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FORTY-TWO

I suspect that I have just celebrated my last Ferragosto in Italy. It is an amiable holiday in August celebrating the birth of our great emperor Augustus who gave the world the Pax Romana, a long period of peace and prosperity after a chaotic time of wars, civil and otherwise. I cannot imagine any of our recent presidents being remembered for so long much less praised generation after generation. But last night was his night and we watched the fireworks as reflected in the bay of Salerno. All the while preparing the books to be moved back to the U.S., a melancholy business at best. For some reason I keep thinking of Nureyev who came to say good-bye some ten years ago. He had been putting in order his house on an island opposite Positano up the coast from us. “From bedroom I can see, on the right, sun come up and, on the left, sun go down. I die there. Is perfect.” He had AIDS. But at regular intervals a doctor from Paris would arrive and change his blood. When this happened, he would be full of energy for a few weeks. On the island, next to his house, was a studio built by a previous occupant, Massine the dancer-choreographer. Revived by new blood Rudi would switch on a gramophone in the studio and dance. The upper part of his body had begun to dwindle away but the legs were unchanged. He sweated like a horse. Finally, Rudi came to lunch with us. As usual, he threw off all his clothes and plunged into the pool. “Must go back to America, doctor says.” After lunch and a great deal of white wine he lay down on the sofa in my study. I switched on the television: it was during a time of dramatic transition in Moscow. We watched as the statue of a chief of the KGB was pulled down. Only the bronze boots remained vertical. “They make good quality boots back then,” Rudi observed; and slept. He expressed few political opinions on Russian matters. He hated it when the press depicted him as a defector from Communism. “I get out only to dance more. Is frozen there, the great dance companies. So I left.”

I never heard him denounce the Soviet system. On the other hand, he was no enthusiast for our system. He was particularly irritated when he was criticized for not admitting that he had AIDS. “If I do, I cannot reenter U.S. Law says no one with such a disease can be allowed in. So I must be silent.” He had a great deal of property in and around Washington, D.C., where he had installed relatives. He was also eager to get his mother to America if only for a visit. The Soviet authorities were cooperative but the Americans were not. Someone suggested that he appeal to President Carter. This proved to be a disaster. The beloved ex-president-to-be was not yet on view. Instead, “wreathed in malaise” as he called it, he was in no mood to grant favors to someone like Nureyev. Rudi was still in a rage as he described Carter’s treatment of him. He had been summoned to the White House where Carter reminded him that the leader of the free world had quite a lot on his plate and had no time to bother about the mother of a famous dancer. Rudi was shocked by the little man’s bad manners. It was all so like Rudi’s native Siberia where “criminals” were sent and petty bureaucrats ruled. Carter made it very clear that he would do nothing to help Rudi’s mother to visit America. Rudi’s volatile Mongol temperament was aroused: “I expected better from an American president so I cursed him.”

Nureyev pays a final call at La Rondinaia.

“You did what?” I was not certain I’d understood him. He was grinning in memory. “I cursed him first in Russian but there was no translator so I cursed him again in English.” When I asked for some technical details of the curse—bell, book, and candle, say? “I told this Carter he would be punished for not allowing an old woman to come visit her son, for his cruelty and his rudeness and then I said that because of this behavior he would lose the coming election, which he did and
all
thanks to my curse. Very powerful, these Russian curses.” I told Rudi he should open an office for people who could use his supernatural powers: today, of course, he would be overworked. Then I walked him to the gate of La Rondinaia and, no doubt affected by this talk of curses, I imitated an old Russian friend and made the sign of the cross on his chest: he bowed gravely. He died soon after. Someone who knew him far better than I said it was like a powerful flame going out.

In early 1978 Howard and I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills. The Red Brigades in Italy had kidnapped then murdered the former prime minister Aldo Moro and everyone’s advice was “get out of Italy which is falling into chaos.” Since chaos is the normal state of that oddly happy nation or perhaps I should say entity I did not fear the apparently rising tide of Communism all over the world possibly because I knew so many interested political and media types in Washington whose wild allegations could then be checked by consulting certain wise Italians or, indeed, Europeans of any sort grown sick of our constant howling wolf when, more and more, we were being identified as
the
wolf advancing upon the house of the three little pigs. When asked what advantage there is to having two houses, one in the Hollywood Hills and the other on the Amalfi coast, I have seldom had an answer. But now, after half a century, I am aware of receiving a wider range of information about what is going on in the world as opposed to the non-news and propaganda of most of our media. Certainly the Italian Communist Party so often demonized by our media was never of any great danger to anyone while radical splinter groups like the Red Brigades could hardly be called Communist: Moro was killed because he favored what Italians call “the historic compromise” between the conservative Christian Democrats and the mildly liberal Communists, each anathema to certain incoherent American activists of the sixties. Had we not intervened so ferociously in the election of 1948 the compromise would have taken place earlier to, one suspects, no great effect, good or bad.

FORTY-THREE

I used to see Moro at the Quirinale palace on the national day of the republic. He was a weary sort of realist with, as someone wrote, “a thousand years of sirocco in his eyes.” He had developed a prose style of total opaqueness. When Luigi Barzini once asked him why, as prime minister, he spoke so cryptically Moro said, “If I spoke clearly about our situation everyone would emigrate.”

Barzini was a witty journalist, son of another famous journalist. During fascism he fell afoul of Mussolini who sent him into “home exile” in the south of Italy; specifically, to Amalfi. Luigi’s wife, a Feltrinelli with money, envisaged a hovel with no running water and so she shipped an entire bathroom of white marble to Amalfi where, like some sinister sculpture, toilet, bathtub, and lonely bidet ended up on the Amalfi beach for many years while the Barzinis enjoyed their exile at a local hotel.

Howard and I bought the house in Los Angeles not to flee the Red Brigades but to prepare for the hospital years which came even sooner than either suspected. Meanwhile we stayed on in Ravello except when work or politics brought me back.

Early 1978 while I was having dinner in Washington with my half sister our mother died in New York, of cancer. I’d not seen her in years but I did read her attack on me in
Time
magazine printed under the headline “A Mother’s Love.” But I had other things than “love” on my mind.

April 5, 1978, I spoke at Arlington Street Church in Boston on behalf of the Boston-Boise Committee. A witch hunt of Salemesque intensity was under way in Boston. Twenty-four men had been arrested at Revere Beach for consorting with local youths (of whom not one was a child): apparently some of the youths rented their favors. During that summer the local police were “cracking down on same-sexualists” at the beach, in the libraries, though not yet in the Irish Catholic Church. Civil libertarians, in order to ensure fair trials for those who had been cracked down upon, formed a group called the National Jury Project to determine whether or not fair trials were possible in so heated an atmosphere to which additional heat would presently be added by the arrival in town of that scourge of Sodom, singer Anita Bryant. Out of the blue, the Boston-Boise group asked me to speak at the church in order to raise money not so much for the defense of the Revere Beachers as to draw attention to the local all-out war on those deemed “homosexual.” Only now, reading old correspondence, am I beginning to grasp why 1,500 people crowded the church to hear me. Unfortunately, I was confronted with every speaker’s nightmare: I had no written text; worse, no close knowledge of the events leading up to my appearance. I was dull. After the speech I was introduced to some members of the Boston-Boise Committee. Boise, Idaho, had recently endured a similar witch hunt where most of the male civic leaders of that city were charged with engaging in sexual acts with willing ephebes. John Gerassi, author of
The Boys of Boise
, a book that shocked the nation largely because, as was noted at the time, “the guilty parties were all married men with children and grandchildren,” just like the Revere Beachers who were mostly married blue-collar men. At the back of the church an amiable scholarly figure asked me to autograph his copy of
Burr
. I duly wrote his name, “Robert M. Bonin,” little suspecting how soon our names would be juxtaposed in the Boston press. When I signed that book for Mr. Bonin I had no idea that he was the chief justice of Massachusetts. A week later he was being vilified in the Boston press for having come to hear me speak at a fund-raiser for twenty-four sex criminals, (
sic
) et cetera…

I promptly wrote Judge Bonin to say how sorry I was to have been used as a pretext to destroy a much-admired jurist. Bonin responded graciously: “I had made other misjudgments but none so rash as underestimating the extensive and intensive aspects of homophobia and anti-Semitism. Massachusetts has its own home-grown and flourishing Generals Brown and Anita Bryants.” Judge Bonin, as a Jew, did not suit the prejudices of the Roman Catholic–WASP judiciary of his state. Bonin’s subsequent letter of resignation to Governor Michael S. Dukakis is balanced and dignified. “The Legislature has spoken. The approval of the Address was unjust and is a bad precedent. Address, without required reasons and trial is a dreadful procedure lacking in due process. I hope it will not be a prologue to future actions against other judges. I cannot conceive of Address for the impropriety of ‘neglectful’ attendance at a lecture.” (“Neglectful” is a weird word to use for hearing a speech in a church.) He also remarks that he had been pre-tried in the media. He quotes Solzhenitsyn: “The press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary…hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else is this disease reflected in the press.” And so he went, most cheerfully, on his way. It is a wonder that he could have endured such an establishment for as long as he did. Meanwhile, I started to write more and more about contemporary politics.

FORTY-FOUR

A few years ago the BBC wondered if I would do a program on the American South and its families. Incidentally it is only British television that wants to do interesting projects on our native land: with few exceptions, the home team deals only in entertainers if, of course, they can be guaranteed not to entertain. Someone had noticed that although the WASPs are in themselves a small minority in the South they compensate for their fewness in numbers by their webs of cousinage in families which go back to the 1600s like my grandmother Gore, a Kay from South Carolina whose family had emigrated from Bury in Lancashire in the eighteenth century. Since there were so few British settlers in the Southern states there was not much of anyone for these immigrants to marry so they kept marrying into the same families. I have never been able to remember what relation I am to Albert Gore Junior even though his father, a Tennessee senator, once explained it to me on television in San Francisco (no, I don’t recall what he said but he did say that had I been elected to Congress in 1960 “our relationship would have been much closer,” which perhaps says it all).

Once a year the Gores hold a family reunion in northern Mississippi which I eventually attended in the interest of a documentary on me rather than on that white Anglo-Saxon enclave in the Southern states, a project abandoned because the BBC did not want to get involved in the business of race or, as my grandmother Gore liked to say, if any descendant of mine should marry someone colored I’ll come back and haunt ’em. When I was grown I liked to tease her with the knowledge that our blood had been commingled with that of the other race ever since the country began; she would then simply change the subject and complain about how the Civil War was the vengeance of God on a generation of Southern boys who preferred shooting and hunting to going to school. The producers had also been put off by Jimmy Carter himself who had thought the program was to be about me when the subject was about kin and all of us. I had of course sent him a telegram after his disastrous intervention with helicopters in Iran during the hostage crisis, reminding him that honor required his resignation for having disgraced the country. Had he perhaps taken my censure amiss?

Finally, he and I do share a most distinguished ancestor, John Kay of Bury (1733–1764). According to the
Dictionary of National Biography
, “Kay’s improvements in machinery for weaving continue in use to the present day” (the Flying Shuttle). He was the founder of the first great improvements in the manufacture of cloth by which employment is now given to hundreds of thousands of people while in 1760 his son Robert invented the shuttle drop box. I fear that neither Jimmy nor I have ever lived up to our brilliant heritage.