Gore Vidal (134 page)

If he complained about feeling ill, it was the occasional hypochondriacal response, partly annoyance, partly fear, to the decline of his body or to environmental assaults like the nuclear-plant explosion in the Soviet Union. The irradiated clouds drifted westward on the winds. “
Thanks to Chernobyl
,” he told Claire Bloom in June 1986, “a number of us now spit blood like 18th century poets: irritated throats from Cesium B7 in the soil. I had lungs, esophagus—the lot—checked. No cancer, just dripping sinuses,
throats of fire. The govt refuses to admit just what happened.” That did not prevent him, immediately after his return from a monthlong trip to Bangkok, via Laos, Burma, Tahiti, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles, from accepting an invitation to attend a peace conference in Moscow in February 1987, with, among others, Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, and Gregory Peck, where he gave a speech on the origins of the Cold War. The invitation came “
from a street in Moscow
,” he told Halfpenny, “no signature, just a street number, asking me to come to a Forum on a nuclear free world, Feb 14–16. This was the 11th. So I rang the Soviet consulate, the slowest most Byzantine office outside the Vatican. ‘Was it too late' … I began. ‘Come right over,' said the consul. ‘But you're closed.' … ‘We'll open,' he said. In half an hour I had my visa; another half hour I was at Aeroflot where a ticket waited.”

In Moscow he saw John Kenneth Galbraith, Pierre Trudeau, Yoko Ono, and Claudia Cardinale, among other celebrities, though when he asked to see the list of writers, he was shown a dozen names, all, except Mailer and Graham Greene, unknown to him, “
the usual loyal party
members who are repaid, once a decade, with a slice of bread and a seat at the circus.” The Mailers and he had an amiable dinner together at the flat of the editor of the Russian publishing house that published them both. “M was upset that only
Naked and D
has been published in the Soviet while five of my books have been done. He then held us riveted with an analysis of
Ancient Evenings
which he regards as his best book and must be published in Russia. Slight tension. ‘The book,' said our editor, ‘is just too long for us, with the paper shortage'—which is true.” During the conference working sessions, the participants were divided into sections. “Alas, I was with Culture,” Gore recalled, “presided over by a deputy minister, rather smooth, with Greene as figurehead. I sat next to him at a baize covered main table while several hundred lit-types made speeches at us…. Andrei Voisinitzen [Andrey Voznesensky] (I can never spell it) was in good form, a great charmer and considered their best poet…. AV knew that I knew that (Top Secret) he had fucked Mme Onassis and so every time he could get me to one side he would ask, wistfully, for news of
her
, which I gave as best I could, as learned from our sister in common. Around eleven in the morning GG would begin to wriggle beside me: he still looks about 17, a lean dirty-minded boy with a face that got, somehow, frost-bitten and worn. ‘Will these French never shut up?' he moaned. Then he wriggled up some more
and then he whispered, ‘I've got a flask, you know. Do I dare?' ‘No.' I was stern. ‘Everyone will see you' (Gorbachev is harsh on the subject). ‘I suppose not,' he whined. Then I took pity on him. ‘Drop your notes,' I said. ‘Pretend to search for them beneath the green baize, take a swig.' He sighed, ‘I should never come up again, I fear.' But at lunch, he alone was supplied an entire bottle of vodka, which he drank in about an hour, no sign of drunkenness, not, indeed, at midnight either, after he and I had caroused together at the cinema club restaurant with our translators.” Gorbachev impressed him considerably. “Norman was more suspicious. I turned out to be right. But he was right to be suspicious. He had followed the communist line more than I had, and he thought it was the usual bluff for Westerners. I thought something had happened there. And then Gorbachev told very funny stories about Ronald Reagan's meetings with him. Some of them were wildly funny.” When they met at Vienna, Reagan had told Gorbachev “that if the earth were facing an invasion from Mars, his country and my country would become allies.” Gorbachev had responded, “‘I think it's premature to worry about an invasion from Mars, but there are nuclear weapons that are here right now, and the two of us should work together and ban them.' Then Gorbachev paused, dramatically. ‘The president made no reply.'” The next day, at a crowded international press session, British, French, and American journalists asked hostile, baiting questions. “I sat next to Mailer and wife on the ground that as she was the best-looking person in the hall we would not be much noticed and the press would leave Mailer and me alone. I was right. The Soviet Union fell in love with her, if not with us.”

At the end of February, soon after returning from Moscow, Gore flew to Brazil, Argentina, and Spain for lectures and TV appearances in conjunction with Spanish-language editions of
Matters of Fact and of Fiction
and his new novel,
Empire
. It was the first time he had been to South America. “
All sorts of changes
are taking place in people's blood with AIDS as the most exciting and my own Epstein-Barr (known in LA as Epstein Bar and Grill),” which it turned out he did not have, “as one of the dullest: constant allergies, a feeling of lethargy, etc. I transcend it,” he told Halfpenny, “by, in 6 months, going to Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuquet, Hong Kong, NYC, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Toledo, London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Moscow again.” When he returned to Ravello, he was furious to discover that the gardener had murdered the two dogs living in the olive groves, two strays who had come to stay. Some
years before, the gardener had allowed Michael Tyler-Whittle's elderly Caligula, whom they had inherited, to starve to death. He was immediately and angrily fired. The only remaining pet was a charming homeless cat who had wandered in the year before, “
white slender with pale
yellow-green eyes, pink tipped ears, nose, paws,” and had instantly become a cherished member of the family. “She talks constantly … and is known as Miss Miao to the town and the Cat from Hell around the house,” he wrote to Halfpenny. “She is incredibly clumsy but very affectionate in a most uncatlike way but then we brought her up with two dogs and she thinks she is a dog which means a sandpapery licking of one's nose.”

At La Rondinaia through much of 1985—86 he had worked on
Manifest Destiny
, the tentative title of the next novel in his American-history series. When the manuscript became too long, he used much of it under the title
Empire (“Manifest Destiny
was considered too difficult a title for our non-reading readers”), published in June 1987, for which Random House had paid a $1-million advance. The remainder became the core of
Empire's
successor,
Hollywood
, which was published in February 1990. “I knew I had to stop at the end of
Empire
at a good point, which I found with the showdown between Theodore Roosevelt and Hearst. But I was doing the story really from Caroline's point of view,” he recalled, “and I couldn't let her go. Since I was going to take her up in Hollywood, that would then get me through Woodrow Wilson…. So in a way these two are really one book.” The main character of
Empire
(1987), which begins precisely on the day when the Spanish-American War is over and twenty-one years after
1876
ends, is Caroline Sanford, Emma and William's daughter, Charles Schuyler's granddaughter, and Blaise Sanford's half-sister. The young Caroline is in England, visiting the American ambassador, John Hay, among whose famous guests are his friends Henry Adams and Henry James and who is about to be invited by President McKinley to become Secretary of State. Caroline soon moves to Washington, escapes her engagement to marry Del Hay, John Hay's son, and successfully fights her half-brother's attempt to deprive her of her part of their inheritance. Shortly she is the proprietor of an increasingly powerful Washington newspaper, competing with William Randolph Hearst and her brother Blaise, Hearst's protégé, as the marriage of image-makers and power brokers solidifies the transformation of the republic into a modern empire in which the wealthy get wealthier
and the powerful more powerful. For the restless, beautiful Caroline, the next stop is
Hollywood
, which begins in 1917 with Hearst at the White House and America about to enter World War I. Much of
Hollywood
is the story of Caroline's life in Washington and then California, her movement from the newspaper's printed page to Hollywood's silver screen within the context of American history from 1917 to 1928, Woodrow Wilson to Warren Harding, both of whom make substantial appearances. Senator Thomas P. Gore appears as himself. An important invented new character, Senator James Burden Day, a powerful up-and-coming political figure who has much in common with Senator Gore, is Caroline's married lover. A friend of Caroline's brother, Blaise, who has now become an influential Washington newspaper publisher and political operative, Day's ambition is to be President. Burden Day's history, sensibility, and political life become one of the important elements in the novel. When Caroline moves to California, soon to become a star of the silent screen, the worlds of Hollywood and of Washington are united; the country will never be the same again. Powerful California now not only makes images but determines elections. A border-state Southerner, Senator Day (his middle name indicates some of the strain) carries one of the heavy weights of American history, the North-South antagonism, still very much alive, embodied for him in his constant awareness that his father, who had fought and died for the Confederacy, would strongly disapprove of his son's politics and his Washington, D.C., world. Caroline fades from his life and then from the series.

In late November 1987 Gore was in London for
Empire's
British publication, a new volume of essays (
Armageddon? Essays, 1983–1987)
, and a single-volume reissue of
Myra/Myron
by his new British publisher, Andrew Deutsch. Its director, Tom Rosenthal, whom Gore had known since Heinemann days, was a devoted Vidal enthusiast. In general, both in America and Britain,
Empire
got superlative reviews, particularly from those sympathetic to Vidal's view of American history, but even from a reviewer as begrudging as the
New York Times
's Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, whom Vidal disliked for what he felt was his continuation of Orville Prescott's narrow-minded moralism, though in fact Lehmann-Haupt frequently praised Vidal's historical fiction, which he reviewed glowingly. He had much less enthusiasm for
Myron
and the inventions, mainly on aesthetic grounds. Michiko Kakutani Vidal thought an even worse embodiment of the
Prescott tradition, to which she added a tendency to lecture the reader about the obvious, an exemplification of the maxim that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.”

Much of the spring and summer of 1988 he spent at Ravello, working on
Hollywood
and writing essays, a volume of which,
At Home: Essays, 1982–1988
, Random House published in November 1988. For a man who had claimed he would never write an autobiography, numbers of essays in
At Home
were noticeably autobiographical, particularly the two that framed the titular theme, “At Home in Washington, D.C.” and “At Home in a Roman Street” as well as “On Flying” and the essays on Prokosch, Williams, and Calvino. So too was
Hollywood
, in sly, effective ways, particularly the homage paid to Gene Vidal, who appears as Douglas Fairbanks's trainer, “tall and out of place among the stars … a handsome Army flier who had been an all-American football player at West Point”; and the evocation of Thomas Pryor Gore, who is an important presence in the Woodrow Wilson—Warren Harding world the novel dramatizes. Senator Burden Day “and his blind neighbor, former Senator Thomas Gore, gazed upon the moonlit woods where Gore was building a house. Defeated in 1920 after three terms in the Senate, Gore was practicing law in Washington and for the first time making money. ‘The house will be just out of view, three hundred yards to the northwest of that hill.' The blind man pointed accurately with his cane…. Although two separate accidents had blinded him by the time he was ten, there was a legend that he had been elected Oklahoma's first senator by pretending not to be blind. Hence the pretense of reading, of seeing…. Some years earlier, Gore had created a sensation in the Senate by revealing that he had been offered a bribe by an oil company. No one had ever done that before and, privately, Gore's eccentricity was deplored in the cloakroom. ‘I'd
starve
if it wasn't for my friends!' a Southern statesman had declaimed…. ‘You plan to come back, don't you?' Gore looked at him. In the moonlight his single glass eye shone, while the blind one was full and reflected no light. ‘When I went down in the Harding sweep, I thought it was the end of the world. Then I pulled myself together and said to myself, Here you are, fifty years old, and you've been a senator since you were thirty-seven and never had a chance to make a penny. So take time off. Build a house in Rock Creek Park. Then go back. I wrote a note and hid it in the Senate chamber, saying I'd be back one day.
Funny,' he held his cane in front of him like a dowsing rod, ‘right after I hid that scrap of paper, I went into the cloakroom to collect my gear—this was the last day of the session—and suddenly I felt two arms around me and I was being given a bear-hug and I said, “Who is it?” and this voice said, “Just an old duffer going off to be hung.” And it was Harding.' … ‘He [Harding] had so much luck for so long,' Burden said. ‘Now the people are ready to turn on him.' ‘Sooner or later, they turn on everybody.' Gore sighed. ‘I tell you, if there was any race other than the human race, I'd go join it.'”