Gore Vidal (93 page)

Though he complained in late winter 1963 that “I
have an ulcer
, don't drink, have a short temper and constant melancholy without the fine ups and desperate downs of the grape,” his melancholy did not prevent him moving ahead briskly with
Julian
and having a busy Roman social life. Henry James was sometimes on his mind, including James's heavy London social schedule. “In a way I'm grateful for the ulcer: no drinking for months which will give me courage
not
to dine out 174 times (the Master's number) this season.” He reminded himself that he had come to Rome for a “quiet time.” Somewhat shy, sometimes reticent, qualities he managed often to obscure by overcompensation, he hoped for some happy balance between sociability and work. In his daily schedule, writing, reading, and exercise took priority. He walked everywhere. In the afternoon he went daily for workouts to a newly opened American-style gym run by an American named Ed Cheever. The weather felt to him like the Hudson River Valley in October, which he liked. But he also enjoyed visitors and visiting, though usually late in the day. There were ample opportunities for both. A solid three hours of writing in the morning usually exhausted his primary creativity; then there was correspondence and, with long calls to Britain and America ruinously expensive, almost all communication was by mail. Dinner was sometimes at the flat, where the maid Vitalia cooked, though Howard did the shopping and occasionally cooked also. Often, though, it was at a trattoria, particularly his favorite, La Carbonara, where, as in Rome in general, the dollar went a long way, and it was not expensive to indulge his usual desire to be host. Even the large Via Giulia apartment was reasonable, the equivalent of about $200 a month, though they had had to commit themselves to paying for a full year despite their intention to occupy it for only half that time. It “was sublet from an old English gentleman who had been married to an Italian,” Howard recalled. “He worked for the British diplomatic corps. The William Morris office in Rome went to an agency and got it for us. It was on the ground floor, a garden floor, with a long big hall, with a staircase going up to another floor, where there were the two bedroom suites and, I guess, a servant's room in the back. To the left was the main salon and the dining room and the garden on two sides. The bedrooms were just above that. It was a strange-shaped apartment, but it was, for Rome, very elegant and with lots of space.”

Soon after they settled in, the British novelist Angus Wilson stopped by for a visit. “
He has gained weight
,” Gore wrote to Louis Auchincloss, “and looks rather like Margaret Rutherford” and “sounds like the Queen…. He is the most operative man-of-letters since Hugh Walpole, but flawed by intelligence. I do like to see and hear him; less to read his novels, but the stories were marvelous.” Wilson was, he told Dupee, “in that euphoric state the British fall into the moment they get out of England, rather like the Institute” (Rovere's joking name for when Gore, Fred, and he would get together) “at the second martini on a summer's day…. Since he is the best of talkers and very quick, one forgives the busy-ness, which goes even beyond Mailer if only because Angus has a plan of battle for a war he means to win as opposed to Norman's doomed uprisings, invariably put down by govt. troops. With firm resolve, Angus has attended every writer's conference in every country, addressing each provincial literary parliament in its own language, including Danish.” Terry Kilmartin, the influential editor of
The Observer
and translator of Proust, with whom Gore had become friendly in London and for whom he had begun to review, stopped by, eager to talk about literary things and people. A visit from Tom Driberg, regularly to drop in on Gore's Italian life, was imminent. The Anglo-Italian connection immediately became part of his Roman world. The centuries-long British presence still flourished. There were the famous ghosts from the past, the artistic and the aristocratic English who had intertwined their lives with the Italian world. Gore knew very well where Keats was buried, where Turner painted, where Byron flamed. But the current British presence in Rome was less literary than social, often on the highest levels, mainly centered around the estimable Judy Montagu, Gore's friend from his London visits in the late 1940s. Having moved to Rome in the 1950s, Montagu had taken up residence on the Isola Tiberina, a perfect combination of seclusion and accessibility not far from Via Giulia, in a charmingly complicated duplex apartment with medieval vaulted ceilings, whose ancient Roman foundations had probably been part of the Temple of Aesculapius. Attached to her island and to Roman history, married to the American painter and photographer Milton Gendel, who had lived in Rome since 1950, she anchored the British Anglo-Roman social world, partly by the force of her own intelligent graciousness but also by her friendships with and social command of distinguished visitors, the foremost of which was Princess Margaret. She and the princess “were best friends, and Judy was
the mistress of the revels,” Gore recalled. The Princess was a regular visitor at Isola Tiberina, with her husband Tony Armstrong-Jones. So too were other interesting English, from Diana Cooper to Evelyn Waugh to Iris Tree. The art historian John Pope Hennessy visited regularly. Italian aristocrats and artists were often in attendance. Peggy Guggenheim came from Venice. As jet travel promoted international connections, Montagu's American friends, including Arthur Schlesinger's wife, who had become the president of the Tiber Island Historical Museum Association, also made Isola Tiberina one of their destinations. Soon Gore and Judy were having amusing lunches together, often just the two of them. “She was quite unattractive,” Howard, who rarely got to see her alone, recalled. “She had a horsey face, but thoroughly enchanting…. She was about five foot six, with a decent figure but nothing you would look at. She didn't dress badly, but she wasn't stylish. She and Gore were buddies. She had a very good sort of masculine sense of humor. A very upper-class lady. Gore adored her, and she adored Gore.” Judy, Gore wrote to their mutual friend, Tom Driberg, “is
splendid company
, as always, an island of illuminating malice in a pasta-sea.”

Though he missed American friends and Edgewater associations, many of them came regularly that spring and summer. Rome seemed on everyone's itinerary. Close friends stayed in the guest bedroom at Via Giulia. In June, Kit and Gene came for a brief stop on a monthlong European trip, father and son pleased to see one another, though Gene felt overtired from travel and depressed at having too little interesting professional work to do. Despite appointments to various military and aviation-industry committees, he felt put out to pasture. Late in the spring Fred Dupee, traveling with Andrew Chiappe, stopped by for a visit en route to an academic conference in Yugoslavia. Roman life appealed to Fred immensely. In the summer, when Gore and Howard were away, Andy Dupee and her daughter, having a European summer, stayed at the Via Giulia apartment, which they found comfortable enough except for the mess Blanche and Billy made each night in the kitchen. Elaine came from London, with her ten-year-old daughter, Tracy. Unfortunately, the enchanting Tracy had “a hacking cough which has nearly sent us all riding on ahead: the viruses of childhood are fatal to adults: King Herod's gesture was no doubt a sanitary one.” Also, that week the heating system at Via Giulia failed, so “the last week has been hell.” “Everyone seems to be visiting Rome and it is just like the country: I am an inn-keeper, which I mind only about half the time.”
Mostly, the guests were welcome, including the always amusing Sam Lurie, with his companion and colleague Stanley Kaminsky. “We will arrive in Rome June 1 and will stay till the 4th, then on to Positano, etc. Will you be there? Would you like us to stay with you? … Why does Bobby Kennedy only stare when I mention your name?” “Dear Maureen O'Hara,” Gore replied, “Yes, you … will be welcome…. You had better have a lot of gossip and better than your meagre letter suggests. Meanwhile I remain as always a Great American.”

At a Roman dinner party early in June, Sam and Stan met a new friend of Gore's, the attractive Alice Boatwright, known as “Boaty,” a Southern-born New York- and London-based movie publicist. Her extensive sociability and her familiarity with an ever-widening circle of well-known people had been elevated into a professional art. Boaty “was very amusing,” Stanley recalled. “But a name-dropper, and even that's funny, unintentionally…. We all had dinner together at a restaurant in the ghetto area, in an old firehouse. Sam and I decided that we would try to stump her. While we were talking, with all these names flying around—we had a client for a short time named Mark Brandel, whom nobody really had ever heard of whom we knew. He was English. I said to Sam or Sam said to me, ‘Oh, by the way, have you heard anything from Mark Brandel?' We expected Boaty either to say nothing or to say who was Mark Brandel or to react in some way. Boaty said, ‘Do you know Mark Brandel? I talked to him not two weeks ago when I was in London. He's fine. You know his book is doing very well, etc., etc.' And on she went. She knew exactly who he was, which was rather remarkable…. Then later, in New York, at a party, she was there, and I said, ‘Boaty and I know each other from Rome, where we met.' Before I could get another word out, Boaty said, ‘Stanley and I met at Gore Vidal's the day Pope John died.' It was true. When we were there, Pope John died. And I thought, how wonderful! Even I couldn't put together in one sentence Pope John and Gore Vidal.” Later in June, in a Rome crowded with participants in the papal conclave, Gore, at 3 A.M., with one hundred thousand other people, saw Pope John XXIII lying in state. With so many American newspaper people in town, it felt like home. There were also Americans who were in town permanently, or at least, like Gore and Howard, for long residences. One stellar friend, in the tradition of Gore's “old ladies” for whom Dot was the prototype, was the American popular novelist, Grace Zaring Stone, whom Gore had met in New York in the late fifties and who
regularly spent part of the year at her Greenwich, Connecticut, home and three or so winter months happily in Rome, often accompanied by her daughter, Eleanor. Frank Capra had turned the best-known of her novels,
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
(1930), into a successful Hollywood movie. A witty, self-confident woman with a strong sense of presence and international sophistication, she found Gore an attractive companion whom she loved to have join her for tea or dinner, often at her hotel near the Parliament buildings. They shared a sense of humor, an enthusiasm for language and life. Both were perceptive analysts who turned gossip into wit and wisdom. She “was kind of divine in her own way,” Howard thought. “Funny, funny, funny. She was so crazy about Gore then that she resented my presence, but I didn't mind. Gore and she had a wonderful relationship…. We'd take her to the opera, we'd take her to dinner. She was just wonderful company. First of all she was a writer and knew everything about writing. She and Gore would spend hours talking.”

Two Americans on the scene when Gore arrived quickly became friends. Mickey Knox, the young actor and Norman Mailer's childhood friend, whom Gore and Howard had met in New York and who had been a guest at Edgewater, had recently moved to Rome. He had had difficulty getting jobs in America either because of an early Communist Party affiliation or because of an affair with a Hollywood movie executive's wife. Married to Mailer's ex-wife's sister, Knox had moved from Paris to Rome to do a movie. Short, handsome, he was a down-to-earth, fun-loving friend, frequently hustling for work, whose unmistakable New Yorkishness was part of his charm. As the center of a flourishing European movie industry, Rome attracted many Americans, including Clint Eastwood—whom Gore regularly saw at his daily workouts at Ed Cheever's—revivifying his dormant career in what came to be called “spaghetti Westerns.” More important, Gore soon met George Armstrong, an American journalist from Little Rock who had gone to Harvard and had fallen in love with Italy in the summer of 1948. In 1950 he had enrolled at the University of Florence under the G.I. Bill. On his return to New York, Italy seemed the blessed place. When his landlord offered to buy him out of his $28-a-month subleased apartment, he used most of the money to purchase passage to Naples via Tangier. For a long time he did not, so to speak, look back. Life in Rome was cheap. Entertaining companions, good food, and nonpuritanical sex were readily available. A movie enthusiast, he enjoyed the interaction of Cinecittà and
Hollywood. Earning a living, though, was sometimes a struggle. He did a daily column for an American-run English-language daily, then “air-mailers” for American newspapers, and soon articles for the London papers, especially
The Guardian
, and also
The Economist
. In June 1963 a friend told him that Gore Vidal was staying in Rome. He soon stopped by the apartment. When Howard opened the door, Armstrong noticed piles of yellow legal-size papers stacked on a hallway table. “That looks like manuscript,” he said. “Yes, Gore's new book.” “I guess that'll be a lot of work for you.” “Are you kidding—I don't do typing! Not on your life!” It was the start of a friendship, with Gore, not Howard. Later, George was to do some of the typing, for which Gore paid him. Over the next decades he was to be, among other things, a traveling companion, especially to the Italian cities they both were enchanted by. “He was all of what was left of my Exeter world,” Gore remarked. “He was at Harvard when all of my Exeter classmates were there, and he knew them all. He didn't hang out with them, but he knew them, and it was all the same generation. We knew many of the same people from the forties. He was a great fan of the movies. Had Roman fever too, as I had. So we had a confluence of interests.” A thin, somewhat delicate-looking man of medium height, diplomatic in manner though an assertive conversationalist, alert to social nuances and interested both personally and professionally in political and cultural life, he was happy to match Gore's late hours drinking wine at outdoor cafés, a regular part of Gore's Roman life.