Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  But he was soon back at his desk, “ready to be enslaved again to words,” as he good-humoredly told Judith Halfpenny, with little sign of the decrease in energy he had complained of after finishing Vidal in Venice. In fact, the ten years from 1985 to 1995 were to be among the most productive of his life as a writer. If he complained about tiredness, it was in the context of a whirlwind of work, which included numbers of screenplays. In 1979 he had made a movie adaptation of Lucian Truscott’s novel Dress Gray, about a West Point murder, that Frank Von Zerneck produced for Warner Brothers. Zerneck and he worked well together. It was a moderate success when it appeared as a television movie in 1986. Immediately after Vidal in Venice he had gone to Palermo to consult with the producer and director Michael Cimino—director of the disastrous Heaven’s Gate, which had bankrupted United Artists—about the screenplay he had done at Cimino’s request, based on Mario Puzo’s novel The Sicilian. When Cimino came to Rome in April 1986 to enlist Vidal’s services, he brought a script that he represented as entirely his own. There had been an earlier script by Steve Shagan, he told Vidal, but “he preferred that I not read it.” Cimino initially described Vidal’s assignment as polishing Cimino’s script. Filming was to begin that summer. Setting to work immediately, doing numbers of rewrites during a three-month period, and then making further changes and additions with Cimino through the production and editing period, Vidal created almost an entirely new shooting script. “Cimino has made no major problems yet and follows, obediently, the script,” Vidal told Halfpenny in August 1986, “but he is already manoeuvering to get credit for writing what I have written. Fortunately, our Guild is protective.” He soon discovered he was wrong, though Cimino was not the problem. In a maneuver eerily reminiscent of what had happened with Ben-Hur, the Writers Guild of America, of which Shagan had been a director, awarded screenplay credit exclusively to Shagan. Furious, Vidal protested, then requested guild arbitration, this time armed with detailed records and corroborating third-party testimony to support his claim. After he had rewritten Cimino’s script, he wrote to the guild, “Cimino sent me Shagan’s script. There are perhaps a half dozen lines of Shagan’s in the shooting script, which I, otherwise, wrote. For the record, I have every page on which I worked (from the Cimino script) to the shooting script, which is almost entirely my work.” Vidal and his lawyer believed that Cimino also supported his claim. The guild soon turned down Vidal’s compromise proposal that Shagan be given credit for the “screen story,” Vidal for the “screenplay.” Cimino also went to arbitration, where he lost, concerning not the screenplay but his agreement with the sponsoring company about the length of the film. As with Heaven’s Gate, his “final” version was too long, though Vidal agreed with Cimino that the longer version was artistically superior to the shorter. When three anonymous arbitrators ruled Vidal should not get any credit for his contribution to the film, he sued the guild, despite rules forbidding a member’s suing, on the grounds that its secret arbitration procedure was illegal. In addition, he maintained, relevant documents had purposely been withheld from the arbitrators, and the guild had not followed its own procedural rules.

  Furious at what seemed an injustice, determined not to be victimized again, he was willing to spend whatever necessary to force the guild to operate in a way that was above suspicion. The California Court of Appeals ruled against the guild. The arbitrators’ names had to be revealed. The guild’s appeals were not upheld. But there was no movement toward a satisfactory resolution for Vidal. The guild to this day continues to keep secret the names of its arbitrators. The $250,000 he had been paid for his work on the script, almost all of which went to pay legal fees, and his victory in the California appeals court had to remain his substitute for credit for his work. “I sued over it only because I was angry at the Writer’s Guild,” he recalled. “I didn’t want credit. I was happy not to have it.” But it was enough like the Ben-Hur experience to impress on him, indelibly and bitterly, that making movies, as he knew all along, while usually lucrative was rarely satisfying. And he had done numbers of original scripts and adaptations that had never been made, though being made badly might have been even a worse fate. As a child of the golden films of the 1930s and ’40s, never star-struck but deeply screen-struck, he was often temptable if the money were enough, if the subject appealed to him, if the circumstances seemed promising. In 1990 he was to do a screenplay at Martin Scorsese’s request based on the life of Theodora and Justinian, a topic he also had in mind for a novel to be a successor to Julian. Scorsese liked the script, but the movie was never made. As usual, the problems were financing and timing. Though Vidal had been paid for movie options on numbers of his own novels, the options, no matter how promising at first, never produced actual films. For his work as a screenwriter he had been paid handsomely, but only The Catered Affair, Suddenly, Last Summer, and The Best Man had turned out reasonably well. It was vocation, not art. Still, if he ever had complete control over his screenplay, and if he had a director who respected it, he believed he might make a wonderful movie.

  In 1989 he finally had an opportunity, though the conditions were not entirely favorable. The Turner Home Entertainment company agreed to finance a made-for-television movie that he would write based on the story of Billy the Kid, which Frank Von Zerneck would produce. Vidal had already done two versions, one for television in the 1950s, the other transformed into the unsatisfactory The Left-Handed Gun. Now he had the chance to do it his own way, in a film that starred Val Kilmer, a dark version of Billy as heroic innocent who finds himself trapped by the community’s corruption into a highly principled but doomed criminality. Billy’s temperament as rebel on behalf of justice, determined never to be a victim, Gore still identified as his own: the man who never started a fight but always fought self-defensively to a victory in the end, even if mainly a triumph of the iconoclastic spirit. Less successful as a film than he had anticipated, for reasons that had little to do with the screenplay, it still gave him satisfaction at last to do his version of Billy, though it demonstrated again that the collaborative nature of filmmaking made any script subject to forces beyond the author’s control. Though reviews were adequate to good, the direction was relentlessly dark in color and mood, and Billy’s story seemed not to appeal to Americans in the late 1980s. Also, it may have been too late in life for Gore to return to a subject he had identified with since adolescence. This last reworking lacked the freshness of the first, perhaps the inevitable difference between Vidal in his twenties and Vidal in his late sixties.

  If he complained about feeling ill, it was the occasional hypochondriacal response, partly annoyance, partly fear, to the decline of his body or to environmental assaults like the nuclear-plant explosion in the Soviet Union. The irradiated clouds drifted westward on the winds. “Thanks to Chernobyl,” he told Claire Bloom in June 1986, “a number of us now spit blood like 18th century poets: irritated throats from Cesium B7 in the soil. I had lungs, esophagus—the lot—checked. No cancer, just dripping sinuses, throats of fire. The govt refuses to admit just what happened.” That did not prevent him, immediately after his return from a monthlong trip to Bangkok, via Laos, Burma, Tahiti, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles, from accepting an invitation to attend a peace conference in Moscow in February 1987, with, among others, Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, and Gregory Peck, where he gave a speech on the origins of the Cold War. The invitation came “from a street in Moscow,” he told Halfpenny, “no signature, just a street number, asking me to come to a Forum on a nuclear free world, Feb 14–16. This was the 11th. So I rang the Soviet consulate, the slowest most Byzantine office outside the Vatican. ‘Was it too late’ … I began. ‘Come right over,’ said the consul. ‘But you’re closed.’ … ‘We’ll open,’ he said. In half an hour I had my visa; another half hour I was at Aeroflot where a ticket waited.”

  In Moscow he saw John Kenneth Galbraith, Pierre Trudeau, Yoko Ono, and Claudia Cardinale, among other celebrities, though when he asked to see the list of writ
ers, he was shown a dozen names, all, except Mailer and Graham Greene, unknown to him, “the usual loyal party members who are repaid, once a decade, with a slice of bread and a seat at the circus.” The Mailers and he had an amiable dinner together at the flat of the editor of the Russian publishing house that published them both. “M was upset that only Naked and D has been published in the Soviet while five of my books have been done. He then held us riveted with an analysis of Ancient Evenings which he regards as his best book and must be published in Russia. Slight tension. ‘The book,’ said our editor, ‘is just too long for us, with the paper shortage’—which is true.” During the conference working sessions, the participants were divided into sections. “Alas, I was with Culture,” Gore recalled, “presided over by a deputy minister, rather smooth, with Greene as figurehead. I sat next to him at a baize covered main table while several hundred lit-types made speeches at us…. Andrei Voisinitzen [Andrey Voznesensky] (I can never spell it) was in good form, a great charmer and considered their best poet…. AV knew that I knew that (Top Secret) he had fucked Mme Onassis and so every time he could get me to one side he would ask, wistfully, for news of her, which I gave as best I could, as learned from our sister in common. Around eleven in the morning GG would begin to wriggle beside me: he still looks about 17, a lean dirty-minded boy with a face that got, somehow, frost-bitten and worn. ‘Will these French never shut up?’ he moaned. Then he wriggled up some more and then he whispered, ‘I’ve got a flask, you know. Do I dare?’ ‘No.’ I was stern. ‘Everyone will see you’ (Gorbachev is harsh on the subject). ‘I suppose not,’ he whined. Then I took pity on him. ‘Drop your notes,’ I said. ‘Pretend to search for them beneath the green baize, take a swig.’ He sighed, ‘I should never come up again, I fear.’ But at lunch, he alone was supplied an entire bottle of vodka, which he drank in about an hour, no sign of drunkenness, not, indeed, at midnight either, after he and I had caroused together at the cinema club restaurant with our translators.” Gorbachev impressed him considerably. “Norman was more suspicious. I turned out to be right. But he was right to be suspicious. He had followed the communist line more than I had, and he thought it was the usual bluff for Westerners. I thought something had happened there. And then Gorbachev told very funny stories about Ronald Reagan’s meetings with him. Some of them were wildly funny.” When they met at Vienna, Reagan had told Gorbachev “that if the earth were facing an invasion from Mars, his country and my country would become allies.” Gorbachev had responded, “‘I think it’s premature to worry about an invasion from Mars, but there are nuclear weapons that are here right now, and the two of us should work together and ban them.’ Then Gorbachev paused, dramatically. ‘The president made no reply.’” The next day, at a crowded international press session, British, French, and American journalists asked hostile, baiting questions. “I sat next to Mailer and wife on the ground that as she was the best-looking person in the hall we would not be much noticed and the press would leave Mailer and me alone. I was right. The Soviet Union fell in love with her, if not with us.”

  At the end of February, soon after returning from Moscow, Gore flew to Brazil, Argentina, and Spain for lectures and TV appearances in conjunction with Spanish-language editions of Matters of Fact and of Fiction and his new novel, Empire. It was the first time he had been to South America. “All sorts of changes are taking place in people’s blood with AIDS as the most exciting and my own Epstein-Barr (known in LA as Epstein Bar and Grill),” which it turned out he did not have, “as one of the dullest: constant allergies, a feeling of lethargy, etc. I transcend it,” he told Halfpenny, “by, in 6 months, going to Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuquet, Hong Kong, NYC, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Toledo, London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Moscow again.” When he returned to Ravello, he was furious to discover that the gardener had murdered the two dogs living in the olive groves, two strays who had come to stay. Some years before, the gardener had allowed Michael Tyler-Whittle’s elderly Caligula, whom they had inherited, to starve to death. He was immediately and angrily fired. The only remaining pet was a charming homeless cat who had wandered in the year before, “white slender with pale yellow-green eyes, pink tipped ears, nose, paws,” and had instantly become a cherished member of the family. “She talks constantly … and is known as Miss Miao to the town and the Cat from Hell around the house,” he wrote to Halfpenny. “She is incredibly clumsy but very affectionate in a most uncatlike way but then we brought her up with two dogs and she thinks she is a dog which means a sandpapery licking of one’s nose.”

  At La Rondinaia through much of 1985—86 he had worked on Manifest Destiny, the tentative title of the next novel in his American-history series. When the manuscript became too long, he used much of it under the title Empire (“Manifest Destiny was considered too difficult a title for our non-reading readers”), published in June 1987, for which Random House had paid a $1-million advance. The remainder became the core of Empire’s successor, Hollywood, which was published in February 1990. “I knew I had to stop at the end of Empire at a good point, which I found with the showdown between Theodore Roosevelt and Hearst. But I was doing the story really from Caroline’s point of view,” he recalled, “and I couldn’t let her go. Since I was going to take her up in Hollywood, that would then get me through Woodrow Wilson…. So in a way these two are really one book.” The main character of Empire (1987), which begins precisely on the day when the Spanish-American War is over and twenty-one years after 1876 ends, is Caroline Sanford, Emma and William’s daughter, Charles Schuyler’s granddaughter, and Blaise Sanford’s half-sister. The young Caroline is in England, visiting the American ambassador, John Hay, among whose famous guests are his friends Henry Adams and Henry James and who is about to be invited by President McKinley to become Secretary of State. Caroline soon moves to Washington, escapes her engagement to marry Del Hay, John Hay’s son, and successfully fights her half-brother’s attempt to deprive her of her part of their inheritance. Shortly she is the proprietor of an increasingly powerful Washington newspaper, competing with William Randolph Hearst and her brother Blaise, Hearst’s protégé, as the marriage of image-makers and power brokers solidifies the transformation of the republic into a modern empire in which the wealthy get wealthier and the powerful more powerful. For the restless, beautiful Caroline, the next stop is Hollywood, which begins in 1917 with Hearst at the White House and America about to enter World War I. Much of Hollywood is the story of Caroline’s life in Washington and then California, her movement from the newspaper’s printed page to Hollywood’s silver screen within the context of American history from 1917 to 1928, Woodrow Wilson to Warren Harding, both of whom make substantial appearances. Senator Thomas P. Gore appears as himself. An important invented new character, Senator James Burden Day, a powerful up-and-coming political figure who has much in common with Senator Gore, is Caroline’s married lover. A friend of Caroline’s brother, Blaise, who has now become an influential Washington newspaper publisher and political operative, Day’s ambition is to be President. Burden Day’s history, sensibility, and political life become one of the important elements in the novel. When Caroline moves to California, soon to become a star of the silent screen, the worlds of Hollywood and of Washington are united; the country will never be the same again. Powerful California now not only makes images but determines elections. A border-state Southerner, Senator Day (his middle name indicates some of the strain) carries one of the heavy weights of American history, the North-South antagonism, still very much alive, embodied for him in his constant awareness that his father, who had fought and died for the Confederacy, would strongly disapprove of his son’s politics and his Washington, D.C., world. Caroline fades from his life and then from the series.

  In late November 1987 Gore was in London for Empire’s British publication, a new volume of essays (Armageddon? Essays, 1983–1987), and a single-volume reissue of Myra/Myron by his new British publisher, Andrew Deutsch. Its director, Tom R
osenthal, whom Gore had known since Heinemann days, was a devoted Vidal enthusiast. In general, both in America and Britain, Empire got superlative reviews, particularly from those sympathetic to Vidal’s view of American history, but even from a reviewer as begrudging as the New York Times’s Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, whom Vidal disliked for what he felt was his continuation of Orville Prescott’s narrow-minded moralism, though in fact Lehmann-Haupt frequently praised Vidal’s historical fiction, which he reviewed glowingly. He had much less enthusiasm for Myron and the inventions, mainly on aesthetic grounds. Michiko Kakutani Vidal thought an even worse embodiment of the Prescott tradition, to which she added a tendency to lecture the reader about the obvious, an exemplification of the maxim that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.”