Gore Vidal (129 page)

For the next ninety days he energetically, methodically devoted himself to a statewide campaign in Northern and Southern California, speaking at college and university campuses, at rallies in the major and many of the minor cities. His likely supporters were in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where he attended the inevitable fund-raisers, mainly small gatherings in handsome homes in Beverly Hills and Pacific Heights. His most enthusiastic supporters were on the campuses, where much of the filming of a documentary,
Gore Vidal, The Man Who Said No
, directed by Gary Conklin, was done. Some of the shots were so arty, indirect, or irrelevant that Vidal felt they may have been purposely double-edged. Headquarters were set up at the Outpost Drive house. There was no shortage of volunteers to stuff envelopes, answer telephones, and drive him to events. Hugh Guilbeau, a young volunteer in San Francisco, accompanied him to talks and made his Northern California arrangements. At Fresno he spoke to the Democratic statewide delegates, many of whom found his wit entertaining but his politics unrealistic. Modest contributions came from friends and supporters. Elizabeth Hardwick, Christopher Isherwood, John Hallowell, and Richard Poirier, among others, sent contributions; so too did most of Gore's Hollywood friends. For the time being, money was a secondary issue. His own funds would carry him through the primary. There was a small budget for media advertisements. Saturation television exposure had not yet become a widespread campaign technique. Local radio and television covered statewide candidates, who usually scheduled appearances and press conferences in order to make the early-evening news. Questions frequently arose about whether Vidal was indeed a serious candidate, mainly because he seemed too entertaining to be a politician, too irreverent to be serious. His barbed wit encouraged some, who otherwise might have known better, to believe that he was against everything rather than for something. Jerry Brown, of course, declined to accept his challenge that they debate. The same polls that indicated Brown would lose in the general election to any of the Republican candidates showed he had a large lead over Vidal in the primary. The businessman/hairdresser Vidal Sassoon sent Gore—with a note that said, “
This has to be worth
10,000 votes”—a copy of a
San Francisco Chronicle
cartoon that depicted two identical Gore Vidals, the first of whom says,
“And I have 38% name recognition,” the second of whom is asked by a reporter, “How will that translate into votes, Mr. Sassoon?” Neither anti-Semitism nor homosexuality was an issue. In the Hollywood world, where Vidal had worked and played amiably with many Jews, his philo-Jewishness was taken for granted. “Norman Lear,” Vidal told Armistead Maupin—the San Francisco novelist with a cult following in the gay community, who interviewed him at length for
California
magazine—had loved “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” and “had copies sent around.” It was, Vidal insisted, a political, not a sexual, document. When Maupin queried him about his sexuality, Vidal stuck to his usual line: it was a private matter; if there was any social significance to his running for the Senate, that was for others to comment on; and he and Howard were “old friends…. He's lived various places, I've lived various places. We travel together, we travel separately.” When the actor Rock Hudson, an admirer, volunteered, with his companion, to work in his campaign, Jay Allen told Gore “that if I were you, I'd avoid that association. I'd avoid anything to do with Rock or his friend because they were such well-known homosexuals…. But he ignored my advice. But homosexuality never became an issue in that campaign. Let's face it. There was too much whispering going on about whether or not Jerry was homosexual.”

And Brown studiously ignored him. How can I reply to one-liners? he said to reporters, attempting to avoid talking about issues and to trivialize Vidal's candidacy. A newspaper cartoon depicted Vidal behind a podium casting a fishing rod with a microphone at the end toward the mouth of Jerry Brown, represented as a sphinx decorated by signs that said, “Silence is Golden,” “A Closed Mouth Catches No Flies,” and “Mum's the Word.” Finally, in late May, they appeared on the same program in a nondebate format, each giving a brief presentation and answering questions at the annual meeting of the American Editorial Cartoonists in San Francisco. There was a fine balance of humor and venom in the questions and answers, such as Gore's references to the secretary of state as “Alexander the Great Haig,” Richard Nixon as “his satanic majesty,” and Jerry Brown as “Lord of the Flies.” Vidal publicly offered to give $25,000 to Brown's favorite charity if he would debate the author on election eve. Both men seemed tired. For Brown the “fatigue factor” had set in long before, partly the result of his awareness that California voters in general were tired of him on, so to speak, an existential level. Vidal, who had failed to make significant inroads
on Brown's lead, had to deal with exhaustion and the reality that in the latest polls Brown had decisively pulled away from him. And both had been nervously looking over their shoulders, not so much at one another as at the Republican primary campaign. From the start the polls had shown that Brown would lose to either of the two major candidates—the initial leader, Barry Goldwater, Jr., and by a larger margin to Goldwater's competitor, Mayor Pete Wilson of San Diego. At first Wilson seemed unlikely to over-take Goldwater in the primary.

To everyone's surprise, Goldwater had begun to fade by mid-May, partly because of revelations about his private life, including drug use, mostly because he was an inept campaigner. Suddenly the well-financed Wilson seemed certain to win the nomination. That meant, as the polls showed, certain defeat for either Vidal or Brown in the general election, though Brown would undoubtedly have more financial and party support. Vidal had alienated the main sources of money as a matter of principle. As soon as Wilson seemed the likely opponent, Vidal knew that he did not have a ghost of a chance in the general election. Still, he campaigned aggressively in the waning days of the campaign, though he instructed his treasurer to spend only the minimum necessary. Most of it was his own money. On June 4, primary-election day, the
Los Angeles Times
commented that “author Gore Vidal, witty and sardonic, promised a lively campaign, but it has turned languid.”
The California Eye
reported in its sophisticated election analysis that the Democratic Party exit-poll interviews made clear that Brown, “while very resourceful, suffers from a high number of negatives which led voters to vote against him rather than for Gore Vidal…. There is, based on these polls, a very strong belief that Brown could have been beaten in the primary with enough money, preparation and the right issues.” And the right opponent. Brown received 45 percent of the vote, Vidal 15. That night, in Brown's victory speech, he featured prominently in his election platform the issues Vidal had stressed in the primary campaign. The speech sounded to Vidal as if it could have come out of his own mouth. In November, Brown was to lose decisively to Wilson. California and the American public had made a commitment to views other than Vidal's
or
Brown's. The day after the primary election Vidal was at a Westwood bookstore signing copies of his latest collection of essays,
The Second American Revolution
. The revolution itself had not and was not about to take place. Soon he was to write, in an essay called “Hollywood,” that “
one morning last spring
,
I cast a vote for myself in the Hollywood hills; then I descended to the flats of Beverly Hills for a haircut at the barber shop in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where I found the Wise Hack…. ‘Why do you want to be governor of this schmattah state?' When I said that I didn't want to be
governor
(I was a candidate for the U.S. Senate) he nodded slyly. ‘That's what I told people,' he said, cryptic as always.”

Ironic perspective provided some relief for the loss, though there was also the balancing pleasure of returning immediately to the literary life, one expression of which was his decision to attempt to rewrite as a full-length novel a script based on the life of Lincoln that he had first conceived in 1979 as a miniseries for television, a six-hour production that Norman Lear had enthusiastically agreed to produce and had sold to Fred Silverman, the head of NBC. He also had it in mind to do it as a stage play afterward. While watching the actor Tony Perkins, his friend from Chateau Marmont days, perform in a television version of
Les Misérables
, he had suddenly had the inspiration to do a dramatization of Lincoln's life. Perkins would be perfect as the Great Emancipator. “Generally, I don't care for dictators,” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny in 1979, “no matter how cute and all-American.” But “ideally, with a classic subject, and the Civil War is our Trojan War, one could put the whole thing onto film…. After all, that is exactly what the swan of Avon was doing” in his history plays. Through much of 1979 and 1980, he renewed and increased his familiarity with Lincoln and the Civil War, acknowledging that “the best analysis of Lincoln is Wilson's in
Patriotic Gore.”
Memories of his grandparents' comments on the war from their Southern perspective gave personal depth to his reading. He detested slavery, oppression of every sort. But he wondered if it would not have been better for the North to have let the South go. Lincoln's vision of an all-powerful single nation had been realized at a heavy price. “
L. is our Bismarck
, and that's how I plan to show him.”

When Silverman fell from power, the new regime at NBC had no interest in Vidal's script. The assumption that American history did not have a national audience still prevailed. Just before he began campaigning for the senatorial nomination, Jason Epstein, visiting at Outpost Drive and spending hours in the kitchen at his usual culinary magic, read the television script. He urged him to “make a novel out of this.” But Gore had reservations,
which he shared with Peter Davison, an editor at Atlantic Monthly Press who hoped to entice him away from Random House. “First, I must know what my political life will be…. Second, I am being made a large offer by RH for a novel about A. Lincoln, which I rather dread as I've already done it for TV (not done yet) and will do it again for the theater this spring. Third, my irritable but continuing relations with RH and Jason E.” When the primary settled his political future, he was willing to consider
Lincoln
. “Both Jason and I suggested that Gore do it as a novel,” Owen Laster recalled. “He wasn't enthusiastic. After Jason worked on him, he decided to do it,” though it took considerable persuasion. In October 1982, at Ravello, where he arrived in a driving rain, Owen brought for signing the handsome contract that Random House had offered and Gore agreed to. Vidal insisted that a few hundred thousand dollars be returned to compensate the publisher for a portion of the unearned advance on his previous contract. “He did something very unusual,” Epstein acknowledged. “Never in the history of publishing had that happened before. An expression of decency and responsibility. He thought that was the right thing to do. I was just amazed. I'll never forget that. He never wanted to be in debt to his publisher.” That night at Ravello, Laster “got as drunk as I ever remember being. We went to dinner…. Then we came back. And Howard always disappears earlier. They had a setup then with two couches. He was lying on one couch, I on the other, facing each other. There's a bottle of wine between us. We must already have had one or two bottles at dinner and a brandy in the town square. We were drinking wine, and then Gore told me how he had wanted to be President and how he had chosen to be a writer but never stopped wanting to be President.” By early November, one month after his fifty-seventh birthday, Gore was, he told Richard Poirier, “deep into
Lincoln
, an enjoyable process, all in all. For once, I start out with five years of research and two other versions behind me. He is endlessly interesting. The American Bismarck coming on like Will Rogers…. I trust Jason will make the fortune he and RH so richly deserve!”

Publisher and author profited greatly from
Lincoln
, a huge bestseller from its initial publication in June 1984. It was to provide the linking centerpiece of what Vidal had now reconceived as a larger, multinovel series about American history from the beginning of the republic to the twentieth century. The overall structure and pattern of the series now, as he wrote
Lincoln
, became clear to him.
Burr, 1876
, and
Washington, D.C
. were already in place,
Empire
and
Hollywood
were to follow in the seven years after
Lincoln
. A final volume,
The Golden Age
, was planned as the culmination. A deep believer in history as the ultimately human subject, he desired to make history more vividly alive and intellectually credible than in textbooks, an alternative account of American history that embodies Vidal's understanding of how politics and power work, past and present. It contrasts the American republic with the American empire. In Vidal's story the Founding Fathers were a brilliant but mixed lot (George Washington the dullest of them all), who created a balance between the big-money interests of the Federalists and the small-farm, small-money, small-government civil-libertarian views of the Jeffersonians. But Jacksonian America broke the precarious balance. Land and power became the predominant concerns: the Indians east of the Mississippi were pushed westward or destroyed; slavery could not be contained, let alone abolished. Lincoln, as much villain as hero, established a nationalistic, monolithic Union, a huge, industrialized anti-Jeffersonian monster. In the next fifty years his successors, led by McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, transformed the United States from a republic into an aggressive empire. The Monroe Doctrine had established the Caribbean and South America as an American sphere of influence. Now the Pacific was going to be an American lake. World War I, into which Woodrow Wilson elected to insert America, made the United States the dominant economic power of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal retooled American government and slightly redistributed national wealth in order to make America safe for capitalism. Immediately after World War II, Harry Truman celebrated the absolute international dominance of the United States by creating for the first time a national-security state whose underlying premise was that the Soviet Union was so great a menace that Americans must give up some of their freedoms to guard themselves permanently against the enemy. The temporary wartime OSS was converted into the permanent peacetime CIA. Its ongoing task was to balk the Soviet Union, whose strength was exaggerated by those for whom the Cold War was an economic and ideological boon. For the first time a huge peacetime Army was put in place. The defense budget became sacred. The garrison state became permanent. Those who controlled and had always controlled wealth and political power in America kept themselves rich and powerful. Inevitably, the Korean
and Vietnam wars followed. As with ancient Rome, America had moved from republic to empire. Lincoln was, in Vidal's view, the pivotal figure in that movement.