Born On This Day- October 3rd... Writer Gore Vidal

"A Narcissist is Someone Better Looking Than You Are"

I played him once. Well, not exactly, but I based a character that I played- a theatre critic in Tom Stoppard's brilliant- The Real Inspector Hound, on Gore Vidal taken from his apperances on talk shows.

In my collection of favorite authors, there looms the Holy Trinity: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote & Gore Vidal. If I was pressed to pick just one, I would pick the works of Gore Vidal. Brilliant, erudite, perceptive & sarcastic, Vidal could be my one writer library. He is the author of 23 novels, 5 plays, 3 memoirs, numerous screenplays & short stories, & well over 200 essays. With his pedigree (his grandfather was a US senator & his father was a member of Roosevelt’s Cabinet), some good luck & talent, Vidal was witness to almost a century of American political & social life.


His most famous series of novels: Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, Washington DC & The Golden Age, are a fictional history of the United States from the American Revolution to the recent past. Vidal ran for Congress in 1960 & the U.S. Senate in 1982, & he lost both elections. Vidal turned his political genius into literature, chronicling the decline & fall of the American empire in a series of perceptive essays- United States: Essays 1952-1992, which won the 1993 National Book Award. In 2008, Vidal's best essays were collected in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal.

Vidal’s latest, Point to Point Navigation, is a memoir about Vidal coming to grips with the loss of his partner of over 50 years- Howard Auster, who died in 2003. As always, Vidal’s personal drama unfolds against the backdrop of a larger political & historical tableau, in this case the spectacle of George W. Bush’s America as it sinks deeper into war, debt, & autocratic rule. The book’s title refers to Vidal’s flight service during World War, a method of visual navigation in which one flies from one landmark to the next. A follow-up to his 1995 memoir- Palimpsest, the new book returns to Vidal’s early years but focuses mostly on the last half of his life.

In the new Snapshots in History’s Glare, Gore Vidal begins one paragraph with the words: ‘Despite never having been very social…’. He then proceeds to talk of asking Andy Warhol, Mick & Bianca Jagger to visit him & his long time partner- Howard Austen, at their villa outside Ravello, Italy. Vidal:”Our old friends the Newmans (Paul & Joanne, that is) used to drop by. So did Lauren Hutton, Susan Sarandon, Rudolf Nureyev, Hillary Clinton, Sting, James Taylor, Leonard Bernstein, Johnny Carson, Bruce Springsteen & many others.” I have seen photos of a young Vidal setting off to war & later frolicking with Tennessee Williams; & of a middle-aged Vidal running for Congress & hobnobbing with JFK (Vidal shared a stepfather with Jackie Kennedy). Williams told Vidal that JFK had ‘a nice ass’; Vidal told Kennedy who said: ‘Why, that’s very exciting.’  How exhausting it would all have been if Vidal had actually liked company.Gore Vidal is a treasury of quips, bon mots & his vast knowledge of literature & history, particularly American history, shows him to be a sharp observer. His razor sharp tongue cuts down the powerful. He does it with aplomb: “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, & not giving a damn."