Gore Vidal (125 page)

Over the next few years Mickey Knox tried, unsuccessfully, to mediate a reconciliation. From Vidal's point of view there was nothing worth reconciling. They had never really been friends, though prior to 1971 they had been amiable colleagues. Gore had not been judgmental about Mailer's violence and drunkenness in the 1960s. But he had been appalled and furious at Mailer's two assaults on him, which he saw as not in the least existential or romantic, let alone heroic. In 1984 Mailer, in the role of conciliatory elder statesman, having taken on the presidency of PEN, the international writers' organization, invited Vidal to help him bury the hatchet. Would he not join Mailer and about fifteen other writers and participate in one of a series of literary evenings in the fall of 1985 to raise money for the convocation of a PEN World Congress? And whatever his decision about participating in the public event, he wanted Gore to know that the offer of a personal reconciliation still stood, though “
we won't have a full
roster without you.” Vidal, who feared he might find the hatchet buried in his back, could not be sure to what degree the offer of personal reconciliation was the necessary price Mailer felt he had to pay to get him to participate in the fund-raising event. “Our feud, whatever its roots for each of us, has become a luxury,” Mailer wrote to Vidal in November. “It's possible in years to come that we'll both have to be manning the same sinking boat at the same time.” Indeed, each independently was aware that the audience for serious literature was diminishing, the trend in the direction of decreasing sales for the literary novelists of their generation. Those who once were cultural icons had good reason to fear they were becoming peripheral. But “apart from that, I'd still like to make up,” Mailer wrote. “An element in me, absolutely immune to weather
and tides, runs independently fond of you.” The inflated language of the personal overture seemed histrionically self-aggrandizing. And Vidal was understandably suspicious of the sincerity of the claim of fondness; after all, in their two last personal encounters Mailer had attacked him physically. “If he had so much as an atom of authenticity in his nature,” Gore wrote to Paul Bowles, “one might respond to that; but all is performance and ambition, and so I shall reply amiably and with an insincerity quite equal to his: I boast, perhaps.” To Bowles, privately, he characterized Mailer as “the Great Halvah Merchant” who “is now president of PEN and ricocheting around the lit. world (don't ask me where
that
is) in a mad quest for the Nobel prize (God knows he's bad enough to get it) and lit. respectability and the world's acceptance that he is really numero uno…. Oh, the drama of it! Imagine caring that much, at 61. Earlier, yes. But now we are such stuff as dissertations are made on and our little careers are rounded with a boredom.” Mailer may have been acting sincerely in his role as peacemaker. There had been, though, too much unpleasantness between them for any reconciliation to be more than perfunctory, in this case pragmatic. Vidal agreed to participate in the fund-raising event.

In early 1985 the program took shape. Each of the eight evenings would be shared by two authors, each of whom, as a matter of preference, might take half the evening separately or join his colleague in a tandem performance. “
Do you have someone
you'd like to go on with?” Mailer asked Vidal in January 1985, giving him the privilege of first choice. The possibilities included the usual suspects, from Woody Allen to Tom Wolfe. With mischievous humor, Gore proposed that he and Mailer share an evening. He may have done so with the conviction that he would benefit from their juxtaposition as stage performers. “All right, fine, it'll be you and me on the date you've named,” Mailer responded. “I do think, however, we've got to address ourselves to an agenda. If we have nothing to do with one another and merely give our separate hours, then everyone's going to be prodigiously disappointed…. The evening will be a frightful anticlimax.” Mailer suggested that they might read from Shaw's
Don Juan in Hell
. He hoped that “the example of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer having fun together on the stage will suggest that anything and everything is possible in this overweight, corrupt world of ours.” Vidal proposed that on the stage together they each address the audience on whatever topic each wanted for approximately an hour and then respond to questions from a moderator.
The courtly, highly admired New York City journalist, Murray Kempton, whose columns were famous for their trenchant and iconoclastic realism and whom both writers respected, agreed to serve as moderator. As the time of the event approached, the New York literary and social rumor mill began to work up enthusiasm for what was soon being billed as a return grudge match between two sluggers who had fought it out before and who might, if the audience were lucky, once more treat everyone to a nasty performance. Would Mailer physically attack Vidal again? The betting odds were against that. Would there be at least a renewal of their war of words? Hopes were high. Subscriptions were purchased, many by well-to-do corporate PEN supporters. Celebrities arrived, including Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, and a long list of noted New York and Los Angeles literary, movie, and social people. On the rematch night of November 17, before a $1,000-a-ticket full house at the Booth Theatre, the combatants refused to fight. As a confrontational entertainment the evening was a failure. As intellectual stimulation it had severe limits. Vidal, the classicist, had created a talk, for which he had written out the text, later to be published in
The Nation
as “The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas.” Mailer thought it “a brilliant talk on détente between Russia and China and who was going to inherit the earth. It had nothing to do with him and with me personally. I think people were surprised. But it was one of Gore's masterstrokes to do this. It was a hell of a good essay.” Mailer, the romantic, had not prepared a presentation, trusting to inspiration and spontaneity. His criticism of American “plastic” culture fell as flat as his jokes, one of which Vidal recalls as an example of Mailer's poor timing as a storyteller: “Mailer said to the audience, ‘Gore says I can't tell a joke. Well, just to show him that he's wrong, I'll tell a joke right now. This wealthy self-made New York man was showing a visitor around his expensive apartment. He was showing off all the valuable things he had. “This is my expensive living-room furniture. This is a magnificent painting I bought. This is my …” He opened the door to a bedroom. On the bed there was a beautiful blond lady. “This is my wife,” he said. In bed with the beautiful lady, fucking her, was a handsome young man. “That's me!” he said.' End of joke. Nobody laughed. It's all a matter of timing.” Perhaps, though, the audience thought the joke itself not funny. “
We may both be known
in literary history for our feud rather than our works,” Mailer admitted, and he certainly not for his jokes. To liven up his performance Mailer read a selection from his essay on the first Ali-Frazier fight. By
the time of the question-and-answer period a large part of the audience had left. Questioners tried to arouse controversial responses or to draw Mailer and Vidal into open conflict. Vidal declined. In Mailer's view, “he didn't want to allow the question period to be used as vehicle for us to debate since the evening was his already.”

Whatever had been interesting about the relationship had now been relegated to the past, footnotes to literary gossip and literary history, often indistinguishable categories in the long-standing cultural text. Since the 1985 appearance for PEN, “we've been professionally over the feud,” Mailer feels, “and are half friendly. Gore tries not to be too nasty.” When Vidal tried to read some of Mailer's recent fiction, his judgment was mixed with antagonism and fair praise: “every line is loaded with the agony of a man consciously trying to be great, and I somehow think this is probably not the way to go about it. Yet when he relaxes, he can be extraordinarily good.” Mailer found it satisfying to reserve most of his praise for Vidal as a writer of essays. A retrospective tone began gradually, over the next decade, to soften their respective analyses of some of their crucial divisions and differences of literary and personal temperament. The issue of manliness, though, of early post—World War II muscle-flexing and prejudices about appropriate male sexual roles, so important to both men, still seemed crucial to their attempts to mediate the differences between them, personally if not intellectually. Vidal: “Norman
is
homophobic—whatever that means—but it's very complicated. He's against masturbation. He's against condoms. Good fucks make good babies. He's got all sorts of strange crotchets.” Mailer: “No, I've never been irked or bothered by Gore's homosexuality. Gore has always treated his homosexuality as a rather interesting quirk caused by—whatever. As a homosexual, he's very much a man. He insists on that and he acts that way. In sex, he does it…. No one does anything to him. So he's just as much a male as any ‘convict,' so to speak, any strong male. That's never entered into our feuding. But we have been very competitive with one another. For me it was the same as with Jim Jones, but there was more affection there. But I think people who love Gore's work aren't going to be drawn to mine anyway. So there was competition, from the beginning, for success and fame—but not for readers. Anyway, we're in the same boat. Neither of us will have any readers if things keep going on the way they are.” As combatants they had been of interest. As amiable, cooperative elderly writers, who still essentially did not like one another and had not
forgiven the other for wounds previously inflicted, whatever had seemed significant about their pairing seemed less so. During the next decade they were to see one another rarely, but always without visible conflict. In fact, though Vidal had not much affection to extend to Mailer, he found he quite liked Norris Church, whom Mailer had married since the encounter at Lally Weymouth's, where “Gore had the notion,” Mailer recalls, “that Norris was somehow forbidding or implacable…. But Norris then was still working as a model and had on the company face that she always had to wear in those days. So here was this tall, rather distinguished-looking woman, whom Gore didn't know, closely observing and seemingly dispassionately looking down on the whole thing…. Gore and she have become quite amiable. They rather like one another.” In 1993, when Mailer was raising money for the Actors Studio, Gore accepted his invitation to appear with him in a reading performance of
Don Juan in Hell
in which “Susan Sontag played Elvira, Gore played the Devil,” Gay Talese played Don Juan, “and I played the statue. I also directed. Both Susan Sontag and Gore had a strong sense of how they wanted to play those roles. So as director I didn't interfere very much. I was a passive director and let them do what they wanted to do. Gore was surprisingly good. Very, very good, really. His detractors say he can be a ham. That's because as an actor his voice carries the brunt of his acting, which is true. But he's very, very good at it. This was a distinguished performance.” In 1995 they both accommodated a friend of Mailer's who wanted to interview them at length for
Esquire
, though the interview had nothing especially interesting, let alone new, to add to the Mailer-Vidal saga. “I have nothing to say, only to add,” had become one of Vidal's favorite comments. Both writers were becoming increasingly aware that there was less that needed saying and less time in which to add anything at all.

Having signed a new two-novel contract with Random House in 1977, he had delivered
Kalki
, which had done adequately in hardcover, unexpectedly poorly in paperback. The contract, for $1.2 million—the smaller portion for
Kalki
, the larger for an unnamed novel that, it was generally agreed, would be a historical fiction—had been negotiated by Owen Laster, the senior literary agent at William Morris. Laster had been handling Vidal's backlist for the contracts Helen Strauss had negotiated before Gore himself took over handling the rights to his literary works in the United States.
Graham Watson at Curtis Brown still took care of British rights. Foreign-language contracts, except for Germany, had been managed by Little, Brown. Over the years, as Laster rose at William Morris, he had eventually, by 1976, persuaded Vidal to allow him to negotiate all his other literary contracts. A soft-spoken New Yorker, both self-effacing and clever, Laster, a great movie enthusiast in his youth who had first heard of Vidal as a famous scriptwriter, had risen through the ranks at William Morris from the mailroom in 1961, then into the television department, and finally the literary department. When Strauss left, he became the senior literary agent. In the early 1970s Gore “asked me some questions about what kind of deal I had for Michener. He might not have said Michener explicitly, but he knew that I had the big one, and I think he was fishing around. It was a very entertaining meeting: he did imitations of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. It was the first time I was alone with him…. I remember saying to him that I get paid for this kind of advice and I remember suggesting that we work together. He said, ‘I bet you're going to insist on the movie situation.' I said, ‘Ya.' He said, ‘Well then, I don't think so.' I went back to the office and went in to see Nat Lefkowitz. ‘Look,' I said, ‘I think I can get Gore Vidal back as a client, but I can't get back everything. He just won't do it.' Nat said, ‘Stay after him.' … Then he did another contract with Random House for
Myron
and
1876
. It was around the time of publication of
1876
and
Kalki
that he agreed to come to William Morris in all areas.” Eager to capitalize on the success of
Burr
and
1876
, Random House had consented to part with a huge sum for the two-book contract, which helped affirm Laster's argument that not only could he relieve Vidal of tedious detail for which he had little patience and less talent but that William Morris could negotiate better contracts for him than he could for himself. When, influenced by Robert Gurland, an American lawyer practicing in London, Vidal proposed to Laster and Random House that instead of the usual arrangement for an advance against royalties the contract be structured as a loan, which the recipient, not Vidal but a newly created corporate entity, would pay back over a ten-year period, both Laster and Random House felt uneasy, partly because it was so different from the usual publishing-industry practices. As the tax advantage to Vidal would be considerable, Random House reluctantly agreed to the new configuration. “This was the summer of 1977,” Laster recalls. “I was watching television, and suddenly the screen went blank. There had been a blackout in New York,
the notorious 1977 blackout. Soon afterward, during that vacation, I was talking to Gore…. For some reason, I think at least partly because of the blackout, Gore had become very concerned about this complicated deal.” Life in the modern world, he told Laster, had become “too complicated … the infrastructure too fragile. Everything might collapse. He suddenly said, ‘Just go to Random House and do the equivalent of an ordinary contract.'”