by Gore Vidal
George Irving (the star), Claire Bloom, and I at the New York opening of An Evening with Richard Nixon.
TWELVE
As early as 1959 Judge Joe Hawkins from Poughkeepsie wanted me to run for Congress. Joe was a blue-eyed Irishman with a lively Greek wife. Joe liked show business; he also knew that, thanks to television, I was known to the five counties of the district: Dutchess, Ulster, Greene, Columbia, and Scoharie. Joe was Democratic chairman of Dutchess, the largest county which perversely prided itself on how it had always voted resolutely against its most famous resident Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now his widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, held sway at Valkill Cottage while the Roosevelt main house was being turned into a museum and the president himself lay buried nearby in the roosevelt, Dutch for rose garden.
In 1960 Eleanor wanted Adlai Stevenson to be our candidate again. She disliked Jack because she detested his father nor was she enthralled by Jack’s friendship with the Red Scare monger Senator Joe McCarthy. She was dubious about me, too; the increasingly conservative Senator Gore was not a favorite of the Roosevelts. Eleanor did like my father because he was close to Amelia Earhart for whom she had a Sapphic passion that Amelia found disconcerting. Amelia said that Eleanor was always suggesting they make flights together all around the country, just the two of them, communing with the wind and the stars. Although my father maintained that his long relationship with Amelia was simply professional, his sister, while snooping around his bachelor flat in the Anchorage, a small residential hotel on Connecticut Avenue, found in the bathroom a silver-backed hairbrush with the initials A.E. and reddish blond strands of her curly hair in the brush. As a child I longed for Amelia to be my stepmother but nothing came of it. We used to show each other poems that we had written.
In 1960 Jack persuaded FDR Jr., Walter Reuther, and me to be envoys to Mrs. Roosevelt and get her to support Jack for president. We failed: at the Los Angeles convention she was for Stevenson to the end. Once nominated, Jack flew into Hyde Park to woo her. Since Eleanor was nothing if not a realist, she promptly became a partisan. After the election, she sometimes gave me advice to give to him. The first was: “He must get a voice coach. He talks too fast. People can’t follow what he’s saying.” She told me how she herself had had a wonderful coach. Then she gave her sudden high giggle and flashed her Rooseveltian tombstone teeth so like her uncle Theodore’s. “Yes, I know my voice is still rather dreadful but it was ever so much worse.” She also thought the Kennedy children were in luck. “They will still be so young after eight years in the White House which is no place”—and she frowned grimly—“for young people to be brought up in, where they are flattered and tempted by all sorts of the wrong people.” I know that my father was not pleased that young Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, was going around saying that Gene Vidal was his man in the first administration “and so if you wanted an airline route…”
I was not present at this meeting between JFK and Eleanor Roosevelt, disguised as a Sherman tank, but I heard from each fairly similar stories! Jack looks uncommonly nervous as she encourages him to be like Uncle Theodore and FDR. This was 1961, he has just been elected president. Dallas is two years ahead of him. She died in 1962. R.I.P.
Politics. What was the 1960 race about? Overall, the election of 1960 was largely about appearances—literally. In the television debate between Kennedy and Nixon, Kennedy did not look too young as his handlers feared while, sweating on camera and looking ill-shaven, Nixon did not appeal to many viewers. The only substantive issue of their joint appearance were two islands off China’s shore, Quemoy and Matsu, and were these barren lumps a significant part of the free world to be defended to the death by the United States or simply ignored as they had been throughout history and so hardly worth a third world war. Since Kennedy looked handsome on camera, he won the debates. But tricky Dick Nixon did get one up on Jack. After they shook hands before the debate, Nixon suddenly scowled and pointed his finger accusingly at Jack, making for a stern winning picture of what Adlai Stevenson liked to refer to as Richard the Black Hearted.
Quemoy and Matsu were promptly forgotten and Jack squeaked through to victory, thanks to Chicago’s Mayor Daley’s sly way with election returns. The country was also being told that we were—all of us—looking for a new generation of young vigorous leaders born in the twentieth century. Dutifully, we pretended that we were. Certainly President Eisenhower did not inspire those of us allegedly eager for new frontiers to cross. In retrospect, Eisenhower managed to keep the peace with a world where Communism was said to be, thanks to the media’s shrill warnings, triumphantly on the march everywhere. Although Eisenhower, the general, did not believe that the Soviets were a threat to the United States, he did see them as posing a danger to that commercial free world that we held so dear and so, secretly, he instructed the CIA to overthrow the freely elected Iranian government of Mossadegh who had wanted to tax “our” British oil supply; then the CIA was ordered to overthrow the democratic government of Guatemala because United Fruit did not want to pay any tax at all on “our” bananas that they harvested and sold elsewhere. I’d written a novel about this, Dark Green, Bright Red, but in the general blackout of my work it vanished until Castro appeared on the scene and the book was hailed as “prophetic.” During the campaign for Congress I reluctantly gave an interview to The New York Times, knowing I was being set up because the Times did not cover mid-Hudson elections. The interviewer could not stop giggling as he kept repeating, “I know nothing about politics.” With the help of Mrs. Roosevelt I had come up with an alternative to military conscription: voluntary service at home or abroad in such places where help was needed. I got such a good response from the district that I passed the proposition on to Jack who adopted it. Once president, it became the Peace Corps headed by his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver. The Times interview ignored all real issues except for the one that was supposed to be death to a candidate: recognition at the United Nations of Red China. I found that even the conservative electorate of the mid-Hudson valley were puzzled that we had no relations with the world’s most populous country. But Henry Luce, Lord of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, believed that the great mission of the United States was the Christianization of China. This meant that anyone who favored recognition of their vile regime was promptly smeared as pro-Communist.
In the end, I carried the cities of Poughkeepsie, Kingston, Beacon, Hudson, and Catskill but the McKinley rural vote determined the election. I did get more votes for Congress than Jack got for president, which was satisfying—to me. Jack liked to say that the two humiliations of 1960 were my getting 20,000 votes more than he in upstate New York and Senator Claiborne Pell getting a million more than he in Rhode Island.
Later, he congratulated me on my luck: “Hell, you would have hated the House. I did. It’s a can of worms.” Joe Hawkins was now eager for me to enter the Senate race against Jack Javits, a Democrat at heart, who wisely ran as a Republican. But he was unbeatable that year. If I’d wanted a serious career in politics I would have run again in 1964 and joined the other worms in the can. But Julian had been followed by Washington, D.C. and then by Myra Breckinridge and I was, as they say, back. By 1982 I had sold the house on the Hudson and got interested in California politics.
THIRTEEN
In the twenty-two years since the race for Congress the American political landscape had entirely changed. Issues, never a strong suit in our politics, were seldom alluded to. Only money—who had raised how much and from whom—interested the media, and the politicians. Senator Cranston explained the facts of the new politics to me. “Say you’re elected to a six-year term as senator. Say you would like to be elected to a second term. Unless you sell out to one of the great lobbies, you will be obliged to raise ten thousand dollars each week for every week of your first term. That’s 312 weeks.” This explains why so many senators are now funded by corporate America. Lately, I gather, the Internet has made fund-raising somewhat easier and less corrupt but it is a g
reat burden for anyone who would like to be useful to be obliged to ring up strangers and ask them for money to run for office. It was not something I was ever able to do, and so did not even try. The admirable Cranston was himself rather good at it.
In the course of the 1982 primary I talked to numerous journalists. Most were only interested to know how much money I had raised. When I said, accurately, “practically nothing,” they concluded that I was not “serious.” Yet I was going up in various polls without running many of those TV ads made gratis for me by well-wishers in television. One journalist in San Francisco, Richard Rapaport, had an interest in California history and here is what he wrote some time after the election. During the buildup to the primary, Rapaport: “had been disappointed to watch the varying degrees to which political writers supped on Gore’s spectacular repartee and witty commentaries and then go on to question his electoral bona fides. Inevitably, a hugely amusing and news-desk-pleasing campaign appearance would be chilled by the stopper, ‘but really Mr. Vidal, are you serious?’
“A writer from the San Francisco Chronicle named Randy Shilts billed himself as the nation’s first openly gay mainstream newspaper reporter, and he would soon gain immense fame as the author of And the Band Played On. This 1988 history of the ravaging AIDS epidemic would ironically and tragically claim Randy within a few years. Somewhat blinded—I felt—by the light of his own coming-out celebrity, Randy had confronted Gore over the fact that he would not declare himself America’s first openly gay Senatorial candidate. Gore had asked me to stay on several occasions as he took Randy aside and patiently explained to him that although it was no secret, his sexuality was his own damn business and not a thing gentlemen of his generation comfortably advertised.
“Each time, Randy took it a little more badly, and then took it upon himself to punish Gore with some unnecessarily, pointedly nasty reportage. I had made it my own brief to make sure that Randy understood that his behavior and critique were neither fair nor professional. Several noisy confrontations occurred between Randy and me to little effect. His Chronicle stories continued to damage Gore’s campaign and helped, I felt, secure the nomination for Jerry Brown.”
FOURTEEN
Obituary Time. Arthur Miller is dead and I have broadcast five times today to the BBC, to Italy, to everywhere except our native land where he has always been underrated. I praised The Crucible as well as his political courage in the McCarthy years. I have been wondering what to call this memoir. Should it be Between Obituaries? Those of us whose careers began in the twentieth century are now rapidly fleeing the twenty-first, with good reason.
I first met Miller at Tennessee’s flat in New York shortly before Death of a Salesman was about to open. Miller had given Tennessee a copy of the play and had come to pick it up. They had little in common except the director Elia Kazan, who had successfully staged A Streetcar Named Desire and I think now, in retrospect, ruined Tennessee’s play in the interest of Broadway success. Kazan allowed Brando, as Stanley Kowalski, to upstage the play’s true protagonist, Blanche Dubois. The audience was mesmerized by Brando and so found Blanche—his foil—somewhat ridiculous. At the time even Tennessee agreed that Brando’s appearance in the theater was unique and there was no way that Jessica Tandy could compete with him. She seemed all tics and mannerisms while he was the male principle writ large. Tennessee, who loved glory almost as much as his inventions, made no fuss then or later.
With the best intentions in the world, Kazan managed to do quite a lot of damage to Tennessee’s plays while, simultaneously, making them into sexy melodramatic commercial hits. I think it was that season that someone asked me to define “commercialism” and I said that it is the ability to do well what ought not to be done at all. I admired and personally liked Kazan but I felt the timid Tennessee should have relied on his tricks less and on his own instinct more.
With an Italian playwright, Franco Brusati, I went to Philadelphia to see the tryout of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In the first scene, Tennessee had written, as a stage direction, that the tension at a gathering of Big Daddy’s family, after his recent brush with death at the Ochsner Clinic, is so charged that it is like “a summer storm.” As a result of this one note, Gadge had the family arriving during a deafening summer storm with thunder and lightning. Tennessee only sighed. “I have tried to explain to Gadge the nature of metaphor. And failed.” Tennessee was always willing to sacrifice aspects of his art to success as represented by Kazan’s bold kinetic energy.
During our stay in Philadelphia, Tennessee was persuaded to write an unfunny joke for Big Daddy, played by folksinger Burl Ives. The joke had something to do with an elephant whose genital member was allegedly like that of Big Daddy or was it vice versa? I’ve forgotten whether or not this “surefire” audience-pleaser stayed in the play but the intended result—a hit—was duly achieved later on Broadway.
Currently, Tennessee and the theater are on my mind because I have, finally, after fifty years, got ready a play called On the March to the Sea which was given a “dramatic reading” at Hartford, Connecticut, and then recently at Duke University where we played fourteen performances with a first-rate New York cast. What is a dramatic reading and how does it differ from—well, an undramatic reading? There are no sets, no costumes. The actors (we had nine) sit in a row upstage center. Downstage there are five lecterns. When an actor hears his cue he goes to a previously assigned lectern and opens his script and pretends to read. Actually the play has been learned and rehearsed for a week or so before the “reading.” The model for all this was a famous Dramatic Reading years ago of Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, with Charles Boyer and Charles Laughton. Mailer revived this staging for himself, Sontag and me, with, admittedly, somewhat different results from the Boyer-Laughton version.
Norman Mailer and me with Susan Sontag and Gay Talese in Don Juan in Hell to raise money for the Actors Studio.
At Duke our director, Warner Shook, also appropriated the form which works particularly well with a play that depends entirely on its language. Also, since there are no sets or costumes, this saves the producers a million or so dollars while making the company easy to tour. Since things went well at Duke the producer expects to keep the “reading” on the move with, one hopes, as many of the original actors as possible, hard to do since they tend to be in demand elsewhere. After certain performances at Duke, my contract called for me to chat back and forth with the audience on whatever happens to occur to us. I find this, as always, enjoyable and the public seems not to mind. As we are in North Carolina, language is a great local skill as it is in most of the South where the play is set in a small town during the Civil War. A half-mad and so half-sane Yankee colonel occupies the town and moves into the house of its leading magnate. Chris Noth played Colonel Thayer and he and the house owner, Harris Yulin, duel with each other as the narrative gets more and more surreal. Are they all dreaming? Or dead? The ending surprises and, I think, satisfies. I found it liberating to be writing Southern or “Southron” as the play has it. I evoke the cadences and language of my grandparents. Tennessee, a fair poet himself, was drawn to Southron locations because he found the naturalistic American speech of our day ill suited as a basis for poetry of the sort that he liked to evoke in dialogue. And so, deliberately, he mined the speech of his youth, of his Episcopal minister grandfather, of his garrulous metaphor-inclined mother, and of those crippled heroines often based on his sister, Rose, who had undergone a barbarous lobotomy; yet even the damaged Rose had a kind of magniloquence: once she mailed him some pot holders that she had made herself with the note, “I have created them in bright tragic colors.”
I watched my new play either in the wings on those occasions when I was obliged to speak after the performance to the audience, or in the back of the theater where, by watching the backs of heads, one can tell to what extent a play is holding the audience’s attention.
There was one awful price we had to pay for playing in Durham, the heart of the tobacco industry: the occ
asional uncontrolled thunderous cougher, one of whom nearly brought the production to a halt at the last performance.
Just before I arrived at Duke my nephew Burr Steers, a film director–writer, and I had gone to Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington to bury Howard’s ashes in a plot that we had bought some years ago. Barrett Prettyman, a constitutional lawyer, and his wife, as well as Barbara Epstein and the agent Alice Lee Boatwright joined us under a crimson cloth marquee.
