If Tynan didn’t yet have a title for his show, he did have a poster or, at least, an image: a Turkish harem odalisque, painted by Clovis Trouille in 1946. The buttocks-fixated Tynan had admired the painting for years, thought it symbolized what he wanted his revue to be, and he even liked how the painting’s title, O quel cul t’as!, translated to “What an arse you have!” That’s what Tynan would call his show, Oh! Calcutta!
If Vidal was offended by the general hetero ambiance of Tynan’s project, he kept it to himself. Besides, he had something else in mind—something playful, ironic, and perverse in a way that would severely tweak a militant heterosexual like Tynan. In the late 1960s, the story of a transsexual didn’t qualify as gay so much as outrageous. “Generally, [Tynan] wanted something far out,” said Vidal. “Myra’d do business for spanking. After all, if she was just dildo wielding . . . ,” it didn’t give him much room to add many participants to Tynan’s imagined orgy.
Vidal toyed with writing a skit for Tynan, then came to his creative, as well as his commercial, senses.
As with most of Vidal’s fictional works, “I seldom start with any more than a sentence that has taken possession of me,” the author revealed. In this case, that sentence was “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man may possess; clad only in garter belt and one dress shield.”
That’s all Vidal needed. A sentence grew into a paragraph, a paragraph into a chapter, a chapter into a book. He didn’t know where his novel was going, but Vidal envisioned something far greater than a ten-minute sex skit. “I hadn’t even made up my mind about the sex-change at that point. I heard this voice in my head. Absolutely like Joan of Arc, telling me to liberate my native land.”
And so Vidal discarded his Oh! Calcutta! assignment, since his “native land” never included Tynan’s projected audience of tired businessmen in need of wooing instructions.
Somewhere in that evolution between paragraph and first chapter, Vidal decided to keep Myra for himself. “It got more interesting,” he said of his newest project, “and I certainly wasn’t going to waste it on a review-sketch.”
Vidal “vividly” recalled the day that he began writing the novel Myra Breckinridge in earnest, when that first sentence had already bloomed into a few untidy paragraphs. He and Howard Austen were in the process of fixing up their new flat in Rome. “I had a pile of lined yellow legal pads on my writing table, which was opposite my bed,” Vidal recalled. Across from the table, a French door opened onto the terrace that overlooked the Largo Argentina—“a great square with several Roman temples beneath the pavement’s level, as well as a large colony of cats.” There was a new moon. It had just risen over the Vatican to the west of the apartment, a sign for him of good luck. “The moon, not the Vatican,” he noted.
When he wrote his historical novels Julian and Washington, D.C., Vidal indulged in a great deal of note-taking from the necessary records. With what he called “an entirely invented book like Myra,” he simply let that first sentence “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man may possess . . .” take possession of his imagination.
Two weeks into the project, it occurred to Vidal: “Myra had been a male film critic who had changed his sex.” He laughed. He continued writing. Furiously. Then Christopher Isherwood came to visit. The author of The Berlin Stories, which became the play I Am a Camera, which became the stage musical Cabaret, had recently toured India with his lover, Don Bachardy, thirty-two years his junior; and back on terra Italiano, Isherwood wondered aloud to Vidal if the teeming peoples of color would eventually wipe out their “fragile white race.” Then they shared another vodka tonic to mull over the ensuing genocide.
Vidal and Isherwood shared the same ironic, if not downright camp, attitude toward sex that allowed them to find amusement in everything from the coming apocalypse to the eminent demise of Caucasians. Isherwood devised a plan for the latter: “But we must set aside reservations for the better-looking blonds, the Danes and such,” he pontificated. “They must be preserved like rare unicorns. Certainly, the Indians will enjoy them in their reservations along with all that snow we’ll shovel in to provide the right Arctic touch.”
Isherwood’s detachment, along with the vodka, put his writer-friend in the proper mood. Vidal also thought of Norman Mailer as he continued writing his new novel. He had once told the author of The Naked and the Dead that he put too many orgasms in his novels. Mailer, in turn, faulted Vidal for being cold and clinical about sex. “So I stuffed it with cold, clinical sex,” Vidal said of Myra Breckinridge, in which his transsexual heroine buckles on a dildo in order to rape a recalcitrant young actor-pupil whom she/he is mentoring. Otherwise, “Myra sprang out of my head like Minerva, speaking with the humourlessness of a Susan Sontag. As an old movie buff, I also drew on Parker Tyler, one of the first intellectuals to take the movies seriously.” Vidal especially liked that Tyler wrote ponderously, for example, about Lana Turner’s ankle and how it “reminded him of something Spengler once said” in such 1940s classics of film criticism as The Hollywood Hallucination and Magic and Myth of the Movies. (After Vidal sent Tyler an autographed copy of Myra Breckinridge and inscribed it “le maitre Tyler,” Tyler himself claimed, “I don’t think Gore Vidal would have ever conceived this heroine otherwise, because Myra really is a disciple of mine. That’s the simple truth!”)
There were other fathers of Myra as well. In addition to Sontag and Parker, Vidal conjured up Anaïs Nin. He used the words “hot stuff” to describe her book Incest, from a Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932–1934. As he devoured Incest, Vidal realized that the voice of Myra Breckinridge “was actually that of Anaïs in all the flowing megalomania of the diaries. Lying had become her first, not second, nature; yet even that would not have mattered so much had she not set herself up as a diarist who told the absolute truth.”
For Myra’s dress and physique, Vidal took to the street. His trannie mimicked a huge statue of a Las Vegas showgirl that used to rotate outside his fifth-floor window at the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where he resided in the 1950s when toiling for MGM as a screenwriter. The plaster Amazon held a sombrero in one hand, the fingers of her other begloved hand splayed out at the hip. A blue brassiere covered with white stars adorned her bosom, and from there the bra spurted red and white stripes to cover her equally Brobdingnagian derriere and crotch. “Oh God, to wake up in the morning with a hangover and look out and see that figure turning, turning, holding the sombrero—you knew what death would be like,” Vidal noted.
Then there was the name Breckinridge. It was not entirely Vidal’s creation. John Cabell Breckinridge was an American actor and drag queen of little renown who starred as The Ruler in Ed Wood’s cult classic Plan 9 from Outer Space. Born in Paris, Breckinridge was the great-great-great-grandson of U.S. attorney general John Breckinridge (and the great-grandson of both U.S. vice president and Confederate general John C. Breckinridge and Wells Fargo bank founder Lloyd Tevis). How the fictitious Myra Breckinridge came to resemble the real John Cabell Breckinridge is that both wanted to undergo a sex change operation. But unlike Myra, John was ordered by a judge in San Francisco to pay $8,500 a year to support his blind mother in England. Later, when Bunny—John Cabell Breckinridge called himself Bunny—traveled to get an inexpensive castration in Mexico, a bad car accident prevented him from doing so, and he gave up on the idea of becoming a woman à la Christine Jorgensen, his idol. As Vidal described him, Bunny Breckinridge was “just a big queen—very rich,” and he knew of him from overhearing his mother’s circle of friends at the Beverly Hills Hotel when the women referred to their “feathered friends,” a euphemism for fairies. Feathered friends or fairies, the subject of homosexuality was not out of bounds for such a sophisticated group. “Bunny Breckinridge was a famous queen who had married and gone to prison in that order or, if not in that order, the other way around, and all the ladies had met him, including my mother, and that was all, and then I never thought of him again,” Vidal recalled.
/> Until he started work on Myra Breckinridge.
Prophetically, when he finished the first longhand draft of that novel, there was again a new moon over the Vatican. An incredibly short pregnancy, only one month had passed from start to finish of his book.
A few weeks later, Vidal showed a polished version to his friend Jane Fonda, who was also living in Rome at the time, on the Via Appia Antica. Barbarella, directed by her then-husband Roger Vadim and written by Terry Southern, had brought the actress to the Eternal City, and she called her rented home, on the outskirts of the city, “part castle, part dungeon.” During one dinner party, to which Vidal and Southern had been invited, the second century BC tower in which they were eating underwent an impromptu renovation. A small chunk of plaster fell from the tower’s ceiling and an owl dropped onto Vidal’s plate of food. “Can I have the recipe?” he asked his hostess.
If the moon over the Vatican was a sign, so was the dead bird. Regarding her interest in playing Myra onscreen, Jane Fonda mentioned that she was already in the midst of playing a sex icon and might not be in the market for another such role.
Barbarella began its life as an erotic comic strip, published in the avant-garde Evergreen Review, and the svengali Vadim, who’d previously romanced and directed Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve, somehow talked his current actress-wife-blonde into rejecting the female lead in Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde to play the title role in his sci-fi film about a female astronaut traveling through space and having a few hundred orgasms along the way in the year AD 40,000. By the time Fonda read Myra Breckinridge, she’d just shot the risqué title sequence of Barbarella in which she performed a weightless striptease in a spaceship. It was one of Southern’s favorite scenes. Vadim’s, too. Since it was her naked body up there onscreen, Fonda wasn’t so sure. “Vadim promised that the letters in the film credits would be placed judiciously to cover what needed to be covered,” Fonda reported. But again, she wasn’t so sure.
Over dinner and a dead owl, Vidal confronted a rather skittish Fonda. She had no idea how moviegoers, much less critics, would respond to the cartoon sex of Barbarella. The actress had gotten so jittery at the Dino De Laurentiis studio in Rome that she started popping Dexedrine, while her director-husband took to binge drinking to calm his nerves. Even Vadim had to admit, “It looks more like a Brigitte Bardot type of movie, it is true. Sex is there.”
One fictitious sex icon, as it turned out, was enough for Fonda, even if Vadim also wanted to bring Myra Breckinridge to the screen. She’d already turned down Terry Southern, who wanted the thirty-year-old actress to play the coed Candy—that is, when the Candy producers were still interested in his screenplay. In a way, Barbarella was much closer to Candy, screwing her way through life—only in space. Myra was from another galaxy entirely. Fonda adored Vidal and even liked his new novel. But playing a transsexual rapist onscreen mystified her, and with utmost diplomacy she informed Vidal, “I don’t think I know how to play it.”
Two other prepublication reviews of Vidal’s novel ran the gamut. Christopher Isherwood called it his friend’s “very best satirical work.” But then Vidal had inoculated himself from a bad review by dedicating the book to Isherwood, who a few years earlier had dedicated his autobiographical novel A Single Man to Vidal.
Less flattering was the review Vidal received from his father, Lieutenant Eugene Luther Vidal. An aviation pioneer and erstwhile lover of Amelia Earhart, the lieutenant was oft mentioned many years earlier in the same breath as his 1930s contemporaries Charles Lindbergh, J. Edgar Hoover, and Henry R. Luce. The older Vidal read the younger Vidal’s as-yet unpublished novel Myra Breckinridge and immediately underwent an uncomfortable case of déjà vu. He’d been here before—or, at least, he felt his son’s literary reputation had been here before. Back in 1946, when Gore Vidal was a mere nineteen years old, he’d written and published his first novel, Williwaw, set during World War II and based upon his own Alaskan Harbor Detachment duty. The novel received glowing reviews. His precocious genius reputation, however, proved short-lived, even for one leaving his teenage years. In 1948, Vidal’s follow-up novel, The City and the Pillar, caused a furor for its graphic and nonjudgmental depiction of homosexuality and put his literary career on indefinite hold.
Vidal recalled, “It was believed in right-wing circles that I invented same sexuality in 1948 with The City and the Pillar, that nothing like that had ever happened in the United States until my book. I feel like Prometheus having brought fire from heaven.”
The editors at the New York Times treated it more like fire from hell and refused to review Vidal’s next five novels, as if the taint might infect the entire newsroom. At the time, Vidal took comfort in the banished company of a sex researcher whose book The Kinsey Report came out a month after The City and the Pillar. “And the shocked New York Times would not advertise either book,” Vidal noted. Due to the press blackout, the financially strapped Vidal cranked out any number of screenplays for the Hollywood factory in the following years. By the early 1960s, however, he was enjoying a literary rebound thanks to the Broadway success of The Best Man and his novel Julian, a fictional account of fourth-century Rome, which happened to be Vidal’s first major work of fiction in more than a decade.
Eugene Vidal—good-looking, tall, blue-eyed—sincerely felt that Myra Breckinridge might undo his son’s long climb back to respectability from The City and the Pillar. Regarding Myra Breckinridge, he believed, “Gore has slipped upon this one.” He was even more blunt when he expressed that thought to his son. “I never found rear ends sexually attractive,” said the lieutenant, referring to the novel’s soon-to-be-infamous rape scene.
Despite his father’s misgivings, Vidal traveled to New York City to deliver the unexpurgated Myra Breckinridge manuscript to his publisher. He kept in mind something that William Faulkner had told him years earlier about another great but compromised author. “You know, Hemingway’s problem is that he never takes chances,” said Faulkner. “You have got to keep going as far out as you can, as far as your imagination will take you.” Vidal’s imagination took him to Myra Breckinridge, and with Faulkner’s words in mind he gave his novel to Little, Brown and Company.
While in New York City, Vidal took time to have lunch with the British film director John Schlesinger, who’d had a great success a couple of years earlier with Darling, which epitomized the new, hip, swinging London and made Julie Christie a star. Schlesinger was also about to release Far from the Madding Crowd, which would have the effect of nearly undoing everything good that Darling had achieved for him and Christie.
Until the movie gods reversed his fate, Schlesinger remained a proud, successful director, and he wanted to talk to Vidal about his new film, the first he would direct in the United States. They met at the Plaza hotel’s tea room, and Schlesinger brought the film’s producer, Jerome Hellman, who had come aboard on the project when Joseph Janni, the producer on Schlesinger’s four previous movies, found himself repulsed by the thought of making a movie about a lowlife male hustler who worked the streets of Times Square.
“I’m looking for someone to adapt the novel Midnight Cowboy to the screen,” said Schlesinger, and he wondered if Vidal might be interested in taking a whack at James Leo Herlihy’s bestseller.
Vidal knew the novel about a dim-witted dishwasher who leaves Texas to become a New York City gigolo and instead ends up prostituting himself with male customers. Vidal didn’t have to think long, and was brief to the point of insult. “Oh, I think I’ve already done that with The City and the Pillar. Why don’t you make that into a movie?” he asked, referring to his novel, which had nothing to do with Times Square hustling or Texas dishwashing. Vidal dismissed Schlesinger’s project with a quick “The subject seems kind of silly.”
Then he changed the subject. “So let’s just enjoy our lunch.” Which was being expense-accounted to United Artists. Regarding Vidal’s rejection, Hellman chalked it up to “Gore’s arrogant ego.”
Vi
dal could only hope that his editor, Ned Bradford, at Little, Brown would be more receptive, as well as diplomatic, regarding his new novel about a dildo-touting transsexual who takes on all of civilization west of the San Gabriel Mountains with little more than an encyclopedic knowledge of the world according to Twentieth Century Fox.
Vidal recalled his apprehension, which proved unfounded: “I hoped that Ned and the publisher, Arthur Thornhill, would not be too upset by Myra’s exuberant pansexuality. Fortunately, they were not.” Vidal never considered Bradford a problem. Thornhill was another matter. The publisher had strongly objected to a scene Vidal put in his novel Washington, D.C., written the previous year, that featured a masturbation session between two boys. Luckily, Thornhill underwent a sudden liberal conversion around the time Vidal submitted his follow-up manuscript. He no longer really cared if Myra Breckinridge tarnished the reputation of Little, Brown or not, because he would soon be selling his publishing company to Time, Inc. He did, however, insist that Vidal sign a release holding himself solely responsible for any obscenity lawsuits resulting from the publication of Myra Breckinridge.
Vidal’s London publisher, Heinemann, proved even more cautious than the ready-to-be-auctioned Little, Brown. Heinemann rejected the novel outright, and to see Myra Breckinridge published in England, Vidal had to make a deal with a smaller house, Anthony Blond, which insisted on minor cuts, such as the lead character’s sex fantasies about real-life movie stars, like Ava Gardner, to avoid libel suits.
Fortunately, Vidal’s American publisher knew exactly how to publicize the novel. In some ways, the press campaign to promote Myra Breckinridge would presage the publication strategy of most books to come in the 1970s and beyond: Little, Brown did absolutely nothing to promote the book. Suddenly, without fanfare, on January 28, 1968, the novel’s discreet black-and-gold cover with a picture from Vidal’s inferno—that super-sized Sunset Boulevard Amazon—appeared in bookstores and airports everywhere. No less a tome than Newsweek noted the anti-hype hype campaign.
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