Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  During the year before his first summer at Ravello, as he worked on Burr, he alternated his interest in the political and military machinations of the Founding Fathers with his concern about America’s role in the modern world, especially the seemingly unending war in Vietnam, which in his election campaign in 1968 Richard Nixon had promised to bring to a speedy conclusion, based on a plan he refused to divulge. Once elected, it was clear Nixon had no plan other than to be more brutally militaristic than even Johnson had been. For Vidal, as for many others, the Vietnam War had become a noxious trauma, its corrosive destructiveness a constant preoccupation. He talked about it, dreamed about it, argued against it. Having gradually formed the view that American history had from the beginning manifested a predilection for wealth through aggressive conquests, from Andrew Jackson’s Indian Wars to the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and now the Vietnam War, he had begun to call America’s international presence “the American Empire.” It was not a phrase most Americans liked hearing. The nation on the whole maintained an unselfconscious disconnection between its view of itself as a peace-loving republic uninterested in exploiting others and the reality of its far-flung dominance. Often, under the pretense of fighting international communism, America had been expanding its own economic and political power, at great cost to domestic stability and prosperity, and in the cases of Korea and Vietnam at the expense of substantial amounts of American blood. Much as he had grown to hate Lyndon Johnson, Vidal had become even more hostile to Nixon, who, unlike Johnson, had few to no redeeming elements. As a realist, Vidal expected politicians to lie, manipulate, and maneuver. That was in the nature of their profession. But Nixon seemed excessive in these matters, and, unlike Johnson’s, his domestic program seemed dedicated to maintaining and enriching his electoral base. Everything Vidal valued in public life—justice, fairness, open-mindedness, noninterference in the private life of the individual, a commitment to the Bill of Rights—the Nixon administration opposed, explicitly or covertly. The FBI, as Vidal saw in its attacks on the New Party, whose 1972 presidential candidate, Ralph Nader, he supported, had become an instrument of oppression. America seemed to be turning into a police state.

  As he made progress with Burr, a novel partly about the politics of the eighteenth century, the idea came to him to write a satirical play about politics in the twentieth century, in which Nixon would be the main character. His dialogue would consist almost entirely of words the real Nixon had uttered in public discourse. The other main characters would be George Washington, whom he had begun to dramatize in Burr, Eisenhower, and John Kennedy, with two contemporary figures, called “Pro” and “Con,” one loosely based on William Buckley, a Nixon supporter, the other representing his own views, who would comment on the characters. Washington would be depicted as critical of Kennedy’s and Nixon’s militaristic ambitions, Eisenhower as a golf-playing nonentity, Nixon as a mendacious, power-mad psychopath. Suddenly preoccupied with the idea of the play, he stopped work on Burr, barely under way, to write An Evening with Richard Nixon. Within a short time of its completion in late summer 1971, he had a publisher and a producer. Jason of course did not balk at the prospect of Random House’s putting it out. “Sure, I was happy to publish An Evening with Richard Nixon. It was funny. It was a way of getting Gore started at Random House,” and whatever minor loss there would be in printing a small edition, scheduled for March 1972, would be outweighed by having Vidal under contract for Burr. In mid-October, Gore sent the play to New York. “Here it is,” he wrote to Jason. “I’ve put a red line in the margin opposite the speeches that are invented. I think there should be a different kind of type for the invented—but not italics. Bolder Roman, say … ? I’ll write a one page note for the beginning, explaining what’s real and what’s not.” That there would actually be a stage production was uncertain, in part because there had not yet been time to determine that but also because the play had limited theatrical potential. There was no plot in the conventional sense. It was a topical play about political ideas, hardly the usual stuff of Broadway box-office triumphs. Only the national preoccupation with the Vietnam War and the passion Nixon and his policies aroused made it potentially though problematically viable, especially perhaps on college campuses and in a New York theatrical situation that kept costs as low as possible. Nixon supporters would not be likely to flow in from the suburbs to see the play. The vast uncomfortable middle, uneasy with the war but unwilling to oppose it actively, would not be eager to buy tickets to be made even more uncomfortable. Spending an evening with Richard Nixon would not be much fun even in the best of circumstances. Political theater was rarely commercially successful.

  That An Evening with Richard Nixon was to close after thirteen performances on Broadway was partly a given of the genre, mostly the result of the honorable if not idealistic misjudgments of the producer, Hillard Elkins, who was delighted to be working with Gore, hated Nixon, and hoped he might make the play a commercial success. Gore met “Hilly” through Claire Bloom, who had married him in 1970, soon after her divorce from Rod Steiger. The marriage “obviously was over long before that,” Howard recalled. “Claire had been seeing Hilly. There was a plan that he was to get in touch with her via our address. However, neither Gore nor Claire clued me into this little plot they’d hatched. So a telegram arrives for Claire Bloom care of Gore Vidal or something, and neither Claire nor Rod are in town. Rod calls and, unthinkingly, not knowing anything, I said, ‘How strange, did you change agents or something?’ They had changed apartments, and I thought it was probably her agent and he’s got a job for Claire and doesn’t know how to contact her. Steiger said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ He said, ‘Will you do me a favor: open it and read it to me?’ So I opened it and I’m reading just words. It sounds like baby talk. ‘Can’t wait to meet you for act 3, love and kisses,’ and some name. It was from Hilly Elkins to Claire. She returned to Rome that day. Steiger confronted her with the telegram, and that was the end of the marriage. Gore, that same day, called me from New York, and I told him that this strange thing had happened. ‘Why would Claire be getting telegrams here?’ And he started calling me all kinds of names, ‘Idiot and stupid,’ and this and that! I felt, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done?’ The next morning at eight o’clock the doorbell rings. It’s Claire. I said, ‘Claire, I’m afraid I have done something so awful. I’m so mortified. I’ll get on my knees.’ ‘You know,’ she said, ‘it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Otherwise I never would have found the courage to get out of this horrible marriage.’”

  Elkins seemed to many as unlikely a match for Claire as had Steiger. Smart, energetic, fast-talking, domineering, with a huge wardrobe, an obsession with Napoleon, and an amusing effervescence that was both self-indulgent and charming, he had made two successful films, Alice’s Restaurant and A New Leaf. He had produced a number of flashy but commercially unsuccessful Broadway plays, including Golden Boy, with Sammy Davis, Jr., and the musical The Rothschilds, as well as the economically successful Oh! Calcutta!, on which he worked closely with Ken Tynan. Five years younger than Vidal, a tense mix of liberal idealism and entrepreneurial commercialism, Elkins felt that there was nothing he could not do successfully, nothing that would not benefit from his salesmanship, including An Evening with Richard Nixon. As soon as he read the script in summer 1971, he determined to do it. Probably he raised money for the production from friends who were sympathetic to the play’s message, perhaps people more interested in politics than theater. Vidal, who liked his brash high spirits, was delighted. Soon Elkins, so dedicated to self-promotion that he had recently encouraged a book called The Producer that sycophantically chronicled his theater life during 1970-71, had a director, a cast, and the Shubert Theatre, “the largest musical comedy house on Broadway. I should have known then,” Gore remarked, “as Claire should have known, about his acute megalomania, the phase he was going into, and I was so preoccupied I didn’t notice it. I just
said the theater’s too big for this play. Musicals can’t fill it. How can this play?” In December, Elkins tracked down the young director Ed Sherin, on holiday skiing with his sons, and soon wore down his resistance to what Sherin, with experience as a director in television, movies, and theater, most recently the Broadway success The Great White Hope, thought an untheatrical script. “I said, ‘This is impossible. It’s a political pamphlet in dialogue form.’ He said, ‘Don’t you like it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I like it.’ He said, ‘You mean to tell me you can’t find a way to stage this?’ I think Hilly wanted to do it because he wanted to do anything that would get press.” An admirer of Vidal’s essays and novels, Sherin shared Vidal’s view of Nixon and recent American politics. When he had had a small role in Romulus in 1962 he had observed Gore during rehearsals looking unhappy at what seemed the play’s likely failure. “I thought the play itself was miserably done,” Sherin recalled. “Cyril was not fleshy enough, edgy enough, real enough for the role. You had that kind of buttery, creamy, wonderful largesse of Ritchard, but it had a vaudeville taint to it. I think that was a critical error, so that the real meaning of the play escaped the production. It was a much darker play than the one we put on.” Sherin had a similar challenge with An Evening with Richard Nixon: how to make theatrically effective an unrealistic script grounded in a realistic contemporary political discourse consisting entirely of talk about rather than depiction of physical action or emotional tension.

  Frenetically energetic, Hilly produced, Sherin directed, Claire watched nervously, filled with high expectations. Gore and Howard came from Rome in January. Sherin, who had not seen Gore for ten years, noticed that he looked older, more mature. The young man had disappeared. In February, rehearsals went into high gear in preparation for a month of tryouts. The brilliant, seriously comedic George S. Irving took on the role of Nixon. To bridge the gap between political realism and theatrical fantasy, as well as to deal with the large cast of characters, Sherin decided to make use of masks and have numbers of actors play multiple roles, including the relatively unknown Susan Sarandon. Claire thought Sherin “wonderfully creative, brilliant.” Gore, looking to explain the play’s failure, was less appreciative. Sherin “wasn’t right for the play. But the whole thing was doomed anyway. I can’t blame him for anything.” During rehearsals Sherin noticed Gore’s playfulness, his charm. “But I always felt that there was an agenda there. That was part of his power and also something that made me somewhat unnerved when I was around him. You always thought he was looking around the back of your head. A very bright man but very careful. Almost premeditated. It looked as if he had written the script before he’d gotten to the meeting. I’m not talking about a business meeting. I’m talking about life, about personal interactions. Very controlled, careful. The only fun that Gore ever had with me was when he would talk about my hidden desires to be a homosexual, and that was fun. He would come on a little bit about ‘You don’t really know what’s going on inside you,’ and so forth. Then he would say that pickles were very important. You had to eat a lot of dill pickles in order to keep your pecker hard, or something like that. He was charming even when he was playful, and then he said some very wonderful things to me about my work. And it bonded me to him.”

  As rehearsals progressed, Vidal rewrote the script, the performance version considerably different and much shorter than the Random House edition. In late March 1972 a month of previews began. Elkins had decided there would be no out-of-town openings. Gore came regularly to rehearsals. “We were perfecting it or trying to. I was giving them new stuff all the time. Hilly was hysterical. That’s his nature. He was either stoned or jittery. He wasn’t much help.” Press releases and word of mouth let the world know that a politically inflammatory anti-Nixon play was about to open. Gore appeared on the Cavett and Susskind shows. Soon author and producer were getting anonymous hate letters, including death threats. On the one hand, they seemed preposterous. On the other, they were unnerving. “The only bomb scare that I knew of,” Sherin later joked, “was that we were going to close.” Apparently “a few Republicans set fire to the balcony,” though it appears to have been confined to a wastepaper basket, “and there were all kinds of disruptive things,” Gore recalled. Men in dark suits and white shirts, who announced that they represented the White House, came to one of the previews. As they left, one of them waved pleasantly. “When the Nixon deputy smiled and waved, we knew,” Sherin recalled. “‘Enjoy yourselves,’ they must have said. ‘Put this on in Manhattan, the hotbed of American radicalism, it won’t hurt us.’” Though the director, the producer, and the author then and later found it compelling to think they were being stalked by the FBI, the IRS, and the Watergate plumbers, a New York anti-Nixon Broadway play had no national significance. Only those involved assumed (and usually briefly) that political theater had a political impact. Elkins and Sherin were more worried that the play would not have enough theatrical impact. Sherin felt he had gone as far as he could with pratfalls. More would be counterproductive. Elkins arranged a lunch at Sardi’s with Elaine May, whom he wanted to consult about adding jokes. “Elaine was rather embarrassed,” Gore remembered, “but wonderfully insane. She didn’t have any jokes. It wasn’t her field. We had a strange meeting at Sardi’s. She had just watched the play…. It was really kind of a seminar on comedy. How you get jokes. How you make people laugh. I knew quite as much about it as she did. But all very amiable and all pointless,” because, as Sherin saw, of the gap between Vidal’s belief that he had written an important political play and the producer’s desire to do whatever necessary to have a commercial success. “Gore’s the sweetest man in the world, but he’s not the world’s greatest dramatist,” Sherin observed. “He’s a great novelist, great essayist, and that’s what Nixon is—a political essay in dialogue form. You want to chortle when you read it, ‘Look at this. Did that asshole really say that?’ ‘Oh, that bastard, did he do that about Cambodia, and did he really go to the Lincoln Memorial steps and pray to Lincoln? My God!’ But you don’t want to see that up on the stage. That’s what came out of that meeting at Sardi’s. Gore said that’s what it is, and it’s wonderful. Elaine didn’t know what to say. And Hilly was responding to the fact that he was the ringmaster at Barnum and Bailey’s Circus. He just wanted to pull out any stops he could.”

  The play opened on May 6. Some of the reviews were respectable, though hardly glowing. The New York Times headlined Clive Barnes’s review “Evening with Richard Nixon Is for Radical Liberals,” complaining that the play had “no real drama, no real excitement.” To attack Nixon this way was “no more exciting than seeing candy taken from little kids.” Still, this recent British arrival conceded, “some people might like to see a mean and nasty play about our President.” Very few got the opportunity. “Sorry you didn’t see the play,” Gore wrote to Ned Bradford. “It was one of the best evenings I’ve ever spent in the theatre (this quite modestly, as actors, director and Nixon et al contributed).” The play closed after two weeks. In Gore’s recollection the preview audience had been ecstatic. “Then it all ended with one review in the Times by an Englishman who said he knew nothing about politics. He’d been a dance reviewer. A nice little fellow, but he was told to write a bad review and he did. It wasn’t that bad: he kept saying how funny it was. And then he said that Gore Vidal has said mean and nasty things about our President. I remember that sentence.” It was his third consecutive theatrical failure, “the only failure that bothered me, because I believed it was a good play.” If there was ever a reasonable postmortem, it would have concluded that Sherin’s analysis was sensible. It was not the subject matter, as Gore insisted, that had sunk the play but the difficulty of making it into an effective theatrical experience for a large audience. For Elkins it had been a triumph of self-assertion. “The day before the play opened, he went to bed for two weeks” in his Manhattan brownstone, which, Gore joked, “looked like Elba.” His Napoleonic obsession “made everybody nervous, and it drove Hilly mad,
it finally did. I don’t think he even knew when the play closed. He was just lying there in bed with a great smile on his face, smoking pot. Nothing was done, not that there was anything to do.” For Claire “the first night,” she soon wrote Gore, “was one of the most exciting evenings in the theatre I have ever had,” but “this was not just the death of a play, but a condemnation of the American people.” For Gore it had been an exhausting, dispiriting experience, one that brought him to the edge of collapse, though he managed to disguise from almost everyone just how miserable he felt. For a while he worried he might be about to have a breakdown. It seemed like the misery he had experienced just after Alice Astor’s and John Latouche’s deaths. Soon he and Howard were back in Rome. “My blood pressure nearly took the top of my head off those last few days,” he wrote to Claire. “But now it falls as my spirit soars, freed of that place!,” by which he meant New York. In June he took possession of Ravello. The bright spring sun revived him. So too did Burr. By midsummer he was back at work, and almost happy.