by Fred Kaplan
[Some] might cling to childhood out of self-delusion,
But that, or any similar, confusion,
You’ve always held in absolute contempt—
The only Absolute that you exempt
From your unwearyingly edifying
Assault on mankind’s thirst to be undying—
A hope you’ve never ceased to make a mock of
Or boldly nominate what it’s a crock of.
One of the expected guests who did not show up was John Galliher, who divided his time between Paris, London, and New York. Galliher, who had been Nina’s friend and lover-in-passing in the early fifties, had introduced Gore to Jackie Bouvier twenty-five years before at a party at his Georgetown flat. “Apparently your party was a dazzler,” Galliher wrote to him the next week. “Diana said it was enormous fun, and Marguerite that it was the most entertaining group of people possible. Alas, I went to a dinner and afterwards after a few magic puffs and lots of vino, got involved in activities that kept me too late to go to Mark’s.” After the party John Bowen went with Gore to the Ritz suite where, in voices hushed so as not to awaken Howard, they talked until dawn.
One party in Gore’s honor that he declined to attend was his election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. On the last day of 1975 the secretary of the institute, the poet William Meredith, had sent him the letter of notification. “Will you be kind enough to let us know by return mail (or by cable) that you accept this election?” There would be an informal dinner in New York in April, a formal induction in May. Gore cabled from Rome: “THE INSTITUTE DOES ITSELF BELATED HONOR MY CONGRATULATIONS I CANNOT OF COURSE ACCEPT MEMBERSHIP BEST WISHES TO YOU GORE VIDAL.” Over the years friends had privately told him that whenever they had raised his name he had not had sufficient support. Most of his equally well-known contemporaries, and many less accomplished writers, were members. Now the better part of honor and anger seemed to dictate that he decline. Perhaps he had in mind William James’s response when elected to membership in the Academy, an elite subgroup whose members were drawn from the institute, that he did not care to belong to an organization to which “his younger and shallower and vainer brother” belonged. “I note now,” Gore wrote to Dick Poirier, “that every lit. prize save the Pulitzer is within the gift of the Nat’l Inst. of A and L who, impertinently, elected me a member. I was stern. Told them that I could not join them as I already belong to the Diners Club,” a line which was soon stinging the ears of some, amusing many.
He was aware, of course, that his response, like his residence in Europe, might promote an already existing general disinclination among many of his peers to say kind words about his work, let alone offer him glittering prizes. Still, it seemed better to be a gadfly than a golden cow, and things were still quite golden anyway, including his appearance on the cover of Time in March 1976, to mark the publication of 1876 (dedicated to Claire Bloom), which he had finished the previous autumn. Dressed in nineteenth-century clothes, quill pen and manuscript in hand, framed by white clouds and blue sky, handsome face with receding hairline and white flecks in his hair, “Gore Vidals New Novel ‘1876’: SINS OF THE FATHERS!” in bold letters against his dark coat, his half figure dominated the best possible advertisement for the novel. It had gradually dawned on him in 1973 that with Burr and Washington, D.C., he had written the eighteenth-century beginning and the twentieth-century present of American history. By spring 1974 he decided that he would fill in some of the intervening years, and 1876, published exactly one hundred years after its events and two hundred after the founding of the republic, would be both intellectually apposite and dramatically timely. “I am sinking into a vast novel 1876,” he wrote to Dick Poirier in May 1974. By early 1975 he was “holed up at Ravello with 1876, “he told Tom Driberg, “a novel about the last days of Gen. Grant’s admin, and the Tilden-Hayes election. Rather pleased to be back in the past: the food is so good!” And he was soon delighted to learn, he wrote to Graham Watson, that the “Book of the Month has bought 1876 sight unseen by anyone except me and I’ve only written a hundred pages!” In 1876 a now elderly Schuyler and his daughter Emma sail into the port of New York in late 1875. A famous historian who feels like Rip Van Winkle, he has come to cover the election of 1876, to advance his own fortunes, and to reestablish his connection with his native country. Instantly minor celebrities in New York social life, Schuyler observes the American scene and Emma falls in love with the wealthy, married William Sanford, whose wife dies giving birth to Blaise Delacroix Sanford. Three months later Emma and William marry amid rumors that they may have had something to do with Sanford’s wife’s death. To escape wicked tongues the newly married couple goes to live in France. Emma’s father, who suspects that his daughter has done something questionable, stays on in New York, where he dies in 1877, having experienced the Revolutionary War via Burr, the Civil War via Lincoln and Hay, and having survived until just after the republic’s one-hundredth birthday. His experience is dismal and disillusioning. The small, mostly honorable world of the Founding Fathers is in the process of becoming a large, dishonorable empire. A novel written about the events of the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the country, it was a message for the celebrants of the two-hundredth. With his appearance on the cover of Time, Gore had, like his father, reached one of the apogees of American celebrity, though he appreciated the irony that not only had Henry Luce once proposed to his mother but that the owner of Time had very different views than Gore did of American politics past and present. That of course did not matter. In a country in which everything was commodity, Time and Random House were happy to be partners in the selling business. So too was Gore. 1876 quickly went to the top of the bestseller list.
The usual variant on the traditional book tour that he had worked out long ago brought him to New York in March, for television and radio appearances and for print interviews, and then to California, where under the guidance of an expert and well-known publicist, Jay Allen, who had become a friend, he did further appearances. Allen, a longtime Hollywood insider, a habitué of the Beverly Hills Hotel, courteous and amiably conversational, had become Vidal’s West Coast publicist in 1968 with the publication of Myra. When he had Gore’s schedule in hand, Jay would call Robert Dolce, Johnny Carson’s talent coordinator, a great admirer of Gore’s, who as “a street kid from Brooklyn” found his work and his pleasures, including a dinner with Gore in Rome, a heady thrill. “There were so few people who could bring to The Tonight Show statements that were so quotable the next morning as could Gore,” Dolce remarked. “People who wanted to make political statements would usually go on Face the Nation, not The Tonight Show. But Gore always was prepared enough to know who the audience was and what he could accomplish on that program. He really enjoyed it. He had a good time. I knew how courageous he was on the air and how outrageous, but I never cautioned him about anything, and he never was in questionable taste. He knew what questions were coming, and my job was to get the very best out of this person. But for most guests there was a little bit of comfort to know that you weren’t going to get a curve from out of left field. You had six minutes…. But before he would go out—and this is fascinating—Gore would stand backstage—this remarkable man who was going to go out there and shock the audience of five hundred people and shock the nation and didn’t give a fuck about what their reactions were and what they thought—he’d be behind the curtains saying, ‘Oh, my God! What am I going to do!’ He was as panic-stricken as anybody. And then he would go out and do it and do something remarkable.”
Gore’s appearances on The Tonight Show had become semiannual events. Carson and Vidal were alike in their combination of impromptu wit and icy discipline, which created some sparkling moments in the transient world of 1960s and ’70s talk television. NBC later filmed over the tapes: none of Gore’s Tonight Show performances survive. His most sustained performance had him in Los Angeles in late August—early September 1976 for the taping of six telecasts of Norman Lear’s
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, in which the comedienne Louise Lasser played a version of herself in a late-night parody of the soap-opera genre, itself a soap opera, that had attracted both a cult and a wide popular audience. Gore’s new agent for American television and film, the Hollywood impresario Irving [Swifty] Lazar, known for aggressive deal-making and his elite Oscar-night parties, handled the contracts. Sue Mengers and Gore remained close. With Mengers and her husband, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Gore and Howard took brief vacations in Venice, Vienna, and Morocco. In Hollywood she hosted birthday and other parties for them, especially for Howard, who found Hollywood glamour and sociability irresistible in contrast to the comparative isolation of much of his Ravello routine. Gore’s friendship with Mengers puzzled some of his friends. Jay Allen thought Mengers evil. “Gore said, ‘She’s so filthy-mouthed that she intrigues me.’ For instance, she tells him stories about [her sexual escapades]. In her bachelor days, when she and Gore were in Morocco, she showed how adventuresome she could be. And they always appeared to be having a very humorous time together. “But I think it’s her very vulgarity that intrigues him. Also, of course, they go way way back to when she was just a secretary back in New York. And he likes to say, ‘We made her,’ Gore and Paul Newman.” Both a gentile and genteel Midwesterner, Allen did his best to understand the attraction, which had and would keep Gore a loyal friend through Mengers’s rise and then fall as a premiere Hollywood power broker, though they had ended their business relationship. They were both disappointed with her disposition of the movie and television rights to Burr. She had optioned it to ABC for a Bicentennial miniseries special, which it soon became clear would never be made, and it now seemed too late for alternatives. Lazar eagerly promised great things.
Although Lazar had dealt with the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman contracts, Gore had himself initiated the appearances directly with Lear, whose television work he admired and whom he had known for a while, though he actually hated Lear’s script, which both he and Lasser rewrote as they went along. “Louise would be busy going through it adding jokes for herself,” Vidal recalled, “and trying to take my jokes away from me. So we’d have little fights, and she’d say, ‘I think it would be better if I said that line,’ and I’d say, ‘Better for you but not for me.’ She industriously began to rewrite her part, which ended up, a couple of times, really screwing up the script, so I said, ‘I’ll rewrite mine.’ We were so busy improving it that we ignored what was there and sometimes lost the laughs because of empire-building.” When one of the writers, furious at changes Vidal had made in a reference to the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, said that he had changed Laing’s meaning, Gore replied, “‘Well, I certainly want to be accurate, but I hate R. D. Laing.’ And she said, ‘Yes, but it’s my script.’ And I said, ‘Yes, but you’re putting it into Gore Vidal’s mouth.’ This was a real moment of surrealism. An author, using me as a fictional character to propagate something that I don’t believe in, which I object to saying. It was a very strange moment. I was now totally fictional.” Playing a fictionalized version of himself, Gore proposes from Rome on the telephone to Mary, who has had a nervous breakdown on the David Susskind Show, become famous, and been committed to an asylum in her home town of Fernwood, Ohio, that they write a book together about Mary’s fascinating life. For “a book about you,” he tells her, “would be a book about America, about promises unkept and also, paradoxically, about hope.” When he visits her in Fernwood, she’s reading Heartland by Mort Sahl and thinking about what should go into a time capsule to tell future generations about America in the 1970s. Vidal plays his media version of himself, forceful, authoritative, well connected, a frequent guest on the Merv Griffin and David Susskind shows. Mary wants to be released from the hospital, but the villain, a slimy hospital executive who desires publicity and fame, conspires to keep her incarcerated and himself in the spotlight. Gore obtains Mary’s release by threatening to expose him on national television if he refuses to release her but to praise him if he does. Then he meets with Mary to tell her the good news but also to tell her that he is leaving that same night for Rome, where they are about to start shooting Gore Vidal’s Caligula. “You’re going to finish your book, Mary…. This is your story. You’ve got to tell it. I can’t…. In a sense, Mary, you know, you are America.” Mary responds, “I’m sure you don’t care. I love you. I’ve never felt this way before…. I want you in my life. Some way always in my life.” He responds, “What can I say? Thank you,” a flat speech improvised to replace what he thought an even less effective line in the script. “Dearest, darling Gore,” Lear soon wrote to him, “If you haven’t had the opportunity to see yourself on MARY HARTMAN, let me be the 30,000th to tell you, you were sensational. If you did happen to see yourself, you don’t have to hear from any of us. I enjoyed every moment with you.”
In reality, Gore had flown to Rome immediately after the filming, though he and Howard were giving serious thought to a long stay in Los Angeles, partly for professional and mostly for personal reasons. The plug on Mary Hartman for Gore Vidal’s Caligula had been done in perfect good faith. In July 1975 he had signed a contract with Franco Rossellini’s Felix Cinematographica for $225,000 and 10 percent of the gross to write an original screenplay based on the life of the Roman Emperor Caligula, the point of which would be to emphasize, as he told the London Sunday Times, that “freedom and liberalism are aberrations in the history of the world” and that without due vigilance America and Britain were likely to get their own modern version of Roman royalty. The producer and financial sponsor of the film was Bob Guccione, the owner of Penthouse magazine, who was to invest $16 million in the production, which would star Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud, and Helen Mirren. An alliance between Guccione and Vidal struck the Sunday Times interviewer as “a trifle odd…. Vidal cocked an eyebrow. ‘Bob Guccione and I were made for each other,’ he declared.” It turned out they were not. By mid-1976 he had become aware, indirectly, that his screen treatment had been radically changed by the director, Tinto Brass. The director—whom he soon began calling “Tinto Zinc,” and who “in a properly run world would be washing windows in Venice”—and Gore had not gotten along from the beginning. Apparently Brass thought his name should be in the title, not the scriptwriter’s. Also that the film should have much more sex. When Vidal complained to Guccione about the nudes and “the grotesque sex scenes,” the producer urged patience. “I thought that Tinto and I were in agreement,” Vidal complained to Rossellini in June 1976, “that the picture should be realistic; real uncluttered rooms, real streets, sweat, dirty clothes; above all, no fantasy, no Fellini.” But Brass and his set designer were in the process of creating a baroque extravanganza that made Fellini seem a realist. Soon the revised script was being kept secret, at least from Vidal. As the film was shot in Rome over the next two years, he stayed away and was kept away. Rumors from the set, though, reached him regularly. In early 1979, when Roberto Rossellini, Franco’s brother, instituted a suit claiming that the idea for the film had been his and that Vidal had plagiarized his material, Gore denied the charge but also took the legal opportunity to join him in the request that the film be “seized” in order to determine whether or not “his screenplay had been used by the director … and, consequently, whether or not he would accept that the name of the motion picture be Gore Vidal’s Caligula as agreed with Felix” or that his name be associated with it in any way at all. When he finally saw the film, his strong choice was the latter. It seemed an ugly travesty, his conception of Caligula radically altered, his dialogue manipulated to reverse his meanings. “The film is a hard-core porn disaster,” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny, “in which the likes of O’Toole and Gielgud flounder, under the impression that the proprietor of Penthouse intended to make my script.” Director, producer, and author were soon trading insults. Guccione: “‘Gore’s single greatest regret in life is that he wasn’t born a woman…. As a result, he becomes bitchy and petulant.’” Brass: “‘If I ever re
ally get mad at Gore Vidal, I’ll publish his script.’” The film does have some distinction, Vidal responded. “‘It’s not just another bad movie. It is a joke movie.’” He succeeded in getting his name removed from the title, though not from the credits, a minor price to pay for having allowed his vanity and idealism to tempt him to a partnership that had less chance to produce something intellectually serious than even the usual mass-market film venture.
That winter they returned to Los Angeles, this time not to a hotel but to a comfortable mountaintop house, rented from John Schlesinger, the award-winning director of Billy Liar and Darling, on Rising Glen Road, with a spectacular view of the city. They descended frequently for social evenings with film-industry people, mostly those Gore had come to know over the years through work. “There,” he soon wrote to Judith Halfpenny, after summarizing a social evening in which the talk was primarily about movies and deals, “you have an evening in Hollywood, less the real conversation which has to do with negative costs and grosses. Celebrities, as you call them, tend to flock together largely because they have the same sort of problems. Criminals are the same.” It seemed to Jay Allen that every one of the many times he stopped by, Gore was at work in his “god-damned old filthy robe. I’m sure he still has it. I’m sure he must work nineteen or twenty hours a day.” On the one hand, he worked “so hard to keep his weight down so he’ll look good on camera,” mostly at spas, one of his favorites La Costa, near San Diego, which he now began to visit every time he was in California. On the other, Allen thought he paid insufficient attention to his wardrobe, especially for television appearances, though Jay never worked up the courage to suggest he bring a larger wardrobe and keep it fresher. “We were doing the Carson show one night and we were sitting in the dressing room before the show, and I looked over at him and his stomach was just bulging out of his [jacket] … and I said, ‘Gore—you know the way the camera catches clearly your knees on this show—take my sleeveless sweater and put it on. I think you should wear a sleeveless sweater when you go on, and you won’t be aware.’ He never returned the sweater. It was midnight blue. But if you notice, now he usually wears a sweater under his jacket.” Absolutely comfortable in his old robe, Gore spent much of that winter at work on Kalki, a new novel with an apocalyptic theme, picking up from Messiah in that regard but radically different, a representation of American post—Vietnam War religious and political distress, focusing on an American ex-soldier who convinces himself and much of the world that he is the latest and final incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, who has come to end civilization and usher in a new age. At the end, through an ironic miscalculation, he succeeds in destroying all human life. By late January 1977 Gore had sent a completed draft to Jason Epstein, who responded that “Kalki can and should work brilliantly” but that the flawed conception of the first-person narrator, who had no qualities of heart or mind with which the reader could identify, undermined the novel’s effectiveness. Would it not work better and be more plausible in the narrative as a whole if the transexual male narrator were actually a woman? “Those who have read [Kalki] fear that I have lost my cunning,” he confided to Judith Halfpenny. “I am trying to salvage it.”