by Gore Vidal
“I now grow forgetful,” wrote Montaigne in old age. “Names refuse to come when bidden.” It is encouraging to know that Montaigne who had read and reread everything worried about loss of memory, too. He was also fascinated by the process of memory: after all, he was the first great memoirist of life not only as lived by himself but as reported by others and written down.
“Off I go,” Montaigne writes, “rummaging about in books for sayings which please me—not so as to store them up (for I have no storehouses) but so as to carry them back to the book, where they are no more mine than they were in their original place. We only know, I believe, what we know now: ‘knowing’ no more consists in what we once knew than in what we shall know in the future…”
It has been my experience that writers, myself included, often forget what they have written since the act of writing is simply a letting go of a piece of one’s own mind, and so there is a kind of mental erasure as it finds its place on a page in order to leap to another consciousness like a mutant viral strain. I have just recorded Jane Bowles’s uncharacteristic behavior as jealous wife only to recall that I had already quoted her letters to Paul in Palimpsest.
TWENTY-THREE
I have now had a researcher prepare an outline of what I was writing and sometimes doing over the last forty years. Immediately after my return to the novel with Julian, somewhat perversely I took on a great deal of film work. One project was at the request of Ray Stark, a Hollywood producer, who found himself burdened with an unmakable screenplay of a best-selling book about the Nazi occupation of Paris. René Clément, a much admired French director—not least, as it proved, by himself and his formidable wife. He told me once that he had perfect taste. Howard and I holed up in a flat under the eaves of the Hotel Plaza-Athénée where Billy, our black spaniel, had distinguished himself by relieving himself on the carpet in the lobby as we were checking in. But the French tolerance of pets is their most distinguishing amiable characteristic.
The making of Is Paris Burning? was, as so often happens, far more interesting than the finished product. The previous writer, an American Francophile, had all the underground French freedom fighters constantly shouting Vive la France! He must have worked at Warner Brothers where films set in France were popular and the actors were either French or spoke their American English dialogue with heavy French accents. The fact that a script written in English to represent French speech could also contain many French phrases bothered no one. I would try to explain that the English spoken by the actors playing Frenchmen was, in context, French, and to clutter it up with numerous zut alors did not make the whole thing seem more French but simply confusing. My metaphysical arguments seldom won the day.
In Los Angeles Ray Stark had hired a young would-be filmmaker, a graduate of film school, Francis Ford Coppola, who could write an entire screenplay in a day or two. He was just what Ray had been looking for. Ray would give Francis a book like Carson’s Reflections in a Golden Eye. Then, while Francis was working on the script, Ray would be persuading Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando to play the leads. When they finally asked to see a script, Ray would give them Francis’s handiwork with the explanation: “This is only a rough draft. Tennessee will be doing the final script.” Ray was a great salesman and, of course, Tennessee never did do a final draft nor, sadly, did Francis. Ray was also not particularly grateful for how well Francis was serving him. As soon as I got to Paris, I sat down with Francis to go over my predecessor’s script. There were a lot of “voilàs” and “Gallic shrugs” with strains of the Marseillaise on the soundtrack. I found Francis to be encyclopedic on anything that had to do with filmmaking. He was truly post-Gutenberg. Film was where it—all of it—was at. For him the written culture had passed into night, making him the first member of the total-film generation that I was ever to meet. Then I got a call from Ray: “Now that you’re here I can let Francis go.” I saw myself writing endless exterior shots: “Long Shot: German tank turns into Place de la Concorde—Day.” I said, “No. I need him. He’s done a lot of the exterior stuff already. I need him for that.” On the personal side, Francis was in Paris with a young wife and baby. Reluctantly, Ray kept him on. Recently, Francis told me that I had turned him onto wine which, in turn, led to his becoming one of the leading winemakers in the United States. I asked him how I’d made this contribution. “Remember when we’d go out to lunch and you’d have a glass of wine and so would I though I didn’t particularly like it at first? I associated wine with the older guys in the family who always drank red wine out of these Gallo jugs. I thought it was strictly for Italians hung up on the old country. Then you started talking about French wine and I was hooked.” The reader who finds moviemaking interesting will note at this point that the director René Clément has not yet made an appearance. I’m sure he did in life but movies in those days were strictly controlled by the producer while the director, with a few exceptions, was simply a technician under the producer’s guidance.
That season, Paris was particularly interesting for me due to the presence of Orson Welles who was acting-directing Chimes at Midnight at the Boulogne studio; he also played the part of the Swedish consul in Is Paris Burning?, a man who did his best to save a number of Jews from the Gestapo as Hitler’s Third Reich was tumbling down. Hitler had determined that should his armies leave France, Paris must be burned to the ground. A good German and numerous brave and good French Gaullists and Communists prevented the burning. Orson was suitably cynical about our project but he was, as always, broke as well as deep into the role of Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight. After one lunch and six bottles of wine, we went back to the studio where Orson had been dubbing himself. On the screen was a picture of him, with lips moving. As he entered, he turned to a microphone and became Falstaff, not missing a beat. Considering what he ate and drank, it is amazing that he lived to be seventy. When he laughed, which was often, his face, starting at the lower lip, would turn scarlet while sweat formed on his brow like a sudden spring rain.
Orson Welles after lunch in Is Paris Burning? He was also moonlighting in the Bois de Boulogne acting in and directing Chimes at Midnight. Rudy Vallee, songster of yesteryear, kept sending each of us updates of his memoirs, which we used to study over lunch, particularly the trauma of the grapefruit someone hurled at him when he was onstage playing his horn; had it hit the horn, he keened, that golden voice would have been forever stilled.
Orson was fascinated by politics. He had helped President Roosevelt with speeches. FDR thought him a born politician. But he was dissuaded from running for the Senate by “well-wishers” who said he could never make it because he was an actor and divorced. “Now look!” he boomed at his favorite Hollywood restaurant. “Look at Ronald Reagan! An actor and divorced!” Could an actor, I wondered, make a good president after a lifetime of being directed by others? Orson was ready for that one: “Suppose he’d been a director, too? But, even so, I’d trust Gregory Peck as president, if not as Captain Ahab.”
Ray had a German co-producer whose task was to please, politically, the French Communist Party and the party of de Gaulle. Chaban-Delmas, a Gaullist politician, wanted to know who would play him. When told the beautiful Alain Delon, he was delighted. “Why, he looks exactly like me in the war.” There were also a dozen or so American stars who played the victorious American army that arrived to secure Paris not quite ahead of the Free French troops who were incredibly bold to a man under Clément’s rather nervous direction, nervous because of the political rivalries still going on. The German co-producer waited until Ray and I were gone. He then threw out most of our dialogue for the French characters and allowed the Gaullists and the Communists to supply their own dialogue, mostly great stunning clichés to demonstrate their overwhelming love of La France and la gloire. The result was purest chloroform. The picture ran for nearly three hours and at the gala American premiere the principal star in the audience was former vice president Richard Nixon, the only time I ever felt compassion for him. I had insisted th
at Francis get screen credit as a scriptwriter—his first. I then tried to get my name taken off the film but the lawyers worked too slowly and so my name remains. Later, when the film was shortened for television, some of it was not, visually, too bad. Vive la France! I also forced Ray to read a script that Francis had written. Gloomily, he read You’re a Big Boy Now and then—gloomily?—he made it as a successful film, and so a great film career began.
Francis thought entirely in movie terms. To him, when we met on Is Paris Burning?, he was the young Budd Schulberg, while I was the washed-up golden-boy novelist of yesteryear, Scott Fitzgerald. The fact that several recent novels of mine were doing well went unnoticed. Twenty years later we met on a TV program. Francis was stout with a full white beard; he stared at me, bewildered. “Didn’t you used to be older than me?” he asked. “That was just the movie version,” I said. He gave me a bottle of wine from his vineyard.
After Julian 1964, Washington, D.C. 1967, Myra Breckinridge 1968, and on to now, I was once again a novelist-essayist-pamphleteer.
Washington, D.C. was the next to last novel, chronologically, in what publishers like to call my “American Chronicles,” carefully avoiding my own title for the series, Narratives of Empire. I had been taken to task by Time magazine in a review of my first book of essays, Rocking the Boat. In order to show what a bad person I was, Time wrote that I had dared to refer to our minatory global presence as “an empire” which of course it could not be as we were, in the Luce publications, Christian goodness incarnate. It seems I had, once again, said the unsayable too soon. I was subversive.
But not entirely alone: today the only subversive programming on American television is C-SPAN. One would like to say it is because they try to take books seriously. But it is not book chat where C-SPAN is at its best; rather, for those of us fascinated by politics, congressional hearings as shown by C-SPAN in exquisitely boring detail are to me the only exciting and useful American television on offer. To watch senators and representatives fairly up close in Congress assembled affords us the only living look we will ever have of a government that is more and more secretive and remote not to mention repressive. Only the slowest among us—and I am one—are able to process yards of absolute boredom and feel revivified. Of course I was brought up in the District of Columbia when the Capitol was an almost lively place in my childhood. Also, D.C. was the domestic source of most secondhand news, as filtered through the print media. Now, with C-SPAN, we observe Senator Robert Byrd in eruption when faced with yet another usurpation of our liberties by an executive branch entirely geared for perpetual war and kept in office by one corrupted election after another bought and paid for by such masters of in-your-face corruption as Representative DeLay, who once dared We the People to try and bring him to justice, which he thought we could not do since he and his fellow operatives had control of the election machinery electronic as well as humanoid. Finally someone at C-SPAN had the bright idea of covering, from time to time, the British House of Commons at question time when the prime minister and his opponents are forced to answer questions of high policy, often impaling themselves on their own quibbling, though seldom on lies. This is democracy in action, something we have never actually experienced and may now never know.
Years ago the critic Dwight Macdonald noted that any letter to the Times of London (and Brits are addicted to substantive letter-writing) is sure to be better written than any editorial in The New York Times. At first hand, I can also attest that our own congressional voices fifty years ago were light-years superior to those today or to the halting subliterate style of our governing junta. Also, not only were the three recent British party heads (Blair, Howard, and Kennedy) more knowledgeable than their American counterparts, they were also quite able to deal with a live BBC audience whose average age seemed thirty or so while the twenty-somethings on hand were formidable, too. Blair got it not only from his rivals for the premiership but from a young man who wanted some action by government against bullying in schools. This is a real subject that Americans are taught to think of as character building for serial killers and inspirational for heavily armed children eager to thin their own ranks.
A young woman wondered why, under national health (utopian compared to our insurance/pharmaceutical anti-health services), it took forty-eight hours for a G.P. to grant her an appointment. Blair’s unfamiliarity with this flaw in the health system got him booed by others with the same complaint. To compare their audience of informed average citizens—quaintly called subjects, thanks to the ubiquitous presence of the phantom crown—was jarring to anyone foolish enough to believe that the U.S. is at all democratic in anything except the furious imprisoning of the innocent, the joyous electing of the guilty.
TWENTY-FOUR
It is sometimes harder to get out of local politics than into it. Some time after the 1960 election I was visited at Edgewater by Mike Prendergast who had succeeded Carmine di Sapio as head of New York City’s Tammany Hall. Would I be the Democrat candidate for Senate? Since I was convinced that no Democrat could defeat Jack Javits, the Republican who usually voted like a Democrat, I said, no, thanks. But then Howard and I discussed the possibility of living in Rome, a city I’d fallen in love with as a schoolboy in 1939 and, again, in the fifties when I returned to write the script for Ben-Hur. Although Howard had many friends at nearby Bard College, he’d never really taken to the area, which was changing from agrarian to suburban thanks to IBM’s plants in Poughkeepsie and Kingston. Our friend Alice Bouverie, one of the reasons that I’d bought Edgewater in 1950, was dead and Eleanor Roosevelt was dying. The last time I saw her she said, almost cheerfully, “There has always been something wrong with my blood; and they hope to do something about it at last.” I wrote her a note, wondering if I should make the Senate race. She wrote me a few lines; despite shaky handwriting, she was as practical as always. She was also not in the habit of advising others about their business. “People are what they are,” she liked to say. She may have suspected that I was ready to follow Apollo’s advice to Rilke and change my life which meant going to Rome and finishing Julian in the stacks of the American Academy’s classical library on Janiculum Hill. During this time, Eleanor died of tuberculosis of the blood. I don’t think she was ever fully aware, as a widow, how powerful she was, always ready to engage in dialogue except when Stalin, suspecting the president was murdered, insisted she have an autopsy performed. “Marshal Stalin doesn’t know we are not like that,” an ironic response in the light of later events. When Khrushchev came to the UN, she invited him to Hyde Park to view FDR’s grave and talk politics. Khrushchev rushed from New York City to Hyde Park, saw the grave and rushed back. She was disappointed; also stoic. “Mr. Khrushchev,” she told me, “is interested only in power and I have none.” But of course she did, which he did not grasp.
I left New York on the Italian liner Leonardo da Vinci for what was to be a “celebrity cruise.” A number of so-called celebrities would sail for free (to the annoyance, no doubt, of the paying customers). Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward saw me off. I was booked as far as the Piraeus where Howard would join me and we’d then move on to Rome and an apartment in the Via Giulia rented sight unseen. Howard had just recovered from an operation at Manhattan’s Memorial hospital where a great lump on his thyroid had been removed. It was benign but in the anxious time it took to get him booked into Memorial I developed a duodenal ulcer.
Once the Leonardo was under way, feeling cut off from all the world, I drank a glass of milk for my ulcer and then went into the dining room to find Paul and Joanne seated at the captain’s table. They had only pretended to see me off on the cruise when, actually, they too were fellow passengers on what we ungratefully dubbed the ship of fools. On the cruise Paul proved to be our star of stars. Women sometimes behaved oddly when they saw him. Once when we were walking down Madison Avenue, a large young woman came toward us from the opposite direction: quickly, he tucked his chin into his collar to hide those arctic blue eyes. He also incre
ased his pace. “Keep moving,” he whispered as we passed her. Then there was a crash behind us. “Don’t look around,” he said, looking around; then he broke into a run. “What happened?” I asked. “She’s fainted,” he said and leapt into a taxicab.
TWENTY-FIVE
Although I have never enjoyed large parties, when Howard arrived in Rome we went to quite a few, largely to see the interiors of a number of palaces. Rudi and Consuelo Crespi were at the center of the city’s social life which was like Rome itself—a bit on the sleepy side but the settings were splendid. Consuelo Crespi was a beautiful American with that very American urge to bring different sorts of people together. This works just about everywhere but not in Rome during the sixties. Everyone she asked to their flat in Palazzo Taverna gladly came but the various groups stayed together like floral arrangements, each rooted to its own Aubusson rug. One group would consist of the so-called black nobles, created by the Popes. Then the whites, ennobled by the kings. Literary figures like Moravia and Bassani stood apart in the corners, while movie people swarmed. A few years later I arrived at a Roman reception to find the current prime minister holding court. The hostess apologized: “They aren’t making films at Cinecittà anymore so now all we get to see on television are politicians so everyone is starting to invite them. Odd, isn’t it?” Although Consuelo and Rudi were most diplomatic there was no way that members of one group were going to commingle with members of another. By and large, the intellectuals who had a lot to say spoke no English while the aristos, thanks to childhood nannys, spoke perfect English but had little to say. So, one ended up learning a great deal about how to heat a five-hundred-room palace and nothing at all about The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. The only time I saw the Romans close ranks was against the Prince and Princess of Monaco. The Romans executed a sort of graceful military maneuver, leaving Rainier and Grace Kelly alone at the center of the room, radiating serenity. Since Grace and I had been under contract to MGM at the same time, I paid my respects. She was unchanged. We always talked about her uncle the playwright George Kelly whom we both admired; unfortunately, he was as right wing as Grace who, invariably, with flushed cheeks, would explain how FDR and the New Deal had stopped him from writing plays. I would slip quietly away. Across the room Howard was discussing the Oceanographic Museum at Monte Carlo, a subject dear to Prince Rainier who was interested in saving the Mediterranean over, to hear him tell it, the dead bodies of every Italian politician.