Gore Vidal (95 page)

In Los Angeles, Gore enjoyed Isherwood's company, though most of his other friends were out of town. The relationship gave him great pleasure, and Isherwood's candid entries about Vidal in his private diary, often in the tone of a loving but analytical father about a complicated son, reveal Isherwood's affection for him. “
I do like
and admire him—absurd and serious simultaneously, and all the time,” Isherwood wrote. Himself an incurable domestic romantic, Isherwood found Gore's sex life incomprehensible, just
as he thought Gore's political enthusiasms incompatible with his artistic aspirations. When Gore had been in Los Angeles for the July 1960 Democratic convention, Isherwood found him enjoying “playing the role of the reckless young political gambler, rushing to fame or disaster. He enjoys playing with the idea that the Republicans will launch some terrific smear campaign against his private life…. He talked about ‘the new Athens' which will arise when Kennedy is in power; but at the same time he described, rather admiringly, instances of Bob Kennedy's ruthless methods. Gore also admires Jack Kennedy's ruthless sex life. As for himself, he claims that he now feels no sentiment whatever—nothing but lust. He can't imagine kissing anyone. The way he has to have these sex dates set up is certainly compulsive.” Whatever his personal practices, Gore was more concerned than Isherwood, and a great deal more practical, about the larger issue of the relationship between consensual sexual conduct and legal statutes. For that, among others reasons, politics was more important to him than to Isherwood, and among those of Isherwood's generation the person with whom Gore most shared a sensibility and a dialogue about such matters was his British friend, Tom Driberg. Before leaving Rome at the end of July, Gore had urged Driberg, as a member of Parliament and an important Labour Party leader, to help persuade Labour to support reform of the British legal statutes concerning homosexual practices, known as the Wolfenden Laws. “
If your party
would only support Wolfenden reform” in the upcoming election “it would make many well wishers breathe easier.” The issue was to him inseparable from the overall health of a modern liberal society. “I am troubled by what seems to be a new puritanism rising in England, fully blessed by socialism which does like nothing better than to involve itself in private lives under the guise of ‘morality' and the good life, not realizing that the ‘morality' is Mosaic in origin and beautifully antipathetic to the good life.” Unlike Isherwood, Gore looked to larger issues and particularly to long-term practical consequences. “This election is a most important one,” he told Driberg, “and not just for your nice island. It means that the West is
consciously
moving toward the planned society and Americans will respond in kind, perhaps in '68. But if the planning is
au fond
neurotically based I see a perfect nightmare come to life: a controlled, illiberal, authoritarian society, drawing for its authority on all the evil, anti-life sources which so appeal to the northern peoples. I hate the word ‘puritanism' with a passion, for it implies that (a) what is pure is a deducible abstraction and
(b) it invariably involves restraint, preferably imposed forcibly on others. I do feel quite nervous during this period: things can go awfully wrong.”

On
The Best Man
sound stage, where these issues had a muted presence in the play's plot and themes, the important things went well. True to form, Schaffner got fine performances out of the male characters, though Cliff Robertson, who was used to acting leading-man roles, proved annoyingly persistent in his attempt to make clear to the world that this was for him a “character role.” He had dyed his hair partly white in order to make himself appear older. Unfortunately, this made him look too old for the age of his character. Also, the directors, as a realistic touch, had at some cost created mock covers of
Time
magazine with a photo of Robertson as the Nixon-like character. They had been created before Robertson had dyed his hair. Despite persistent efforts to get him to have his hair revert back to its normal color, Robertson resisted, and two weeks of shooting time were lost. Schaffner had poor luck with two of the three female roles, at least in Gore's view. Since Ann Sothern had been his suggestion, he took the blame himself. “She was terrible. She wouldn't say a word [of the script]. She'd make up her own jokes, which she thought were really cute. She lost every laugh. Edie Adams was pretty good, and Margaret Leighton was having a nervous breakdown because Tony Quinn had dumped her. So she was having crying jags and complaining about being in an American script. I said, ‘Well, why did you take the job?' Frank was a good director. But he couldn't direct women. All the women were bad. If he'd known how to talk to women, he might have been able to help them.” Turman, who thought all the female performances good to excellent, had more trouble with Robertson than with anyone else, and in the end thought the film an artistic success. When he realized the script was too long, he was delighted to find Gore responsive. “We were already shooting when we decided to take six or eight pages out…. Gore rolled up his sleeves and we worked. He was never defensive about it.”

When the rough cut was ready in December, Gore returned to Los Angeles. The producers had cabled him on November 11, “
SHOOTING COMPLETED
ON YOUR EPIC THIS AFTERNOON STOP ALL WENT WELL STOP HOPE TO HAVE ROUGH CUT MID DECEMBER CAN YOU PLAN ACCORDINGLY.” Unaware, in Turman's view, that a rough cut was just that, Gore was appalled at the infelicities in the film, convinced that his blundering colleagues had produced what would be for him another movie disaster. Upset, he told
Millar and Turman that unless they made major improvements he would insist his name be disassociated from the movie. His colleagues tried to calm him. A superb film editor, Robert Swink, assisted by the young Hal Ashby, did his usual excellent job, as the producers had anticipated. Gore was delighted with the final cut. So too were the critics when the film opened in April 1964. The reviews were almost unanimously good, the film a critical success. Financially it at best broke even, further support for the common wisdom in Hollywood that political films do not do well at the box office. At the Cannes Film Festival in May 1964, where it was an unofficial entry, the French critics and audiences loved it. Gore joined Turman and Millar and their wives at Cannes. As he drove into town, to his annoyance he saw a sign trumpeting
“The Best Man
, a film by Franklin Schaffner.” The
auteur
theory that overvalued the director's contribution stared him in the face.

At Edgewater for a month in early fall 1963, he enjoyed the rose garden and the company of Dutchess County friends. He was happy to see Alice Dows again. Rovere and Dupee were in good form, the former reconciled to the Kennedy presidency, the latter attempting to make his adjustment from his Roman freedom to Wildercliff domesticity. Andy and Fred were more than usually on edge with one another. Gore, who still adored them both, did not think their marital complexities were his concern, though Andy felt that Gore's influence in Rome was somewhat to blame for Fred's change in mood. “Andy's the real thing,” Gore recalled. “Andy's Ishmael—she was there. She was the center of all our lives up there.” An effervescent, attractive Canadian-born writer, Margaret Shafer—with her husband, Fritz, a professor of religion at Bard—had joined the Rovere-Dupee circle beginning in 1959 and was delighted to find herself part of Gore's summer world as well. She looked up to Rovere as a mentor, and she and Andy soon became good friends. One day Jason Epstein, the nervous neophyte owner of an expensive new motor yacht, puttered up to the dock at Edgewater. The Dupees, whom Jason and Barbara had picked up in Rhinebeck, were aboard. They were on their way northward to Lake Champlain. As they left Edgewater, Gore said to the Dupees' daughter, the Dupees and the Epsteins “will not be speaking to each other by the time they get back!” The trip was a disaster.

In Manhattan, Gore stayed at the Algonquin, where he had lunch with
Dawn Powell, whom he admired and liked. An Ohio-born New York writer of unsuccessful plays and brilliant but modest-selling satiric novels, Powell had been a good friend of John Latouche's and had thought Vidal “an extraordinary individual with a rich, articulate gift” from her first meeting with him in 1954. Louis Auchincloss was in town. What they referred to as Howard's apartment at 360 East Fifty-fifth Street had been sublet, though the tenant was not paying the rent. From Rome, “
feeling slightly bored
and depressed,” Howard had been trying to get the tenant either to pay up or leave. “It's almost two months since I've seen you,” he wrote to Gore, eager for his return. The two buildings on East Fifty-eighth Street bumbled along decently despite an occasional problem, though Howard's desire to have room made available at 416 for an apartment for them was still unfulfilled. With Harold Hayes, who had commissioned him to write a piece on the future of the Kennedy presidency, Gore had some contentious back-and-forth about a draft that Hayes did not think worked well enough. When he left for Rome in mid-October, the article for
Esquire
was still unsettled, though he was at work on two essays that were to appear in December: “Citizen Ken,” a review of “The Wit and Wisdom of J. K. Galbraith” for
The New York Review of Books
, and “Tarzan Revisited” for
Esquire
. “James Bond, Mike Hammer, and Tarzan,” he concluded, “are all dream selves, and the aim of each is to establish personal primacy in a world that, more and more, diminishes the individual. Among adults, the popularity of these lively fictions strikes me as a most significant and unbearably sad phenomenon.” Barbara Epstein kept discreetly reminding him to write the O'Hara essay, which he soon did.

Happy to be back at Via Giulia, Gore began carefully to go over the 200,000-word draft of
Julian
, which he had had typed in New York, to be sent as soon as possible to Little, Brown in order for galleys to be set up. “I can't tell much yet how
good
the book is,” Gore had written to Wreden's heir, Ned Bradford, when he had finished an earlier draft, “but I guarantee you a large scandal which I don't for once at all look forward to. But the thing took a certain line and I had to follow. Anyway I'm sure Boston is already too confining for your activities. You won't mind being driven out by the Irish.” In October 1963, Bradford, about to read that draft himself, had cabled Gore, “JULIAN READ BY AN ASSOCIATE EDITOR WHILE I WAS IN CALIFORNIA AND HE SAYS QUOTE IT'S PROBABLY ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS WE'VE PUBLISHED IN THE LAST TEN YEARS AND WILL REESTABLISH
VIDAL AS A MAJOR NOVELIST.” Bradford had given the associate editor, Herman Gollob, instructions to find passages to cut from the long manuscript. On Bradford's return, when Gollob was asked what could be cut, he responded, “Not a word!” Bradford, who had nurtured the Little, Brown relationship with Gore through the unremunerative
The Best Man
and
Rocking the Boat
, provided unhesitatingly supportive enthusiasm. “A Midwesterner from an old New England family who had worked himself up from book salesman to editor in chief, Bradford had both literary and commercial good sense.

Late in October, Gore and Howard drove for a few days' refreshment to Florence and Siena, then in November by train to Bologna, where they rented a car for a visit to Ravenna and Ferrara. On November 22 Gore went to the beach at Ostia and that night to a movie house in Rome. During intermission there was a foreboding buzz, with the name Kennedy mentioned many times. Suddenly everyone in the theater knew what had happened. “I didn't believe it,” Gore recalled. “There had been a mistake. That's not the right plot.” Kennedy's serious joke about assassination had come true. The shock was as surrealistically dissociative for Gore as for the stunned American public. The literally unimaginable had happened. He was quickly on an airplane to Washington to attend the funeral. He had warmly liked John Kennedy, with whom he had felt a sympathetic identification. What many had seen as Kennedy's faults Gore had seen as virtues, and his promiscuous sexual life, which only a small number of people knew about then, had exemplified for Gore a desirable and admirable defiance of American puritanism. But his closest relationship in the Kennedy world had been with Jackie. It seemed the right occasion to have a reconciliation with her, which he had gotten an indication, probably through his half-sister Nini, she was willing to have. “
I flew back
for the funeral, but there was much ‘confusion' over tickets ('the French foreign minister
must
be in the church') so one did not attend,” he told Louis Auchincloss in January. “I suspect Bobby's hand, even at the edge of the grave. But one had made the gesture of solidarity. Jackie's mood, apparently, was one of rage more than grief: how dare they do this to us! But then Merrywood was always a bit like Colchis. Yes, Jack is a sad loss. He was adorable and one enjoyed his wit and pleasure in himself and the comedy which turned so unexpectedly black. If ever one doubted the wisdom of Greek tragedy, doubt no longer: nothing vast ever entered human life without a curse, as Sophocles more or less
wrote. So I watched it all from in front of the White House. As the coffin came out of the White House and then went up to the Capitol, I did my best to pay obeisance and then, when that was over, I went out to California” where he saw, ironically, the unsatisfactory rough cut of
The Best Man
.