by Kelly Link
General Wallace went to his living quarters. His wife was out doing whatever damn fool thing it is the wives of territorial governors do when they’re new in town.
He went to his writing desk, where his steel-nibbed pens and inkwells were in a rough skirmish-line on the blotter-edge. (Unlike his desk in the office, where no matter what it looked like when he left, the Captain had it all ship-shape and Bristol-fashion the next morning. This desk was messy, and the General liked it that way.)
He looked over the last pages he’d written the night before, ran his hand through his double-haystack beard and mustache, and then dipped his favorite pen in the black inkwell, and started writing:
“His shoes brought to him, and in a few minutes Ben-Hur sallied out to find the fair Egyptian. The shadow of the mountains was creeping over the Orchard of Palms in advance of night. Afar through the trees came the tinkling of sheepbells, the lowing of cattle, and the voices of the herdsman bringing their charges home.”
Truman Capote was born in 1924.
He was from a family that moved (and moved him) around a lot. Lived with many relatives, many places. Part of his time was spent in Alabama, where he was the Dill of Harper Lee’s To kill a Mockingbird, the second most famous book of the American 1960s, which was set in the Alabama of the 1930s.
He also said he’d tap-danced on showboats with Louis Armstrong. Satchmo had only played the riverboats when Fate was on the river. That was the late teens and early 1920, between the time the Navy closed down Storyville, when Fate Marable’s bands played between New Orleans and Cairo, Illinois. In other words, some years before Capote was born. Truman probably made that story up, early.
By and by as a teenager he came to the Enfabled Rock and got a job at the New Yorker, not as a writer but as an office boy in the art department.
One of his jobs, it went on to appear, was taking the nearly blind James Thurber across the street each afternoon, and, in a sort of reverse ropos de luz ceremony, undress Thurber down to his undershorts and point him in the general direction of the bedroom door, beyond which Thurber’s current mistress waited. Truman would sit there for an hour or so, reading books and magazines. Later he would rerobe Thurber and take him back across the street to the office.
Since the present Mrs. Thurber dressed the cartoonist each morning, and helped him out of his clothes at night, it was an easy matter one afternoon for young Truman to put Thurber’s socks, sock garters and undershirt on him inside-out, and then wait to hear what had been the present Mrs. Thurber’s reaction that evening. Or, His World and Welcome To It.
Capote was also writing and selling stories, just post-WWII, when he was 22 years old and looked 13. His first novel came out with a picture of him on the back cover, slung across a couch, in which, he said, he looked as if he were waiting for someone to come in and lie down on him.
Suddenly he was famous, at almost the same time as Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer (and Thomas Heggen and Ross Lockridge, who were dead a short while after their first novels came out.) And Gore Vidal.
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the West Point Infirmary. His father, Gene Vidal, being an army football hero, would later become FDR’s head of Civil Aviation, called nowadays the FAA. His father started three different airlines, with Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. There is a newsreel of the 10-year-old E. L. Gore Vidal flying aircraft his father was marketing as a family airplane.
There was a divorce. Vidal went from school to school, most of them for rich boys. If you go to the Los Alamos Atomic Museum, in New Mexico, you can see Gore Vidal’s chaps. He was a student at the Los Alamos Boys Ranch School (like William Burroughs before him) when the government took over the land for the Manhattan Project in WWII.
Vidal served as an Army warrant officer on a ship in the Aleutians, and out of it came his first novel, Williwaw. He was 21.
Lew Wallace had arrived as Territorial Governor of New Mexico on September 4, 1878.
On the 13th of November he signed an amnesty for “all misdemeanors and offenses . . . committed between February 1, 1878 and 13th November 1878 . . . in the County of Lincoln.”
At the time, Lincoln County was one of only four counties in New Mexico Territory, the entire southeast quarter.
There were, of course, more shootings, killings and mayhem as the deputies of one county, run by a political ring, had killed the sheriff of another, while vigilantes called Regulators were shooting other people, and in one case one of their own men, while trying to arrest deputies from another.
As far as General Wallace could tell, things had been simmering for a long time before the actual shooting had started. Someone disgruntled about back pay owed him by Mr. Chisholm or Mr. Goodnight or one of those other big ranchers over in the state of Texas, had cut out a few of his cattle, herded them over and sold them to the wrong bunch over in this Territory.
The whole thing was about money.
Guys were shot coming in to register for the amnesty with the sheriff of Lincoln County, by deputies from Dõna Aña County.
At the middle of everything, but not the instigators, had been a bunch who’d been Regulators early in the proceedings; some of whom became deputies on one side or the other, about halfway through the thing.
Which now started all over again.
No matter who you talked to, they all agreed on only one thing:
Times would be a lot better when The Kid was locked up.
“Simonides bade me say further,” Malluch continued, “Sanballat is having trouble. Drusus, and those signed with him, refused the question of paying the five talents they lost to the Consul Maxentius, and he has referred it to Caesar. Messale also refused his losses, and Sanballet, in imitation of Drusus, went to the Consul, the matter is still on advisement. The better Romans say the protestants shall not be excused, and all the adverse factions join with them. The city rings with scandal.”
Capote started with journalism early, doing pieces for his old bosses at the New Yorker; text for a book of Richard Avedon’s photographs in the early Fifties, and a bunch of profiles of the famous that led the magazine to send him to Japan, to interview Brando during the filming of Sayonnara.
The director tried to get them to send someone else for the job.
The word came back: We’re sending Capote.
The director was Joshua Logan, and when Capote arrived, he said to the writer, “Say what you want about me; I don’t care. But if you trash the movie, you’ll regret it for the rest of your fat midget life.”
Capote knew the Kennedys, and was, for awhile, special chums with Princess Lee Radziwill. Newspapers were full of pictures of them boogying all night to the crazy beat at places like Arthur’s, named for Ringo Starr’s haircut.
Before those days, he also knew Lee Harvey Oswald.
He happened to be in Russia when Oswald defected the first time, to them, before he reverse-defected back to the U.S. later.
Some people say Capote made that up.
He also knew six of the seven people at Sharon Tate’s house.
And he knew Bobby Beausoleil, one of Manson’s people.
Some people say Capote made this up, too.
1959, he went to the Midwest to find out why someone had murdered four members of the Clutter family, in the middle of nowhere, U.S.A., Kansas.
Seven years later, he published In Cold Blood, the first non-fiction novel, telling exactly why.
It was the most famous book of the decade.
The first movie that gave Gore Vidal a sense of history and of time was The Mummy (1932). Especially the scene in which the character, played by Bramwell Fletcher, goes laughing mad, as the offscreen Karloff as the revivified Im-Ho-Tep takes the Scroll of Thoth from the table before him.
Twenty-three years later, Dark Possession, Vidal’s first teleplay was about to be broadcast live. In the cast was Lesl
ie Nielsen, and of course, Bramwell Fletcher.
Later, in 1960, when live TV was dying, he wrote a last teleplay, The Indestructible Mr. Gore, about his grandfather, Senator T. P. Gore of Oklahoma. The blind senator was played by William Shatner.
In between, among others, he wrote Visit to a Small Planet. Broadcast in 1955, it got rave reviews. It went on Broadway with the same star, Cyril Ritchard, and ran for two years there, and touring companies played the whole U.S.
Paramount Studios bought the rights, as a vehicle, they said “for someone like Alec Guinness.”
It was filmed. It starred Jerry Lewis.
If you watch Beat the Devil (1954) and study Bogart, he looks like he’s hearing the words he’s speaking, for the first time, as he says them.
Capote was writing the screenplay at night, giving the actors their scenes a few minutes before they shot them the next morning.
Bogart isn’t acting.
He also wrote the screenplay for The Innocents, which is an adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. For a film in which nothing happens, it’s pretty good.
In the Presidential election year of 1960, Vidal ran for Congressman from upstate New York.
Bobby Kennedy asked him “Why didn’t you once mention the ticket?”
“Because I wanted to win,” said Vidal.
“He’s right,” said Jack Kennedy.
Vidal had lost, but by a lesser margin that the Kennedy-Johnson ticket did in his district.
From then on, Bobby Kennedy had an enemies list that read 1) Jimmy Hoffa 2) Gore Vidal 3) j. Edgar Hoover.
They would all three outlive him.
Vidal also published essays and reviews in magazines which made him the Ogre of Ogres to every right-wing writer in America, forever. He was three things they absolutely could not tolerate: He was a Liberal. He liked boys and guys. And he could write well. He and William F. Buckley had a series of debates. He fought the (in those days) monolithic phone company. He told labor unions their bosses wanted them to be docile zombies at work, and creative, murderous consumers off the job, which was too close to the bone for either Capital or Labor to stand.
Of March 14, 1879, General Wallace received a letter from William Bonney, alias The Kid, telling him he knew who was responsible for two of the more recent deaths, as he had been an eyewitness. (The survivors attributed the hostilities to the people traveling with Bonney.)
The general wrote back on March 15th, arranging a meeting at 9 pm on the next Monday night at Squire Wilson’s house.
They met. Bonney didn’t impress General Wallace much one way or the other, except that he was probably telling the truth.
What neither of them knew at the time was that two other troublemakers named Evans and Campbell, escaped from the jail where they were being held, a move guaranteed to stir up everyone all over again while the governor was trying to bring some order, at least with the people who wanted The Kid dead.
Wallace wrote back to Bonney and told him and Tom O’Falliard to meet with Sheriff Kimball to be arrested. They turned themselves in on March 21, 1879.
Part of the agreement between Governor Lew Wallace and William Bonney was that the General would testify in case he was put on trial for his part in the War in Lincoln County, where The Kid knew he wouldn’t get a fair trial.
What happened next was unexpected: there would be a rigged trial with a prejudiced judge. But there was also a change of venue over to Doña Aña County, so the jury wasn’t rigged, too. Then they tried somebody else, and held The Kid for his eyewitness testimony in that case.
The General attended the trial on April 14, but didn’t testify, as the trial wasn’t of Bonney, but was about the murder of two men named Brady and Hindman.
The General went back to Santa Fe, and Bonney went back to jail.
“It was a house and a store,” said the Captain to General Wallace. “If I remember correctly, there were people from the two Rings, the sheriff of one county, deputies from the other, and Bonney and his pals. There were federal marshals involved on both sides.”
“And you?”
“Your predecessor called out the garrison on what we found to be the third day of the siege, and we got there the morning of the fifth day. The place was burned just about to the ground, but there was still gunfire coming from it. The men surrounding the place had riflemen firing into it from the water tower down the road.
“Some others had come into the fight that morning and things were quieting down again. The Major wanted to arrest everybody in sight and sort it out later, but their orders were to help the faction surrounding the place to restore order, since they were more or less the legal authorities there. There was a lot of argument about that, too, sir.”
“And then?”
“When the truce finally came, what we found when we got in there was a lot of shot-up people, including the woman and the family, and some wounded from the other faction, who’d been crawling around a couple of days. But not what we expected to find.”
“They’d gotten away?”
“Or, they were never there in the first place, Sir.”
“How in the world did I ever find myself here trying to sort out this mess?” asked General Wallace.
“I’m sure I don’t know, Sir,” said the captain. “For that matter, I don’t think any of the people involved know exactly how they got into it, either.”
“Smoke lay on the sea like a semitransparent fog, through which here and there shone cones of intense brilliance. A quick intelligence told him they were ships on fire. The battle was yet on, nor could he say who was the victor. Within the radius of his vision now and then ships passed, shooting shadows athwart the light. Out of the dim clouds further on he caught the crash of other ships colliding.”
Sometime in the mid-1950s, Vidal wrote a teleplay, The Death of Billy the Kid, which starred Paul Newman. Before that, Newman’s debut on the big screen was a Biblical spectacle called The Silver Chalice. After that, he swore he would never act in another movie where he wore a short skirt.
The Death of Billy the Kid worked out Vidal’s fascination with the outlaw he’d had since he’d been at the Los Alamo’s School.
It, too, was bought for the movies, to be done from Vidal’s script and with the director who’d done the TV show. When it was made, it did star Paul Newman, but it had a different director and a changed script, and it was called The Left-Handed Gun.
Opinions vary as to whether William Bonney, alias The Kid, also known as Billy The Kid, was or was not a southpaw.
(The word southpaw was a later appellation, from the days when baseball was becoming a growth industry. Diamonds were laid out with the homeplate to the west, giving the home team a supposed advantage in the late afternoons. Somebody pitching with his left used the hand on the south.)
The argument is because, in the most famous, and only authenticated, photo of William Bonney, he’s holding a Henry lever-action rifle in his left hand.
Some say this was for the sake of composition. Others say the picture is flopped, as was common in many positive-processes of the photography of the times.
The same people who insist he’s a lefty say if the positive is flopped the Henry rifle was a custom-made one, with a left-side shell port, since if it were a standard model, and he were holding it in his right, the shell-port would be on the other side, where you couldn’t see it . . .
You would think that finding out whether a guy was a leftie-rightie or ambidextrous would be easy. Like everything else involved with him, it was not.
In 1958, MGM was in trouble, and to get out of trouble, it put all its eggs in one basket, and the basket was called Ben-Hur.
When it was filmed the first time, in the silent days of 1925, it had made MGM.
And sometime in the spring of that year, it was realized the basket was full of, well, past
sell-date eggs.
What actually happened in the script was two big things, and a minor third one.
You had a big sea battle. (When it had been filmed in 1925, a couple of dozen Italians had been accidentally drowned during the production.) Then, a couple of thousand script pages later, you had a chariot race. Oh, yeah, the third minor thing, from a novel subtitled A Tale Of The Christ, was a crucifixion.
They had Charlton Heston for the part of Ben-Hur. (They’d wanted Paul Newman, but since James Dean had gotten himself killed in his Porsche Spyder on September 30, 1955, and Paul Newman had stepped into Dean’s Rocky Graziano role in Somebody Up There Likes Me, Newman was a star. And was not going to put on a toga, ever again. So they had Heston as Ben-Hur, and Stephen Boyd as Messalla. Those two, and a 33-year-old DOA film script every writer in Hollywood had been called in on at one time or another.
They brought Vidal in to do something with the script, anything. They needed an engine for the film, a story motor as it were.
Vidal said: Messalla and Ben-Hur had been lovers when they were boys, and after Ben-Hur comes back from the big city, he doesn’t want to do that anymore.
Not that there wasn’t some kind of subtext anyway, by the writing from other hands, what with Ben-Hur a galley slave, and the, well, tense rowing sequences before the sea-battle, and in the movie as eventually filmed, Jack Hawkins looking very, well, admiringly at Heston’s pecs.
The producer and director thought anything was better than nothing and told Vidal to write it with all the force, daring and powers at his command, as long as he never mentioned it in the script.
Vidal did a swell job. It’s either there or not, depending on whether you want it to be.
The producer had Vidal talk to Boyd, but swore everybody to complete secrecy around Heston, as if the very thought of what the movie was about would turn the normally wooden actor to a pillar of salt, in which you could see, like Rodin’s Balzac, a stunned talent entombed forever by the dichotomy that dare not speak its name.
