Gore Vidal (133 page)

It had been a walk down “memory lane” (a phrase he was becoming fond of), down those pathways his grandfather's stories had provided him. He had always valued highly his own and his family's past, partly because of the childhood instability his parents' temperaments and divorce had forced on him. The past provided an anchor. The Gore clan was a stable family he could both be a part of and keep at a distance. Given his strong historical temperament, it was natural that family history would interest him as history. The family sagas on both sides had resonant depth. They made his presence and his statements as an American even the more formidable. Some
of his ancestors had done illustrious things. A few had been famous. The association did him credit, and as a man who lived by creating stories, by holding an audience with what he wrote and what he said, the family histories provided additional illustrative coordinates that made his tales shine more brightly, sharply, engagingly. His personal history was also a family story that preceded even his grandparents' generation, and he had become aware as early as the 1960s that he could not tell, perhaps even know, his own story fully enough if he did not know his family's origins. Much Gore family history was palpably there for him from the start. He had grown up among its latest expressions, particularly at Rock Creek Park. Vidal family history was more elusive. Family legend provided some detail. Still, little was known of what had transpired before 1848. Gene and Pick had been mostly uninterested; there was little reason to believe that the generation of Vidals after his own would have any interest at all. But it mattered to him. While Gene was alive, Gore had begun to look into Vidal family origins. His father gave what little help he could. Some of the details would always remain elusive or vague. By the late 1960s, after two visits to Feldkirch and the search for documents in Italy and Switzerland, he had begun to put together the general story, some aspects of which fascinated him, particularly that the family's likely origin was Sephardic Jewish and that Vidal had been a prominent name in Northern Italy, particularly in Venice, a city he visited regularly and for which he had great affection. “So I'm a Jew after all,” he commented. “It's fascinating. I've always suspected Norman Mailer was Greek Orthodox from Russia. So we'll just change roles at the end. I'll work out the transfer.”

Though he had vowed never to write his autobiography, and during the 1970s and '80s believed he would not, he was actually, in limited ways, in the process of doing precisely that. “
I'm not going to write
a memoir,” he told Halfpenny in 1985, soon after Walter Clemons contracted to write his life, “and biographers no longer do any research. So I'd better fill in gaps for them now.” He had been providing his version of some of the gaps in essays, particularly “West Point” and “On Flying,” a graceful evocation of his father's career in the early days of commercial aviation. His own youth had also begun to take on quasimythic proportion in numbers of memoiristic essays, particularly those on Tennessee Williams. Vidal had been both participant and eyewitness in the making of legends. The autobiographical essays he had begun to write were both literary history and personal memoir.
“Yes,” he admitted, “
I am getting very autobiographical
, but if I don't do some of it, others will invent everything as they have already invented so much.” When the BBC and Italy's RAI-TV offered him in 1985 the opportunity to write and narrate a two-hour TV documentary on Venice, he happily agreed. From the start of his Italian life, Venice had been a place he identified with, an irresistible lure for visits, especially with Barbara Epstein, and during the Christmas-New Year holiday, always with Howard, sometimes with American friends. Once, Jason Epstein recalled, “I was in Venice with Gore and an old [female] friend whom I happened to be traveling with and we were crossing the Rialto Bridge. There was a bunch of sailors. ‘Seafood,' Gore said, and they both took off after them, leaving me behind.” One of Gore's favorite stories about Tennessee and Maria was set in Venice. They “were sitting on the beach … and this very thin, elegant woman is walking along the beach. Maria, Lady St. Just, turns to Tennessee and says, ‘That is Anorexia Nervosa.' Tennessee says, ‘Oh, Maria, you know everyone!'” Harry's Bar, Peggy Guggenheim's palazzo, the luxurious Gritti Palace Hotel, long walks in the cold weather with touches of snow lining the canals, the pleasures of the Venetian opera house—the epicurean's Venice was also the historian's and the writer's, the setting of Mann's
Death in Venice
, the piazza that Henry James in
The Wings of the Dove
describes as the drawing room of Europe. Deepening the Venetian imprint was Gore's awareness that Vidals had come to that city when it was relatively young, as early as the fourteenth century. “Most of May—June [1985] in Venice and Crete and Naxos (we do the empire, too),” he told Halfpenny. “It is not easy among so many false notes to know which chords are least banal. I write, which I didn't want to do; and act, which I ought not to do.” Among the true and revealing notes was the segment of film in which he discusses his Venetian ancestry. The camera takes him to the famous library where the records of the noble Venetian families are preserved. He is searching for evidence to tie him by lineage to Venetian fame. Alas, he tells his audience, as he runs his finger up and down the columns of the golden book, the name Vidal is not there. By the end of the year the documentary appeared on British and Italian television. George Armstrong wrote the text for the American and British print versions. Gore wanted them to be identified as co-authors. The British publisher refused, demanding Vidal's name alone, though he agreed to the formula “Edited by George Armstrong.” Gore gave the entire royalty to his friend. “
It is a picture book
for Xmas, to go
round the world with the various showings of the two films, a perfect non-book and so I have done nothing,” except the preface. The project had been “a lot of work, and I grow old,” he complained. “The energy isn't the same.”

But he was soon back at his desk, “ready to be enslaved again to words,” as he good-humoredly told Judith Halfpenny, with little sign of the decrease in energy he had complained of after finishing
Vidal in Venice
. In fact, the ten years from 1985 to 1995 were to be among the most productive of his life as a writer. If he complained about tiredness, it was in the context of a whirlwind of work, which included numbers of screenplays. In 1979 he had made a movie adaptation of Lucian Truscott's novel
Dress Gray
, about a West Point murder, that Frank Von Zerneck produced for Warner Brothers. Zerneck and he worked well together. It was a moderate success when it appeared as a television movie in 1986. Immediately after
Vidal in Venice
he had gone to Palermo to consult with the producer and director Michael Cimino—director of the disastrous
Heaven's Gate
, which had bankrupted United Artists—about the screenplay he had done at Cimino's request, based on Mario Puzo's novel
The Sicilian
. When Cimino came to Rome in April 1986 to enlist Vidal's services, he brought a script that he represented as entirely his own. There had been an earlier script by Steve Shagan, he told Vidal, but “he preferred that I not read it.” Cimino initially described Vidal's assignment as polishing Cimino's script. Filming was to begin that summer. Setting to work immediately, doing numbers of rewrites during a three-month period, and then making further changes and additions with Cimino through the production and editing period, Vidal created almost an entirely new shooting script. “
Cimino has made no
major problems yet and follows, obediently, the script,” Vidal told Halfpenny in August 1986, “but he is already manoeuvering to get credit for writing what I have written. Fortunately, our Guild is protective.” He soon discovered he was wrong, though Cimino was not the problem. In a maneuver eerily reminiscent of what had happened with
Ben-Hur
, the Writers Guild of America, of which Shagan had been a director, awarded screenplay credit exclusively to Shagan. Furious, Vidal protested, then requested guild arbitration, this time armed with detailed records and corroborating third-party testimony to support his claim. After he had rewritten Cimino's script, he wrote to the
guild, “Cimino sent me Shagan's script. There are perhaps a half dozen lines of Shagan's in the shooting script, which I, otherwise, wrote. For the record, I have every page on which I worked (from the Cimino script) to the shooting script, which is almost entirely my work.” Vidal and his lawyer believed that Cimino also supported his claim. The guild soon turned down Vidal's compromise proposal that Shagan be given credit for the “screen story,” Vidal for the “screenplay.” Cimino also went to arbitration, where he lost, concerning not the screenplay but his agreement with the sponsoring company about the length of the film. As with
Heaven's Gate
, his “final” version was too long, though Vidal agreed with Cimino that the longer version was artistically superior to the shorter. When three anonymous arbitrators ruled Vidal should not get any credit for his contribution to the film, he sued the guild, despite rules forbidding a member's suing, on the grounds that its secret arbitration procedure was illegal. In addition, he maintained, relevant documents had purposely been withheld from the arbitrators, and the guild had not followed its own procedural rules.

Furious at what seemed an injustice, determined not to be victimized again, he was willing to spend whatever necessary to force the guild to operate in a way that was above suspicion. The California Court of Appeals ruled against the guild. The arbitrators' names had to be revealed. The guild's appeals were not upheld. But there was no movement toward a satisfactory resolution for Vidal. The guild to this day continues to keep secret the names of its arbitrators. The $250,000 he had been paid for his work on the script, almost all of which went to pay legal fees, and his victory in the California appeals court had to remain his substitute for credit for his work. “I sued over it only because I was angry at the Writer's Guild,” he recalled. “I didn't want credit. I was happy not to have it.” But it was enough like the
Ben-Hur
experience to impress on him, indelibly and bitterly, that making movies, as he knew all along, while usually lucrative was rarely satisfying. And he had done numbers of original scripts and adaptations that had never been made, though being made badly might have been even a worse fate. As a child of the golden films of the 1930s and '40s, never star-struck but deeply screen-struck, he was often temptable if the money were enough, if the subject appealed to him, if the circumstances seemed promising. In 1990 he was to do a screenplay at Martin Scorsese's request based on the life of Theodora and Justinian, a topic he also had in mind for a novel to be a successor to
Julian
. Scorsese liked the script, but the
movie was never made. As usual, the problems were financing and timing. Though Vidal had been paid for movie options on numbers of his own novels, the options, no matter how promising at first, never produced actual films. For his work as a screenwriter he had been paid handsomely, but only
The Catered Affair, Suddenly, Last Summer
, and
The Best Man
had turned out reasonably well. It was vocation, not art. Still, if he ever had complete control over his screenplay, and if he had a director who respected it, he believed he might make a wonderful movie.

In 1989 he finally had an opportunity, though the conditions were not entirely favorable. The Turner Home Entertainment company agreed to finance a made-for-television movie that he would write based on the story of Billy the Kid, which Frank Von Zerneck would produce. Vidal had already done two versions, one for television in the 1950s, the other transformed into the unsatisfactory
The Left-Handed Gun
. Now he had the chance to do it his own way, in a film that starred Val Kilmer, a dark version of Billy as heroic innocent who finds himself trapped by the community's corruption into a highly principled but doomed criminality. Billy's temperament as rebel on behalf of justice, determined never to be a victim, Gore still identified as his own: the man who never started a fight but always fought self-defensively to a victory in the end, even if mainly a triumph of the iconoclastic spirit. Less successful as a film than he had anticipated, for reasons that had little to do with the screenplay, it still gave him satisfaction at last to do his version of
Billy
, though it demonstrated again that the collaborative nature of filmmaking made any script subject to forces beyond the author's control. Though reviews were adequate to good, the direction was relentlessly dark in color and mood, and Billy's story seemed not to appeal to Americans in the late 1980s. Also, it may have been too late in life for Gore to return to a subject he had identified with since adolescence. This last reworking lacked the freshness of the first, perhaps the inevitable difference between Vidal in his twenties and Vidal in his late sixties.