Gore Vidal (52 page)

Kubie, Gore knew, had advised Tennessee Williams to give up writing and boys.

At first Gore enthusiastically accepted Williams's and Bowles's invitation. Then he changed his mind, partly because he had it in mind to write a new novel, this one set in Guatemala. It made more sense to spend the winter there than traveling in Europe. Perhaps Nina's advice gave him pause. Certainly it would be cheaper to live in his own house in Antigua, the rent from which produced very little profit and which he had again been giving serious thought to selling. On the train to New Orleans he began to write
Dark Green, Bright Red
.

The late summer and fall of 1948, after the return from Europe, had been mostly uneventful but pleasurable, except for his increasing frustration with Lehmann's resistance to publishing any of his novels other than
City
.
With
City
, Lehmann was cautious on moral grounds, but, “
considering that
[John Horne Burns's]
The Gallery
doesn't appear to have made a single moral ripple, I think with care we ought to be all right.” Vidal had hoped Lehmann would bring out
The Season of Comfort
, a copy of which Gore had had Nick Wreden send him in October. The verdict on that was still out. For a short time he was “in the midst of my I AM A FAILURE mood, a chronic disease with me.” All his
real
illnesses, he told Lehmann, “have been related back to my revolting liver,” the result of the hepatitis attacks of summer 1947, “and that is currently being treated.” Lehmann was not having his complaints either. “Good God, if I'd managed to get three books out by the time I was 23, and had the fun with one and the success or scandal you've had with another, I should not have been depressed but almost unbearably conceited. I feel sure it must be a purely physical reaction, simply coming from doing too much and living too scandalously.” By October, Gore was busy “
getting the two
books ready and fooling with a hopeless play. I've written two short stories; the only new work since spring. One gets very well-paid for such things and I'm planning more when I really learn how to write them.” One, called “The Robin,” partly about the horror of death, dramatizes the decision of two boys to put a wounded bird out of its misery, their emotions hovering between compassion and cruelty, shame and pleasure. “Not much news,” he wrote Pat Crocker in the late fall, “many parties, much intrigue and little work.” In fact, if the latest potential buyer for the Antigua house was serious, why not sell it? “Since I am embarked on my annual response (a peculiar Freudian slip) I mean to say romance, I shall undoubtedly be in New York forever.”

In late summer he had spent time at East Hampton, staying at his father's rented place and visiting Nina in Washington and Southampton. With two young stepsiblings at the Fifth Avenue apartment, he stayed for a while at the Chelsea Hotel, then for a brief time in Tennessee's apartment while Williams was away, then in a sublease on East Fifty-second Street, downstairs from the ballerina Nora Kaye, who had been married to one of the literary heroes of his adolescence, James T. Farrell, everything of whose he had read at Exeter. One night her bathtub overflowed, flooding his apartment, leaving them both discomfited but even friendlier. Anxious, as always, about his career, still angry about
City's
hostile reviews, perhaps what Nina thought his discomfort with himself was his ongoing preoccupation with his personal and professional pulse. Articulately egomaniacal, he
was clever at both self-assertion and accommodation. Nina, a real and a necessary foil, unable to make peace with let alone lovingly accept his sexual preferences, inevitably fueled (sometimes with alcohol) the worst in her and in him. On the one hand she could boast publicly about the success of her son the bestselling author whose name frequently appeared in the newspapers. On the other, she could glower bitterly, in bars and cocktail lounges, about her son “the faggot,” one of the undeserved blows fate had inflicted on a blameless mother.

With rivals Gore was both self-asserting and accommodating, even for a brief time with Truman Capote, whom he saw more of in New York during the fall of 1948 than ever before or again. “
Truman is everywhere
,” Gore wrote to Lehmann, “giddy and mad and not working but rather charming I think (young writers who don't write always charm me).” He was still friendly toward Capote, though there was no real friendship. Frederick Buechner's
A Long Day's Dying
, about to be published by Knopf “with much fanfare,” reminded him of “the way Truman would write
if he
had a prose style instead of that peculiar interior decorator's way he has of constructing a Saks Fifth Avenue window and calling it a novel,” he wrote to Lehmann. The day after Gore's twenty-third birthday, Vidal and Capote concluded a night on the town by going together to the Everard Baths. “It was strictly voyeur time,” Gore recalled. “Lights were dim. But each of us was sufficiently well known so that we did not particularly want to be recognized.” Truman babbled on about how wonderful Tallulah Bankhead had been that evening in the premiere of a revival of Noel Coward's
Private Lives
. Wrapped in white towels, they went about their separate activities, probably literally, in the case, looking over one another's shoulders. As they slunk along the corridor, someone who knew them both, “the greatest gossip in town,” rushed up and shouted, “Ah see you! Ah see you!” Gore occasionally declined to say harsh things about his competitor, perhaps influenced by the companionable atmosphere promoted by “parties and gatherings” at Tennessee's apartment and by the excitement of the Broadway premiere in October of
Summer and Smoke
. The barbs between Vidal and Capote were often mediated or amplified by third parties, though Williams had no favorite to play when he wrote to his own and Capote's good friend, the novelist Donald Windham, “
I think you judge
Truman a bit too charitably when you call him a child: he is more like a sweetly vicious old lady.”

Gore had found amusing Capote's performance at Williams's apartment
one August evening, soon after Truman and Tennessee had returned from Europe on the
Queen Mary
. Capote lived nearby with Johnny Nicholson, who had just opened his café on Fifty-eighth Street. Tennessee and Gore came back to Tennessee's flat with an actress, Jane Lawrence Smith, to find Truman and Carson McCullers's young cousin “in the apartment undergoing questioning by a detective.” Earlier, after waiting for Capote, who was late, Williams had gone off. When Capote had finally turned up, frustrated at not finding Williams at home, he had climbed in through a ground-floor window. Two policemen, seeing him in the act, assumed they were about to catch a burglar. “By the time we arrived,” Gore remembered, “Capote had matters well under control.” The police “were listening bug-eyed to Capote, who was telling them
everything
about the private lives of Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Chaplin.” Truman, delighted when Walter Winchell reported the incident in his gossip column, had made sure Gore's name was not included in the report. Gore evened the score twice, the first simply a practical joke, as he told it to Paul Bowles. While working on the score for
Summer and Smoke
for which he was writing incidental music, and anticipating spring publication of
The Sheltering Sky
, Bowles was staying in grand comfort at the Sixty-first Street town house of his friend, the torch singer Libby Holman, to whom he and Latouche introduced Gore. With his usual marvelous mimicry, Gore called Williams on the telephone, pretending he was Capote, and induced Tennessee to make “uncomplimentary remarks about Gore's writing.” When, a few days later, Gore next saw Tennessee, he made “oblique but unmistakable allusions” to comments Tennessee had made to the person he thought Capote. “To Tennessee it seemed quite obvious,” Bowles wrote in his memoir, “that Truman had run to Gore and maliciously repeated the telephone conversation. As a result he was angry with Truman, which had been the object of the ploy.” In November,
Life
, on the occasion of a New York visit by Edith and Osbert Sitwell, had invited a group of America's most famous poets to appear in a celebrity photograph to be taken at the Gotham Book Mart, New York's best-known high-literary bookstore. Its energetic owner, Frances Stelloff, frequently held book parties and hosted literary people. Both Sitwells, Gore wrote to Lehmann, “have taken their social success with the ease and the calm of Plantagenets among colonial gentry.” Surrounding the royal couple were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Horace Gregory, Charles Henri Ford, among others, and
Tennessee Williams. While the group was not strictly limited to poets, Williams was poet enough. Gore had managed to get himself included somehow, though even less a poet than Williams. Capote was furious. “
You're not a poet
at all!” he said to Gore. “What right do you have to be there?” More to the point, he was furious that he had not been included in the august company.

At ease with and attractive to members of his mother's generation, that fall Gore had met three extraordinary people with whom he was to remain friends until their deaths. Eddie Bismarck—handsome, slim, clear-eyed, fair-haired, a grandson of the nineteenth-century German chancellor—came from two families of aristocratic distinction in the Austro-Hungarian and German empires. By 1948 he had for a decade been closely associated with Mona and Harrison Williams. From Kentucky, Mona Strader had risen to the pinnacle of international society through beauty, charm, good taste, and three useful marriages, the last to the wealthy Harrison Williams, twenty-three years her senior. By the early 1930s, New York, London, Palm Beach, and Riviera society celebrated her, as did the prestige fashion magazines, as the best-dressed woman in the world. Her glamorous parties and personal splendor expressed “perhaps the first private life to be shaped and pitched for public consumption.” An attractive homosexual, Eddie Bismarck shared with Mona Williams, starting in the late thirties, a life of good taste and fine society. As companion, secretary, and adviser, he was perfectly acceptable to Harrison Williams. An outspoken anti-Nazi, the only member of his family to oppose the National Socialist regime, Bismarck had lived some golden years between the two world wars, a benign aristocrat supported by his wealthy brother Otto. A world traveler of exquisite taste, Eddie collected antiques and occasionally took on clients whose homes he redecorated. When he fled the Nazis, he found himself penniless. With the domination of Central Europe by Communist regimes, the capitals of his youth were again closed to him. A comfortable life with the Harrison Williamses in New York, Palm Beach, and Capri became his fate.

Bismarck invited Gore to one of the many grand dinners at the Williamses' thirty-room Georgian mansion on Fifth Avenue and Ninety-fourth Street, a few blocks from Gene Vidal's apartment. Though loved for himself alone, on this occasion Gore was loved also for his friendship with Tennessee
Williams, now at the height of his fame.
Streetcar
had been running on Broadway for almost two years, arguably now the most famous American play by the best-known, most widely publicized living playwright, though his most recent play,
Summer and Smoke
, Gore wrote to Lehmann, had “
received, for the most
part, hostile and bitter notices.” Through Gore, Eddie invited Tennessee to the dinner. Unconventionally, Mona sat the dramatist on her right, Gore on her left, surrounding her bejeweled elegance with two handsome young writers who, like everyone else, dressed formally for the occasion. Among the thirty or so guests was Eddie's cousin, Countess Cecilia Sternberg, a witty, unconventional aristocrat who had been brought up in Vienna. At seventeen she had married Count Leopold Sternberg, the heir to estates in Bohemian Czechloslovakia. Having lost everything to the Nazis before the war, he had had his property expropriated a second time, by the Communist government. Without resources, the Sternbergs had recently arrived in New York with their eleven-year-old daughter, Diana, exiles once again, reliant for the time being on their personal attractions, their distinguished names, and their large network of European connections, which included, through Eddie, “Aunt Mona,” as Diana called her.