Gore Vidal (84 page)

If the underlying message was that American politics safeguarded the republic by excluding the worst candidates even if at the price of excluding the best, everyone recognized that the premise was plausible, perhaps even convincing. After reading the script, which Gore had sent him, Jack Kennedy said to Jackie, in regard to William Russell's womanizing, “‘
Is Gore writing
about me?'” She passed the gist of the conversation along to the playwright. Gore's depiction of Kennedy's two rivals appealed to the presidential hopeful. When Kennedy told Gore that “
in a campaign
, we don't have all that much time to talk about the meaning of it all,” Gore agreed but said that “no audience would understand the shorthand that politicians talk
in.” Neither Douglas nor Roger Stevens seemed especially bothered by Adlai Stevenson's objections, communicated through Stevenson's good friend Agnes Meyer, the widow of the former owner of the
Washington Post
. Stevenson feared that audiences would identify him with William Russell, the excessively high-minded candidate who has great difficulty making up his mind about whether he should use damaging information about the private life of his chief opponent. “I have always felt that one takes a moral position about actions,” Gore wrote to a correspondent some years later, “but not about people since people are capable at any given moment of a wide variety of responses both good and bad, and the more deeply one examines a character the more difficult it is to give out marks to the whole. I learned this with
The Best Man
. No one liked the play when they read it. The good guy tended to be vacillating (not to mention promiscuous which is supposed to be a bad thing), and the bad guy was decisive and a good husband, full of love. It was all just too peculiar. As Adlai Stevenson wrote unhappily to Roger Stevens, ‘it is an ugly play.'” For Stevens the situation was awkward. He was again one of Stevenson's chief fund-raisers. Still, he could not be pressured on the matter, and its timeliness appealed to everyone connected to the play, especially the producer, who added that to the other attractions he presented to potential investors. With his usual adroitness, Stevens began to raise the $105,000 necessary to bring it to Broadway. Vidal's share of this was an advance of $500. If the play were to succeed, he would have 5 percent of the first $5,000 weekly gross and a larger percentage thereafter. If not, he would receive nothing more than the $500. Joe Anthony, who would also share in the profits, persuaded Gore to lighten the ending considerably. In the original version, the Nixon-like candidate gets the nomination. In revision, as the three men talked over the script through the fall and early winter, a dark-horse candidate, eventually triumphant, was introduced. Sharply critical remarks about Eisenhower and Stevenson were eliminated. All references to which party's convention was being depicted were removed. When Stevens made a deal with the Sheraton Hotel chain that it pay for the sets, references to the Sheraton were substituted for “early Conrad Hilton.” At one of the rehearsals in January, to which Gore had invited Louis Auchincloss, Gore agreed immediately to a change in the dialogue prompted by the director, who thought a particularly witty remark about the Republican matrons of the country would offend some of the audience. Astounded, Louis, who did not know that Gore had decided to
run for Congress, protested that such a witty remark should not be cut. Gore repeated, “Cut it!”

In mid-March, after a week of fine-tuning in Wilmington, Delaware, the company of
The Best Man
, nervous but anticipating success, took the train to Boston, where Stevens put them all up at the luxurious Ritz. Despite Stevens's efforts, the play was not yet fully funded. Partly because of its political content, mostly because Stevens's usual investors had taken heavy losses in recent plays, investors had been slow to commit themselves. Fortunately, the Boston reviews were excellent, the word of mouth descending to New York favorable. Lucien Price wrote Gore a long letter of analysis and praise. “
Never in my lifetime
had I expected to see and hear American politics handled so without gloves.”
Variety's
critic wrote that “by the time
The Best Man
reaches Broadway, it should be ready for the hit class.” Nervous, at dinner with Elaine and Ken Tynan one evening during the Boston run, Gore expressed his anxiety. Ken assured him, Elaine recalled, “‘I know it's going to be a hit. I can tell.' It was nothing about, ‘Oh, it'll be a hit, and that's that.' Ken simply knew and wanted Gore to know that he knew.” Stevens quickly disposed of the rest of the shares, including an investment by Howard of $1,575, or one unit, which represented three fourths of 1 percent of the value of the play. Two weeks later, on March 31,
The Best Man
premiered at the Morosco, the theater that Stevens thought perfect because of its reputation as the classiest house for serious drama. The first-night audience applauded warmly, the buzz in the theater cheerfully enthusiastic. Experienced theater hands, though, knew that the audience at a premiere often has special reasons to seem delighted. Gore and Lyn Austin, behind the railing in back of the orchestra at opposite sides of the theater, worried and paced. As usual, Roger Stevens did things in high style. Everyone went to Sardi's for a champagne dinner party, which the producer hosted. Kit and Gene were there. Howard's parents came. Gore's father, handsomely at ease in evening dress, “loved the success and the glamour,” so it seemed to Howard. Nina, with whom Gore had not communicated for over two years, had not been invited. When rumors about the early reviews began to arrive, the response was ecstatic. The
Variety
reviewer called Stevens to tell him he planned to give the play a superlative notice. “The room began to buzz with a report that Walter Kerr of the
New York Herald Tribune
was calling the play ‘a knockout.' Several minutes later, copies of the New York
Daily News
and the
New York Mirror
were available, with rave
reviews. The
Herald Tribune
appeared at about twelve-thirty, and the rumor about Kerr proved to be correct. When Brooks Atkinson of the
Times
also pronounced
The Best Man
a hit, it very plainly was.” Gore was euphoric. The play was to run for 520 Broadway performances.

In late October 1960, when a carping Robert Kennedy, two hours late, stepped out of the small plane that had just landed at Saugerties Landing in Ulster County and greeted the 29th District's Democratic candidate for Congress, Gore's intensive campaign had been in high gear for over four months. In early April the district's Democratic committee had formally offered him the nomination. So too did the tiny Liberal Party. Since then Joe Hawkins's good judgment had been confirmed. His main liability as a candidate, Gore told his two young campaign assistants, Janet Caro and Ruth Davis, as they drove to events around the five counties, was that if he told the voters what he really thought, they never would elect him. In four of the counties the registration was about four to one Republican, in Dutchess, influenced by Poughkeepsie, the odds only slightly against the Democrats, though even many of the Democratic voters were considerably more conservative than liberal. To many of them, federal funds for education and a national achievement test for schoolchildren in order to qualify for the funds seemed an unconstitutional, even Communist idea. Advocacy of the admission of Red China to the United Nations seemed unattractively radical. Before conservative groups Gore found it expeditious to emphasize family heritage, movie stars, and personal charm. To be elected he needed to swing twenty thousand Republican votes into his column, virtually an impossibility, as most political realists recognized, including friends like Dick Rovere and politicians like Joe Hawkins. From the start he had taken refuge in multiple motives for his candidacy, including the claims of civic responsibility, the fulfillment of family heritage, and the pleasure of high-level mischief-making. That he could not win he would never admit, though he remained throughout realistic about the odds. “
The morning after
the Boston opening” of
The Best Man
he “gave three speeches in Dutchess County and then flew back to Boston. It's remarkable how much energy one has when one's caught up,” he wrote in “On Campaigning,” an unpublished early-1960s essay.

When Robert Kennedy, who knew that the presidential election would
be excruciatingly close, confronted him at Saugerties Landing and testily demanded to know why he was not doing more to push the national ticket, Gore could only answer frankly, “Because I want to win.” The swing voters in the 29th District, to the extent that such a phenomenon existed in that Republican world, were suspicious of the Catholic Kennedys. While Gore admired Jack, he had little respect for Bobby, who seemed to him a relentlessly prejudiced Catholic ideologue who saw the world exclusively in terms of good and evil, all issues as black or white. At study sessions at his home in Virginia with invited intellectual guests, Robert Kennedy, Gore had heard from mutual friends, had revealed the intellectual flexibility of a rhinoceros. Anyway, there was no chance that the national ticket would carry the district. Rabidly partisan, as it made sense for the national campaign manager to be, Robert Kennedy believed that the Kennedy greater good would be and must be served by the self-sacrifice of all his supporters. Gore said no. Whatever chance he had of winning, he wanted his vote count to be as high as possible. From the start of the campaign, and as a condition that Joe Hawkins had agreed to, he had made himself as much an independent candidate as possible. He publicly supported Kennedy. But as he campaigned, his emphasis was entirely on other things. Apparently Jack, with his wry practicality, understood perfectly. Bobby never forgave him.

That it would cost money to run even a congressional campaign had not been much on Vidal's mind when he had encouraged Hawkins to arrange the nomination for him and when he had accepted. The 29th District Democratic committee had little to offer. Gore himself had no intention of spending any more than tiny sums of his own money. Wharton had the wealthy Republican machine behind him. He had become congressman, so rumor had it, when a powerful New York State Republican wagered with Governor Thomas Dewey that he could take “the most obscure person from the most obscure county and send him to Congress.” Wharton had been his exemplary choice. Gore, Janet Caro, recalled, “was very harsh—funny—about his opponent,” who had compiled an empty record as a legislator and who, except for one occasion, declined to appear on the same platform with Vidal. Wharton's was a winning strategy. By mid-August, Gore was advised that his harsh even if witty personal attacks were counterproductive. “
Sell yourself
, don't knock J. Ernest,” Ruth Davis advised. “Much of what you say about him is taken as ‘disrespect.'” And, Davis counseled, “This makes me sick! sick! sick!!—but be sincere! sincere!! sincere!!” The challenge was
to disguise his feelings, sugarcoat his ideas, one of which at least was instantly attractive to voters of both parties and soon reached a larger constituency. Why not give idealistic youngsters when drafted into the military the opportunity to work as American goodwill ambassadors, bringing their technical skills to Third World countries where, under American supervision, they could help local people improve their living standard? When on one of his visits to Washington he mentioned the favorable reception the idea had been receiving, the Kennedys, separating the concept from military service, reconfigured it as the Peace Corps, which within weeks Kennedy formally advocated. Though its origin in Vidal's proposal was not acknowledged, he was delighted to have made that contribution.

That the 29th District Democratic Party had little to contribute to his campaign was not a serious problem. Large sums had never been spent on congressional elections there. The party battle lines were sharply drawn. Wharton felt no need to spend anything but paltry amounts. Gore raised about $2,000 in contributions, almost entirely from friends. Print ads in local newspapers were cheap. When the largely Republican papers attempted to decline his ads, a group of Poughkeepsie merchants, mostly Jewish, who supported his candidacy threatened to withdraw their advertising. The newspaper owners immediately relented. As a supporter of Israel and as a public political statement, Gore was later to buy a $1,000 Israeli bond. Radio interview programs were delighted to have him. Leaflets, handbills, and posters cost next to nothing. The Democratic Party network provided foot soldiers, particularly the inexperienced but energetic Caro and Davis, both of whom enjoyed Gore's entertaining company, and others, including Pat Walsh, Bill Walsh's wife, who also drove him to events. Don MacIsaacs, his competent campaign manager, arranged his schedule, taking care of a thousand and one technical details. There were endless daily coffees and evening meetings, especially with small groups, many of them women delighted to hear about Jack Paar and Paul Newman and occasionally something specifically political. That Vidal was the author of a controversial novel,
The City and the Pillar
, or of any novels at all, almost none of the voters had any notion of. His advisers wisely counseled that the candidate do everything possible to keep his novels and his personal life out of the campaign. Howard kept as much in the background as possible, though of those who knew him as Gore's secretary, some assumed he was also his personal companion, especially since he was regularly at Edgewater. With his own
interests and somewhat puzzled about what Gore's election might mean to their life together, Howard preferred to have little to do with the campaign. “I really had
nothing
to do with that campaign,” Howard recalled. “I didn't like the campaign, all those people…. I was running away from that kind of world, and Gore was running to get into it after he had left his aristocratic world. I couldn't understand it. I can't understand why anybody would want to be elected.” When Wharton's supporters attempted to damage Gore by alluding in broad terms to his sexual preferences, they did not get far. It was to some extent a forbidden topic, and the use of it risked damage to those who used it. At most, an anonymous whispering campaign could be sustained. That one of the crucial plot ploys of
The Best Man
involved a false accusation of homosexual activity against the Nixon-like candidate was both ironic and too thin to be of any use to Gore's political enemies. Soon he was telling noticeably often the story of how he
almost
married Joanne Woodward. The issue mostly disappeared. The Democrats would automatically pull the lever for him, the Republicans for his opponent. In realistic terms, the only issue was how many of the small number of independents and soft Republicans he could attract.