Gore Vidal (85 page)

To tempt these voters to give him a hearing, he had at least one effective weapon, some formidable friends, though their impact could cut both ways. To the extent that they were prominent Democrats, they solidified his Democratic support, but they were not likely to help with independents or Republicans. To the extent that they were celebrities, they did bring out people regardless of party affiliation, eager to see Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, for example, both of whom came up at least twice to widely advertised rallies and both of whom, nervous, did their best to tout their good friend. Glamour helped. But with the stolid Republican mainstream it was an entertainment, not an influence. Eleanor Roosevelt, totally unglamorous in appearance, was both celebrity and prominent Democrat. From the beginning she liked and supported Vidal, though at first she had had reservations about his candidacy. She may have wondered whether he would actually take the campaign seriously. She also knew how formidable were the odds. Her husband had not carried the 29th District in any of his four presidential campaigns. From the moment in fall 1959 that Gore had arrived at Val-Kill, her Hyde Park home, and discovered her arranging gladioli in a toilet bowl to keep them fresh, there was a low-keyed rapport between them. As the campaign swung into high gear in August 1960, she
happily allowed herself to be photographed at Hyde Park inaugurating a series of coffee meetings for the candidate. “
My husband always said
: one has to have the hide of a rhinoceros to survive in politics,” she remarked to him at dinner one hot June night at Val-Kill a month before the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. The other guests were the labor leader Walter Reuther and Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. “Eleanor Roosevelt's curious small eyes turned, looked straight at me,” Gore later wrote. “They are her most interesting feature, the whites very clear, the blue somewhat opaque; when she thinks you are not watching her, she watches you; to catch her staring at you makes her flush and sometimes she will giggle nervously and look away; the eyes are those of an interested girl.” She told him, probably unconvinced by his claim that he was protected by bright armor, that people in Hyde Park who had known her husband all his life believed that he did not suffer from polio but “‘from something you get from not having lived the right sort of life,'” perhaps an allusion to Gore's also being vulnerable to the charge that he had not lived “the right sort of life.” Reuther had traveled to Hyde Park to try to convince Mrs. Roosevelt to support John Kennedy. Franklin, Jr., had just come from campaigning for Kennedy in West Virginia. For some time now Gore had been in the Kennedy camp. Earlier in the year Dick Rovere had privately told Gore that Kennedy had Addison's disease, which would put him in an early grave, a fact Rovere intended to reveal in an article in
Esquire
. Jack, who had heard of Rovere's intention, called Gore from Washington and blandly, persuasively lied: “Tell your friend Rovere that I don't have Addison's disease.” Mrs. Roosevelt—partly because she detested the Kennedy patriarch, Joe Kennedy, for his pro-Nazi, anti-Roosevelt sympathies at the start of World War II, partly because she distrusted Jack and Bobby for their friendship with Joseph McCarthy—remained loyal to Adlai Stevenson. Just before the evening at Val-Kill, at a small dinner party at Alice Dows's, Gore had heard Mrs. Roosevelt's detailed indictment of Joe Kennedy's cowardice and perfidy. Like Dick Rovere, with whom Gore wagered on the issue, Mrs. Roosevelt did not believe that Kennedy could win and did not want him as the candidate. Her dinner guests did not get her to change her mind.

Smoke hovered over the convention hall in Los Angeles in July. The atmosphere seemed especially surreal to Gore as he stepped from the gallery
“
into that vast
hall.” There was a “terrible strange blue light over everything.” He was feeling ghastly, suffering from ambulatory pneumonia, as a doctor soon told him, probably caught on the flight out, though except for some totally energyless, feverish hours in his hotel room he kept to his full schedule as an alternate delegate from New York. Throughout, however, he felt disoriented, and it seemed odd to him to be in Los Angeles not “as a reigning screenwriter but as a delegate.” His request had been honored by the New York party bosses, a routine accommodation for a congressional candidate. That he was a friend of the Kennedys and the author of a currently running Broadway hit having special appeal to politicians would not have been irrelevant. Unlike most of the New York delegation, headed by Robert Wagner, New York City's mayor, Gore was at home in Los Angeles and both served himself and paid back small debts by hosting for his state's delegation a celebrity-studded Hollywood party at Romanoff's restaurant on July 12. It was one of the early synergistic mixtures of Hollywood and politics, “easily the best attended and highest calibre affair given during Convention week,” an. acquaintance somewhat hyperbolically wrote to Gore. Norman Mailer, sitting at the bar, drinking heavily and glowering, said enviously, “I hate you. You're too successful,” though Gore could not help wondering if what he himself felt was not illness but jealousy of Jack Kennedy. Movie stars like Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, and Charlton Heston, whom Gore knew from the filming of
Ben-Hur
and who at this time had no quarrel with Vidal's account of his contribution to the script, rubbed shoulders, among dozens of other stars, with all the important Democratic politicians, including Lyndon Johnson—with the exception of John Kennedy, whose night it was to be out philandering, Gore later observed. It was still a splendid party, confirmed by the fact that the
New York Times
picked up a story first published in a Poughkeepsie newspaper accusing the New York delegation of “neglecting its duty” by attending. This gave the
Times
the opportunity to headline, “Vidal Denies Democratic ‘Malingering' by New York State Delegates at Los Angeles.” The night after the nomination he was himself a guest at another Hollywood political bash, this one hosted by Tony Curtis and his wife Janet Leigh, surrogates for Frank Sinatra, who had been prevented from being the official host by the Kennedys' concern that his Mafia associations might damage Jack's chances for the nomination. “It was a dreadful evening,” Gore recalled. “Curtis gave an all-star party for the victor, and Jack didn't come. There were a lot of round tables, about
two or three hundred movie stars, and I was waiting there at the main round table where Janet Leigh presided with Frank Sinatra and some bimbo and me. They waited for Jack and they waited for Jack. Eunice went to the phone. Came back to report, ‘He's gone to the movies!' Which meant that Jack was off fucking. I looked at Sinatra, and it was Attila the Hun. If he could have killed Jack and half the earth, he would have.”

The evening before, in the convention hall, still feeling wobbly but determined to be there for the climactic moment, Gore ran into John Kenneth Galbraith, the six-and-a-half-foot-tall Harvard economist, an enthusiastic Kennedy stalwart, and the slim, small, bespectacled Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., with his characteristic bow tie, who had recently turned from Stevenson enthusiast into committed Kennedy partisan. Galbraith had made his popular reputation with his book
The Affluent Society
, an influential social and economic analysis of post—World War II American prosperity. Schlesinger had published the first volume of what was expected to be the definitive history of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. After attending the Boston opening of
The Best Man
, Schlesinger, who predicted that “
the play will be
a great success,” had written Gore an encouraging letter and invited him to a dinner party at his Cambridge home. “The Reinhold Niebuhrs and the Edmund Wilsons will be there and, I think, John Strachey.” Gore, who had met Schlesinger through Rovere, had urged Rovere to tell Schlesinger to give up on Stevenson. When he did, Eleanor Roosevelt thought it a betrayal. Both intelligent liberals, Galbraith and Schlesinger had signed on to provide Kennedy with ideas and words. As the roll call of the states proceeded, there was an electric thrill in the blue light. When Wyoming's votes put the Kennedy candidacy over the top, the three men exploded simultaneously amid the general eruption of wild cheers and ecstatic applause. They all congratulated one another. They felt allied with destiny. The young political columnist, Murray Kempton, looking up at Gore from his typewriter, said, “‘
Is this
…
all
there is to it?'” Ted Sorenson, a member of Kennedy's inner circle and his chief speech coordinator, came up to them out of the crowd. Mutual congratulations again. The three of you “ought to get cracking now,” he said. “We've got to get a good acceptance speech,” a draft of which Gore, still feeling ill, quickly wrote and sent to the Kennedy suite at the Biltmore. Apparently it never got into Sorenson's hands. “Jack also asked me. At Hyde Park he said, ‘You know, we have everything but words. I haven't got anything to say.'” The good-spirited
trio, soon awash in rum, went off together to a popular Polynesian restaurant in Beverly Hills. Neither members of the Kennedy inner circle nor his recreational companions, they had not been invited to join the nominee's celebration. At dinner they debated which one of them “would tell Jack to stop saying ‘between you and I.'” In the middle of dinner Gore suddenly thought of Eleanor Roosevelt's “last appeal to the convention. We were making a mistake, she had said, waving a long finger at us, if we did not nominate Stevenson. But no one had listened. Her passion for Stevenson was the source of many cruel jokes and her loathing of the Kennedys thought to be unfair: the father's sins ought not to pass to the next generation. With a twinge of guilt, and some malice, I asked my companions,
‘Have
we made a mistake?' Certainly not! They were euphoric.” In front of the restaurant Galbraith tried to turn the restaurant's decorative ship's wheel, shouting “‘This is the ship of state!'” As it was immovable, several spokes broke off.

Returning to the daily grind of his campaign, the endless upbeat talks to every conceivable civic and political group in the face of formidable registration odds, Gore moved through the tedium of his July and August schedule. “
Some days I do
seven eight nine coffee hours with women with hats,” he wrote to Isherwood, his words coated with ambivalence and irony. “You cover an entire township or ward that way. They get maybe fifty women with hats in a room and you pop in and chat shyly about the Major Issues and then cut out. In addition, I address farm bureaus, labor picnics, party rallies…. Then there is the TV where recently on CBS I was quizzed just like the President on my Views. My answers were a lot like the President's, too. I may not be very smart but I'm sincere and that's come through which I think is a lot more important than making jokes or talking over people's heads.” His assessment was mildly optimistic. “Jack, Jackie are doing well,” he told Elaine Dundy, “and he will win though the press has come out for Wm McKinley and will not back down, fearing the Democratic process's great waiting goose. I am in terrible danger of winning myself. I've never worked so hard at anything.” His half-sister Nini came up to cover his labors for the Tennessee newspaper whose Washington correspondent she had become through the good offices of a well-known Washington journalist, a friend of the Kennedys. A conservative Republican, Nini “was reacting against her mother, a drunk, and her mother's promiscuity and reacting against Jackie and Lee being fast,” Gore thought.
“She was going to be the bluestocking. She was going to be the intellectual. She was going to be the one who read books and wrote books, the great brain…. I think she wrote rather viciously” about the campaign. “She never showed me, and I never asked. She was so right-wing, and I was a friend of Mrs. Roosevelt, and I introduced her to her, and she described Mrs. Roosevelt as the devil. It goes back to her own right-wing instincts, which come out of a battered childhood, and a battered child generally ends up trying to batter other people.” From Washington, Jackie, eager to provide practical help, sent Gore a copy of one of Jack's pamphlets from his first campaign for the Senate and a detailed letter about what should go into his publicity material. She'd be interested to read it, as she knew everybody would, she wrote to him. She urged him to mail it to as many people in his district as possible and wait till nearer election time.

In mid-August he finally succeeded, to the delight of local Democrats, in cashing in his most valuable celebrity chip. Kennedy came to Dutchess County. Newspaper photographs highlighted the two men standing together, identifying the congressional candidate as “a personal friend” of the presidential nominee. Joe Hawkins's eyes worshipfully glittered with Irish pride. Actually, Kennedy's determinative reason for coming to the 29th District was to mend fences with the still-unenthusiastic Eleanor Roosevelt. He knew he had little chance of carrying the area. But Mrs. Roosevelt's approval would have national circulation. He wanted Gore to be his intermediary, which Gore was happy to be. In June he had kept Kennedy informed about his own campaign and about the attempts of people like Walter Reuther and himself to persuade Mrs. Roosevelt to be less hostile to Kennedy's candidacy. “
Needless to say
,” he reported, “these sessions are always most interesting for what is
not
said. I have a hunch she was depressed by Stevenson's waffling.” As to helping with Kennedy's speeches, “I hardly have time to prepare my own … but if you want me to act as emissary to those liberal establishments to which I have a key (Ascoli, the
Nation, PR
, etc.), I'll be happy to. I think at one point, if you have time, you should meet the various contiguous worlds of Norman Mailer, Philip Rahv, Trilling, etc. They view you with suspicion but I have a hunch you could win them around. If you like, I'll set up something along those lines. Their influence is formidable.” They were, though, not votes or minds that Kennedy, at this point in his campaign, was interested in. But he did query Gore about how best to approach Mrs. Roosevelt, on which Gore gave detailed
suggestions, including the necessity to keep Joe Kennedy out of the conversation if at all possible. On a mid-August Sunday, after a moderately successful lunch with Mrs. Roosevelt, Kennedy shared the platform at Hyde Park with Dutchess County Democrats, especially his “relative by marriage,” as the newspapers put it, at a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act. “Vidal has the will and the vigor and he understands the need for action in this changing world,” Kennedy told the press. The
Hyde Park Independent
headlined, “Kennedy Stumps for Vidal.” Because of a death in the family, Mrs. Roosevelt canceled her appearance at the rally. Kennedy praised her profusely. Later she issued a tepid endorsement.