Vidal would no doubt be happy to concur. ‘My God, what a lucky life,’ he confesses. ‘I was born into Washington society. Both sides of my family were political. Money, fame, power — I was never in awe of any of that. It had no spell over me.’
His family was grand, but it was also scattered. His father, Eugene Vidal, was on F.D. Roosevelt’s cabinet as the first chief aviation administrator. (‘I was the youngest person ever to land a plane,’ says Vidal, nodding proudly at a framed photograph of father and son in the cockpit. One wonders, confusedly, whether he still is.) He spent most of his childhood, however, under the tutelage of his grandfather, Senator Gore, Oklahoma’s first elected senator. Gore senior had been blind from the age of ten, and Gore junior often used to guide the old man to and from the Capitol (one summer Gore junior wore a swimsuit when he went to collect his grandfather; Gore senior was none the wiser, until he overheard catty speculations about the family’s red-neck origins).
The Gores were Anglo-Irish, settling in America in the 1690s, the Vidals Alpine newcomers arriving’in 1848: Gore Vidal combined the family names in a melodious clinch, one that I take to be an indispensable ingredient of his glamour. At an early age little Gore acquired a further sprig to the family tree. His mother divorced his father and became the second wife of Hugh Auchincloss, a descendant of Aaron Burr, whom Vidal would eventually write a novel about. Mr Auchincloss was plainly a lucky man: his third-wife was the mother of Jackie Bouvier, who later became Jackie Kennedy, and who is now Jackie Onassis.
Vidal ‘quit schooling’ at the age of seventeen, and has been a tireless autodidact ever since. Recent reading includes Balzac and D.H. Lawrence: ‘Balzac is giving me great pleasure. Lawrence — my God — every page I think, “Jesus, what a fag. Jesus, what a faggot this guy sounds.”‘
As the war was petering out, Vidal saw peripheral service in the Aleutians. ‘For all my generation, the war was just a great interruption.’ He was committed to hospital in mid-service with premature arthritis; the break nevertheless allowed him to complete his first novel Williwaw, a cool look at war from the edges, at the age of nineteen. The book was a succès, but hardly a success. Sales were indifferent, and Vidal now found that he had to write a novel a year to stay alive. Contrary to popular belief, Vidal was no princeling: he got a handsome send-off when he came of age, but nothing since.
Between 1945 and 1949 he wrote six novels, living frugally in cheap countries like Guatemala. One of these novels was a notorious work called The City and the Pillar. It was enough to evaporate the little repute Vidal had.
‘I took on the whole heterosexual dictatorship of America at the age of twenty-three. Enough wounds were given and received in that battle to satisfy even Norman Mailer.’ The City and the Pillar was about ‘the essential naturalness, if not normality, of homosexuality’. It seems mild enough — even evasively cerebral – today; but all the closets were locked in the American 1940s, and the book scuppered Vidal as a serious novelist. A few more fictions trickled out until 1953 (including three detective novels under the quibbling name of Edgar Box — ‘they took eight days each to write’), then Vidal put down his quill, opened his eyes and looked round about himself.
There followed a busy, public decade. Spreading his wings, Vidal became one of the last contract writers for MGM. ‘It wasn’t like working as a writer. It was like working for General Motors,’ he admits coolly. One of his (uncredited) screenplays was for Ben Hur: ‘By the time I arrived on the set, everything had already been built — including Charlton Heston.’ He wrote plays for television and Broadway; he wrote essays and political pieces; Vidal embarked on his long career as a television pundit. At one point there was surprising talk of a romance and engagement between Vidal and Joanne Woodward. They ended up living à trots for a time in California, the third member of this curious ménage being Paul Newman.