ALL GORE IS DIVIDED INTO THREE PARTS
There is a review
in this week’s New Yorker, to which I have after so long away started to
subscribe as it is so cheap, and I can feel their desperation—so literate in a
world where so few people anymore turn to the actual page—of a Gore Vidal
biography. And I feel how lucky I am to
have had in one lifetime a man who loved me like Don, and a friend—as much as
he could be one—like Gore Vidal.
We were living
in London as a young couple, going for our first visit to Rome, and it was
early enough in our lives so we were still friends with Sue Mengers, who told
us to call Gore. Invited for tea, or
more probably it was a drink, to Gore’s rooftop apartment in Rome, apparently
we passed the audition, as he said we should go on with him to dinner, and we
did. His companion, and as he was to
seem from time to time, clever and funny friend Howard Austen was along, as was
one of the Andy Warhol girls, Ultra Violet, I think.
The dinner was
obviously Italian, and the words, though I can’t remember what all of them
actually were, dazzling. I do remember
precisely Gore’s looking at me intensely at one point and asking if I was
wearing contacts. I told him no.
“It’s just that
your eyes are so beautiful I thought you must have something in them.”
Well, let me tell
you, reader, if you are there: there is nothing more dizzying than being hit on
by one of the world’s most notorious homosexuals. As I remember, I was stunned into silence.
Don, who’d been
captivated but less than comfortable for most of the evening, was furious. “It just shows what a pervert you are,” he
said in the taxi back to the hotel,” that you enjoy the company of a pervert
like Gore Vidal.”
And I did, and
continued to, whenever I was in the same city he was. When he came to Los Angeles I would meet him
at the Beverly Hills Hotel where he stayed with appropriate panache, squeakily
saying “Really?” when I relayed something flattering that had been said about
him, and going to visit him at his home in Ravello, when Don had died too
early, and I was questing for the upside of being alone.
“This…” Gore
said, arms outspread, standing on the side of the mountain his villa was
perched on, overlooking the ocean, “is our view.”
I was still so overcome at having an actual
relationship, such as it was, with Gore Vidal himself, that I didn’t really log
how pretentious it sounded. Even now,
all these years later, I prize having had the contact, and sorrow over the
deterioration that was to come, the inevitability of decay if you are lucky
enough to have a long run. At the time,
though, he was still superior, contemptuous even while appearing the sort-of
gracious host. Howard, though, was
patently pissed, not enjoying Gore’s being interested in a woman, though it was
Nothing really Personal.
I told tales of
having gone to the nude encounter marathon, that wet adventure that was to be
the center of most of my career
difficulties. Both Gore and Howard were
unenchanted, and understanding now how foolish the whole thing was, I am sorry
to have wasted both their attentions, as much of it as I had, on that. Gore became contemptuous, and when I gave him
a novel of mine that I had brought as a gift, dismissive. I doubt that he ever even bothered to read a
work of mine.
But after
Howard died, and he was lonely, I was with him on a number of occasions. He waited for me at the gate to the path that
led down to his villa, and I realized he was actually anxious for my
company. But he became more arch, and
less appealing with every visit. Sort of
happily, I had had one phone conversation with Howard before he died that was
amicable and even borderline hearty, and that made me happy. I do like to make friends, especially when
they don’t like me.
Reading now
about him in The New Yorker, once my—and everybody’s as I remember—favorite
magazine, it is easy to see how far or maybe near we have actually come. The cartoons are no longer so funny or so
well drawn, but the prose is still read over the nose as if it were a transom,
and everybody should be standing on tiptoe.
And Gore, from
a distance, seems actually closer than he could get, because I realize how glad
he was for my company, even though he less than prized it, how desperately he longed
for literary acknowledgement. “The
very rich are different from you and me,” Fitzgerald said to Hemingway, and
Ernest replied, “Yes, they have more money.”
“The very
literate are different from you and me,” I say.
“Yes,” I answer back, being fork-tongued, “they pretend to read The New
York Review of Books.”
