Gore Vidal (68 page)

For Gore it was a new experience, much of which he enjoyed and learned from, despite his resolute conviction that all this was craft, not art; that the total control of his artistic destiny that he preferred was still available to him only within the novel form. In late March 1955, when he thought he had essentially finished his adaptation of the George Kaufman/Edna Ferber Broadway hit
Stage Door
for the television series
The Best of Broadway
, to star Rhonda Fleming and Diana Lynn, he found that Felix Jackson, the producer, needed an immediate change. He had “an
immense practical problem
,” he told Gore. Rhonda Fleming “signed without reading the play and was told that her part would be first-rate. In addition to that, she is
getting first star billing over Diana Lynn. Don't ask me why and how…. You have done a great job…. You have done the right thing with this adaptation, but I must now ask you to do the wrong thing. If Miss Fleming reads this draft, she'll walk out on us, and I simply cannot risk that. Therefore, I must ask you to enlarge [her] part…. Gore, I imagine you'll hate me for this, but something on this order has to be done … and don't carry a gun when we meet.” In fact, he apparently did not in the least hold it against the producer and did what had to be done. As a sweetener, he found Rhonda Fleming stunningly attractive, Diana Lynn compellingly interesting. “
Do you realize
,” he wrote to Jack Aldridge, an eager pursuer of women, “tonight I have dinner with Rhonda Fleming? Say you envy me!”

He did, however, usually have more control over his original scripts, one of the best of which,
Summer Pavilion
, was in rehearsal for
Studio One
in late April for an early-May telecast. Influenced by Tennessee Williams in its evocation of Southern repression and hysteria, it had in it “a lot of my own family,” Vidal recalled. Starring the eccentric, assertive stage veteran Miriam Hopkins; her sister in the play, Ruth White, “one of the great actresses of that period”; and the young Elizabeth Montgomery. The main character was partly based on Mrs. Gore. Dot “was never that vain or that closed to the world. But she did have a kind of run-on act, which was a sort of filibuster, especially with strangers to whom she didn't want to say anything personal about herself or the Senator. Each political wife has her own style. So I used hers.” But, he conceded, “if my grandfather had had two eyes,” he would have been the father-in-law in the play, “reading a book, paying no attention, occasionally checking into the conversation, often deliberately missing. That was very T. P. Gore, an allusive man in a literary way…. Elizabeth Montgomery was adorable.” Montgomery, Vidal recalled, “was quite nervous, because Miriam was an overpowering star of the theater and movies who said to her, ‘I just don't know what you're doing acting. You have no talent for it. You should be in college. We'll go on with the scene now, won't we?' Knocking the girl three ways to Sunday. But Elizabeth was very tough.” Late in the winter he flew to Los Angeles to do an adaptation of John Marquand's novel
Sincerely, Willis Wayde
, for a CBS dramatic series. “The only sad aspect of being a hack is that one is called upon to adapt the work of more successful hacks,” he wrote to Aldridge about adapting Marquand.

Hollywood itself was not uncongenial, especially when he considered the possibility of making much greater sums writing for movies than he could make in television. He had some discussions at Columbia Studios about the possibility of work for him there, and most likely also at MGM, at whose commissary he had lunch with Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood told Gore “
that he had just
written a film for Lana Turner. The subject? Diane de Poitiers. When I laughed, he shook his head. ‘Lana can do it,' he said grimly. Later, as we walked about the lot and I told him that I hoped to get a job as a writer at the studio since I could no longer live on my royalties as a novelist (and would not teach), Christopher gave me as melancholy a look as those bright—even harsh—blue eyes can affect. ‘Don't,' he said with great intensity, posing against the train beneath whose wheels Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina made her last dive, ‘become a hack like me.' But we both knew this was playacting…. He had been able to write to order for movies while never ceasing to do his own work in his own way. Those whom Hollywood destroyed were never worth saving.” Isherwood had been fighting with the Breen Office censors, who claimed that his script condoned adultery. “If they had their way,” he wrote in his diary, “adultery would be punished by stoning, and homosexuality by being burned alive.” Gore now met Leonard Spigelgass, the senior writer at MGM, who with his intelligent sharpness about all things Hollywood and record of successful films dominated the writers' table at the MGM commissary. To Gore, during his brief visit, Hollywood seemed desirable. In early March he went down to Philadelphia to see the out-of-town opening of Tennessee's
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, where he joined numbers of his friends from the Williams circle—Carson McCullers, James Laughlin, Maria Britneva, and Williams's good friend Paul Bigelow. Isherwood was there to see the play. Later that month Gore helped Tennessee celebrate its triumphant New York premiere.

That same spring Vidal had an idea for a television comedy with a political message. Visitors from outer space, usually hostile and frightening, had been one of the staples of the Western imagination for centuries. Orson Welles had terrified American radio audiences with
The War of the Worlds
, his dramatization of invaders from Mars, intended as radio fiction but initially taken by many as a news report. Hollywood had discovered that alien creatures sold tickets at the box office, epitomized by the successful 1951 film
The Day the Earth Stood Still
. At Water Mill in the summer of 1953 Vance Bourjaily's skit with visitors from outer space had comic overtones, though
apparently no political agenda and none of the major satiric premises that struck Gore as a good idea for a one-hour television comedy to be called
Visit to a Small Planet
. The main character, from a distant world, comes to earth with the expectation that he will amuse himself with the spectacle of human beings at war, an amusement available only in primitive places like the earth. When Kreton falls to earth at the home of a TV-news commentator, he proceeds to use his special unearthly powers to foment a combination of comedy and terror, the perfect formula for a satirical attack on human small-mindedness and self-destructiveness. Eager to enjoy the grand nuclear fireworks spectacular, Kreton seems more fascinated with weapons as toys than even the American and Russian generals. Kreton (cretin) has his plans frustrated at the end by fellow otherworldlings who come in a flying saucer, in the equivalent of asylum white coats, to take him back to the institution for the demented from which he has escaped. Retarded, his is the mind of a child. The earth is saved, but not from itself, since of course the satirical thrust associates Kreton with military and political hawks. For the audience the nuclear-arms race and the Korean War are the context. The enemy is not in our (or other) stars but in ourselves. Delighted with the idea, whose comic realities were soon made especially sharp by the wit of so many of Kreton's lines, Gore wrote the one-hour teleplay with his usual speed and handed it over to Harold Franklin. “
I am at heart
,” Gore confessed later in regard to
Visit
, “a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.” Whatever Franklin's anticipation,
Visit to a Small Planet
was not an easy sell. Political subjects, no matter how distanced from the identifiably topical, were not welcome in television drama. Whereas some years before, advertisers simply bought time blindly, now they were in tight alliance with the television networks, determining what programs were viable vehicles for the sale of their products. After two of the major series turned down
Visit
, NBC's
Philco-Goodyear Playhouse
, broadcast on Sunday nights, agreed to do it. At CBS the decision had been made by the sponsor's advertising agency. “‘
Too much social
significance.' … It's a maddening business and I don't know why we put up with it,” the producer of
Studio One
bitterly reported to Gore. Probably at NBC it slipped by their usual self-censoring, perhaps because so much of its surface was funny. In late April the telescript was in rehearsal, with the British comic actor Cyril Ritchard playing Kreton. On Sunday night, May 8, its
performance, viewed by about thirty million people, had an electrifying impact. “With some anxiety we waited for the roof to fall in.” It did not. The major reviews were superb. At a party at the Manulises', where he happily met John Steinbeck, Gore basked in his success. When he left for California, he was more readily and widely identified with television drama than he had ever been with fiction.

After arriving in Los Angeles in May 1955, that very day Gore and Manulis were at the television studio working on an adaptation of Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms
for the dramatic series
Climax
, which was telecast on May 26. Now a top CBS television producer, Manulis was charged with improving the overall quality of
Climax
. The adaptation starred Guy Madison and Diana Lynn, the actress Gore had met during the rehearsals for
Stage Door
and with whom he got along wonderfully. Something sparkled between them. Enchanted, he looked at her with adoring eyes. The script, though, and the performances other than Lynn's were less than glittering, partly the difficulty of transforming Hemingway's novelistic speech into effective dialogue for actors. The best part of the rehearsals was the opportunity to spend time with the slender, blond, Los Angeles-born actress, who was between husbands and whose smart, flirtatious intensity became an addictive enjoyment. “She had this elegant sort of kittenlike manner with very sharp eyes,” Gore recalled, a pert nose, and an attractively angled face. Her look radiated witty good humor and well-informed intelligence. As a child she had been a piano prodigy, her avenue into the movies and a long-term contract with Paramount, where in 1942 she debuted in a Billy Wilder comedy,
The Major and the Minor
. She then had almost ten years as a successful child and teenage actress. When her adult movie career as a leading lady faltered, she turned to television drama. Suddenly she was a great success again. During much of May and early June she and Gore had a good time together, socially as well as professionally, with a tactile engagement unusual for Gore. “Diana and Gore had a special friendship,” recalled Dominick Dunne, who later, when he too was brought out to Hollywood by Manulis, became a close friend of Lynn's. “There was a deep, deep affection there. If he ever could have been in love with a woman, she's the one…. Gore was mad about her.”

One evening at a Hollywood party, Gore recalled, as they made their way through a room with about ten couples, “she murmured to me, ‘Do you realize I have been to bed with every man in this room?'” And she was by no means promiscuous in the civilian sense of the word. We were all in the business. She'd been a child star, so she'd been around for twenty years. One weekend Gore and Marty Manulis, “tourists from the East who had heard of Palm Springs,” drove out to the desert, where they stayed at a pleasant motel, relaxing, swimming. At some of the larger towns they drove through, Manulis remembered, Gore said, “‘Let's find the library.' He was looking to see whether his books were taken out more or less frequently than Capote's or Tennessee Williams's…. I never saw anyone do that before.” From Gore's point of view “every writer does that. I never introduced myself to the librarians. You sneak around and you find your books on the shelf and you see when was the last time it was stamped out. Then you look at Capote and Mailer.”

While he worked on numbers of scripts for
Climax
, two other projects kept him busy and busily moving. The playwright George Axelrod, whose comedy
The Seven Year Itch
had been a Broadway success in 1953, approached Harold Franklin about Axelrod's producing a Broadway version of
Visit to a Small Planet
. Three years older than Gore, Axelrod had charm, good looks, self-confidence.
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
had become his second Broadway hit, his screenplay for
The Seven Year Itch
about to become a successful movie with the cachet of Marilyn Monroe in one of the starring roles. An excellent technician, clever rather than deep, with a sharp eye for the main chance, Axelrod had decided that an expanded version of
Visit
, with the right star, would be a Broadway success. The plan was to have
Visit
on the Broadway stage at the beginning of 1956. With Gore's approval Franklin closed the deal at the beginning of June. Cyril Ritchard was signed to star
and
direct. In late May, Gore flew first to New York, then to Jamaica, where Ritchard had a vacation home and where they discussed Gore's expansion of
Visit
for stage production. “
Dear Gorgeous
” and “Dear Gold Dust,” Ritchard teasingly addressed Gore over the next few months in their correspondence about the play. “I'm delighted to hear that
Visit
is too long … much better that way.” Back at Edgewater for the rest of June and early July, Gore worked at the revision, with suggestions from Axelrod. “I have been studying this goddam play for two weeks,”
Axelrod wrote, “and I am now absolutely convinced that we have a complete natural…. As I said in New York, the only problem is the girl and the two boys—the rest of it marches like a little doll.”