Gore Vidal (120 page)

Two attenuated presences from the past, who had hardly been in his mind at all, suddenly had definition again. He had not thought of Stanley Sofield or Pat Crocker in ages, neither of whom he had seen since the early 1950s. Sofield had been at the center of his St. Albans School experiences, the teacher there who had made the greatest impression on him and with whom he had kept in touch well into the 1950s. But they had not had any communication for many years. “
Most sad about Sofield
,” he told Louis Auchincloss in late 1974, who had written him that Sofield had died of a “sudden and merciful” heart attack. “Strange how those teachers confronted during pubescence remain so vividly in the memory while the later ones blur and vanish.” In April 1973 Gore learned that Pat Crocker, of whom he had been quite fond, had died of cancer in Antigua in December 1972. His mother had been with him for his last three painful months. “He is in a tomb in that beautiful little cemetery in Antigua,” Penny Crocker told him in response to his consolatory letter, a genre that he took to with grace and diligence. Generally it was as close as he wanted to get to the dead. A batch of Gore's books that had been stored in Pat's house in Panajachel and twenty of his letters to Pat, which Pat had carefully saved, surfaced. Most of the books had dedications from the author to Gore, including two of Anaïs's novels, a book of poems by Louise Nicholl, a novel by Somerset Maugham, and Michael Arlen's
The Green Hat
. The list evoked much of his youth and early manhood. What, Pat's executor wanted to know, should he do with the books and letters? “
Maybe you would like
to file [the letters] away for some future biographer, whose task will not be any the easier from your … awful habit of not dating any correspondence!”

Time and distance had, long before their deaths, made Sofield and Crocker absences. But Tom Driberg's sudden exit in August 1976 removed someone who had been a vivid part of Gore's present life. They had been friends since the 1950s, and during the 1950s and early '60s had seen each other whenever visiting either America or England. They enjoyed each
other's humor, talent, and capacity for entertaining outrageousness. Each lauded the other's vividness and capacity as writer and as celebrant. With Gore's move to Rome, and then the purchase of the Ravello house, they saw one another regularly. Gore was in England often enough. Tom loved Rome and Ravello even more. Whenever he could afford to get away from London (he had to appear regularly at the House of Lords in order to be eligible to collect his much-needed salary), he headed for Malta or Italy. La Rondinaia was a cost-free paradise to which he had an open invitation to come anytime. Driberg's sex life had had a sort of admirable recklessness, especially for a high-ranking Labour Party politician. Usually when he left after a visit to Ravello, where he had what was thought of as his own bedroom and where he worked on his autobiography, his thank-you letters contained entertaining accounts of his adventures with Italian boys in Florence and Venice and on the train to England. Often they were selfconsciously amusing variants on Lord Bradwell, the peerage to which he had recently been elevated, as dirty old man who was at the same time a romantic idealist perfectly capable of falling in love with his latest working-class passion. Though he had little money, he was generous to those he cared for and sometimes found himself exploited or even victimized. With Gore and Howard he gradually came to be cast partly in the role of avuncular family friend. The age gap between them and Driberg's declining health elicted Gore's concern and generosity. As Driberg's health deteriorated in the early 1970s, Gore became even more solicitous, more hospitable. In August 1973, after another in a series of heart attacks, Driberg convalesced at La Rondinaia. By 1975 he had convinced himself that he could write no place else but there. Gore was happy to accept the claim. The question of how frank he could be about his sex life in his autobiography worried Driberg and became a topic of conversation among his friends. Gore advised him to write everything but reserve publication of the controversial details, such as his having given Prime Minister Bevan a blow job, for posthumous publication. It was, at the same time, both worrisomely serious and high comedy. “
Can it be that
our little boy is now 70!” Gore wrote to him on his birthday. “It seems like only yesterday you were, in a piping treble, commanding the honest yeomen to drop their trousers. Well, now the halcyon days begin … and I wait impatiently for the next chapter of The Life. Do
not
be influenced by well-wishing fools who will attempt to bowdlerize.” Most lives in politics and journalism are “very like another
but it is Pepys fumbling with serving girls, and Boswell's dripping cock that command our attention and common humanity. Who can really hear J. Caesar's self-advertisements? and who can resist Catullus or Horace in their private moods?” Driberg went on with the memoir. He hoped to make good progress at Ravello, where he was scheduled to spend much of August 1976, though Gore had to be away part of the time. But “you can now stay, safely, without me as Anna is a splendid dedicated maid … and of course the Man of God [Michael Tyler-Whittle], the Smiths and Howard are on the scene.” A few days before his scheduled departure Driberg came down to London from Oxford to prepare for the trip. In a cab from Paddington Station to his Barbican apartment he had a fatal heart attack.

The year before Driberg's death Gore had brought together in London about fifty of his British friends for an elegant fiftieth-birthday party. The party had been his own idea. It seemed appropriate to celebrate and memorialize the passage of his half a century. It was almost inconceivable to him that the face he looked at in the mirror each morning when he shaved was the latest, stranger version of a face he had grown used to in a different version long ago. Recently, when he had grown a beard, it had been almost entirely white. He shaved it immediately. The fact of being fifty was ominously distinctive, unlike any other birthday, and rather than retreat into glum solitude he had decided on a celebratory event, both acknowledgment and defiance. His last big birthday bash had been twenty-five years before, at Johnny Nicholson's café in New York. This guest list would be vastly different. Of the three most prominent people in his life in 1945, one was dead. From the other two, Anaïs and Nina, he had been long estranged. Only two people who had attended the 1945 festivities, Tennessee and Howard, were there now, and practical considerations made the list mainly British. Kathleen Tynan, whom Ken had married after his divorce from Elaine, and Diana Phipps handled the party arrangements. Gore made suggestions for the guest list. He arrived in London a full week before the party, mostly to do some television appearances, including
Vidal, Profile of a Writer
for German television, part of which was to be filmed at his favorite London bookstore, Heywood Hill. The weather was foul, rainy and dark, John Saumurez Smith, the proprietor, recalled, and a fiftieth birthday was not entirely a happy occasion. The cameras inside the shop began filming him as he came to the outside front and walked through the door. As he entered, he said to the German camera crew, “What's new from Auschwitz?”
Stunned silence. The camera crew did not know whether to laugh or to cry. On the morning of the day of the party, as he and Howard descended in the small mirrored elevator from their suite at the Ritz Hotel, the elevator stopped on its way to the lobby. Jackie Kennedy stepped in, alone. It was a complete surprise to both of them. Since they had last talked, people had reported to him over the years that she had begun to deny she had ever even known him. He turned his back, his face to the mirror, and semiconsciously ran his hand through his hair. As the lift door opened, they let her exit first. “Bye-bye,” she said.

The responses to the invitations went to Diana Phipps. Princess Margaret came, smoking her usual endless chain of cigarettes. Lady Diana Cooper, whose husband had been Churchill's ambassador to France and who had known Gore since 1949, walked up to him, unaware he was talking to the princess, and began talking to him. “Oh, it's
you!”
Lady Diana dryly said when she noticed Margaret, and curtsied. Evangeline Bruce, wife of the American ambassador to Britain, with whom Gore had become friendly, attended, as did old London friends, including John Lehmann, now retired from publishing; and John Bowen, mostly writing for theater and television, and his companion David Cook; and the Tynans, he angular, tall, and bizarrely colorful, she sharply attractive. From Gore's Hollywood world Lee Remick, slightly reminiscent of Diana Lynn, was in town, and arrived with her husband. Diana Phipps and Claire Bloom were in good spirits. Marguerite Lamkin came, Speed Lamkin's sister, now a London socialite who still occasionally worked as a drama coach and had helped Claire perfect the American accent for her successful London performance in
Streetcar
the previous year. Gore, who had known Marguerite in New York in the 1950s, had brought them together. Antonia Fraser arrived with the playwright Harold Pinter, whom she had recently met. Gore and Pinter immediately discovered a shared passion for radical politics. The ubiquitous Maria, Lady St. Just, entered on the arm of Tennessee Williams. All week Maria spent with Gore as much free time as he had. In evening dress, assembled in private rooms at Mark's in Mayfair, the guests had drinks, then went in to dinner. “I looked across the room and saw Gore with Princess Margaret on one side of him and Tennessee Williams on the other,” John Bowen recalled. Princess Margaret “was constantly needing a light. She had a long cigarette with a holder. Tennessee Williams just giggled at her.” Claire, who thought the party stunning, “was thinking how incredible it was
that anyone could be as old as fifty.” Adept at light verse, the novelist Clive James, a close friend of Diana's, read a birthday poem he had composed, “
To Gore Vidal at Fifty
,” with lines as effervescent as “A Marvellous Boy whose golden aureola/Still scintillates as fresh as
Pepsi-Cola.”
The poetic tribute was not entirely unserious:

[Some] might cling to childhood out of self-delusion,
But that, or any similar, confusion,
You've always held in absolute contempt—
The only Absolute that you exempt
From your unwearyingly edifying
Assault on mankind's thirst to be undying—
A hope you've never ceased to make a mock of
Or boldly nominate what it's a crock of.

One of the expected guests who did not show up was John Galliher, who divided his time between Paris, London, and New York. Galliher, who had been Nina's friend and lover-in-passing in the early fifties, had introduced Gore to Jackie Bouvier twenty-five years before at a party at his Georgetown flat. “Apparently your party was a dazzler,” Galliher wrote to him the next week. “Diana said it was enormous fun, and Marguerite that it was the most entertaining group of people possible. Alas, I went to a dinner and afterwards after a few magic puffs and lots of vino, got involved in activities that kept me too late to go to Mark's.” After the party John Bowen went with Gore to the Ritz suite where, in voices hushed so as not to awaken Howard, they talked until dawn.

One party in Gore's honor that he declined to attend was his election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. On the last day of 1975 the secretary of the institute, the poet William Meredith, had sent him the letter of notification. “
Will you be kind enough
to let us know by return mail (or by cable) that you accept this election?” There would be an informal dinner in New York in April, a formal induction in May. Gore cabled from Rome: “THE INSTITUTE DOES ITSELF BELATED HONOR MY CONGRATULATIONS I CANNOT OF COURSE ACCEPT MEMBERSHIP BEST WISHES TO YOU GORE VIDAL.” Over the years friends had privately told him that whenever they had raised
his name he had not had sufficient support. Most of his equally well-known contemporaries, and many less accomplished writers, were members. Now the better part of honor and anger seemed to dictate that he decline. Perhaps he had in mind William James's response when elected to membership in the Academy, an elite subgroup whose members were drawn from the institute, that he did not care to belong to an organization to which “his younger and shallower and vainer brother” belonged. “
I note now
,” Gore wrote to Dick Poirier, “that every lit. prize save the Pulitzer is within the gift of the Nat'l Inst. of A and L who, impertinently, elected me a member. I was stern. Told them that I could not join them as I already belong to the Diners Club,” a line which was soon stinging the ears of some, amusing many.

He was aware, of course, that his response, like his residence in Europe, might promote an already existing general disinclination among many of his peers to say kind words about his work, let alone offer him glittering prizes. Still, it seemed better to be a gadfly than a golden cow, and things were still quite golden anyway, including his appearance on the cover of
Time
in March 1976, to mark the publication of
1876
(dedicated to Claire Bloom), which he had finished the previous autumn. Dressed in nineteenth-century clothes, quill pen and manuscript in hand, framed by white clouds and blue sky, handsome face with receding hairline and white flecks in his hair, “Gore Vidals New Novel ‘1876': SINS OF THE FATHERS!” in bold letters against his dark coat, his half figure dominated the best possible advertisement for the novel. It had gradually dawned on him in 1973 that with
Burr
and
Washington, D.C
., he had written the eighteenth-century beginning and the twentieth-century present of American history. By spring 1974 he decided that he would fill in some of the intervening years, and
1876
, published exactly one hundred years after its events and two hundred after the founding of the republic, would be both intellectually apposite and dramatically timely. “I am sinking into a vast novel
1876
,” he wrote to Dick Poirier in May 1974. By early 1975 he was “holed up at Ravello with
1876
, “he told Tom Driberg, “a novel about the last days of Gen. Grant's admin, and the Tilden-Hayes election. Rather pleased to be back in the past: the food is so good!” And he was soon delighted to learn, he wrote to Graham Watson, that
the “Book of the Month
has bought
1876
sight unseen by anyone except me and I've only written a hundred pages!” In
1876 a
now elderly Schuyler and his daughter Emma sail into the port of New York in late 1875. A famous historian who feels like Rip Van Winkle, he has come to cover the
election of 1876, to advance his own fortunes, and to reestablish his connection with his native country. Instantly minor celebrities in New York social life, Schuyler observes the American scene and Emma falls in love with the wealthy, married William Sanford, whose wife dies giving birth to Blaise Delacroix Sanford. Three months later Emma and William marry amid rumors that they may have had something to do with Sanford's wife's death. To escape wicked tongues the newly married couple goes to live in France. Emma's father, who suspects that his daughter has done something questionable, stays on in New York, where he dies in 1877, having experienced the Revolutionary War via Burr, the Civil War via Lincoln and Hay, and having survived until just after the republic's one-hundredth birthday. His experience is dismal and disillusioning. The small, mostly honorable world of the Founding Fathers is in the process of becoming a large, dishonorable empire. A novel written about the events of the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the country, it was a message for the celebrants of the two-hundredth. With his appearance on the cover of
Time
, Gore had, like his father, reached one of the apogees of American celebrity, though he appreciated the irony that not only had Henry Luce once proposed to his mother but that the owner of
Time
had very different views than Gore did of American politics past and present. That of course did not matter. In a country in which everything was commodity,
Time
and Random House were happy to be partners in the selling business. So too was Gore.
1876
quickly went to the top of the bestseller list.