Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/092892/0928520.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 13KB | 247 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 64

A Gadfly in Glorious, Angry Exile


Author, controversialist and now a rave-winning movie actor,
Gore Vidal takes a bleak look at his country

By MARTHA DUFFY RAVELLO


    The prayer breakfast during the Republican Convention is
revving up its final hallelujahs as Mary Lou Retton burbles her
introduction of President Bush. Thousands of miles away, in his
aerie on the Mediterranean, an avid CNN watcher is taking in the
action and talking back to his TV set. Of the ex-gymnast, he
predicts, "She'll be running for office very soon." The
President, as usual, quotes a letter, this one from a child
named Joy Vaughn. "What if her name were Joy Previn?" asks the
viewer sarcastically. One of the pols plugs voluntary prayer in
schools. "Well," is the response, "there goes the First
Amendment again."

    Despite his glee at the campaign antics, Gore Vidal is
disgusted. He has loved politics passionately all his life. The
grandchild of a U.S. Senator, he himself ran for that office
unsuccessfully in 1982. In 1960 he wrote The Best Man, a witty,
astute play about a presidential campaign. What he sees around
him now is all change and decay. "We have one political party
with two right wings," he says. "See why I go so deep into
satire? You know, there are only two great issues -- converting
from war to peace and managing the economy. Instead we're
talking about the fetus and the flag."

    Vidal -- perversely brilliant novelist, acerbic gadfly and
now movie actor -- lives in self-imposed partial exile in a
massive villa in the postcard-picturesque town of Ravello on
Italy's Amalfi coast. All his surroundings are serene. Vidal,
67, is a tireless, disciplined author, and his house is in every
detail of location and layout designed to enhance concentration.

    For the first time in nearly six months, he recently left
Ravello. Paramount persuaded him to go to Hollywood for a press
jamboree to promote Tim Robbins' shrewd, bumptious political
film Bob Roberts. Vidal co-stars as an aging liberal Senator,
and he does it with authority and panache. His reviews have been
excellent, and the ham in him loves it. "I keep saying, `John
Houseman is dead. Maybe I'll get those nice parts.' "

    On the literary front, Random House is publishing LIVE
from Golgotha, an outrageous recasting of the Jesus story ("All
these excuses and all this fund raising, and still he hasn't
come back"). Harvard University Press has just brought out
Screening History, a gentle, charming memoir of the movies Vidal
saw as a child and how they influenced him. Two books and a
movie in two weeks -- not bad.

    Not surprising, however. Vidal has written 23 novels, six
plays, eight volumes of essays and he isn't sure how many film
and television scripts. At the moment he is reading the page
proofs of his collected commentary -- 1,200 pages' worth --
representing just two-thirds of his output since 1952. But to
him all this is old hat. "I have a new career," he exults. "I'm
now a journalist. And all because of the fax!" He keeps the
machine nearer to him than his phone. "I'm full of opinions, but
with the mails, the pieces were out of date when they arrived."

    Vidal has lived most of his adult life in the public eye.
Even for people who have only heard of his mischievous best
seller Myra Breckinridge, his image from countless TV talk shows
is indelible -- by turns suave, perverse, a man smarter than
anyone else on the set. His waspish ripostes can be frightening
to confront but endlessly quotable later -- like his line about
Ronald Reagan: "A triumph of the embalmer's art." Handsome,
saturnine, Vidal projects the threat that he is capable of
derailing anything.

    Christianity, for one thing. LIVE from Golgotha takes a
shocking look at Jesus' claim as the Messiah and at those who,
like St. Paul and St. Timothy, spread the word. Though the
author has personally never progressed beyond a manual Smith
Corona ("I have spent my life changing ribbons"), he has a
sophisticated knowledge of computer gadgetry and a puddle
jumper's expertise at time tripping.

    Golgotha and Myra have several things in common: fantastic
sexual gambits and a kind of Lewis Carroll flouting of the laws
of time. Plotted like a mystery for late-page plot twists, it
casts Paul as a tap-dancing gay, Jesus as a brilliant
businessman. Drawing on the work of historian Joel Carmichael,
Vidal argues that when Jesus threw the money changers out of the
temple, he was destroying a sophisticated Roman financial
structure that controlled banking in the Middle East -- and
thereby sealing his own fate.

    The narrator is Timothy, who is caught on a time trip not
of his choosing. All he wants to do is set down his own account
of the glory days, but he is thwarted by sci-fi circuitry that
allows other people to penetrate his narrative. In particular,
two chaps named Cutler intrude ruthlessly. Gradually it becomes
clear that Cutler One wants to discard Jesus and await a
Messiah who does not end up on a cross. Cutler Two opts for
Jesus as the focus of a new religion. In this muddle, centuries
turn inside out and the cast at Golgotha can be changed and
added to; there is even room for Mary Baker Eddy and Dr. Helen
Schucman. It is also possible for Jesus to command a good table
at Spago. Or, given Vidal's insatiable need to shock, to find
himself pinioned by user-friendly nails at the Crucifixion.

    Already, an Irish bishop, a Conservative British M.P. and
the Vatican press have denounced Vidal for blasphemy, though
none of them had access to the book when they went public. But
LIVE from Golgotha will nettle many more. The author shrugs it
all off: "Christianity is such a silly religion." As for the
book's teasingly naughty humor, he washes his hands of other
people's want of wit: "Sometimes the wrong word makes exactly
the right joke."

    Vidal has always been impossible to pigeonhole. He is ever
the restless bull in the china shop of conventional wisdom. He
is also a serious student of history. Jason Epstein, his old
friend and longtime publisher, correctly calls Vidal "the last
in a line of men of letters -- among whom Edmund Wilson is a
classic example. Scholars like him are rare in any age,
polymaths with a huge range of interests." Vidal can lampoon the
New Testament because he knows the Bible and Roman history.

    But Wilson's career was a clear trajectory compared with
Vidal's. Competing in his psyche are two more obsessions: show
biz and sexual identity. He is the grandchild of Oklahoma
Senator Thomas P. Gore (making him a distant -- "in every way"
-- cousin of Al Gore's), and, since his mother was feckless and
his father often away starting up airlines, he spent his first
10 years happily with his grandfather, in privileged Washington
circles.

    The elder Gore was blind, so his grandchild began reading
to him as soon as he could make sense of the letters himself.
It was the perfect start for an autodidact. Later, his mother
married financier Hugh D. Auchincloss, who was to leave her to
marry Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' mother, thus establishing
Vidal's long connection with the Kennedys. But at the time, it
set young Gore adrift ("If my mother heard about a school at a
party, she just sent me there").

    He never bothered with college. From the age of 14 he had
been trying to write a novel, and at 19 he completed Williwaw,
for which he drew on his Army service in the Aleutians in 1943.
Vidal was a precocious success, but when he published The City
and the Pillar (1948), which had an openly homosexual theme, he
found himself blackballed by the mainstream press. He has never
forgotten the ostracism and remains suspicious to the point of
paranoia about the literary Establishment. Still, it never
occurred to him that he could not prosper. He was a natural at
script writing and started a second career in Hollywood. (His
first credit, The Catered Affair in 1956, starring Bette Davis,
was shown recently on Italian TV, and he reveled in his personal
time trip.)

    At no time has he lacked ideas or opportunities. His
agenda at the moment is typical. This winter Martin Scorsese's
new film on the Byzantine Empress Theodora, for which Vidal has
written the screenplay, goes into production. Then he and
Howard Austin, his companion of many years, hop off to Bangkok
for their annual cool-out at the Oriental Hotel. While Vidal
was promoting Bob Roberts, he and Warren Beatty found time to
discuss another political movie. Sting may dramatize his 1978
novel Kalki. Looking back, Vidal regrets that he didn't take
movies more seriously. "After The Best Man I think I could have
become a director -- not so much of theatrical movies but of TV
films, where you have much more control. And the novel just may
be dead."

    But in the next breath he adds, "What I really have to do
is bite the bullet on the final novel of my American story,
called The Golden Age. I'll have a fictional plot and myself as
a fictional character as well. I won't ever write a memoir. If
I tried, it would be like a bad MGM movie -- or worse, a good
one." The Golden Age in question is an ironic description of the
Kennedy years.

    Recently he unearthed 13 pages of notes he took after a
visit to Hyannis Port. However, anyone expecting a burnished
glow of memory will be disappointed. "In the beginning I was as
impressed as anyone," he says. "But it was nonsense really. The
invasion of Cuba was the first moment I realized that Kennedy
was not going to be much of a President. And Vietnam is really
on his head. The truth is that he was something of a war lover,
very romantic."

    But J.F.K. was fun. Vidal, who had grown up among
Washington elders, found an ebullient President, who was only
seven years older than he, very refreshing. Kennedy relished the
kind of slanging session at which Vidal is a master. He
remembers Kennedy "as one of the greatest gossips I've ever
known. He knew everything, and still he questioned you
constantly. He was wildly interested in all the movie stars I
knew. `Tell me about Hope Lange,' he'd say."

    Those freewheeling good times are distant now. His health
is good, his career robust, but Vidal seems like a lion in
winter. He feels that the populist causes he fought for all his
life died with Lyndon Johnson. He is confident that Bush will
lose the election, largely because of his stand on abortion,
but he despairs of Bill Clinton's shaking up the economy
sufficiently or reversing the incursions on civil liberties and
women's rights made in the name of family sanctity by what he
calls the Party of God, consisting mostly of Republicans, but
Democrats as well.

    "Bush is a perfectly rational man on abortion," he notes,
"but he thinks he can't afford to be. His only hope is for a
very small turnout and enough godly folk to push him over. But
the Democrats have two conservative Southern boys running, and
they'll take back the South." Vidal is depressed, but his
irrepressible humor -- never dormant long -- bubbles to the
surface. "Ultimately it's a matter of style. What it comes down
to is this: Do you spell Jennifer with a J or a G? That's a
class division. As a populist, I'm all for G."

    Vidal is also confronting the fact that old friends are
dying of AIDS. He does not advertise his homosexuality, but a
reader of his fiction, notably Myra, Kalki, Duluth and of course
Golgotha, knows that he hates the chains of sexual identity.
Throughout his literary career he has played endlessly with the
notions of bisexuality or transsexuality. If readers find the
new novel repellent, it may be that it is no longer easy to
laugh at scenes in which Nero rapes Timothy ("Tighten those
beautiful little buns") or to laugh off lewd goings-on along the
missionary trail.

    Vidal will not give ground, as always determined to follow
his instincts. There is a scene in Golgotha in which Timothy
and Mark, walking in Rome, hear a noisome humming that they
cannot place. "I hear it too," says the author. "It's not
supernatural or anything silly like that. It's just a sense that
things are going on around you." Armed with TV, the fax and
endless phone calls from an international army of well-placed
pals, this remorseless observer is picking up every buzz.