ALL GORE IS DIVIDED INTO THREE PARTS
There is a review
in this week’s New Yorker, to which I have after a long time away started to subscribe
as magazines have so fallen in favor, they are cheap, and you can feel their
desperation—so literate in a world where so few people now 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 as much as
Don did, and a friend—as much as he could be one—like Gore Vidal.
Don and I were
living in London as a young couple with little kids, going for our first visit
to Rome. It was early enough in our
lives so we were still friends with the powerful and witty agent 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, we
apparently passed the audition, and he said we should go on with him to
dinner. Impressed and excited,--or at
least I was, --- we did.
His companion, and, as he was to seem from
time to time, clever and funny friend Howard Austen was along. So was one of the Andy Warhol girls: Ultra
Violet, I think it was.
The dinner was
obviously Italian, and the words, though I can’t remember what all of them
actually were, were dazzling. There was
little he seemed to be able to say without its being framed and mounted like a
celebrity photo on a mantel. And I do
remember vividly 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, dear reader, if one
you are and you are there: there is nothing more dizzying than being hit on by
one of the world’s most notorious and dazzlingly articulate homosexuals. As I remember, I was stunned into silence.
Don, viably
straight man that he was, who’d been captivated but less than comfortable for most
of the evening, was furious. “It just
shows what a pervert you really are,” he said in the taxi back to the hotel,”
that you enjoy the company of 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. And I recall vividly, his squeakily saying
“Really?” when I relayed something flattering that had been said about him. Then there was going to visit him at his home
in Ravello, when Don had died shatteringly young, and much too early, and I was
questing for the upside of being alone, and he had invited me.
“This…” Gore
said, arms outspread, as he gazed down from 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 register 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, literally
and geographically above it all, 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, the wet adventure that was to be
the center of most of my career
difficulties, when the novel that resulted started an egregious landmark
lawsuit. Both Gore and Howard were visibly
un-enchanted. Gore became contemptuous, and when I gave him
a novel of mine that I had brought as a gift, MARRIAGE, not a smart choice of
subject on my part, was dismissive. I
don’t imagine he ever even bothered to read a work of mine.
But after
Howard died, and he was lonely, I was invited to be with him on a number of occasions. He waited for me at the gate to the path that
led down to his villa. I could almost
hear him holding his breath as I approached, 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, amicable and even borderline hearty, and that made me happy. I do like to make friends, especially when
they don’t like me.
Reading about
Gore 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.
Gore, from a
distance, seems actually closer than one could really get, and I realize how glad
he was for my company though he less than prized it, and 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, trying to be fork-tongued. “They pretend to read
The New York Review of Books.”
