Gore Vidal (47 page)

Early in March, as Gore awakened to his first morning in Rome, there were signs of spring. “
First impressions
: Acid-yellow forsythia in the Janiculum. Purple wisteria in the Forum. Chunks of goat on a plate in a trattoria.” Suddenly he was high with the whirl of visual pleasures, revisiting with happy eyes the monuments, the remains of pagan and Christian civilizations, combining the pleasure of new experience with an overlay of vivid memory. Just as years later he encountered in his visual memory, as he walked in Rome, a presence as real as any other of the passersby: the Gore Vidal of this visit now; so too he now encountered his thirteen-year-old self, the schoolboy rapturously reeling from one long-anticipated site to another. “In Rome whenever I turn down the street which goes past the Hotel Eden,” he wrote years later, “where I lived when I first came to Europe after the war, I can sometimes see myself coming up the street, a ghost not knowing he's being watched by me, by a stranger old enough to be his father, and yet the instant we pass one another and I see the same face I look at every day—but as it was then, unlined, pale, intense—time overlaps for an instant and I am he. I know what he is thinking, where he is going.” Rome began to become inseparable from a personal palimpsest, as if he were writing himself onto the city and the city onto him, his experience over the years taking as its visual and verbal model the overlayered archaeological levels of Roman history. At a table in his cold hotel room he worked in longhand on
The Search for the King
. The first line he wrote, once settled, was particularly expressive of his strong sense that he had as an ultimate goal some personal version of the power of the Eternal City: “Toward some further mystery time moved, and the days, the moments of light and dark passed, and he moved, like time, toward a mystery he could not name, a
place beyond illusion, larger than the moment, enlarged by death.” For him the movement toward mystery, “beyond illusion,” interfaced with consciousness in the passion he felt for the past, in the energy he felt in his writing.

Aware that there were other American writers and artists in Rome, all part of the Grand Tour of 1948, he balanced his quiet hours of work on
Search
with an active Roman street and café life. Eager to meet everyone, he expected that everyone in the American community would know his name, particularly the artists and intellectuals. Also, those with a special interest in the subject of
City
would almost certainly know of its existence, if only for its association with scandal, one of the advantages of having published a controversial bestseller. Public discussion of the subject was still mostly muzzled. As to the act itself, that was another matter, especially in impoverished Rome, where he was delighted to discover that John Horne Burns's “topolini” were indeed widely available. Burns responded to Gore's letter of confirmation, “
I'm happy to know
that you're picking up mice in Italy. Italian mice are most agreeable.” Used to the restrictions and conventions of cruising in New York, newly arrived Americans found postwar Rome and Paris refreshing. “Honey, you would love Rome! Not Paris, but Rome,” Tennessee Williams, who had arrived from Paris while Gore was at sea on the
Neue Helena
, wrote to a friend. “I have not been to bed with Michelangelo's David but with any number of his more delicate creations, in fact the abundance and accessibility is downright embarrassing. You can't walk a block without being accosted by someone you would spend a whole evening trying vainly to make in the New York bars. Of course it usually cost you a thousand lire but that is only two bucks (less if you patronize the black market) and there is never any unpleasantness about it even though one does not know a word they are saying.” Fritz Prokosch greeted Gore with a touch of coolness, happy to have his company though unable fully to contain his annoyance at
City's
success. With Prokosch he immediately toured the usual spots, from the Pincio, a favorite pickup place for sexual partners, to Doney's, a popular café on the Via Veneto, an informal head-quarters for coffee, drinks, and conversation. Mornings he walked the few streets from his hotel to Doney's to have breakfast with Prokosch. At a nearby table Orson Welles usually sat alone, reading. Around the corner from his hotel, on the Via Aurora just below the Borghese Gardens, the newly famous thirty-six-year-old Tennessee Williams had a few weeks before
rented a sunlit apartment he was in the process of decorating. One of its ornaments was a young Italian. Romantically self-indulgent and at the same time serially promiscuous, he had immediately found one to his liking.

Four months earlier the spectacular Broadway success of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, in the first of its over-three-year run, had made Williams an American celebrity. Short, well built, with a tendency to be stocky and puffy, with a small dark mustache, brownish complexion, and an intelligent, laughing glitter in his light-blue eyes, Williams was tasting the first fruits of fame and freedom. He had enough money now to live as he pleased. With a wickedly delicious sense of humor, his broad Missouri drawl deepened by his long residences in New Orleans, he loved being funny, outrageous, spontaneous. An eager drinker, he had a great thirst for parties and fun, for sociability and titillating emotional drama, especially the histrionics of his own life. With a talent for moodiness, capriciousness, and unexpected emotional tropes, he enjoyed big scenes both on- and offstage. Hypochondriacal, he told everyone in Rome he had been hospitalized in Paris for fatal pancreatic cancer. It actually had been for tapeworm. During the next few months he and Gore played the European stage together.

The two met on a shining early-March day, introduced at a party for visiting Americans in a baroque apartment at the nearby American Academy, high on the Janiculum. The view from the sun-filled windows held the palpable tone of the quiet city. Prokosch was there. The host was the American composer Samuel Barber, who, Gore noticed, spoke Italian fluently, unlike the other newly arrived Americans, who at best spoke adequate French. Williams looked unmistakably, unforgettably, familiar. “
I had actually seen
but not met him the previous year,” Gore remembered. “He was following me up Fifth Avenue while I, in turn, was stalking yet another quarry. I recognized him. He wore a blue bow tie with white polka dots. In no mood for literary encounters, I gave him a scowl and he abandoned the chase just north of Rockefeller Center.” Since they
both
liked young men, they were not meant to be sexual partners. As the introductions were made, the conversation immediately turned to New York City, though not directly to that first encounter. “‘
I particularly like
New York,'” Williams said, “‘on hot summer nights when all the … uh, superfluous people are off the streets.'” Then “the foggy blue eyes blinked, and a nervous chuckle filled the moment's silence.” The differences of personality were already clearly established in the difference in artistic self-definition—the emotional
dramatist and the intellectual novelist; the romantic, theatrical hysteric and the witty, coolly observant man of ideas. Yet there was an immediate affinity, a sense of mutual responsiveness. To Gore, the playwright, fifteen years older, looked ancient, clearly a member of the next-older generation. “Williams is not at all what you might expect the most successful playwright since Shakespeare—well, O'Neill—would be like. He has a funny laugh, heh-heh-heh, and a habit of biting his knuckles to make them crack,” he later wrote. To Tennessee, Gore was handsome, sexy, funny, talented, ambitious. Each responded to the other's gift for language, to the satiric voice, the elaborate put-on, the practical joke, the self-defensive, sometimes aggressive vulnerability. Despite differences, they immediately liked one another. They soon knew each other's quips and cues; they could read one another's body language and facial expressions; they knew when the barbed wit was about to strike or the clownish joke about to be performed. “Tennessee,” Gore later recollected, “was the greatest company on earth. We laughed. He had a wild sense of humor, grotesque, much like mine, and we just spent a lot of time parodying the world, mocking and burlesquing everything and everybody. He wasn't a terribly good mimic … but he could do numbers. He could do a dying heroine for you. Or he could do an addle-headed piece of trade for you. He could do these characters, much the way he wrote them.”

In a newly purchased Army-surplus jeep, with a canvas roof neither could figure out how to put up, they were soon off on a trip down to Naples, where Gore had first disembarked, then south along the Amalfi coast to Positano and Amalfi. It had taken Williams an entire afternoon, he told “
Dear Blood and Gore
,” to do the “transfer of jeep-ownership red tape.” In Rome in 1948 it was easiest to communicate leaving a note with a concierge. “We're definitely going to Amalfi Sunday morning,” Tennessee assured him. In the meantime, at dawn, Williams, drunk, drove the jeep, which had a defective muffler, up and down the Via Veneto and then to St. Peter's, where he raced through the wind-blown fountains to cool his head. He loved the roaring engine, the sense of freedom. An amazingly bad driver with terrible eyesight, almost blind in one eye, he seemed indifferent or oblivious to how easily he could have been killed or killed others. Apparently the roar from the muffler and the absence of other vehicles prevented mayhem. Positano and Amalfi, set in the steep hills above the sea, remained vivid in their memories, each to return later to what seemed one of the
unspoiled natural paradises. The coast from Naples to Sicily combined visual splendor, medieval life, and rich classical associations. But “our drive down was through nothing but ruined cities that had been bombarded either by our fleet or by retreating Germans. Everything was a mess.” In Amalfi they stayed at the Luna Hotel on the coast highway. There were no other guests. As in Rome, they could live and dine handsomely on an extraordinarily favorable exchange rate in an impoverished Italy. A thousand feet above them, obscured by the high cliffs, was the town of Ravello, which they did not visit, where La Rondinaia, a villa that decades later Vidal was to buy, served as a convalescent home for injured British officers.

As they toured, each time they got out of the jeep, even for brief stops, they had to remove all their possessions. There was no way to protect anything from theft. Even when they stopped for lunch, everything had to come out, including Gore's manuscript of
A Search for the King
, which he had taken with him and which he worked on in hotels. He put it inside his shirt for safekeeping. “I wasn't going to leave it in the car and have it stolen. Stolen and then tossed away. Every time I got out of the jeep, I made sure I had the manuscript with me. We didn't know how to put up the canvas top of the jeep. Anybody could have got in.” Williams, who was working on
Summer and Smoke
, probably had that manuscript with him. They had a photo taken of the two of them, Gore leaning against the hood, one foot on the bumper, Tennessee sitting on the hood, his arm around Gore, which they had made into a postcard. Gore proudly sent it to friends and family. “
That happy picture
of you and your friend nesting lazily on that Jeep was too much for me,” Judith Jones responded. “I've decided to take your suggestion—I shall be sailing on the Vulcania on the 18th of May.” To Anaïs he wrote lovingly, “Write me in care of American Embassy Rome. I think of you cherie; you are still closer to me than anyone else. I want so much to see you. I think about you constantly; glad you're happy with RP.” In response to a letter from Nina that had reached him at American Express in Rome, he wrote on the back of the postcard, “Tennessee Williams (
Streetcar Named Desire
) and me—we're touring Italy in his jeep. Lousy weather, dangerous politics, working well…. Life is luxurious and cheap.” “I have never laughed more with anyone,” he remembered.

Life was great fun, both on the road and in Rome, though there were the usual anxieties and complaints, most focusing on the reception of
City
. It had made him an uneasy celebrity and a ready target, even among friends.
When Williams and Prokosch were sitting in Doney's, Vidal came by, so Bill Fricks remembered. Vidal stopped and asked Prokosch if he had gotten the copy of
City
he had recently dropped off at Prokosch's hotel. A few polite remarks were exchanged, and Vidal left. Then Prokosch said to Williams and Fricks that Vidal was “a terrible writer, the book is bad, and we'll never hear from Vidal again—he'll probably never write anything more and nothing worth reading.” Years later, when Fricks conveyed the story to Vidal, Gore responded, “I always knew that Fritz hated the sale of my books.” Rarely an enthusiastic reader of anything, Williams “got through
The City and the Pillar
. He disliked the ending. He said, ‘I don't think you realize, Gore, what a good book you've written.' He thought I'd just put on a hokey ending for commercial reasons.” Williams mistakenly assumed that Jim Willard's father was modeled on Gore's and “said of the family scenes, ‘Our fathers were very much alike.'” Toward the end of March, celebrating his thirty-seventh birthday (he claimed it was his thirty-fourth), Williams threw a large party at his Via Aurora apartment. In the crowded rooms everyone spoke English and some French, except for occasional Italians, mostly attractive young men, including Williams's latest passion. The wealthy British-born art connoisseur Harold Acton, a longtime Italian resident, had come down from his Florentine villa, La Pietra, to inspect the invasion of American artists. He seemed to float “
like some large pale fish
through the crowded room; from time to time he would make a sudden lunge at this or that promising piece of bait.” Acton later criticized the young Americans for being more interested in sex than in Italian culture. Condescendingly haughty to seemingly provincial Americans who hardly knew a word of Italian, Acton politely deplored “our barbarous presence in
his
Europe.”