Gore Vidal (128 page)

It was a thorn in the side of the friendship with Barbara Epstein and reminded him of other articles of his
The New York Review
had turned down for political reasons. “Barbara was worried about the other people, the paranoid ones,” Vidal later remarked.
“The New York Review
does get into enough trouble from what I call the Jewish Letterheads. The president societies. Any time they mention Israel they're going to get at least ten presidential letterheads saying, ‘How can a publication with Jewish editors print such lies and so on?' Yes, the friendship has been close in spite of serious disagreements. Never being honest about their reasons.” As despised or at least mistrusted minorities, Jews and homosexuals, he argued in the article, had been and would again, if Nazi-like dark forces gained the upper hand, be destroyed in the same gas chambers. Decter's depiction of homosexuals revealed ignorance, he maintained, and her strategy was to blame the victim for his victimization. On the contrary, homosexuals suffered the same sort of unprovoked persecution as that inflicted on blacks and Jews. “
I would suggest
that the three despised minorities join forces in order not to be destroyed…. After all, homosexuality is only important when made so by irrational opponents. In this as in so much else, the Jewish situation is precisely the same…. I would suggest a cease-fire and a common front against the common enemy, whose kindly voice is that of Ronald Reagan and whose less than kindly mind is elsewhere in the boardrooms of the Republic.” Of course, some Jewish-Americans, particularly neoconservatives like Decter, Podhoretz, and Joseph Epstein, recoiled in horror. Homosexuality was a sickness. Ronald Reagan was their ally, not their enemy. The values associated with homosexuality were abhorrent. And many nonneoconservative Jews feared that making common cause with homosexuals
would provoke an antagonism among Christians that would undercut the increasing acceptance of Jews as Americans. And, worse, to suggest a common gas chamber for homosexuals and Jews was to denigrate the Holocaust, a mordantly funny reference to which Vidal had used as an example of the common boat and the general disinclination of many Jews to share the Holocaust with other victims of the Nazis. “
In the German concentration
camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexualists wore pink triangles. I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. ‘After all,' said Isherwood, ‘Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals.' The young man was not impressed. ‘But Hitler killed six
million
Jews,' he said sternly. ‘What are you?' asked Isherwood. ‘In real estate?'” Mainstream Jewish-Americans, including liberals, mostly declined to accept Vidal's premise. Though some of their grounds varied from instance to instance, Jewish-American response in general would not and could not accept any argument that challenged the ethnocentric uniqueness of the Jewish experience, especially where the Holocaust was concerned.

Always the rationalist, usually willing if not eager to rock the boat of political correctness in both ideas and language, Vidal was treading on sacred ground. His language was refreshing to some, detestable to others. To those with a vested interest in the issue, his ideas as well as his language were unacceptable. As he recalls his conversation with Barbara Epstein about “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” “She said, ‘The Jewish situation is no way analogous to that of homosexuals.' I said, “Well, Hitler felt otherwise. After all, he was an authority, a rather negative authority, but if he thought so, I can certainly say so. If you're going to go into the scapegoating business, which American bigots love to do, each group is on the same unseaworthy boat and each will be sunk with the other.' Well, she wouldn't accept that.” If the society were going to proscribe the use of words like “kike” and “fag,” he would insist on purposely using them, in appropriate instances, with the self-consciousness of the raised ironic eyebrow, both to shock and to call attention to the reality and complexity of American attitudes toward minority groups. The next step after the proscription of language, he feared, would be the proscription of ideas, and unpopular ideas had a difficult, often impossible, time gaining a public forum anyway. Here was an instance in which an esteemed intellectual journal, which otherwise valued his contributions, declined to print his review-essay mainly, it would
seem, because it disagreed with his ideas and feared hostile response.
The New York Review
fell far short of its implied libertarian standard. Vidal's essay made a valuable point effectively, whether or not one agreed with the central premise, which in any rational perspective was sufficiently valid to warrant publication and serious discussion. But irrational taboos and self-serving special interests made the subject difficult to handle: prior to “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” an essay whose focus was on homophobia, there had been no particular association between Vidal and Jews other than that he shared his life with a Jewish man, that he had moved quite comfortably in the 1950s and '60s in an intellectual and media world in which he had many Jewish friends, that he had been sympathetic to and strongly supported by the Jewish community in Poughkeepsie in his 1960 congressional campaign, that he detested anti-Semitism, and that his vigorous commitment to speaking out on behalf of justice for everyone included sympathy for Jewish suffering.

Actually his mind was more on the general issues of the country than on “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star.” Whatever their attitude toward homosexuals, the neoconservatives' influence on national politics was of greater importance. William Buckley now had good friends in the White House. Barry Goldwater's values were alive and well in Washington, and his son, Barry Goldwater, Jr., was the likely Republican Party candidate for senator from California in 1982. Elected in 1980, Ronald Reagan had successfully advocated an expensive defense budget and minuscule support for social welfare. As Vidal observed national politics, he began to feel the stirring of his latent desire to hold elective office. His own time would run out soon on even the possibility of fulfilling that ambition. When he toured California in the late 1970s and in 1980, speaking to audiences at college campuses, he was astounded at how much name recognition he had and how many thousands of people lined up to hear his words. In as conservative a city as Santa Barbara, five thousand people paid to listen to him. That he could be a viable candidate in 1982 in California, where he had a home, began to seem possible.

The obstacles, though, were formidable. To have a chance of being elected to the Senate he would need to have the Democratic Party nomination.
His experience with the People's Party in 1968 had demonstrated the odds against a third party's having electoral success, though that had not prevented his donating $1,000 to the third-party candidacy of John Anderson in 1980. The Democratic nomination would not come cheaply. Two-term Governor Jerry Brown, the son of former governor Pat Brown, would be the candidate the party machine, weak as it was, would support. Vidal would be an outsider, with some friends within the Democratic ranks, particularly on the left; some of his Hollywood colleagues would support him; many of those who disapproved of or had fallen out with Jerry Brown would give his candidacy ballast; there would be votes for him in the gay and intellectual communities, though Brown had influence and strong supporters in both those constituencies; the generally disaffected might rally behind him, particularly those, like himself, who were disaffiliated from and found so little difference between both parties that they elevated
not
voting into a political statement. But to be competitive he would need to attract large numbers of ordinary Democrats, many of whom usually pulled the party lever automatically. That would cost money, though his estimate was that Brown's unpopularity would allow him to make a credible run at a cost that he himself could afford to pay, about $300,000. If Vidal made it a point not to accept large contributions, he could make his campaign an exemplification of his belief that elections were preposterously expensive and therefore corrupt. He could attack the huge defense budget and advocate more funds for schools, effective gun-control laws, a stronger defense of civil liberties, the decriminalization of victimless crimes, a new constitutional convention to promote more direct democracy, and a fairer tax structure that would feature a 10- to 15-percent tax on all corporations. Brown, he felt, could be beaten, and even if he himself did not in the end gain the nomination, the opportunity to have a larger platform for his views began to be difficult to resist. The expense would hardly deplete his overall resources. He did, though, have two serious concerns. If he won the nomination, where would he get the money to pay for the general campaign against a well-financed Republican opponent? That cost would be immense. He would be dependent on the Democratic Party machine and on influence-buying fat-cat contributors from the very industries and corporations he would be denouncing, though he factored in that if Barry Goldwater, Jr., were the Republican nominee he would have a weak opponent. Then $1
million of his own money, he hypothesized, would put him in the Senate. That seemed a worthwhile expenditure. But if he actually were elected, what would his life be like? “
Does one want to win
?” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny, who was surprised to learn of his plans. “Ah, that's a question…. You're right, though, that if I go to the Senate, survive the six year term (age 57—63), I'll be unable to write anything worth reading—be too old and raddled at the end to do much more than become a national
trombone
as the Italians say.”

Did he actually want to give up his life as a writer? Probably not, though he would have to face that reality only if he won the election, which seemed less likely even to his friends and well-wishers than it did to him. Most thought his chances minuscule. He himself performed the enabling act of suspension of disbelief, which, combined with the attraction of having large audiences and being dramatically front and center as well as trying on, without necessarily ever having to wear, his grandfather's senatorial suit, allowed him to commit himself in his own mind to giving it a try. Six years in the Senate would provide a prominent national platform for his views. Beginning in August 1980 he more and more frequently presented his “State of the Union” talk, an elaborate form of what was to become his campaign speech, to audiences around the state and sound bites from the speech to television audiences during his usual talk-show appearances. By January 1981 newspapers were reporting that “Gore Vidal, Critic of Voting, May Seek Office,” as the unfriendly
Los Angeles Times
put it. Max Palevsky, the wealthy Californian who had already made a career as a power broker, contributing large sums to Democratic candidates, and who no longer wanted to support Jerry Brown, began to push the possibility of Gore's candidacy. Palevsky, on whom Norman Mailer had fallen at Lally Weymouth's party in New York in 1977, volunteered to serve as campaign treasurer. Paul Ziffern, a prominent show-business attorney Gore had known for a long time, who had been and continued to be the most powerful behind-the-scenes Democrat in California, gave him encouragement and advice. Ziffern disliked Brown, who was his neighbor in Malibu. “Jerry had a house at that time—he was then with Linda Ronstadt—right down the beach from the Zifferns' place in Malibu,” Jay Allan remembered, “and he would think nothing of coming right over the wall and into their house. So they trained their dog to attack him if he'd jump over the wall. Seriously.
They didn't like him.” Ziffern gave Vidal “advice and said he'd like to see him elected but he didn't see a chance of it.” Palevsky's call to the
Los Angeles Times
initiated the newspaper speculation about Vidal's running for the senate.

No, Vidal wrote to
People
magazine in February, “I have not ‘thrown my hat in the ring' for the Democratic senatorial nomination in 1982. I am not a candidate. I am barely at the stage known as ‘seriously considering a race,' which means, in English, where is the money going to come from?” The money, he had decided by summer 1981, would come from himself and from small contributions. “
I am sauntering
for the Senate,” he told Judith Halfpenny. “A couple of dozen speeches about the state (I can file as late as March 16). I attack the tax structure which favors the rich (who pay little or no tax) and the corporations (who now pay almost nothing at all) and I propose doing away with the graduated income tax. One would figure the amount needed for the next year's budget and
then
raise, through taxes, the money needed with a flat 10—15% on the gross adjusted income of the corporations—more than enough to defend the free world and enrich Congress with, perhaps, the same tax for those earning more than 20,000—the rest would pay no Fed tax at all: they're broke anyway. Also, cut the Pentagon by 25%—learn to think modestly of the US as simply another country in no way special except for its megalomania and its bad management of public affairs…. We shall see. In the winter, in a field of three, I was 10%. I'm now down to a mere 4% but that changes with the number of appearances. The press is thrilled I'm in the race: good copy. But one is constantly warned that no issues should ever be discussed, only personalities, polls, money raised. Presently, I eschew the first, ignore the second, and do nothing about the third. People are stunned when they hear I don't want contributions yet.” By Halloween his speaking schedule had intensified. Early in 1982 the interviewer for
San Diego Magazine
, who found him catching his breath and losing weight at La Costa, remarked that, unlike most candidates for statewide office, he traveled without any retinue, often by himself. It made for a distinctive but unprofessional-looking campaign. “
I'm now about to be
raising $ for the senate and will seldom be out of the Gilded State,” he wrote to John Mitzel. On March 9, in Los Angeles, he filed for the Democratic nomination. Polls showed he was second, though a distant second, in a field of five. The Gore Vidal for U.S. Senate organization
soon placed an advertisement in
The New York Review of Books
. “I don't have to explain to you who I am or what I stand for as I take this occasion, in these familiar pages, to ask for help.”