Gore Vidal (115 page)

Bradford was not surprised when finally, in September 1971, Vidal, somewhat guiltily, broke the news. “My dear Gore,” he responded, “naturally I was saddened by your letter. And, yes, shocked—although, I must say, only in the way one is when told that the imminent death of a relative or friend has finally occurred. Now I hope you find some new green meadows in this country that look as fair to you in their way as those new ones of yours in [Ireland]. And let's do keep in touch,” which they were to do over the next years. Once Gore made his wishes known, Bradford helped facilitate the move to Random House by cooperating in settling the complicated financial arrangements. It was an additional inducement to sign a contract with a $235,000 advance, most of it for
Burr
. Gradually his backlist was moved to Random House, though Little, Brown for some time had rights to the books it had most recently published. Bradford, who regretted Gore's departure, genuinely liked and admired him. In retrospect, Gore thought Bradford, with whom he had gotten along so well, the best editor he had ever had, with the exception of Nick Wreden, mainly because Bradford was equally enthusiastic about books as different as
Washington, D.C
., and
Myra Breckinridge
. When in 1973 Bradford expressed interest in property in Ireland, Gore gave him the benefit of his own experience and later that year sent him an inscribed copy of the Random House edition of
Burr
. “
I nearly dedicated
Burr
to you but then thought that this might be complicated all
around.” Bradford sent back a congratulatory note. “Clearly you're getting richer and richer. Everything considered,” the stoical editor concluded, it is “a development I view for once with utter equanimity.” Gore would have gotten equally rich, both he and Bradford knew, with Little, Brown, and over the next decades he faulted himself for disloyalty, or at least insufficient gratefulness, and often felt that the new publishing relationship had been a Faustian bargain in which he had lost, over the years, in a different sort of currency, more than he had gained.

For both Jason Epstein and Gore Vidal the new dimension to their relationship had its hazards, though in the long run the risk was essentially on the personal side. They had been friends since the late 1950s, from Dupee-Rovere days at Edgewater. Both ambitious, both strong-willed, during the 1960s each had pursued fame and fortune in his own way. By middecade Epstein had become a powerful figure in the publishing world. That Anchor Books had led the way in the creation of the paperback industry added the cachet of visionary practicality to his reputation for intellectual brilliance. Now the dominant young editor at Random House, also with high management responsibilities, he had wanted Gore to be one of his authors almost from the start of their friendship. The success of
The New York Review of Books
had provided an additional bond, though Jason, a part owner, played no editorial role. The familial connection was intensified by Gore's closeness to Barbara. An effective editor of his essays with whom he occasionally had differences of opinion, she had a talent for avoiding confrontation, a compelling need to soothe. If in the domestic and publishing bestiary Jason was the argumentative, peremptory bear, Barbara was the domesticated doe, the gracious, dark-eyed, and soft-spoken creature quietly grazing in the meadow, sensitive, easily startled, of whom Gore felt protective, fraternal. With Jason the closeness was never without some tension, partly two assertive personalities clashing, partly because from the start Gore was never sure he had done the right thing in succumbing to Jason's professional blandishments.

During the year before his first summer at Ravello, as he worked on
Burr
, he alternated his interest in the political and military machinations of the Founding Fathers with his concern about America's role in the modern world, especially the seemingly unending war in Vietnam, which in his
election campaign in 1968 Richard Nixon had promised to bring to a speedy conclusion, based on a plan he refused to divulge. Once elected, it was clear Nixon had no plan other than to be more brutally militaristic than even Johnson had been. For Vidal, as for many others, the Vietnam War had become a noxious trauma, its corrosive destructiveness a constant preoccupation. He talked about it, dreamed about it, argued against it. Having gradually formed the view that American history had from the beginning manifested a predilection for wealth through aggressive conquests, from Andrew Jackson's Indian Wars to the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and now the Vietnam War, he had begun to call America's international presence “the American Empire.” It was not a phrase most Americans liked hearing. The nation on the whole maintained an unselfconscious disconnection between its view of itself as a peace-loving republic uninterested in exploiting others and the reality of its far-flung dominance. Often, under the pretense of fighting international communism, America had been expanding its own economic and political power, at great cost to domestic stability and prosperity, and in the cases of Korea and Vietnam at the expense of substantial amounts of American blood. Much as he had grown to hate Lyndon Johnson, Vidal had become even more hostile to Nixon, who, unlike Johnson, had few to no redeeming elements. As a realist, Vidal expected politicians to lie, manipulate, and maneuver. That was in the nature of their profession. But Nixon seemed excessive in these matters, and, unlike Johnson's, his domestic program seemed dedicated to maintaining and enriching his electoral base. Everything Vidal valued in public life—justice, fairness, open-mindedness, noninterference in the private life of the individual, a commitment to the Bill of Rights—the Nixon administration opposed, explicitly or covertly. The FBI, as Vidal saw in its attacks on the New Party, whose 1972 presidential candidate, Ralph Nader, he supported, had become an instrument of oppression. America seemed to be turning into a police state.

As he made progress with
Burr
, a novel partly about the politics of the eighteenth century, the idea came to him to write a satirical play about politics in the twentieth century, in which Nixon would be the main character. His dialogue would consist almost entirely of words the real Nixon had uttered in public discourse. The other main characters would be George Washington, whom he had begun to dramatize in
Burr
, Eisenhower, and John Kennedy, with two contemporary figures, called “Pro” and “Con,”
one loosely based on William Buckley, a Nixon supporter, the other representing his own views, who would comment on the characters. Washington would be depicted as critical of Kennedy's and Nixon's militaristic ambitions, Eisenhower as a golf-playing nonentity, Nixon as a mendacious, power-mad psychopath. Suddenly preoccupied with the idea of the play, he stopped work on
Burr
, barely under way, to write
An Evening with Richard Nixon
. Within a short time of its completion in late summer 1971, he had a publisher and a producer. Jason of course did not balk at the prospect of Random House's putting it out. “Sure, I was happy to publish
An Evening with Richard Nixon
. It was funny. It was a way of getting Gore started at Random House,” and whatever minor loss there would be in printing a small edition, scheduled for March 1972, would be outweighed by having Vidal under contract for
Burr
. In mid-October, Gore sent the play to New York. “
Here it is
,” he wrote to Jason. “I've put a red line in the margin opposite the speeches that are invented. I think there should be a different kind of type for the invented—but
not
italics. Bolder Roman, say … ? I'll write a one page note for the beginning, explaining what's real and what's not.” That there would actually be a stage production was uncertain, in part because there had not yet been time to determine that but also because the play had limited theatrical potential. There was no plot in the conventional sense. It was a topical play about political ideas, hardly the usual stuff of Broadway box-office triumphs. Only the national preoccupation with the Vietnam War and the passion Nixon and his policies aroused made it potentially though problematically viable, especially perhaps on college campuses and in a New York theatrical situation that kept costs as low as possible. Nixon supporters would not be likely to flow in from the suburbs to see the play. The vast uncomfortable middle, uneasy with the war but unwilling to oppose it actively, would not be eager to buy tickets to be made even more uncomfortable. Spending an evening with Richard Nixon would not be much fun even in the best of circumstances. Political theater was rarely commercially successful.

That
An Evening with Richard Nixon
was to close after thirteen performances on Broadway was partly a given of the genre, mostly the result of the honorable if not idealistic misjudgments of the producer, Hillard Elkins, who was delighted to be working with Gore, hated Nixon, and hoped he might make the play a commercial success. Gore met “Hilly” through Claire Bloom, who had married him in 1970, soon after her divorce from
Rod Steiger. The marriage “obviously was over long before that,” Howard recalled. “Claire had been seeing Hilly. There was a plan that he was to get in touch with her via our address. However, neither Gore nor Claire clued me into this little plot they'd hatched. So a telegram arrives for Claire Bloom care of Gore Vidal or something, and neither Claire nor Rod are in town. Rod calls and, unthinkingly, not knowing anything, I said, ‘How strange, did you change agents or something?' They had changed apartments, and I thought it was probably her agent and he's got a job for Claire and doesn't know how to contact her. Steiger said, ‘No.' I said, ‘What do you want me to do?' He said, ‘Will you do me a favor: open it and read it to me?' So I opened it and I'm reading just words. It sounds like baby talk. ‘Can't wait to meet you for act 3, love and kisses,' and some name. It was from Hilly Elkins to Claire. She returned to Rome that day. Steiger confronted her with the telegram, and that was the end of the marriage. Gore, that same day, called me from New York, and I told him that this strange thing had happened. ‘Why would Claire be getting telegrams here?' And he started calling me all kinds of names, ‘Idiot and stupid,' and this and that! I felt, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done?' The next morning at eight o'clock the doorbell rings. It's Claire. I said, ‘Claire, I'm afraid I have done something so awful. I'm so mortified. I'll get on my knees.' ‘You know,' she said, ‘it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Otherwise I never would have found the courage to get out of this horrible marriage.'”

Elkins seemed to many as unlikely a match for Claire as had Steiger. Smart, energetic, fast-talking, domineering, with a huge wardrobe, an obsession with Napoleon, and an amusing effervescence that was both self-indulgent and charming, he had made two successful films,
Alice's Restaurant
and
A New Leaf
. He had produced a number of flashy but commercially unsuccessful Broadway plays, including
Golden Boy
, with Sammy Davis, Jr., and the musical
The Rothschilds
, as well as the economically successful
Oh! Calcutta!
, on which he worked closely with Ken Tynan. Five years younger than Vidal, a tense mix of liberal idealism and entrepreneurial commercialism, Elkins felt that there was nothing he could not do successfully, nothing that would not benefit from his salesmanship, including
An Evening with Richard Nixon
. As soon as he read the script in summer 1971, he determined to do it. Probably he raised money for the production from friends who were sympathetic to the play's message, perhaps people more interested in politics than theater. Vidal, who liked his brash high spirits, was delighted.
Soon Elkins, so dedicated to self-promotion that he had recently encouraged a book called
The Producer
that sycophantically chronicled his theater life during 1970-71, had a director, a cast, and the Shubert Theatre, “the largest musical comedy house on Broadway. I should have known then,” Gore remarked, “as Claire should have known, about his acute megalomania, the phase he was going into, and I was so preoccupied I didn't notice it. I just said the theater's too big for this play. Musicals can't fill it. How can this play?” In December, Elkins tracked down the young director Ed Sherin, on holiday skiing with his sons, and soon wore down his resistance to what Sherin, with experience as a director in television, movies, and theater, most recently the Broadway success
The Great White Hope
, thought an untheatrical script. “I said, ‘This is impossible. It's a political pamphlet in dialogue form.' He said, ‘Don't you like it?' I said, ‘Yeah, I like it.' He said, ‘You mean to tell me you can't find a way to stage this?' I think Hilly wanted to do it because he wanted to do anything that would get press.” An admirer of Vidal's essays and novels, Sherin shared Vidal's view of Nixon and recent American politics. When he had had a small role in
Romulus
in 1962 he had observed Gore during rehearsals looking unhappy at what seemed the play's likely failure. “I thought the play itself was miserably done,” Sherin recalled. “Cyril was not fleshy enough, edgy enough, real enough for the role. You had that kind of buttery, creamy, wonderful largesse of Ritchard, but it had a vaudeville taint to it. I think that was a critical error, so that the real meaning of the play escaped the production. It was a much darker play than the one we put on.” Sherin had a similar challenge with
An Evening with Richard Nixon:
how to make theatrically effective an unrealistic script grounded in a realistic contemporary political discourse consisting entirely of talk about rather than depiction of physical action or emotional tension.