Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  That same spring Vidal had an idea for a television comedy with a political message. Visitors from outer space, usually hostile and frightening, had been one of the staples of the Western imagination for centuries. Orson Welles had terrified American radio audiences with The War of the Worlds, his dramatization of invaders from Mars, intended as radio fiction but initially taken by many as a news report. Hollywood had discovered that alien creatures sold tickets at the box office, epitomized by the successful 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still. At Water Mill in the summer of 1953 Vance Bourjaily’s skit with visitors from outer space had comic overtones, though apparently no political agenda and none of the major satiric premises that struck Gore as a good idea for a one-hour television comedy to be called Visit to a Small Planet. The main character, from a distant world, comes to earth with the expectation that he will amuse himself with the spectacle of human beings at war, an amusement available only in primitive places like the earth. When Kreton falls to earth at the home of a TV-news commentator, he proceeds to use his special unearthly powers to foment a combination of comedy and terror, the perfect formula for a satirical attack on human small-mindedness and self-destructiveness. Eager to enjoy the grand nuclear fireworks spectacular, Kreton seems more fascinated with weapons as toys than even the American and Russian generals. Kreton (cretin) has his plans frustrated at the end by fellow otherworldlings who come in a flying saucer, in the equivalent of asylum white coats, to take him back to the institution for the demented from which he has escaped. Retarded, his is the mind of a child. The earth is saved, but not from itself, since of course the satirical thrust associates Kreton with military and political hawks. For the audience the nuclear-arms race and the Korean War are the context. The enemy is not in our (or other) stars but in ourselves. Delighted with the idea, whose comic realities were soon made especially sharp by the wit of so many of Kreton’s lines, Gore wrote the one-hour teleplay with his usual speed and handed it over to Harold Franklin. “I am at heart,” Gore confessed later in regard to Visit, “a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.” Whatever Franklin’s anticipation, Visit to a Small Planet was not an easy sell. Political subjects, no matter how distanced from the identifiably topical, were not welcome in television drama. Whereas some years before, advertisers simply bought time blindly, now they were in tight alliance with the television networks, determining what programs were viable vehicles for the sale of their products. After two of the major series turned down Visit, NBC’s Philco-Goodyear Playhouse, broadcast on Sunday nights, agreed to do it. At CBS the decision had been made by the sponsor’s advertising agency. “‘Too much social significance.’ … It’s a maddening business and I don’t know why we put up with it,” the producer of Studio One bitterly reported to Gore. Probably at NBC it slipped by their usual self-censoring, perhaps because so much of its surface was funny. In late April the telescript was in rehearsal, with the British comic actor Cyril Ritchard playing Kreton. On Sunday night, May 8, its performance, viewed by about thirty million people, had an electrifying impact. “With some anxiety we waited for the roof to fall in.” It did not. The major reviews were superb. At a party at the Manulises’, where he happily met John Steinbeck, Gore basked in his success. When he left for California, he was more readily and widely identified with television drama than he had ever been with fiction.

  After arriving in Los Angeles in May 1955, that very day Gore and Manulis were at the television studio working on an adaptation of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms for the dramatic series Climax, which was telecast on May 26. Now a top CBS television producer, Manulis was charged with improving the overall quality of Climax. The adaptation starred Guy Madison and Diana Lynn, the actress Gore had met during the rehearsals for Stage Door and with whom he got along wonderfully. Something sparkled between them. Enchanted, he looked at her with adoring eyes. The script, though, and the performances other than Lynn’s were less than glittering, partly the difficulty of transforming Hemingway’s novelistic speech into effective dialogue for actors. The best part of the rehearsals was the opportunity to spend time with the slender, blond, Los Angeles-born actress, who was between husbands and whose smart, flirtatious intensity became an addictive enjoyment. “She had this elegant sort of kittenlike manner with very sharp eyes,” Gore recalled, a pert nose, and an attractively angled face. Her look radiated witty good humor and well-informed intelligence. As a child she had been a piano prodigy, her avenue into the movies and a long-term contract with Paramount, where in 1942 she debuted in a Billy Wilder comedy, The Major and the Minor. She then had almost ten years as a successful child and teenage actress. When her adult movie career as a leading lady faltered, she turned to television drama. Suddenly she was a great success again. During much of May and early June she and Gore had a good time together, socially as well as professionally, with a tactile engagement unusual for Gore. “Diana and Gore had a special friendship,” recalled Dominick Dunne, who later, when he too was brought out to Hollywood by Manulis, became a close friend of Lynn’s. “There was a deep, deep affection there. If he ever could have been in love with a woman, she’s the one…. Gore was mad about her.”

  One evening at a Hollywood party, Gore recalled, as they made their way through a room with about ten couples, “she murmured to me, ‘Do you realize I have been to bed with every man in this room?’” And she was by no means promiscuous in the civilian sense of the word. We were all in the business. She’d been a child star, so she’d been around for twenty years. One weekend Gore and Marty Manulis, “tourists from the East who had heard of Palm Springs,” drove out to the desert, where they stayed at a pleasant motel, relaxing, swimming. At some of the larger towns they drove through, Manulis remembered, Gore said, “‘Let’s find the library.’ He was looking to see whether his books were taken out more or less frequently than Capote’s or Tennessee Williams’s…. I never saw anyone do that before.” From Gore’s point of view “every writer does that. I never introduced myself to the librarians. You sneak around and you find your books on the shelf and you see when was the last time it was stamped out. Then you look at Capote and Mailer.”

  While he worked on numbers of scripts for Climax, two other projects kept him busy and busily moving. The playwright George Axelrod, whose comedy The Seven Year Itch had been a Broadway success in 1953, approached Harold Franklin about Axelrod’s producing a Broadway version of Visit to a Small Planet. Three years older than Gore, Axelrod had charm, good looks, self-confidence. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? had become his second Broadway hit, his screenplay for The Seven Year Itch about to become a successful movie with the cachet of Marilyn Monroe in one of the starring roles. An excellent technician, clever rather than deep, with a sharp eye for the main chance, Axelrod had decided that an expanded version of Visit, with the right star, would be a Broadway success. The plan was to have Visit on the Broadway stage at the beginning of 1956. With Gore’s approval Franklin closed the deal at the beginning of June. Cyril Ritchard was signed to star and direct. In late May, Gore flew first to New York, then to Jamaica, where Ritchard had a vacation home and where they discussed Gore’s expansion of Visit for stage production. “Dear Gorgeous” and “Dear Gold Dust,” Ritchard teasingly addressed Gore over the next few months in their correspondence about the play. “I’m delighted to hear that Visit is too long … much better that way.” Back at Edgewater for the rest of June and early July, Gore worked at the revision, with suggestions from Axelrod. “I have been studying this goddam play for two weeks,” Axelrod wrote, “and I am now absolutely convinced that we have a complete natural…. As I said in New York, the only problem is the girl and the two boys—the rest of it marches like a little doll.”

  At Edgewater, as Gore worked on the revision of Visit, his thoughts returned to his stymied career as a novelist, particularly the reception of Judgment in early 1952 and of Messiah
, which Dutton had published in March 1954. Heinemann, his new British publisher, had recently brought out Messiah in London. Neither novel had been reviewed in the daily New York Times or in Time magazine, probably the result of the ongoing influence of those, like Orville Prescott, who had hated The City and the Pillar on moral grounds. The Judgment of Paris, an intellectual and satirical fable embedded in a semirealistic narrative, recounts the adventures of an indeterminately talented young American in early-postwar Europe and Egypt as he is given the opportunity to choose, in the form of three different women, between power, knowledge, and love. A novel of ideas, it is also a novel about sexual identity, partly satirical, often comic in its depiction of human nature, particularly the hilarious Roman homosexual-bathhouse scene. Its secondary characters are both bizarre exaggerations and interesting ideas, the novel’s energy directed toward an elegance of overview that has great success in its balanced structure, its sharpness of language, and its comically playful engagement with fundamental choices for intelligent people. In the end the main character surprisingly, perhaps unfortunately, chooses love. Unlike Vidal’s previous novels, Judgment rejects some of the conventions of literary realism while still sustaining a coherent narrative. It has more in common with Fielding’s Tom Jones than with the treasured and influential warhorses of nineteenth- and twentieth-century realism, especially turn-of-the-century models like Gissing, Galsworthy, and Hardy. As he wrote Judgment, Vidal felt that it represented a new beginning for him, a decisive turn away from hard-core realism toward Meredith and Henry James, toward comic elegance, poetic turns of language, tighter form, satirical deflation, an intellectual sweep that embraced the tradition of the novel of ideas without giving up accessible coherence, the pleasures of readability. To his disappointment, despite moderately good reviews, Judgment sold poorly. Nick Wreden tried hard to get him to redefine success. Given the depressed book market in general, especially for serious literary fiction, a sale of 10,000 copies should be applauded. To Gore it had not felt like applause. Partly he blamed what he insisted were poor sales on the refusal of the daily New York Times and Time magazine to review it. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review John Aldridge had qualified his praise with reservations and summarized the author as heretofore a “relatively rare sort of young writer in whom precocious creative energy is largely unaccompanied by precocious creative brilliance.” But Aldridge’s praise was also strong. “The Judgment of Paris is the best and most ambitious of his novels, the richest in texture and the most carefully executed…. Vidal has found a way to a dramatic statement of his theme.” For some reason, with Judgment, “values” did not carry the Aldridge day, though numbers of reviewers also expressed some moral censure, as did the Miami Herald reviewer, whose editor headlined his comments, “Vidal’s Latest on Depravity Just So, So.” Still, despite the disappointing sales, the critics, even when overall judgment was mixed, had found much to praise, especially the novel’s stylistic brilliance.

  Vastly more powerful, pointed, and ambitious, Messiah—later to become a cult novel, with touches of Swift, Orwell, and the satirical inversions of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—attacks Christian hypocrisy, organized religion, and the death cult behind Eisenhower’s American sunshine. The main character, who in his old age narrates the events, is Eugene Luther, partly named after the author, amid other autobiographical touches, including a beautiful evocation of the Hudson Valley summer landscape at the novel’s beginning. In his old age, hiding in Egypt, Eugene Luther fears he will be discovered by Cavites, followers of the dominant new religion of the world, named after John Cave, a hypnotic, charismatic exponent of a religion whose psychological and philosophical insight was that death was real, final, and stingless, and under appropriate conditions should be embraced. When Cave is assassinated by his disciple in charge of organization and dissemination, whose name is Paul, Cave’s vision is turned into an organized, powerful, wealthy, and authoritarian religion. Eugene Luther’s important contribution, even his name, is erased, except that the main anti-Cavite heresy is called Lutherism. Flawed from the beginning, Eugene Luther is sexually impotent or at least unarousable, but in the face of this and as part of his understanding of John Cave’s original vision, he nevertheless affirms that life is potentially rich, desirable, and improvable. He embraces Cave’s vision because he believes that Cave intends it to enrich life in the present, to rid human beings of the evasive, destructive emphasis on an afterlife, a mythical, controlling, exploitive heaven and hell of the dominant Christian sort.

  As Gore, writing Messiah, looked around him, he had seen an America dedicated to Senator Joseph McCarthy, to superficial Christian piety, to suppression of individuality and free speech, to increasing authoritarian control through media and political pressure, to the use of nuclear terror if not nuclear war to intimidate dissent abroad and at home, and to the triumph of Henry Luce’s vision that the mission of America was to bring to the entire world Time magazine’s combination of Christian and capitalistic doctrine. America’s business and America’s God would rule the planet. In Messiah Vidal provides an alternative vision, or a vision in which Cavism recapitulates the history of Christianity and capitalism together and brings oppression to the world again. He had hoped that Messiah’s artistry would make the horror unmistakable to its readers. As with Judgment, the sales again had reached only 10,000. Though the daily New York Times and Time magazine, predictably, did not review it, the reviews across the country and in England had been generally good; some, like those in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the Richmond News-Leader, and the Boston Globe, superlative Most reviewers, more or less, understood the novel. “This quite serious satire is written in a rich, almost baroque style. It moves with power and conviction,” wrote the critic for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. The more independent the newspaper, the less connected to corporate and national power structures, the better the reviews tended to be, though the New York Mirror and the Chicago Sunday Tribune thought it spellbinding and provocative. A new friend and admirer, Lucien Price, an Exeter graduate whose Boston high-culture credentials were impeccable and who headed the Boston Globe editorial staff, thought the book so powerful and important that he had made it the subject of a lead editorial. As Gore in the summer of 1955 gave thought to where he had been and where he now was, he had paused retrospectively. Messiah, he wrote to Kimon Friar modestly, “was a noble failure, though I think it has certain virtues.” He had no illusion that great art was possible in television drama or even on the stage, at least as he experienced his own dramatic talents. “A gift for playwriting is only a form of cleverness,” he later recalled, “like being adept at charades or doublecrostics, while novel writing goes, at its best, beyond cleverness to that point where one’s whole mind and experience and vision are the novel and the effort to translate this wholeness into prose is the life: a circle of creation.” But at least now, writing for television, he was “doing something people really wanted. All my life I had been writing novels, and nobody wanted novels by me or by anybody else.”

  In early July 1955 Howard, who had been spending weekends in Barrytown, easily enticed Gore home to Edgewater with a reminder that their enormous roses were in bloom, the house was sparkling, their dog Tinker, the black cocker spaniel whom they had gotten as a pup in 1951 (his name derived from “Tinker-Bell,” Howard’s nickname), missed Gore as much as Howard did. Howard’s nickname for Gore, “Me Me,” was both affectionate and realistic. Earlier in the summer Howard had enjoyed a weekend with Nina who the previous year had bought a large Victorian-style shingle house on Main Street in Southampton, where Howard had been her guest for a few pleasant weeks. Increasingly bored during the last two years at the advertising firm, resentful that he had not received an expected raise, Howard had recently resigned. A singing career was a still-unrealized hope. Doing something in the theater world appealed to him and seemed more possible with Gore’s television and now Broadway work. With Gore away and with ample time, Howard began to
take care of the bills at Edgewater, to handle the accounts, to attend to the details of domestic business, to deal with the accountant, Leonard Strauss, whom Gore now employed as a business manager handling his rapidly increasing cash flow. Howard’s role in their domestic business arrangement began to be more clearly delineated. What had been a casual arrangement was formally verbalized, his salary as secretary doubled. Gore’s television income gave them a latitude that they had not had before. Without the constraints of daily work in Manhattan, Howard could now travel with Gore, including to Los Angeles if Gore’s stay should prove this time to be a long one. “Me Me’s” working schedule and preferences in general would determine both their residences.

  In July, Gore rewrote Visit and attended rehearsals in New York of his newest television drama, The Death of Billy the Kid, which was televised on Philco Television Playhouse on July 24th. He later described it as his favorite of all his television plays, “though by no means the most admired.” Billy had of course been on his mind for years, and Harold Franklin had finally found a taker, Fred Coe, a senior NBC producer, for the presentation Gore had laid out the year before in his letter to Helen Harvey. Coe, in overall charge of the Philco Television Playhouse, chose Robert Mulligan to direct. How to dramatize Billy’s ruthless life and well-deserved death was a challenge, the difficulty of balancing his and the frontier’s cruelty with the meaningfulness of the other things Billy stood for—the independence, the romance, the defiant individuality of his code of loyalty and self-assertion. “My decision, finally, was to show not so much Billy himself as the people who created the myth of Billy the Kid,” a myth that Gore desired to deepen and extend, among other reasons as a critical statement about corporate America in the self-satisfied 1950s. To play Billy, Coe had found the perfect young actor. Only James Dean or Marlon Brando might have done as well. Brando, the star of A Streetcar Named Desire, Gore had met in New York through Tennessee Williams. James Dean he soon met in Hollywood. They both had an electric edge of defiance. But Paul Newman, a young television and theater actor, turned out to be the perfect choice.