Gore Vidal (94 page)

To his delight Gore soon discovered that Claire Bloom, with her husband Rod Steiger and their three-year-old daughter Anna, had taken an apartment in Rome, which they were to occupy for part of each of the next five years. Bloom and Steiger had married in 1959. Rome became their headquarters, to which they returned and from where they left in the usual traveling life of the actor. Movies were being made in Italy, England, Spain, and North Africa, as well as Hollywood. Rome was the perfect place to be. Gore and Claire quickly intensified their friendship, a combination of deep but mostly unspoken affection and mutual respect. In Rome over the next years Claire was a constant companion. “Those were great days,” she recalled. “We did marvelous, wonderful things. Day trips. I remember going with him to some place associated with Coriolanus, and it was unbelievably hot. Gore insisted that we climb up to the top despite the heat. I almost got sunstroke. And he just goes on. I never wanted him to feel that
he was with a woman and that it was boring. We wanted to keep up with him…. We were climbing up to see a Volscian ruin…. We had lots of Etruscan expeditions. Gore always said that my great excitement was to find the Cloaca Maxima. He's right. It was built by the Tarquins, a Tarquin king of Rome, the oldest kings of Rome. I found it very exciting. We had lots of wonderful expeditions.” Steiger, trained at the Actors Studio in New York, where Mickey Knox had gotten to know him, and who in 1954 had received an Academy Award nomination for
On the Waterfront
, was busy doing a series of international films at Cinecittà. At dinners and parties, often with other movie people, Gore and Howard found Steiger's aggressive self-involvement tolerable but unattractive, “the kind of actor,” Howard recalled, “who'd take out his wallet and show you his last review, which he actually did one night…. He was overwhelmingly egotistical.” Mickey Knox also found Steiger difficult to like. “He was full of mannerisms, the actor. He'd get serious and heavy. He was no fun at all.” In an unguarded moment Gore told Knox that he had been in love with Diana Lynn, whom he had seen less and less of in the late 1950s, though they remained on good terms, their pleasure in one another undiminished, though now mostly in recollection. Lynn had married Mortimer Hall, a wealthy New York newspaper heir, exchanging her acting career for a family and comfortable domesticity.

One of the attractions of Italian life was the availability of wonderful places to visit beyond Rome, both to the south and north, with even Greece relatively nearby. Though he had no special feeling for Egypt, when Harold Hayes proposed he write about Nasser and Soviet-American rivalries there, Gore was sufficiently tempted by the thought of again visiting the ancient sites to accept Hayes's offer. He flew from Rome to Cairo. April in Egypt shocked him. “
This was the hottest
spring in years,” he discovered, “in the Valley of the Kings where the temperature [was] over a hundred and the blaze of sun on white limestone blinding.” Egyptian politics seemed emblematic of the Arab mind, structured on coordinates totally out of the rational Western framework. The Suez Canal conflict of 1956 had even further embittered Arab-Israeli relations. When Vidal asked a prominent Arab if the Israelis did not have reason to feel threatened by the announced intention of the Arab countries to drive them into the sea, he got the usual unsatisfactory answer. What he did see clearly as his own view of the American-Soviet conflict was evolving into a strong conviction that America
vastly overestimated the Soviet threat was that, with its technological level abysmally low, Russia had real reasons to feel threatened. With such friends as Russia, Egypt hardly needed enemies. Soon after returning to Rome he wrote “A Passage to Egypt: A Sophisticated Traveler's Adventures and Observations in a Most Curious Country,” which
Esquire
published in October. He was much more interested, though, in seeing more of Italy than Egypt. Eager to view at leisure places he had visited only in haste or had been dreaming about since his first visit in 1939, he could hardly wait to get going, despite the bothersomeness of his ulcer, and despite his commitment to finishing
Julian
. With a hired car and driver, he took a six-day excursion to Naples, Cumae, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Amalfi, Paestum, Agropoli, Lecce, Brindisi, Foggia, Lucera, Troia, Caserta, and back to Rome. “This was to me the greatest joy of living in Italy, like driving to Cremona, a city that I didn't know, going to the best hotel, to a marvelous restaurant, getting to know Cremona for two or three days, and then we'd go home.” In late April, with Rome unseasonably cold and his bones chilled, he took the train to Taormina with Howard and Maria Britneva, his first visit to Sicily, where he ran into Nan and Gay Talese, the former an enterprising young editor, the latter a rising journalist especially interested in cultural issues, both of whom he knew about but had not met before. Sicily, he wrote to Fred Dupee, “
is splendid just now
, very rich, green, wild flowers, and bunnies romping among the ruins of worse as well as better days.” He toured the island in a rented car,
Blue Guide
in hand, then flew back to Rome, where, refreshed, he immediately returned to
Julian
. “All in all a quiet time though people keep coming, expecting to be amused and I am at that part of the book where I don't want to see anyone,” he wrote to Alice Dows. In early June he was traveling again, this time to Spoleto, where he enjoyed Menotti's company and stayed with him overnight, then to Assisi, Perugia, and Orvieto, a short but pleasurable trip. A longer trip late in June gave him even more pleasure, but at a price. “Please come,
please come!!!”
Elaine Tynan had urged, signing her letter with hearts and cupid arrows. As another reclamatory effort in the late stages of their tumultuous marriage, the Tynans had planned an eating tour in France, to start from Paris, where Gore joined them on June 22 for “a pleasantly bloating” experience, which soon left him with pounds to work off at Cheever's gym. From Paris they went mostly to three-star restaurants in Lyons, Vienne, and Lac d'Annecy. “I did the driving,” Gore recalled. “Ken couldn't drive…. He would sit
with a map, and I would do the driving and he would direct.” Ken and Elaine managed to do only a little sniping. The Tynans went on to Spain. Gore returned, via Switzerland, to Rome.

With Howard in late June he came back to Paris, where for $3,000 he bought from the actor Robert Wagner a jet-black 1961 Jaguar, the cost of which he asked his accountant in New York, the well-known Bernard Reiss, to deduct as a business expense. A self-important cultural entrepreneur very much involved in the arts, who had collected a fortune's worth of modern paintings, Reiss years later was to be involved as executor in the contentious disposition of Mark Rothko's estate. Since Gore's work was his pleasure, his pleasure his work, and he used the car to go places he might write about or to see people he had business with, it seemed a deductible expense. When Gore was audited, as Gene Vidal also was at about the same time, he suspected it had more to do with Robert Kennedy than with questionable deductions. The audits were almost always resolved in his favor, though a large part of his income still went to taxes, and his residence abroad did not entitle him to any special tax arrangements. As he worked on
Julian
, with one eye on his bank account, he suspected he might soon have to accept one of the lucrative screenwriting proposals he was regularly sounded out about. “
I begin to think
I shall never finish
Julian
. It has got very long but I hope another month will see it in shape,” he told Alice Dows. For the time being, his answer was no to film offers. He kept writing
Julian
, and with Howard or with George Armstrong, occasionally with both, he went on excursions. In the fast, graceful Jaguar, they drove in mid-July first to Spoleto again, then to Florence and Siena, then up to Lugano and back to Rome, the pleasure of the adventure only partly marred by their different driving temperaments. Howard “couldn't stand Gore's driving.” “And I was a good driver,” Gore insisted. “That was your opinion.” Howard admitted he was “very conservative. I didn't have the competitiveness on the road that Gore did.” “Yes, but you also didn't have the accuracy.” “Maybe not, but I wasn't as bad….” “If the important turn was to the right, he doesn't really know right from left, so he'd make a left turn. I would be steaming. My blood pressure would be tripling. He would defend his position, no matter how incorrect. He'd say, ‘Well, it said to go to the left.' I was not stoical about his driving. I generally drove. We drove all over Europe with me at the wheel.” The black Jaguar performed well, though both drivers' blood pressures boiled. Passengers were often shocked at how intemperately they
railed at one another, though the minute they arrived some place it was as if they had not been fighting at all. Soon, when Gore proposed motoring tours, Howard declined to go, for both their sakes.

With
Julian
written but not quite finished by early summer 1963, Gore did not in the least mind having to fly to New York and then Los Angeles at the beginning of August to put in two weeks on the preparation of
The Best Man
for filming. In mid-July, Fred Dupee came by on his way back to New York. “I doubt if he will ever be able to live in Rhinecliff again,” Gore wrote to Alice Dows. “
He is quite
euphoric in Italy. I do a lot of sightseeing, very little social life; and regular exercise (I have become mad on the subject: one feels so much better).” As much as he himself loved Rome, he missed Edgewater. While at Via Giulia, Dupee read much or all of the manuscript of
Julian
. “I listen to him (he was a great help on the first part),” Gore wrote to Ned Bradford, his editor at Little, Brown. He is “the only critic I
can
listen to with profit.” With his flight home imminent, he confided to Dows that he did “miss the country but the vacation from the U.S. was needed,” alerting her to his return to Edgewater and to American scenes in general, though only for the summer and early fall. Howard, with Blanche and Billy, would stay on at Via Giulia. Gore would rejoin him as soon as
The Best Man
filming permitted. Distressed at the awful Hollywood mess that had been made of
Visit to a Small Planet
, he wanted to make sure
The Best Man
film had some reasonable resemblance to the wit and vision of the play. Its critical and financial success had been gratifying. Even Howard's tiny investment had been rewarded tenfold; within three months of the opening, he had received a check for $15,750 to add to his annual $6,000 salary from Gore, an arrangement that had made the business part of their relationship explicit and provided a modest independence. Gore's profits had been put immediately into a Lehman Brothers Profit Sharing Plan. The income from the plan provided about $10,000 a year.

In early summer 1960 United Artists had bought the Playwright Company's share of the film rights for $300,000. Eager to keep as much control as possible, Gore agreed to “be a sort of producer as well as the writer of the screenplay.” He would be paid $100,000. When United Artists engaged the famous Frank Capra to produce and direct, Gore became concerned. He was not an admirer of
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
or
Meet John Doe
, an
Italian-American immigrant's utopian fantasies about how American politics ought to be. “
Even at twelve
, I knew too much about politics to be taken in by his corny Mr. Smith coming to my town.” Capra's apple-pie Americanism seemed incompatible with
The Best Man's
political realism. If Capra made the film, Gore feared it would be as disastrously different from his playscript as had been the films made from
Billy the Kid
and
Visit to a Small Planet
. Uneasy, he had gone to see Capra soon after United Artists bought the rights. “Suddenly, Capra was inspired. ‘Let's open this up,' he said, small bright eyes like black olives. ‘At the convention, on the first day, our good guy—we'll get Stewart or maybe Fonda—he goes out into the crowd, where all these little people are the—you know, delegates.' … What, I asked, masking my inner despair with a Mickey Rooney smile left over from Boy Airman days, ‘does he
say
to them that's going to be so important?' Capra was radiant in his vision. ‘He quotes Lincoln to them…. Now then, get this,
He dresses up as Abraham Lincoln
. Then he gives them the Gettysburg Address, or something.' I said that I thought that this was truly inspired. Then I went to United Artists and got Capra off the movie and put myself in control. Next I picked a pair of bright young producers to produce, and we hired a director who had worked for me in television.”

Apparently he met Stuart Millar first, before Millar and Larry Turman had become business partners. “I was lunching with Stuart at the Oak Room at the Plaza,” Turman recalled, “and he had met Gore or something, and Gore came up, and Stuart said, ‘Gore, this is my new partner, Larry Turman,' and Gore said, ‘Stuart, I knew when you fell you'd fall hard.'” Millar, who had been an assistant to William Wyler, and Turman, from a lower-middle-class Los Angeles family, both about the same age as Vidal and partners since 1959, had had a small-budget/strong-profit success with
The Young Doctors
, whose entire production cost had been $1 million. United Artists had also grown nervous about Capra. They had in mind an expenditure of no more than $1 million in addition to the $400,000 purchase price. Capra, they had begun to suspect, would want to spend much more. Probably, then, both Vidal's concern that Capra would make the wrong kind of film and United Artists' about cost resulted in a new production team. Most likely, Harold Franklin at William Morris raised Millar's name. Young, energetic, sufficiently experienced and very cost-conscious, Millar and Turman seemed just right. Franklin Schaffner, a handsome, taciturn man with a reputation for being particularly good with male characters and
relationships and who, before doing movies, had made his reputation in live television, where he had directed Vidal's first play,
Dark Possession
, seemed a sensible choice. Gore liked and thought well of him. Vidal soon had a screenplay ready. The script conferences went smoothly. Vidal found the producers capable and companionable. Millar and Turman thought Vidal charming, bright, sophisticated about most movie things, and pleasurably easy to work with, “the consummate professional,” as Turman later remarked. At first the plan was to make the film in 1962, for 1963 release; then in 1963, for 1964 release, though there was disagreement about when in 1964 to release it. The producers thought it should open at the start of the summer political-convention season. United Artists thought that might be more damaging than helpful. By spring 1963 the cast was in place. To everyone's delight, in April Henry Fonda had unhesitatingly agreed to play William Russell. The producers cabled the good news to Vidal in Rome. Cliff Robertson, fresh from playing John Kennedy in
PT 109
, signed on for the Nixon-like candidate. Though Joanne Woodward turned down the role of his wife, Edie Adams immediately accepted the part. Lee Tracy, who had been splendid in the play, agreed to do the Harry Truman-like character again. Vidal suggested Ann Sothern for the meddling Democratic committeewoman. When Turman was away, Millar signed Margaret Leighton for William Russell's wife. When Shelley Berman screen-tested for the role of the informer, everyone thought him perfect for the part. Two excellent actors took important small roles: Gene Raymond and Kevin McCarthy, Mary McCarthy's brother, whom Gore knew from their overlapping New York worlds. With the budget and production schedules set, space was rented at Columbia Studios; the Los Angeles Sports Arena would serve as the convention hall, and the hotel scenes would be shot at the Ambassador. By early August, when Gore arrived at Edgewater, everything was ready. In California during mid-August they worked on the final shooting script, which they finished by the end of the month.