by Fred Kaplan
The previous year Gore had helped make the case for Rome in Fellini’s Roma. His brief scene, set in an outdoor trattoria in August during the Roman “Festival of Ourselves,” had been filmed between midnight and 5 A.M. on a cold November night in 1971. Shivering, he had been asked the question, “‘Gorino, why do you live in Rome?’” “My answer varied with each take,” Gore wrote two years later, “but the theme was always the same. The artist deals in illusions. Modern Rome has only three industries: the government, the Church, and the movies; each a dream-dispenser. I waffled about the world’s end through over-population … and concluded that a city which calls itself ‘eternal’ is obviously the best place to watch eternity go down the drain.” Watching also included an active social life with Romans, other Americans in residence, and British and American visitors. Most of his wealthy and aristocratic Roman friends, what he called his “Palace life,” he began to see less of after his father’s death and especially after the purchase of La Rondinaia. “One day I got tired of them and really stopped seeing them overnight. Rather rude, I must say, but I got tired of them. Romans don’t care. That’s why I liked them. They may or may not have taken it personally, but nothing bothers Romans.” Judy Montagu’s death ended the festivities at Isola Tiberina. Never having taken to one another, Gore and Milton Gendel remained uneasy if not sometimes contentious acquaintances. But with some of Judy’s Anglo-Italian associates he had independent friendships, including his ongoing relationship with Princess Margaret. To be friendly with royalty was not entirely enjoyable, but during the 1970s they saw one another with enough frequency and mutual regard for the benefit to outweigh the inconvenience. “Princess Margaret is in the neighborhood,” he wrote later in the decade to a new friend, Judith Halfpenny, a British-born Toronto librarian who had opened a correspondence by sending him a long letter about his work and to whom he began to send letters about twice a year. Princess Margaret is “very thin; off the booze (hepatitis); she looks like Queen Mary. I find her witty and sympathetic; every woman I know who knows her hates her. She comes to dinner tonight. Vegetables, she said wanly. Just vegetables.”
Donald Stewart, an American writer with an Italian wife, alternating between Rome and Chicago, where he worked for Playboy magazine, entered Gore’s Roman life. Stewart, a tall, handsome man whose father had been a famously successful Hollywood writer, had first met Gore at a New England winter resort in the early 1960s. A part of the Paris Review world, he now moved comfortably in Roman circles, which soon included, for Gore, an Italian specialist in American literature, Luigi Corsini—a Communist intellectual of sensitivity and subtlety who wrote on literature and politics—and the celebrated Italian writer Italo Calvino. Calvino turned out to be his neighbor in the nearby Piazza Campo Marzio between Via Di Torre Argentina and the Pantheon. Calvino was notoriously quiet, but he and Gore actually had conversations, the start of a friendship that included Calvino’s vivacious wife, Judith, nicknamed Chichita. At his Rome apartment Gore frequently had small parties, evenings of conversation with interesting combinations of Italians and Americans, including Mickey Knox, who still lived in Rome, and of course George Armstrong. Ned Rorem, emblematic of the variety of his English and American visitors, whom he had met in New York in 1948, spent an evening in July 1970 with other guests at Via Di Torre Argentina. They had kept in touch with one another, mutually respectful, mutedly affectionate, through letters and occasional meetings. The day before, they had run into one another in the Piazza Navona. “Gore Vidal on the phone this morning,” Rorem wrote in his diary, “seems not so much depressed as apologetic that I’d not recognized him. ‘I’ve aged terribly,’ he explains.” When Rorem, hungry, arrived for dinner at eight-thirty, he was “ushered … onto a shabbily lavish roof garden…. ‘Some day all this will be yours,’” Gore said. The romantic Rorem and the antiromantic Vidal enjoyed one another’s conversation. “I’m sympathetic to virtually everything chez lui except the cynical stance. Those steely epigrams summing up all subjects resemble the bars of a cage through which he peers defensively. ‘It’s not that love’s a farce—it doesn’t exist.’ Defensible. Yet it’s just one definition, of something without definition. Rather than risk being called a softy, he affects a pose of weariness,” which Rorem thought he had learned from Paul Bowles. “Still, Paul remains in Morocco and Gore in Italy. These are romantic decisions as well as practical. Vulnerability is a major factor in any artist’s makeup. To disguise the fact is merely another way of making art.” After hours of drinks they went as Gore’s guests to La Carbonara in Campo de Fiore, dining “outdoors in the shadow of the Palazzo Farnese.” A few days later, as Rorem was about to leave Rome, they had dinner again, with another group of people. After the others had gone, Gore walked Rorem halfway home in the early-morning fog. “He said: It’s too bad I can’t love anyone. But of course he doesn’t mean it.”
Longtime friends came, those from England more regularly, especially Tom Driberg and even John Bowen, who had no special Italian interest. Maria Britneva and Diana Phipps made frequent visits from London. Gore and Elaine Dundy kept in touch, mostly by mail, Elaine’s funny “dear Gauze” letters part special code, mostly a delight, though her own emotional turmoil and her aspirations as a playwright kept her for the most part in the United States. The Newmans he saw mostly in America, though they eagerly did brief excursions together when the Newmans came to Italy. When they had last seen him in Los Angeles, they had given him another canine gift. The much-cherished but ill Billy, the survivor of the pair of cocker spaniels the Newmans and Howard had gotten for Gore at Edgewater, had had a dramatic final moment in Florence in 1970. Blind and deaf, Billy was Gore’s private passion and compassion, though Howard did most of the work of caring for him. They nursed and adored him. It was clear, though, that he would not survive much longer. Of the pleasures of a dog’s life only his delight in eating, which he did greedily, remained. With George Armstrong they made one of their Florentine excursions, driving up from Rome in lovely mild weather. Gore, Howard, and Billy stayed at the Grand Hotel. From their terrace they had a view of the Arno. Before going to bed, they put the remnants of an expensive steak dinner out on the balcony for Billy. In the morning they were called by the hotel people: there was a dead dog on the pavement below. Billy had pushed the steak bone through the wide balustrades. Blind and deaf, he had pursued his meal beyond the edge. When George arrived in the morning, Gore came down to the lobby with Billy’s corpse in a flight bag. “What’s that for?” “Billy.” “Billy?” “He’s dead.” Howard put the flight bag in the car trunk. They went on to have a scheduled lunch with Vernon Bartlett, whom Gore had not met before, a former member of Parliament now living in retirement in a villa near Lucca. “I have a little task to do,” Gore said. “Do you have a shovel?” “Yes.” “Lots of land?” “Of course.” Gore dug a hole. Bartlett, in his seventies, insisted on helping. Then they went in and had lunch. Soon, in Los Angeles, at the Newmans’, Gore was surrounded by dogs and children. The children and the other dogs disliked the newest acquisition, a small wire-haired terrier pup with one permanently bent ear. Since Billy was gone, why not take this dog off their hands? After dinner Gore drove back to the Beverly Hills Hotel with the dog in the car. That night, sleeping on his back, he was awakened by the dog’s face a few inches from his. Both ears were, unexpectedly, completely up. With his ears up, his long tail, and his thin, tight-haired body, he looked a little bit like a rat, which Gore decided was now to be his name, not as disparagement but as affection. The deal and the bond were struck. Gore resolved that the dog was his forever.
Eager to see Greece again, he seized the opportunity when Claire told him she was planning to go herself and travel economically by bus throughout the country. “I thought I’d ask Gore if he’d like to go. I was going to go by myself, to get away from it all and do something I’d always wanted to do. I got a wire back from Gore saying he’d love to and he’d meet me in Athens.” The marriage to Hilly had fallen apart. Gore lo
vingly did some hand-holding. “Through all these disastrous marriages Gore was there. He found them amusing and silly and accepted them because he loved me. He had good relationships with my husbands. When my second idiotic marriage ended, he was there to pick up the pieces.” Claire stayed at the Via Di Torre Argentina apartment, though she found that the apartment itself made her uneasy in a way she later declined to talk about. It was not Gore’s and Howard’s sexual activities, she insisted, that had made her uncomfortable, though what Gore readily referred to as “the bunnies” may not have been part of the traffic during her visits. For Claire, Gore “turned away from women” because of his mother. “I don’t think Gore is in any way gay genetically. Something happened. It seems to have turned him away from love. I don’t believe that entirely. One has to accept what he says. I was aware of Gore’s … sexual activities, but it was something I didn’t … it was none of my business.” Independent of anything else that happened, “I was always a little bit in love with Gore.” Claire’s mother found Gore charming and funny, but “‘why will he go on and on about the Kennedys?’” she would say. “‘Tell your friend he shouldn’t go on and on.’” In March 1974 Claire met him in Athens, where they stayed at the Hotel Grande Bretagne, the start of a ten-day holiday together, first in Athens and then to all his favorite ancient sites, which he was eager to show her. Claire had never been to Greece before. He was in his element.
As they traveled together in a rented car with a driver, he helped keep her spirits up with funny references to Hilly’s new lady. Hilly himself Claire had renamed “The Unmentionable.” On the first day out of Athens, Claire went to the back of the car to check her suitcase. It was not there. Her favorite red-fox coat, which she had worn for years and which Gore thought ugly from the moment he saw her in it, was also gone. “I thought the coat … was really lovely. Gore hated it with a passion.” After a moment of shock she felt relief. She would not “have to worry about toothpaste and clothes and rubbish. But he kept looking out the back window and saying, ‘The red fox coat is loping down the road.’” At Nestos they climbed to the monastery. At Thermopylae, Aristodemus and The Spartan could not have been far from his mind. As they drove around the Peloponnese, he showed her Mycenae and Sparta. At Naphthlion one evening, as they dined, they watched the last of the rosy sunlight on the purple water. On the far side of the peninsula they headed for Olympia, where they climbed the nearby hills and looked across the breathtaking vista, then to Corinth and Delphi. At Thebes they had a wine-filled lunch and then went to the ancient theater at Epidaurus. “She was standing center on the stage, and I was way up in the top row with a camera,” Gore recalled, “and I was not all that well focused myself, much less the camera. So she has a series of pictures of the top of her head only. You can see the widow’s peak and the background of Epidaurus and that was it.” Later “she evinced some displeasure at being removed entirely from the photograph except for her scalp,” though neither of them considered the possibility that perhaps the photograph represented Gore’s uncertainty about whether or not he really wanted her, in the larger sense, in the center of his picture. The trip was a great success. “Thank you for everything,” she soon wrote him. “It was the dream of my life to see Mycenae, and Delphi, and I am happy I saw them with you…. I look back on the Greek trip as one of the great moments of my life.”
For a man who had reinvented himself numbers of times as a writer, the patterns of his personal life, which had always been consistent, were now firmly in place. Daily life would alternate between Rome and Ravello and occasional travels for business or pleasure, including in December 1974 his first visit to Australia, where he publicized Burr and had lunch with the Prime Minister. His mainstay was work, which he did mostly at home, though he often took a manuscript with him when he traveled. By 1973 the work schedule for much of the rest of his life was set, a schedule that Howard remarked “he was born with…. Usually he gets up around nine-thirty. Right to his desk. Works two or three or four hours and then the rest of the day takes care of other things, though mostly he reads. That can go on till late. He’s always got his nose in a book. Except when he travels, and even then…. The first thing he does every morning is answer his mail…. The little Olivetti. It’s left there (by the door) and could get knocked down on the floor by anybody coming in. But I won’t touch anything. I’m not allowed…. He writes novels in longhand but plays and essays on a typewriter. I think he was forced to do the typewriter for television plays so it would make it go faster. With novels he can be leisurely and take his time…. He writes a lot of notes. We have this special small stationery so that he can scribble just a line or two.” More like his grandfather than either of his parents, he was almost always at work on something, a literary or political article, a television appearance, a speaking trip, a collection of essays, a historical novel, or one of what he called his inventions, the next of which, Myron, he began to work on in 1973, as he brought Burr to a conclusion. “I could not exorcise myself of Myra,” he wrote to Dick Poirier in January 1974, “and so as much as I disapprove of sequels, I found myself again at her mercy. The beginning is, I gather, difficult and that will put people off, I fear. Also, unlike most novels, I have put too many things into a short space. But life is short and Myra lives!”
By early 1974 Jason and Jim Silberman, a taciturn, somewhat shy but sharp editor at Random House, essentially in agreement with Jason, had responded to Myron. Unethusiastic, Jason raised questions about plot and pace, particularly that Myra makes her appearance as the other (and more interesting) half of Myron’s personality later in the novel than he thought effective. “I couldn’t figure out the time sequence,” Gore later wrote to a friend. “My publisher thought the beginning unclear and I kept bring[ing] Myra closer and closer to page one when her original delayed entrance was, to me, gorgeous.” Jason desired more narrative clarity and directness. Gore responded with some conciliatory revision. He soon saw that Jason’s dissatisfaction with the novel’s mechanics reflected his overall dislike of the genre, which included Myra Breckinridge. He wanted another Burr. Instead he got what he began to refer to as one of Gore’s “Chinese boxes.” Gore’s pattern would be to alternate a historical novel with an invention. “We understood this more or less,” Jason recalled. “It seemed Okay. Myron was the first one.” But it was just barely okay. Both editor and publishing house knew that the sales for the historical novels would be much greater than for the inventions, though the issue was less sales than temperamental and aesthetic disjunction. As an editor Epstein found it almost impossible to be soothingly supportive.
I can’t pretend I like something if I don’t like it, and he knew that I felt that way especially about those strange little books. All of them. I just didn’t like them…. As an undergraduate I once went to the Chinese opera down here on Chatham Square. I wanted to see what it was. It was so disorienting. First of all, the houselights are on all through the opera. Old Chinese men are sitting around eating oranges, throwing the peels around, paying hardly any attention to what’s going on on the stage. The stage is occupied by these people in fantastic costumes shrieking at the top of their lungs incomprehensibly. Men in the orchestra are dressed like the audience and playing funny-looking violins, squeaking away. It was the strangest experience. Then one of them would topple over on the stage, dead. The prop man, also dressed like someone in the audience, would come out and put a pillow under his head. It was very confusing to me. I’m not good at being shocked. I remember after that I was very upset for three or four days. I couldn’t pull myself together. I felt schizzy.
Clearly he could not be an enthusiastic editor for novels one of whose purposes was to shock through aesthetic and moral transgressions. Gore knew how Jason felt about the book. Jason knew that Gore knew. Both had tacitly agreed to accept that as a given and proceed with their personal and professional relationship. For the time being they were contractually bound, though both would find it increasingly difficult to sustain personal har
mony within professional dissonance. At best, they assumed, Gore’s historical novels would keep them together as editor and author; the inventions would not drive them apart. In March 1974, along with Silberman, a more restrained reveler than his companions, they undertook another eating tour, partly in Gore’s mind a celebration of the completion of Myron, scheduled for publication late in the year. They concentrated on food, not literature. With relentless aggressiveness, they ate and drank their way across Bordeaux. Jason apparently could consume more food, Gore more alcohol, though both pushed their gourmet adventures into New York publishing-world mythology. Neither accepted even the idea of restraint other than the physical impossibility of having more. Gore dealt with the added pounds by exercise and crash diets either at home or at spas. As to the alcohol, his daily regimen normally, in Rome and at Ravello, included wine and drinks from the later afternoon on. His tolerance was high. “I never saw anybody drink as much as Gore in my life, ever,” Jason later recalled. “We used to go on these gluttonous trips around the south of France. We’d hire a car with a driver because neither one of us could be trusted to drive. Usually just the two of us. Must have been about a half dozen of such trips. Maybe four times. One night we were at Rouen and we’d had a lot to drink. I could not keep my eyes open. I didn’t know which way I was walking. At the end of dinner we walked upstairs. Gore had a bottle of Dom Perignon in his hand. He was going to finish it.” But Jason never once saw him drunk. Howard thought “Jason and Gore were pigs. You can quote me. Pigs! And why wasn’t Barbara on the trips? There are some people who know a thing or two.” Gore preferred to be called a glutton. “We were not eating everything in sight, but we were eating great meals.”