Gore Vidal (73 page)

For the Boston opening the house was sold out. People had come up from New York. Gene and Kit had driven from Avon. Howard was there. When the curtain descended, there was sinking uneasiness. There had been very little laughter. The audience had not seemed to like it. The critics enjoyed it even less. One Boston reviewer, who acerbically wrote that
Visit to a Small Planet
would have a short visit on Broadway, epitomized the general view. Word immediately got back to New York: the play was in trouble. Perhaps only Axelrod managed to be upbeat, telling funny stories to the cast, after the performance in Boston, about Jayne Mansfield's auditioning for her role in
The Seven Year Itch
. But “the out-of-town tryouts were a disaster,” Sarah Marshall commented. Author, director, and producers pondered what to do. The problem seemed to be that the play was not comedic enough. The commercial theater required an imbalance, heavily titled toward humor, between comic entertainment and serious message. The funny lines, the witty situations, the comic paradoxes and entertaining tensions
were being outbalanced by the serious satire, the scathing antimilitaristic indictment, and the discomfiting high stakes of the nuclear context. Sarah Marshall remembered “Gore saying at some point, ‘I wanted to write an antiwar play, and the only way to write an antiwar play is to write a prowar play.” Audiences were too uncomfortable, even too frightened, to laugh. The stakes were high. This was the commercial theater. Like the movies, it had its particular audience, its popular-culture necessities. Reluctantly, Gore saw the point. “Gore turned serious,” Axelrod commented, “when the audience didn't want him to … and … he attempted to say something and, God forbid, you can't do that. So I sort of persuaded him to have a hit comedy instead of a serious flop. He went for it, reluctantly.” More than anything, he feared failure. More than anything, he feared returning to California, which he had to do shortly after the opening, with the entire country knowing his play had been a failure. In fact, he most feared having to face the barbed wit of the writers' table at MGM. There would be sharp humor and false sympathy at his expense. It was too painful to contemplate. Immediately he began to make changes, outwardly resigned, inwardly seething. But he was resolutely, triumphantly practical. Two scenes were dropped, one radically changed. A mushroom-cloud background was eliminated from one of the sets. The play he left behind in the earlier versions, “though hardly earth-shaking, was far more interesting and true,” he felt, than the one they were now performing. But “
because it costs
too much to put on a play, one works in a state of hysteria. Everything is geared to success. Yet art is mostly failure. It is only from a succession of daring, flawed works that the occasional masterwork comes. But in the Broadway theater to fail is death.” From the tryout in New Haven until the New York premiere, “I was more dentist than writer, extracting the sharper (and not always carious) teeth.”

On the train ride from Boston to New York, as author, director, and producers mulled over their situation, they were still uneasy, mostly frightened. The cast was anticipating a fiasco. Sitting separately, Sarah Marshall said to Conrad Janis (they soon were playing lovers in real life also) that she thought she had detected a flaw in Cyril Ritchard's performance the correction of which might make all the difference in the play's reception. It seemed to her that Gore had intended Kreton to be childishly unaware of exactly what a nuclear bomb was and what the consequences of nuclear war would be. The original text had designed the role to be played as a child amusing
himself with firecrackers. Instead Ritchard had transformed Kreton into a mustache-twirling villain. Therefore “everything he says takes on an almost Hitlerian meaning.” No wonder the audience was not laughing. Convinced she was right, Janis went immediately to the compartment where Gore and Axelrod were. “I said, ‘George, can I speak to you for a minute?'” So George sat down. I was the one who said to him, even though it was Sarah's idea, ‘You know Cyril is playing it all wrong.' This was absolutely an astounding thing for the juvenile to say to the producer and director. But George, who was no dope, sat there and said. ‘What do you mean?' We proceeded to explain to him what it meant that the character understood what an atomic bomb was. If, conversely, he didn't and thought it was a giant firecracker that made a lot of noise, the audience could then say, ‘Oh, well, he's mistaken, and he's not a bad person, and if he did know it was going to kill millions of people and pollute the air, he certainly wouldn't do it.' Which is exactly what happened. George told that to Cyril, who understood it immediately. We met the next day in the lobby of the Booth Theatre to rehearse the play in the men's room, actually the lounge downstairs, because the stage was being used, in front of the washrooms with chairs posted instead of props. Cyril had changed the character, and it became Noël Coward in his hands.”

As
Visit
opened in New York on February 7, 1957, the cast and playwright were still pessimistic. Sarah Marshall heard one of “the Shubert guys say to Clinton Wilder, ‘Do you want the moving-in bill put on the moving-out bill to save money?'” Most everyone concerned hoped, at best, to avoid embarrassment. If they had not laughed in New Haven or Boston, why should they laugh in New York? Before the performance Ritchard told the cast to go to Sardi's and have an extra glass of champagne to loosen up. When the lights went down, the Booth Theatre was filled with critics and theatrical notables, with friends of the cast and production, with the glamorous first-night audience that characterized Broadway premieres at a time when Broadway was American theater and theater culturally important. Still, for the rest of the seats “we had to drag people in, because we had no advance at all.” As the first act progressed, the cast began to sense that this was different from New Haven and Boston. The audience
was
laughing. At the end of the first act Martin Gabel turned to his wife, Arlene Francis, and said, “‘Heh, you know this is pretty funny.' And at the end of the second act he turned to her and said, ‘You know, I think this thing is going to be a
hit.' And in the middle of the third act, he said, ‘You know something, Jesus Christ, we have money in it!'”

Sardi's restaurant awaited, a cast party and the ritual of waiting for the early reviews, which would be out by the time people had finished their entrées. Nina was there with John Galliher. Gene and Kit had come in from Connecticut. Sally and Pick, stationed again at Mitchell Field, had attended the performance and came to the party. “The whole family was there,” Sally recalled. “About fourteen of us. We were his family. He had gotten the tickets.” Axelrod had been so desperate to get out word of mouth that
he
had arranged with a popular radio-talk-show host to read the reviews, even bad, over the air from Sardi's as they came in. “When the first one was this tone poem by Walter Kerr to Eddie Mayehoff, I had him read it and he burst into tears.” Brooks Atkinson in the
New York Times
thought Ritchard's performance “a comic masterpiece.” “The atmosphere was jubilant,” John Galliher recalled “Nina was very proud.” She seemed to Gene “to take full credit.” Every reviewer praised the play and lauded the playwright. The premiere was the first of 388 performances. Unexpectedly, Gore had a Broadway hit. The next day, as he flew to Los Angeles, he felt the relief of knowing that when he appeared at the MGM writers' table, he would be on the receiving end of congratulations and jealousy.

With the satisfaction and money from a Broadway hit, the spring and summer of 1957, spent mostly working in California except for June at Edgewater, were seasons of relative triumph. Gore's grief at Alice's and Latouche's deaths subsided. He missed them both, especially Alice. But he had a healthy amount of the ordinary capacity for bearing loss. Perhaps the one loss he might not have borne, except at a cost almost beyond bearing, was the loss of Howard, who was becoming, gradually, the indispensable man. When there had been a brief scare in 1955 about a cancer on Howard's ear, Gore, Isherwood noticed, was deeply worried. Fortunately, it turned out to be inconsequential. When MGM assigned him to work on a script with the working title
Spectacular
, he quickly saw that nothing would come of it. Since he was still paid $2,000 a week, it hardly mattered.
I Accuse
had finally gone into production, delayed mostly because of a casting problem. Zimbalist, frustrated, had not been able to obtain a major star for the main role and eventually settled on the talented José Ferrer, who was eager to
play the lead and direct. At least it was being made. The filming, at MGM's Ealing Studios near London, moved along fairly rapidly during late winter and early spring 1957.

The one fly in the professional ointment that demanded immediate attention, much of it distressing, was
Billy the Kid
. Warner Brothers, prodded by Newman, had finaly made a commitment to do it. Before immersing himself in the Broadway production of
Visit
, Gore had agreed with Newman that Fred Coe, with no movie experience but great television success, would produce it and Robert Mulligan would direct. They thought it reasonable to assume that the same team that had been successful with the television production would be successful with the movie version. Gore would use his television script as the basis for an expanded, full-length movie version. He had already given Coe a new script as the basis for his final draft. It would be his movie. When he arrived in Los Angeles in February, he learned that Coe had fired Mulligan and hired another director from television, Arthur Penn, whom Coe preferred. He had also brought in a journeyman scriptwriter, Leslie Stevens, to revise Gore's screen version, now to be called
The Left-Handed Gun
. In effect, Gore would have almost nothing to do with the film. Coe, he felt, had self-servingly betrayed him. “To be fair to him—I don't see why I should be—but to be fair to him, he was on his uppers. He was scared. There was no more of what he did, live television drama. Now he had to jump to the movies. He sees what he thinks is a stupid movie star in Paul Newman and a scatterbrained playwright who's all over the place in me, and he has an opening to get in and take it over and did.” Penn, whom he thought Iago to Coe's Othello, he despised. Paul, he believed, had done nothing to prevent this happening, partly out of inexperience, mostly because of an unwillingness to offend powerful people at a time when his own movie career was still at its beginning. Gore, in New York, had assumed that Paul was looking capably after both their interests. Under the circumstances it was not a realistic assumption. “I wish,” Newman remarked later, “Gore had written the screenplay. Maybe I should have pushed a little more for that to happen. But I didn't know much about the politics of Hollywood.”

With Fred Coe, Vidal tried a combination of thin honey and forcefulness. By early April it was clear that Coe had the legal power to enforce his changes. Warner Brothers would support the producer. Since the William Morris office in Hollywood represented all the principals except Newman, it
would not work against the interests of the majority of its clients, though it would do its best to provide equity for Vidal. “
In principle,” Vidal agreed
with Coe, “there is certainly nothing wrong with your calling in another writer and probing with him the script, but I believe you should have done me the courtesy of telling me
before
you made this arrangement rather than after.” He was, though, reduced to moral suasion. “I never thought I should ever have to remind you that it was I who wrote the television play, and interested Paul Newman in the picture, and got you involved as
our
choice of producer and that had I not been actively goading everyone concerned from July 1955 until last summer when you became operative, there would have been no production…. I realize that as time passes and you and Arthur work long together in warm communion, your own contributions to the script will loom larger and larger while my own will appear villainously small. Let me say you were, as always, sensitive and wise, cutting, directing, tightening, accenting, while Arthur gave us some fine visual settings. But to hammer the point home, the essential conception was mine and the narrative was mine. I now find myself in the odd position of having designed a house for myself only to find that the contractor has moved in and that I may or may not be invited to the house warming.” His only meaningful weapon was the threat of withdrawal and an appeal to their common interest. “To get down to cases, this is the problem for me: a) I will not share billing with another writer; b) nor can I honestly take credit for another writer's work; c) I have no intention of withdrawing easily. I believe it unwise, for both our sakes, to have a complete falling out now, tempting though it might be. We have a common interest in this project.” The changes Stevens, Coe, and Penn had made, he felt, had ruined the screenplay. When he gave them the opportunity to redo it, with his assistance, they declined. “
I shall want to pull out
altogether,” he told Harold Franklin. “I shall be paid. I shall get back my screenplay.” With the assistance of William Morris, happy to mollify him if they could do so without alienating the others, he regained control of his original script for the teleplay. He hoped to have the chance someday to make it his way. In the meantime, he refused to have anything to do with
The Left-Handed Gun
other than accept the money due him from the acknowledgment that it was based on a television play by Gore Vidal. It was an unhappy lesson in Hollywood politics.