October 3, 1924– Gore Vidal:
“A Narcissist is someone better looking than you are”
I played him once. Well, not exactly, but I based a character that I once portrayed, a theatre critic, in Tom Stoppard‘s brilliant The Real Inspector Hound, on Gore Vidal, taken from his appearances on talk shows.
Born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal at West Point, NY, the brilliant, erudite, perceptive & sarcastic, Vidal could be my own single writer library. He is the author of 23 novels, 5 plays, 3 volumes of memoirs, numerous screenplays & short stories, & over 400 essays. With his special pedigree (his grandfather was a US senator & his father was a member of Roosevelt’s Cabinet), good-looks, good-luck, & talent, Vidal was a witness to almost a century of American political & social life.
Vidal was a tried & true progressive promoter of gay visibility. He was brave at a time when he could have had everything to lose. His third novel, The City And The Pillar (1948), was the first mainstream novel to deal openly with male homosexuality. Vidal lacked support from his own editor, who forced him to make the already dark ending less compelling by having the gay main character become a murderer, killing his straight lifelong crush. When the novel was released, The NY Times reviewer was so outraged by the depravity that the newspaper refused to review Vidal’s next 5 books. Time & Newsweek vowed never to review another book by him.
Forthcoming with gay themes & characters in his fiction, & lending strong support to Sexual Freedom & Equal Rights, Vidal still famously believed in gay sex acts, but not gay people. He claimed to be bisexual, but his close relationships with women like actors Joanne Woodward & Claire Bloom were strictly platonic. Vidal claimed that he & his partner of 50+ years, Howard Austen, only had sex at the start of their relationship. Vidal never officially came out of the closet; the very idea of coming out was abhorrent to him.
Vidal:
“‘Homoerotic’ means to lust for one’s own sex, which I certainly did a lot of in my youth, ‘Homosexual’ implies really an organization of one’s life around it, & I never did that & always kept my options open. Needless to say I was immediately categorized with The City And The Pillar when I need not have been, and never regretted it for one minute. I always thought it was my opinion of others which mattered, not their opinion of me. I was less distressed than you might think for being so categorized but always hesitated to categorize anyone else unless they insisted on it.”
When ABC News hired Vidal & William F. Buckley to cover the political conventions in 1968, the rancor & resentment came to a head when Vidal called Buckley a “pro-crypto Nazi”. Buckley ranted in his upper-class Atlantic accent:
“Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi, or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face & you’ll stay plastered.”
Buckley continued to attack Vidal in Esquire Magazine just months after The Stonewall Riots, claiming that Vidal: “was proclaiming the normalcy of his affliction” & comparing him to a drug pusher for promoting his gayness.
This little fascinating & entertaining slice of history is the subject of Best Of Enemies (2015), a documentary film directed by Robert Gordon & Morgan Neville about the famed televised debates.
Vidals most famous series of novels: Burr (1973), Lincoln (1984), 1876 (1976), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), Washington DC (1967), & The Golden Age (2000) are fictional histories of the USA from the American Revolution to the recent past.
“Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues & with interchangeable candidates.”
Vidal ran as a Democrat for the House Of Representatives from New York in 1960 & the Senate from California in 1982. He lost both elections. Vidal turned his political genius into literature, chronicling the decline & fall of the American Empire in a series of essays United States: Essays 1952-1992, which won the 1993 National Book Award. Vidal’s best essays are collected in The Selected Essays Of Gore Vidal (2008).
Vidal’s Point To Point Navigation (2006) is a memoir about dealing with the loss of his partner Auster, who left this world in 2003. As always, Vidal’s personal drama reflects the larger political & historical picture of the USA, in this case George W.’s legacy of war, torture, & autocratic rule. The book’s title refers to Vidal’s flight service during World War II, a method of visual navigation in which one flies from one landmark to the next. It is a very readable follow-up to one of my favorite books of all time, his memoir Palimpsest (1995).
I love this moment from Point To Point Navigation: Austen asks from his deathbed: “Didn’t it go by awfully fast?” Vidal answers:
“Of course it had. We had been too happy & the gods cannot bear the happiness of mortals.”
Often a conundrum, Vidal actually begins a paragraph in his final memoir Gore Vidal: Snapshots In History’s Glare (2009): “Despite never having been very social…”, & then proceeds to tell of asking Andy Warhol, Mick & Bianca Jagger to visit him & Austen at their villa outside Ravello, Italy. Vidal:
“Our old friends the Newmans (Paul & Joanne) used to drop by. So did Lauren Hutton, Susan Sarandon, Rudolf Nureyev, Hillary Clinton, Sting, James Taylor, Leonard Bernstein, Johnny Carson, Bruce Springsteen & many others.”
I have seen photographs of young Vidal setting off to war & later frolicking with Tennessee Williams; & of a middle-aged Vidal running for Congress & hobnobbing with JFK (Vidal shared a stepfather with Jackie Kennedy). Williams told Vidal that JFK had ‘a nice ass’; Vidal told Kennedy, who answered: “Why, that’s very exciting.”
Vidal left us with a treasury of quips, bon mots & his vast knowledge of literature & history, particularly American History. He is a smart observer & his sharp insights cut down the powerful. He does it with aplomb:
“I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.”
“There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”
“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, & not giving a damn.”
Vidal left this world in summer 2012. Austen & Vidal are buried together Rock Creek Cemetery in DC. Vidal continues to fascinate me with his wit & insight. He is an American Treasure.
“As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.”
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