Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  From the time of the inauguration through much of 1961, Gore was invited a few times to the White House. When Jackie returned from her Paris trip, she sent him an inscribed copy of the more flattering photograph: “For Gore, who makes it impossible to look this serious, with affection, Jackie Kennedy.” With some pride, he displayed it in a place of honor at Edgewater. After all, he had known her before her husband had, and she had come to him for advice about a career when she was an unknown. Going upstairs to the family’s private quarters at the White House for dinner one evening, what most struck him was the smell of frying onions, the quotidian even in high places. Not that he was not proud to be at the White House. On one occasion, he called Roy Thompson, T. P. Gore’s last secretary, who had known him as a boy, simply to tell him where he was calling from, both a boastful and a nostalgic bow in the direction of his grandfather. The White House connection had its attractions, though he was feeling increasingly edgy about his own political career, leaning more and more to the notion that he ought to get out entirely and return full-time to writing. Yet he still kept open his options in the 29th District and even the possibility of the Senate. When he received an official letter in September requesting that he agree to be appointed to the President’s Advisory Council on the Arts for the National Cultural Center, he perfunctorily accepted, partly because it seemed easier than explaining a declination, though he had no intention of attending the committee’s meetings.

  In early November 1961 he was busy in New York with rehearsals of Romulus. There seemed little reason to be optimistic that the play would be as successful as The Best Man, let alone a success at all. The first act was tediously troublesome. Cyril Ritchard’s comic flair for the outrageously campy did not convey the Roman emperor’s serious side and the play’s significant historical elements, including the analogy between the Roman and the American empires. Lyn Austin, who had not had the same tingle as she had had with The Best Man, was happy to have another of Roger Stevens’s associates, Robert Whitehead, be the hands-on producer. Though he had not yet faced it consciously, Gore sensed that his decision to adapt the Dürrenmatt play had been a mistake. Also, he would soon have to make up his mind whether to run for Congress again. Joe Hawkins pressed him for a decision, as ambivalent as Gore about whether it would be a good idea. The Senate seat came up again. For both, he had until late winter to decide. But the longer he waited, the less likely his chance of success. Maybe the best thing would be to chuck political life altogether. He had seen much during the first year of the Kennedy administration that had drawn home the disadvantages of political office. For the first time he admitted to himself that both holding political office and writing novels was untenable. At this point he received an invitation from the President and Mrs. Kennedy to attend a large dinner at the White House on November 11. As he went down to Washington for the grand dinner, he was not in the best of moods. Recently he had written for Esquire, for which he now did occasional political columns, about his outrage at the Justice Department’s indifference to the FBI’s disregard for civil liberties. Bobby Kennedy seemed either too much in sympathy with or too much under the thumb of the powerful FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. Gore had written directly to Bobby at the Justice Department to complain about FBI coziness with the Ku Klux Klan. The Attorney General had responded with curt dismissiveness. Still, this was a celebratory evening. The Kennedy administration had come into power almost exactly one year before. It was the first major social dinner they were hosting, in honor of their glamorous Italian friends, the Agnellis, owners of Fiat, and, apparently, also in honor of the Radziwills, Jackie’s sister Lee and her tenuously royal Polish businessman-husband. Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., whom Gore knew through Eleanor and who represented the Agnelli business interests in America, was being rewarded for his early support of Kennedy by a White House dinner for his clients.

  Arriving by car with Schlesinger and his wife and John Kenneth Galbraith, Gore anticipated an evening of ostensible glamour and real boredom. About a hundred fashionable guests in tuxedos and evening dresses. Elaborate White House hospitality in spaces small for the event. Music. Dancing. Dinner. Flashes of crystal catching light. A hum from dozens of indistinguishable voices. In the Red Room he unexpectedly found himself face to face with the Auchinclosses. Marriage to Nina had brought Hughdie access to a senator. Marriage to Janet had brought him to the White House. With his usual good manners Gore attempted to maneuver the encounter onto high ground. With characteristic quarrelsomeness Janet responded rebukingly to an elaborate compliment from Gore about how well she had performed as a stepmother to Gore’s sister Nini. Why are you attacking your mother? Taken aback, Gore answered that he thought he had been complimenting Janet. Extricating himself as quickly as possible, he moved into the adjacent Blue Room. There was barely standing space. Groups of chairs, mostly occupied, were scattered around. He was delighted to see Jackie, seated amid other occupied chairs. Never quarrelsome, she could be counted on for her usual purring pleasantries. Since the chairs around her were taken, he squatted next to hers, steadying himself by placing his hand across the back of her straight-backed chair, his arm brushing her back and shoulders. Jackie seemed happy to see him. They chatted amiably. As she turned her head to talk to someone on her other side, Gore felt his hand being removed from behind the back of her chair and shoulder. Looking around and up, he saw Robert Kennedy, who then immediately walked to the door separating the Blue from the Red Room. Unaware of what had happened, Jackie continued her other conversation. Gore went immediately to Kennedy. It had seemed to him a personal attack, as if the Attorney General were some high-toned puritan butler policing the room. “Don’t ever do that again!” he said to Kennedy. “‘Fuck off, buddy boy,’” Gore recalls Kennedy responding, “to which one of America’s most distinguished men of letters responded, ‘You fuck off, too.’” Since clearly he had the Attorney General’s ear, Gore renewed the complaint he had outlined in his Esquire article about the FBI’s acting in the South as an anti-civil-rights terrorist organization. Kennedy responded that it was none of his business. Gore said that as a writer he would make it his business. Kennedy answered that he was not much of a writer. Later, Gore heard that Kennedy claimed that Gore had said, “I’ll get you!” No one had seen the encounter. No one else heard the dialogue.

  Within minutes the two men separated. Gore fled into the Green Room, “not from Bobby but from a terrible bad karma in the air.” Before he could move across the room to Lee Radziwill, who had waved to him, Lem Billings, a Kennedy friend, suddenly confronted him with his disregard of the Council on the Arts. He had not gone to one meeting. Why did you accept, Billings wanted to know, if you weren’t going to attend? Vidal’s explanation did not satisfy Billings. Gore, for whom a social event was not an appropriate occasion for ironing out business disagreements, felt attacked by someone inexplicably quarrelsome at a time when the occasion required social pleasantries. Leaving Billings, he found himself at a table with Ethel Kennedy, Robert Kennedy’s wife, and two other equally dull people, a tediousness that flowing champagne helped make tolerable. Everyone drank handsomely. After midnight, eager to leave, Gore signaled Schlesinger about departure. Schlesinger had found the evening tense. After only one year of the new administration, “the mood … was different,” Schlesinger wrote in his diary. “People were tired…. There was an undercurrent of edginess everywhere.” John Kenneth Galbraith’s table, at which he had been seated with Eunice Shriver, Tish Baldrige (Jackie’s social secretary), “and some lady who is doing the White House furniture,” had not been scintillating either. “A loud jazz band made a nerve-curdling but pleasant racket.” Gore tried to negotiate a taxi. A crowd of Secret Service men, ushers, and guests blocked the exit. It seemed sensible to wait for Schlesinger. The President came by. “‘You know, I’d like to wring your brother’s neck,’” Gore said to him. “‘That’s the White House. Don’t worry,’ Jack said. So I just sort of sat around, and Jack was off in a corner with a beautiful
girl, having a chat.” Finally, hours after midnight, Schlesinger got Gore, Galbraith, and George Plimpton into his car. Plimpton, whose years at Exeter overlapped with Gore’s and who, as editor of The Paris Review, had been establishing a literary-social career in New York, had been thrilled by his White House evening. In the car Gore may have told them something about his encounter with Bobby. If the champagne had at first calmed him down, more of it inflamed him. Galbraith remembered nothing about that part of the conversation. He had had “a great deal of champagne” and remembered “telling Gore Vidal on the way home that Shakespeare was almost certainly better than he. Gore was mortally insulted but took it well.” The next morning Gore called Schlesinger to give his account of his confrontation with Bobby. Schlesinger recorded a version identical, except for some inconsequential phrasing, to what Gore told others then and afterward.

  Unpleasant as the episode had been, there were no immediate consequences. “Actually,” Gore wrote four years later to Louis Auchincloss, “we both behaved like children and neither can take much satisfaction from any version.” No one at the White House took it seriously, even Robert Kennedy, for whom it may have seemed just another unpleasant encounter with someone he already disliked. Gossip, of course, quickly embellished it. But the President essentially dismissed it as the kind of thing his brother had a penchant for. Bobby had never been diplomatic, let alone tactful. It was not his strength. It was certainly not his job. Jackie did not in the least hold it against Gore. If what she heard about the interchange had importance for her, it was simply to try to remember to keep the two men apart, or at least avoid being together with both of them, something unlikely to happen anyway, unless it were at some other White House party. As always, such parties were a trial to Gore, and they intensified his ambivalence, his awareness that he was in the process of deciding to give up politics and New York/Washington social life altogether. But neither Jackie nor he saw this as any impediment to their cordiality. There were no further invitations to the White House that winter or spring 1962. Probably that would have been the case even if Gore and Bobby had been cordial. The White House had other social and political fish to fry, both at home and abroad, and there never had been an ongoing intimacy except with Jackie, who easily turned such friendships off as well as on. She did not turn it off with Gore regardless of what had been reported to her about the White House incident. When in early-summer 1962 he sent her a copy of Three and his first book of essays, Rocking the Boat, which contained the Sunday Telegraph article on the President, her response was friendly. She had just read his article on Jack and couldn’t wait to get to the others in the volume. Since it was at last lovely summer, she would have leisure time to read, and she longed to know more about Julian the Apostate. She hoped that they would be seeing Gore soon and urged him to get in touch with her at Hyannis, where she would be for all of July.

  Rocking the Boat formally introduced Gore to a wide public as a more-than-occasional essayist. It was favorably reviewed, though its political articles riled conservative critics, some balm to the ache caused by the failure of Romulus, which had opened at the Music Box theater on January 10. Oliver Smith had designed the sets. “After a disastrous run-through,” Gore recalled, “he was sitting behind me in the theater—he leaned over and said—he called everybody cookie—‘Well, cookie, it isn’t Aeschylus.’” At Sardi’s he waited with the Roveres and Dupees for the first reviews. They were mixed but far from damning. Most reviewers found the first act “flat and ponderous,” some consolation for Gore, since the first act was Dürrenmatt, the second newly composed. “Let us be grateful for Romulus, “ the New York Times reviewer concluded, “for a witty, slashing half-play assuredly is better than none.” Roger Stevens soon spent $50,000 of his own money on advertising to keep the play alive. But audiences did not come. It ran for only sixty-nine performances. “I decided,” Stevens wrote to Gore at the middle of March, that “the fight was hopeless…. I just had lunch with Cyril, who still can’t understand why we closed the show, but, as you know, actors are very vague about financial details…. I hope … that by now you’ve finished at least two plays so that we can get back some money for our backers.” For Gore the retrospective analysis was frank. “I liked the notion of Romulus. It had failed everywhere, in Germany and so on, and I thought I could fix it and I couldn’t. It runs out of gas halfway through. Once you know the plot, it’s repetition. I did my best with the ending to try to open it up and make it a little larger than it was. If I’d had a better actor—I picked Cyril Ritchard in a moment of madness. He was a good comic basically, and he was wonderful in Visit. But he was not made for this. I should have waited: I could have gotten Paul Scofield, who might have given us quite a different play. It didn’t work. It’s never worked in any language. It was a mistake.”

  When Romulus closed, Gore was abroad. He had no intention, for the time being, of providing Roger Stevens with another play. A Broadway show had some of the same risks as a political campaign. Usually a great deal of effort and money produced no return at all. At least with a book, the book remained, a tangible embodiment of effort and imagination. Also, his confidence in the well-made realistic play that commercial theater encouraged had been undermined by the impact of the expressionistic plays he had seen in Berlin in 1960. Commercial theater seemed an untenable arena for effective symbolic or intellectual drama. Theater itself had never, he had felt from the start, been his most empathetic forum. He liked the glamour, the wide exposure, the opportunity to make a great deal of money. Unlike fiction, though, theater demanded excessive simplification of a sort his intellect and artistry did not readily embrace. He had done it for television, for movie scripts, for Broadway. But the enterprise had all along had an explicit Faustian element to it. He had not sold his soul, but he had sold his time and his pen, and the commercial devil, so to speak, had kept his side of the bargain. Large sums of money had been paid him, enough so that if he invested wisely and lived reasonably he would not have to write exclusively for money perhaps ever again, or at least for some time. And if he chose to do so, he could do it selectively, bound by neither long-term contract nor immediate necessity.

  His campaign for Congress had had nothing Faustian about it at all. He had immersed himself in politics partly because he had, so to speak, been genetically programmed to do so, partly because ambition and circumstance had come together to hand him the opportunity to run for office. It was to remain an ongoing virus in the blood. But by early 1962 the virus had lost its strength. That he would ever be elected to high political office seemed less and less likely. Another campaign would probably be more a forum for articulating his ideas than a practical avenue into political service. In the ordinary run of things he was simply not electable. The extraordinary sometimes did happen, as it might have if he had been willing to continue to pay his 29th District political dues and make himself available for the congressional nomination in 1962 and, if necessary, again in 1964. Still, to run he would need some reasonable assurance that he had a respectable chance to win. When Joe Hawkins urged him to try again for Congress in 1962, it was clear he had a better chance to win than in 1960. But the prospect of being a congressman had lost much of its attraction. During the spring and summer of 1962 he was given strong encouragement by the New York State Democratic establishment to run against the Republican incumbent for the Senate. He did some preliminary evaluations, including employing a professional analyst to evaluate the electoral situation, which reinforced his sense that Jacob Javits was virtually an unbeatable incumbent. Gore would have liked to serve in the Senate, but what was the point in spending time and money for an almost certain defeat? If he gave serious consideration to a long-term political plan, which would have encouraged him to accept losing in 1962 so as to position himself perhaps to win in 1966, he most likely found the thought of how he would have to spend his time during these years repellently chilling.

  Eager to get away, he accepted an invitation from the Italian line, pro
moting its New York-Italy service, to sail as its guest to Rome and Athens early in 1962 on the Leonardo da Vinci. “It’s not like a celebrity cruise as we envision it now,” Joanne Woodward recalls, “where people go on the cruise to entertain. The celebrities then were not expected to do anything. They were just to be there.” As a famous playwright, Gore seemed attractively compatible with other stars from the entertainment world. Gloria Swanson was on board, and his New York friends Ruth Ford and Zachary Scott. Howard would fly to Italy to join Gore there. Why don’t you come on the cruise also? he had asked the Newmans. “I said, ‘Oh, no, I can’t do that! My babies! My babies are small. What if something terrible happens to them? I couldn’t do that!’ So we said we couldn’t go. Paul in the meantime made me feel very guilty, saying, ‘We never do anything! We don’t go anywhere! Let’s do something!’ And I said, ‘My babies! my babies! How can I go?’ And then, finally, Okay. But we didn’t tell Gore that we were going. There was a farewell party on board, and we went and we chatted. Of course we had taken our bags on and had them hidden away. We spent the time at the party with Gore. Finally the announcement came, ‘All ashore that’s going ashore.’ We said, ‘Well, Gore, have a wonderful trip. We’ll see ya.’ And we went downstairs, clutching martinis, as if we were going to leave. We waited until the ship sailed out of the harbor, and then we went back upstairs. Gore was still sitting there, clutching a martini, one of many, I’m sure by then, and he looked up and said, ‘Wait, you’re supposed to be off! You’re supposed to be off!’ It was great fun and a wonderful trip.” Food was piled high, especially mounds of caviar. Liquor flowed. Gore read Isherwood’s recently published Down There on a Visit, which he found powerful and funny, though he disagreed with Isherwood’s emphasis on an aggressive division between hetero- and homosexual, as if the two had to be constantly at war. “You do make me laugh,” he wrote to Isherwood. “That image of the poster: won’t you please help? nearly got me from my bunk to the deck of the Leonardo.” In the evenings the passengers were treated to movies in which the Newmans starred, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Three Faces of Eve. One of Gore’s films was shown, The Catered Affair. One elderly lady developed a crush on him, another on Paul. Each, starry-eyed, followed her idol around the ship.