964. Of all living people, other than his father, Dot had been his most dearly beloved. Lesser loved ones fell away. In late winter 1966, at the age of fifty-three, John Kelly died after surgery in New York, a victim of overweight, heavy drinking, and a weak heart. Kelly’s death seemed best understood as a sacrifice to the gods of self-destructiveness. It had not been a life devoted to sustaining life. Andrew Chiappe, whom Gore had last seen when he had come to Rome with Fred Dupee in 1963, died of a heart attack in Paris in May 1967 at fifty-two. As with Kelly, Gore had seen less of the reclusive Chiappe in the 1960s, though his resonant Shakespearean recitations kept a place in Gore’s memory and remained the first association that came to mind when Shakespeare was mentioned. Both Kelly and Chiappe had been mentors of sorts in the 1950s. Fred Dupee had been a mentor with whom Gore had had both an intimacy and a regularity of helpful communication that he never had with Kelly or Chiappe. But by the end of the decade the good friends had become alienated. Arguably Dupee had been Gore’s closest friend of the late Edgewater years, beginning in 1958 and continuing for a full decade that the move to Rome in 1963 only partly attenuated. For much of those years, with Andy and Howard, they had had a kind of family life together. After 1963 they continued to see one another in Rome and New York, and they corresponded regularly at a level of literary resonance that kept their lives intellectually and emotionally connected. In 1963 Gore and Howard had left their elaborate tropical-fish aquarium with the Dupees. Andy worried about the fish; she kept them in the living room near the fireplace because she worried they would die of the cold at Wildercliff during the winter. The fish became a motif and a preoccupation. One night Andy smelled smoke. Wildercliff, which had been built in 1798, was far from fireproof. That night the house did catch fire, probably from under the fireplace. But Andy saved the fish. One night she dreamed that she took the fish to the zoo.

  The fish had a simpler time of it than the people. By the end of the decade, the Dupee/Vidal ménage had collapsed, shattered by tensions largely generated by Dupee’s difficulty in satisfying the conflicting demands of his fragmented life. His 1963 Roman visit had infuriated Andy. It seemed to bring out what, from her perspective, was the worst in Fred. She threatened divorce. The same thing happened in 1967, additionally complicated by Andy’s feeling that Gore and Howard encouraged Fred’s Roman adventures. Dupee was always a welcome visitor in Rome, a valuable literary confidant whose comments as an early reader of Julian, then of Washington, D.C. were valuable for the revision process. Apparently Gore and Howard enjoyed Fred’s openly flamboyant sexual escapades abroad. His double life in New York seemed to them burdened by clanking chains. When Fred read Myra Breckinridge in manuscript in summer 1967, he thought it “a brilliant tour de force; written with great energy and obvious pleasure; limited and two-dimensional in its self-imposed caricature-style, but to my mind much better than anything Nathanael West wrote! … The pornographic climax is a brilliant success, of course, and the best (and most amusing) thing of that type I’ve read.” When Andy read it, furious at both Fred and Gore, she threw her printed copy out the window. When, in 1968, Gore and Howard came for the first and last time for lunch at the Manhattan apartment on Morningside Heights into which the Dupees had just moved, the relations were strained, the atmosphere tense. Andy felt betrayed and bitter. Gore had no idea why or at least no sympathy with her resentments. At sixty-five, soon perforce to retire from Columbia, Fred was depressed, restless, emotionally exhausted, and deeply unhappy. Howard hardly noticed that the three principals were suffering. Soon the Dupees moved to California for a semiretirement in which Fred taught occasionally at Stanford and Berkeley, totally separating himself from his New York world. He wrote nothing more. After that unhappy lunch, Gore and Fred never saw one another again. When Fred died in California, a little more than ten years later, Gore wrote to Andy, “For the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about Fred. In fact, drove to Big Sur and spent the night Dec. 23 [1978]. I rang but got no answer. Went on to San Francisco and tried again. We thought we’d drive back down and make one more effort but took the plane, and that was that. I think the Roman death highly in character—and what a complicated, layered and counter-layered character it was. The last years didn’t sound too splendid…. I have too many thoughts to come up with one, or even two. Sadness: that we’d not seen each other for so long. There aren’t many people left to talk to. How fast it goes! An unoriginal truism that would have Fred speaking in italics, ‘single quotes,’” double quotes”—speaking. Love,
Gore.” Andy resented the letter and did not respond.

  The world Kelly, Chiappe, and Dupee had been a part of in the 1950s and ’60s had been steadily fading away, and in the case of Edgewater itself Gore had now determined to cut the attenuated cord. In early 1969 he finally put it up for sale. There seemed no practical reason to keep the house. In New York they stayed at the East Fifty-fifth Street apartment or at 416 East Fifty-eighth Street, where they had moved some of the furniture from Edgewater, although Gore disliked the apartment. By the end of the year Edgewater had been sold to a wealthy New York businessman, William Jenrette, for $125,000, a handsome profit on Gore’s initial purchase price of $16,000. Jenrette soon transformed it into an expensively restored historical showplace. In October, Howard arranged to ship Gore’s books to Rome and organized a sale of the furniture. When Howard could not resist selling two chairs that had been set aside for Barbara Epstein at double the price they had agreed on, she was “shocked and furious with me—and I could kill myself for having been talked into it,” Howard wrote to Gore. “I’ve apologized but I don’t think she really accepts—I’m not going to take money for the other two things she wants and pay for shipping them.” Dispossessing himself of Edgewater simplfied Gore’s life desirably. It had begun to seem impossible to take care of the house from his European distance. But he knew, and afterward always felt with dreamlike resonance, that his Edgewater associations inextricably interwove the key experiences of his personal and professional life. It had been his residence during a golden time. Latouche and Alice Astor had been his friends and mentors then. The last, best years with his grandmother, the start of his relationship with Howard, the years of financial struggle when through television and movies he had triumphed economically, his partly successful political campaign in 1960, his return to writing fiction, and his victory swim in the river when Julian rose to the top of the bestseller lists—Edgewater had been for a decade and more an inextricable part of his life. It was never to stop being a part of him. But some of the anxieties that owning the house created and that contributed to his decision to sell it were always connected to darker, retrogressive fears about loss and death, about the difficulty of holding back inevitable, ultimate changes. The longer he lived in the house, the more it became clear to him that he would not live there for the rest of his life, or live anyplace forever. Change and dissolution were the laws of material reality. Nothing escapes, and both Julian and Washington, D.C. were strongly elegiac evocations of worlds past, present, and to come. There was no going back. “I still dream about Edgewater,” he said in the late 1990s. “That I bought it back and have gone back to live but everything’s falling apart. Time has undone Jenrette’s work. The river has eaten away the lawn. No, I don’t put any interpretation on that dream. No, I wouldn’t like to own Edgewater again. Too much work. You can’t live in those houses without servants, and there aren’t servants…. I couldn’t maintain it at a distance, and it constantly needed repairs. I finally sold it. I’ve never regretted selling it.”

  At the beginning of 1969 he rented, with the help of Alain Bernheim, a large apartment in Klosters, Switzerland, that had been occupied by Anatole Litvak, the director of Sorry Wrong Number and The Snake Pit, a good friend of the Bernheims, in a four-story chalet-style building called Casa Willi in the center of the small town. Klosters was the vacation home of artistic and literary people, including the novelist Irwin Shaw—whose The Young Lions was one of the best known and most commercially successful World War II novels—who lived there year-round, and movie people, among them Greta Garbo, who visited regularly. Shaw, whom Gore liked, had become the unofficial mayor of the Klosters international community. In a valley, surrounded by high mountains, Klosters was brisk in the winter, bright in the summer. From the balcony on one side of the apartment the views were spectacular. “It was a skiing place, and we went for the winter, for about two or three months,” Howard recalled, though neither of them did downhill skiing. Still unspoiled enough in 1969 for artistic people to afford, from Christmas through February Klosters became a winter playground, though its period of high-fashionableness was still to come. Gore signed a five-year lease for the equivalent of $300 a month, with a payment of $7,000 to Litvak for his furniture. The flat, Gore recalled, “had formerly been Greta Garbo’s, and she moved down the street…. Then up the street was Irwin Shaw, who sort of ran the town. The Jimmy Joneses and the Sam Spiegels were in and out of town. Much too Hollywood for my taste. Beautiful country and wonderful air and I loved cross-country skiing, and I did a lot of that. A very healthy period.” Garbo, who came to Klosters every winter to visit a friend, usually stopped by in the mornings to join Gore and Billy for a walk. At the railroad station she bought every movie-gossip magazine. One night Gore entertained Garbo, Irwin Shaw, and the writer Martha Gellhorn, who had been married to Ernest Hemingway. Overwhelmed by Garbo’s presence, Gellhorn could not stop talking. The next morning she apologized to Gore: “But what else do you do when you finally meet Helen of Troy?” Helen of Troy also enjoyed trying on Howard’s clothes, which fit her. “She always wanted to dress up in my clothes or Howard’s clothes,” Gore recalled, “and be a boy with other boys. She took Howard’s blazer and Nehru jacket and never brought them back.” At the end of the winter season the town was quiet, semi-deserted. When they occasionally spent a few summer weeks at Klosters, the vistas were green and vast, the weather comfortable. They were to keep the apartment for five years, then to give (rather than sell) the lease to the Bernheims. “I don’t know why we gave it up. Well, things got very cumbersome,” Howard remarked. He had to look after the building and apartment in New York City, the flat in Rome, now Casa Willi.

  Having given up Edgewater, Gore needed a replacement. The apartments in New York were for visits or rentals. The Via Di Torre Argentina apartment had become home for the time being. But having been brought up, even if peripatetically, in houses, his mental model of architectural domesticity had the separateness, the privacy, and the size of a freestanding house. As much as he felt at home in Rome, the attractive apartment seemed ancillary, or at least partial, to be completed by another residence, preferably not in a large city, not necessarily in Italy. He had already begun to pressure Howard to keep his eyes and ears open about the possibility of a country place, the European replacement for Edgewater.

  The home-lust was further complicated by Vidal’s political alienation because of America’s Vietnam madness and his dissatisfaction with his high taxes, much of which went to support a war he detested. During their August 1968 appearances on television, Buckley had contemptuously referred to him as an expatriate. He did not feel like one, at least in the traditional sense embodied in Henry James’s long English residence and assumption of British citizenship. He felt more like Mark Twain, who over a ten-year period had taken multi-year-long vacations from America, returning only for business visits. Distance clarified perspective, kept emotions under control. To the extent that he might obtain tax advantages if he resided abroad, Gore would be happy to have them, but his overriding motivation was to keep a healthy distance. European life appealed to him emotionally and culturally. Whatever price he would pay to live abroad, especially in regard to his career as an American writer, he was willing to pay, though probably he did not fully appreciate how alienating to many Americans his long-term foreign residence would seem and what consequences would result from forgoing on-site opportunities for career promotion. It would be seen as expatriation, which went against the national ethos. It was something an American writer would have to explain, and no explanation could ever completely suffice. Spurred by his disgust with the war, he considered making the ultimate statement beyond expatriation. In 1969, while establishing residence in Switzerland, he explored the possibility of becoming a Swiss national. It would have meant giving up his American citizenship. Residence was feasible. Nationality, though, was too technically complicated, Swiss regulations too restrictive to make it sensible to pursue. Even the tax advantage
s of Swiss residency soon proved illusory. He next tried Ireland, with whose prime minister his Hollywood friend John Huston put him in communication. “I confess that when I wrote threatening to change my nationality [because of the Vietnam War], I never dreamed my rhetoric would ever be translated into action,” he explained to the prime minister. “Like most writers, I am prone to spur others to positions I myself never quite get around to taking. But this is the exception: last April I became a resident of Switzerland simply because one has to have an official residence somewhere and the United States was mine no longer. This month I sold my house in New York State and am now poised for permanent departure…. I’m aware that the honorable course for me would be to stay and fight. But I am now 44 with work to do and so think it time to leave the marching and fine speeches to those who are not only younger but more optimistic than I.” Ireland offered a tax haven for artistic people who could demonstrate Irish descent. Gore could easily do that on both sides of the family. “I would indeed live in Ireland with pleasure and, come to think of it, symbolically it is perhaps the best gesture I could make at this time: to return after more than two centuries to the family’s point of origin. Certainly this is a nice symmetry. The American experiment has gone wrong while the troubled country that could sustain us is now coming alive, and proves the better place to be.”