Gore Vidal (53 page)

Wandering out of one of the maid's rooms upstairs where she had been put to bed, Diana, on the balcony above the marble staircase, heard voices, laughter, a voice singing Russian songs. In his dressing gown, Harrison Williams, who had declined to attend the party, joined her. The singer was one of the guests, the actor Yul Brynner. In the salon they all enjoyed his handsome good looks, his striking visage, his deep romantic voice. Prince Serge Obolensky, a New York society celebrity of White Russian origin who was divorced from the wealthy Alice Astor but ran the St. Regis hotel for Alice's brother Vincent, sat near Mona and chatted with Cecilia, who soon turned to Tennessee. At first she assumed he must be a relative of Harrison Williams. She had never heard of
Streetcar
. Within a few minutes of conversation she was convinced that he disliked her and had turned away. “
You'll like
Gore Vidal much better,” Eddie assured her. “He's brilliant, but in a way more like us. Suffered as much from family tradition as we did in our youth.” “Is he by any chance the boy who looks like an archaic Apollo?” Introduced to Gore, she thought him “charming and amusing,” his eyes “alive with humor, and so was the smiling mouth.” Gore thought her exotic, beautiful, fearlessly herself, an embodiment of an aristocratic
world that had its own rules, its own freedom, liberated from the constraints of middle-class life, distinctly its own thing, possessed of a certain laissez-faire wisdom about life. With Mona, Eddie, and Cecilia, in New York and then in London and Capri, he was to become a good and caring friend. Later, eleven-year-old Diana was to become a close friend.

He was more likely to be found, though, at the equally festive but less elegant parties of ballet and theater people, at gatherings of editors and writers, with Sarah Moore and Connie Darby, with whom he continued to have good times, at various popular bars that artistic people frequented, and especially at the Astor Bar, which he still visited often. He went regularly to the well-known Blue Angel on Fifty-fifth street off First Avenue, the most popular club for classy entertainment, for high spirits, for adventuresome socialites, rubbing shoulders with those of accomplishment and celebrity. At the Astor he met the Columbia University Shakespeare scholar Andrew Chiappe, also there to pick up trade, accompanied by his good friends Bob Giroux and John Kelly. Kelly introduced Gore to the impressive Chiappe, who knew most of Shakespeare by heart and had “a rather penetrating very beautiful voice, a Shakespearean actor's voice.” With a sharp critical mind, Chiappe could not only recite but interpret Shakespeare with a brilliance that immediately impressed Gore. “He looked Dickensian,” Jason Epstein, later to be Gore's editor, recalled, “a set of spheres, a big round head and round body. He walked like a ballet dancer and was very fastidious.” Gore found him striking. It was the start of a friendship. Sam Lurie, the publicist for the Ballet Theatre, whom he already knew, he now got to know better. “Dorothy Parker, when she needed a joke,” Gore recalled, “would go to him. She thought he was the wittiest man in New York.” One day a group that included Sam and Gore were trying to remember where the phrase “always be kind to strangers … for they may be angels in disguise” appears. “We were talking about trade, I suppose. Well, Sam says it's in the Bible, and somebody said, ‘Yeah, it's in the Book of Hebrews.' And this guy goes over to a Bible and riffles the pages and says, ‘There's no book of Hebrews here.' And Sam says, ‘That's the Racquet Club edition.'” At the exclusive Blue Angel a sailor somehow got in. “Sam went over and sat beside him and tried to open a conversation with him. The sailor was surly. Sam rolled off the stool and onto the floor, where he lay on his back like a turtle. As waiters moved in, Sam, from the floor, said to the sailor, very quietly, ‘You don't seem to realize that I could ruin you socially!'”

During the autumn of 1948 the ballet world engaged Gore even more than it had in spring 1946, partly because some of its major figures were his friends, from his upstairs neighbor Nora Kaye to Antony Tudor, the choreographer for the Ballet Theatre; to Leon Danielian, a lead dancer first at Ballet Theatre and then at the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo; to his former lover Harold Lang; his occasional companion Johnny Kriza; and the witty Sam Lurie. Like others in that golden period when ballet flourished and three or four companies circulated from one city to another in Europe and America, Gore attended the ballet regularly, sometimes numbers of times a week, occasionally with John Kelly, who was madly in love with Leon Danielian, to whom he had created a small shrine in his bedroom at Cismont. Dressing rooms were open to Gore, ballet-world parties embraced him. Tudor, whose ballets he admired, lived nearby on Fifty-second Street with his companion, Hugh Laing. Though no longer sleeping together, Gore and Harold remained friends, though Gore worried about Harold's increasingly dangerous sexual escapades, which began to threaten his career. Gore and Johnny Kriza had become good friends. “Gore liked Johnny,” Sam Lurie, one of Kriza's close friends, recalled, “but I don't think he was passionate about him the way he was for a while about Harold.” A character dancer with a flair for acting, the short, dark-haired, craggily handsome Kriza, son of working-class Czech immigrants from Chicago, had been the protégé and lover of Ballet Theatre dancer Anton Dolin, who in 1941 had danced the first
Bluebeard
with Alicia Markova, Antony Tudor, and Nora Kaye. With Lang and Robbins, Kriza became famous as one of the three sailors in
Fancy Free
and performed brilliantly in
Billy the Kid
, a role with which Gore strongly identified. “Copland's music certainly flowed through that strong body, particularly the percussion.” In that role Kriza may have seemed to Gore an alter ego. “He was absolutely fun to be with,” Lurie remarked, “terribly bright, humorous…. He and Gore may have had sex, and I would say if it was important to Gore they would have…. Promiscuity was Johnny's middle name…. Johnny was very attractive as a personality. Not beautiful as some people are, but he was an extremely personable, attractive, bright, humorous companion, a beautiful body…. Great charisma…. By today's standard he certainly was not a great dancer. And his success as a star should be attributed to the war, because many of the best dancers were in the service and he was not. I think because of the homosexual thing…. Because the company toured a great deal, he
had friends all over the country. No matter what city you went to, if you mentioned John Kriza among the ballet crowd, they not only knew him but they adored him. Even the people who didn't think that he danced that well. He was so likable and endearing.”

So too was John Latouche, known to everyone as “Touche.” By fall 1948 he was becoming one of Gore's regular companions, partly because of his wickedly funny, widely talented irrepressibility, also because in the postwar decade he had become a pervasive presence in New York artistic circles. Latouche immediately liked Gore. They made plans to collaborate. Why not write a play together, a comedy or a drama, particularly a screenplay, where there was money to be made quickly? Everyone knew and many loved Latouche, if not for himself alone, then for his talent and his high-spirited zaniness. Immensely but idiosyncratically social, he was everyplace, at artistic-social dinners, at the ballet and theater, in Virgil Thomson's high-art musical circle, at Leo Lerman's and Peggy Guggenheim's salons, in the nightclub world of the Blue Angel and Libby Holman, with New York society and artistic celebrities like Joe O'Donohue and the novelist-photographer Carl Van Vechten, with Greenwich Village friends like the novelist Dawn Powell. Sleeplessly, from dusk to dawn, at openings, parties, dinners, bars, clubs, he was part of a New York nightlife that dressed for dinner, partied in tuxedos in Harlem, embraced high musical culture and the latest jazz, and for a while seemed to have revivified its own version of the high-kicking spirit of the 1920s. That Latouche was usually broke made no difference. Constantly abuzz with schemes for musical comedies and dramas, enamored of the Broadway musical theater, he had had a number of fame-creating successes as a lyricist, from
Flair Flair the Idol of Paree
as an undergraduate at Columbia to the patriotic cantata
Ballad for Americans
, which Paul Robeson made famous in 1939, to the Broadway musical drama
Cabin in the Sky
. If as an artist he was, as the composer Ned Rorem remarked, “
a sort of preface to Sondheim
,” someone who “mingled with the upper crust but catered to the middlebrow,” he was a preface with a distinctively unforgettable personality, “the most irresistibly quick man in the world,” witty, funny, perceptive, generous.

A heavy drinker and, by the late 1940s, regularly dependent on a pharmacopoeia of pills and injections in the Max Jacobson age, Latouche had been born in 1919 in Richmond, Virginia, to a fractured family with an absent father and a strong mother, to whom he remained devoted. He had
won a scholarship to Columbia, embraced a
New Masses
—Communist phase, discovered poetry, musical lyrics, and sex with men, married in 1940 and quickly divorced the daughter of a former United States ambassador to Spain, spent fourteen months in the Congo ostensibly to make a documentary film but producing a book instead, served in the Navy in the Pacific, and ultimately returned to New York to pursue art, good company, infinite fun, and high fame. He knew how to amuse himself and other people, though not everyone was amused. He “thought he was a Communist,” Joe O'Donohue recalled. “He'd go to dinner parties in a black shirt rather than in evening dress. He was attractive to hosts at these fancy parties as an oddity. He was a short man, tending to pudginess. Not good-looking at all. He'd try to dominate conversation.” To Johnny Nicholson, an admirer, “he looked like a frog. A great friend of his was named Spivey. She was an entertainer. She worked in Tony's East Side. She opened her own club called Spivey's Roof. She was just called Madame Spivey. If you met her, you would know you had met somebody. She and John Latouche were very good friends. He wrote songs for her. One night after the club we all went up to Harlem to have spareribs. It was about four or five o'clock in the morning, and he was talking about his hometown and how the dogs used to bark in the morning. Before you knew it, he was on his hands and knees like a dog, howling, showing us. It was enchanting.” Like most everyone else, Gore was enchanted.

Though he had six months earlier declined Bowles's and Williams's invitation to go to Europe with them at the end of 1948, Gore still had it in mind to go to Europe, probably in spring 1949. He hoped to be in London for the publication of Lehmann's edition of
The City and the Pillar
, scheduled for May. Not that he was happy with Lehmann. Indeed, he was simmeringly furious. Soon after his arrival in Antigua, he had written him a friendly letter. “
Serene and working
for the first time since last May. Started a book on a revolution in a country like Guatemala and a rather humorous story, a bit anti-revolutionary in tone but unpolitical, absolutely unpolitical—to be called, I think,
Dark Green, Bright Red
—the jungle and blood; any number of other symbols can be safely maintained. I'll send you
Search for the King
(how is that title?) around March when I make it ready for press—turned out fairly good they tell me, be out next January. Did you get
S of C
, and what do you think of it?” On January 3, 1949, Dutton published
Season
in New York. Within a few weeks Gore wrote Lehmann twice more, tactfully but with an anxious subtext. Are you going to publish
Season?
Vidal's next letter crossed Lehmann's in the mail. “I have such a high regard for your gifts,” Lehmann wrote in the middle of January, “that I cannot conceal my disappointment, which Rosamond shares…. It strikes me as a tired book.” Though not entirely wrong about some of
Season's
weaknesses, Lehmann had no eye for its strengths. To Gore, Lehmann was for the moment a hateful semi-enemy. What was the point of having a publisher who disliked one's work? Isherwood advised him not to “break with John yet. At any rate, not until
The City and the Pillar
has been published. I think changing publishers is always a pity, anyhow. One suffers for it…. It has to be weighed carefully, like a divorce.” Gore took Isherwood's advice. Lehmann, who published
Dark Green, Bright Red
in 1951, was to be out of business as a publisher soon, essentially because he was undercapitalized and overextended. “Bad management,” Graham Watson remarked. “Lehmann went bust because he was an intellectual nonbusinessman and he had a taste for certain types of books, fairly eclectic and fairly intellectual.” To Gore the rejection was both painful and infuriating. Rather than respond to Lehmann, he kept silent for months. In April he wrote to him, “
as to
The Season of Comfort:
I've made no attempt to get another [British] publisher for it; on the other hand I'm not anxious, at the moment, to let you see any new work. We both have plenty of time to think all this over.” He had been uneasy about Lehmann from the beginning, but he had had high hopes that as author and publisher they would flourish.