by Gore Vidal
THIRTY-EIGHT
On October 3, 1975, I turned fifty, an event that I wanted to keep secret. I cannot imagine anyone willingly celebrating time’s ruthless one-way passage. But that year friends decided to do something and Kathleen Tynan, second wife of the critic Kenneth Tynan, and my old friend Diana Phipps decided to give a party in London where over the years I had come to know more people than anywhere else. A club with a good cook was the site. Howard and I flew to London and stayed not as always before at the Connaught but at the Ritz. I remember I had a pile of letters to answer and so the morning of the third I was up early answering them in longhand. Then Howard and I took the lift down to the lobby. It was a small lift lined with mirrors. Halfway down it stopped to admit another passenger, a woman in a white trench coat. Our eyes met in mute shock: it was Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Relations between us had broken off after my row with Bobby in 1961 and time certainly had not improved my mood. First, the IRS went after my father with a long pointless audit. Then I heard from Mississippi that someone from Bobby’s Justice Department had been snooping around trying to dig up scandal about Senator Gore while several court journalists were always available to think up items about me. I certainly never blamed Jackie for taking his side in a complicated unbecoming row but her contribution was that we had not known each other until a chance encounter at a horse show, the last place I would ever be found unless it was after dinner at the White House when Jackie dragged Jack and me there. With that in mind, to Howard’s horror, I turned my back on her to discover in the mirror a smudge of ink on my brow. As I used a handkerchief to remove the ink the lift door opened and she sighed in her best Marilyn Monroe voice, “Bye-bye” and vanished into Piccadilly.
At the beach house of Kenneth and Kathleen Tynan and several of their children: Kathleen is at left, then director Tony Richardson, Princess Margaret, me, and Jack Nicholson. Ken was writing a biography of Laurence Olivier who, when he heard how much Ken was being paid for the book, ceased to cooperate and wrote his own tedious book. Ken, who was dying of emphysema, changed his publisher’s contract to a sort of personal memoir; he died before he completed it. Then Kathleen, also dying of cancer, did finish the book. Each summer for several years she would come to La Rondinaia and faithfully do her exercises in the pool. Olivier, in explanation of his bad behavior, told me: “I owe Ken Tynan many things but not my life.” My rejoinder was a muttered expletive. After all, it was Ken not Olivier who was most responsible for England’s National Theatre.
THIRTY-NINE
Recently a new mystery was revealed. There is some TV footage of Jack, Jackie, and me making our entrance at a Washington horse show where I end up sitting to Jack’s left; then there is Jackie to my left and an unknown lady behind us. Just visible, back of us, was the memorable hat of Alice Roosevelt Longworth who had been at dinner in what had once been her bedroom. A lady has currently written a book about life at the Kennedy court. I showed her the TV footage. She had questioned my story of the placement at the horse show. Apparently she had “proof” that Alice sat beside the president. I agreed that she should have but she didn’t. The journalist then sent me an archival photograph of the event in which I have been neatly cropped out and replaced by Alice and her hat. Nowadays when we are more used to creative history and fictional presences this seems par for that particular course. But in Palimpsest there is a picture of Jack talking into my right ear at the horse show. This could not have happened unless I were sitting on poor Alice’s lap, a most indecorous thing for me to have done. Later at my birthday party Princess Margaret provided me with extra dialogue in response to “Bye-bye.”
Much of half a century of my English life was present at the birthday party. From the 1940s the novelist John Bowen. From the present day, Evangeline Bruce, wife to our ambassador, and then an ambassadress from long ago, Diana Cooper who spent her honeymoon with Duff Cooper at Villa Cimbrone back of our Ravello house. I have no list of who else was there. Diana Phipps who makes collages*1 out of pictures cut from newspapers and magazines did a fine memorial of the occasion including friends and foes as well as those present and absent. Clive James, a friend of Diana’s, wrote an amiable poem to celebrate the occasion. Diana Cooper took it away to study at home. When I wrote her a polite note asking for it back she sent it to me along with my note requesting it, an odd bit of one-upmanship. As a child she had known and admired George Meredith, a friend of her mother. When he died she dressed herself in her mother’s mourning clothes complete with thick veil, and attended Meredith’s funeral where she was noticed by all as the mystery lady who sobbed so loudly throughout the service, adding unexpected romance to Meredith’s troubled life.
Jackie had a good—even honest—response to publishers eager for her to write “the story of your life which has been so fascinating to so many people.” “I know it has,” she would say. “At least I know people say so but how can I write about it if I’ve forgotten it all?” But she had not forgotten that after the first bullet was fired at Dallas, Jack had said, “I’ve been hit.” Since he wore a corset for his bad back all she needed to have done was pull him onto the car floor but she reacted too slowly in the shock of the moment. She was also bemused by the piece of his skull which she wanted to put back in place. The rest seems to have been confusion. There was a small group of friends waiting at the airport in Washington. Angie Duke, chief of protocol, reported that her first words to him were, “Get me the plans for the funeral of Abraham Lincoln.” Years later a friend asked her what she considered her greatest achievement. The answer was prompt: “That after all that I had gone through I did not go mad.”
FORTY
During the war years Princess Margaret was awed to meet an American giantess, Eleanor Roosevelt. At six foot she was, literally, to the small Hanoverian, a giantess. Eleanor was a permanent ambassador for the president, making her reports, giving advice that was not always welcome to that consummate games player. Princess Margaret (PM for short) had an eye for detail and an ear, too, if, for nothing else, absurdity. The great family figure of her childhood was Uncle David, briefly King Edward VIII, thereafter, lengthily, aka Duke of Windsor. Neither he nor “the woman he loved” was welcome in England. Although PM and her sister, Queen Elizabeth II, were curious to meet this crown-crossed couple their mother saw to it that no such occasion would arise. “It’s all a woman’s show now,” said the Duchess of Windsor to me, bitter that her husband had been given no proper work to do other than the governorship of some Caribbean islands. Finally Uncle David died and his remains were brought back to be interred: only then did the Queen Mother relent and allow the Duchess to attend the funeral. While the family was duly assembled, PM reports that “Lilibet and I were so fascinated to see and hear this legendary figure in the flesh that we stationed ourselves at either end of the sofa where, side by side, Mummy and the Duchess sat, at peace at last, or so it seemed. I am rather good at eavesdropping, my sister not. So I heard more of what was said. The Duchess was a well-preserved old lady from the 1930s. The first thing that she said to Mummy was, ‘Do you have an upstairs or a downstairs kitchen?’ Mummy looked a bit alarmed. Not only does she not know where the food comes from, she only knows that it is on the table three times a day. Luckily, the Duchess was quite prepared to fill any gaps in the conversation: ‘We tried both and I prefer the upstairs as there is so much less moving about. Naturally, it depends upon how many guests you are entertaining.’ At this point they were interrupted.” The family was to assemble for the funeral service. The Duchess remained behind and watched from a window. After the service, the Queen Mother returned to the sofa, radiating charm and condolences to the family’s ancient enemy. PM again took up her place at the listening post only to hear the Duchess ask, yet again: “Do you have an upstairs or a downstairs kitchen?” Not long after when PM was in New York she got orders from the palace to pay a call on the Duchess. She was greeted at the door by several yapping dogs and Wallis Windsor. As PM dutifully patted the dogs she said
, “Now I know the reason why you come so seldom to England.” “Well,” said Wallis, “they are one of the reasons.”
PM spoke of the royal family with expectable reverence not unmixed with humor and the occasional surrealist note: “The Queen is uncommonly talented in ways that you might not suspect,” she proclaimed. Suspecting nothing, I asked, “In what way?” “Well, she can put on a very heavy tiara while hurrying down a flight of stairs with no mirror.”
One bright hot summer PM organized a house party at the Royal Lodge near Windsor. “You can easily recognize it. It is very pink.” And so it was, set among tall trees. The lodge had been built by the Prince Regent whose portrait by Lawrence scowled peevishly at us in the terrace sitting room. I was assigned to what I think was called the blue bedroom. There were three or four other houseguests and PM had got King George’s cook out of retirement for the weekend. The Queen Mother who often lived at the lodge had retreated from the unusual heat to Scotland. We swam in an ancient pool full of drowning bees.
On the seventy-fifth birthday of Jack Heinz his wife, Drue, gave a grand evening party at Ascot where they had rented a house. There was a tent with an orchestra for dancing. Another tent for those invited to dinner. A Ferris wheel. A pond. Swans.
I should note that no one is supposed to attend an event after the Queen’s arrival but PM and I, at the lodge, lingered over gin and tonics. On the lawn of the Heinzes’ house the Queen frowned at her sister, who said within my hearing, “How’s it going?” The Queen replied: “We have shaken many hands,” which meant many Americans were on hand; the sovereign is not supposed to be touched by subjects: males incline their heads as in a bow, females curtsey. PM presented me, I did the nod. The Queen said: “You are staying at the lodge. Which room?” I said I thought it was called the blue bedroom. Suddenly the Queen’s girlish voice was replaced by the voice of Lady Bracknell: “My room!” she boomed. Then she fled across the lawn.
At dinner I sat next to PM. Across from her was Senator John Heinz, Jack’s son, soon to be killed in a plane crash. “Isn’t he beautiful,” PM muttered to me. I complimented her on her taste. As dinner ended, after-dinner guests poked their heads through the tent flaps: the first head belonged to Rex Harrison. When, finally, the Queen rose I ended up on the lawn where Rex, querulous as always, said, “Who was that awful-looking man sitting next to the Queen?” I said he was in charge of the Heinz interests in Ireland and so he was the largest single employer in an island that was not to become prosperous until the premiership of Charlie Haughey.
After the dancing was done we returned to the lodge where PM gave us a reading from a book of mine called Duluth. Some of the descriptions were very graphic but the several young men who had come back to the lodge with the house party were, happily, clueless. As PM shut the book, she said, “I don’t know what there is in me that is so low and base, that I love this book.” I can answer that now that years and death have separated us: she was far too intelligent for her station in life. She often had a bad press, the usual fate of wits in a literal society. “Also,” she said, “it was inevitable: when there are two sisters and one is the Queen who must be the source of honor and all that is good while the other must be the focus of the most creative malice, the evil sister.” She was stoic; nothing to be done but one can note her kindness to friends, to those employees whose pensions she paid out of fairly meager resources, not to mention her steadfast loyalty to a system that never in the end did as much for her as she sacrificed for it.
FORTY-ONE
Someone has dug up some irritable letters of mine to various publications. Apparently in the British New Statesman (August 28, 1976) I took exception to A. J. P. Taylor’s obituary of my old friend Tom Driberg. Tom had been chairman of the Labour Party as well as member of Parliament for years. He was the original William Hickey, a sort of highbrow columnist (yes, there was once such a thing and in a Beaverbrook newspaper, too). He was a dedicated Christian as well as Marxist and a powerful debater particularly on television. That he is not easily summed up is a tribute to his originality. He enjoyed writing about the higher Bohemia and championed the Sitwells when it was not fashionable; then he continued to do so, most bravely, when it was. A formidable gossip, his world of glamorous ladies overlapped with Waugh’s to the delight of neither. He was on his way to the airport to go to Ravello when he died in a taxicab. He had been at work on his memoirs written in a perfect hand on special cards. Compton Mackenzie had written a roman à clef about him called Thin Ice which just about says it all. When the Labour Party was holding its conference in Scotland, I think it was toward the end of the war, Tom was arrested while having carnal knowledge of a Norwegian sailor. Happily for Tom the arresting officer was a Labour voter and, best of all, a fan of Tom’s Hickey column. Tom applied the extreme unction of his hortatory style to the policeman about how this brave blameless lad, who had been fighting with the Allies against Hitler, knew no English; had just happened to be in port and should be allowed to return to his ship. The policeman told the brave lad to return to the war. The lad fled. As Tom told me the story, with some satisfaction, he noted that without the sailor’s presence there was no case against him. He then proceeded to charm the policeman. They discussed politics. Then over the years Tom became a friend of both the policeman and his wife who sent Tom the policeman’s library when he died.
The historian A. J. P. Taylor’s obituary of Tom in the New Statesman, a paper I wrote for in those days, inspired me to respond to his condescension and inaccuracies. Particularly this observation: “Tom was also homosexual and flagrant and unashamed.” This was a bit much even by the lower-middle-class insular standards of that day. I wrote that “I was not aware that homosexuality was something to be ashamed of. Certainly Taylor would not write of Lloyd George that he was heterosexual, flagrant and unashamed. I daresay Taylor meant compulsive or promiscuous; even so, shame hardly enters in.” Then Taylor warms to his subject: “Tom was not at all a clever man or an intellectual. He did not understand either Marx or Keynes.” This is a startling non sequitur. First, Tom knew as much Marx and Keynes as was good for him; second, a close knowledge of outdated economic theory is not a decisive factor in determining whether or not a man is an intellectual. Tom’s knowledge of poetry was vast; his mind was literary; it was also divergent not convergent. He was often an inspired theologian; he had a formidable gift for logic (without which it is hardly possible to be an intellectual), his ear for the false note in poetry or reasoning was near-perfect. As for not being “clever”…Well, I have no idea what Taylor means by cleverness. Admittedly, Tom never taught school.
On July 7, 1977, I wrote to The New York Times:
In what looks to be a review of my new collection of essays [Matters of Fact and of Fiction], your dispenser of book-chat tells us that my attack on nearly two hundred years of American imperialism as symbolized by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (where my father was an instructor when I was born) is the result of an “unresolved hostility toward his father, further evidence of which, some would argue, is Mr. Vidal’s cheerfully admitted homosexuality.”
This is quintessential New York Times reporting. First, it is ill-written, hence ill-edited. Second, it is inaccurate. Third, it is unintelligent in the vulgar Freudian way. There is no evidence of an “unresolved hostility” toward my father in the pages under review or elsewhere in my work. Quite the contrary. I quote from Two Sisters, a Novel in the form of a Memoir: “my father was the only man I ever entirely liked….” Nowhere in my writing have I “admitted”(“cheerfully” or dolefully) to homosexuality, or to heterosexuality. Even the dullest of mental therapists no longer accepts the proposition that cold-father-plus-clinging-mother-equals-fag-offspring.
These demurs to one side, I am grateful to your employee for so beautifully demonstrating in a single sentence so many of the reasons why The New York Times is a perennially bad newspaper and bound to champion the disreputable likes of Judith Miller [name added later, obviously
].
FORTY-TWO
I suspect that I have just celebrated my last Ferragosto in Italy. It is an amiable holiday in August celebrating the birth of our great emperor Augustus who gave the world the Pax Romana, a long period of peace and prosperity after a chaotic time of wars, civil and otherwise. I cannot imagine any of our recent presidents being remembered for so long much less praised generation after generation. But last night was his night and we watched the fireworks as reflected in the bay of Salerno. All the while preparing the books to be moved back to the U.S., a melancholy business at best. For some reason I keep thinking of Nureyev who came to say good-bye some ten years ago. He had been putting in order his house on an island opposite Positano up the coast from us. “From bedroom I can see, on the right, sun come up and, on the left, sun go down. I die there. Is perfect.” He had AIDS. But at regular intervals a doctor from Paris would arrive and change his blood. When this happened, he would be full of energy for a few weeks. On the island, next to his house, was a studio built by a previous occupant, Massine the dancer-choreographer. Revived by new blood Rudi would switch on a gramophone in the studio and dance. The upper part of his body had begun to dwindle away but the legs were unchanged. He sweated like a horse. Finally, Rudi came to lunch with us. As usual, he threw off all his clothes and plunged into the pool. “Must go back to America, doctor says.” After lunch and a great deal of white wine he lay down on the sofa in my study. I switched on the television: it was during a time of dramatic transition in Moscow. We watched as the statue of a chief of the KGB was pulled down. Only the bronze boots remained vertical. “They make good quality boots back then,” Rudi observed; and slept. He expressed few political opinions on Russian matters. He hated it when the press depicted him as a defector from Communism. “I get out only to dance more. Is frozen there, the great dance companies. So I left.”