Gore Vidal (79 page)

At Cinecittà he joined Zimbalist and Wyler, both anxious about the script and desperate to make it workable. Final touches were being put on the expensive sets. Actors were rehearsing, hammers pounding, art and design people sketching, costumes being stitched, hundreds of tons of camera equipment moving into place, everyone being paid. Wyler spent days watching every Hollywood film set in ancient Rome that could quickly be flown to him, probably by courier from New York or Los Angeles, as if he could learn what he needed to know about ancient Rome from Hollywood's prior versions. Between daily conferences with Zimbalist and Wyler, Gore began to rewrite the script from the beginning. His expectation, part of his agreement with Zimbalist, was that he would spend four to six weeks working on the script. Zimbalist hoped he would stay and work, as needed, throughout the entire filming. Always rapid, Gore felt that whatever good he could do would be done in five weeks or so; anyway, he wanted to be back in New York for what he hoped would be a deal for a Broadway production of
March to the Sea
. With so much riding on improving the script as quickly as possible, Zimbalist had hired the sophisticated British playwright Christopher Fry, though he had no movie experience, also to work on the script, with the notion that Gore, since he was there first but would not stay throughout, would start at the beginning and Fry would begin at the end, so they could expeditiously meet in the middle. Somewhere about the halfway point they would sink the golden spike.

In the meantime, with Gore each day providing pages for shooting, the filming began, Heston in the title role, the British actor Stephen Boyd in the other crucial part, Messala—Ben-Hur's Roman friend from childhood, by now his enemy—much of the rest of the cast well-known movie veterans like Sam Jaffe, Hugh Griffith, and Jack Hawkins. “
When I was finished
with a scene,” Gore later wrote, “I would give it to Zimbalist. We would go over it. Then the scene would be passed on to Wyler. Normally, Wyler is slow
and deliberately indecisive; but first-century Jerusalem had been built at enormous expense; the first day of shooting was approaching; the studio was nervous. As a result, I did not often hear Wyler's famous cry, as he would hand you back your script, ‘If I knew what was wrong with it, I'd fix it myself.'” The crucial problem that needed fixing was the absence of creditable motivation for Messala's punitive hatred of Ben-Hur. Political differences alone seemed insufficient. Gore suggested to his colleagues that he write into the script by indirection that Messala's fury is that of a lover scorned, that the Roman who has loved Ben-Hur since childhood turns against him because Ben-Hur declines to respond. For a Roman there would be nothing shameful about such feelings. For Ben-Hur, a Jew, they would be anathema. Wyler was shocked, frightened. That might make the problems they were confronting even worse. Gore reassured him. There would be no overt discussion, let alone depiction, of love between men. Messala's love for Ben-Hur would be presented indirectly, almost subliminally. Zimbalist hesitated. If it were done effectively, he realized, they might get away with it, and at least it would focus some of the emotional intensity between the men in a way that would make Messala's motivation credible without ever being explicit. Wyler reluctantly agreed to try it. They agreed not to say a word to Heston, whose cooperation had no relevance. Messala was the key. When they spoke to Boyd, he grasped the point immediately. His performance quickly embodied Gore's vision and revision. When they watched the daily rushes of the early scenes, all of which Gore wrote, they liked the results, including Heston, who viewed their power simply as the result of his and Boyd's fine acting of what in his mind was a straightforward political disagreement. Heston, smiling, in costume, with his friendly hand on Gore's shoulder, happily posed for a photograph with Gore, Wyler, and Christopher Fry.

With the filming going better than they had hoped, Gore worked each day with Zimbalist and Wyler, reconceiving important scenes and writing new dialogue. “
I am doing a fast
rewrite of a mammoth epic called
Ben-Hur,”
he wrote to Paul Bowles. “I start at the beginning whilst my coauthor, Christopher Fry, a nice little man who looks rather the way Shakespeare must've looked starts at the end and works toward me. It is predicted that we shall meet during the chariot race, though I rather hope to see him in Pilate's audience chamber. What fun art is!” The film's ancient world became more anchored in historical reality. The dramatic conception sharpened.
The dialogue had some rhythmic credibility. Though in the long run no revision could make the film either intelligent or interesting, Vidal's and Fry's work made the film believable for a mass audience, a Hollywood spectacular in which the basic emotional and technical scaffolding was strong enough to support its bombast, intellectual emptiness, and religious sentimentality. It was a film for its time. It would offend nobody. It would attract large audiences. It was good for MGM and Hollywood. And for Wyler, Zimbalist, and everyone connected with making the film, including Heston and Vidal, it was a triumph of sorts. For Gore it had, as he wrote and worked with his colleagues, the satisfaction of a challenge well met. He liked his colleagues and the experience. He was satisfying his last responsibility to his MGM contract. And it was a pleasure to be in Rome again, where he kept working on the script from the beginning of the last week in April to the end of the last week in May, a total of five weeks minus one day, at a salary of $2,250 a week and all expenses. Occasionally he even found himself contributing to the correction of little ludicrous things. “
Luckily, I was on the set
at the begining of the shooting and so was able to persuade the art director to remove tomatoes from Mrs. Ben-Hur Senior's kitchen. Otherwise, [she] might have had Hannah prepare a tomato and bacon sandwich for her daughter Mary.” Zimbalist was delighted with Gore's substantial contribution and on May 24, a few days before Gore's departure, gave him a handsome briefcase as a personal token of appreciation. Zimbalist still wanted him to stay for the entire filming. Gore declined again. “This is not a going-away present,” Zimbalist wrote in the note that came with the gift. “This is only to keep me from worrying over your losing more pages of your goddam good play,”
March to the Sea
, which Zimbalist had recently read. “Thanks for helping out.”

During the next weeks, as the filming proceeded, Gore's friends on the set kept him abreast of progress. Morgan Hudgens, the MGM publicity director for the film, sent him photos and a report on the last day of May. “
The horses began
pounding around the Spina today—quite a sight,” and “the big cornpone,” a derisive nickname for Heston, “really threw himself into your ‘first meeting' scene yesterday. You should have seen those boys embrace! … We miss you.” So too did Zimbalist, who early in June also reported on “our first big day of the race…. Willy [Wyler] has not read beyond the first 10–12 pages of the new script,” overworked and exhausted by the grinding daily schedule. “Again I want to thank you for helping out.
My only regret is you couldn't stay longer, which would have enabled you to work a bit more slowly. I think some of the scenes suffered because you had to rush to get them done before you left. Christopher has completed the ending…. It reads and feels very good…. Mary asked me to send her love. You also have mine.” At the end of July, Zimbalist, who expressed his hope that Gore would find time to do the script for his next film, brought him up to date again. “The new opening you wrote worked out well.” Gore's main contribution had stretched from the opening to the chariot scene, as he wrote less than a year later to William Morris when the question of how many and whom of those who had contributed to the script should get on-screen credit.

I rewrote the script from the first page through the chariot race; P. 180. Christopher Fry wrote the rest. I kept the construction of the old script (with one important change) but I rewrote nearly all of the dialogue, as I have indicated. After I left, perhaps a third of my dialogue was in turn rewritten by Fry. In any case, I should say a third of the picture shot is my dialogue. As for construction, in the scene where Ben-Hur first meets Messala, in the old script they quarreled and fell out. In my version, P. 19 to P. 31, I broke the scene into two parts. First, at the Castle Antonio; second, at Ben-Hur's home. I also put in the business of the brooch for Tirzah, the horse for Messala, etc. From 12 to 31 the script filmed is all mine (I was there while it was rehearsed, while much of it was shot). The same goes for all dialogue in the chariot race sequence. Tiberius at Rome, and the other places indicated in the script. I was asked to stay on till the end of the picture but could not; we parted most amiably; and Willy Wyler will, I am sure, back me up as to authorship of the parts in question.

When the arbitration panel of the Screen Writers' Guild decided that Tunberg, one of its clubbable own, should have exclusive credit for the script, Wyler fiercely but unavailingly objected. Having become quite collegial with Fry, Wyler found it infuriating that Fry would get no credit for his work. Fry pressed Wyler to insist that Vidal be given credit for his substantial contribution. The Guild ruled that Fry had not contributed the minimum
one third. Despite evidence to the contrary, they also concluded that Gore had not. Ironically, though later he was to fight numbers of times to have his name removed from association with a film, this was one instance in which he desired the credit he deserved. Unfortunately, Zimbalist was not there to make the case for Gore, though probably he also would not have been succcessful. At the last stages of filming, after Gore had returned to New York, Zimbalist unexpectedly died of a heart attack. “
I was more upset
than I thought I would be by Sam Z's death,” Gore wrote to Isherwood that fall. “It almost doesn't do to get to like anybody if he is going to die on you.”

Despite his efforts during the rest of 1958 to find a producer for
Fire to the Sea
, Gore had no success. There were too many things wrong with the play, including the general assumption that even a good Civil War play would have difficulty attracting a sufficient Broadway audience. Producers wanted another comedy from him, not a historical dramatic play. “My career as a dramatist has come to a grinding halt,” he confessed to Isherwood in the late fall. “No star will do the Civil War play.” Before going to Rome in April, he had told Tom Driberg, “I should love a British visit, but I am deep in a play for the fall, and my novel about Julian.” In April he had published in the
Nation
, the beginning of a long association, an essay on satire, “The Unrocked Boat: Satire in the 1950s,” with some sharp analysis of American cultural and political distaste for satirical art, including the observation that “the Christian victory, though it did not bring peace on earth, did at least manage to put a severe leash on the satiric impulse…. If ever there was a people ripe for dictatorship it is the American people today. Should a home-grown Hitler appear, whose voice, amongst the public orders, would be raised against him in derision? Certainly no voice on television: ‘Sorry, the guy has a lot of fans. Sure, we know he's bad news, but you can't hurt people's feelings. They buy soap, too.'” Even when he wrote on subjects ostensibly literary, his comment was now becoming increasingly political. Louis Auchincloss wrote to tell him he thought it his finest essay yet, a brilliant piece. Late in the spring he went out to Long Island for a week of brainstorming with librettist Howard Dietz and composer Arthur Schwartz at Dietz's home. They had proposed he write the book for a new satirical musical based on a recent popular novel,
The King
from Ashtabula
. Since the success of
Visit
he had had numerous such proposals, including from Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers. Each time his agent Harold Franklin urged him to do it. Each time he responded, “I have never read the press of any musical in which the book was ever praised. It's always the weak point. You know, ‘Had it not been for a banal book by Gore Vidal this would have soared.'” Despite the attractive company of Lucinda Ballard, a theatrical costume designer and Deitz's wife, the week did not prove productive. Each time Gore proposed an idea as they walked in Dietz's lovely garden, Dietz, full of energy though suffering from the onset of Parkinson's disease, and Schwartz, “solemn, rabbinical, and rather humorless,” would shoot it down.

At Edgewater through the summer and fall he returned to
Julian
, trying to set up the opening chapters. “
No more movies
for some time,” he had promised himself and Paul Bowles, “and perhaps, if things work as they ought, I shall be novel-writing next year. I find I miss prose. It has been four years since I have written anything but clattering dialogue. I persist for the money: in another year I shall be financially independent. Also, it is delightful to be patronized as a corrupted hack by the corrupt hacks. I have never been quite so pleased with myself.” Actually, the summer at Edgewater was dreary and wet. “I still have occasional attacks of my Roman fever—a spiritual fever, that is, and I could, I think, live there till the end. But I am disloyal to the house and the river: neither is at fault that it is in America.” Anaïs, eager to have his help, wrote a bitter account of her own Hollywood disappointments, to which he responded sympathetically, though he also teased her about the credibility of her diary. “No one will believe your diaries, you know, which will insure you an immortal niche amongst the fabulists: oh, to have it all ways! … Yes, Europe was wonderful. I had the best four weeks of my life in Rome, seeing people I'd not seen in ten years, recapturing
that
time, less the pain…. And I suddenly find myself longing to live in Rome … the first urge I have had in eight years to be any place but home. You are right about California. I tend to go mad there: eat too much, drink too much (I am now thin, abstemious and quite unconquerable in spirit.) I am out of the MGM contract at last and I have no plans for another picture.”