Gore Vidal (80 page)

By late 1958, despite his promise to himself and his general disinclination, he was working on another film. When he received a request from Sam Spiegel, an Austrian-born independent producer whom he already knew
from Los Angeles, to write a movie version of Tennessee Williams's
Garden District
, he could not resist. Spiegel's 1954 production of
On the Waterfront
had been a commercial and artistic success. Tennessee had declined to do the adaptation himself. Soon after Spiegel telephoned Williams to buy the film rights for
Suddenly, Last Summer
, the second of the two
Garden District
plays, Gore, in early autumn 1958, joined Tennessee and Spiegel in Miami. “Sam was on a boat. I went to stay at the Dupont Plaza Hotel, and Tennessee was also there,” Gore recalled, “and it was just to have a chat about the script and so on. I was being auditioned, I guess. Tennessee had insisted on me.” When he received the assurance that he would be the sole scriptwriter, he agreed, partly as a favor to Tennessee.
Julian
went on the back burner again, as did a production of
March to the Sea
. A brash, aggressive producer whom some thought vulgar and undiplomatic, Spiegel soon signed Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Katharine Hepburn for the principal roles. Clift, a movie actor of great talent, with Oscar nominations for
A Place in the Sun
and
From Here to Eternity
, whose alcoholism and homosexuality had devastated his personal life, had an apartment on the Upper East Side and sometimes cruised in some of Howard and Gore's circle. “Montgomery Clift was in love with the actor Kevin McCarthy, Mary McCarthy's brother,” Gore recalled. Kevin “was seriously married but very fond of Monty. He was also upset because he thought Monty was killing himself.” Gore found Spiegel a fussy, domineering producer, “always destructive and generally pointless. He loved the power of ordering script after script. On
Night of the Generals
I wrote, at his demand, a thousand pages. On the other hand, Sam was very intelligent, somewhat unusual in films.”

Tennessee he was happy to see. The friendship remained strong, based on affection and a shared sense of humor, refracted through their awareness that a decade ago they had been relatively young together, though they saw less of one another since Gore had stopped going regularly to Key West. When Williams had an opening and a party, Gore was likely to be there. In London, Maria Britneva was a bond between them. They shared a group of New York friends and acquaintances, mostly on the Upper East Side, at Café Nicholson and at the round of parties and happenstance meetings in the area of East Fifty-fifth and East Fifty-eighth streets. Frankie Merlo, Tennessee's lover and still Howard's and Johnny Nicholson's friend, and Tennessee continued their relationship, though occasionally with great difficulty and some separations. Probably America's most famous playwright, Williams
was certainly its most notorious. The raw emotional power of his dramatizations and subject matter had risen to the level of a cultural incitement. Since the success of
Streetcar
Williams's ascendancy had had simultaneously a complicated downward drift, mostly due to the fact that he could never again replicate that triumph, partly because American mainstream culture found his themes offensive. A deeply flawed craftsman and aesthetician who repeatedly dramatized versions of the same hysteria, by the late 1950s Williams, an addictive personality, sustained his nerves on a well-stocked pharmacopoeia of Seconal and sleeping, pills. Success and stability were slipping away. Hysterically, though not inaccurately, he believed that many critics, and society in general, were eager to bring him down. That Spiegel wanted to make a major movie of
Suddenly, Last Summer
was both daring and prescient. It dramatized both late-1950s cultural repression and the incipient countercurrents that would radically change sexual politics in the 1960s.

Before returning to New York to work on the script. Gore went to Palm Beach with Tennessee to visit the Kennedys, vacationing at Joseph Kennedy's Palm Beach estate. Jackie, who had heard that Gore and Tennessee were in Miami, eagerly invited them to lunch, excited about the opportunity to meet the famous playwright. The rather apolitical Tennessee, who had heard of neither of the Kennedys, took Gore at his word that Jack was likely one day to be President. “I hadn't realized how long it was from Miami, so I drove. We were an hour late for lunch. The Bird was restive, blaming it on my driving. I said, ‘I'm certainly not going to let you drive.' So we did a lot of quibbling on the way. Then we had a great lunch.” When they arrived, Jack was target-shooting on the lawn, apparently with results that indicated he was a poor shot. Tennessee asked for the rifle and immediately shot three bull's-eyes. Jackie flattered the famous playwright, saying she was jealous of her half-brother Tommy, whom she mistakenly believed Tennessee had taken to Coney Island in 1951. As if already running for higher office, Jack, still a senator, praised one of Tennessee's less successful plays,
Summer and Smoke
. In a good mood, Tennessee whispered to Gore as, going in for lunch, they walked behind Jack, “
Look at that
ass.” “You can't cruise our next President,” Gore sternly said. To Williams the young couple looked far too attractive ever to qualify for the White House. If Gore had told Tennessee about the stirring of his own dormant political aspirations, the playwright presumably would have told him the same thing.

In September 1958 Gore went to California, “to get a director and star for his … play,” Isherwood remarked in his diary. “I do like him. He is handsome, sad, sardonic, plump—quite Byronic in a way…. Gore's favorite quotation ‘I am the Duchess of Malfi still.' He sees himself as an exchamp, out of condition and punchy who still has a fight in him.” Some of his fight was with the Beats, particularly Kerouac, whose success he resented, partly because he thought Kerouac's prose flaccidly antiliterary, almost incoherent. Also, if the public wanted to read Kerouac, why would they want to read him? “
Gore regards me
,” Isherwood observed, “also as a neglected writer of quality, so he feels a bond between us.” Gore also felt a bond, though of a thinner sort, with Mailer, at least in their mutual detestation of the Beats. Mailer had been unable to repeat the success of
The Naked and the Dead
. Both his second novel,
Barbary Shore
in 1951, and his third,
The Deer Park
in 1955, had been poorly received. Mailer had begun to redefine himself as a political and cultural critic, his new authorial persona soon to have its 1959 debut in
Advertisements for Myself
in which, as Gore had started to do, Mailer first found his distinctive nonfictional voice as an essayist. When Mailer, having decided to try for a theatrical production of his own adaptation of
The Deer Park
, looked for a helpful private audience for a reading of the play, he invited Gore and Montgomery Clift to join him and his wife, Adele, at their apartment on Perry Street in the Village. Gore's opinion as successful playwright would carry some weight. When Gore asked if he could bring Elaine Dundy, Mailer said yes. The Tynans had moved to New York in September 1958, Gore delighted that Ken had accepted
The New Yorker's
offer that he try a two-year stint as its theater critic. Soon after his return from England in March, Gore had queried Tom Driberg, “What news of Ken, et al? or did I dream these wraiths in a nodding winter?” Suddenly, six months later, the Tynans were part of the New York scene, Ken as flamboyantly distinctive as ever, Elaine as energetically explosive, now herself the author of a successful novel. Gore saw “a good deal of the Tynans,” he wrote to Driberg. “He has raised the level of criticism or rather indicated how it might be raised in New York, a hick town which attracts the world's venality if not affection. But I don't see the effect of his work lasting; we don't like that sort of thing.” Eager to introduce them to his New York friends, he hosted a party in their honor in November 1958, guests shoulder to shoulder at the small East Fifty-fifth Street apartment, many of them theater distingués like Moss Hart, Ruth
Ford, Zachary Scott, Adolph Green, and Betty Comden, eager to meet the West End's
enfant terrible
who now was to have some of the fate of Broadway in his hands. “I gave a party for the Tynans,” Gore wrote to Tom Driberg, “and it all went well until Ken, goaded beyond endurance, took Norman Mailer apart at supper.”

In late autumn, at Mailer's apartment, Norman, Gore, Adele, and Clift each read a part. Elaine was the audience. When Gore, sometime before the reading, had told Sam Spiegel, with whom he was working in New York on the script of
Suddenly, Last Summer
, that Monty was to be there, Spiegel asked him to report back on Clift's condition. With constant talk of Clift's heavy drinking, Spiegel worried about his reliability. “And I said I would, knowing that of course I would lie if I found him drunk, which I did,” Gore recalled. “So I lied to Spiegel with great joy and said, ‘He was wonderful.' Spiegel deserved everything he got in this way.” At first the reading went well. “Gore was very nice,” Mailer remembered. “He was generous that night, as one can be when talking to an aspirant. He kept saying, ‘Well, this is good, this really ought to go somewhere, and so forth and so on.' … He was almost always on the generous side. He protects his generous side and doesn't want people to know too much about it, and of course I loved his arrogance because it came with style. That was part of his charm.” As the reading progressed, Clift, drinking, began to slur his words. He soon passed out. At that point Gore, at his own suggestion, began to read Clift's part. The play, which he had read in manuscript, he thought not bad at all. Elaine, who did not like it, began to express her criticism to Mailer, who tactfully, even gently, deflected her remarks, reminding her that it was a rough draft of a work in progress. Elaine, Mailer recalled, “was dynamite. You'd get along with her sometimes. Sometimes you'd have a terrible fight. Sometimes you wouldn't speak for half a year. Sometimes you'd be great friends again. Elaine's ten kittens in one bag.” She was an honest kitten that night. More in sorrow than anger, as Mailer was bringing the reading to a close, she said, “Norman, this is shit!”

Roman fever had touched Gore in May 1958, but he still felt passionately about Edgewater, in love with the house and location. He had no reason to think, when he returned from London in March and then from Rome at the end of May, that he would not be able to resume his Dutchess
County life. The house had been a blessing to him, even when he could barely afford it. By springtime 1958 the garden and lawn were resplendent, the house handsomely comfortable, much of it Howard's doing. Though it was a particularly wet summer, Gore easily resumed his usual work schedule, making progress with his plans for
Julian
. In the fall, urged by Bob Bingham, he became
The Reporter'
s drama critic, which he was to do for two years, the best of his reviews collected later in his first book of essays. Sam Spiegel began to keep him busy with calls and conferences about
Suddenly, Last Summer
, a draft of which he had under way by late summer. The writing of
Julian
was still on hold again. Soon he had no doubt that he genuinely disliked Spiegel, resented his interference, and had little respect for his abilities. Such, however, was the price for augmenting his bank account so that he might in the near future be free to return to fiction. If he resented paying the price, he still paid it energetically, as if he had no choice other than to give to whatever project to which he had committed himself his full focus. Also, despite the demands of these secondary, moneymaking projects, he kept time free to continue and even intensify his reading about
Julian
. He bought and absorbed every book on the subject he could get his hands on, and he returned to the New York Edition of Henry James, rereading much that he had read before.

Now, to his delight, he had someone to discuss James with. Before leaving for London late the previous fall, he had met in New York, probably through Andrew Chiappe, Frederick Wilcox Dupee, Gore's Dutchess County neighbor, a former Bard professor, now a well-known literary critic and Columbia University professor since 1948. The Dupees had recently moved from their Red Hook farmhouse into the newly purchased Wildercliff, a large, lovely riverfront house built in 1798, about ten miles south of Edgewater, sufficiently distant from the railroad tracks so that they were not disturbed by the train. “They bought Wildercliff for $45,000,” their friend, the editor Jason Epstein, recalled. “It was like buying the Taj Mahal. Fred must have had a little family money. But they never had enough to paint it or furnish it.” Gore had followed up their meeting by having Dupee sent a copy of
Messiah
, which arrived when Gore was still in London. The perceptive, ironic Columbia professor had replied with the well-phrased literary response that Gore eagerly looked for from a distinguished critic, an effective mixture of encouragement and honesty. “
I can't say
… that
[Messiah]
appeals to me as much as your other books, especially
Judgment of
Paris
. Is
Messiah too
fantastic for a good working fantasy?” If Gore would like, Dupee would be “glad to deliver a short lecture” on several of his theories of fantasy, “if you will bring your notebooks…. Or just come for dinner when you're in Barrytown and we'll talk about something else.” Or they could get together for drinks in New York, where Dupee taught three days a week. Eager for literary talk, Gore found Dupee enchanting, the most intellectually interesting company he had ever had, someone whose sensibility and mind were permeated with and totally defined by his commitment to literary high culture. He seemed to have read everything. A slow, readily distracted writer, he had published in 1951 an excellent short book on Henry James.