Good-Bye, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal

He was quite simply, one of my favorite writers, elegant & fearless. I have been reading him for more than 5 decades & my book shelves are heavy in the Vs.

He watched & reported on the decline of this once great country of ours. Gore Vidal reminded readers of our failure of education, manners on the decline, & political leaders cynical, cretinous, & closed to the reality.  He found the values & culture of his fellow Americans to be shameful, & the state of literature & pop culture, almost, but not quite, beyond words.

He had a distaste for TV, & it was a compliment to his skillful storytelling & considerable wit that he could appear with such frequency on the most popular medium to deride popular entertainment, & be welcomed back the following week to do it again.

There were few subjects for which he could not invent a quip, often memorably dismissive. Vidal could be relied on to be entertaining about almost anything: history, politics, art, journalism, theatre, sex, morals or celebrity.  Vidal: “I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which cannot be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

His literary output was prodigious: collections of smart, witty, biting essays, plays, screenplays, & more than 20 novels, including 7 books about our country from the American Revolution to the Korean War known as the Narrative of Empire series.

Vidal: “Our leaders can no longer write their own speeches or books, & there is some evidence they cannot read them either. Our political system has become a game for the very rich.”

His statements found detractors. Norman Mailer went so far as to headbutt Vidal while they were in the green room, waiting to appear together on a chat show. William F. Buckley called his a fag, on air & threatened to punch him on the spot.  But, Vidal appeared to relish feuds. When Truman Capote made a comment about Vidal being thrown out of the Kennedy White House, Vidal sued for libel.

Vidal derided the term “gay” & claimed that he had had sex with 1,000s of people of both genders by the time he was 25. But the great love of his life was Jimmie Trimble, an athletics star who was to die at Iwo Jima, preserving forever the image of a kind of romantic ideal in Vidal’s mind.

Vidal joined the Army after graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He served in a transport ship, ending the war as a warrant officer. It was while on board ship that he wrote his first novel- Williwaw (1946). The word means an Arctic squall, & the novel’s setup is the effect of the storm on a crew of hot young men in cramped conditions.

In 1948, Vidal’s The City & the Pillar was published. It is a groundbreaking novel of youthful homosexuality told against the background of the story of Sodom. At the time the Kinsey Report had just been released & homosexuality was more widely discussed, & acknowledged to exist, than ever before. Vidal: “I wanted to take risks, to try something no American had done before. I decided to examine the homosexual underworld, which I knew rather less well than I pretended, & in the process show the 'naturalness’ of homosexual relations.”  Written 2 years after Iwo Jima, the book was dedicated “to JT”.

Not shocking by current standards, at the time Vidal’s book was hugely controversial, & it was described it as embarrassing, courageous, serious, social tract. Some papers which slammed the novel would not accept advertisements for it. Vidal claimed that the book affected the reviews of future reviews he received from major publications, especially The NY Times, for his later books. “He may have been right,” The NY Times stated this morning.

In the 1950s he wrote screenplays in Hollywood: The Catered Affair, I Accuse, The Scapegoat, Suddenly Last Summer & Is Paris Burning?

Vidal wrote successfully for the theatre: Visit To A Small Planet, The Best Man (which had a well-received revival this Broadway season), Romulus, & An Evening With Richard Nixon. For TV he wrote: Dark Possession, The Death Of Billy The Kid, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, The Turn Of The Screw, State Door, & A Farewell to Arms. He found the work interesting, but only as a way to make money to buy time to write books.

I appreciate his essays the mist, but I have been lost in his elegant historical fiction where Vidal introduced real figures from the past, & combine them with gossipy asides from his fictional characters. His plots featured cameo appearances by Washington Irving, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James & many others. In Empire (1987), Vidal set President Teddy Roosevelt & newspaper man William Randolph Hearst in a confrontation which becomes a reflection on the press’s power to make or break a politician.

In 1968 Vidal had a stunning success with Myra Breckenridge, a very funny spoof on the shattering of sexual barriers & a send-up of the porn industry so explicit that the book itself was labeled pornography. In his best known novel, Vidal managed to strike at young people, entertainment, writing, California, the decline of civilization & to rage about his particular concern- population control. He used sex-changed title character to repeat his vigorously held contention that only zero population growth can save the planet from starvation.

Vidal: “If the human race is to survive, population will have to be reduced drastically, if not by atomic war then by law, an unhappy prospect for civil liberties but better than starving... it may already be too late to save this ark of fools.”

Essays are my own favored written expression &Vidal’s collections are my favorites of his work: Sex, Death & Money (1968),  Reflections Upon A Sinking Ship (1969), Homage to Daniel Shays (1972), Matters of Fact & Fiction, & Armageddon (1987).

The Second American Revolution & Other Essays won the 1982 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for criticism. This collection  took on born-again Christians, politicians, universities, big business, the Churches & all those in authority, with awesome range & radical, renegade instinct to rail against established authority- clerical, academic, corporate & patriotic. Vidal observed that politics had become trivialized, with substance & debate replaced by talking heads allowed only seconds to make arguments about the future of the nation & the world.

In 1993 Vidal won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction for the collection United States: Essays 1952–1992. He followed this with a second collection of essays- The Last Empire, published in 2000.

Among my favorite books of all time are his pair of memoirs-  Palimpsest& Point to Point Navigation, in which he mentions his many sexual conquests as “ nothing special”,  compared to the pursuits of his pals John F. Kennedy & Tennessee Williams. Vidal was fond of drinking & alleged that he had sampled every major drug, once.

One of my favorite Vidal anecdotes:  During the casting of his 1959 play about a political convention- The Best Man, a talent agent proposed offering Ronald Reagan the lead. Vidal: “We all had a good laugh. He is by no means a bad actor, but he would hardly be convincing, I said with that eerie prescience which has earned me the title 'The American Nostradamus’, as a presidential candidate.”

He twice ran unsuccessfully for office. In 1960 he was a Democratic candidate for Congress in New York’s 29th district, and he ran for nomination as the Democratic senatorial candidate in 1982. Vidal would appear as himself in several cameo roles, including The Simpsons. In 2009 he was awarded the annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation.

He was host for a time on the TV program Hot Line, & received the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America in 1955. His novel of the ancient world- Creation, won the Prix Deauville in 1983.

Vidal lived in Beverly Hills, NYC, Rome & Ravello on Italy’s Adriatic coast, for more than half a century, with Howard Austen, a former advertising executive who died in 2003. Vidal & Austen chose cemetery plots in Washington DC, between Jimmie Trimble & one of Vidal's literary heroes, Henry Adams. At the end of his life, saddened by the death of Austen & many close friends, Vidal still looked to no existence beyond this one. "Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it, & quite enough, all in all."

I once played Gore Vidal, or rather I based a character, rather successfully, on the writer. The play was Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound & my character was an acerbic, bitter theatre critic. Vidal did my homework for me. Vidal has been a major player in my rather insignificant life & I like to think that I am a bit similar to him, minus his intelligence, talent & nerve.

Kate Was Great... Considering Katharine Hepburn On Her Birthday- May 12th

Post Apocalyptic Bohemian favorite writer- Gore Vidal vouches for his buddy- Scotty Bowers, who claims that he set Katharine Hepburn up “with over 150 different women” in his dishy, juicy book- Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood & the Secret Sex Lives of Stars, which I read in 2 sittings back in February.

Vidal flew in to L.A. to be part the book’s release event. He wanted to assure attendees that Bowers is totally telling the truth. In a speech, he told partygoers he’s never caught Bowers in a lie in the 60+ years he’s known him, noting that in L.A. “you can meet 1,000 liars a day". I think there is a difference between never catching someone in a lie as opposed someone has never told a lie, but I will take Vidal & Bowers at their word: Katharine Hepburn was a very sexually active lesbian. That closet door is now open.

If you don’t want to go with Bower’s version, try noted film historian- William J. Mann's Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, published in 2004.  Mann tells that the epic romance of Katharine Hepburn & Spencer Tracy was a fable cultivated by Hepburn to hide their bisexuality. The pair of stars were sexually complicated screen legends that had an enduring companionship but were only briefly passionate & never lived together intimately.

Hepburn fostered the belief that she & Tracy could never marry because he was a devout Catholic committed to Louise Treadwell, his wife of 43 years & mother of their deaf child. Mann used documents & interviews with people who wouldn't talk while Hepburn was alive. & 8 years before Bower’s book, Mann insists that it was at gay director George Cukor's estate that he met a Hollywood hustler identified as "Scotty," a mechanic who staffed his gas station with "handsome young bucks, just home from the war" who for $20 were "happy to wash their hands (or not) & take a trip with a client to the back room."

Mann writes that Scotty related: "Tracy would always be drinking when I arrived. He'd get so loaded. He'd sit there at the table drinking from five o'clock in the afternoon until two in the morning, when he'd fall onto the bed & ask me to join him. ... & in the morning he'd act like nothing happened."

According to Mann, Hepburn's notorious relationship with American Express heiress Laura Harding wasn't "lesbian," but it sure was sexual. Mann: "Hepburn admitted as much to friends like James Prideaux, cutting him off with a shrill 'Of course!' when he asked about Harding ... as if the subject were simply too obvious & boring to belabor."

There is a famous story about the making of the film adaptation of Tennessee William's notorious Suddenly, Last Summer that starred Elizabeth Taylor,  the very gay Montgomery Clift & Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn, as Violet Venable was so obsessed with her dead son, Sebastian, that she wants to have her niece, played by Taylor lobotomized rather than have it revealed that he was homosexual. 

Apparently Hepburn was clueless that this was a film about homosexual lust & the director, Joseph Mankiewicz, & screenwriter- the very gay Gore Vidal, had to explain it to her. Meanwhile, she nailed the role as the disturbed, evilly controlling mother. 

This anecdote works against the image of independent, smart Hepburn, the Connecticut feminist Yankee who supposedly seduced Hollywood’s leading men- Spencer Tracy, Gary Grant, Humphrey Bogart & James Stewart.  In her real life, Hepburn followed in the footsteps of her mother who pioneered reproductive freedoms & the right of American women to vote.

  

In the 1930s, where of the strict studio system made & crushed careers, Hepburn challenged studio execs & made it work for her. She grew as a businesswoman, commanding salaries & negotiating roles at a time when it was just not done.  She was a symbol of a true American original who could accomplish anything.

Hepburn's career spanned decades & her range was legendary, even while her roles were always secondary to her own personality.

Was there ever a gayer film than the1937 camp classic- Stagedoor in which Hepburn perfected the screen ingenue, uttering the line: "The calla lillies are in bloom again."  Cast opposite Gay Icons Eve Arden, Lucille Ball, Ann Miller, & Ginger Rogers, she played it broadly & autobiographically, as the daughter of a wealthy businessman who wants a career in the theater with no prior training. It remains a favorite Hepburn performance at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia,

Hepburn excelled in screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby with bi-sexual Carey Grant who uttered the famous line: "I’ve turned gay all of the sudden!" For gay audiences, Hepburn inadvertently developed an androgynous image in such roles as the cross-dressing Sylvia Scarlet.

After being victimized by studio mouthpieces & being branded "box office poison" by the press, Hepburn refused to be ignored.  She starred on Broadway in Philip Barry‘s The Philadelphia Story, purchasing the rights to star in the film. More than any other actress of the period, Hepburn controlled her own career. 

In the 1940s & 1950s, Hepburn launched a classical stage & film career, transitioning beautifully, at a time in her career when most stars would retreat to predictable vehicles that would showcase them.  Among other things, she tackled Shakespeare onstage while in her 50s, at the same time becoming the first lady of American cinema, eventually nominated for 12 Best Actress Oscars & winning 4 times, a record.

She bravely stood with her colleagues Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall during the trials of the Hollywood 10, screenwriters, actors & directors called before the Senator Joseph McCarthy's House on Un-American Activities Committee in protest of their unconstitutional Senate investigations, without risk of guilt by association. Hepburn made The African Queen (which is not about Ru-Paul) with Bogart.

 

Hepburn is a Gay Icon. She was a tough-minded authority as a liberal thinker. Gay men & lesbians love her equally, if for different reasons, & even if she didn't acknowledge he won gayness, it is impossible to ignore Hepburn’s impact on Gay culture, Gay minds & Gay hearts. Hepburn was Fierce.

I only saw her live once, in L.A. circa 1971, in a mess of a musical- Coco, playing Coco Chanel, with a book & lyrics by Alan J. Lerner & music by Andre Previn, with sets by the very gay Cecil Beaton, choreographed by  the very gay- Michael Bennett, with a  cast that included: René Auberjonois, George Rose, David Holliday, Bob Avian, Jon Cypher, Suzanne Rogers, Graciela Daniele,& Ann Reinking. To prepare for Coco, Hepburn received singing coaching with MGM’s very gay muscial producer Roger Edens. She was simply brilliant & breathtaking in the role. I loved her & ran out to by the cast album. I do a terrific imitation of Hepburn singing the title song. Ask me sometime.

My favorite Hepburn role was in 1975’s Love Among The Ruins with Lawrence Olivier, although I have studied every moment of The Philadelphia Story. The Husband’s choice is The Lion In Winter. What is your favorite Katherine Hepburn performance?

Maxims For Living

"Style is knowing who you are & what you want to say, & not giving a damn."

Gore Vidal