On the Death of Gore Vidal--Who Really Wanted to be Mickey Rooney
by John Aquino on 08/01/12
I have two vivid memories about Gore Vidal, celebrated author, playwright, novelist, essayist, failed politician, and gadfly celebrity, who died on July 31 and whom I never met and only saw once—it was at a party and when he first came in people clustered around him but, since he was bored, snappish, and maybe angry about something, by the time he left the entire party had moved to the other end of the room.
The first memory is reading his 1964 novel Julian. I read it in paperback in 1968 when my father was dying. I sat in the hospital waiting room, waiting for my mother to come out after spending her own time with Dad, and I remember realizing as I was reading it that history was not dead and that it could be read from different angles and fresh perspectives without being false. The second memory is of his calling conservative William Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” in a television one-on-one during the 1968 Democratic convention. I had to look up what “crypto” meant, finding its definition to be “hidden” or “secret,” which is a pretty damning thing to say about anyone. Buckley knew exactly what it meant and he, usually the most erudite and eloquent human being, was reduced to calling Vidal a “queer” and threatening to sock him.
Vidal was almost a jack of all trades and a master of none. Writing evidently came easily to him. I first became aware of him as a television writer, reading his tv play Visit to a Small Planet in a paperback of “great” television dramas of the 1950s along with Paddy Chayefsky's Marty , Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, and Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men. Four years before Serling used the science fiction genre to comment on contemporary issues in the tv series The Twilight Zone, Vidal employed the story of an alien visiting earth as a satire on the Cold War and the fear of Communism. The teleplay starred Cyril Ritchard, fresh from playing Captain Hook on Broadway and tv, as a seemingly all-powerful alien who is later revealed to have escaped from his planet where he is regarded as a big baby. Vidal later ineptly adapted his 1955 teleplay for Broadway in 1957 with Ritchard acting and directing, and it was made into a 1960 Jerry Lewis movie.
Vidal wrote a lot for television, much of it formula—I own a VHS of an adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde he wrote starring Michael Rennie—but at least one show, The Death of Billy the Kid, was appreciated enough to become the movie The Left-Handed Gun starring Paul Newman as a Marlon Brando-esque version of the outlaw with a screenplay by Leslie Stevens and not Vidal. Later in his career, Vidal wrote a sharp television mystery dealing with student military life—he was born at West Point where his father taught—called Dress Gray (1986).
He moved to Hollywood, where he adapted the work of other playwrights—Chayefsky’s A Catered Affair and, collaborating with Tennessee Williams, Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer. Vidal later told the story about how he was hired to work on the screenplay for Ben Hur (1959) and was able to address the question about why Messala hated Ben Hur so much by suggesting in oblique phrases that they had been lovers and that hell hath no fury as a lover scorned. Charlton Heston, who played Ben Hur, mocked Vidal’s claim in his autobiography, but Vidal does appeared to have worked on the screenplay—uncredited along with British playwright Christopher Fry—and there is such a scene in the finished movie and the scene works.
Vidal then wrote The Best Man for Broadway in 1960. It is still a powerful drama of individuals dealing with the issue of power, the power to be president and to run a country. It was made into a 1964 movie starring Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson and was revived for Broadway just this past year. Political conventions such as the one Vidal depicts don’t really exist anymore. It's interesting, then, that the play keeps getting revived, but it is revived because the people in the drama and the country they are fighting to lead still live.
Vidal also collaborated with Francis Ford Coppola of all people on the screenplay for the unjustly neglected war movie “Is Paris Burning? (1967)” I have always thought that the scene in which Orson Welles as a diplomat struggles to help a woman played by Leslie Caron keep her husband off a train headed for a concentration camp was one of the most powerful I have ever experienced.
Vidal then returned to novels. His second novel, The City and the Pillar (1948) had created a sensation for its portrayal of homosexuality and evidently drove Vidal to writing for television. He published Julian in 1964, based on the life of the grandson of the Emperor Constantine, who was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. When he became emperor, Julian attempted to restore worship of the Roman gods. The characters are vivid rather than cardboard. It recalls—and in his published notes on the novel Vidal credited as his influence--Robert Graves’ I Claudius and Claudius the God. I remember being fascinated about the scene where Julian, who tells the novel in the first person, describes his last meeting with his grandfather who walked away after starting a sentence with the word “remember” but never finished it. Julian later wondered if his grandfather was going to ask him to “remember me.” As I said, I was reading this while my father was dying.
In 1967, Vidal published Washington, D.C., which appears to have been inspired by his own family—his grandfather was a U.S. senator and he and Jacqueline Kennedy shared a stepfather. As a native Washingtonian, I felt that this was one of the few novels about the city that actually reflected the city.
I didn’t read his next novel Myra Breckinridge but did read among his later ones Burr, 1876, Lincoln, and Creation. The first three were good reads, tellings and reassessments of historical events, although they were maybe a little perfunctory. The last was one of the most boring, gosh-awful things I ever read about a Persian diplomat in the 5th century BCE who travels the world gathering creation myths—to no purpose. I remember Vidal going on talk shows to promote the book and insisting that he did not believe in God, which makes a survey of creation myths rather pointless. Vidal evidently carried this non-belief to his last days.
I used to buy Vidal’s collections of essays, read one or two, and end up bringing the books to Second Story Books for credit. I remember a review he wrote of books on Orson Welles in The New York Review of Books in which Vidal described his encounters with Welles—mostly on the phone—and never mentioned the books under review.
In his later years, he revisited the Billy the Kid story for a 1989 television movie starring Val Kilmer and adapted Lincoln for television in 1988. In the latter, Sam Waterson's was a most memorable Lincoln--he had almost none of Raymond Massey's height and majesty but evoked Lincoln's humor and humanity quite well.
But mostly Vidal seemed to wander around being outrageous, suggesting that the Bush administration had advanced knowledge of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And yet, for all of that, as he got older, maybe he got a little gentler. I remember seeing him on Turner Classic Movies, reminiscing about watching Mickey Rooney as Puck--the mischieveous fairy--in the 1935 movie of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I wanted to be Mickey Rooney!” he insisted, seriously.
I don’t want to end this like Citizen Kane with the little boy, rather than wanting to play with his sled, wanting to be Mickey Rooney and growing up to be Gore Vidal. A jack of all trades and a master of none? Maybe. I don’t think he will be remembered as a great novelist, playwright, or screenwriter, and his essays probably date rather badly.
But a career that produced Visit to a Small Planet,The Best Man, Julian, Washington, D.C., and Lincoln is a good career.
Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquino
