Gore Vidal (67 page)

In may 1955, soon after the telecast of
Visit to a Small Planet
, flying overnight on the red-eye from New York to Los Angeles, Gore Vidal was a nationally known television dramatist. It had all happened in little more than a year. That he had published seven novels was fine and good, and there were many who waited for his next. But television success had begun to provide him with something that writing fiction had not, the glow of celebrity and the security of a good income. If he were a success in television, movies could not be far behind. One or the other or both would, he now had no doubt, provide him with the money to support Edgewater and himself. At least he would still earn his living as a writer, even if these collaborative media demanded craftsmanship more than art. As an art form, he still embraced the novel, and he felt certain that neither the networks nor the film studios would in the long run interfere with his commitment to writing fiction. It was clear to him that in his case at least he could separate the part of his brain devoted to craftsmanlike scripts and the part that created serious literature; he felt in no danger of cross-contamination. Good at compartmentalizing, it seemed to him better to earn his living, since it had
come to this, writing for television or movies than working in advertising or teaching. At a minimum it was more interesting; the people more various, accomplished, and attractive; the stakes higher; the money better; the visibility greater.

Between his inaugural appearance with the production of
Dark Possession
in February 1954 and his departure for Los Angeles he had established a reputation and career in an industry that had already transformed American culture. With the end of the war, commercial television became a reality. By 1950 it had become a pervasive cultural presence. By 1953, 80 percent of American homes had television sets. Two national networks, CBS and NBC, with their affiliates, controlled the airwaves, distantly followed by ABC. In each major city there were numbers of unaffiliated local channels. Expansions, mergers, buyouts, new licenses, technical innovations—suddenly a highly profitable television marketplace existed. Power was being grasped and consolidated, fortunes made. Remunerative protocols between American business and the networks were being worked out. Business discovered that it had a powerful new tool for selling products. Together the networks and business decided that that was what television would be about. Since government, a willing collaborator, determined who could legitimately cash in on the fortunes to be made, many legislators became shareholders in new stations. Advertising agencies became powerful players, intermediaries between advertisers and the networks. Talent agencies representing writers, actors, directors, and producers saw a profitable opportunity to package programs. At first there had been only nighttime television. Now, with daytime and late-night, a huge amount of salable airtime needed to be filled.

For much of the 1950s the networks filled some of their most profitable hours with live television drama. At first the production facilities of the Hollywood movie studios were hardly involved, and movie libraries had not yet been sold to fill television airtime. In Manhattan empty warehouses were converted rapidly into production and broadcast facilities. For those early years television originated almost entirely in New York, from the earliest remedial newscasts to Edward R. Murrow to the comedy of
Your Show of Shows, The Jackie Gleason Show
, and Milton Berle's
Texaco Star Theater
, to the dozen or so dramatic anthologies, each of which presented weekly an original self-standing dramatic play:
Studio One, Philco Television Playhouse, Kraft Television Theatre, Goodyear Playhouse, Robert Montgomery Presents
, and
Playhouse 90
, among others. In 1954 four of the ten top-watched
programs in the country were anthology dramas. Since technology had not yet made immediately editable tape available, the ten to forty million households a week that watched one or more prime-time television dramas saw the program simultaneous with its first and only creation. Legal restrictions and technical limitations resulted in kinescopic recordings becoming only archival records. Suddenly there was a new, demanding but exciting source of remunerative work for actors, producers, technicians, directors, and writers, particularly those who could create actable dialogue, construct dramatic stories, and adhere to the technical limitations of television broadcasting. “
You have no idea
,” Gore wrote to Kimon Friar, “how many good things get done in that vast vulgar medium. The people who produce and direct are all young and clever. The actors of course are the best in the world … any great star or any good Broadway performer is available, such being the lure of money, steady occupation, and an audience of thirty millions.”

Fortunately, he had no association with any left-wing political organizations that might have darkened his name, as Latouche's had been, by inclusion in
Red Channels, The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television
(1950) or on later lists. Latouche “was turned down by the Communist Party,” Gore remarked. “He was so humiliated by this that he would never tell even the FBI, so he was blacklisted for years, even though he was not only not a party member but had been rejected by the party as too frivolous and a sexual degenerate.” Such blacklists were now, with the dominance of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist investigations and the start of the Korean War, blighting many careers. Latouche was unemployable in television. Though Gore had come some distance from his grandfather's anti-Roosevelt conservatism in domestic matters, his mind was only moderately on political considerations. In foreign affairs he still believed in the cautionary principle of America First. McCarthy he detested. Eisenhower seemed blandly empty-headed, a political front for big business. Suspicious of Truman's commitment of American troops to a Korean civil war, he had begun to think anti-Communism would at best be used as a weapon to suppress civil liberties at home and expand America's sphere of influence abroad. At worst it would be the trigger for a nuclear war. The arms race seemed inevitably catastrophic. To the extent that he had a political affiliation, it was with the Democrats; but mainly he was against the hawks who dominated both major parties.

“
My own days are
alternately serene and hectic,” he told Kimon Friar.
“I write plays occasionally for television, a fascinating occupation but tiring,” though he seemed tireless to most people. Hal Franklin had done well to take a chance on him. With the market's insatiable demand for scripts, opportunities came quickly. Within days after the success of
Dark Possession
he was at work on new assignments. For the one-hour program he had received $1,400. “The day after my debut in February of 1954,” he wrote a few years later, “I was committed seriously to writing for the camera. I discovered that although the restrictions imposed by a popular medium are not always agreeable, they do at least make creative demands upon one's ingenuity.” He had much to learn, among other reasons because he did not own a television set and had hardly watched television at all. His two attempts to write for the stage had produced untenable manuscripts. From Key West, in December 1953, while he worked on
Dark Possession
, he corresponded with Franklin about a number of television treatments he had proposed, one of them based on
Messiah
. Franklin found the central character unacceptably static. As Vidal proposed ideas, Franklin responded, providing suggestions for revision, determining which producer to send what to, whom to approach directly, whom indirectly, what might appeal to whom. “We were like two generals,” Gore recalled, “going over a battlefield trying to figure out how to win it.” Their first victory actually came not as an original drama but as a streamlining of the American colonial dramatist Royall Tyler's
The Contrast
for the Ford Foundation's
Omnibus
program, which he wrote during one weekend before leaving for Key West and whose telecast actually preceded
Dark Possession
by over a month.

Ideas came quickly. As soon he had a concept in mind, he had the language for presenting it as a story outline that agents and producers could grasp immediately. Some of the original ideas combined his own emotional and political preoccupations. In summer 1954, while working at Edgewater on another Edgar Box, he outlined in detail ideas for two resonant television stories, the first called
Sovereign State
, the second
Billy the Kid
. In
Sovereign State
the main character, an ambitious, pragmatic governor, accidentally gets into a conflict with the federal government. When he threatens secession, he becomes nationally famous. At the end, though he losses, he is “
still smiling
, more dangerous than ever having discovered the pleasures of power … our young governor is going to be heard from again, in a larger, more dangerous way…. The point to a study like this is, I think, important. A fact missed by the general public (and certainly by most of the intellectuals
who brood on political matters) is that these political climbers, these dictators in embryo are
not
Iagos, are
not
devoted to any set of diabolic principles, are, actually, nothing more than beguiling men who find it easy to set aside all those tacit rules by which … no matter how reluctantly … most lives are lived. I have known a good many political figures and a set of more charming, more amoral men one could not encounter. To do a portrait of one would, I think, be a public service … no horns, no halo. There will be, I hasten to say in this fearful time, no McCarthy analogy possible … because, properly done, neither his enemies nor his admirers will recognize him in my governor although, in fact, he is humanly closer to my protagonist than to their conflicting black and white.” The other project,
Billy the Kid
, was an extension of his obsession with Billy that had begun at Los Alamos. “I have read book after book about him … I can't think why.” In a long letter to Harold Franklin's assistant he outlined a story that was to continue to haunt him for much of his life, about an American outlaw with whom he deeply identified, someone permanently young, undyingly loyal to personal bonds, resolutely insistent on individual autonomy, and defiantly critical of injustice, especially when state-sanctioned. Both ideas, which had no takers for the time being, were put on the back burner.

In late February 1954 he signed a contract to do for CBS's
Suspense
a half-hour adaptation of Faulkner's short story “Smoke.” When Martin Manulis, the charming, handsome, immensely capable CBS director, ten years older than Gore, who had known John Latouche at Columbia and Alice Astor in England during the war, heard that Vidal was interested in doing the adaptation of “Smoke,” he was enthusiastic. Manulis had come to CBS in 1952. “I had never been in television, very rarely had seen one, and didn't own a set even.” Since coming out of the Navy, he had been directing in the theater, where he had had a major success with a revival of Noël Coward's
Private Lives
, starring Tallulah Bankhead. “I had known of Gore, but I wasn't even up on the fact that he had done some television before that…. I was under the impression that this was the first television show that he ever did. I don't know how this came about, but someone told me that he might be a possibility for that because especially as it was a Faulkner story, it might be something that would appeal to him.” The William Morris Agency also represented Manulis. Probably Harold Franklin brought them together. “It did appeal to him, and we had a nice success with it, and we did the other one right after that,” Manulis recalled. “The only surprise was
that he was interested in doing a television adaptation. He seemed awfully young to me … and very handsome. When I met him, I thought this guy could well be a leading man. He had the trimness of someone who had been in the Army…. He seemed eager to do the adaptation and very happy that we'd asked him to do it.” They became friends almost immediately. “
GET WRITING, PUSS
,” Manulis telegraphed him in March. “WE WANTED A GREAT SCRIPT YESTERDAY.” Broadcast in early May, “Smoke” was so successful that
Suspense
hired him to adapt Faulkner's “Barn Burning” for an August production. In late May his adaptation of the novel
A Man And Two Gods
appeared on
Studio One
. Since he could do an adaptation over a weekend, an hour-long original play in a week or two, in the rest of 1954 he did about a half dozen more, his February 1955 one-year anniversary in television marked by the performance of two of his adaptations, Henry James's “The Turn of the Screw” for
Omnibus
and Stephen Crane's “The Blue Hotel” for
Danger
, and his hourlong original drama
A Sense of Justice
, for
Philco Television Playhouse
, with an excellent performance by E. G. Marshall, who had starred in the two Faulkner adaptations. Of course Franklin did not find buyers for all Gore's story ideas, the most ambitious of which was his proposal for a series called
Devil's Theater
, dramatizations of human frailties in which he proposed that “the role of the roguish Satan” be played by someone like the Hollywood actor Louis Jourdan. Another,
Traveller in Time
, sends a young physicist back in time to change history by preventing the assassination of Lincoln. For some scripts he wrote and which were produced he used a pseudonym. “I can't even remember what name I used. I did
The Tell-Tale Clue
twice. Awful stuff. Rod Serling and I alternated. We were getting fifteen hundred dollars for a half hour. Nobody had ever seen such money before.”

After the telecast of “Barn Burning” in May, he hosted at Howard's Lexington Avenue apartment a party for everyone connected with the production and invited friends like the Bourjailys. Nina, living at the Volney, enjoying the reflected glory of Gore's television success, came. He was happy to celebrate the triumph of the performance and how far he had come in just six months. In April the script of “Smoke” had received, in advance of the actual telecast, the Edgar Allan Poe Award as the best mystery television play of 1954, the award presented on April 21 at a dinner at the Stork Club. His name was now on a short list of superior television dramatists, which included Rod Sterling, Reginald Rose, Horton Foote, and Paddy
Chayevsky, whose
Marty
, on
The Goodyear Playhouse
in May 1953, had made him arguably the best-known playwright in America. Gore's boast to John Aldridge that “
Yes, I am television's
king,” was only a small exaggeration. His claim “that “television itself is a river of gold” was a greater one. Like his well-known colleagues, Vidal received a flat fee for his scripts. Since there were no multiple performances, a royalty schedule was irrelevant. For a half-hour script writers received between $500 and $1,200, for an hour script between $1,200 and $2,500. He had earned about $7,000 his first year writing for television. It was hardly a great deal of money, but it did make all the difference for the time being, since he had very little other income. In addition, he liked writing for television. The writing and production process were completed swiftly, intensely. Problems arose quickly and were disposed of immediately. It was also the first time he worked collaboratively. Some people he worked with he liked, especially his agent, Harold Franklin; the story editor for
Studio One
, Florence Britton; the low-keyed, flexible director Franklin Schaffner; performers like Leslie Nielsen, Geraldine Page, and E. G. Marshall; and the director for the Faulkner adaptations, Martin Manulis. For the first time he had the camaraderie of colleagues, the advantage of quick, full immersion, the reality of partial control over the process and the result. As the cast rehearsed, he often rewrote thoroughly. The principals lived intensely together for about two weeks. They watched, usually sympathetically, one another try, stumble, rise, sweat, even throw up, the camera relentless, the only direction forward once the telecast began. During rehearsals Gore made a point of absorbing the technical details to help himself write more craftsmanlike scripts. After the performances, at Downey's and other popular bars near the West Side studios, they drank, unwound, and did postmortems together.