Gore Vidal (71 page)

Doing rewrites as
The Catered Affair
was filmed, working on the Dreyfus film, he and Howard stayed a while longer at the Chateau Marmont, then rented a house in Laurel Canyon, where they stayed until late December. Reading various books on Dreyfus, he found himself caught up in both the theme of injustice and the challenge of creating an effective script. “I am here doing, of all things,
The Dreyfus Case
for the screen,” he wrote to Lehmann, “and there are moments when I believe this might be a good and useful production: each generation dearly needs to have Dreyfus re-interpreted.” Hollywood cruising had its usual satisfactions. No one at the Chateau cared or even noticed whom you brought to your room. Isherwood, despite his somber diary entries, was a frequent host, often good-humored in Gore's company, his home a center for the more cultured
movie-industry people, particularly writers. On New Year's Day 1956, CBS telecast
Portrait of a Ballerina
, which Gore had adapted earlier in the year from
Death in the Fifth Position
. There were, though, good reasons to return to New York. Gore and Howard missed Edgewater and New York friends. Also, Axelrod's intention to put the stage version of
Visit to a Small Planet
into production for a spring premiere was still in place, though he was having difficulty raising the required $75,000, mostly because investors doubted that an expanded version of
Visit
or any other television play could be produced successfully on Broadway.

Early in January, they were on their way to New Orleans, where they stayed at the Lafitte Guest House for a few weeks, then to New York, to which, despite the winter cold, they were happy to return. Gore was not happy, though, to learn that Axelrod and his associate, Clinton Wilder a cousin of the novelist Thornton Wilder, had decided to postpone
Visit
until early 1957. They had not been able to raise the necessary money. Though the delay was a disappointment, there were many other things to attend to. Themistocles Hoetis, whom he had met in Tangier, urged Gore to allow his Zero Press to publish Gore's short stories, to which he now added a seventh, “Pages from an Abandoned Journal,” based on an episode in the life of Denham Fouts. Though Gore had reservations about Zero Press, he decided to give Hoetis the book. “I didn't want to do
A Thirsty Evil
with a conventional publisher. I've always liked the idea of doing small editions, not available to the general public.” The book was dedicated to Howard. For Ballantine Books he put together an original paperback anthology of
Best Television Plays
, which included
Visit to a Small Planet
, and wrote a brief introduction, “Notes on Television,” which he published also in
New World Writing
. In February, Howard began as assistant stage manager for Axelrod's
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
, a foot in the Broadway entertainment door that he hoped might open wider. As a condition of Howard's getting the job, Gore agreed to reimburse Axelrod for his salary.

At the beginning of March 1956
The Catered Affair
opened nationwide to great praise, particularly for Vidal's script, which the reviewers greeted as an original screen version, not a narrow adaptation of a teleplay. Even the somewhat carping, generally annoyed Chayevsky thought Vidal's approach desirable. “
I think you were
very right in making
The Catered Affair
into your own script instead of trying to mimic my approach. I am sure it will be a much better picture that way.” Later there was to be some genuine
warmth between them. Now it was muted respect, and anger on Chayevsky's part, especially at the change of name to
The Wedding Breakfast
for the British version. “Everywhere Chayevsky went, they only knew
Wedding Breakfast
. Nobody mentioned
The Catered Affair
. It was
Wedding Breakfast
with Bette Davis. And he kept trying to explain that, well, it wasn't his, it was mine. You can't get very far with that with the press, which never gets anything right. There was a lot of resentment. Then we became friends eventually.” From Hollywood, Newman kept him up to date about his effort to persuade Warner Brothers to make a full-length film from Gore's
Billy the Kid
teleplay. Gore would expand it into a movie script. Newman would star. The same team, Robert Mulligan and Fred Coe, who had done it for
Philco
would direct and produce. Newman was doing his best, with the help of MCA and William Morris, their respective agents, to make it happen. Fortunately, they were making progress, he told Gore, and the only thing holding them up was Jack Warner attending Grace Kelly's wedding.

As Gore worked on the Dreyfus script, his salary from MGM continued. Since he could now afford it, he and Howard decided to give up Howard's small Lexington Avenue walk-up and get a larger apartment. In the fall Howard, with Nina's assistance, found a one-bedroom fifth-floor apartment they liked in an attractive prewar building at the corner of Fifty-fifth Street and First Avenue. They already knew 360 East Fifty-fifth Street through friends. Miles White had the apartment down the hall. In November 1956 Gore signed a two-year lease at a rent of $175.70 a month and, though he lived more at Edgewater than on East Fifty-fifth Street, it became his New York City residence, where he and Howard (who stayed there during the week) entertained and lived when not in the country. Nina and Howard decorated the apartment. Gore paid for the furnishings. It was at Edgewater, though, that he felt most at home and worked best. In January, Zimbalist, who soon went to London to produce a remake of
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
, reported that everyone concerned at MGM, including Dore Schary, liked the Dreyfus script. “
They definitely want
to go ahead with the picture.” In March, Vidal proposed to Manulis that he do for CBS's
Playhouse 90
a project he had “been saving for many years … the story of my grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore,” focusing on the Senator's early life. The script would end with his election to the United States Senate, “the excitement of an underdog victory, his father and mother with him from Mississippi, astonished and delighted at their son's success when they had always,
secretly, feared he would end his days in a home for the blind.” Manulis loved the idea. “GO AHEAD WITH GRAND-DADDY,” he telegraphed Vidal in London, where he had gone after a brief visit in Los Angeles to join Zimbalist to consult with him about the Dreyfus script and prepare it for filming.

His six weeks in London were mostly a delight. Claridge's, which he could not have afforded had MGM not been paying his expenses, was elegantly posh. Judy Montagu was around. Edith Sitwell invited him to her club, where her comic eccentricities amused everyone. He met his Heinneman editor, Dwye Evans, whom he asked to send copies of the British editions of
Messiah
and
Death Likes It Hot
to Mona Williams, now the Contessa Bismarck, living mostly at her villa on Capri. After Harrison's death it had seemed an intelligent convenience for Eddie and Mona to marry. At dinner at the 120 Mount Street apartment of Mike Canfield, the son of the eminent Harper & Row editor Cass Canfield, on leave from publishing to work as the American ambassador's social secretary, and his wife—Jackie Kennedy's sister Lee who had married Canfield in 1953—Gore met a vivacious, outspoken American actress and writer, Elaine Dundy, and her British husband, the well-known drama critic Kenneth Tynan. His own date was the actress Ella Raines, his quasi-relative, who was in London to do a play. Elaine and Ken, who lived immediately above the Canfields, had been invited down for drinks. Elaine was at work on a novel; Ken, the drama critic for
The Observer
, had recently become script director for Ealing Studios, newly purchased by MGM. Soon Gore and the Tynans were on a first-name basis. They had friends in common, and Elaine recalled that he had been pointed out to her in New York at the opening of Tennessee Williams's
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. “The next day we talked on the phone. Gore said, ‘What are you doing? I just had a good bowel movement, and now I'm just lying here looking at the ceiling. What are you doing?' ‘I'm reading the Sundays. What does the ceiling look like?' ‘Tidy.'” It was the start of a friendship.

One day he went to Southwark Cathedral with another new friend whom he had met briefly before in New York, the British journalist and left-wing Labour Member of Parliament, Tom Driberg, twenty years older than Gore. Driberg, who had already had a controversial career advocating the legalization of drugs and homosexuality, was a flamboyantly expressive gay man in the London social-political world. Both great talkers, they delighted
in endless banter and gossip about politics, people, art, sex. Driberg, a member of the Labour National Executive Committee who under the pseudonym William Hickey had for fifteen years written a column in the form of a diary for the
Daily Express
, knew everyone of consequence in British public life. Soon after sailing to New York in May, Gore, at Edgewater, read a volume of Driberg's columns. “
I very much enjoyed
your diary which I read on the return trip: I liked the war reporting and the king's funeral and I think you come through in those casual pages much better than you think … that does sound patronizing but it's not; none of us really has much admiration for himself and I think your remarkable duality which we discussed at the entrance to Southwark cathedral has put one part of yourself in flight from the other.” American politics were on Driberg's and Vidal's minds as an election year approached its early summer. Eisenhower would be running again. Adlai Stevenson would again oppose him. “
The political world
here is looking up as the firm hand at the tiller seems to be faltering even in the eyes of Republican newspapers,” Gore wrote to Driberg, “though they will doubtless run the great warrior dead or alive; Stevenson's chances are bright and if I can possibly find the time I will work on the campaign.” He did not have the time and would not find it. He was still on assignment with
I Accuse
, “though the movie business is staggering again and I am told there is panic in Culver City: what fun to have worked in the movies just at the end … what a Byzantine time this is! The novel declining, the movies, at least phase one, stopping, and homosexuality, once our nation's pride and source of strength (oh, pioneers!), become unfashionable … well, let it come down.”

Live television had not only come down but was coming to an end. Having agreed to do for Fred Coe, the producer of NBC's
Playwrights '56
, a new television play he thought might well be his last, during May 1956 Gore wrote
Honor
, a drama about a wealthy Southerner who faces a vital decision during the Civil War: whether to allow Yankee troops to occupy his mansion or destroy it by fire. Gore asked for and got what he believed the largest sum ever paid for an original television drama, $5,050. With Coe he had “amiable relations.” Directed by Victor Donohue, with a cast led by Ralph Bellamy and Leo G. Carroll,
Honor
was telecast in mid-June, a powerful antiwar play that was as sophisticated and as emotionally compelling as anything yet produced on television. Some of its force came from the author's personal world, from the death of Jimmie Trimble, from the North-South
conflict and the importance of the Civil War in Gore family history, and especially from his preoccupation with the clash between social pressure and individual self-determination. With the television play about his grandfather on hold, he thought this might be his last appearance on the small screen for some time. That suited him well. The pay from MGM was substantial, and he hoped he might soon start preparing to write
Washington, D.C
. or turn to his long-standing desire to do a novel based on the life of the Roman Emperor Julian.

At Edgewater a full, delightful summer was ahead of him. With his new affluence, despite the heavy taxes, he and Howard had done enough fixing up so that the house looked lovely, though still sparsely furnished. “Wooden chairs. The kitchen had a table, and there was little or nothing in the dining room,” Paul Newman recalled. “There was some soft stuff, but it was sparse. I liked going up there. It was a good way to get out of the city. Stayed overnight, long weekends.” The roses were in bloom. Gore expected Paul and Joanne together and separately, especially Joanne, who had committed herself to doing
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
in July at the nearby Hyde Park Playhouse. Later in the summer, once rehearsals began, Joanne moved to Edgewater. Gore looked forward to a visit from his grandmother and soon had a brief visit from Sarah Moore, whose father was collaborating with Latouche on
The Ballad of Baby Doe
, to be premiered that summer in Central City, Colorado. Latouche, now at work on the lyrics for the Leonard Bernstein–Lillian Hellman musical,
Candide
, was his usual manic self, unstoppably talkative, always amusing, with a thousand ideas. There was soon good news that cheered both Gore and Alice Astor. The premiere of
The Ballad of Baby Doe
had gotten rave reviews. Alice and Latouche, though, had ceased to be lovers. She had taken up with a professional parapsychic researcher—partly scientific, mostly far-fetched—whose institute she handsomely supported, a relationship that her friends worried about. To Gore she seemed much the same, always happy to see him in New York, warmly welcoming at Rhinebeck, where he and Howard went regularly for lunch or dinner.

Dot soon came for one of her annual visits. When, at the same time, Joanne's mother visited New York, Gore invited her to join them at Edgewater. In preparation for the visit, he and Joanne agreed to suggest to the ladies that they were going to get married. “Somehow we decided that it would be a wonderful idea if my mother and Gore's grandmother thought
we were engaged. It would make them very happy. I don't think I got to the point of telling my mother that we actually were. I kind of intimated. I don't know whether or not Gore told Mrs. Gore that we were engaged. I remember we had a delightful weekend. And the ladies really did like each other, being two Southern ladies.” Actually, at a restaurant in New York they had a more serious discussion about marriage. For Gore the question had arisen before, most seriously with Rosalind. Occasionally rumors circulated that Gore, charming and flirtatious with women he was attracted to, was going to marry, usually, so the speculation went, to provide marital cover for a political career. Sometimes he himself raised the possibility, usually ironically or humorously, sometimes with a touch of sincerity. For Joanne, in despair at what seemed Paul's disheartening slowness in divorcing his wife, the thought was not implausible. “Why not marry Gore?” Then “we decided that there was no way we could ever go to bed together because we would laugh. So that was not possible. I was thinking, ‘Oh, God, if I'm never going to marry Paul, I might as well marry Gore.' And I remember saying, ‘What would we do about Howard?' That's when we decided that the answer to life was for Gore to run for President. He would win the election, and we would overrun the government and create a constitutional monarchy. I would go to the White House and be the First Lady. And once again we said, but what about Howard? I think if we had gotten to that point and Gore had said, ‘Let's get married,' I might very well have done so. Because I was very fond of him. Many people have had that sort of marriage. I can't imagine how long it would have lasted. I would have driven Gore crazy, or he would have driven me crazy.” Gore, in this case or in any other after Rosalind, never made the fatal proposal.