A narcissist is someone better-looking than you are.
—Gore Vidal
I. DETECTING LIFE
In 1952, Gore published two radically different novels, both of which involve the act of detection: The Judgment of Paris and Death in the Fifth Position (the latter using his pen name Edgar Box, a clever pseudonym that pays homage to Edgar Allan Poe, the American inventor of detective fiction, not the English writer Edgar Wallace, as his editor Victor Weybright imagined). In the former, he found a voice that felt very true to himself. “It was the first time I heard myself as myself,” he said. The hero at the center of this mythic narrative is Philip Warren, a wry young man of twenty-eight who seems a bit lost, more bemused than dismayed by his lack of worldly success. A veteran of the Pacific war, he had graduated from Harvard Law School; he is heterosexual, with a variety of paths opening before him. The three sections of the novel correspond (roughly) to the three choices that the Greek god Hermes offered to Paris. He could choose among three goddesses: Hera (representing worldly power), Athena (representing wisdom as well as the skills of a warrior), and Aphrodite (representing love). But the mythic dimension is deceptive, as Philip learns; there are really no choices, only the illusion of choices. That is, each choice plays to a certain self-conception, but none of them has the energy to activate a life or inform its true contours.
The novel involves a journey, a Wanderjahr in which Gore’s hero migrates from Italy to Egypt to France. “He was here at last: Italy, Europe, a year of leisure, a time for decision, a prelude to the distinguished fugue his life was sure to be, once he got really to it, once the delightful prelude had been played to its conclusion among the foreign cities.” We’re at once in the hands of a knowing, worldly, chatty narrator: a successor to such English novelists as Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, or, more recently, Aldous Huxley. (As Gore noted: “It was Huxley, in fact, who got me moving in certain directions: Crome Yellow and Antic Hay, the earliest and best of his books. These were novels of ‘types,’ lightly satirized, always part of a larger fugue of ideas.”)
In Rome, Regina Durham dangles before Philip’s gaze the possibility of a career in politics: a choice that had been set before Gore by his family. She is a power broker who wants his body as well as the pleasure of stage-managing his career. In Egypt he meets Sophia Oliver, representing wisdom (as in the Greek roots of her name). She issues the call to intellect: here lies the “real” life, the life of the mind. But in Cairo Philip meets Anna Morris, the wife of a businessman; he finds her irresistible, and follows her to Paris, choosing love over power and wisdom. But this proves a false choice, as he comes to see. In the last paragraph of the novel, Philip looks at her smile and sees “the silver mirror dissolve before his eyes.” The narcissistic image that she offers is broken, and he looks beyond her to “a promise at the present’s farthest edge.”
The plot, however, is little more than a shelf upon which the author will stack his many insights, his caricatures of various types, his lovingly rendered scenes of European life. Philip indeed is not a double for Gore. He is far too innocent, naïve, and easily led. He gazes wide-eyed at the various figures who loom before him, as in a dream, including a couple of gay dilettantes in Rome who want to restore the old monarchy: a parody of certain themes in Gothic fiction. Philip at one point carries a secret for his friends—the message is a single word in Greek: asebia, a term that connotes an inability to worship the gods. None of the choices that lay before his hero (or Gore himself, for that matter) proved truly satisfying.
Among the vivid minor characters in The Judgment of Paris is Mrs. Fay Peabody, a “famous mystery-story writer” based on Agatha Christie, whom she of course derides. She tries to bring her novelistic inventiveness to “real life,” conjuring various plots to murder a poor fellow called Briggs Willys, who lacks the competence required to commit suicide, his only goal. “I came to Egypt to die,” he explains. “I was afraid I wouldn’t have the courage to kill myself so I decided to come up the Nile to the hottest town with a decent hotel and there, if I failed to kill myself, I should die of the heat.”
The final section of the novel is set (as promised by the title) in Paris. Any number of outlandish subplots erupt, one of them involving a bizarre cult dedicated to the idea of the androgyne—a notion that would, in the late sixties, erupt in the gender-bending figure of Myra/Myron Breckinridge. Another plotline centers on Zoe Helotius, a crass socialite with designs on the House of Windsor. Elsewhere in the book, three characters from Gore’s earlier novels—Robert Holton, Jim Willard, and Charles de Cluny—spin across the pages in a parody of William Faulkner’s sage style, in which characters introduced in previous novels or stories show up in later ones. One reads in vain hoping for a firm sense of resolution, which seems to elude Gore’s protagonist, who remains a cipher. But Gore had begun to find a real voice, and the novel has vivid passages that reveal a world of wan sophistication. Here was a young writer who had seen a great deal and could suggest as much.
The Judgment of Paris sold nearly ten thousand copies, attracting decent reviews, including a mostly positive one by John W. Aldridge in The New York Times Book Review. Much to Gore’s fury, Aldridge compared him unfavorably to Truman Capote, regarding Capote as a young writer who arrived on the scene “with a subject and a manner distinctly his own.” Gore, by contrast, he saw as someone throwing “badly balanced darts” at a moving target, trying desperately to find a subject and a voice. To a degree, Aldridge was right: Gore had been searching without obvious success for a subject and a manner, working in an obliquely autobiographical vein, although Philip Warren is certainly not Gore—he is too feckless, and the world pushes him around, leads him this way and that. If he finally chooses love in Anna, as Aldridge mistakenly imagines, this is not much. In creating Philip, Gore was exploring the difficulties of selfhood, contemplating the lack of emotional and psychological coherence in a world that looks and feels more like a fun house, or a hall of mirrors, than a place where anyone could establish a firm identity. And Philip seems, ultimately, like a narcissist: a young man (like the author) in desperate need of reflection.
In a letter to a friend, Norman Mailer writes interestingly about Gore’s “narcissism” in relation to this novel: “When I implied that Gore’s worst vice as a writer might be narcissism I was not talking about homosexuality. He has written very well about that particular subject, modestly, soberly and with instinctive good taste.” He noted that it was “precisely in his more ambitious books like The Judgment of Paris, some of which I did read and did like, that this narcissism is most present and most defeating to the potential reach of his talents which are considerable. The difficulty of writing in a narcissistic vein is that one’s heroes are hermetically sealed in upon themselves. They may rant, rage and roar, or stand aside burnishing their wit, but either way nothing dramatic passes between them and other persons in the novel. The result is inevitably a study of lonely decomposition.”
The charge of narcissism would dog Gore (and his fictional protagonists) for decades to come, though he always denied the charge as unworthy of consideration. “A narcissist is someone better-looking than you are,” he famously said. But the young Philip does, more or less, evoke the young Gore in his search for identity, his difficulty in making choices.
In an effort to market his work, Gore traveled about the country, giving lectures and readings, although this aspect of the literary life never appealed to him. “Gore’s reputation was beginning to expand in academic circles,” said Richard Poirier, a literary scholar who met Gore in the early fifties when he came to lecture at Williams College. “But he never actually liked colleges or universities, and they didn’t like him back. As an autodidact, he didn’t approve of those who didn’t fit that mold.” It was obvious to Poirier and others who met Gore that he didn’t admire or wish to emulate those novelists who were adored in the academic village, such as William Faulkner or, in later years, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, or Don DeLillo. “Gore kept his eye on New York, on Broadway, on Hollywood—always looking for what he believed was the main chance,” Poirier noted. “He didn’t especially like being among ‘teachers,’ as he called us.”
In truth, Gore also moved uncomfortably among his fellow writers, especially when he felt competitive with them. His chief rivals among the younger novelists and story writers were Capote, Mailer, and William Styron, none of whom he liked. In each case, the feeling was mutual. In a letter of 1953, Styron called Gore “a talentless, self-promoting, spineless snob.” As for Mailer, his biographer J. Michael Lennon writes: “The two met at Millie Brower’s apartment on East 27th Street in 1952. In slightly different ways, they both recalled that at their first meeting Vidal was eager to know at what age Mailer’s grandparents had died. Mailer said around seventy. Vidal announced that his grandparents had died much older and, therefore, he told Mailer, ‘I’ve got you.’ He went on, saying that the one who lived the longest would have the best purchase on literary fame. Brower remembered that Mailer told her that Vidal was ‘gornisht,’ the Yiddish word for nothing.”
On August 23, 1953, Gore got a call from Jack Kerouac, a good-looking young writer he had first met at the Metropolitan Opera in 1949, soon after The City and the Pillar had appeared. Kerouac (soon to write On the Road) was not yet the heroic rebel-novelist of the Beat generation, a literary movement that never much interested Gore, though he knew many of the key figures in this group fairly well. Kerouac had recently finished his first, highly autobiographical novel, The Town and the City, which was yet to be published. “This time,” Gore recalled, “he asked me to meet him with Bill Burroughs. It was a hot night, with the air thick and smoky. We met at a bar, the San Remo, in the Village. He reminded me of the young Brando in a T-shirt. Burroughs wore a wrinkled suit, and he seemed drunk or drugged. You expected that. Kerouac was drunk, too. He flirted the whole time, and Burroughs left us alone after a while. We checked into the Chelsea Hotel, where I often stayed, and spent the night in an uncomfortable, damp bed. I think I got a blow job. It wasn’t memorable. Certainly Jack had a terrible hangover in the morning.”
Perhaps the most affable of Gore’s allies among writers was Louis Auchincloss, a relative of Hughdie’s and therefore, in Gore’s mind, somehow a “cousin.” “Of all our novelists,” Gore wrote, “Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs.” Revealing a snobbery inherited from his mother, Gore recalled: “My cousin became my lawyer. I trusted him. He had a fine intellect, a real understanding of the way money works. We talked about books, writers, about politics, New York. He was an heir of Edith Wharton and Henry James, and he knew it. Only the dumb-dumb public didn’t know it.”
Gore had made a fair amount of money as a young writer, but not enough to live as grandly as he wished. At the suggestion of his publishing friend Victor Weybright, he wrote a mystery novel “in perhaps a week or two.” He dictated the first draft, then revised a typed version with care. The book was Death in the Fifth Position, and it proved entertaining. “I had read Agatha Christie, S. S. Van Dine, John Dickson Carr, and Edgar Wallace. The genre made sense,” he said, “in that all you had to do was establish a particular world, create some disequilibrium, and take it from there.”
As a writer, Gore invariably drew on material that interested him, and ballet had been much on his mind in recent years. So the scene of the murder—murders, in this case—is a ballet troupe. They occur onstage, as well they should. The hero in this novel, and in all three mysteries by Gore under the name of Edgar Box, is Peter Cutler Sargeant II, a Harvard man (like Philip Warren) and heterosexual sleuth who makes his living in public relations. Much like in the novels of Christie, the police pursue various red herrings, having no real gift for solving crimes; so Sargeant outwits them, though it’s not hard to manage this. An ex-journalist, Sargeant also gets to report on the crimes in the New York Globe.
The author’s wit comes through repeatedly, as when a ballerina plunges to her death onstage while maintaining “the fifth position,” a ballet pose. Vidal writes that she was “a dedicated artist to the very end.” Another important feature of this first Box novel is the portrait of Louis Giraud, based partly on Harold Lang, Gore’s recent lover. Gore portrays Giraud as a sexually voracious gay man: quite “advanced” for 1952, when the general public had very little sense of the gay underworld. Perhaps the aesthetic weakness of this novel, not unlike the others in this series, hinges on the fact that satire upstages intrigue at every point. Gore didn’t quite adhere to the models before him, and this was genre fiction.
Sargeant may well represent Gore’s ideal version of himself at this age. Although he didn’t go to Harvard, many of his characters did, and Gore would ultimately leave his entire estate to Harvard in a sign that he valued this gold standard for American intellectual achievement. In the three Box novels that Gore wrote for New American Library (without ever revealing his name to readers), Sargeant sounds very like Gore: witty and clear-eyed, a cool customer. One can read these books as campy sexual farces, with Gore wearing a disguise (heterosexual sleuth) that is almost a kind of reverse drag. Indeed, Sargeant at one point resists the sexual advances of Giraud, though he wonders if there is much difference between sleeping with men and women. “It’s all very confusing,” Sargeant notes.
While this novel and its successors, which followed in short order in 1953 and 1954, didn’t make Gore a lot of money, they added something to the coffers. “I got an advance of $1,000 for Death in the Fifth Position. Bits and pieces of income arrived, and I could meet my mortgage, but it wasn’t easy in these years. I kept trying to think how I could ‘solve’ the problem of money,” he said. At the same time, Howard kept trying to get a better job in New York, hoping to contribute to household expenses. He found a job at an ad agency—Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne—a respectable firm, but the position didn’t pay much, and Howard lost interest. “Gore made money, more than I could, in any case, and he needed my help with everything,” Howard said. “It just wasn’t worth it, after a while, to trudge into Manhattan.”
But Howard had become indispensable in another way. Whereas Gore remained awkward in company, Howard showed an easy affability. “He could get people laughing and joking,” remembers George Armstrong, “and Gore understood how useful this was.” Howard’s warmth proved especially useful on long weekends at Edgewater, when visitors arrived with expectations and needs. In general, Howard had a practical side that would save Gore a great deal of time in years to come; he could order plane tickets, make reservations at restaurants, call taxis, ensure that supplies were delivered to Edgewater, hire and fire cleaning ladies and gardeners. He knew how to mix drinks, specializing in ice-cold sidecars. He saw to it that guests found clean sheets and towels in their bedrooms upon arrival. Local plumbers and carpenters came to know him, and he sorted out what had to be done: windows replaced or frames painted, a step on the porch mended, a section of the roof retiled. He assumed these duties without having to be asked.
But Gore went away by himself to Key West in the coldest months, once with his grandmother. One day just off Duval Street, in a hamburger joint, he met a slender young woman, a waitress, with whom he spent a couple of weeks “in the sack,” as he put it. “She claimed that I had knocked her up. It was possible. She asked for money for an abortion,” and so Gore provided it: $780, sent via a money order from New York that could not easily be traced. “I was never cut out for fatherhood,” Gore said. On this matter, Howard suggested that “the whole thing was a scam. She was never pregnant. Gore bought her a new Frigidaire.” This episode suggests, of course, that Gore still felt uncertain about his sexual identity, or at least determined to tell himself that he was bisexual. If he could impregnate this young woman, he must be!
Gore so liked working on the original Box novel that he dashed off another in the spring of 1953. Death Before Bedtime centered on the mysterious death of a senator, which Sargeant helps to solve. Only a year later came Death Likes It Hot, which again features the debonair Sargeant, who helps to solve a murder that occurs at a summer party filled with New York socialites. Indeed, Gore often spent time in the Hamptons in the summer, and in 1953 he spent a long weekend with Francis Markoe, whom he described as “an old-fashioned queen who produced plays on his lawn. People sat on blankets and watched them and swatted mosquitoes.” One of these lawn dramas was by Vance Bourjaily, a well-known novelist and creative-writing professor at the University of Iowa. It concerned a visitor from outer space, and it planted in Gore’s head the idea for Visit to a Small Planet, his first Broadway hit, which was based on his own teleplay by the same name.
The need for money pressed on him, however, as Edgewater proved very expensive to maintain. His pulp novels from this era—all paperback originals—included one called Thieves Fall Out written under the pseudonym of Cameron Kay (Kay was his grandmother’s maiden name, and Cameron Kay was, indeed, Gore’s great-uncle, an attorney general in Texas). This vein of writing never earned enough to ease Gore’s way in the world, however. And he was already working on Messiah, a dystopian satire on religion. But it grew clear to him that pseudonymous novels, however amusing to write, would not “solve” the problem of his finances. Playwriting and screenwriting seemed the obvious move. As he later remarked, “I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer; and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar—and not dissimilar—sphere of operations.”
II. THE SPANISH MAIN
It’s not that Gore hadn’t already tried to write a play. The Different Journey was written in Egypt and revised in Paris, with input from Tennessee Williams. It centered on a young gay man at a loss to make his way. Most who read it thought the homosexual theme made it difficult to produce in New York. But Gore persisted, trying to get Audrey Wood, Tennessee’s agent, to support the project. She and Gore corresponded for several years, and she encouraged him to keep trying. “Ideally you need that ugly word a ‘dramatist collaborator,’ ” she told him. With the right kind of assistance, she thought he might fashion a workable play. She added that, given the “depressed book market,” he might think of drama as a way of adding to his income. Wood never managed to place anything of Gore’s on the stage, however, so he turned to television, having been advised by his mother’s old friend Jules Stein that this new medium would soon blossom into a major industry. At Stein’s suggestion, Gore called on Harold Franklin, an agent at the respected William Morris Agency.
Franklin introduced him to Florence Britton, who was looking for stories for Studio One, an early CBS program of original live dramas. Gore pitched Dark Possession, a Jekyll-and-Hyde concoction about a woman with a split personality who murders her husband but doesn’t know it until her notes are revealed to her, at which point she commits suicide. Britton commissioned the piece, and Gore wrote it—as ever, quickly. It aired nationally on February 15, 1954, on what was then a major venue, with millions of viewers. At twenty-eight, Gore had finally found a large audience, and he would never turn back.
This was the so-called golden age of television, with only three networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—controlling what the public could watch. The growth of the medium over only a few years was staggering. Well over half of American households had a television set by 1954, and the audience grew terrifically month by month. Live drama became an important feature of network programming, complementing an array of game and variety shows, westerns, and soap operas. It was obvious to corporations that TV offered a captive audience for promoting their products, so the race was on for appealing content.
The television industry was based in New York, where empty warehouses suddenly transformed into full production studios for live drama. With millions ready to watch, the networks swung into action, and such programs as Studio One, Kraft Television Theatre, and Playhouse 90 became staples of American television, offering original dramas. According to the cultural critic Neil Postman, “between the years 1948 and 1958, approximately 1,500 fifty-two-minute plays were performed ‘live’ on American television.” It really was a new gold rush, and after the success of Dark Possession, Gore found himself in demand as a writer for the booming medium.
Many of these were adaptations, starting with Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, a late-eighteenth-century play by an American imitator of the British Restoration drama. Other assignments followed, including two episodes of The Telltale Clue, a police drama. Gore worked on several projects that had been long-running obsessions, including a teleplay about Billy the Kid, the legendary rogue who remained loyal to friends and insisted on his own freedom at any cost. (Gore had admired Aaron Copland’s magical Billy the Kid, commissioned in 1938 by Lincoln Kirstein for Ballet Caravan and choreographed by Eugene Loring.) Gore’s script, in different versions, would continue to hold his interest over many decades. He also adapted a couple of famous stories by William Faulkner—“Smoke” and “Barn Burning”—for Martin Manulis, a director at CBS who became a close friend.
Gore’s facility was exactly what the TV market required, and he found he could complete an adaptation over a long weekend; an original hour-length drama would occupy him for a week or ten days. He adapted The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel”—both classic stories he had long admired. He wrote Summer Pavilion, a melodrama about a Southern family that was reminiscent of Tennessee Williams, though without the rhetorical flourishes. Soon Gore’s name appeared on the A-list of television dramatists beside writers like Rod Serling, Paddy Chayefsky, and Horton Foote.
The money—he earned $7,000 from television work in 1954—helped to oil the machinery of his life, though it was hardly a fortune. Once again, however, the promise of riches outstripped the reality. He confessed to Pat Crocker: “I have developed an insatiable love of money in the last four years as a result largely of keeping that huge house going. I always thought I was beyond such things because I was not competent in money matters. I have now discovered that I love money but am still incompetent.” Nevertheless, the work he was doing in television opened doors while adding to his bank account. “I am king of television,” he bragged to Crocker, who still lived in Antigua and hadn’t caught up with the new technology. “Television is a thing which has happened since your last visit to this cultural paradise we call America,” he said, adding: “I myself did a dozen plays this year, adapting Faulkner, Sophocles, H. James and some original plays of my own spurious invention. I drift enigmatically through rehearsal halls; I undercut my directors; I am treacherous in all things; I sign contracts I have no intention of fulfilling; I give dishonorable and incoherent interviews to the press.” This was not, it seemed, the happiest occupation for a man who preferred the freedom of writing novels.
“There was a lot of busyness during those television years,” Gore recalled. And he often neglected his family, even his beloved grandmother, Tot, who complained to him on April 15, 1954: “My dear Mr. Vidal: I used to have a very dear grandson by your name. I have been wondering if you might know him and see him some time, if you should please tell him I should like very much to hear from him.” Gore paid a quick call on Tot in response, of course, but his mind was elsewhere. He had the scent of glory in his nostrils, and he was on the move, hunting for fame and fortune in whatever forms they might take.
III. MEDIA AS MESSAGES
“Never lose an opportunity to have sex or be on television,” Gore famously quipped, always following his own advice. Encouraged by the success of his TV plays, Gore proposed a special program—narrated by himself—about his grandfather. It had been conceived as something for Playhouse 90, a kind of biopic, with Gore acting in a role like that of the Stage Manager in Our Town. The project stalled, however, while Gore shifted among producers, eventually getting a shortened version of The Indestructible Mr. Gore on NBC’s Sunday Showcase aired on December 13, 1959. William Shatner played Senator Gore, with Gore as the on-screen narrator: “I’m Gore Vidal,” he began, “and this is the town of Corsicana, Texas, in the year 1892.” The handsome, baritone-voiced author soon became a familiar face on American television, seen on talk shows hosted by Jack Paar, David Susskind, Les Crane, and Steve Allen, even on popular game shows, such as What’s My Line? “You’ve got to keep popping up, out of the rabbit hole, in different places. It’s the only way,” Gore said. By 1960, after three years of incessant popping up out of various holes, Richard H. Rovere could write in The New Yorker: “Nothing is easier nowadays than to get a feeling of being entirely surrounded by Gore Vidal.” Rovere added: “Stay at home at night, and like as not you’ll be assailed by Mr. Vidal on television.”
It’s easy to overestimate how often Gore got his face on the small screen, but in those days—with only three networks—any appearance got more attention than is possible now, with countless channels pushing content around the world. Gore Vidal became a name to reckon with in the mid-fifties, as he grew into his fame, combining work on Broadway with TV plays as well as incidental appearances here and there. In addition, he kept at work on his novel-writing, although with less compulsiveness.
In the meantime, his novel Messiah appeared in 1954, attracting a small but devoted readership. Thomas Powers, a friend of Gore’s from Rome in the 1960s, recalled, “I was maybe fifteen or sixteen when that came out. I read it not once but three or four times. I kept going back to it. What an astonishing book, and really one of the best things Gore ever wrote.” It was, in fact, a kind of prologue to one of his finest novels, Julian (1964)—the two novels are best read in tandem. “That early novel was an attack on the church, not on the teachings of Jesus,” Gore said. “One can’t displace the ethical teaching of Christianity. They are rarely followed, of course. Turning the other cheek has never been a popular notion.” Like his later hero, the apostate Roman emperor Julian, Gore’s narrator in Messiah is yet another version of himself: Eugene Luther (as in his “real” name: Eugene Luther Gore Vidal). And Luther’s complicity in helping to create the new religion of Cavism (perhaps a play on Calvinism, a severe sixteenth-century version of Protestantism) is central to this novel-as-memoir.
A mortician by training, John Cave is a latter-day Christ figure. His characterization combines features of the Los Angeles evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944) with Evelyn Waugh’s 1948 novel The Loved One, a satire on the California funeral industry. A visionary and born salesman, Cave is destined to unite his occupation and preoccupation. He has discerned a great truth: death trumps life. In a decade devoted to the fear of death (with bomb shelters being built at a rapid speed around the country) and hooked on TV evangelism, what better way to satirize the moment than to create a lurid version of Christianity, one that celebrates not resurrection but death?
In later years, Gore often suggested that Catholic homes should ditch their pictures of Christ on the cross and hang in their place paintings of the Resurrection. This is helpful in thinking about Cavism, a pseudo-religion that leads to the ultimate act of obedience: suicide. (Indeed, Cavism anticipates any number of cults, such as the group suicide in Guyana in 1978 led by Jim Jones, a charismatic if diabolical preacher.)
In Messiah, Gore doesn’t so much dismiss Christianity as explore its misuses, which are largely institutional. The novel offers an anatomy of cultic imperialism and its propagandists. In this case, the religion is spread by Paul Himmell (a parody of the Apostle Paul, a man despised by Gore), who knows how to maximize the effects of television appearances by Cave and promote Cavesword, the authorized “Bible” of the new religion Cavesway. And who understood the use of television for self-promotion better than Gore Vidal? An impishness shimmers through this novel, as when Luther meets with Paul to discuss his assignment to write the official Testament of Cavism: “I faced the efficient vulgarity of Paul Himmell across the portable bar which reflected so brightly in its crystal his competence.”
Cave knows far too much about this history of the religion founded in his name, so Himmell kills him. Luther—a writer who stands in coyly for Gore—is forced to disappear into Egypt, where he hopes to resume writing his book about Julian the Apostate, the emperor who renounced Christianity and briefly restored the old gods. And Luther has much to hide from, as the fanatical votaries of Cave (having killed the messiah himself) wish to control the meaning of their religion without fear of exposure. Luther’s contribution to Cavesword must not be revealed, lest it shake the foundations and trouble the faithful. The final version of the Testament must be orthodox truth, with earlier versions eradicated, as contradictions will only confuse true believers. Heretics need reprogramming, of course. That this new faith depends on confession as a kind of near-sacrament parodies Christianity, which soon after the death of Jesus began to struggle toward its own orthodoxy, with Paul winning the argument on many grounds, and with competing strains of Christianity (such as the Jerusalem group led by James, the brother of Jesus, and Peter) suppressed.
This is a genuine novel of ideas, at once recalling visionary religious figures such as Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard (whose Dianetics hit the bookshelves only four years before Gore’s novel appeared) but also anticipating Jim Jones, David Koresh, and a range of future “messiahs.” It seems prescient in its understanding of the media, and how the manipulations by quasi-religious figures would figure importantly in American culture. Before Marshall McLuhan, Gore understood that “the medium is the message.”
Messiah received only brief, though fairly kind, notices, as in the Saturday Review, where Jerome Stone noted that “the prolific Mr. Vidal writes with a facility and an easy authority unusual in one so young.” The book dropped into a generic niche in paperback format as a “sci-fi” novel and—except among a small coterie of fans—disappeared. One feels Gore’s sense of despair and self-doubt in a letter he wrote to Crocker just after the novel’s publication: “Messiah is rather a bore,” he told him. But Messiah pointed a way forward in many directions, to Julian and Kalki (1978) and other future works, such as Live from Golgotha, published thirty-eight years later. Any number of false, even half-baked, messiahs would appear in Gore’s novels, plays, and screenplays in years to come, and he would continue to ponder the use and misuse of religion, the production of messiah figures, and their amplifications by the media.
IV. SILVERY SCREENS
The failure of Messiah to reach an especially wide audience—it sold the usual ten thousand copies—upset Gore. “I thought I’d done something unusual,” he said, “and that readers would find me.” He noted that here and there enthusiasm had flared, as in The Boston Globe, where Lucien Price, an Exeter graduate, recommended the novel highly. Price saw that Gore had managed to put his finger on a key problem with America, where the mainstream media pushed their vision of a Christian, anti-Communist utopia. To Kimon Friar, Gore wrote that the book had been “a noble failure,” but the novel as a genre remained the most prestigious and arguably influential form of human expression in the mid-twentieth century, and Gore would never abandon it. He regarded playwriting as simply a form of cleverness, a craft one developed. In “Writing Plays for Television,” an autobiographical essay, Gore mused: “A novel is all one’s own, a world fashioned by a single intelligence, its reality in no way dependent upon the collective excellence of others.” But he also understood that, with the dwindling of fiction as a cultural medium, he had no choice if he didn’t want to teach or get a nine-to-five job in the corporate world: He had to keep writing for television and Broadway.
At this point Gore’s career as a screenwriter began in earnest. He had overseen the production in New York of The Death of Billy the Kid, his most accomplished teleplay, for NBC’s Philco Television Playhouse, one of the premier venues for live drama. Billy’s independence, as well as his ruthless qualities, appealed to Gore, and he wanted to make a full-length movie from the story. As sometimes happens, the pieces fell together suddenly, and it was fortunate that Robert Mulligan, the director, opted for young Paul Newman to play Billy.
“I was just getting into my life as an actor, on the stage, in films,” Newman recalled. “Gore seemed so alive, so funny. He was always pushing things as far as they would go. We were friends within days, and we never let go of that.” A small, intense, blue-eyed young man, Newman looked very like Jimmie Trimble, with an astounding (and vaguely feminine) beauty. Newman appealed to Gore at once. “To be frank, Gore loved him,” Howard said. “He was Gore’s type: all boy.” Newman had come from Ohio, the son of a Jewish businessman (his father owned a sporting goods store). Like Gore and Jimmie, he had served in the Pacific theater during the war. But he graduated from Kenyon College and attended Yale for a year before going to New York to study at the Actors Studio under the legendary instructor Lee Strasberg (the pioneer of so-called method acting). With his good looks and raw talent, Newman made a quick success on Broadway in 1953 in William Inge’s Picnic, followed by a role in Joseph Hayes’s hostage melodrama, The Desperate Hours.
Newman moved to Hollywood to act in a second-rate epic set in Jerusalem and Rome at the time of Christ, The Silver Chalice (1954), his first major film; while there, he lived for a period at the legendary Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. Gore was beginning to get regular work from MGM at this time, and he also took a room at the Marmont. Howard soon followed, and so did Joanne Woodward, Newman’s girlfriend, who had been an understudy for Picnic. “We got along so well,” recalled Howard, “almost like a family. Those were beautiful days, though everybody drank too much.” In 1973, Gore would write: “I knew Joanne since television’s self-proclaimed Golden Age, when she acted and I wrote. I watched the Hollywood studio system try to change her into a standard blonde sex symbol; and the Hollywood studio system was the first to collapse. Joanne survived as herself, which is whatever a given role requires.” The rumor, long circulated, that Gore and Joanne were at one time engaged remains, as Gore said, “a piece of fiction.”
Money began to flow, and Gore soon had a contract with MGM to adapt The Catered Affair, a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky—the hugely admired TV writer in New York—for the silver screen at a salary of $2,000 per week. He also received $2,500 for the film rights to his teleplay about Billy the Kid. “I was determined,” said Gore, “to make as much money as quickly as I could, and to put money concerns behind me.”
Occasionally Gore found himself at the writers’ table in Culver City. In essays and interviews, he recalled being surrounded by any number of “hacks” as well as Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, and others. There was, of course, a tradition of well-established novelists working for the studios to support their writing habits. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner spent a good deal of time in Hollywood. And Gore didn’t really disdain this work, agreeing with the Wise Hack (a kind of composite figure based on many journeymen screenwriters that Gore met) who said to him one day, “Shit has its own integrity.” Before long, Gore was offered a permanent contract with MGM, one that required him to be “in residence” for four months a year; the rest of the time he could live wherever he chose, which of course would be Edgewater. According to this new contract, he would make $2,000 a week, increasing to $2,750 by 1959. This was well over $100,000 per year—an impressive sum in the fifties.
Howard recalled: “We would meet Paul and Joanne at the pool, and we’d run into all sorts of Hollywood people, hangers-on, stars, producers. We got invited to parties. It was such a creepy place, the Marmont. A run-down fake château, but perfect, too. We liked it there. After a while we moved up into Laurel Canyon, not far away, overlooking the city. What a view!”
“Gore liked the sexual possibilities in Hollywood,” says Scotty Bowers, his pimp, who acted as a go-between among homosexual celebrities. “I remember meeting him after the war. He drove into the gas station where I worked in his ’47 Chevy. He was very handsome, very kind. Word had got around that I could make introductions, and I introduced him to all sorts of stars, and lots of ordinary guys. He’d hook up for a night or two. He was always a gentleman, didn’t want much. He slept with Rock Hudson, Tyrone Power, Charles Laughton, Fred Astaire, and other actors. This was a lively time for everybody, and nobody thought much about it. Gore liked clean-cut guys best. Guys like Paul Newman, only Newman wasn’t gay. But that was the look he preferred. Sailors were perfect. And he never liked guys too young. His perfect boy was about twenty or twenty-two, crew cut, strong.” Gore and Bowers became lifelong friends. “Scotty was always someone I could trust,” Gore said. “And he didn’t lie. He was a truth-teller. I admired that in him.”
Meanwhile, opportunities for writing teleplays kept coming. Gore had adapted his first Edgar Box novel into Portrait of a Ballerina, which CBS broadcast on New Year’s Day in 1956. There seemed to be no end of such work, and he and Howard decided to lease a spacious apartment in New York on East Fifty-Fifth Street, since Gore often had to meet producers and agents. In addition to the teleplays, Gore worked on a script for MGM based on the infamous Dreyfus Affair—it ultimately came out in 1958 as I Accuse! With its cozy bars and cheerful crowds, Manhattan appealed to Gore in the winter, but he preferred Edgewater in the summer, with its access to the river and its capacious lawns. “I would sit in the garden and write under a big elm, watching boats,” he said.
With money from scripts pouring into his bank account, Gore could afford to fix up the house. “Everything needed doing,” said Howard, “the roof had to be tiled again, the floors sanded. We got some new furniture and rugs.” Newman and Woodward often came to visit on weekends, and there was the usual parade of poets and journalists, producers, dancers. Gore marked his thirtieth birthday there in October 1955 with a party that Howard threw for him. A few days later Gore wrote to Crocker: “We celebrated with much champagne and maudlin good will by some 75 people, ranging from Tennessee to [film actress] Ella Raines and back again.” His sense of time passing seems almost terrifyingly premature: “I am increasingly aware of pains in the back and unusual occurrences in the respiratory system.”
But sadness clouded their lives, too. Alice Bouverie died on July 19, 1956, only fifty-four years old. She stumbled and hit her head on the toilet, but the coroner determined it was a heart attack that precipitated the fall. Three weeks later, John Latouche died as well, also from a heart attack, though rumors of his mixing drugs and alcohol had long circulated among his friends. The effect of these two deaths on Gore was palpable. He languished for days, not working, preoccupied with the question of mortality.
V. MORE VISITS TO SMALL PLANETS
One teleplay by Gore called Visit to a Small Planet attracted more attention than others he had seen produced. “The audience loved it,” Gore recalled. It had evolved from the simple skit he saw in Francis Markoe’s garden in Southampton some years earlier into a fierce satire in the manner of George Bernard Shaw. Its plot was straightforward: A fellow from outer space named Kreton drops to Earth with the idea of creating global mayhem. Human beings at war offered a grand spectacle for his curiosity, and the fifties was a good period for this: The nuclear age had arrived, with the Cold War fueling the dark imagination of the masses, who had begun to build bomb shelters in their backyards. Children were drilled at school, taught to hide under their desks and cover their heads. Fear moved like the wind in a forest. In fact, the paranoia about Communism had been ramped up to new levels with the hearings led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Korean War had raged from 1950 through 1953, when an uncertain armistice was signed; indeed, nobody knew for sure if the peace would hold. This tense political setting was a perfect atmosphere for a drama that satirized the madness of war and the fear of outsiders.
Kreton arrives in the midst of the Spelding household in Manassas, Virginia, hoping to witness the Civil War. Something goes wrong with his time machine, however, and the Battle of Bull Run is long since over. But Kreton is undeterred, and with his penchant for mischief and otherworldly talents—such as reading minds or creating force fields—he begins causing trouble, hoping to precipitate a catastrophe, perhaps something as violent as the Civil War. He is no sweet little alien like E.T. “We’re going to have such good times!” he declares, greedy for mayhem.
Gore satirizes middle America through the Spelding family and their friends as they come to understand that an alien has landed in their midst. In the course of this brief play, he excoriates the politics of the McCarthy era, with its hyped-up anti-Communist passion and paranoia, poking fun at popular culture in ways that made an impression on the audience on May 8, 1955, when the live drama aired on NBC’s Goodyear Television Playhouse, with the Australian-born actor Cyril Ritchard playing Kreton. The broadcast attracted thirty million viewers—Gore’s largest audience thus far. “We expected the worst,” said Gore, “but the audience and reviews were good.” After the broadcast, a huge party was thrown by Martin Manulis, and there Gore met for the first time John Steinbeck and his wife, Elaine, who years later remembered him as “a tense, smart, glittering young man” who got on well with her husband and seemed to admire him. “They shared a passion for politics, and it was a marvelous kind of encounter. John liked him very much. We all adored the play.”
Soon enough, plans were afoot to turn this teleplay into a full-length Broadway drama, with Gore acting as a producer with help from various friends, including George Axelrod, the author of The Seven Year Itch, a 1952 Broadway hit (and later a film starring Marilyn Monroe). Gore’s energy now seemed startling to those around him. “He couldn’t sit still,” said Howard, “but he was making money, getting a lot of attention. He liked all that.”
During the summer of 1955, Gore worked to expand the teleplay. Once again Ritchard was tapped to play Kreton as well as to direct, and Gore spent several weeks discussing the project with him at his home in Jamaica. “We worked in wicker chairs under a large palm tree in his garden, drinking lots of rum to smooth out our differences. He was a sharp, funny man from Sydney. His best part on stage was as Captain Hook in Peter Pan, in the Mary Martin production. But he was a brilliant Kreton. He understood the tone, and his timing was perfect.”
The play worked very well in expanded form. Gore and Ritchard had created a sturdy theatrical vehicle, one full of merriment, mayhem, and satire. It underscored an American penchant for naïve self-destruction, though Gore had expanded the object of his satire beyond U.S. borders. His target was now humankind in general. As Kreton observes to Rosemary, a cat: “I simply dote on people. Why? Because of their primitive addiction to violence.” It’s a mad romp through the funhouse of the fifties, with its religiosity and fury, its transparent bellicosity, its willed innocence. Instead of religious faith, Ellen Spelding depends on telepathy to contact Delton 4—a creature from outer space—who swoops in (quite literally) to save the day, taking away the naughty Kreton before he manages to disrupt the entire planet.
Visit was a huge hit on Broadway in 1957, running for 388 performances at the Booth Theatre, and was described by Brooks Atkinson, the influential theater critic at The New York Times, as “uproarious.” Gore held its success in sacred memory, as is evident in the opening of his essay on Dawn Powell:
One evening back there in once upon a time (February 7, 1957, to be exact) my first play opened at the Booth Theatre. Traditionally, the playwright was invisible to the audience: One hid out in a nearby bar, listening to the sweet nasalities of Pat Boone’s rendering of “Love Letters in the Sand” from a glowing jukebox. But when the curtain fell on this particular night, I went into the crowded lobby to collect someone. Overcoat collar high about my face, I moved invisibly through the crowd, or so I thought. Suddenly a voice boomed-tolled across the lobby. “Gore!” I stopped; everyone stopped. From the cloakroom a small round figure, rather like a Civil War cannon ball, hurtled toward me and collided. As I looked down into that familiar round face with its snub nose and shining bloodshot eyes, I heard, the entire crowded room heard: “How could you do this? How could you sell out like this? To Broadway! To Commercialism! How could you give up The Novel?”
In reality, Gore had been trying to sell out for years, and he had finally succeeded.
VI. OUTLAWS
Newman persuaded Warner Bros. to get behind Gore’s film version of Billy the Kid, and Fred Coe, who had previously worked only in television, came aboard as the director. But he didn’t like Gore’s script and hired an acquaintance in Hollywood to rewrite it, causing resentment. “There is always a hack in the wings,” said Gore. As so often happens with films, one misstep led to another, and soon Gore was divorced from the project and felt terribly betrayed by Coe. “It was my story,” he said, “and I had interested Paul in the project. But I was cut out.” With the help of his agent, he managed to regain control of his original television script, which he planned to remake one day on his own terms.
Meanwhile, Gore traveled, often to London, where he stayed in a suite at Claridge’s, still fussing with his script on the Dreyfus Affair, which had proved challenging. One day he received a letter from his half sister, Nini, saying she was pregnant and seeking advice. They had seen little of each other in the past decade, but a warm relationship had developed between them, and Gore had been asked to serve as a groomsman at her wedding on June 8, 1957. Senator John F. Kennedy was another groomsman, as by now he had married Jacqueline Bouvier, another stepchild of Nini’s father, Hugh D. Auchincloss. Gore wrote back promptly, dispensing avuncular wisdom: “You will be fortunate in having money so you won’t have to face the burden of nursing and cooking and letting go bit by bit your own life. The difficulty, of course, in your case, is determining what you want your life to be. You have a first-class mind and energy…right there you are a leap ahead of most people. But if I may say so you picked up from your family (all sides, including me) a success-worship which is dangerous and destructive without an underlying purpose. Ambition and energy in a void is always disturbing.” In the same letter he refers to Jack Kennedy as “a conscienceless opportunist who wants to be President just for the sake of being, of showing everybody: here is a man.” This was, perhaps, the first sign that trouble lay ahead in Gore’s relations with the Kennedy family.
By now, he was acutely conscious of spreading himself thin. “I’d come to not one but several crossroads,” Gore recalled. “There was Hollywood, and there was Broadway. I wanted to write a better novel than anything I’d managed yet. The idea of a book about Julian, the emperor, wouldn’t go away. I was writing reviews and essays, and this work intrigued me. I liked my house on the Hudson, but I could not suppress an urge to travel.”
In the meantime, Newman had rented a beach house in Malibu from the actress Shirley MacLaine, who was in fact one of the first people in show biz whom Gore met when he went to work at MGM. In the late summer of 1957, Woodward moved in with Newman. At Newman’s suggestion, Howard and Gore joined them. How could they resist? It was a cozy foursome, with lots of jokes and some serious conversation. “It was one of those perfect, unforgettable times,” Howard said. Gore liked it too, as it was a large house, and one that seemed perfect for parties. With Newman and Woodward as draws, the social circle widened, and Gore met a great many actors, producers, directors, and screenwriters, some of whom became useful contacts in the years ahead. Gore had bright prospects everywhere, in fact; but the klieg lights of Hollywood had stunned him, and he worked more slowly than usual. As Howard wrote to Bill Gray: “Gore is doing well, but at a pace so slow that I can’t believe it is Gore working.” He noted that he and Woodward spent a good deal of their time lounging at the pool, and this worried him. He had lost a sense of having his own profession. “I can never see myself sitting around and being a kept boy.” This self-doubt would continue to haunt Howard, whom Gore still called Tinker or just Tink, as in Tinker Bell. “It took some years for that to stop,” recalled Howard. “I was a fairy, but I couldn’t fly.”
Most days, Newman was busy at Warner Bros., playing Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun (1958). It was still based on the teleplay by Gore, but had been adapted by another writer, much to Gore’s annoyance. But he had other projects and worked mostly in Malibu, often at a table on the patio, though he checked in once in a while at the MGM writers’ office. The studio farmed out various scripts to him, but nothing really amused him, and he had a strong sense that his life as a novelist had somehow been hijacked. Nonetheless, he enjoyed living on the West Coast, with its predictable good weather, in a house with lots of room for guests, who kept coming.
Woodward, who was the only woman in the group, soon felt like “the mother of them all,” as she said, and found herself less than thrilled by her circumstances. (She was quite happy when this little commune came to an end.) Occasionally Gore’s friend Claire Bloom, another budding actress, joined the group. (They had met in London nine years earlier, when Bloom was only seventeen.) This friendship developed nicely, with Gore introducing the beautiful young actress to many of his closest friends.
Christopher Isherwood lived nearby, and Gore enjoyed the time he spent with the fifty-three-year-old writer and his young boyfriend, the artist Don Bachardy. But the stresses of being a studio writer proved irksome, and Gore increasingly chafed at the demands made by MGM. He had begun working on both Washington, D.C. and Julian, two novels that would eventually appear. But these remained only half developed as miscellaneous notes, assorted scenes with bits of dialogue, raw outlines. “I needed to keep working on scripts to pay the tax man,” Gore reflected.
To reduce his tax liabilities, he put $300,000 (he really had been doing well!) into a retirement account and bought a rental property in New York City: a four-story brownstone on East Fifty-Eighth Street. “I always believed in property,” Gore said. “It was the only constant in a world of unstable economic value. One could never depend on stocks or other investments. I like bricks and mortar. I like to see my money in front of me. And buildings tend to appreciate in time. All you need is patience.” As ever, Gore took the long view. Indeed, he was shrewd about money—an unusual trait for a novelist—and was determined to die a rich man, which he did.
When the lease ended on MacLaine’s house in Malibu, Gore returned to Edgewater with some relief, getting back to the big desk in his octagonal study, where an array of projects lay before him. He had a play about the Civil War—an extension of a teleplay—that didn’t seem to work. He had pieces of two novels and further assignments from MGM. The project on his grandfather hung in abeyance, never quite ready for production. Of course Visit still played to reasonably full houses on Broadway, so he consoled himself that the name of Gore Vidal would not fade too quickly. More and more, he found himself in demand on talk shows, such as Jack Paar’s popular Tonight Show. But nothing felt quite right.
“Whenever I get out of sorts, I travel,” he said. And so, in the fall of 1957, he took off for London on the Queen Mary with an MGM project in hand: a rewrite of The Scapegoat, a script adapted from a crime novel by Daphne du Maurier. It would star Alec Guinness and Bette Davis (whom Gore enlisted for the role, although her part was cut back in the final production, much to her annoyance). Gore checked in to a suite at Claridge’s, all paid for by MGM. Kenneth Tynan—an influential theater critic at The Observer—had been a fellow passenger on the Atlantic crossing, and what had been a passing contact became a lasting friendship. “I loved Ken,” said Gore, “who was probably one of the most intelligent critics ever.” Gore also met Tynan’s American wife, the actress and writer Elaine Dundy, who was working on her first novel and eagerly sought Gore’s advice. They, too, became friends. Of Tynan’s wives, Gore noted in 1988, “For decades now I have been a friend to the first as well as the second Widow Tynan. Each regards me with suspicion vis-à-vis the other but, as I liked to explain, I am extremely insensitive to the feelings of others, particularly when it comes to amour propre. Each widow agreed that my indifference was to be counted upon as safe haven in a stormy sea.”
Gore now made his first strenuous effort to get Visit to a Small Planet staged in the West End. “I was sabotaged at every turn by Binkie Beaumont, then and forever,” he recalled bitterly. Hugh Beaumont was, indeed, a major impresario, one of the most powerful figures in British drama for many decades, and he disliked Gore and his plays, believing their humor was far too American for the West End. Another British actor of note, Robert Morley, considered taking on the role of Kreton, but he insisted on a portion of the royalties and Gore refused, thinking he could get Guinness or someone else to play Kreton. But American humor often fell flat in Britain, and offers failed to materialize.
The Christmas season in London brought no joy, as Nina arrived, expecting grande dame treatment. As usual, Howard—who had moved into a room at Claridge’s near Gore’s suite—took on the task of looking after her. But her alcoholism had become a problem beyond solution, and she made life miserable for Gore. He took some comfort in a brief visit by Newman and Woodward, who had recently married. But he missed the solace of Edgewater and felt desperate to work without interruption.
VII. BEN-HUR
New York seemed appealing again. Gore’s apartment at 360 East Fifty-Fifth Street became an ideal pied-à-terre, so he didn’t feel the financial need to rent it out. And Edgewater had, with recent improvements, become very comfortable at last. Gore settled in to work as spring arrived in 1957.
But what would he do next? He had in hand his hastily rewritten script of Honor, a Civil War play, which he retitled On the March to the Sea. He had hardly finished revising the first act when the producer Sam Zimbalist called about Ben-Hur—a major MGM production in the works, with a budget of $15 million, the largest of any film to date. Gore knew the novel well, having read it at his grandfather’s house as a teenager. It had been one of the most popular novels in American history, an 1880 publication by Lew Wallace, a Civil War general and the onetime governor of the New Mexico Territory, where he had met Gore’s hero, Billy the Kid. Ben-Hur had outsold everything but the Bible until 1936, when Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell rushed like a tornado across the country.
Wallace’s story of Rome in the time of Jesus had already been adapted twice for Hollywood, but this was going to be a major film, an event in itself, with William Wyler directing Charlton Heston, from a script by journeyman screenwriter Karl Tunberg, who had spent two decades working for major studios. Judah Ben-Hur is a wealthy prince in Jerusalem who runs afoul of the authorities when he refuses to provide his old friend Messala—a Roman tribune—with names of anti-Roman Jews. It’s a vivid story, conceived on an epic scale. But there was script trouble, to put it mildly.
Gore recalled: “I was eager to get out of my contract with MGM. It felt like a life sentence. Having already worked with Sam on The Catered Affair and I Accuse!, I thought this might work. I liked the story well enough. But the original version by Tunberg lacked drama. The dialogue was flat, very American. Tunberg was a studio hack. Sam Behrman had been brought on, but the script still didn’t work, and now they found themselves in a mess. The grand sets had been built in Rome. Money sluiced in the gutters.”
Arriving in April in Rome, still his favorite city, Gore set to work on Tunberg’s script. Zimbalist had also hired Christopher Fry, the British playwright, to work with Gore on the script. It was a peculiar arrangement, and Gore knew at once that trouble lay ahead. The sets had been constructed, the actors had assembled, but the script remained a mess. Dutifully Gore and Fry did their best, producing page after page for rehearsal, even shooting. Wyler, for his part, knew that the script still lacked a necessary tension.
Gore suggested to Wyler that a homoerotic subplot of sorts might help: assume that Messala had once loved Ben-Hur as a boy and hoped to reignite this passion (shades of Gore and Jimmie Trimble). Orthodox and obdurate Ben-Hur would want nothing of this, being—as Gore put it—“all boy.” He hadn’t the slightest interest in a dalliance with Messala: hence the vengefulness that arises. What else could explain the sadistic lengths to which Messala was willing to go to humiliate his former friend by imprisoning his family and sending him into slavery on a galley ship?
Wyler showed some skepticism about this plot twist, but he finally agreed, as long as nobody told Heston, who would never approve. Gore recalled: “Heston was not a good actor, and Willy Wyler knew it. He said to me: ‘It’s one thing to try to inspire a wooden actor. It’s another to animate an entire lumberyard.’ ” Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, was an intelligent actor, however, and he responded well to Gore’s suggestions. “He got the idea right away and seemed to like it.” (Heston, for his part, furiously denied that the plot had any homosexual overtones and said that Gore’s claims infuriated him.) The early rushes, with scenes mostly written by Gore, surprised everyone with their high quality. Wyler felt relieved, and the film proceeded, with Gore on the set every day for five weeks. Zimbalist kept Gore abreast of the filming, and said that his only regret was that Gore “couldn’t stay longer.” This would have allowed him to “work a bit more slowly.” But Gore had other fish to fry, and he found the atmosphere on the set of the film poisonous.
On cue, a battle for screenplay credit ensued and Tunberg, as a former head of the Screen Writers Guild, won. This judgment appalled both Fry and Gore. Ben-Hur was not only a film; it was a major cultural event. Being attached to it, formally or informally, provided a good deal of street credit for everyone involved, especially when it won eleven Academy Awards—the first film ever so lavishly honored.
Gore rushed back to Edgewater to try to get his play On the March to the Sea into production. But this work attracted no interest from producers, who thought it flat and dull, without the Oscar Wilde–like quips that had made Visit to a Small Planet soar on Broadway. He sent the script to several of his actor friends, but nobody showed the slightest interest. So he returned to his novel about Julian, trying to recall what it felt like to write novels. To Paul Bowles, he wrote that he had really had it with script-writing and the distractions that came with it: “No more movies for some time.”
Promises, promises. After only five months of work on Julian, he received a call from Sam Spiegel, the film producer who had, four years earlier, scored a major artistic and commercial success with On the Waterfront. Spiegel wanted to know if Gore might adapt Suddenly, Last Summer, a play by Tennessee Williams that had opened Off-Broadway on January 7, 1958, as part of a duo of one-act plays called Garden District. This stark, melodramatic play about homosexuality and cannibalism drew heavily on Greek tragedy, especially The Bacchae of Euripides. Given his friendship with Williams and the nature of the material, Gore could hardly resist.
But the plot was ludicrous. A strangely remote young brain surgeon (Montgomery Clift) tries to understand why a peculiar and overwrought dowager from New Orleans (Katharine Hepburn) wishes to lobotomize her gorgeous young niece (Elizabeth Taylor). After an oppressive amount of conversation, it becomes clear to the moviegoer that the dowager’s son was killed while on a trip to Europe with her niece. It takes a strong dose of “truth serum” to get the niece to reveal the bizarre circumstances. It turns out the young man was overwhelmed, then eaten, by young boys—“urchins.” Presumably he had sexual designs on them, and had used his cousin as a lure.
Really?
The Gothic imagination of Williams had begun to descend in a downdraft of madness, and this lurid plot was an unlikely vehicle for big-name Hollywood stars. But Spiegel knew what he was doing, and the film—despite terrible reviews—found a receptive audience. Perhaps in the fiercely repressed atmosphere of the late fifties, it made a kind of peculiar sense that audiences would respond to a film that conflated homosexuality, madness, and cannibalism. The fact that Clift, himself a gay man who battled alcoholism, fit the part so well may have helped. But it’s a weak film, nevertheless, and not one of Gore’s better moments as a writer in any medium.
Nevertheless, the fact that it did well at the box office and garnered Academy Award nominations for both Hepburn and Taylor certainly helped to float the name of Gore Vidal, a banner that now rippled in the cultural winds even more prominently.
There was the added benefit, for Gore, of spending more time with Williams, who had to a degree fallen off his radar, because Frank Merlo, Williams’s partner, never liked or trusted Gore. Out of loyalty, Gore never missed a play by Williams, usually contriving to appear on its first night. Gore recalled the early discussions of his adaptation of Suddenly, Last Summer: “The Bird [Williams] and I had an initial script conference with Sam in Florida. Sam was a monster, but very bright, and he got things done. It was during this visit that I took him to meet Jack and Jackie Kennedy. They were staying at the old man’s [Joseph Kennedy’s] house in Palm Beach. The Bird had no idea who these people were. ‘They must have money,’ he said. I explained that Jack might be the next president, and this interested him. Jackie loved meeting Tennessee, and so did Jack. After lunch and cocktails, he took us onto the lawn to shoot skeet, and Tennessee showed him how it was really done. He was a much better shot than Jack. The Bird leaned to my ear: ‘What a nice ass!’ I told this to Jack, who loved it.” Gore recalled that Jack praised Summer and Smoke, not Streetcar or Glass Menagerie. “Now that was a political move. It tells you what you need to know about why Jack became president.”
VIII. A PLACE AT THE ROUND TABLE
Always attracted by power, Gore found the Kennedy aura both thrilling and disconcerting. He envied Kennedy’s popularity and good looks, his grand prospects, and also liked his intelligence and charm, even the furious ambition. He began to wonder again if he might run for political office himself. Certainly he loved being in the public eye, and in appearances on chat shows—now a staple guest on late-afternoon and late-evening television—he felt surprisingly at ease. The camera liked him, and the feeling was mutual. And now his drama about his grandfather was scheduled, near the close of 1959, for a national airing on NBC’s Sunday Showcase. This would ramp up his profile in a more sustained way than brief appearances on a talk show possibly could.
Meanwhile, another idea dawned. Why not write a play about politics? With the 1960 presidential election in view, it made sense to get a play on Broadway that would expose the backroom boys at their own game. He spent a few weeks in Provincetown with Howard in the late summer of 1959, and during this time he sketched the characters and possible action of The Best Man. Working with his usual speed, he had a full draft of the play by October. At the suggestion of Williams, he approached Roger L. Stevens, a prolific producer who had only a few years earlier put on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as well as West Side Story. The Best Man struck Stevens as an obvious hit, and he moved ahead with arrangements for the play to open on Broadway in the spring of 1960, just as the presidential sweepstakes began in earnest.
In the fall of 1959 Gore called on Eleanor Roosevelt at Hyde Park, seeking her encouragement for him to run for Congress in Dutchess County. He wondered if he might represent the Twenty-Ninth Congressional District. At first she demurred. It was obvious that no Democrat could win in the county, which was heavily Republican and had been for the past half century. Mrs. Roosevelt probably also knew that Gore was gay and held radical views on any number of topics. She doubtless recalled that Senator Thomas P. Gore had been something of a thorn in her husband’s political flesh for many years. Nevertheless, she weighed the idea carefully and, within weeks, told Gore she would support him if he ran. She also paved the way for him with Joseph Hawkins, the local head of the Democratic Party, who was glad to have a young man of some fame, even notoriety, to put forward.
“In 1960, I was seeing all sorts of things coming together,” Gore recalled. “My political life, my writing life. It was a good moment, if only a moment.”