Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Ravello itself had reason to be proud that such a distinguished foreigner had chosen to reside there. His association with the town brought it international publicity. The tourist economy benefited. Some of the visitors were, of course, his guests, including widely recognized international celebrities from the entertainment world, from the Newmans to Mick Jagger to Johnny Carson. Most tourist visitors to Ravello, though, did not get to see Vidal, or even his villa. They might more likely see Howard each morning at about ten-thirty, sitting outside the San Domingo bar, having his coffee and leafing through the mail. Tourists of a literary inclination would soon know which private road off the piazza led to La Rondinaia. In the formal garden of the ancient Villa Ruffolo, where the honorary-citizenship ceremony took place, the dignitaries heard Gore, at the end of the formalities, say a few graceful words he had written out celebrating “this earthly heaven, this Ravello, of blue sky and sea, gray limestone and olive,” and invoking the two writers, himself and Tennessee Williams, who had come there together in March 1948, when they were young and the future unknown, riding in a jeep up from Amalfi, thinking they “had never seen such beauty before.” They had walked about in the lavish gardens where the ceremony now was being held and where concerts were performed regularly during the summer season. In his speech honoring the new citizen of Ravello, Calvino, who had recently read Duluth, was inspired to make that novel “in which the things which happen do not conform to Vidal’s principle of ‘absolute uniqueness’” the controlling trope of his speech honoring the new citizen of Ravello. “I must ask myself if we are indeed in Ravello, or in a Ravello reconstructed in a Hollywood studio, with an actor playing Gore Vidal, or if we are in the TV documentary on Vidal in Ravello . . . or whether we are here on the Amalfi coast on a festive occasion, but one in 1840, when, at the end of another Vidal novel, Burr, the narrator learns that the most controversial of America’s Founding Fathers, Aaron Burr, was his father. Or, since there is a spaceship in Duluth, manned by centipedes who can take on any appearance, even becoming dead ringers for U.S. political figures, perhaps we could be aboard that spaceship, which has left Duluth for Ravello, and the ETs aboard could have taken on the appearance of the American writer we are here to celebrate.” But, he said, it seems that Vidal “has never left America even for one second. His passionate and polemical participation in American life is without interruption. What we see in Ravello is someone living a tranquil parallel life. Is it Vidal or his double?” That evening “there was singing (Cantore di Napoli) in the square, colored lights, the works,” Gore told Judith Halfpenny good-humoredly. “I suppose now they will try to get as much mileage out of me as they do from Wagner.” That night he hosted a large party. Chichita Calvino, who like her husband was passionate about American movies, remembered how “at a certain moment” she said to him, “‘I bet you have a photograph of Montgomery Clift.’ It was an intuition, and he took me to a beautiful room, sort of a small library, and he immediately showed me a photograph of himself very young. He was a dangerously handsome man. And then he also had a photograph of Montgomery Clift. Gore’s a great movie freak, and so am I. I didn’t even ask him if he had been a friend of Clift’s. The flash was, Gore must have a photo of him. I can’t explain why that came to me to ask.”

  “Do you notice the speed with which time passes now?” Vidal, who was close to his sixtieth birthday, about to enter the seventh decade of his life, wrote to Paul Bowles in 1985. “I don’t mean years, days—hours even. It is like falling into the deep end of an empty pool…. I race about, being public. To London for Lincoln. To Frankfurt to meet my foreign publishers. To Bordeaux to eat with Jason Epstein. To Naples to speak on Magna Graecia.” When, with Barbara, he had visited Peggy Guggenheim in Venice and asked how she was, “‘All right for someone dying,’ was her nifty retort. ‘But of course that’s natural,’ she added. She invited me to her 80th birthday party next month. ‘If I’m there, of course.’ She likes being a Legend. The nose has shrunk, curiously enough, and lost its once pretty rosiness. . . . ‘But you must make a speech. You won’t mind?’ I told her that since there was no way that she could make a habit of this sort of display, I didn’t mind a one-shot.” When Judith Calvino ran into Howard at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 1986, he said, “‘Chichita, you are here. Please go and talk to Gore because he’s in a terrible mood because he’s sixty today.’ So I went to him, and Gore was sitting down alone and fuming, and I said, ‘Hello, what happened?’ He said, ‘I’m sixty today.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s no big deal.’ And he said to me, ‘Of course, sixty is sexy.’ He had made a joke, and that helped. But he didn’t believe it.”

  Much of the best part of life, though, was private. Less of it was spent in Rome, more and more at Ravello, writing, with undiminished energy, essays and fiction. When, in the late 1980s, Max Rabb, a consummate political operator, a lawyer with his roots in Massachusetts politics in the 1960s, was appointed ambassador to Italy by President Bush, Rabb sent regular invitations for official dinners and private social events. “Ah, if you’d only let me handle you,” the Republican Rabb told Gore, “I could make you a Senator, maybe even President.” Despite the embassy honors, Rome seemed less and less attractive, Ravello more comfortable, though when Michael Tyler-Whittle returned to live in England the loss was noticed. Corsini, who had visited Gore and Howard in Los Angeles, was a regular visitor, and, as the wine flowed late at night, he noticed that Gore mellowed from the coldly analytic to the sympathetically warm. On the far side of political and literary discussion was personal concern for his friends, including for George Armstrong’s finances. Life as a freelance journalist had its uncertainties. George, who soon made the transition to the new computer age, helped with the preparation of manuscripts, an aspect of Gore’s life that Howard left entirely to other people. He preferred his function as secretary be restricted to management of business and domestic affairs. Running La Rondinaia and Outpost Drive, arranging travel, preparing taxes, handling the flow of material to the archive at the Wisconsin State Historical Society seemed enough of a full-time job. Howard himself had become an author when, in 1970, he had co-authored a cookbook with the sculptress Beverly Pepper. With her journalist husband, she had been part of their Roman social world. One of the best moments of Gore’s and Howard’s day together at Ravello, as visitors often noticed, was the hour of chess and coffee after lunch on the long, overstuffed yellow couch in Gore’s study. “They are a very, very solid couple,” Corsini noted, “whatever is the strange nature of their relationship. Gore tells it, but you never know…. There was never any separation of roles. To me they were Gore and Howard. I’m influenced by the way both of them describe it, half jokingly, half seriously. What came out is this complete freedom they both had in their own private lives, corrected by their reciprocal loyalty.”

  Leonard Bernstein came to Ravello in 1987, on a trip to arrange to have the next year, Bernstein’s seventieth, one in which by its end each of his compositions would have been performed someplace. In Rome, Max Rabb entertained Bernstein and hosted Gore and Howard with what Gore remembered as “several wild nights at the embassy. It finally came out that Max played one of the fairies in Iolanthe, and so Lenny sits down and does the whole piece and Max does the dance of the fairies sixty years later. Lenny and I would bad-mouth Ronald Reagan, and Max would say, ‘No, you can’t say that in here, you can’t, you can’t!’ and make both of us more and more unrestrained.” Bernstein proposed that Vidal rewrite the libretto of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a failed political musical Bernstein had done with Alan Jay Lerner and which he now hoped to have performed in an improved version as part of his seventieth-birthday-year celebration. “‘I’m touched that you’ve come to me,’ I said, ‘but you should have gone to Lourdes. There’s nothing that can be done with this.’” At Ravello, Gore gave Bernstein the use of his study, a rare expression of respect.

  He sat at that desk. I watched him working on two scores that he was going to conduct in Amsterdam
. They’re like atlases, and he had a red pencil and a blue pencil. Why? “I’m doing Mahler and I’m doing Schumann,” he said…. “With the red one I make a track for myself through the score. With the blue one I change the instrumentation.” It was fascinating to watch the way he worked. I said, “Do you hear it as you see it?” He said, “No, I see it.” I said, “How does that correlate with hearing?” “What do you mean hearing? I’ll hear it when the instruments play it.” “Do you know what it’s going to sound like?” “Well, of course I do. I see it.” “But do you hear it?” “Of course I don’t hear it!” I began to understand the mystique of what music is about. Closer to mathematics than language. I thought the overture was like Ives. “God, you’re stupid musically,” he said. “It’s not Ives. It’s Aaron [Copland] I’m ripping off. Can’t you tell?” There was something else I liked. “Yeah, that’s Aaron too. That’s Appalachian Spring. I’ve already cannibalized it for something else. Can’t use that one.”

  Most of the visitors, especially at La Rondinaia, were American, some British. Princess Margaret came for lunch whenever she was vacationing on the Amalfi coast. So too did Diana Phipps, who was soon, when the Soviet empire collapsed, to regain her family’s Czech estates and castle and to separate herself from her old London life, determined to restore her family’s ancient property. Though Gore much preferred to be visited than to visit, and almost never stayed anywhere but a hotel when away from home, on a blazing-hot day in July 1983 he had had lunch with Princess Margaret at Kensington Palace and then drove with her to the Royal Lodge at Windsor, where he was a houseguest. “The Q. Mother had just vacated the RL,” he told Judith Halfpenny, “which is pretty much her house and gone to Sandringham and the household wanted to shut it up because no one was there but, ever forceful, she said, ‘I know there are three stewards and the maid.’ … ‘But no cook, your royal highness’ (it is amazing to hear those five syllables spoken naturally—my republican throat would close at the ‘your’—even so, for the first time in 20 years, I addressed her as ma’am when we met at the pool and I responded to her good morning). She was standing in the unheated water rescuing bees with a large leaf while thundering at them: ‘Stupid bees, get out, make honey’ … always advising, warning, counselling.” They lunched outdoors beneath an oak tree on the lawn and then dined on the terrace. The princess gave him a tour of the royal art collection. At a party nearby, hosted by Drue Heinz for her husband, with a hundred guests including the Queen, he met the “Fount of Honor … looking exactly as she does on the money, though darker…. Queen complimented Jack Heinz on his 57 varieties, ‘Only I don’t like the way you make your mayonnaise.’ Jack’s smooth response, ‘That is because we do not make it for you, ma’am.’ … It was my first meeting. ‘I understand you are at the Lodge,’ said the F. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Which room?’ ‘The Blue Nursery,’ I replied. (‘My room,’ she thundered—the sisters have modelled themselves on the two queens in Alice; and then she hurtled across the lawn, scattering quick pecks of affection on cronies and dodging the deeper curtseys.” Around the lodge the park at Windsor seemed almost primeval. “Huge rhododendrons. Owls hooting at night. The Blue Nursery, an ordinary blue-walled bedroom with two windows looking out over a walled rose garden with a rise of forest in the back, a little girl’s room, kept the way it was when the Queen was a child with books on horses, porcelain horses, chipmunks…. An electric fire thing. A wash basin in the corner with running water. All out of time.” In the hot weather he enjoyed the swimming pool around which they sat, drank, and gossiped for hours.

  Of family visitors at La Rondinaia, there was only Nini, whose visits, like their brief times together in Washington or New York, were often at least as vexed as pleasurable. Always a gracious host, Gore had more loyalty than patience with the psychodramas and soap operas of Nini’s life, which soon included divorce from Michael Straight, her second husband. Uncle Pick, Gore’s closest living connection with his father, of whom he was fond and who with Sally had visited him in Italy numbers of times, had died in 1983. Only Gene’s youngest sister, Margaret, who lived in Los Angeles, remained of his father’s generation of Vidals. His Exeter friend, Wid Washburn, now a successful anthropologist-historian in charge of American Studies at the Smithsonian Institution, had reestablished contact in the 1970s, with a friendly letter and then some reciprocal visits in Italy and Washington. “I can’t say I much cared for PEA [Phillips Exeter Academy] today,” Gore wrote to him, “when I spoke there for the bicen. They struck me as dim hustlers, outside civilization. My affection for the Class of ’43 is undimmed and unilluminated. If I’m alive, I’ll come to the 50th.” The extended family of friends still had real presence, though time and distance were attenuating some of the relationships, death ending others. Grace Stone, his novelist friend, had become elderly, infirm, the challenge of traveling from Stonington, Connecticut, to Rome, let alone Ravello, insurmountable. “Once he dragged Grace Stone there,” Corsini recalled, “and she was furious. She didn’t like the house because it was too far away and she was an old lady.” Soon any Italian visits at all became impossible for her. Barbara Epstein was a regular visitor, usually in summers, and they always saw one another in New York. With Louis Auchincloss, whom Gore had grown even fonder of as the years passed, he continued his regular correspondence. Louis stopped by at La Rondinaia whenever he was in the area, though they saw one another usually in New York. The friendship had been additionally warmed by Gore’s laudatory essay on Auchincloss’s fiction, “The Great World and Louis Auchincloss,” in the mid-1970s. He did an even greater service for Frederic Prokosch, whose memoir he reviewed at length in 1983, in helping him over the years get published again. He and Prokosch, who now lived with Jack Bady in the South of France, kept in friendly touch but they had not seen one another in many years. The essay was in honor of someone who had influenced him long ago.

  Claire Bloom, with whom his friendship had been nothing if not intimate, visited occasionally in Rome and Ravello. She had begun a relationship with the novelist Philip Roth in the mid-1970s that was to lead to marriage in 1991 and then a well-publicized breakup in 1993. When she had asked Gore’s advice about Roth, he replied, “You already have had Portnoy’s complaint” in the form of Hilly Elkins. “Do not involve yourself with Portnoy.” Elaine Dundy, her usual ebullient self, visited numbers of times, as did her successor, Kathleen Tynan, now a widow, whom Gore had become fond of. Ken’s death in July 1980 was not a personal loss for Gore; they had long ago drifted apart, mostly, Gore thought, because of Ken’s difficulties in sustaining friendship. He and Howard saw the Newmans on their visits to Europe and when they were all in Los Angeles. Soon after his performance in The Verdict in 1982, Newman had had a heart attack scare. “He lay in a hospital bed,” Gore told Judith Halfpenny, “while they went up with a sort of vacuum cleaner from groin to heart, and cleaned out the valve, all visible on a TV monitor. He saw it all.” As soon as Newman recovered, the four of them met in London. “Our first time there, together, since their honeymoon spent with us 26 years ago. A lot of memory land.” But, as with many friends with busy professional and family lives, they saw one another less often than they once had, and the meetings were brief, the kind of drifting-away that occurs when friends live far apart and the opportunity for intimacy declines.

  Maria Britneva came to visit regularly in Rome and at La Rondinaia. But there had been a devastating change for her, much less so for Gore: Tennessee Williams, in February 1983, at the age of seventy-one, had choked to death on a medicinal bottle cap. “How curious that The Bird who most feared suffocation suffocated to death: a good 7 minutes of ghostly awareness,” he wrote to Paul Bowles. “There is a Bowlesian principle at work: what is most feared fearfully happens. I wish I had been less irritable with him in the last few years but the self-pity (so much vaster than my own) [was hard to tolerate].” Williams’s later years had been brutally difficult—theatrical failures, drugs, alcohol. In the second of two evocatively beautiful essays o
n Williams, “Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With,” in The New York Review in 1985, Vidal had focused on reminiscences of their glory years together and recalled the last time they had met. It had been on a television talk show in the early 1980s. “There were two or three other guests around a table, and the host. Abruptly, the Bird settled back in his chair and shut his eyes. The host’s habitual unease became panic. After some disjointed general chat, he said, tentatively, ‘Tennessee, are you asleep?’ And the Bird replied, eyes still shut, ‘No, I am not asleep but sometimes I shut my eyes when I am bored.’” Tennessee’s death deprived Maria of the focus of her life, though as co-executor she soon perpetuated her intense involvement and manipulative control of Williams’s legacy, including her refusal to give permission for his plays to be produced unless she retained control over the production. When producers refused to meet her demand, the productions usually fell through. Gore disapproved, but he still felt loyalty and love for Maria, though “[I] can’t say that the Bird and I had much connection during the last 20 yrs,” he wrote to Bill Gray. “Friendship with him was always a one-way street; and I tire rapidly. Also, he was not the same person I first knew—to the extent I knew him at all!”