by Gore Vidal
“You were there?” she asked directly.
“Well, it was for young people, really. So I gave away my tickets—”
“Surely,” said Chumbhot, “the revered Queen Mother is hardly in her first youth.” And so it went but not before Mrs. Cartland, perhaps suspecting an American plot, described the inadequate military materiel that the United States had sent to poor beleaguered England, fighting its lonely battle to save civilization. “I know. I was there for Lord Beaverbrook. He taught me how to write. He would have me go down to the docks as those shoddy insufficient arms arrived.” Definitely a hot day in Bangkok.
NINE
No sooner do I vow to put death, at least temporarily, on that proverbial back burner than I learn that my coeval, television’s Johnny Carson, has died at seventy-nine of emphysema. I was a few weeks older than he. He had rung me last month to say that he had been living pretty much in seclusion at the beach and had only just heard that Howard was dead. We reminisced about his visit to us in Rome and Ravello, a first (and I suspect last) visit to Italy for him. He was not one for foreign climes other than Wimbledon and tennis. In Italy he was a dutiful sightseer but as we climbed Palatine Hill, “Everything here is steps,” he sighed, “and broken marble. This place is going to sink under their weight one of these days.”
What would Montaigne have thought of him? Had he been a mere entertainer-interviewer, nothing at all. But since Montaigne was deeply interested in politics, Carson would have interested him very much. John was the only political satirist regularly allowed for thirty years on that television time which is known to be prime and so he was able to influence the way the people at large thought about many things that were often unexamined in the media until he put his satiric spin to them. Montaigne wrote to influence the kings of France and Navarre and so was heeded in a way that the performer Carson was also able to influence, in a much smaller way, American politicians. He once told me that he could predict the winner of any approaching presidential election by the reactions to certain jokes he’d tell to the live audiences at his Burbank studio. He’d make amiable fun—at least it seemed amiable—of the entire field but all the time that sharp ear was listening carefully to the laughter and, even more attentively, to the silences. He read this microcosm of the American people like a barometer.
What was he really like? Well, he was better looking than he looked. Clowning distorts regular features and his were most regular. The eyes were sharp but the most powerful of his senses was that of hearing, detecting false notes and the lessening of an audience’s attention during a joke. The monologue that opened each evening’s Tonight Show was carefully written out on long rolls of paper that were unfurled as the monologue got read, and the roll of abandoned script would then float from the stage down into the audience where, like Chinese paper dragons, one could read what he had often abruptly cut on air. The face in repose was as composed as that of Buster Keaton if not as comically frozen. One night in Ravello, after his wife Joanna had gone up to bed, we sat on the balcony overlooking the Gulf of Salerno and talked politics and comedy and got quietly drunk.
“You know,” he said, “people keep thinking I am this kindly little old Irishman when I’m not little, not kindly, and not Irish but English.” Finally it was that ear, sharp to nuance, which directed his performance. We all have multiple responses to what people say particularly if one is on air and must respond quickly. And so, the appearance of amiability is the wisest defense if what you say might break the spell you are spinning. Hence: mock amazement if sex is in the air or wide-eyed bewilderment at a dangerous turn in a political observation. One night before I came out onstage the producer Freddie De Cordova caught me halfway through the curtain: “No mention of abortion; we’re having trouble this week!” I said, “All right” and stepped into the spotlight upstage center, then turned right to walk to John’s desk where he was unexpectedly beaming. This was unusual. I tried to read his look as I sat in the chair to his right, a swivel chair that tended to slip out from under you in order to face the adjacent couch where other guests might be. “So, Gore, what do you think of this right to life movement?” With that, he shoved me into the water, as it were. Offstage, De Cordova looked grim. I started to improvise.
Unlike most talk-show hosts John liked for his guests to be entertaining and so give him a respite from talking as opposed to reacting. Once, in a break, I told him I’d thought of a funny line about someone but I was afraid it might be too sharp. He drummed on his desk with a long pencil and frowned: “If you ever have the slightest doubt about a line don’t say it.” The best advice. In front of him just above the camera was a huge clock which, as the minutes passed and guests turned boring, he tended to stare at, waiting to be released from his role. One performance, when he wasn’t looking, a member of the crew pushed back the hands of the clock fifteen minutes. Carson’s momentary look of despair when he saw the clock got a laugh even though the audience had no idea why.
I first came to his program when he was in a studio on the sixth floor, I think it was, of the NBC building at Rockefeller Center. He had inherited me from his predecessor, Jack Paar, a popular but somewhat eccentric host of The Tonight Show.
John Carson and I warming up on The Tonight Show.
As we sat drinking on the balcony in the moonlight, we recalled Paar’s tantrums and how he had once, in a rage, walked off his own show. Also, how he had asked me if I’d like to be his summer replacement. I had said no. Paar was amazed, but then so was De Cordova who asked me half a dozen times over twenty or thirty years if I’d like to sit in for Carson when he was performing at Las Vegas. “After all,” said De Cordova, “when you’re in that chair, you’re the king.” “No,” I said. “I may be in the chair but everyone knows that the king is elsewhere. No thanks.” John wanted to know the “real” reason. I said that I had noticed that almost every TV host had written a book that no one wanted to read because they felt that they already knew the author far too well from television to want to know more. So, as a writer for life, I didn’t want to lose readers.
It is now time for me to explain what a writer for life—a novelist—was doing on television even though, as of 1962, I had had two successful plays on Broadway and was writing films, but not novels.
TEN
In World War Two, I was first mate of an army freight-supply ship in the Aleutians. At nineteen, on the long night watches in port at Dutch Harbor, I began a novel set on a ship in the Aleutians—where else? At twenty I was transferred to Birmingham General Hospital in Van Nuys, California: hypothermia—from exposure to the icy Bering Sea—had led to what was misdiagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis. I was offered a lifelong pension if I stayed in the army for another two years (the war had just ended). I said no to the pension if I could be let go right away. Characteristically, on principle, the army held on to me another year and so I became a mess officer at Camp Gordon Johnson on the Gulf of Mexico. After my wisdom teeth were pulled (an eccentric army “cure” for what was finally diagnosed as osteoarthrosis) I was freed. Today I have an artificial knee and no pension. The novel Williwaw was published in 1946 to amiable reviews in The New York Times and elsewhere. A second novel did less well; a third, The City and the Pillar, earned me a letter of congratulations from Dr. Kinsey, himself about to be world famous for his report on the sex life of the human male. But the daily reviewer for the Times, a Mr. Prescott, told Nick Wreden, my editor at E. P. Dutton, that not only would he not review my story of a love affair between two “normal” male athletes, but because of the great horror that I had perpetrated in book-chat land he (the most powerful reviewer of the day writing regularly in the daily Times) would never again read much less review a book of mine. That was how seven novels of mine went unreviewed in the daily Times. Since Time and Newsweek usually followed the Times’s lead, I was neatly erased as a novelist in Freedom’s Land. A professor who lectures on my work tells me that academics to this day refuse to believe that the Times could ever have do
ne such a thing. Such is simple faith. Happily, England continued to take notice of the books. But, in order to make a living, I turned to one Harold Franklin, an agent at the William Morris office. Since he was more virtuous rabbi than showbiz hustler, he patiently introduced me to live television drama in 1954, where I flourished until branching out into films for Hollywood (as the last contract writer hired by MGM) and from there I moved on to the Broadway stage with Visit to a Small Planet and The Best Man. I had also found that I enjoyed essay writing, particularly in a recently established publication called The New York Review of Books. Finally, by 1964, I was back to novel writing, obliging the aged Mr. Prescott to break his vow and come out of retirement to attack Julian, with no discernible effect: his day was done while I had a number of days newly begun. In 1960 I staged a political play on Broadway at the same time I was also the Democrat-Liberal candidate for Congress in New York’s 29th District, polling the most votes for a Democrat since 1910 when Franklin D. Roosevelt won a seat in the state senate because so many of the local Republican voters thought that he was his distant cousin Theodore and so voted for him. But once “tricked” they never voted for him again. Since I had practically no money to buy radio time (there was no TV station in the district) for a congressional race, I went on the various national talk shows of which there were at least a dozen. Several insisted that my opponent, the incumbent Republican, be given equal time. Although he’d served several terms as representative to Congress, he had wisely remained unknown to his constituents, secure in the knowledge that the McKinley vote was forever his. He did not go on television, and won. In 1964 I was again offered the nomination but as I was again a novelist I passed the nomination on to Joe Resnick of Kingston who did win. During 1960, I appeared with Jack Paar, Carson, Steve Allen, Merv Griffin: in fact, anywhere that I could get through to the large audience. In the process, I may, also, inadvertently, have changed American publishing. Julian, my return to the novel, was not exactly a crackling sexy airport novel: this reflective narrative was about the origins of Christianity and the Emperor Julian’s failed attempt to establish religious tolerance in the place of that Christian absolutism installed by his kinsman, Constantine. I had written a book plainly ill suited for raffish bestsellerdom.
In those days publishers were almost as mystified as they are now when it came to the delicate subject of how to lure people into reading books in the age of movies and that upstart, television. Quite by accident, I presented them with a solution. Since I was still thinking about politics in those days, I had continued to go on television whenever possible to talk about the state of the union, which appealed to Carson and a few—very few—other TV hosts. One of the others was Hugh Downs, the low-key star of the Today show. In that unhurried time, he and I would sit at a table, The New York Times between us, and we’d chat—very low key—about the news of the day with breaks for commercials, weather, solid news. When Little, Brown, the publisher of Julian, asked me if I’d go to Houston to Brown’s bookstore to promote the book I said it seemed pointless to me but I would, if they insisted. They gave me a date. I tried to cancel because it conflicted with an appearance on the Today show with Hugh Downs. “Why not,” asked my editor, “do both? Say something about the book on the show.” I explained that we mostly talked politics. “So make an exception,” I was told. I did. I talked very briefly about the book while Downs held it up like the Grail. Then I left the studio for the airport and flew to Houston where Ted Brown of the eponymous bookstore said, “Not only did that TV show sell out every copy that we had in stock, but it looks like every copy in Houston is gone, too, all in one morning.” Julian promptly became the number-one bestseller on the New York Herald Tribune list (The New York Times—ever consistent—listed it farther down their list but then, some years later, they miraculously kept my Lincoln at number two for a couple of years when it was number one in Publishers Weekly). Anyway, the rest is publishing history as publishers drove their writers onto television programs, more happy than not to get so much airtime illuminated free of charge. In time, of course, Gresham’s not Grisham’s law obtained and people got tired of novelists telling how, although their powers of invention were truly extraordinary, absolutely everything in their fiction was absolutely True and had really happened to them exactly as described. Capote even claimed to have invented a non-fiction (sic) novel about an actual murder case.
So—what made Carson himself laugh? Words, not surprisingly. He used them carefully and listened carefully to the way others used them. The moment we realized that we were, somehow, on each other’s wavelength was when I was doing my deep hollow-voiced radio-announcer Nixonian voice. I quoted from Nixon’s book Six Crises: “President Eisenhower was a far more sly and devious man than people suspected and I mean those words in their very best sense.” On air, I got a look of genuine astonishment from John. Then he nearly slid out of his chair. Over the years, when one or the other of us would characterize someone as “sly” and “devious,” the other would add in an oily voice, “I assume you mean those words in their very best sense.”
Last winter I ran into Janet De Cordova, now a widow. She had tried to get John to come to a memorial service for Freddie and he’d said, “I’ll think about it.” He did. He rang her back and said, “No, I can’t do it.” When reminded of their long friendship and so on, he was to the point: “I can’t do it because everyone thinks I’m still Johnny Carson but I’m not anymore. I wouldn’t even know how to fake it. So, I won’t be there but I know what a lousy businessman Freddie was and I’ll bet his affairs are in a mess so I’m sending you something useful.” He sent her a large check and she was pleased. But how odd it must be not to be the self you have spent a lifetime perfecting. To vanish like Prospero into thin air, leaving behind pale understudies but no replacement.
As I was writing these last thoughts on Carson, a friend sent me an old clipping which John would have enjoyed. I start to imagine we are back on his show. I remark how the administration is praising the recent election in Iraq where, perhaps, 72 percent voted. I sit in the swivel chair to his right, an old bit of newspaper clipping in one hand.
“I hear, Gore, you’ve got the latest news from the election in Iraq. It was certainly a real triumph for freedom and democracy, wouldn’t you say?” To myself I mutter, “In the very best sense of those words.” Aloud I say, “Well, actually, it’s from The New York Times of September 3, 1967.”
“A dicey year for freedom, wasn’t it?”
I read the headline: “U.S. encouraged by Vietnam vote: Officials cite 83 percent turnout despite Vietcong terror…A successful election has long been seen as the keystone to President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.” Suddenly, we are sitting on the balcony in Ravello.
CARSON
What’s that phrase you use all the time for the country?
VIDAL
The United States of Amnesia.
CARSON
I’ll open with that, then you read off the “latest” Iraq election news with the quote from 1967.
VIDAL
But where do we do this?
CARSON
Oh, we’ll find a show.
VIDAL
There isn’t one. Remember? You’re dead.
CARSON (evasively)
No, no. I’m just living down at the beach, I think it’s called in seclusion.
The screen is now crowded with Leno et al. telling jokes until mortar fire drowns them out, and we have faded to black. Anyway, a few of us once heard the chimes at midnight and were the better for it.
ELEVEN
I read somewhere how odd it was that although I ran for public office twice I have never really written about either race or, indeed, why I ran. Well, part of the why of 1960 was Jack Kennedy who had married Jackie whose mother had taken the place of my mother as Mrs. Hugh Dudley Auchincloss. After my mother and I had moved out of Auchincloss’s Virginia house Jackie’s mother and sister
moved in while my half brother and half sister became Jackie’s stepbrother and stepsister. So many divorces and remarriages in our interconnected family has made for numerous weird connections as well as non-connections: I have four stepbrothers, sons of my mother’s last husband, General Olds: I have not only never met them but I don’t even know their names. Oh, what a tangled web is woven when divorcées conceive.
In 1956 Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for president, decided to throw the convention open in order to choose a vice presidential candidate. Jack, the junior senator from Massachusetts, placed himself at center stage, battling with Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator with a record for fighting crime. When Jack lost, I wrote him a note congratulating him on not being Stevenson’s running mate since that eloquent figure was clearly not going to beat Eisenhower; and did not.
As Jack began his long campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, I decided to help out with a play called The Best Man whose successful run on Broadway did him no harm. Some years later, I wrote another political play, An Evening with Richard Nixon: in this case my Nixon character, wonderfully played by George Irving, spoke only Nixon’s actual recorded words; this decision to use his actual words as recorded over the years cost me more money in research than I was ever to make out of the play. But with Irving as Nixon the result was wildly comic because Nixon seemed to have no conscious mind. He said whatever was milling about in his overwrought subconscious. In speeches he often turned to Pat, his wife, loyally seated nearby, and, shaking his finger at her, he would intone, “We here in America can no longer stand pat.” The producer, an old friend, suddenly succumbed to a fit of megalomania: instead of opening at a small theater like the Booth where my Visit to a Small Planet had done so well, he opened Nixon at the Shubert, a vast theater that only something the size of Oklahoma!, the musical—or indeed the state—could ever have filled. Needless to say, as always, in Nixon land, there were death threats for many of us, while The New York Times outdid itself by headlining the review: “A play for radical liberals,” certain death for a Broadway play. Actually the play was a sharp preview of Watergate, already unfolding in the wings. A dance critic, Clive Barnes reviewed the play which had done well with tryout audiences. Clive conceded that it was very funny but, by the third paragraph, he knew that he was supposed to attack and did. I think his exact line was: “Gore Vidal has said mean and nasty things about our president.” I ran into him not long after and told him, kindly, that in Clive’s native England one might refer to “Our” Queen but in the U.S. we never say Our President. The best aspect of the play was a sort of limbo to which George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, and JFK have been assigned, quarreling with each other as they watch with wonder Nixon’s inexorable rise to the presidency. As it turned out, aside from revivals, that was to be my last new play on Broadway, made memorable by a young actress who played several different parts. In due course, I became godfather to one of Susan Sarandon’s sons by Tim Robbins. Yes: I did say, Always a godfather, never a god.