Gore Vidal (89 page)

Unpleasant as the episode had been, there were no immediate consequences. “Actually,” Gore wrote four years later to Louis Auchincloss, “we both behaved like children and neither can take much satisfaction from any version.” No one at the White House took it seriously, even Robert Kennedy, for whom it may have seemed just another unpleasant encounter with someone he already disliked. Gossip, of course, quickly embellished it. But the President essentially dismissed it as the kind of thing his brother had a penchant for. Bobby had never been diplomatic, let alone tactful. It was not his strength. It was certainly not his job. Jackie did not in the least hold it against Gore. If what she heard about the interchange had importance for her, it was simply to try to remember to keep the two men apart, or at least avoid being together with both of them, something unlikely to happen anyway, unless it were at some other White House party. As always, such parties were a trial to Gore, and they intensified his ambivalence, his awareness that he was in the process of deciding to give up politics and New York/Washington social life altogether. But neither Jackie nor he saw this as any impediment to their cordiality. There were no further invitations to the White House that winter or spring 1962. Probably that would have been the case even if Gore and Bobby had been cordial. The White House had other social and political fish to fry, both at home and abroad, and there never had been an ongoing intimacy except with Jackie, who easily turned such friendships off as well as on. She did not turn it off with Gore regardless of what had been reported to her about the White House incident. When in early-summer
1962 he sent her a copy of
Three
and his first book of essays,
Rocking the Boat
, which contained the
Sunday Telegraph
article on the President, her response was friendly. She had just read his article on Jack and couldn't wait to get to the others in the volume. Since it was at last lovely summer, she would have leisure time to read, and she longed to know more about Julian the Apostate. She hoped that they would be seeing Gore soon and urged him to get in touch with her at Hyannis, where she would be for all of July.

Rocking the Boat
formally introduced Gore to a wide public as a more-than-occasional essayist. It was favorably reviewed, though its political articles riled conservative critics, some balm to the ache caused by the failure of
Romulus
, which had opened at the Music Box theater on January 10. Oliver Smith had designed the sets. “After a disastrous run-through,” Gore recalled, “he was sitting behind me in the theater—he leaned over and said—he called everybody cookie—‘Well, cookie, it isn't Aeschylus.'” At Sardi's he waited with the Roveres and Dupees for the first reviews. They were mixed but far from damning. Most reviewers found the first act “flat and ponderous,” some consolation for Gore, since the first act was Dürrenmatt, the second newly composed. “Let us be grateful for
Romulus, “
the
New York Times
reviewer concluded, “for a witty, slashing half-play assuredly is better than none.” Roger Stevens soon spent $50,000 of his own money on advertising to keep the play alive. But audiences did not come. It ran for only sixty-nine performances. “I decided,” Stevens wrote to Gore at the middle of March, that “
the fight was hopeless
…. I just had lunch with Cyril, who still can't understand why we closed the show, but, as you know, actors are very vague about financial details…. I hope … that by now you've finished at least two plays so that we can get back some money for our backers.” For Gore the retrospective analysis was frank. “I liked the notion of
Romulus
. It had failed everywhere, in Germany and so on, and I thought I could fix it and I couldn't. It runs out of gas halfway through. Once you know the plot, it's repetition. I did my best with the ending to try to open it up and make it a little larger than it was. If I'd had a better actor—I picked Cyril Ritchard in a moment of madness. He was a good comic basically, and he was wonderful in
Visit
. But he was not made
for this. I should have waited: I could have gotten Paul Scofield, who might have given us quite a different play. It didn't work. It's never worked in any language. It was a mistake.”

When
Romulus
closed, Gore was abroad. He had no intention, for the time being, of providing Roger Stevens with another play. A Broadway show had some of the same risks as a political campaign. Usually a great deal of effort and money produced no return at all. At least with a book, the book remained, a tangible embodiment of effort and imagination. Also, his confidence in the well-made realistic play that commercial theater encouraged had been undermined by the impact of the expressionistic plays he had seen in Berlin in 1960. Commercial theater seemed an untenable arena for effective symbolic or intellectual drama. Theater itself had never, he had felt from the start, been his most empathetic forum. He liked the glamour, the wide exposure, the opportunity to make a great deal of money. Unlike fiction, though, theater demanded excessive simplification of a sort his intellect and artistry did not readily embrace. He had done it for television, for movie scripts, for Broadway. But the enterprise had all along had an explicit Faustian element to it. He had not sold his soul, but he had sold his time and his pen, and the commercial devil, so to speak, had kept his side of the bargain. Large sums of money had been paid him, enough so that if he invested wisely and lived reasonably he would not have to write exclusively for money perhaps ever again, or at least for some time. And if he chose to do so, he could do it selectively, bound by neither long-term contract nor immediate necessity.

His campaign for Congress had had nothing Faustian about it at all. He had immersed himself in politics partly because he had, so to speak, been genetically programmed to do so, partly because ambition and circumstance had come together to hand him the opportunity to run for office. It was to remain an ongoing virus in the blood. But by early 1962 the virus had lost its strength. That he would ever be elected to high political office seemed less and less likely. Another campaign would probably be more a forum for articulating his ideas than a practical avenue into political service. In the ordinary run of things he was simply not electable. The extraordinary sometimes did happen, as it might have if he had been willing to continue to pay his 29th District political dues and make himself available for the congressional nomination in 1962 and, if necessary, again in 1964. Still, to run he would need some reasonable assurance that he had a respectable
chance to win. When Joe Hawkins urged him to try again for Congress in 1962, it was clear he had a better chance to win than in 1960. But the prospect of being a congressman had lost much of its attraction. During the spring and summer of 1962 he was given strong encouragement by the New York State Democratic establishment to run against the Republican incumbent for the Senate. He did some preliminary evaluations, including employing a professional analyst to evaluate the electoral situation, which reinforced his sense that Jacob Javits was virtually an unbeatable incumbent. Gore would have liked to serve in the Senate, but what was the point in spending time and money for an almost certain defeat? If he gave serious consideration to a long-term political plan, which would have encouraged him to accept losing in 1962 so as to position himself perhaps to win in 1966, he most likely found the thought of how he would have to spend his time during these years repellently chilling.

Eager to get away, he accepted an invitation from the Italian line, promoting its New York-Italy service, to sail as its guest to Rome and Athens early in 1962 on the
Leonardo da Vinci
. “It's not like a celebrity cruise as we envision it now,” Joanne Woodward recalls, “where people go on the cruise to entertain. The celebrities then were not expected to do anything. They were just to be there.” As a famous playwright, Gore seemed attractively compatible with other stars from the entertainment world. Gloria Swanson was on board, and his New York friends Ruth Ford and Zachary Scott. Howard would fly to Italy to join Gore there. Why don't you come on the cruise also? he had asked the Newmans. “I said, ‘Oh, no, I can't do that! My babies! My babies are small. What if something terrible happens to them? I couldn't do that!' So we said we couldn't go. Paul in the meantime made me feel very guilty, saying, ‘We never do anything! We don't go anywhere! Let's do something!' And I said, ‘My babies! my babies! How can I go?' And then, finally, Okay. But we didn't tell Gore that we were going. There was a farewell party on board, and we went and we chatted. Of course we had taken our bags on and had them hidden away. We spent the time at the party with Gore. Finally the announcement came, ‘All ashore that's going ashore.' We said, ‘Well, Gore, have a wonderful trip. We'll see ya.' And we went downstairs, clutching martinis, as if we were going to leave. We waited until the ship sailed out of the harbor, and then we went back upstairs. Gore was still sitting there, clutching a martini, one of many, I'm sure by then, and he looked up and said, ‘Wait, you're
supposed to be off! You're supposed to be off!' It was great fun and a wonderful trip.” Food was piled high, especially mounds of caviar. Liquor flowed. Gore read Isherwood's recently published
Down There on a Visit
, which he found powerful and funny, though he disagreed with Isherwood's emphasis on an aggressive division between hetero- and homosexual, as if the two had to be constantly at war. “
You do make me
laugh,” he wrote to Isherwood. “That image of the poster: won't you please help? nearly got me from my bunk to the deck of the Leonardo.” In the evenings the passengers were treated to movies in which the Newmans starred, including
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and
The Three Faces of Eve
. One of Gore's films was shown,
The Catered Affair
. One elderly lady developed a crush on him, another on Paul. Each, starry-eyed, followed her idol around the ship.

After a smooth Atlantic passage, the Mediterranean provided heavy seas, destabilizing storms. Howard joined the boat at Palermo. When they got to Athens in rough seas, the Newmans had had enough of the cruise. “No sooner had Howard got on,” Woodward recalls, “than we had this terrible storm. There were suddenly ropes all over the boat. Howard said we had to get off instantly. So we got to Piraeus and jumped ship. Got all our bags off.” Gore and Howard, soon joined by Elaine Dundy, who came from London, went on to Rhodes and other Aegean sites. Elaine's marriage had gone from frenetically embattled to bitterly divisive. She had been attempting, irresolutely, to divorce Ken, or at least to make a separation stick. During Tynan's two-year stint at
The New Yorker
she and Gore had become close friends, “inties” (short for intimate), a word she enjoyed using. Ken and Gore had continued as ordinary friends. On her visits to Edgewater, Gore had happily become her “dear Gauze,” a familiarity that encompassed a mixture of infatuation and love. Both accepted it as simply their ongoing enjoyment of one another. It involved pleasure, fun, help, a substantial correspondence when apart. Gore gave her much good advice about a play she had been writing, soon to be produced in London. One night at Edgewater, both drunk, they had gone to bed together. Now, at a particularly tense time in her life, she was delighted to be invited to join Gore in Athens, especially since she could share with him his fascination with the ancient world. The voyage had turned into what had been Gore's underlying reason for the entire trip, an on-site survey both through the eyes of the present and through an educated imagination that evoked the past of the lands Julian had lived in. Athens, where they spent almost a month, astounded him. The
American literary critic Leslie Fiedler welcomed them to a circle of American, British, and Greek writers who had made Athens in the fifties and early sixties a well-fabled artistic and cultural center. Conversation, sunshine, sex, food, the low cost of living—for a moment Athens seemed golden again. “
I have just come back
from Athens (a first visit; I am Hellenophile),” he was soon to write to the Greek ambassador to America, who had written him a “good and constructive” letter about the two chapters of
Julian
that had been published in
Three
, “where I completed a long section on J. at the university (from Ennepius) and at Eleusis…. Do you know my new friend [the Greek poet, Niko] Gatsos? or my old friend Kimon Friar? I have never felt more completely, atavistically at home than in Athens; yet I am of Roman descent!”

From Athens he and Howard went on to Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, Turkey, Athens again, and Rome. At Istanbul they explored the marketplace, examined the mosques. Julian the Apostate was on Gore's mind. Egypt seemed hardly different from when he had been there in 1948. From Jordan they attempted to cross into Israel at the Mandelbaum Bridge. Fortunately, the cooperative Jordanians manipulated their passports so that they could enter. At Tel Aviv they enjoyed the beaches. The handsome sabras compelled notice. He liked the lively, articulate, intellectual young Israelis. Jerusalem, for Gore the symbolic center of three restrictive, puritanical religions, did not appeal to him. Whatever impact his brief stay in Israel and Jordan had on him, his imagination was elsewhere. The Middle East's European and classical past riveted his attention, with special emphasis on the conflict between the classical and the Christian worlds that had been the dramatic center of Julian's life. The Arabness of the Middle East held no attraction. It was a world, so he wrote to Isherwood, where “
there are no facts
, no information.” When he failed to locate a copy of
Down There on a Visit
to replace the one he had given the Newmans, he had a quick lesson in the unavailability in the Middle East of Anglo-American literary culture, especially books. When they arrived in Beirut, he was happy at last to be again in a heavily European-influenced city, Lebanon noticeably less impoverished than other countries they had been to, including Israel. And, at last, there was good food. In Turkey he viewed the sites associated with Julian's reign. Returning to Europe, his second visit to Athens followed quickly after his first. The Greek sun, the blue-green sea, Piraeus in the distance from the Athenian hills, the white millennia-old marble resonating under an absolutely
clear winter sky everywhere he walked—suddenly Athens seemed a place he needed to return to, a place he could perhaps live in.