Gore Vidal (75 page)

In 1957 Little, Brown published as a separate volume the expanded stage version of
Visit
. For Thornhill, who hoped that Vidal would one day become a bestselling novelist again, it was an easy but shrewed investment. Actually, Vidal gave the book reluctantly to Little, Brown. “I should have preferred Random House to Little Brown,” he had written in February to James Oliver Brown, his agent, “but of course we owe LB something and the book, of course, is theirs.” A well-known literary agent, with an Ivy League manner, usually sporting tweeds and pipe, to whom he had been introduced by Louis Auchincloss, Brown had recently become Gore's representative, though he had little need for a literary agent, since he had only the plays to sell. William Morris handled his television and theater work, which Brown would have liked to have done. Brown managed only the book-publication arrangements with Little, Brown and, like the publisher, hoped Gore would have something more profitable to offer in the future. In Boston in June 1956 Gore was impressed both by Thornhill's obvious talent for maximizing profits, which he hoped would work in his favor, and his ability to drink four martinis without their having the slightest effect on his lucidity. In fact, though, Gore's mind was more on his frustrated desire that New American Library bring out paperback reprints of his novels, particularly
The City and the Pillar
, which had been out of print for over a year, than on Little, Brown's publication of his television plays. If Jim Brown could do him any real good as an agent, it would be in getting Dutton to release the titles they still controlled and Weybright to make more of his backlist available. Dutton continued to decline to cooperate. “
I would not get
into a row with Dutton at the moment,” Vidal advised Brown. “They will never relinquish their rights and you would just be involved in a long hassle.” Weybright was happy to publish paperback reprints of the three Edgar Box mysteries. Indeed, he urged that he be allowed to provide the real name of their author in the expectation that that would make them even more profitable. For Gore, no matter what the sales, the profit would be small. He declined. “The Edgar Box thing is a problem…. I want to keep the separation distinct, as much as possible, between my hack writing, no matter how charming, and the serious novels, no matter how dull.” To Jim Brown, who emphasized how troublesome these negotiations were, he admitted that he had “never been able to understand the curious jinx on these novels nor Weybright's reluctance to do them. When I lost the critics after
The City and the Pillar
and, generally, lost the public after
The Season of Comfort
, I might have survived if Victor had done as he was at one point obligated contractually to do: reprinting
Judgment…
. The argument that I am not commercial is, alas, rather hideously exploded by my Faustian success in television, movies, the mystery story and the stage…. I have done him a good deal of service both tactically and artistically and though the things I did for him I wanted to do, like
New World Writing
, I nevertheless find it mysterious that he did not reciprocate. Publishers do owe something to their writers. Good writing is not so common that it can be lightly passed over…. Barring a premature death, I shall be center stage for a good many years and, from time to time, I am quite sure that my publisher and reprinter will benefit materially. I think that now is the proper moment to convince Victor that my demands are just and my memory of neglect long.” More than anything, the stage success of
Visit
prompted Weybright to begin putting more of Vidal's novels back into print over the next few years, though in 1957 his resistance was still strong.

To make more attractive Little, Brown's edition of the expanded stage version of
Visit
, Gore wrote a brief preface, which he disarmingly began with the confession that he was “not at heart a playwright. I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer.” Though he lamented his absence from prose
fiction, explaining that he had undertaken dramatic tragedy and satire as an expediency in a world that had made earning one's living as a novelist difficult, the preface itself was an excellent example of another genre, the prose essay that he had eased into as well. A number of brief reviews he had done had provided limited opportunities for literary analysis, though it was not literary analysis in any formal sense that especially interested him. When he looked at a literary work, his interest was in its nature, the relationship between its virtues and his capacities as reader, some combination of wit, lucidity, the conversational voice, and the integrity of the reading experience. “Writing Plays for Television,” his foreword to the 1956 volume of television plays, caught some of the emerging essayistic tone. In the preface to the 1957 edition of
Visit
, the focus is on the process of creating a Broadway hit, the central self at issue is his own. It was this prose essay, brief as it is, in which he first found his voice as an essayist. When the
New York Times
declined to run it as a separate piece, he sent it to Bob Bingham at
The Reporter
, who had urged Gore to do reviews for him and who now had the bright idea of inviting him to be
The Reporter's
regular theater critic. The essay appeared in July, the first of numbers of essay-reviews on drama he was to write for Bingham, whom he now saw occasionally in New York, a brief revival of a less intense version of the friendship they had had in their Exeter days. Married, a father, still hoping to establish himself as a novelist, Bingham had settled in as a hardworking, modestly paid editor at
The Reporter
, later at
The New Yorker
, resigned to behind-the-scenes anonymity in his daily work, ambivalent about Gore's success, bitter about his own failures, especially critical of what he considered Gore's self-promotion. To Gore, Bingham seemed to have lost the ambition he had had at Exeter, perhaps, Gore wondered, a casualty of Bingham's brutal war experiences, a victim of some existential burnout. He was “a very good writer, a good journalist, and he wrote a novel which wasn't very good but it wasn't bad either and when it got rejected he gave up. I said,” Gore recalled, “that's not how you do it.” Some failure of nerve, perhaps of self-esteem, seemed at issue. “We worried about his character, that anybody could be so broken in spirit as to work for Max Ascoli,” the owner of
The Reporter
, “a real tyrant. Bob got on with him very well, which worried us, because nobody of mettle put up with him…. I remained fond of Bob. But I didn't see him much. A classic case of marriage parting old friends.” But there was still affection between them, and some teasing good spirits.
When Bingham named his son Thomas Truman Bingham, the Thomas for Tom Riggs, one of their favorite teachers at Exeter, the Truman for Harry Truman, “I always accused him of using it for Truman Capote, as he knew that I disliked Truman. ‘At least call him Tru-Gore Bingham,' I said.”

With his weekly salary from MGM and his royalties from the continuing run of
Visit
, he was more concerned with finding ways to keep a larger portion of his income than with making more. When he had hesitated for some weeks about taking an unattractive script assignment, MGM had suspended him, and he worried about the fact that his contract required his weeks on suspension be added as additional weeks of contractual responsibility, extending its life beyond its original terminus in 1959. Often enough, a contract writer who unexpectedly had a Broadway success demanded to be released or that his studio contract be renegotiated. Hollywood executives generally still bowed before the prestige of the New York theater. When Gore had returned to MGM in February 1957, after
Visit's
glowing reviews, Sam Zimbalist, with paternal pride, had taken him for the first time into the executive dining room, where he was greeted with congratulatory handshakes and backslaps. He had not thought, though, to try to change or break his contract. After a brief suspension he agreed to work on the script for
Spectacular
, but the length of his contract already was beginning to have some of the feel of a prison sentence, especially since he had to keep postponing work on
Washington, D.C
. and
Julian
. Deductible expenses against income helped fend off the worst depredations of the high income tax, but, still in the highest tax bracket, with the advice of his accountant, Leonard Strauss, he looked to two strategies to soften the annual blow: the first a retirement annuity that sent all his royalties for
Visit
, about $300,000, directly into an annuity account with Massachusetts Mutual; the second the purchase of rental property as an investment that would produce income against which there would be deductible management and maintenance expenses and possibly residence for himself in part of the building.

In late June he agreed to purchase for $90,000 416 East Fifty-eighth Street, a four-story brownstone with floor-through apartments. Paul Kent, one of his neighbors in Barrytown and a friend of Alan Porter, was happy to sell it to him. Short of immediate cash, Gore borrowed $9,500 from Nina, probably for the binder, and then went to contract in September, when he paid in cash a sizable portion of the purchase price, the rest partly a personal mortgage from Kent, partly a bank mortgage, a portion of the payments to
be covered by the rental income. It was a sensible purchase. Unfortunately, there was some confusion with an inconsistent, sometimes incoherent Nina about whether he was supposed to repay her immediately or whether he was to repay over a period of time or whether she had actually intended to lend him the money at all. Apparently it had been a loan, to be repaid at mutual convenience. In October, in a panic, Nina claimed she should have been repaid long before. Suddenly, but not for the first time, she seemed to be irrationally lashing out at him. Their business communciations now went through Leonard Strauss. From Southampton, Nina wrote to Strauss, “
I have told Gore
, and I wish to tell you so that there will be no misunderstanding, that his first financial
must
is to pay off the 9500 dollars that I put into the fifty eighth street place…. I also think that
Gore needs to learn
a business lesson, one does not use other peoples money in any way without their consent. I would never have agreed to a loan, I do not have the cash to operate the way I wish, to be able to, when conditions are the way they are going to be, and have that much on loan.” Gore had Strauss immediately send her a check for interest at 6 percent for three months, two weeks later a check for $3,500. The remainder followed shortly. Whether Nina in October had forgotten the terms of late June, or whether she had misunderstood, or not been in a position to understand, what they had agreed to, she transformed what was at worst a misunderstanding into another painful experience for her son, who had to have felt the punitive nastiness of the claim that “Gore needs to learn a business lesson.” After a period of some modest good feeling, it felt, for Gore, like old times again.

In spring 1957 Sam Zimbalist, appalled at the awful script he had for the remake of
Ben-Hur
, sounded out his young writing star about doing a thorough revision. Drastic changes were needed to make it filmable. The successful 1925 silent
Ben-Hur
had become one of MGM's signature films, a totemic invocation of the studio's glory days. With profits continuing to decline, MGM executives hoped that a remake of
Ben-Hur
would revivify if not the studio system then at least the financial bottom line. Karl Tunberg, a well-established, well-connected journeyman scriptwriter, had, implausibly, been given the assignment. His specialty was light comedy, his most successful movie
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
. Zimbalist, with some anguish,
immediately realized that Tunberg's unwieldy, undramatic script would have to be redone by someone who knew something about first-century Rome. It would be more than ordinary polishing. Well read, interested in history, with a practical pen for dramatic economy, planning to write a novel about the Emperor Julian, Gore seemed just the right person. The assignment, though, did not appeal to him.
Spectacular
was dud enough.
Ben-Hur
might be worse. If he had to earn his living writing movie scripts, then he preferred at least to write the script, even if an adaptation, from scratch. With no wish to offend his paternal supporter, he tactfully begged off the assignment, leaving Zimablist to find someone else to solve his problem. Gore suggested Isherwood. The three of them had lunch together. After some deliberation, Zimbalist backed away from hiring Isherwood. From Vidal's perspective, that was that. It was not his problem.

When the Malibu arrangement ended in late September, he was delighted to have some time at Edgewater. The Newmans, among others, came to visit, the river was attractive, the autumn weather lovely. As usual, by himself and with guests, as long as the warm weather lasted, he swam out to the island and back, eager for the exercise. Oscillating between slim firmness and noticeable expansion, he worried about his weight. He had bought an exercise machine, kept upstairs in his bedroom, to help him keep fit, which he soon declared a resounding failure.