Gore Vidal (104 page)

With Little, Brown there was another issue: whether or not
Myra
should fulfill the “third book” clause of their 1962 contract. “
I'm trying to make up
my mind whether or not we should include
Myra Breckinridge
in the old contract (the third book I'd always planned to be essays),” he wrote to Bradford in the middle of July, as he sent off the manuscript to New York. Actually, Little, Brown had no problem with
Myra's
being counted as the third book or as part of a new contract that would include
Myra
and future novels. Vidal, in fact, had multiple agendas, and his major target was William Morris, not Little, Brown. “It may well be,” he told Bradford, “that if there is a large advance from paperback a separate contract should be drawn since I don't look forward to my heirs getting 15 Gs per annum for the rest of the century,” the amount that Vidal and Little, Brown had agreed
in the existing contract that Vidal would take each year under a tax provision allowing royalties to accrue and tax to be paid only on withdrawal of the funds. “Anyway, do give me figures so that I can brood.” His Little, Brown account contained over $100,000, royalties from
Julian
and especially
Washington, D.C
. It was reasonable to assume that the profits from
Myra
would be substantial. Little, Brown itself was uneasy about holding large amounts of his for more than a brief time. What he really had in mind was cutting William Morris out from any share in the profits from
Myra
. Having become a William Morris client for his television work through Harold Franklin, he had drifted into becoming a literary client as well. In Gore's judgment the agency did little to nothing for its percentage of his royalties, and he increasingly disliked Helen Strauss, who constantly publicized the wonderful things she had done for him and at the same time paid no attention to his backlist, as if that were beneath her interest. Actually, the dislike was mutual, as Owen Laster, a young agent who had finally gotten his wish to move from William Morris's television to its literary department, noticed and as Strauss later confirmed in her memoir. “Helen was ugly but she had presence,” Laster recalled. “She had a classy elegance to her and a touch of the tough lady. When she left William Morris, she was sixty-three years old and had been here for twenty-four years. She started the literary department. She was a powerful agent,” among her clients James Michener and Robert Penn Warren. “She always wore labels. If she had a fur coat, it was from a fancy place. Gore didn't really respect her very much…. When he delivered
Myra
to Helen Strauss, she said to me, ‘This is his pornographic book.'” His anger at Strauss never subsided. “She couldn't read a book,” he remarked years later. “She never read a manuscript. I only took her on out of pity because of Harold Franklin, and, my God, never do anything out of pity on this earth. Every time that I have been seriously damaged professionally and sometimes personally, it's been because I was sorry for somebody. And now here I am being held up by what is essentially a non-agent. Then I read her memoir in which she dismisses me. I sold out to fame, she claimed, as if she knew anything about what I ever wrote. She had no idea.”

To his delight, in 1967 Strauss was lured to Hollywood by a high-paying offer and California sunshine. Vidal's agency contract with William Morris, scheduled to expire on August 15, was up for renewal. This seemed the perfect opportunity for him to leave. Sue Mengers, on the rise at Creative
Management Associates, was eager to have her friend as a movie and television client. That would take care of that aspect of his work, though he insisted, despite her pressure, that Alain Bernheim still negotiate his European movie deals. For the time being he would handle his literary rights himself, except in Britain, which Graham Watson at Curtis Brown very capably arranged. He did not brood long and soon notified William Morris that he would not sign a renewal. He then told both Little, Brown and the agency that
Myra
would not be the third book in his 1962 contract. That would be a volume of essays. He requested that Little, Brown draw up a separate contract for
Myra
. Consequently, he maintained, the agency would not be entitled to any commission from its sales. William Morris disagreed. So too did Little, Brown, though it had no material interest in the change. Its priority was to keep Vidal on its list. If indeed Vidal had all along intended the third be a volume of essays, his intention was contradicted by the words of the contract, which stated it was to be “a novel on a subject to be mutually agreed upon.” Perhaps his anger blinded him to the contract's language. More likely he chose to base his campaign to cut out William Morris on a purposeful misreading that would force the agency either to sue him or to compromise. An actual suit was unlikely. He could force the “novel” to be a novel other than
Myra
, but he could not offer a book of essays rather than a novel. Thornhill and Bradford got out of the line of fire. Gore agreed in writing that if the dispute went to court, he would assume full responsibility should the publisher be cited as co-defendant. In New York he met with Nat Lefkowitz, William Morris's president, a tough defender of his agency's rights. Lefkowitz argued that
Myra
was the “novel” the contract referred to, and consequently the agency had all rights of literary representation. In addition, Lefkowitz maintained that William Morris, not CMA, had the right to negotiate the movie deal, which meant an additional percentage. At first neither party would budge. Vidal proposed that the third novel “to be mutually agreed upon” be a reprint of the now-out-of-print
Williwaw
. That seemed ludicrous to everyone except him. Finally, after some months, a compromise was effected. Vidal agreed to give the agency its percentage of the royalties on the sales of
Myra
and its subsidiary interest in the movie deal, in effect acknowledging that it was the third book of the 1962 contract. William Morris agreed to relinquish its claim to represent Vidal in the sale of the movie rights, hardly a significant concession, since the negotiation did not begin until after the expiration of
his agency contract. Little, Brown substituted the volume of essays for the third novel and drew up a new, separate contract for
Myra
, though this made no material difference to either Little, Brown or Vidal. In February 1968 Little, Brown published
Myra Breckinridge
. Within weeks it was a nationwide bestseller.

While
Myra
soared, Gore's hope that he would have a new Broadway success plummeted. Soon after finishing
Myra
in midsummer 1967 he channeled his restlessness into a new play,
Weekend
, which opened for tryouts in New Haven in February, in Washington for two weeks at the National Theater on February 18, and then premiered at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York in mid-March.
The Best Man
team of Roger Stevens and Joe Anthony produced and directed. John Forsythe played the leading role. The title was as innocuously misleading as that of the still-unproduced
Drawing Room Comedy
. Like
The Best Man
, it was a satiric attack on political morality, on ambition and prejudice, this time a dramatization of the Washington world of the mid-1960s, the realistic, sometimes harsh topical allusions to well-known figures, especially Lyndon Johnson, ummistakable. Washington reviewers and audiences responded enthusiastically, at least partly because of the notorious “inside the Beltway” syndrome. Here was a play about their favorite profession and their own recognizable world. At the Washington premiere one of Lyndon Johnson's daughters, who with her husband had come as the guest of
Washington Post
theater critic Richard Coe, responded to a harsh reference to her father by ostentatiously walking out of the theater. When the reviewer gave the play a mixed to poor review, Gore angrily drew attention to the fact that he had expressed his prejudice against the play even before seeing it by bringing Johnson's daughter with him as his guest. “At least begin by saying I came to the theater with Lynda Bird Johnson, who hated the play because it made fun of her father. She was raging as she went up the aisle. I was standing in the back and heard it all.” The play's mode was realistic-ironic, the structure conventional, none of the characters especially riveting, the clash of ideas and prejudices effectively projected and recognizably part of the revolution in sex, race, and politics that by 1968 had become the visible wounds of a country in turmoil. The Vietnam War inflected national life. Bobby Kennedy and Johnson nervously confronted one another, one soon to be dead, the other to relinquish office, though the year's tragic events were still to come. Hardly influenced by
professional newspaper critics, the Washington audience was enthralled by
Weekend
. The play was a capital event in a city in which there were few such cultural performances. Notable Washington figures rushed to see it. Nini and Gore hosted a huge celebratory party, and Nini soon had a crush on the handsome leading man. In New York and Washington, then in Canada and on the West Coast, Gore combined appearances for
Myra
with publicity for
Weekend
, at least to the extent that two such simultaneous achievements made the drum rolls even more triumphal. There seemed good reason to expect that
Weekend
would have a long Broadway run. When the play opened in New York, the critics were devastatingly hostile, some for aesthetic, some for political reasons, perhaps even at some level uninterested in the ostensible subject. It was attacked for its conventional form. Much of the irony was missed. After twenty-two performances,
Weekend
closed.

“
My entire life
is now devoted to appearing on television: a pleasant alternative to real life,” Gore quipped to friends in March 1968 as he began to bring to a close his intensive schedule of appearances for
Myra
. When he returned to Rome in April, he expected to spend a quiet spring and summer in Italy. Underexercised and overfed, he resumed his daily exercise regimen at the gym. He even began “to look muscle-bound,” he wrote to his father, “but one feels better—another week of the US and television and I could have reached the end.” Suddenly a new television opportunity became available, something more intensive than anything he had done before. ABC Television News offered him the opportunity to appear on a fifteen-minute prime-time slot each night at the national party conventions in August, seven or eight evenings in all. He would represent the liberal left. William F. Buckley would represent the conservative right. The veteran television newscaster Howard K. Smith would moderate. Unlike its rival networks, ABC had decided not to televise the conventions' proceedings in full. Instead each night the network would provide an edited videotape selection of the days' events, live coverage of the most important nighttime activities, and adversarial commentary by two well-known political entertainers who were already notorious adversaries. ABC hoped for a victory in the ratings war; Buckley and Vidal each hoped triumphantly to represent their views and themselves. Neither ABC nor the participants could know that their
own face-off would be a small-scale version of larger, more dramatic, and more image-powerful battles in the Democratic convention hall and in the Chicago streets.

When Gore accepted ABC's invitation, he was unaware that Buckley had been approached as early as spring 1967. Buckley was the only spokesperson for the right who was well known, photogenic, and entertaining; the network needed him in place. In the six years since his ascension to television regularity, he had become a distinctive performer whose turns and tics created photo-compelling high TV political drama, marked by the success of his talk program,
Firing Line
, on which he appeared with guests chosen for the likelihood that the interaction would produce semi-intellectual entertainment.
Firing Line
existed to provide a forum for Buckley and his views. It instantly became a rallying focus for conservative opinion. Unlike Vidal, Buckley had committed himself to television as a propaganda weapon in the political-cultural wars. His career had been narrowly focused, devoted to argumentative political discourse, including running for mayor of New York in 1965 on a platform guaranteed to make his views well known but to minimize his votes. His “self-appointed job, since graduating from college,” he later said, had “been to defend publicly my position on political matters.”
Firing Line
was an extension of the
National Review
, except that to attract a national audience it was necessary to structure the presentation as a clash between confrontational views. Supremely self-confident, Buckley generally gave the liberal devil his due. Formidable representatives of other viewpoints regularly appeared on the program. Vidal himself, though, had not been invited, partly because he had made it clear in public comments that he would not accept an invitation, mostly because he was the one person Buckley found so distasteful that he preferred to avoid the emotional provocation Vidal's presence aroused. In Buckley's view, as Louis Auchincloss surmised, Vidal
was
the devil, “Not the devil's emissary but the devil himself.” Auchincloss had never seen Buckley lose his composure, ever. “Cool, bland, he rolls his blue eyes upward gracefully and calmly and dismissively in the face of provocation and attack. Always. Except with Gore.” With Buckley committed, ABC asked him if there were anyone from the left whom he preferred not to be paired with. Vidal, he responded, suggesting a half dozen or so other names, among them Norman Mailer, Arthur Schlesinger, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Sensing the likelihood of television drama, ABC of course selected Vidal, though it claimed to have
eliminated alternatives on the basis of informal soundings, even research. When informed that Vidal had been selected, Buckley neither strongly objected nor withdrew. He apparently preferred to appear on national convention television with Vidal than for Vidal to appear with someone other than Buckley.