Gore Vidal Read online

  Staying in luxury again at Claridge’s in late November and December, Gore and the Tynans resumed and increased the good fellowship that had begun the previous spring, though the strongest current of affection soon flowed between Gore and Elaine rather than Gore and Ken. As often, Gore’s delight in attractive, witty, luminescent women, his combination of empathetic and principled support—especially in Elaine’s case for her work as a writer—created a mutual enchantment. His hard, biting, often hilariously perceptive humor fascinated her. She admired his unsentimentally objective view of people and the world, so different from the self-pitying subjectivity of her husband and most of the men she knew. At the same time she felt Gore’s capacity for friendship, for loyalty, for unhesitating supportiveness. At work on her first novel, The Dud Avocado, to be published the next year, she appreciated his encouragement, his helpful suggestions. The contrast with Ken was both liberating and additionally discomfiting, a signifier of the long-standing and increasing tension between husband and wife. When Ken discovered that his wife was writing a novel, he whined, “But when I married you, you weren’t a writer.” Both found Gore attractive, fascinating, accomplished. When Gore, who was picked up each day by car for the drive to Ealing, invited Tynan to ride with him to the studio, Ken, for whom early-morning hours were bleary-eyed, incoherent, and coffee-driven, reported to Elaine that the experience was totally unnerving. At that hour of the morning Gore spoke in clearly enunciated, fully formed sentences.

  Four years older than Gore, the daughter of a well-to-do New York Polish-Jewish immigrant family, the beneficiary of a liberal education and increasingly liberated from the cultural and sexual restrictions of her parents’ world, Elaine had moved to Paris in 1949. She was interested in acting and painting. Dark-haired, sensuously engaging, energetic and nervously talkative, she was a lively presence. In 1950, on a London visit, she met the tall, flamboyant, stuttering, self-dramatizing young theater critic. Two weeks later Tynan asked her to marry him. “I am the illegitimate son of the late Sir Peter Peacock. I have an income of X pounds per year. I’m 23, and I will either die or kill myself when I reach 30 because by then I will have said everything I have to say. Will you marry me?” Three months later she cabled her Park Avenue family, “‘Have married Englishman. Letter follows.’” Born in Birmingham, the illegitimate son of a bigamous father, Tynan was a volatile combination of brilliance and histrionic insecurity. A great success in the Oxford University theatrical world, always eager to hold court, which he did with wit and riveting sartorial flamboyance, Tynan was an Oscar Wilde of sorts, though without the talent and artistic discipline. His stutter seemed an almost emblematic flaw. Handsomely sensual, with a high-pitched attention-demanding voice, he had a touch of the theatrical queen. He wore bright clothes, odd color combinations, and a Mickey Mouse wristwatch before these had become a lifestyle statement. Always personally onstage, more than anything he wanted to be noticed. Everything about the theater interested him—acting, directing, producing, evaluating. But what most engaged his frenetic energy was being a celebrity, someone to be noticed and reckoned with in that most publicly defined of all artistic provinces, the theater. He had great skill with language, less with people. Alec Guinness readily admitted that Tynan’s reviews were wonderful unless you happened to be the subject of them. Turned on sexually by light spanking of women, emotionally frivolous and irresponsible, by 1958, at the age of thirty-one, he had become Britain’s premiere chastiser of theatrical performances, the widely read reviewer for The Observer, a witty critic well suited to the role but at odds with his own conflicting compulsion to be of the moment and at the same time to do something more enduring. He had essentially recognized, though, that he did best with short pieces. He was neither personally nor professionally suited for the long haul.

  Days were spent at the Ealing Studios at Elstree, evenings at Claridge’s and with London friends. The American ambassador, John Hay Whitney, with whom Gore had a tenuous connection through Nina and Whitney’s former wife, invited him to an embassy function. He ran into a presence from the past, Cornelia Claiborne’s mother, who was also staying at the hotel and en route to visiting her daughter, who had married an Englishman. There were marital problems, for which she blamed her son-in-law. “She was going down to the country” to see them, Gore recalled, “and she was debating—she talked with a very tough Virginia accent—about the possibilities of smuggling a gun into the house and taking care of him, murdering her son-in-law.” A movie deal was in the process of being made for Visit to a Small Planet, and Eric Burger, an American professor of German literature with extensive contacts in the German publishing and theater world, had been at work successfully since August arranging a Berlin production of the play, which had been in rehearsal since early December. For the premiere on December 23 at the Renaissance Theater, Gore flew to Berlin, his first visit to Germany, where he spoke at a fireside discussion on American literature for a group of fifteen German writers, the talk arranged by the Berlin Cultural Affairs branch of the United States Information Service. The movie negotiations had gotten under way before he had left New York. Abe Lastfogel at William Morris, whom Gore had met socially in New York and who had handled the deal, cabled him that they had been successful in holding out for $150,000. The film, for which Gore did not write the script and over which he had no control, would star Jerry Lewis and be a critical and commercial disaster, an exemplification of the ongoing problem of Hollywood for the novelist or playwright, which has resulted in the widespread wisdom that the best thing to happen is that Hollywood pay vast sums for rights, then not make the film.

  A London theatrical run for Visit seemed likely, at least at first, both to Gore and to Hugh (Binkie) Beaumont, a top London theatrical producer. Gore was skeptical about Beaumont, who was enamored of star actors, thought little of writers and directors, and already had a long history of failed British productions of American plays, especially Tennessee Williams’s. But most roads to a West End production went through Beaumont. Fortunately, the stellar British actor Robert Morley was interested in playing Kreton. But he insisted as a condition of his commitment that the American aspects of the play be transposed into their nearest British equivalents. While he was in London for The Scapegoat, Gore had numbers of discussions with Morley, which made clear that he would pay a heavy price for Morley’s commitment: Morley demanded 50 percent of the royalties and that he himself Britishize the text. Gore loved Morley as an actor. He seemed right for the part. Offering to revise it himself, he quickly produced a version for the British stage. “‘This will never do,’ Morley said. ‘Let me do it, and it will be so much easier for you, and I know how the jokes should go.’ A lot of American humor, though, was unknown to him, and I said, ‘Do you mind if I mark the play where we get a laugh?’ He thought this was outrageous. ‘How do you know where you’ll get a laugh?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s been running a year or two. There are five or six companies out there playing it somewhere or other. Of course I know where the laughs are. It’s a good idea, if you’re going to play it, that you should know what’s funny, since it may not occur to you what in the American style is funny.” He soon sounded out Alec Guinness as an alternative. Guinness, though, did not think the role suitable for him. “I do agree that the tone of Kreton’s dialogue is resolutely frivolous,” Gore responded, “entirely Cyril, and hardly you. But there are many different ways of playing the part.” Guinness firmly declined. Since without a well-known star there would be no production, it was Morley or no one. From New York, Clinton Wilder and George Axelrod urged Gore to be flexible, which he did his best to be. “As I am interested only in art,” Axelrod joked, “and you are interested only in money (which means we have the same ends at heart), I must strongly urge you to give this serious consideration. Should you prove recalcitrant, I shall be obliged to recall you to the States for further brain-washing in the Green Room…. We can make a bundle in London and I am absolutely sure this is the way to do it.” To their bitte
r disappointment, by late 1958, despite attempts to find common ground, Gore ended the negotiations. He could contemplate forgoing a portion of his royalties, but the notion of giving up control of his words to Morley’s revisions he found unacceptable.

  Christmas 1957 in London unexpectedly turned into the dark side of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Eager for family, Gore had invited Nina to join him there for the holiday season. Feeling a twinge of guilt at disliking his mother, he thought this might make up for it. He also invited Howard, who consulted with Nina. Their hope was that they could both book passage on the United States and come across together. Since they had been compatible often enough at Edgewater, there was no reason to think he could not have the company of both in London, especially since he planned to rent a large flat, the grandeur of which, with three servants, he thought Nina might enjoy. He and MGM anticipated there would be about two to three months more of work. It would be more comfortable than staying on at Claridge’s, at least in regard to having guests, and since the studio would pay for either, he could thus have guests without incurring extra expense. There was the likelihood of a visit from Paul and Joanne. Paul’s marital situation had sufficiently cleared so that finally they could marry, which they did on December 26, 1957. Having been busy in New York attending to the recently purchased building on Fifty-eighth Street, Howard felt the attraction of spending the Christmas season with Gore in London. It would be his first European trip. For some time Nina had been busy in Washington, attempting to rent two vacant apartments in the N Street building. For the last year or two there had been a truce between mother and son, though Nina’s aggressive tongue and habits sometimes caused tension. She still constantly put him down “terribly,” Howard recalled. “Even when she wasn’t drunk. Not so much to his face, though there were arguments…. She always had to be right. And she would challenge him when she knew nothing about the subject…. She wanted the attention, she felt competitive. As Gore was with her…. When an argument began between them, I would quickly leave the room. I felt that I shouldn’t be present. The arguments were always about how Gore didn’t really live up to or face up to ‘it’—what? everything! anything! money! She didn’t make an issue of his sexuality head on, and if she did, I would have been out of the room long before. But she might have. She would go around to all the bars in New York and tell people, ‘Oh, my son is a homosexual. Pity me.’ Nina had her litany, ‘I never had any luck.’” After the opening of Visit, after a night on the town she had unexpectedly appeared at Edgewater, banging on the kitchen door, with a young man she had picked up whose father was a well-known Pan Am pilot whom Nina knew. Drunk, first she fell in the mud at the door, then, as Howard and Gore lifted her up, said, “He’s got the biggest cock I’ve ever seen.” For a few days she disappeared with her young man into one of the guest bedrooms. Sandwiches were sent up.

  After “trying like hell,” she wrote to him, “to arrange getting over,” she pulled strings finally to get passage on the solidly booked United States. When nothing was available for him, Howard arranged separate passage, sharing a cabin on another boat. Nina seemed in one of her capable periods, handling her Washington business, preparing for departure. Perhaps, since the episode at Edgewater in the spring, she had been making one of her periodic efforts to dry out, sometimes with the help of AA successful for as long as six months. Gore, anticipating visitors and eager to be out of the hotel, had rented for £50 a week a large triplex flat at 37 Chesham Place in Belgravia, a corner building in an early-nineteenth-century row of houses built around a small private park, near Cavendish Square, not far from Knightsbridge Road and Hyde Park Corner. He had gotten the flat through the son of its owner, who insisted on being paid in dollars to avoid taxes. Spacious, grand, with a huge drawing room on the first floor, uncomfortably furnished with Marie Antoinette furniture but excellent for large parties, with ample bedrooms and servants’ rooms, the flat seemed perfect for his needs. When Nina arrived just before Christmas, it was not yet ready for occupancy; he put her up next to him at Claridge’s. To his disappointment, from the moment of arrival she was drinking. Perhaps she had begun on the transatlantic voyage, where liquor, as usual, flowed freely and Nina, not a reader at all, would have had little to do other than socialize. After a period of relative abstinence she would have been ready, the temptation irresistible. She also may have been nervous in anticipation of her arrival. Visits with her son, let alone long ones, almost always resulted in tension. She also expected the London social world and the American embassy to welcome her, but whatever her expectations, she had to have sensed that it was not a sure thing. Her one prominent contact was her former lover, the ambassador, whose patronage could open doors to her. It would not have been unnatural for her to fantasize about a resumption of their affair of twenty-five years ago. “In her mad Blanche DuBois way,” she had almost assumed it would happen, Howard recalled. Soon after arriving, she put in her call to Jock Whitney at the embassy. Whitney did not call back. Drinking steadily, announcing that she had a bad cold, she locked herself in her hotel suite. When Robert Morley came by to talk with Gore about Visit, impressed with Morley she stirred herself enough to listen through the door. When the servants tried to use their passkeys to get in to clean, she forced them to stay out. The hotel management was not happy. To Gore’s relief, Chesham Place was finally ready. They moved in on December 28. In the meantime Howard had arrived.

  Nina managed to pull herself together, enough at least to appear, as she often did, stunningly attractive, wearing a turban, in a satiny pastel-flowered hostess gown, “all blues and grays and pinks,” at a small party for London friends that Gore hosted early in January. With sharp painterly acuity Don Bachardy sketched her in his mind as she talked with Isherwood, probably with no idea to whom she was talking. “She had very strong features, heavy-lidded eyes, strong, staring eyes. They pinned you. There wasn’t anything else coming from them except their strength. And there wasn’t any kindness in her eyes…. There was a very strong resemblance to Gore. She had a glass in her hand and was certainly drinking, and she was very voluble. She had a red mouth, a red-gold dark lipstick…. She was absolutely accessible, though. She was really outgoing.” In company she had her distinctive combination of beauty and presence. Nervous about giving parties with Nina around, Gore felt constrained by her drinking. He did not feel it safe to include her in his own social rounds. In addition, he went almost every working day to Elstree, still regularly giving Ken Tynan a ride, for script consultations and revisions. Howard, who had more free time, was prepared to take up, as he had done at Southampton, the role of Nina’s escort, especially on ordinary activities about town. But as she continued to drink and her call to Whitney went unreturned, her own worst nightmare materialized: the London social world had no interest in her. Being Senator Gore’s daughter and the ex—Mrs. Auchincloss had no currency here. With no reason to dress and with a glass in hand, she spent hours sitting on the back stairs at Chesham Place, haranguing the servants, gradually but inevitably deciding that her London social opportunities had been destroyed by factors totally beyond her control. She announced herself a victim. She was not being invited out because everyone of course knew that Howard was a Jew and a fag. In her mind she had accepted Gore’s allegedly frequent invitations that she spend Christmas with him in London as a favor to him and with no knowledge that Howard would be there. If she had known, she would not have come. “She would sit in an old wrapper, rather like her coeval Tallulah, body exposed, on the back stairs,” Gore recalled, “talking to the servants about her son the fairy and his Jew boy.” Howard was unhappy but not shocked. He did not for a moment believe Nina anti-Semitic. Nor that she disliked him. She had available to her a class-based vocabulary that, drunk or angry or hurt (or all three), she instinctively used, with neither irony nor awareness of how others might respond. An easy target against which to express her bitterness at the world and her anger at her son, Howard was conveniently there. She herself, she firmly beli
eved, was in no way to blame for any of this. Nor was Howard, in any personal sense: it was simply that her son’s being a fag and his companion not only a fag but a Jew had made a London social life impossible.

  Simmering, furious, Gore began to find her presence intolerable. Her drunken behavior and hateful speech were rising to the level of a primal curse, a pollution that no act of his so far had or could alleviate for long, let along lift permanently. He felt nothing but rage. If this were Oedipal, it was startlingly reversed. His father was no problem at all. He would have liked to kill his mother. She kept drinking. She kept sitting on the stairs in the flat, making trouble. She told outsiders she had a horrible cold that indisposed her. She then demanded that Gore cash into pounds her dollar check for $10,000, the equivalent of £4,000. She had to have the money for some undisclosed reason. With stringent currency restrictions on the import and export of sums above £50, the demand created serious technical difficulties. “She went on and on, and she started giving orders to Gore as if he were a lackey,” Howard recalled, “to tell him to go and cash this check in American dollars. Nobody at the bank knew her. It was irritating the hell out of Gore. She was endless about it.” Busy each working day at Elstree, resistant to Nina’s alcoholic bullying, Gore refused to take care of it for her. If she wanted it done, here were the directions about whom to see and what documents to bring. Used to giving orders and having them obeyed, Nina exploded into even more vehement statements of what she had been saying repeatedly for almost two weeks. Whitney would not call because of “this household!” She was living with two fags, one of whom was a Jew! Clearly she was not after Jews or fags. She was after her son. Hurt herself, she assumed she would feel better if she hurt him. She had been doing that since his childhood. She was treating him as she always had, exacerbated now by the pain of Whitney’s rebuff and by what it stood for—a fifty-five-year-old, heavy-drinking, twice-divorced, once-widowed woman whose glory days of prominence and beauty were rapidly disappearing. It was no longer a pleasure to look in the mirror. She would never again see herself beautiful and beloved in someone else’s eyes. Drunk, self-destructive, raging through the flat, aware that there would be consequences, she would not let up. Furious, his patience at an end, fantasizing about murder, Gore finally said, “I think it’s time for you to leave,” and put a return ticket in her hand. Stunned, she was soon on her way back to New York. She had not seen any necessary connection between her behavior and her son’s response.