Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Soft-spoken, calm, and unprepossessing offstage except when on a drinking spree, onstage Newman dominated the camera with his bright-blue eyes, his small, lithe figure, his preternaturally delicate handsomeness, and the unspoken effect of great but barely restrained emotional power. He had the perfect combination of vulnerability and strength for the role. A matinee idol in the making, eight months older than Gore, part Jewish, part Hungarian-Catholic, a Yale graduate student from a Midwestern business family who had recently separated from his wife and their children to live with an aspiring young actress from Georgia, Newman hit it off immediately with Vidal. During rehearsals they began to get to know one another. Newman’s tight schedule had him bleary-eyed. After the Sunday-night performance of whatever his current role, he regularly took the red-eye to California. At Warner Brothers he was making his first film, The Silver Chalice, one of the fruits of his Broadway success in William Inge’s Picnic, in which he had starred (his ladyfriend, Joanne Woodward, as talented a performer as he but with less potential for Hollywood megastardom, had understudied). Gore and Howard had each separately met Woodward in New York, Gore through a mutual friend, Bill Gray, whom Woodward had known from Louisiana State University. A great admirer of Williams and Vidal, Gray had brought Woodward, a struggling actress, to a party in midtown Manhattan in 1952, where he had introduced her to Vidal. Gore had hardly any recollection of the meeting. She had thought him handsome, almost beautiful, and was deeply impressed with his accomplishments as a writer. Howard met her about the same time at a party at Johnny Nicholson’s café, also through Bill Gray.

  Immediately after the telecast of Billy, Newman flew to California to continue filming The Silver Chalice. Gore, who had more scripts to write for Climax, including an adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, was in Los Angeles by the end of July. Soon the preliminary discussions with MGM began to bear fruit. Howard flew out to join him for what looked like an extended stay. Woodward joined Newman in Los Angeles, partly to be with him, also to continue her own television career there and for the possibility of a movie role. By August they were all in Los Angeles, staying at the same hotel, the Chateau Marmont, the favorite of New Yorkers from the theater and literary world.

  From his room at the Chateau Marmont, Gore, looking out on Sunset Boulevard, saw a huge rotating statue of a woman holding a sombrero, an advertising billboard with a massive bosom. On mornings when he woke up with a hangover, it made him think that he “knew what death would be like.” To his shock, he soon had the bad news of the real death of someone he had a loving regard for, his editor, Nick Wreden. Early in August 1955 the fifty-three-year-old life-loving Wreden had unexpectedly died of a heart attack in a Masachussetts hospital. The previous year he had left Dutton, “after much soul-searching,” to become editor-in-chief at Little, Brown, in Boston, to which Gore had agreed to follow him. Wreden “was overweight, drank too much, talked too much, lived too much,” one of his associates later remarked. He had been a mentor, a supporter, a friend. He would be missed.

  Actually, independent of the hangover or the bad news about Wreden, Gore recognized that Sunset Boulevard’s visual gigantism represented not only death but Hollywood’s fascination with bigger everything, with special effects as a definition of cultural literacy. It was a reference he filed away mentally, to make use of later in Myra Breckinridge. Now, though, he had his own relationship with Hollywood. At the beginning it was on a small scale, in tune with the kind of tightly focused, low-budget dramatic plays that Hollywood turned to in imitation of television’s success. Reeling from a precipitous fall in revenue that had begun with the advent of television, the film industry in general was desperately trying to keep a tighter control on costs, to make cheaper films, to search for new formulas. In March, when Gore met with Jerry Wald of Columbia Pictures, Wald had indicated a strong interest “in working out some future association with you.” Nothing had developed. In early July, Dore Schary, the head of MGM, decided Gore would be perfect for a screen adaptation of Paddy Chayevsky’s teleplay The Catered Affair, to which MGM had purchased the rights. Since all Vidal’s work had been for television, why not have a successful television writer revise and expand a teleplay as the script for a full-length movie?

  In fact, the assignment made perfect sense from Gore’s and MGM’s viewpoint. It was a version of what he already had experience doing. MGM’s risk was modest. Whatever Chayevsky’s feelings, he joined Gore and Isherwood for lunch in early August, after which, Isherwood wrote, “he described how he is haunted by a feeling of horror and unreality which he can only reduce by constantly smoking, and by eating chocolate cake.” On July 11 Gore signed a standard “so-called week-to-week employment contract,” at a salary of $2,000 per week, to adapt The Catered Affair. “Week-to-week” meant that either party could terminate the contract at will with one week’s advance notice. For Billy the Kid NBC had paid him in total $2,250. As long as he turned in satisfactory pages on a regular basis, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would pay him almost that each week he was under contract. Suddenly he found himself in Culver City, sitting in a small office or having lunch with famous MGM contract writers, who immediately tried to break him of his practice of writing rapidly. He assumed he could, as usual, do his entire script in a few weeks. “So my friends at the writers’ table … just said, ‘Gore you’ve got to go along with us. This is how we do it here. We have our traditions. Three pages a day. Five days a week…. Write it in five hours, if you think you can … but give it to them at the rate of three a day, or we’re all in trouble.” In the next office, he wrote to John Bowen, “is Christopher Isherwood, now completing his second decade in the vineyard (a bad little wine but amiable).” Leonard Spigelgass, a trim, elegant New Yorker in his late forties, with thick dark glasses and “a sort of Noël Coward Englishy voice,” dominated the MGM writers’ table and reminded Gore of Sam Lurie. They liked each other immediately. Witty, realistic, and authoritative, Spigelgass had written more than a dozen successful movies, mostly light comedies. In a scaled-down, vulgarized version he was to be the model for “the wise hack,” a semifictional character in Vidal’s essays about Hollywood.

  Vidal’s pages were well received by the director Richard Brooks, still struggling to establish himself and in the process of having his first great success, The Blackboard Jungle, and by Sam Zimbalist, a veteran producer in his early fifties with whom Gore quickly developed a respectful working relationship, one of the few senior Hollywood figures for whom he felt personal affection. By mid-December, Dore Schary was thanking Gore “for the good script you’ve turned out. I know we’ll get a wonderful movie.” Having finished it quickly, Gore had cooperated with his fellow writers and turned it in over a few months. Pleased with his ongoing work on the script of The Catered Affair, MGM asked him to create an original screenplay based on the Dreyfus Affair, which Schary, an advocate of movies with a social message, had been persuaded would make an excellent film. In early October, Gore took the plunge from a week-to-week employment contract to a more complicated one that in effect gave MGM exclusive rights, at the studio’s option, to his screenwriting services for an additional four-year period at $2,000 per week through 1956, $2,250 for 1957, $2,500 for 1958, and $2,750 for 1959. He would be expected to do one script a year, in residence, if called for, at the studio for about four months annually, and be free to do as he wanted with the rest of his time. It was a breathtaking increase in his income, though he soon discovered that it elevated him into the onerous 90-percent tax bracket prevailing throughout the 1950s. “I couldn’t absorb the fact, I couldn’t believe that all of the work that I had done in my life would be taken away by the government.” If he saved enough, he might liberate himself to return to writing only what he wanted to write. There were dangers. The contract contained an important qualifying clause. If he refused to accept an assignment, he would be off salary and his contract obligation extended for a period equal to the length of his suspension. For the moment it was not a problem. He happily turned
in his pages and began to see The Catered Affair, starring Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine, take shape for March 1956 national release. His studio obligations, as he had anticipated, took only a small portion of his time. Away from the studio, he enjoyed Los Angeles life, sometimes writing at his studio office, other times at the hotel, as much engaged with his own larger ambitions as with his movie work, the first stirrings of a new novel in mind. “I have finished The Catered Affair,” he wrote to cousin Louis in September, “and I am being tempted at the moment with Captain Dreyfus which this studio wants me to write and, if I decide to do it, I shall probably stay on until December. I can see, three thousand miles away, the delicate, knowing smile which at this moment flickers, as we novelists say, across your lips. Is the great American legend about to claim another sacrificial victim? Has the hereditary taint of the American man-of-letters asserted itself so fatally again? No. Tell it not in Bourjaily’s house nor publish it in Mailer’s, but another Vidal novel burgeons slowly in the shade of Mammon…. Washington, D.C.”

  Social life was also burgeoning. With Diana Lynn he went to movie-world dinners and parties. The relationship was also private, teasing, self-consciously provocative, both aware of its complexities. “One night after dinner we ended up in Diana’s apartment,” Howard recalled. “Gore and Diana were writhing on the floor, but they were drunk and dressed. I went to the john or something. One could say that she made advances, but Gore welcomed them. He had a special thing with her. They didn’t do it that night because I came back into the room.” To Louis Auchincloss, Gore humorously proposed an exchange. “I live a life here of marvelous glitter which I will tell you about at length only in exchange for all the latest [New York] gossip, literary or real-worldly.” At the swimming pool at the Chateau, Howard and Gore found their New York acting acquaintances, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, whose relationship with California was also ambivalent. Like many theater and television New Yorkers still feeling out their attitude toward Hollywood, they too had taken refuge at the down-class, somewhat seedy Chateau Marmont, a huge, dark, rambling imitation of a French castle, with no lobby and irregular rooms and suites that kept out the intrusive sunshine. The darkness gave the hallways a Gothic tone that allowed Easterners to feel they had not yet succumbed to Californian values. “Life at the Chateau Marmont,” Woodward recalled, “was dark and strange. And we were closeted in together because we were all from New York.” There was no bar, no restaurant at which to preen or socialize. Room service came from a contingent of garage hands and young boys available to bring back take-out food from local restaurants. Pickups from the street, of whatever sex or age, regularly came up by elevator directly from the garage level to the hotel rooms without anyone’s noticing their comings and goings. Separate, a thing of its own despite its Sunset Boulevard location, the Chateau seemed both arty and bizarre, a place where reclusive people could hide and where it had also become fashionable for well-known theatrical people and writers from the East to stay. James Dean was sometimes there, as were Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. On arrival, guests could look at the register to see who of their friends was in residence.

  Paul and Gore, who enjoyed drinking and plotting together, began to plan, at Gore’s urging, how they might get Paul’s studio, Warner Brothers, to do a movie version of Billy the Kid, with Paul in the starring role. Gore would expand the teleplay into a feature-length script. “Paul was so beautiful,” Joanne recalled,” and he was a wonderful actor. I don’t know what the attraction was for Gore. I don’t know whether Gore thought Paul was so gorgeous and all of that. And Howard and I got along.” Around the swimming pool the four chatted, began to become friends. Gore seemed handsome, brilliant, awesomely accomplished. Joanne immediately began to read his novels, “flattered that Gore would deign to pay attention to dumb me…. It was an odd grouping of people. It was interesting because we met people through Gore,” including Nina. “I somehow have a strange image of Nina in a slip at the Chateau Marmont…. I didn’t like her…. On the other hand, being the age she was at that time, how difficult it must have been for her for her gorgeous son to turn out to be someone she didn’t expect. Also, he was so patently superior to her intellectually and in every other way…. I’m sure she was competitive. She never had that sort of admiration…. I just remember her in a slip, by that time the remains of a good-looking woman. She’d been beautiful. Gore really looks like his mother. She was a striking woman. As I recall, she was rather witty. She had a manner that was a bit overwhelming. She was very theatrical. But I didn’t like her. Well, of course I knew that Gore didn’t like her. I think maybe he loved her, and that was the tragedy.”

  At nearby Malibu, Gore and Howard visited regularly with Isherwood and his new companion, twenty-one-year-old American-born Don Bachardy, whom they had met in New York the previous year. Gore found the thin, blond, chicken-hawk-handsome Bachardy, an unformed neophyte who gradually discovered his passion for painting, much preferable to the contentious Caskey. At Isherwood’s cliffside Malibu house, with a valley view and a glimpse of ocean, there were dinners and parties. They enjoyed one another’s humor. They often laughed at the same things. Through Isherwood, Gore met Gerald Heard, Auden’s friend, an Irish-born convert to Southern California, an ascetic through whom Isherwood had met Swami Prabhavananda to whose teachings he had become devoted. Gore did not in the least share Isherwood’s obsession with Vedanta. Or with high romantic love. Isherwood simply assumed that Gore and Howard were lovers, engaged in the same drama of romantic angst as he and Bachardy. At the studio, walking around movie sets together, Isherwood noticed that Gore “looked at the books to see if any of them were by him.” Depressed, irritable, drinking heavily, “feeling that life is really too much trouble,” in his diary, where his dark side often dominated, Isherwood transformed a generally happy friend into a source of his own depression. “Being with Gore really depresses me, unless I’m feeling absolutely up to the mark, because Gore really exudes despair and cynical misery and a grudge against society which is really based on his own lack of talent and creative joy.” The analysis was at least partly self-projection. In fact, Gore was in good spirits. The money from MGM was a blessing. He had a channel for his “grudge,” the revision of the satirically powerful Visit to a Small Planet, an exemplification of his lifesaving ability to make art of his anger. If his mordant distrust of romantic love and family life seemed cynical to some, he thought it realistic. If his anger at those he felt had harmed, him, particularly his mother, seemed excessive, it was a measure of the degree to which he needed to defend himself against pain. If his satiric hostility to nuclear politics and conventional social mores sometimes had a Swiftian edge, he thought his response warranted by the provocations. He sometimes preferred to make a point more than spare a feeling. But his weapons of choice were wit, irony, and art.

  Doing rewrites as The Catered Affair was filmed, working on the Dreyfus film, he and Howard stayed a while longer at the Chateau Marmont, then rented a house in Laurel Canyon, where they stayed until late December. Reading various books on Dreyfus, he found himself caught up in both the theme of injustice and the challenge of creating an effective script. “I am here doing, of all things, The Dreyfus Case for the screen,” he wrote to Lehmann, “and there are moments when I believe this might be a good and useful production: each generation dearly needs to have Dreyfus re-interpreted.” Hollywood cruising had its usual satisfactions. No one at the Chateau cared or even noticed whom you brought to your room. Isherwood, despite his somber diary entries, was a frequent host, often good-humored in Gore’s company, his home a center for the more cultured movie-industry people, particularly writers. On New Year’s Day 1956, CBS telecast Portrait of a Ballerina, which Gore had adapted earlier in the year from Death in the Fifth Position. There were, though, good reasons to return to New York. Gore and Howard missed Edgewater and New York friends. Also, Axelrod’s intention to put the stage version of Visit to a Small Planet into production for a spring premiere w
as still in place, though he was having difficulty raising the required $75,000, mostly because investors doubted that an expanded version of Visit or any other television play could be produced successfully on Broadway.

  Early in January, they were on their way to New Orleans, where they stayed at the Lafitte Guest House for a few weeks, then to New York, to which, despite the winter cold, they were happy to return. Gore was not happy, though, to learn that Axelrod and his associate, Clinton Wilder a cousin of the novelist Thornton Wilder, had decided to postpone Visit until early 1957. They had not been able to raise the necessary money. Though the delay was a disappointment, there were many other things to attend to. Themistocles Hoetis, whom he had met in Tangier, urged Gore to allow his Zero Press to publish Gore’s short stories, to which he now added a seventh, “Pages from an Abandoned Journal,” based on an episode in the life of Denham Fouts. Though Gore had reservations about Zero Press, he decided to give Hoetis the book. “I didn’t want to do A Thirsty Evil with a conventional publisher. I’ve always liked the idea of doing small editions, not available to the general public.” The book was dedicated to Howard. For Ballantine Books he put together an original paperback anthology of Best Television Plays, which included Visit to a Small Planet, and wrote a brief introduction, “Notes on Television,” which he published also in New World Writing. In February, Howard began as assistant stage manager for Axelrod’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, a foot in the Broadway entertainment door that he hoped might open wider. As a condition of Howard’s getting the job, Gore agreed to reimburse Axelrod for his salary.