Gore Vidal (107 page)

Within the month Vidal had drafted an essay in rebuttal. If Buckley felt free to attack his sexual life—which, though Buckley continued to make homophobic comments in private, had not been a part of their initial public discussions—Vidal would feel free to attack Buckley in similar ways, the first of which Buckley's essay gave him the opportunity to do. Buckley had begun the essay with a lengthy excursus on an accusation made by a journalist that Buckley frequently used “faggot logic,” whatever that was. The journalist apparently meant that he had been bitchy in an ad hominem way. At some length Buckley referred to numbers of such references to him in the press and asked why it was acceptable to refer to his “faggot logic” and not acceptable for him to call Gore Vidal “a queer.” Vidal had an opening he could not resist, part of which he used to clarify what he thought the obvious protocols in the use of prejudice-laden references and part of which to discuss the possibility that, in regard to Buckley's sexuality, where there was smoke there might be fire. Perhaps there was some reason he struck so many people as queenlike. Since Buckley had insisted he have the
right to discuss Vidal's sexuality in his essay, why should Vidal not have the right to discuss Buckley's? And Buckley himself inevitably had to bring back to public attention, by quoting the exchange, the phrase he had found so offensive. He could hardly exculpate himself without reference to what had triggered his explosion. Since Vidal's reference to Buckley as a “pro- or crypto-Nazi” was part of a political argument, that seemed to Vidal to justify his making one of the organizing principles of his rebuttal essay the history of anti-Semitism in the Buckley family. The Sharon incident would help elucidate Buckley's prejudices and some of his politics. With the help of researchers, Vidal obtained the evidence about the participation of Buckley's sisters in the church desecration. Though she requested that her name be kept out, Jayne Meadows provided some of the details. Since Buckley was claiming the moral high ground, it seemed appropriate to reveal that some of it was below sea level.

Esquire
's response to both essays was to try to protect itself against the possibility of either author's suing it for libel. Buckley's response was to attempt to force
Esquire
to force Vidal to eliminate the parts of his article that Buckley did not like. The issue was initially engaged on the level of fact. At
Esquire's
request, Buckley and Vidal were required to provide corroboration for claims of fact. Whatever they could corroborate, Hayes accepted as publishable. But much of the tension was about opinion, and there the lawyerlike phrase “fair in opinion” came in as the standard to be upheld. Inevitably, opinions about “fair in opinion” differed. Vidal made demands of Buckley's claims of fact. Buckley did the same of Vidal's. The adjudication process seemed to go on endlessly. Finally, after two months of attempting to serve as honest broker, Hayes was exhausted, almost ready to rue the day he had decided to proceed. Medina was regularly consulted. Buckley kept his lawyer busy. So too did Vidal keep his, William Fitelson, a successful entertainment lawyer who seemed from the start noticeably out of his usual waters. The antagonists received the customary cautionary lawyerly advice. Vidal removed certain provocations. Buckley removed some as well. More inclined to let Buckley have his say than Buckley to allow him his, Vidal mainly forced corroboration for claims of fact and defended his own, including getting additional evidence to support his account of the Sharon incident. With a low-threshold libel detector, including declaiming that he would sue if Vidal repeated what Buckley now regularly referred to as the libelous August claim that Buckley was a Nazi, Buckley pressured
Hayes and Vidal with threats. When Hayes pointed out that since Buckley himself had quoted it in his essay, Vidal could hardly be expected to respond without quoting it also, Buckley seemed to withdraw his objection. When Hayes argued that as long as Vidal had corroborative evidence for his claims of fact about the Sharon incident, it was not libelous for him to interpret the incident as anti-Semitic, he thought he had reason to think Buckley did not disagree or at least would not make his disagreement the basis of a libel suit. Vidal was not as convinced, aware that Buckley over the last decade had sued for libel in roughly analogous situations in which the suit seemed intended to stifle free speech, especially criticism of Buckley. In 1966 Buckley's lawyer, C. Dickerman Williams, a civil-liberties attorney who had defended numbers of freedom-of-speech cases, had successfully so defended Buckley in a libel suit brought by Linus C. Pauling, whom the
National Review
had described as a Communist fellow traveler. Williams was now carrying Buckley's repressive libel banner against Vidal's free-speech defense. In the Pauling case Williams had won dismissal on the grounds that Pauling was a public figure, one of Vidal's defenses against Buckley.

Gore now revised his article to meet what
Esquire
, prompted by Buckley and its own attorney, considered “true in fact and fair in comment.” Hayes felt confident that Buckley would recognize that
Esquire
had acted in good faith, that it had followed the agreed-upon procedures, and that unpleasant interpretations of accurate facts were constitutionally protected speech acts. Finally, at the end of April, unwilling to protract the vetting process indefinitely, already months behind schedule, Hayes called a stop to the cross-commentary. Buckley had stated unequivocally that he would sue
Esquire
and Vidal if
Esquire
published the last draft that he had seen. “
You understand, I hope
,” he told Hayes, “that I am driven to making this statement because I wish to prevent the publication of libels, rather than merely to punish the author of those libels.” Hayes then went through Vidal's article again, making changes he believed eliminated or at least substantially decreased Buckley's grounds for complaint. On April 28 Buckley responded to Hayes's request that he now allow both articles to be published, “Dear Harold, You ask, would I, as a favor to
Esquire
, permit
Esquire
to publish about me things that aren't so? Yes, I will—assuming that Vidal's piece is otherwise corrected, and that I am satisfied that he will not attempt to publish his libels elsewhere.” Hayes made further changes in response to Buckley's directions and to conform to
Esquire's
lawyers
“minimum
libel restrictions.”
At that point, as far as
Esquire
was concerned, it could now publish unless one or both authors withdrew his essay. Vidal detested Buckley's article. But he had no further objection to its being printed in the August issue. His own was slated for September. Buckley did not withdraw his essay. If he had,
Esquire
would not have published Vidal's. Apparently much of Buckley's strategy had been to pressure
Esquire
to publish his alone. Shortly after Hayes's decision to publish both, Buckley's lawyer informed Vidal that his client was suing Vidal for libel. The suit had already been initiated in United States District Court. The legal papers were in hand.

Hayes was stunned. Buckley's suit against Vidal seemed an unreasonable attempt to prevent his having his say in an essay that appeared to
Esquire
to meet reasonable standards of truth and fairness. Was this also a message to
Esquire
? Would
Esquire
also be sued if it printed Vidal's essay? Hayes had to begin to consider what had seemed to him inconceivable. Vidal also had threatened to sue
Esquire
if it published Buckley's article. But his intent was to condition the withdrawal of the threat on
Esquire's
publishing his as well, since Buckley was pressuring the magazine to publish only Buckley's. When Vidal's revision met
Esquire's
conditions, his threat to sue was moot. He said nothing more about it. Hayes had believed that Buckley's threat was also moot. In general, he had trusted in what he believed to be Buckley's sense of fairness, among other reasons because he genuinely liked and admired him. As a journalist-editor, Hayes had assumed that in the end Buckley shared his view that controversial articles that met his own profession's standards of interpretive fairness should not be prevented from being published by recourse to legal pressure. If both parties were to have their say, what better jury and judge than the court of public opinion? But a week before he learned that Buckley was suing Vidal, Hayes had had a preparatory jolt. The New York magazine world buzzed with gossipy tremors. On May 6 and 7 Buckley had sent telegrams to twenty magazine publishers: “LAST AUGUST I WAS DEFAMED ON NETWORK TELEVISION BY MR. GORE VIDAL. MR. VIDAL HAS NOT RETRACTED HIS LIBEL OR APOLOGIZED TO ME. ON THE CONTRARY, HE HAS SOUGHT TO GIVE RENEWED CURRENCY TO THAT LIBEL AND TO LAUNCH OTHERS, TO WHICH END HE SUBMITTED A MANUSCRIPT TO ESQUIRE MAGAZINE WHICH ESQUIRE DECLINED TO PUBLISH BECAUSE IT WAS DEFAMATORY AND UNTRUE. MR. VIDAL'S ACTIVITIES HAVE LEFT ME WITH NO OTHER RECOURSE THAN TO A LAWSUIT, AND ACCORDINGLY
I HAVE FILED SUIT AGAINST MR. VIDAL FOR FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS IN DAMAGE. I ADVISE YOU OF THESE PROCEEDINGS BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN INFORMED THAT MR. VIDAL IS BENT UPON CIRCULATING CHARGES ABOUT ME WHICH ARE ABSOLUTELY UNTRUE. I WRITE TO REGISTER MY WILLINGNESS TO COOPERATE WITH YOU IN ANY WAY … SO AS TO GUARD AGAINST YOUR JOURNAL'S INADVERTENTLY CIRCULATING MR. VIDAL'S DEFAMATORY MATERIAL.” In the telegram to
Playboy
he added, “I HAVE JUST BEEN INFORMED THAT IN THE JUNE PLAYBOY YOU PLAN TO PUBLISH STATEMENTS BY VIDAL WHICH I CAN PROVE TO BE DEFAMATORY. I REQUEST OPPORTUNITY TO PROVE TO YOU THAT SAID REMARKS ARE FALSE SO THAT YOU MAY ELIMINATE THEM FROM THE ISSUE.” A general interview with Vidal that appeared in the June
Playboy
, one of a series of interviews with celebrities that the magazine published regularly, made some of the same points about Buckley that were in his rebuttal article for
Esquire. Playboy
's editor-publisher, Hugh Hefner, was not intimidated by Buckley's telegram. “
Speaking as one publisher
to another, I must tell you that I do not regard Vidal's remarks as published in the June issue as actionable. They must be read in the context of the well publicized dispute between the two of you. Indeed a contemporary piece concerning either of you which did not in some measure reflect the views of the subject toward the other would have to be considered incomplete.” In fact,
Esquire
had not declined to publish Vidal's article. It had simply said that it could not publish it without revision. The same had been said of Buckley's. By the time of Buckley's twenty telegrams, Vidal's revision had been approved by
Esquire
's lawyer. But apparently, despite having given his conditional go-ahead to Hayes, Buckley still had not accepted that
Esquire
would publish it. When he incorrectly got it into his head that Vidal was trying to find an alternative publisher, he precipitously sent the telegrams, the result of which was to make twenty influential people curious about what it was he so desperately wanted to suppress.

Hayes soon learned, in fact, that Buckley still hoped that
Esquire
would publish his article but not Vidal's, or at least that
Esquire
was still susceptible to pressure from him. This worrisome scenario was dramatized in a semi-threatening letter in mid-June: “
I am sure there is
practically no chance at all that Fate will require me to sue
Esquire
, but I must remind myself that the last exchange I read between Williams and Medina had Williams contending that one version of Vidal's piece was libelous with
Medina disagreeing. And the further datum that I would not be shown V's piece as finally accepted, nor even advised as to whether a version has been accepted. Understand, I am quite certain that there will be a happy ending to all this….” On July 17 the August issue of
Esquire
, with Buckley's article, appeared on the newsstands. In early August, with Gore's essay about to appear in the September issue, or perhaps with an advance copy in hand, Buckley asked John Kenneth Galbraith's advice. Galbraith had read Buckley's essay, perhaps Vidal's. “Your
Esquire
piece, as always, is lively … and in spite of the incredible length, it is very interesting,” he wrote to Buckley. “But it lacks plausibility…. You are talking about a staged row between two highly experienced controversialists…. That was ABC's intention when they engaged you. And there is further and devastating weakness in your case when you concede that you first refused and then accepted Vidal. Obviously you accepted a risk of which you were aware…. As entertainment you perhaps could pursue this controversy. An an issue of justice you simply cannot. That holds especially for the courts…. Were you the literary cynosure of the SDS [Students for Democratic Society] my advice would not be different except as I might suppose your instinct for self-preservation to be less developed.” On August 18 the September
Esquire
, with Vidal's article, “A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley,” appeared on newsstands. That same day Buckley's lawyer filed suit in United States District Court against the magazine. It demanded $1 million in compensation for emotional and financial damage done to the plaintiff. The charges were essentially the same as those against Vidal. Vidal had willfully defamed the defendant by charging that he was a Nazi, a homosexual, a war lover, and an anti-Semite.
Esquire
had conspired with Vidal by encouraging him to write the article, guiding him in its construction, and providing a forum for its publication.