Gore Vidal (116 page)

Frenetically energetic, Hilly produced, Sherin directed, Claire watched nervously, filled with high expectations. Gore and Howard came from Rome in January. Sherin, who had not seen Gore for ten years, noticed that he looked older, more mature. The young man had disappeared. In February, rehearsals went into high gear in preparation for a month of tryouts. The brilliant, seriously comedic George S. Irving took on the role of Nixon. To bridge the gap between political realism and theatrical fantasy, as well as to deal with the large cast of characters, Sherin decided to make use of masks and have numbers of actors play multiple roles, including the relatively unknown Susan Sarandon. Claire thought Sherin “wonderfully creative,
brilliant.” Gore, looking to explain the play's failure, was less appreciative. Sherin “wasn't right for the play. But the whole thing was doomed anyway. I can't blame him for anything.” During rehearsals Sherin noticed Gore's playfulness, his charm. “But I always felt that there was an agenda there. That was part of his power and also something that made me somewhat unnerved when I was around him. You always thought he was looking around the back of your head. A very bright man but very careful. Almost premeditated. It looked as if he had written the script before he'd gotten to the meeting. I'm not talking about a business meeting. I'm talking about life, about personal interactions. Very controlled, careful. The only fun that Gore ever had with me was when he would talk about my hidden desires to be a homosexual, and that was fun. He would come on a little bit about ‘You don't really know what's going on inside you,' and so forth. Then he would say that pickles were very important. You had to eat a lot of dill pickles in order to keep your pecker hard, or something like that. He was charming even when he was playful, and then he said some very wonderful things to me about my work. And it bonded me to him.”

As rehearsals progressed, Vidal rewrote the script, the performance version considerably different and much shorter than the Random House edition. In late March 1972 a month of previews began. Elkins had decided there would be no out-of-town openings. Gore came regularly to rehearsals. “We were perfecting it or trying to. I was giving them new stuff all the time. Hilly was hysterical. That's his nature. He was either stoned or jittery. He wasn't much help.” Press releases and word of mouth let the world know that a politically inflammatory anti-Nixon play was about to open. Gore appeared on the Cavett and Susskind shows. Soon author and producer were getting anonymous hate letters, including death threats. On the one hand, they seemed preposterous. On the other, they were unnerving. “The only bomb scare that I knew of,” Sherin later joked, “was that we were going to close.” Apparently “a few Republicans set fire to the balcony,” though it appears to have been confined to a wastepaper basket, “and there were all kinds of disruptive things,” Gore recalled. Men in dark suits and white shirts, who announced that they represented the White House, came to one of the previews. As they left, one of them waved pleasantly. “When the Nixon deputy smiled and waved, we knew,” Sherin recalled. “‘Enjoy yourselves,' they must have said. ‘Put this on in Manhattan, the hotbed of American radicalism, it won't hurt us.'” Though the director, the producer,
and the author then and later found it compelling to think they were being stalked by the FBI, the IRS, and the Watergate plumbers, a New York anti-Nixon Broadway play had no national significance. Only those involved assumed (and usually briefly) that political theater had a political impact. Elkins and Sherin were more worried that the play would not have enough theatrical impact. Sherin felt he had gone as far as he could with pratfalls. More would be counterproductive. Elkins arranged a lunch at Sardi's with Elaine May, whom he wanted to consult about adding jokes. “Elaine was rather embarrassed,” Gore remembered, “but wonderfully insane. She didn't have any jokes. It wasn't her field. We had a strange meeting at Sardi's. She had just watched the play…. It was really kind of a seminar on comedy. How you get jokes. How you make people laugh. I knew quite as much about it as she did. But all very amiable and all pointless,” because, as Sherin saw, of the gap between Vidal's belief that he had written an important political play and the producer's desire to do whatever necessary to have a commercial success. “Gore's the sweetest man in the world, but he's not the world's greatest dramatist,” Sherin observed. “He's a great novelist, great essayist, and that's what
Nixon
is—a political essay in dialogue form. You want to chortle when you read it, ‘Look at this. Did that asshole really say that?' ‘Oh, that bastard, did he do that about Cambodia, and did he really go to the Lincoln Memorial steps and pray to Lincoln? My God!' But you don't want to see that up on the stage. That's what came out of that meeting at Sardi's. Gore said that's what it is, and it's wonderful. Elaine didn't know what to say. And Hilly was responding to the fact that he was the ringmaster at Barnum and Bailey's Circus. He just wanted to pull out any stops he could.”

The play opened on May 6. Some of the reviews were respectable, though hardly glowing. The
New York Times
headlined Clive Barnes's review “Evening with Richard Nixon Is for Radical Liberals,” complaining that the play had “no real drama, no real excitement.” To attack Nixon this way was “no more exciting than seeing candy taken from little kids.” Still, this recent British arrival conceded, “some people might like to see a mean and nasty play about our President.” Very few got the opportunity. “
Sorry you didn't see
the play,” Gore wrote to Ned Bradford. “It was one of the best evenings I've ever spent in the theatre (this quite modestly, as actors, director and Nixon et al contributed).” The play closed after two weeks. In Gore's recollection the preview audience had been ecstatic. “Then it all
ended with one review in the
Times
by an Englishman who said he knew nothing about politics. He'd been a dance reviewer. A nice little fellow, but he was told to write a bad review and he did. It wasn't that bad: he kept saying how funny it was. And then he said that Gore Vidal has said mean and nasty things about
our
President. I remember that sentence.” It was his third consecutive theatrical failure, “the only failure that bothered me, because I believed it was a good play.” If there was ever a reasonable postmortem, it would have concluded that Sherin's analysis was sensible. It was not the subject matter, as Gore insisted, that had sunk the play but the difficulty of making it into an effective theatrical experience for a large audience. For Elkins it had been a triumph of self-assertion. “The day before the play opened, he went to bed for two weeks” in his Manhattan brownstone, which, Gore joked, “looked like Elba.” His Napoleonic obsession “made everybody nervous, and it drove Hilly mad, it finally did. I don't think he even knew when the play closed. He was just lying there in bed with a great smile on his face, smoking pot. Nothing was done, not that there was anything to do.” For Claire “the first night,” she soon wrote Gore, “was one of the most exciting evenings in the theatre I have ever had,” but “this was not just the death of a play, but a condemnation of the American people.” For Gore it had been an exhausting, dispiriting experience, one that brought him to the edge of collapse, though he managed to disguise from almost everyone just how miserable he felt. For a while he worried he might be about to have a breakdown. It seemed like the misery he had experienced just after Alice Astor's and John Latouche's deaths. Soon he and Howard were back in Rome. “
My blood pressure nearly
took the top of my head off those last few days,” he wrote to Claire. “But now it falls as my spirit soars, freed of
that
place!,” by which he meant New York. In June he took possession of Ravello. The bright spring sun revived him. So too did
Burr
. By midsummer he was back at work, and almost happy.

With his forty-seventh birthday imminent, he was relieved to be in reasonably good health and at the same time fearful that the next year would bring some near-fatal misery of the sort he associated with his father and his grandfather at about the same age. Gene Vidal had had his life-shattering heart attack at the age his son was soon to turn. Senator Gore had, at the same time in his life, almost died from influenza and had never quite gotten
his full strength back again. In youth his grandson had been “a hypochondriac; saw nothing but skull beneath the bone.” His thanatophobia still remained strong, though over the years it had switched its focus from the undesirability of being dead to the fear of experiencing some debilitating process in which his body would waste away or, even worse, he would lose his mind without knowing it. Skittish, superstitious, there was no disaster scenario that did not occur to him while he waited for the results of ordinary medical tests. “Skin cancers fall away; but hypochondria mounts,” he later wrote to Claire Bloom. “Why so many extra white cells, doctor? What—you always use cobalt for a minor sinusitis? Nothing serious of course. What an anticlimax death will be!” Fortunately, all alarms turned out to be false. Except for a tendency to high blood pressure and the 1940s hepatitis that still skewed his test results, he was in fine health, and his occasional fears alternated with an ironic self-awareness that allowed him as often to joke as to worry about death. Still, he was soon happy to have the year behind him, to be able to think, without fear of contradiction, that at least his forty-seventh year would not carry as much bad luck for him as it had for his father and grandfather.

Despite the failure of
An Evening with Richard Nixon
, much of the year had been productive. As soon as they took possession of La Rondinaia in June, Gore felt as if once again he had a home, as he had only once before felt he had, at Edgewater. Here, though, most friends had to be imported, usually for short visits, with the exception of an Englishman who lived in walking distance and who, with his dog Caligula, introduced himself soon after their arrival. A writer specializing in historical novels and books about flowers, Michael Tyler-Whittle, two years younger than Gore, had been trained in law and literature and had become an Anglican clergyman. A superb amateur botanist, he would be elected a fellow of the Linnaean Society. Deeply conservative in theology, he was an oversized, affectionate man, a lover of good food and wine, and an avid social conversationalist who thought matters of liturgy and ritual more important than considerations of personal conduct, especially sexual matters. He had faith that God would accept and forgive. Gore's sexual preferences did not distress him in the least. Recently married, he had moved in 1970 from England to the Amalfi coast, which had become the base for his ministrations to the Anglicans in the area and pastoral activities in other parts of Italy. Widely known as the “vicar of the divine coast,” he and Gore immediately took to one
another. Tyler-Whittle and Howard got along well. Soon he was a frequent visitor at La Rondinaia. Most other visitors had to come from a much greater distance, including Claire, probably exhausted by Hilly, with whom there was increasing tension. She came with her young daughter for two weeks in July 1972. “
I think you know how much
our friendship means to me,” she wrote to Gore, “and that I
do
love you. I mean that completely, and see no reason to change. We are very lucky. Few people have so much between them as we do.” Gore himself had communicated that sentiment to her and the world, without using her name, in
Two Sisters
. “
Recently I spent
an afternoon full of silences in the Protestant Cemetery,” he had written, “with someone I did not have an affair with a dozen years ago—too much silence at a crucial moment on a midnight beach, and a sense she was distracted by someone else—yet we continue to see one another year after year and affection grows, unstated and undefined and all the deeper perhaps for that…. I think how remarkably beautiful she is, as one marriage ends and another begins, and how we are once again together, in transit, emotionally. I prepare myself for the new husband, hopefully an improvement on the old.” Claire had been and continued to be a road not taken. But, as she later remarked, “it was there [that feeling with Gore]. But I was always in love with other people. I loved Gore. Very continuously. Those letters [from me to him] surprised me. No, it was never meant to come to anything. When something is there like that it will always be there. I never thought it would come to anything. I don't know why. I never really knew or thought that Gore was gay…. I was so dumb in those days. Awfully dumb because he didn't stop telling everybody. Certainly in Rome I did know. Those things don't matter if you want to have a life with someone, but there was never any question about that…. We never talked about a life together.” Howard and Gore, though, did speculate then and later about what might have been. “There are many times we've spoken about what would have happened if,” Howard recalled. “And I say, ‘You really should have married Claire. She's wonderful company, and she would have fit right in here beautifully.' I'm not quite serious, you know. Gore sometimes says, ‘Yeah, it depends.' Of all the women that we do know, she would have been the best.”