Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  In early summer 1960 United Artists had bought the Playwright Company’s share of the film rights for $300,000. Eager to keep as much control as possible, Gore agreed to “be a sort of producer as well as the writer of the screenplay.” He would be paid $100,000. When United Artists engaged the famous Frank Capra to produce and direct, Gore became concerned. He was not an admirer of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Meet John Doe, an Italian-American immigrant’s utopian fantasies about how American politics ought to be. “Even at twelve, I knew too much about politics to be taken in by his corny Mr. Smith coming to my town.” Capra’s apple-pie Americanism seemed incompatible with The Best Man’s political realism. If Capra made the film, Gore feared it would be as disastrously different from his playscript as had been the films made from Billy the Kid and Visit to a Small Planet. Uneasy, he had gone to see Capra soon after United Artists bought the rights. “Suddenly, Capra was inspired. ‘Let’s open this up,’ he said, small bright eyes like black olives. ‘At the convention, on the first day, our good guy—we’ll get Stewart or maybe Fonda—he goes out into the crowd, where all these little people are the—you know, delegates.’ … What, I asked, masking my inner despair with a Mickey Rooney smile left over from Boy Airman days, ‘does he say to them that’s going to be so important?’ Capra was radiant in his vision. ‘He quotes Lincoln to them…. Now then, get this, He dresses up as Abraham Lincoln. Then he gives them the Gettysburg Address, or something.’ I said that I thought that this was truly inspired. Then I went to United Artists and got Capra off the movie and put myself in control. Next I picked a pair of bright young producers to produce, and we hired a director who had worked for me in television.”

  Apparently he met Stuart Millar first, before Millar and Larry Turman had become business partners. “I was lunching with Stuart at the Oak Room at the Plaza,” Turman recalled, “and he had met Gore or something, and Gore came up, and Stuart said, ‘Gore, this is my new partner, Larry Turman,’ and Gore said, ‘Stuart, I knew when you fell you’d fall hard.’” Millar, who had been an assistant to William Wyler, and Turman, from a lower-middle-class Los Angeles family, both about the same age as Vidal and partners since 1959, had had a small-budget/strong-profit success with The Young Doctors, whose entire production cost had been $1 million. United Artists had also grown nervous about Capra. They had in mind an expenditure of no more than $1 million in addition to the $400,000 purchase price. Capra, they had begun to suspect, would want to spend much more. Probably, then, both Vidal’s concern that Capra would make the wrong kind of film and United Artists’ about cost resulted in a new production team. Most likely, Harold Franklin at William Morris raised Millar’s name. Young, energetic, sufficiently experienced and very cost-conscious, Millar and Turman seemed just right. Franklin Schaffner, a handsome, taciturn man with a reputation for being particularly good with male characters and relationships and who, before doing movies, had made his reputation in live television, where he had directed Vidal’s first play, Dark Possession, seemed a sensible choice. Gore liked and thought well of him. Vidal soon had a screenplay ready. The script conferences went smoothly. Vidal found the producers capable and companionable. Millar and Turman thought Vidal charming, bright, sophisticated about most movie things, and pleasurably easy to work with, “the consummate professional,” as Turman later remarked. At first the plan was to make the film in 1962, for 1963 release; then in 1963, for 1964 release, though there was disagreement about when in 1964 to release it. The producers thought it should open at the start of the summer political-convention season. United Artists thought that might be more damaging than helpful. By spring 1963 the cast was in place. To everyone’s delight, in April Henry Fonda had unhesitatingly agreed to play William Russell. The producers cabled the good news to Vidal in Rome. Cliff Robertson, fresh from playing John Kennedy in PT 109, signed on for the Nixon-like candidate. Though Joanne Woodward turned down the role of his wife, Edie Adams immediately accepted the part. Lee Tracy, who had been splendid in the play, agreed to do the Harry Truman-like character again. Vidal suggested Ann Sothern for the meddling Democratic committeewoman. When Turman was away, Millar signed Margaret Leighton for William Russell’s wife. When Shelley Berman screen-tested for the role of the informer, everyone thought him perfect for the part. Two excellent actors took important small roles: Gene Raymond and Kevin McCarthy, Mary McCarthy’s brother, whom Gore knew from their overlapping New York worlds. With the budget and production schedules set, space was rented at Columbia Studios; the Los Angeles Sports Arena would serve as the convention hall, and the hotel scenes would be shot at the Ambassador. By early August, when Gore arrived at Edgewater, everything was ready. In California during mid-August they worked on the final shooting script, which they finished by the end of the month.

  In Los Angeles, Gore enjoyed Isherwood’s company, though most of his other friends were out of town. The relationship gave him great pleasure, and Isherwood’s candid entries about Vidal in his private diary, often in the tone of a loving but analytical father about a complicated son, reveal Isherwood’s affection for him. “I do like and admire him—absurd and serious simultaneously, and all the time,” Isherwood wrote. Himself an incurable domestic romantic, Isherwood found Gore’s sex life incomprehensible, just as he thought Gore’s political enthusiasms incompatible with his artistic aspirations. When Gore had been in Los Angeles for the July 1960 Democratic convention, Isherwood found him enjoying “playing the role of the reckless young political gambler, rushing to fame or disaster. He enjoys playing with the idea that the Republicans will launch some terrific smear campaign against his private life…. He talked about ‘the new Athens’ which will arise when Kennedy is in power; but at the same time he described, rather admiringly, instances of Bob Kennedy’s ruthless methods. Gore also admires Jack Kennedy’s ruthless sex life. As for himself, he claims that he now feels no sentiment whatever—nothing but lust. He can’t imagine kissing anyone. The way he has to have these sex dates set up is certainly compulsive.” Whatever his personal practices, Gore was more concerned than Isherwood, and a great deal more practical, about the larger issue of the relationship between consensual sexual conduct and legal statutes. For that, among others reasons, politics was more important to him than to Isherwood, and among those of Isherwood’s generation the person with whom Gore most shared a sensibility and a dialogue about such matters was his British friend, Tom Driberg. Before leaving Rome at the end of July, Gore had urged Driberg, as a member of Parliament and an important Labour Party leader, to help persuade Labour to support reform of the British legal statutes concerning homosexual practices, known as the Wolfenden Laws. “If your party would only support Wolfenden reform” in the upcoming election “it would make many well wishers breathe easier.” The issue was to him inseparable from the overall health of a modern liberal society. “I am troubled by what seems to be a new puritanism rising in England, fully blessed by socialism which does like nothing better than to involve itself in private lives under the guise of ‘morality’ and the good life, not realizing that the ‘morality’ is Mosaic in origin and beautifully antipathetic to the good life.” Unlike Isherwood, Gore looked to larger issues and particularly to long-term practical consequences. “This election is a most important one,” he told Driberg, “and not just for your nice island. It means that the West is consciously moving toward the planned society and Americans will respond in kind, perhaps in ’68. But if the planning is au fond neurotically based I see a perfect nightmare come to life: a controlled, illiberal, authoritarian society, drawing for its authority on all the evil, anti-life sources which so appeal to the northern peoples. I hate the word ‘puritanism’ with a passion, for it implies that (a) what is pure is a deducible abstraction and (b) it invariably involves restraint, preferably imposed forcibly on others. I do feel quite nervous during this period: things can go awfully wrong.”

  On The Best Man sound stage, where these issues had a muted presence in the play’s plot and themes, the
important things went well. True to form, Schaffner got fine performances out of the male characters, though Cliff Robertson, who was used to acting leading-man roles, proved annoyingly persistent in his attempt to make clear to the world that this was for him a “character role.” He had dyed his hair partly white in order to make himself appear older. Unfortunately, this made him look too old for the age of his character. Also, the directors, as a realistic touch, had at some cost created mock covers of Time magazine with a photo of Robertson as the Nixon-like character. They had been created before Robertson had dyed his hair. Despite persistent efforts to get him to have his hair revert back to its normal color, Robertson resisted, and two weeks of shooting time were lost. Schaffner had poor luck with two of the three female roles, at least in Gore’s view. Since Ann Sothern had been his suggestion, he took the blame himself. “She was terrible. She wouldn’t say a word [of the script]. She’d make up her own jokes, which she thought were really cute. She lost every laugh. Edie Adams was pretty good, and Margaret Leighton was having a nervous breakdown because Tony Quinn had dumped her. So she was having crying jags and complaining about being in an American script. I said, ‘Well, why did you take the job?’ Frank was a good director. But he couldn’t direct women. All the women were bad. If he’d known how to talk to women, he might have been able to help them.” Turman, who thought all the female performances good to excellent, had more trouble with Robertson than with anyone else, and in the end thought the film an artistic success. When he realized the script was too long, he was delighted to find Gore responsive. “We were already shooting when we decided to take six or eight pages out…. Gore rolled up his sleeves and we worked. He was never defensive about it.”

  When the rough cut was ready in December, Gore returned to Los Angeles. The producers had cabled him on November 11, “SHOOTING COMPLETED ON YOUR EPIC THIS AFTERNOON STOP ALL WENT WELL STOP HOPE TO HAVE ROUGH CUT MID DECEMBER CAN YOU PLAN ACCORDINGLY.” Unaware, in Turman’s view, that a rough cut was just that, Gore was appalled at the infelicities in the film, convinced that his blundering colleagues had produced what would be for him another movie disaster. Upset, he told Millar and Turman that unless they made major improvements he would insist his name be disassociated from the movie. His colleagues tried to calm him. A superb film editor, Robert Swink, assisted by the young Hal Ashby, did his usual excellent job, as the producers had anticipated. Gore was delighted with the final cut. So too were the critics when the film opened in April 1964. The reviews were almost unanimously good, the film a critical success. Financially it at best broke even, further support for the common wisdom in Hollywood that political films do not do well at the box office. At the Cannes Film Festival in May 1964, where it was an unofficial entry, the French critics and audiences loved it. Gore joined Turman and Millar and their wives at Cannes. As he drove into town, to his annoyance he saw a sign trumpeting “The Best Man, a film by Franklin Schaffner.” The auteur theory that overvalued the director’s contribution stared him in the face.

  At Edgewater for a month in early fall 1963, he enjoyed the rose garden and the company of Dutchess County friends. He was happy to see Alice Dows again. Rovere and Dupee were in good form, the former reconciled to the Kennedy presidency, the latter attempting to make his adjustment from his Roman freedom to Wildercliff domesticity. Andy and Fred were more than usually on edge with one another. Gore, who still adored them both, did not think their marital complexities were his concern, though Andy felt that Gore’s influence in Rome was somewhat to blame for Fred’s change in mood. “Andy’s the real thing,” Gore recalled. “Andy’s Ishmael—she was there. She was the center of all our lives up there.” An effervescent, attractive Canadian-born writer, Margaret Shafer—with her husband, Fritz, a professor of religion at Bard—had joined the Rovere-Dupee circle beginning in 1959 and was delighted to find herself part of Gore’s summer world as well. She looked up to Rovere as a mentor, and she and Andy soon became good friends. One day Jason Epstein, the nervous neophyte owner of an expensive new motor yacht, puttered up to the dock at Edgewater. The Dupees, whom Jason and Barbara had picked up in Rhinebeck, were aboard. They were on their way northward to Lake Champlain. As they left Edgewater, Gore said to the Dupees’ daughter, the Dupees and the Epsteins “will not be speaking to each other by the time they get back!” The trip was a disaster.

  In Manhattan, Gore stayed at the Algonquin, where he had lunch with Dawn Powell, whom he admired and liked. An Ohio-born New York writer of unsuccessful plays and brilliant but modest-selling satiric novels, Powell had been a good friend of John Latouche’s and had thought Vidal “an extraordinary individual with a rich, articulate gift” from her first meeting with him in 1954. Louis Auchincloss was in town. What they referred to as Howard’s apartment at 360 East Fifty-fifth Street had been sublet, though the tenant was not paying the rent. From Rome, “feeling slightly bored and depressed,” Howard had been trying to get the tenant either to pay up or leave. “It’s almost two months since I’ve seen you,” he wrote to Gore, eager for his return. The two buildings on East Fifty-eighth Street bumbled along decently despite an occasional problem, though Howard’s desire to have room made available at 416 for an apartment for them was still unfulfilled. With Harold Hayes, who had commissioned him to write a piece on the future of the Kennedy presidency, Gore had some contentious back-and-forth about a draft that Hayes did not think worked well enough. When he left for Rome in mid-October, the article for Esquire was still unsettled, though he was at work on two essays that were to appear in December: “Citizen Ken,” a review of “The Wit and Wisdom of J. K. Galbraith” for The New York Review of Books, and “Tarzan Revisited” for Esquire. “James Bond, Mike Hammer, and Tarzan,” he concluded, “are all dream selves, and the aim of each is to establish personal primacy in a world that, more and more, diminishes the individual. Among adults, the popularity of these lively fictions strikes me as a most significant and unbearably sad phenomenon.” Barbara Epstein kept discreetly reminding him to write the O’Hara essay, which he soon did.

  Happy to be back at Via Giulia, Gore began carefully to go over the 200,000-word draft of Julian, which he had had typed in New York, to be sent as soon as possible to Little, Brown in order for galleys to be set up. “I can’t tell much yet how good the book is,” Gore had written to Wreden’s heir, Ned Bradford, when he had finished an earlier draft, “but I guarantee you a large scandal which I don’t for once at all look forward to. But the thing took a certain line and I had to follow. Anyway I’m sure Boston is already too confining for your activities. You won’t mind being driven out by the Irish.” In October 1963, Bradford, about to read that draft himself, had cabled Gore, “JULIAN READ BY AN ASSOCIATE EDITOR WHILE I WAS IN CALIFORNIA AND HE SAYS QUOTE IT’S PROBABLY ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS WE’VE PUBLISHED IN THE LAST TEN YEARS AND WILL REESTABLISH VIDAL AS A MAJOR NOVELIST.” Bradford had given the associate editor, Herman Gollob, instructions to find passages to cut from the long manuscript. On Bradford’s return, when Gollob was asked what could be cut, he responded, “Not a word!” Bradford, who had nurtured the Little, Brown relationship with Gore through the unremunerative The Best Man and Rocking the Boat, provided unhesitatingly supportive enthusiasm. “A Midwesterner from an old New England family who had worked himself up from book salesman to editor in chief, Bradford had both literary and commercial good sense.

  Late in October, Gore and Howard drove for a few days’ refreshment to Florence and Siena, then in November by train to Bologna, where they rented a car for a visit to Ravenna and Ferrara. On November 22 Gore went to the beach at Ostia and that night to a movie house in Rome. During intermission there was a foreboding buzz, with the name Kennedy mentioned many times. Suddenly everyone in the theater knew what had happened. “I didn’t believe it,” Gore recalled. “There had been a mistake. That’s not the right plot.” Kennedy’s serious joke about assassination had come true. The shock was as surrealistically dissociative for Gore as for the stunne
d American public. The literally unimaginable had happened. He was quickly on an airplane to Washington to attend the funeral. He had warmly liked John Kennedy, with whom he had felt a sympathetic identification. What many had seen as Kennedy’s faults Gore had seen as virtues, and his promiscuous sexual life, which only a small number of people knew about then, had exemplified for Gore a desirable and admirable defiance of American puritanism. But his closest relationship in the Kennedy world had been with Jackie. It seemed the right occasion to have a reconciliation with her, which he had gotten an indication, probably through his half-sister Nini, she was willing to have. “I flew back for the funeral, but there was much ‘confusion’ over tickets (’the French foreign minister must be in the church’) so one did not attend,” he told Louis Auchincloss in January. “I suspect Bobby’s hand, even at the edge of the grave. But one had made the gesture of solidarity. Jackie’s mood, apparently, was one of rage more than grief: how dare they do this to us! But then Merrywood was always a bit like Colchis. Yes, Jack is a sad loss. He was adorable and one enjoyed his wit and pleasure in himself and the comedy which turned so unexpectedly black. If ever one doubted the wisdom of Greek tragedy, doubt no longer: nothing vast ever entered human life without a curse, as Sophocles more or less wrote. So I watched it all from in front of the White House. As the coffin came out of the White House and then went up to the Capitol, I did my best to pay obeisance and then, when that was over, I went out to California” where he saw, ironically, the unsatisfactory rough cut of The Best Man.