Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Soon after settling in at the Plaza, Gore and Howard went from a dinner party at which Princess Margaret was the guest of honor to a large party hosted by Lally Weymouth, a writer and journalist and the daughter of Katharine Graham, the Washington Post publisher. Weymouth had invited seventy guests to a buffet dinner in honor of Lord Weidenfeld, the British publisher who had recently established himself in New York, and fifty additional guests for drinks afterward. Following her flight from London, Princess Margaret was too tired to attend. But Weidenfeld’s power and Weymouth’s social connections had created a glamorous guest list: CBS’s William Paley was there; Jackie Kennedy (now Onassis); the British ambassador Peter Jay; Marella Agnelli; Katharine Graham; Jerry Brown; John Kenneth Galbraith; Joseph Alsop; Lillian Hellman; William Styron; Susan Sontag; Gay Talese; Jason Epstein; Clay Felker, the Esquire editor; Mort Janklow, the lawyer-agent; Pete Hamill, the writer; Max Palevsky, the high-level Democratic fund-raiser and power broker from California; and, among others, even Sue Mengers and Sam Spiegel. When Gore and Howard arrived at about 11 P.M., the rooms of the large apartment were crowded with guests. Aware that Jackie would be there, Howard, Gore recalled, thought “I should make up with Jackie and this was the night when it was going to happen.” Lally Weymouth asked Gore, “‘Do you want to say hello to her?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll stay here, and if she wants to talk, she can come on in here.’” Weymouth went to the kitchen. Mailer was talking with Onassis. His companion, Norris Church, came to tell him that Gore had arrived. Mailer went into the living room to find Vidal. He walked directly toward him. Norris went with him. Sitting on a couch at one end of the room, Gore saw him coming and rose to meet him. Accounts differ as to the dialogue. Mailer’s day-after account: “I said to Vidal, ‘You look like a Jewish socialist,’ which is to be differentiated from a socialist Jew. The former is a way of twitting him; the latter would be anti-Semitic. You see, years ago, Vidal used to refer to me as a ‘Jewish socialist.’” Mailer’s account twenty years later: “‘You look like an old socialist.” Vidal’s account: “Mailer said, ‘You look like an old Jew.’ So I said in my wittiest repartee, ‘Well, Norman, you look like an old Jew, too.’” All the contemporary reports from observers agree that Mailer said either “Jew” or “Jewish,” though clearly it was an attempt at hostile humor, not anti-Semitism. Mailer denies the use of either word. “He said later that I said to him, ‘You look like an old Jewish socialist,’ which was so fucking clever of him, to turn things around, as if I were an anti-Semite.”

  Contemporary accounts of what then happened differ. As the ten seconds of dialogue ended, Mailer apparently threw the contents of his glass at Vidal’s face, hitting him with the liquor and ice cubes. Mailer’s recent comment: “Well, it’s hard to hit someone cold. I was trying to work myself up to hit him. I was getting psyched up to fight. But the fact is that I was on the warpath strategically, not physically. So I couldn’t hit him. But what I did was to throw my drink and ice cubes at him. He reported later that he saw a small fist coming at him…. But it was the drink and the ice cubes. Frustrated, I raised my arm and I threw the liquor glass down at him and hit him on the head with it. He must have been stunned and maybe blacked out for a second. It certainly would have given him a cut or at least a welt. This whole thing took about fifteen seconds.” Vidal’s account: “He threw the contents of the glass in my face and said to the press that it was an old street fighter’s trick, to blind the other person. He then followed with what he thought would be a punch but he still had the glass in his hand. So what he does is hit my upper lip with the glass in his hand. Mind you, he’s way down here. I’m much taller, and the glass goes across my lip. It doesn’t do much damage, but I bite the inside and get some blood coming down from inside.” As they faced one another, Mailer grabbed Vidal by the arm. Vidal grabbed Mailer’s lapel and shirt front with both hands, Mailer gripping tightly, leaving bruise marks that remained for weeks, Vidal shaking Mailer, attempting to break loose his hold on his arm. For a moment they could have been perceived as being in an energetic embrace. By this time people were aware that there was a fight in progress. Those closest to the combatants had seen the scuffle. Lally Weymouth came from the kitchen to find “two guys punching each other out in my living room…. I didn’t know who was hitting whom. Needless to say I was not thrilled to be having a fistfight at my party, and when I saw what was happening, I said, ‘God, this is so awful; somebody do something,’ and Clay Felker said, ‘Shut up, this fight is making your party!’” Janklow, who was talking to Hamill and Felker, rushed over to try to separate the two. So did Howard. Gore shook Mailer’s grip loose from his arm and shoved him away. Mailer stumbled into Palevsky, who spilled his glass of champagne over Weymouth’s dress. Sam Spiegel went immediately to Mailer to try to convince him not to rush back toward Vidal, which he seemed about to do. “People almost immediately separated us,” Mailer recalls. Vidal went toward the far side of the room, where, seated on the couch he’d been on when Mailer came toward him, Sue Mengers dabbed at the blood on his lip with a handkerchief. Jackie Onassis stood in the doorway watching.

  From his side of the room Mailer challenged Vidal to come downstairs with him and have it out in the street. “Howard came up to me,” Mailer recalls, “and said he would fight for Gore. I said, ‘My fourteen-year-old son could take you.’ Howard never forgave me for that remark.” According to Vidal, Mailer “made several passes and said, ‘Let’s go outside and settle this!’ Then Howard chased him out: ‘Fuckin’ asshole loser!’” Gore’s “nothing but a mouth,” Mailer insisted. Jason Epstein said, “Norman, grow up!” Mailer turned to Lally Weymouth and said, “Either he goes or I do.” When she refused to ask either of them to leave, Mailer stormed out, with Norris. As he sat on the couch, stanching the blood on his lip, Gore turned and saw Jackie in the doorway watching him. He turned away. When he turned back in her direction, she was gone. The postmortems and the press war began immediately, and the funny comments. “Frankly, after speaking to both combatants,” Janklow remarked, “I consider the incident to be one of the great moments of modern literature.” Gore, who had already been booked for a Dick Cavett show taping the next day, used a portion of his airtime jokingly to belittle Mailer’s aggression. Mailer recalls that he immediately “went to Cavett with a lawyer because of Gore’s libelous remarks. We settled it by Cavett giving us each a half hour, back to back I think,” which Mailer insisted on. Cavett recalls that he called Mailer and invited him to view the tape of Vidal’s interview. “Poor Norman,” Gore soon wrote to Ned Bradford, who was now Mailer’s editor at Little, Brown, “‘wrote’ all the accounts of the 28 second punch and shove (he landed on top of Max Palevsky some eight feet away from me). But the battle report was filed by yr. author with every gossip columnist in town in order to make it appear (a) there was a battle (b) he was the victor. He may yet return to fiction full-time and cut yr. losses.” Soon, in California, Gore referred to the experience as “the night of the small fists.” Russell Baker wrote a column in the Times about the literary rivals the bloodthirsty Henry James had beaten up. But “James finally retired from pugilism after Edith Wharton knocked him out for 35 minutes with her famous powder-puff uppercut during a chance meeting at Alice Roosevelt’s coming-out party.”

  Over the next few years Mickey Knox tried, unsuccessfully, to mediate a reconciliation. From Vidal’s point of view there was nothing worth reconciling. They had never really been friends, though prior to 1971 they had been amiable colleagues. Gore had not been judgmental about Mailer’s violence and drunkenness in the 1960s. But he had been appalled and furious at Mailer’s two assaults on him, which he saw as not in the least existential or romantic, let alone heroic. In 1984 Mailer, in the role of conciliatory elder statesman, having taken on the presidency of PEN, the international writers’ organization, invited Vidal to help him bury the hatchet. Would he not join Mailer and about fifteen other writers and participate in one of a series of literary evenings in the fall of 1
985 to raise money for the convocation of a PEN World Congress? And whatever his decision about participating in the public event, he wanted Gore to know that the offer of a personal reconciliation still stood, though “we won’t have a full roster without you.” Vidal, who feared he might find the hatchet buried in his back, could not be sure to what degree the offer of personal reconciliation was the necessary price Mailer felt he had to pay to get him to participate in the fund-raising event. “Our feud, whatever its roots for each of us, has become a luxury,” Mailer wrote to Vidal in November. “It’s possible in years to come that we’ll both have to be manning the same sinking boat at the same time.” Indeed, each independently was aware that the audience for serious literature was diminishing, the trend in the direction of decreasing sales for the literary novelists of their generation. Those who once were cultural icons had good reason to fear they were becoming peripheral. But “apart from that, I’d still like to make up,” Mailer wrote. “An element in me, absolutely immune to weather and tides, runs independently fond of you.” The inflated language of the personal overture seemed histrionically self-aggrandizing. And Vidal was understandably suspicious of the sincerity of the claim of fondness; after all, in their two last personal encounters Mailer had attacked him physically. “If he had so much as an atom of authenticity in his nature,” Gore wrote to Paul Bowles, “one might respond to that; but all is performance and ambition, and so I shall reply amiably and with an insincerity quite equal to his: I boast, perhaps.” To Bowles, privately, he characterized Mailer as “the Great Halvah Merchant” who “is now president of PEN and ricocheting around the lit. world (don’t ask me where that is) in a mad quest for the Nobel prize (God knows he’s bad enough to get it) and lit. respectability and the world’s acceptance that he is really numero uno…. Oh, the drama of it! Imagine caring that much, at 61. Earlier, yes. But now we are such stuff as dissertations are made on and our little careers are rounded with a boredom.” Mailer may have been acting sincerely in his role as peacemaker. There had been, though, too much unpleasantness between them for any reconciliation to be more than perfunctory, in this case pragmatic. Vidal agreed to participate in the fund-raising event.

  In early 1985 the program took shape. Each of the eight evenings would be shared by two authors, each of whom, as a matter of preference, might take half the evening separately or join his colleague in a tandem performance. “Do you have someone you’d like to go on with?” Mailer asked Vidal in January 1985, giving him the privilege of first choice. The possibilities included the usual suspects, from Woody Allen to Tom Wolfe. With mischievous humor, Gore proposed that he and Mailer share an evening. He may have done so with the conviction that he would benefit from their juxtaposition as stage performers. “All right, fine, it’ll be you and me on the date you’ve named,” Mailer responded. “I do think, however, we’ve got to address ourselves to an agenda. If we have nothing to do with one another and merely give our separate hours, then everyone’s going to be prodigiously disappointed…. The evening will be a frightful anticlimax.” Mailer suggested that they might read from Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell. He hoped that “the example of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer having fun together on the stage will suggest that anything and everything is possible in this overweight, corrupt world of ours.” Vidal proposed that on the stage together they each address the audience on whatever topic each wanted for approximately an hour and then respond to questions from a moderator. The courtly, highly admired New York City journalist, Murray Kempton, whose columns were famous for their trenchant and iconoclastic realism and whom both writers respected, agreed to serve as moderator. As the time of the event approached, the New York literary and social rumor mill began to work up enthusiasm for what was soon being billed as a return grudge match between two sluggers who had fought it out before and who might, if the audience were lucky, once more treat everyone to a nasty performance. Would Mailer physically attack Vidal again? The betting odds were against that. Would there be at least a renewal of their war of words? Hopes were high. Subscriptions were purchased, many by well-to-do corporate PEN supporters. Celebrities arrived, including Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, and a long list of noted New York and Los Angeles literary, movie, and social people. On the rematch night of November 17, before a $1,000-a-ticket full house at the Booth Theatre, the combatants refused to fight. As a confrontational entertainment the evening was a failure. As intellectual stimulation it had severe limits. Vidal, the classicist, had created a talk, for which he had written out the text, later to be published in The Nation as “The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas.” Mailer thought it “a brilliant talk on détente between Russia and China and who was going to inherit the earth. It had nothing to do with him and with me personally. I think people were surprised. But it was one of Gore’s masterstrokes to do this. It was a hell of a good essay.” Mailer, the romantic, had not prepared a presentation, trusting to inspiration and spontaneity. His criticism of American “plastic” culture fell as flat as his jokes, one of which Vidal recalls as an example of Mailer’s poor timing as a storyteller: “Mailer said to the audience, ‘Gore says I can’t tell a joke. Well, just to show him that he’s wrong, I’ll tell a joke right now. This wealthy self-made New York man was showing a visitor around his expensive apartment. He was showing off all the valuable things he had. “This is my expensive living-room furniture. This is a magnificent painting I bought. This is my …” He opened the door to a bedroom. On the bed there was a beautiful blond lady. “This is my wife,” he said. In bed with the beautiful lady, fucking her, was a handsome young man. “That’s me!” he said.’ End of joke. Nobody laughed. It’s all a matter of timing.” Perhaps, though, the audience thought the joke itself not funny. “We may both be known in literary history for our feud rather than our works,” Mailer admitted, and he certainly not for his jokes. To liven up his performance Mailer read a selection from his essay on the first Ali-Frazier fight. By the time of the question-and-answer period a large part of the audience had left. Questioners tried to arouse controversial responses or to draw Mailer and Vidal into open conflict. Vidal declined. In Mailer’s view, “he didn’t want to allow the question period to be used as vehicle for us to debate since the evening was his already.”

  Whatever had been interesting about the relationship had now been relegated to the past, footnotes to literary gossip and literary history, often indistinguishable categories in the long-standing cultural text. Since the 1985 appearance for PEN, “we’ve been professionally over the feud,” Mailer feels, “and are half friendly. Gore tries not to be too nasty.” When Vidal tried to read some of Mailer’s recent fiction, his judgment was mixed with antagonism and fair praise: “every line is loaded with the agony of a man consciously trying to be great, and I somehow think this is probably not the way to go about it. Yet when he relaxes, he can be extraordinarily good.” Mailer found it satisfying to reserve most of his praise for Vidal as a writer of essays. A retrospective tone began gradually, over the next decade, to soften their respective analyses of some of their crucial divisions and differences of literary and personal temperament. The issue of manliness, though, of early post—World War II muscle-flexing and prejudices about appropriate male sexual roles, so important to both men, still seemed crucial to their attempts to mediate the differences between them, personally if not intellectually. Vidal: “Norman is homophobic—whatever that means—but it’s very complicated. He’s against masturbation. He’s against condoms. Good fucks make good babies. He’s got all sorts of strange crotchets.” Mailer: “No, I’ve never been irked or bothered by Gore’s homosexuality. Gore has always treated his homosexuality as a rather interesting quirk caused by—whatever. As a homosexual, he’s very much a man. He insists on that and he acts that way. In sex, he does it…. No one does anything to him. So he’s just as much a male as any ‘convict,’ so to speak, any strong male. That’s never entered into our feuding. But we have been very competitive with one another. For me it was the same
as with Jim Jones, but there was more affection there. But I think people who love Gore’s work aren’t going to be drawn to mine anyway. So there was competition, from the beginning, for success and fame—but not for readers. Anyway, we’re in the same boat. Neither of us will have any readers if things keep going on the way they are.” As combatants they had been of interest. As amiable, cooperative elderly writers, who still essentially did not like one another and had not forgiven the other for wounds previously inflicted, whatever had seemed significant about their pairing seemed less so. During the next decade they were to see one another rarely, but always without visible conflict. In fact, though Vidal had not much affection to extend to Mailer, he found he quite liked Norris Church, whom Mailer had married since the encounter at Lally Weymouth’s, where “Gore had the notion,” Mailer recalls, “that Norris was somehow forbidding or implacable…. But Norris then was still working as a model and had on the company face that she always had to wear in those days. So here was this tall, rather distinguished-looking woman, whom Gore didn’t know, closely observing and seemingly dispassionately looking down on the whole thing…. Gore and she have become quite amiable. They rather like one another.” In 1993, when Mailer was raising money for the Actors Studio, Gore accepted his invitation to appear with him in a reading performance of Don Juan in Hell in which “Susan Sontag played Elvira, Gore played the Devil,” Gay Talese played Don Juan, “and I played the statue. I also directed. Both Susan Sontag and Gore had a strong sense of how they wanted to play those roles. So as director I didn’t interfere very much. I was a passive director and let them do what they wanted to do. Gore was surprisingly good. Very, very good, really. His detractors say he can be a ham. That’s because as an actor his voice carries the brunt of his acting, which is true. But he’s very, very good at it. This was a distinguished performance.” In 1995 they both accommodated a friend of Mailer’s who wanted to interview them at length for Esquire, though the interview had nothing especially interesting, let alone new, to add to the Mailer-Vidal saga. “I have nothing to say, only to add,” had become one of Vidal’s favorite comments. Both writers were becoming increasingly aware that there was less that needed saying and less time in which to add anything at all.