Gore Vidal (98 page)

However, to his distress, he learned in March 1959 that the actress Jayne Meadows, the daughter of Reverend Frances James Meadows Cotter, who had been a witness to some of the events of 1944, had at a television studio “regaled” CBS reporter Mike Wallace with an account of the incident. Like her husband, Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows abhorred Buckley's
radical conservatism. “Evidently the entire studio was your audience,” a pained and angry Buckley wrote to her. “Is it your intention to publicize the episode indefinitely? Or is there a point, say on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its happening, when you will feel that the story of an evening's aberration by three of your childhood friends has earned retirement from an active role in your repertory? Do you, in recounting the story, remark the fact that my three sisters, all of whom you knew well, had distinguished careers in school and college, untouched by scandal of any sort; and that not a man or woman who has ever known them, then or now, has ever imputed to any of them a trace of malice or bias?” With a talent for taking other people's rhetorical simplifications and shorthand attacks with serious literalness, he was aggressively self-defensive about his family. Perhaps the Sharon incident had made him especially sensitive about what he considered personal attacks, and less than sharp in drawing the line between political and personal rhetoric. (When in September 1964, on a radio talk show, he allowed his audience to think he believed that American Jews were in general historically prone to be sympathetic to Communism, he gave those aware of the Sharon incident further reason to think him at a minimum insensitive to Jewish concerns and, worse, prone to making racial generalizations.) At the same time the
National Review
was becoming notorious for biting, brutal, often painfully insulting headlines and editorials many readers thought racist. Either there was a moral blind spot or a self-indulgent fascination with the language of exaggeration. Also, it had begun to be clear to those who disagreed with Buckley that he considered threats to sue for libel an appropriate extension of open debate. In October 1961 he had implied to the publisher of the
New York Times
that he might sue the newspaper for libel, a threat he made against numbers of opponents in the late fifties and now in the sixties as well, if the
Times
did not stop misrepresenting the
National Review
. “
Your reporter wrote
as though it were the organ of a Nazi-like movement which included Lincoln Rockwell and the California anti-semites; now you suggest it is the right-wing counterpart of Communism.” Whether or not the
Times
reporter was in any way culpable, Buckley characteristically counterattacked aggressively. His own rhetorical simplifications he avidly defended as incontrovertibly true. As a television entertainer he was deadly serious, and potentially lethal.

Fortunately, Vidal's and Buckley's fireworks during two hours on the Susskind show focused on public issues, not personal matters. The TV critic
for the
New York Herald Tribune
, Jack Iams, thought it “one of the most stimulating programs ever offered by
Open End
… an intellectual free-for-all that must have left both participants nursing their lumps together. Aside from the mental gymnastics … it was the suavity and polish of their respective performances that made the program a consistently fascinating one.” It was Buckley, though, who was the surprise. Whereas the reviewer had expected Vidal to be excellent, the “virtuosity that Buckley brought to his role, however infuriating it may have been at times, was truly remarkable. The supercilious manner in which Buckley displayed his vast erudition, the flashes of wit and velvety insults that were sprinkled throughout his remarks, reminded me of Noël Coward acting in one of his own plays. Buckley even looked a little like Noël Coward when he delivered a line like, ‘I wish you wouldn't sound so fatigued when confronted by historical facts.” Whatever the innuendo of the Noël Coward comparison, which caught an aspect of Buckley's manner that further complicated the Vidal-Buckley relationship, the reviewer apparently intended it as a compliment. In San Francisco in July 1964 Vidal and Susskind took on Buckley again. The focus was on the Republican Party convention and its candidates. That Lyndon Johnson would be the Democratic nominee was a foregone conclusion. What to do about the Vietnam War was one of the dominant issues. Buckley, like Goldwater, favored harsh escalation. Both combatants kept the gloves of civility on. The reviewer for the
San Francisco Chronicle
had the feeling that Buckley, whose “facial expressions are unequalled by anyone in show business with the possible exception of Martha Raye,” and Vidal “were acting—like professional wrestlers—according to a rehearsal plan.” Another observer commented that it seemed “Susskind was a zookeeper trying to prevent two hissing adders from killing each other. But the hissing was always wreathed in benign smiles.” When Vidal claimed that Buckley's efforts to provide Goldwater with an acceptance speech had been summarily turned down, Buckley's hiss intensified. He felt it was an unfactual attempt to humiliate him. “
For the record
,” Vidal wrote to a Buckley supporter after the convention, Goldwater's press secretary “told Douglas Kiker, Norman Mailer and me that B. had telephoned him ‘ten times' the day of the nomination and that he had ‘picked up the phone once,' and that when B. ‘had sent some stuff over I took it in to the Senator and he said ‘I don't want to read this.' After the show, Buckley protested to Nellor [Goldwater's press secretary] who wrote him a letter, denying he had said what
the people had heard him say…. In any event, for me to suggest that there might be a rift between Buckley and Goldwater is to help Goldwater tremendously. So loyal partisans should be pleased.” Buckley, who disputed Vidal's account but never challenged his witnesses, was bitterly angry.

Amid a varied, busy schedule, politics partly preoccupied Gore for the rest of the year, though Lyndon Johnson's defeat of Goldwater in November diminished for the time being his concern that Buckley and his conservative cohorts were about to take over America. Before returning from the West Coast after the San Francisco convention, he spent some weeks in Hollywood, having responded to the pressure, especially increased by his tax liabilities, to do some well-paid hackwork for MGM. He had in fact over the past year been trying unsuccessfully to sell a movie script of his own, a political satire called
O Say Can You See
. British producer Tony Richardson liked the script but could not make a commitment. Back at Edgewater in September, Gore had his usual social rounds, while Howard ran the house and attended to the New York brownstone. Since Gore did not have the equivalent of Ed Cheever's gym available at Edgewater, he bought an expensive exercise machine that sent an electric current through the muscles and promised to reshape them more handsomely. Gore, Eleanor Rovere recalled, finally realized that it was hopeless and gave the machine to her. Ordinary exercise seemed more effective, and he did his best to establish a daily routine. “Gore was very vain,” Eleanor thought, “and hated to get fat. He told Johnny Carson one night on television, ‘As you can see, I've been on the Orson Welles diet.'” He had the blessing (and the occasional disadvantage) of seeming dazzlingly handsome, and often glamorous, an Apollonian figure to some, to others too attractive not to be suspected of something. Of what? Of being too talented. Of being too handsome. Of being too well born and at ease. Of being too ambitious. Of being a collection of qualities that had to have some character flaw at their hidden (or not too hidden) center, perhaps arrogance, or vanity, or some punishable vice.

Except for a two-week visit to London and Rome in early fall to push the British edition of
Julian
and perhaps to look into an apartment for January, Gore spent the rest of the year at Edgewater and in New York. In November, in New York, he voted for Lyndon Johnson, the last time he was
ever to vote, though later he happily declined to attend the inaugural ball to which Vice-President-Elect Humphrey had invited him. Johnson had promised a New Society. Having gotten through Congress the Civil Rights legislation Kennedy had failed at, Johnson was infinitely preferable to Goldwater, who had threatened the use of nuclear weapons in Asia. At a minimum Goldwater would expand the Vietnam War. Johnson promised peace. Gore also voted for Kenneth Keating for the Senate from New York, the only time he had ever voted for a Republican. Gore strongly preferred the liberal Keating to Robert Kennedy, whose movement toward the left Gore thought calculatingly self-serving. His personal reservations about Kennedy would have precluded his supporting him under almost any circumstance. Perhaps he could distinguish between personal hostility and objective judgment. Perhaps not. In this case there was no need to, though the fact that he actively campaigned for Keating, something he had done for no political candidate other than himself, spearheading the “Democrats for Keating” committee, suggests the degree to which personal feeling and political disagreement coalesced. Robert Kennedy was nevertheless elected the junior senator from New York. Gore found the election result so distasteful that he said very little about it, though before the voting he had had his say in various forums, including numbers of television shows: Susskind's, as usual, and also the popular
Steve Allen Show
, where his remarks about Buckley prompted Buckley to write to Allen that Gore Vidal “lied last night on your program.”

Since finishing
Julian
, Gore had done a few essays, the form increasingly congenial, his voice more noticeably elegant and conversational. One appeared in the
Herald Tribune Book Week
, on the television blacklist, the other in
The New York Review of Books
, about the magical children's-book author, Edith Nesbit. “As an adult writing of her own childhood, she noted, ‘When I was a little child I used to pray fervently, fearfully, that when I should be grown up I might never forget what I felt and thought and suffered then.' With extraordinary perceptiveness she realized that each grown-up must kill the child he was before he himself can live.” For Gore, the shadow of Nina lurked in those sentences. Actually, Nina had tried to materialize again as a presence in his life but he kept her at more than arm's length, dealing with her claim that he owed her money through his accountant, whom he instructed to give her something, as he was to do numbers of times over the years. He did not feel generous. He did not believe he owed
her anything. And a condition of anything he would give would be that the contact be through an intermediary. His father he saw with reasonable and happy regularity, at Edgewater, in New York City, even a few times in Avon, Connecticut.

Gore still had reason to hope that the play he had worked on since its first conception at Delphi and recently completed, ironically called
Drawing Room Comedy
, would have a Broadway production. The powerful producer David Merrick had made a commitment to do it; preliminary discussions had reached the reading and casting stage. Then, suddenly, Merrick had canceled the plans. His justification was that the play was too depressing, that Broadway audiences would not flock to see the protracted depiction of a man dying of a coronary thrombosis. In London, in January, Gore sounded people out about a British production. “
If you can come up with
a production and a cast that might have a chance,” he told the actor Jerome Kilty, who was interested, “then I see no reason for not trying it out in London.” For a short time there was a Berlin opportunity at the Schiller Theater, perhaps with some of the same people who had done the successful German version of
The Best Man
. Neither London nor Berlin worked out. To Gore's disappointment, the play was never performed. Without a performance, he had no interest in pursuing publication. The manuscript went into his storage chest, which now had an additional drawer. He had recently been approached by the University of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin State Historical Society at Madison, which, in the process of building a television and movie archive, urged him to deposit his papers there. Ironically, his prominence as a television and movie dramatist had brought him to Wisconsin's attention. Though they were somewhat aware of his novels and essays, his achievement as a dramatist was foremost in their minds: that was what they were specializing in. To get that material they would have to ask for everything, which they assumed would be, in the future, predominantly movie scripts. No other library had asked for his papers. The tax laws provided that the fair market value of such material, as ascertained by an expert, was deductible against gross income, very much like a business expense or loss. It seemed sensible to Gore to accept the invitation. Soon Howard was sending, on an irregular basis and later quite regularly, cartons of manuscripts and personal papers to Madison. The library gradually realized that it was getting more than it had initially expected. Later, Gore realized he was locked into a relationship he had made without adequate consideration of
other possibilities. Still, it was a practical advantage to have an archive for his papers, though the tax advantage would not last long, and it also had some of the feel of a date with posterity.