Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  By April they had returned to Italy, where Gore began to rewrite substantially. Epstein’s suggestions were helpful. “Kalki being re-done. Lovely idea, wrong narrator.” By June 1977 he had completed the revision. Jason thought it successful, its overall effect “powerful and upsetting.” Never having had and never generally needing an editor who did close editing, Gore felt ambivalent about Jason’s contributions. He recognized that he had needed help in getting Kalki back on the right track. Still, he needed total control over the time and the conditions of intercession. He had gone to Random House, he wrote to Halfpenny, “because of my friend Jason Epstein who does like to inflict his views on me. By and large, they are ignored. Books like Myron distress him, and there is bickering. But nothing more. He is excellent with the historical works because he publishes the leading historians and biographers in the field and sees to it that for a small fee they vet what I’ve written. In the case of 1876, the professor in question provided me with a lot of new material that I was able to use.” Having just benefited from Epstein’s suggestions about Kalki, Gore’s description was ungenerous and only partly accurate. But as the title of his newest volume of essays—Matters of Fact and of Fiction: Essays 1973—1976, which Random House published in April—indicated, both this author-editor relationship and this author-publisher relationship had their complications. Epstein often preferred the fact to the fiction, the history to the invention. Kalki, published in April 1978, had a mixed reception and a modest sale. Some thought it brilliant. Others found it thin, implausible as realistic fiction. Criticism inevitably focused on the narrator. Mick Jagger, who imagined himself playing Kalki, the ex-Marine turned messianic Hindu god, optioned the film rights. The volume of essays, published in April 1977, had almost unanimously favorable reviews, and the close timing of the publication of the essays and the novel gave occasion for some reviewers to compare Vidal the essayist to Vidal the novelist. A fairer comparison would have been to Burr or Myra Breckinridge. But if Kalki was not Vidal at his best as novelist, in Matters of Fact and of Fiction he was at his best as essayist, and Stephen Spender on the front page of the New York Times Book Review remarked, about essays such as “The Ten Top Best-Sellers,” “Calvino’s Novels,” “American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction,” “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self,” “President and Mrs. U. S. Grant,” and “West Point,” that “as a critic of manners as well as literature, Vidal is in the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson.”

  Concerned, even worried, about Italian political and social chaos, including kidnappings, murders, and the threat that Italian residents with American citizenship would be required to pay taxes as if they were Italian citizens, Gore soon did what he had never wanted to do—he bought a handsome, substantial stucco house in the Hollywood Hills with large gardens and a swimming pool, rumored inaccurately once to have belonged to the actress Dolores Del Rio. The previous winter at Rising Glen Road had been an attempt to see whether they could live in Los Angeles. In a letter to Judith Halfpenny, Gore had described Southern California as “our Tahiti—with much the same cultural impact, and destiny.” But if he were to be persuaded to return to live in the United States, the only city that seemed plausible, much as he disliked it, was Los Angeles. “We would have preferred Beverly Hills,” he later remarked. “Jean Stein said that the Hollywood Hills are much more glamorous. And much cheaper because they were quite run down.” “We may be back in Calif in the fall,” Gore had written to Joe O’Donohue. They quickly agreed to the asking price of about $200,000, with a mortgage inherited from the seller. As always, Gore had good luck with houses. In late October 1978, taking possession, they settled in for six months or so of California life. They brought Diana Phipps, who had been thrilled at Matters of Fact and of Fiction’s being dedicated to her, with them. “I admire the essays more than I can say and to be somehow involved makes me inordinately proud.” Now making her living as an interior decorator, she was given total charge of redoing their house on Outpost Drive. Gore settled in to continue work on the new historical novel he had started and which developed into Creation, about the inception of three great world religions in the fifth century B.C., as soon as he had finished the revision of Kalki. With various assistants, Diana began transforming the interior, mainly with billowing paisley fabrics that created a tent effect in some of the rooms. Within about six weeks she had it ready. “She’s got a great sense of organization,” Howard observed, “and knows how to give orders. She’s also got a very short temper and she’s difficult sometimes…. Diana’s work at Outpost Drive is a bit too effeminate for me. It could go with married couples, but when two men live together, you can’t live in Turkish tents. I was very uncomfortable living with it at the beginning, but once I got used to it I loved it.” He also loved Hollywood social life, including a grand party they threw for Diana to celebrate the completion of what she had done. “As far as knowing how to do a place, I’ve had the best, from Alice Astor to Gore’s mother to Diana Phipps, all of them originals and with great eyes. I wouldn’t put myself in their class. But I could appreciate what they did.” By the end of the winter, comfortable as the house had now become, Gore still could not envision living in Los Angeles indefinitely. Fortunately, by late 1978 Italy had reverted to its traditional low- or non-tax arrangement for resident foreigners. Early in the new year he was happy to return to Ravello.

  In Washington, on a Monday morning in early April 1978, several months before leaving for Ravello, from the window of a building to which he had gone to do TV publicity for Kalki, Gore’s eye had suddenly fixed on St. Margaret’s Church. Nina, who had died that morning, was much on his mind. The beautiful eighteen-year-old debutante and her handsome Army officer had been married there over fifty-six years before. The limousine, which drove Gore from place to place through his publicity schedule on a route he had not planned, passed other familiar places, starting with the apartment building in which Senator and Mrs. Gore had died. Within a few moments he caught a glimpse of the bridge across Rock Creek Park. Soon, on the left, was the transformed version of the old Wardman Park Hotel, where he and his mother had gone to live after she had divorced Gene Vidal and where she had married Hugh Auchincloss. To the right was the road that went down to his grandfather’s stone house, in which Gore had spent some of the most resonant hours of his childhood. “I was thinking about everything. And then suddenly all these places, each touching a memory.” It was as if, with unplanned but uncanny appropriateness, on the morning on which he learned of his mother’s death, all the places in Washington with powerful family associations were becoming part of his kaleidoscopic, surreal journey through familiar but ghostly locations.

  In early March he had received a telegram: “DOCTORS AT LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE HOSPITAL SAN ANTONIO TEXAS ADVISE THAT YOUR MOTHER IS EXPECTED TO DIE SOON–SEVERAL DAYS TO 4–5 WEEKS DEPENDING ON CIRCUMSTANCES SHE HAS LUNG CANCER AND EMPHYSEMA.” In Washington, the night before, he had had dinner with his sister Nini. As much alienated from her mother as Gore, Nini had nothing good to say about her. From her early teenage years they had fought bitterly, and separated mostly, almost twins in temperament and looks. Most recently they had exchanged hard words about Nini’s belief that her mother had offered to testify against her in Nini’s divorce from Newton Steers. “How ridiculous,” Nina wrote to Gore in one of many letters he had never answered, “as though it would ever reach such a point—or that I’d do such a thing.” She had written to Nini how “shocked and amazed” she was that her daughter would believe that she “would go on the stand against” her, though, ever the combative mother, she repeated her view that Newton was more sinned against than sinning. On that Monday morning in April 1978 Nini had called Gore at his hotel with the news that Tommy had telephoned: their mother had died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York, where Tommy, who had been looking after her, had brought her for treatment. Three days before, she had told Tommy that Gore had been to the hospital to visit and that sh
e had forgiven him. As always, to those who did not know better, she was very convincing. Tommy checked the hospital records. Gore had not been there.

  Nina had tried to effect a reconciliation ever since 1958. Self-justifying, she thought nothing that had happened had been her fault. Gore thought the fault entirely hers. There was no bridging the gap, and Nina had no idea of the extent to which her behavior in London seemed to him simply the last, most unacceptable aggression in a lifelong series of inconsiderate, irresponsible, and painful performances. Since she had merely been herself, why should he respond differently from all such previous occasions? They had always fought. They had always reconciled. Why not this time? Her alcoholism had both eased and increased her burdens. It had only increased his. He had unburdened himself by deciding never to see her again. To make that possible, he needed to see her as evil rather than as pathetic and ill. “I am like Turgenev and Hemingway: I detested my mother,” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny in 1977, as if she were already dead. “No Oedipus there. And the detestation in each case (from what one can tell reading biographies) was not thwarted incestuous love but hatred of evil.” Freud, he believed, could throw no light on his own family romance. With a less confrontational and more forgiving temperament, Tommy had increasingly taken on the burden of Nina’s last years. In 1972, in Cuernavaca, she fell and hurt herself badly. With osteoporosis, her bones healed slowly. A chainsmoker, she developed severe emphysema. Addicted as she was to painkillers and sleeping pills, her mind was often addled, including her certainty that her bank account and her investments had been plundered by rapacious bankers, her valuables stolen by servants. She could no longer focus sufficiently to play bridge, which had been for so long her passion and pleasure. At her worst she confused pesos with dollars. In fact, as Tommy, who kept her financial records, knew, her resources had dwindled almost to nothing. There were no savings. When Hugh Auchincloss’s financial difficulties resulted in suspending payment of her monthly stipend, the value of which inflation had reduced considerably, Tommy provided funds. In 1974, desperate, she reminded Gore that she had given him $3,000 toward the purchase of Edgewater. Sometimes her figure was $3,000, other times $6,000, as if she counted Mrs. Gore’s contribution as her own. “Of course,” she recognized, “at the time it was a gift not a loan…. I’m not an Indian giver but this last illness and broken leg has cost me $24,000…. This is most embarassing [sic] though it shouldn’t be—parents do all they can for children then sometimes the necessity arrives for a turn about…. I am very proud of your hard working. Love Bommy.” Could he not give her the money plus accumulated interest and then deduct it from his taxes? He authorized Hecht to send her $8,000, which Hecht did immediately and for which she thanked them both. She soon went to the Army hospital in San Antonio for treatment. Then she took an apartment in Florida. Just over seventy, she looked ravaged.

  In March 1976, after reading in Time magazine Anaïs Nin’s comment that Gore had been “abandoned” by his mother, Nina responded with a blistering, self-defensive letter to the editor, a small, comparatively innocuous portion of which Time published under the ambiguous but mostly ironic title “Mother Love.” Instead of appealing to her son to protect her private life from becoming a public target, she launched an exculpatory attack. The full letter provided a detailed list of all the ways she had nurtured and supported him from infancy to early manhood, each ending with the rhetorical refrain, “Abandonment?” Even Henry Luce was invoked. He “was a great friend of mine” and “never would have permitted my being involved in the recent TIME article about Gore, in which there were such vicious quips about me.” For whatever success Gene Vidal had had, she took credit. For whatever difficulty she had in raising Gore, his father was to blame. She was not at fault, she argued between the lines, for the type of man Gore had become. As usual, her claims were based on half-truths and self-serving fantasy, and the letter was in devastatingly bad taste, as if the pages of Time were an appropriate place for the mother of a famous son to defend herself against comments such as Anaïs’s. Gore himself had said nothing critical of her in print. With her usual bad judgment, Nina destroyed whatever minuscule chance for reconciliation had existed. Hurt and furious, Gore wrote to Nini, “Nice to see your mother’s rage and incomprehension continue as bones corrode with cancer and eternity opens wide! I showed the letter to Elaine Dundy who’s here (and much involved with shrinks). ‘The letter of an angry twelve year old’ was her verdict. To have learned nothing. Ah, well, sadism is a hard and inexorable motor to some—to her life.” Two years later there would be no deathbed reconciliation. Nina requested that her ashes be scattered over the San Francisco Mountains in New Mexico to join those of her last, most-loved husband. Tommy had the body cremated in New Jersey, the ashes shipped to his home in Vermont. They stayed in his attic for ten years. Eventually he had some of them buried next to her parents in Oklahoma City. The rest he spread on a forest road in what he thought the San Francisco Mountains. The next day he discovered he had scattered the ashes on the wrong mountains.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Same Sinking Boat

  1978-1986

  In the mid-1970s two of Vidal’s literary colleagues, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, had come back into his life, both unpleasantly, as if these well-publicized giants of American literature insisted on inscribing their names in comic headlines. Perhaps any headline was better than none. Not that he himself had forgotten or neglected either of them. In Myron, in 1974, Capote makes a parodic appearance as a giggling, inept gossip named Maude, a snobbish hairdresser with “a damp-looking face.” Mailer appears as a drunken, semiviolent cook named Whittaker Kaiser, “a small fat old man of fifty or so with a full head of wiry gray hair,” constantly threatening Myron/Myra with a meat cleaver. Kaiser proclaims that “the real man … takes one woman after another without the use of contraceptives … just the all-conquering sperm because contraception of any kind is as bad as masturbation and because the good burger makes the good baby.” Other than Time magazine, which remarked on Kaiser as “a merciless lampoon” of Norman Mailer, few reviewers identified the wildly funny portrait or the eerie precision of the caricature of Capote, though many recognized Vidal’s targets. Neither Mailer nor Capote responded privately to Vidal or commented in print. Probably neither had read the novel: all three had long since given up reading one another’s fiction. Mailer and Vidal had not had any contact since they appeared together in 1971 on The Dick Cavett Show. Vidal, with his talent for moving on, had focused whatever occasional public comments he had made about Mailer since 1971 on the issues on which they differed. “Yes,” he wrote to Jim Tuck, his Washington childhood playmate who had written him favorably about Myron, “Norman is every bit as flabby and his own conversation rather less credible than W.K.’s.” The depiction of Mailer as Whittaker Kaiser expressed how much he resented Mailer’s attack on him on the Cavett show and what it represented, especially Mailer’s homophobia.

  Vidal had last seen Capote at a party in New York, where neither said anything of consequence to the other, though later Vidal recollected that because he had not had his glasses on, he sat down “on what I thought was a stool and it was Capote.” “Where was Capote sitting at the time you sat on him?” “On a smaller stool.” Capote’s attempt at a reconciliation in Rome in 1969, which Vidal mistrusted, did not prevent each occasionally making derogatory comments about the other for quotation, mostly witty, humorous ripostes such as Vidal’s that Capote has “raised lying into an art—a minor art” and that he “belongs less to the history of literature than the history of public relations.” Capote’s remarks were equally hostile, particularly his on-camera comment to David Susskind, “Of course, I’m always sad about Gore. Very sad that he has to breathe every day.” To Judith Halfpenny, who had queried Gore in 1976 about the rumor that he was “about to write a gossip novel,” he privately expressed his disdain for both Capote and Mailer. “That is Capote’s field. Most of what is written about me in the press is
untrue. This is not due to malice so much as to plain incompetence…. I find on TV I am often supposed to talk about fashions and famous society ladies. I then remind the host that I am the one who talks about politics and Capote is the one who tells naughty stories about the rich and Mailer is the messiah.”