GORE VIDAL: Laughing Cassandra

"Left to my own devices, I spent a bemused hour observing the Senate and the House of Representatives. The two chambers have recently been renovated, and the old red hangings and tobacco-stained rugs have been replaced by a delicate grey decor with hints here and there of imperial gilt ... Those few who had come to observe the democratic process seemed mostly to be simple country people who behaved--quite rightly--as if they were at the circus; they chewed tobacco, shelled peanuts, ate popped corn, a newly contrived delicacy with the consistency and, I should think, the flavor of new paper currency."

The quotation is from 1876 (Random House, 364 pages, $10), Gore Vidal's new novel. In any other year but the Bicentennial, 1876 would merely be a bestseller. It was, after all, prompted by two earlier Vidal bestsellers: Washington, D.C. (1967), a study of mid-20th century political scrambling; and Burr (1973), a revisionist appraisal of the foundering fathers. "With 1876" says Vidal, "I've examined the dead center of the country, the year of the Centennial, and there's a nice symmetry, obviously, that it's coming out the year of the Bicentennial."

This "nice symmetry" is even nicer calculation. For the historical fervor fostered by the Bicentennial promises to turn 1876 into a quasi-official happening. Prepublication signs have been uniformly bullish. Random House and Ballantine Books jointly paid Vidal an advance approaching $1 million for hardback and paperback rights. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which has made 1876 its main selection for March, shelled out more than twice its normal fee of $85,000. A first printing of 75,000 copies has virtually disappeared under a flood of orders, and a second printing of 25,000 is on the way. Yet while Vidal, 50, is quite willing to ride the Bicentennial wave, he is in no mood to join in the celebration: "I should think a year of mourning would be highly salutary--for our lost innocence, our eroding liberties, our vanishing resources, our ruined environment."

In fact, 1876 undercuts Vidal's post-Watergate gloom. For his novel demonstrates that the nation was no Eden a hundred years ago. 7576 accurately and comically recounts the sins of the fathers. Maimed Civil War veterans beg on the streets. The odor of the recently destroyed Tweed Ring still hovers over New York City. In Washington, the corruption of the Grant Administration grows more garish by the day. Everything and everybody has a price. An appointment to West Point costs the applicant's parents $5,000, while a seat in the U.S. Senate can be obtained for $200,000. U.S. Senators, as a rule, can be had for much less. Moral indignation, that main current of contemporary American thought, seems nonexistent. Yet Vidal's travelogue through this dark time is as funny as it is unsettling. With malicious wit, irresistible gossip and sturdy research, he turns 1876 into an ornate 200th birthday card inscribed with a poison pen.

The book purports to be the private journal of Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, the illegitimate son and protege of Aaron Burr (and the co-star of Burr). Charles, now 62, returns to the U.S. on the eve of its Centennial after a 38-year sojourn in Europe. Wiped out by the panic of 1873, he must barter his reputation as a respected journalist for some badly needed cash. He must also make a suitable match for his daughter Emma, 35, the widow of an impecunious French prince. Ultimately, Schuyler hopes to parlay a casual friendship with New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden into the best old-age pension of all: with Reformer Tilden the certain Democratic nominee for President and a likely victor over the scandal-ridden Republicans, Schuyler grandly casts himself as America's next minister to France.

Schuyler soon secures domestic assignments with several New York papers and covers a number of enviable beats: Congress and the White House, the opening of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, the Republican convention in Cincinnati. (He rejects his editor's invitation to go West and write about the Indians; the massacre of troops led by General George A. Custer convinces Schuyler that he was right to refuse.) Leading writers and politicos traverse the pages of 1876: William Cullen Bryant,

Mark Twain, President Grant, New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, Representatives Is James G. Elaine and James A. Garfield.

Bedazzled by Schuyler's fatherly connection with royalty, the best New York families--the "Astorocracy"--throw open their gilded doors. Schuyler is allowed into the presence of Mrs. William Astor, contender for the post of society's grandest dame, and notices that her "dead-black hair is not entirely her own." He catches a party glimpse of John Jacob Astor III, "slow but agreeable, and much too red in the face." Wherever he goes, Schuyler is publicly deferential, as befits an aging favor seeker. Privately, this self-described "effete Parisian" fills his journal with barbed, often uproarious observations on this "vigorous, ugly, turbulent realm."

Schuyler's comments (see box) are themselves worth the price of the novel. Vidal has no peers at breathing movement and laughter into the historical past. His book teems with offbeat details: Tilden's dyspepsia and private collection of erotic literature; the Petronian orgy of a White House banquet ("25 courses and six good wines"); the surprisingly low and musical quality of Grant's voice. Even though the results have been in for 100 years, Vidal marshals his research so that the 1876 election reads like a cliffhanger.

The outcome dashes Schuyler's hopes. Tilden collects over 250,000 popular votes more than his Republican opponent, Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, but outright frauds, payoffs and congressional deals make Hayes the victor by one electoral vote. Even the profoundly cynical Schuyler is shocked by the brazenness of the theft. A further jolt awaits him. His daughter catches a millionaire husband--and there is evidence that she may have abetted his first wife's death to do it. "Why write any of this?" a distraught Schuyler asks near the end. "Answer: habit. To turn life to words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round. Words translate and transmute raw life, make bearable the unbearable." It is the last refuge of the artist--or of the bitterly disappointed.

In the case of Schuyler's creator, the two may in fact be one and the same. For despite his advanced years and portly figure, the tremor in his right hand, rheumatic shoulder and incipient cataracts, Charlie bears an uncanny resemblance to Gore. If proof were needed of this connection, Vidal teasingly provides it. At one point in 7576, Schuyler meets "a most sensitive, wide-eyed, rather plump young man from, I think, Boston." Though Schuyler does not give his name, he is clearly Henry James. The young writer promises to send Schuyler his newly issued first novel (James himself had just published Roderick Hudson) and to live abroad "the sort of life you have led, Mr. Schuyler." Nabokovian mirror-images multiply. Vidal's puppet., Schuyler, prompts James to live abroad; Vidal has since followed James' example. The locale of this meeting is--also clearly--Edgewater; the handsome 1820 Greek Revival mansion on the Hudson River was once owned by the author of 7576.

The James-Schuyler scene is typically Vidalian: a bright, sparkling surface charged with the animus of estrangement. The same note echoes through all of his writings.

Affairs are in the hands of parvenus and thugs; the best and the brightest cannot bail out the sinking ship.

Vidal obviously numbers himself among this Sisyphean elite.

His tone is that of the seer scorned; yet he can hardly claim to be the prophet ignored. For 30 years he has been a cinder in the public eye: novelist, Broadway playwright, television dramatist, screenwriter, essayist, congressional candidate, actor, troubador to the Kennedy Camelot, talk-show regular, political debater and full-time nag. Millions who have never read him recognize his electronic presence: elegance bordering on narcissism, feline languor, throaty self-assurance.

He has never lacked a podium to argue his pet causes--and to infuriate great masses of his countrymen at will. He has mocked the "heterosexual dictatorship" in the U.S., championed the rights and pleasures of homosexuals, and called for a legal curb on human breeding. He has castigated America as "the land of the dull and the home of the literal" and repeatedly predicted the "smashup" of the "last empire on earth." Like many a gadfly before him, from Twain to Mencken, Vidal has won fame and wealth by biting the land that feeds him.

Yet this most prodigal native son cannot seem to decide whether he abandoned his home or was pushed. "I do nothing but think about my country," he says. "The United States is my theme, and all that dwell in it." Vidal's gibes at the nation's expense are based on something more than casual distaste; they bear the stamp of a long--and unrequited--passion. "The only thing I've ever really wanted in my life," he says without irony, "was to be President."

To those who know Vidal simply as the Dracula of late-night talk shows, his federal dreams may sound like terminal hubris. In fact, they are in his blood. Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. was born Oct. 3, 1925, in the Cadet Hospital at West Point, where his father Eugene, a one-time football hero, taught aeronautics.

His mother Nina was the daughter of Oklahoma Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, a fiery Populist-Democrat who had been completely blind from the age of eleven. Vidal spent much time in his grandfather's home in Washington's Rock Creek Park. The boy read aloud to the Senator (constitutional history, British common law, the Congressional Record) and guided him around Washington. A book-crammed attic also gave Vidal a place to hide from growing tensions at home. A childhood friend from these years remembers Vidal's father as "quiet" and his mother as "so self-centered I cannot imagine anyone standing to be in a room with her." They were divorced in 1935.

Vidal still expresses unabashed hero worship for his father, who died in 1969: "He was the most famous athlete of his day and a very glamorous figure in aviation." Several years ago Vidal entered a movie theater "to see some old March of Time newsreels. And there, suddenly, was my father. It made an extraordinary impact on me. He must have been about 35, and there I was, older than that, watching him. It was very strange. I was very, very fond of him."

Senator Gore, who died in 1949, was eulogized in a 1959 TV play written by his grandson. Vidal himself spoke the last words: "Gore's long life passed as swiftly, in his own phrase as 'the snowflakes upon the river.' But he is still remembered and he is missed not only for himself but for what he was."

His mother, though, is a subject on which the usually candid Vidal has volunteered little. "She had a gift for not doing the right thing" is about all he has to offer. But Anais Nin, who met and befriended Vidal in Paris in 1945, told her Diary that the young man "knows the meaning of his mother abandoning him when he was ten to remarry and have other children." In another entry, she wrote: "He had wanted his mother to die."

Shortly after her divorce, Nina Vidal married Hugh D. Auchincloss, a wealthy broker and the squire of Merrywood, a handsome Virginia estate. Despite the trauma that this union occasioned, it gave Vidal two tenuous family connections that were to affect his career: Auchincloss's mother was Emma Brewster Jennings, a descendant of Aaron Burr; and, after he and Vidal's mother were divorced, Auchincloss married Mrs. Janet Bouvier, the mother of the future Jacqueline Kennedy.

In 1940 Vidal entered Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and, echoing his grandfather's fierce isolationism, soon joined the school's America First movement. "He fancied himself a campus politician," recalls Classmate Robert Bingham, now an editor at The New Yorker. Student government allowed Vidal to act out childhood dreams. "There was a senate," Bingham says, "and he pretended to represent Oklahoma. He threw himself into it, and I'm sure he saw himself as a Senator." A streak of vanity surfaced; opponents noticed that Vidal always presented his better profile during debates. A less-than-brilliant student, Vidal never made it to the advanced English class. But he published poems and stories in the school Review, began and abandoned a novel, and changed his name from Gene to Gore. His graduation yearbook named him Class Hypocrite.

As if in confirmation, Vidal immediately dropped his isolationism. On July 30, 1943, he joined the Enlisted Reserve Corps of the U.S. Army and later landed in the Transportation Corps. He spent some months as a warrant officer aboard a freighter plying the seas around the Aleutians. Vidal used the empty hours to begin Williwaw, a Hemingwayesque tale of men at sea. By the time he was discharged in 1946, he had finished it and a second novel as well. When Williwaw was published that March, Vidal was heralded as a prodigy of American letters.

It was a heady time to be young, famous and among the first into the era of postwar fiction. Vidal did not attend college; instead, he joined the class of Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, John Hersey. An Alabama gamin named Truman Capote materialized, and he and Vidal were soon nightclubbing together and meeting for weekly gossip lunches amid the palms of New York's Plaza Hotel. "It was deadly to get caught in the crossfire of their conversation," recalls one who was there. "They were a pair of gilded youths on top of the world."

But perhaps because success had come so easily, Vidal soon grew "bored with playing it safe." In 1948 he published The City and the Pillar, a sympathetic story of homosexuality. The novel's subdued, discreet portrait of physical love between males was shocking for its time. The sensation it caused made The City and the Pillar a bestseller. It also may have harmed the author. The New York Times refused to run advertisements for the book. Many critics were angered and decided that Vidal had betrayed their earlier praise. During the next six years, his star declined. He published five more novels to a generally tepid recognition from reviewers and the public. His average income from each was about $5,000.

That was hardly enough to maintain the Vidal style, much less Edgewater, which he had bought in 1950. Searching for a way to support himself with his pen, Vidal decided to try writing for television. The Iron Pyrites age had arrived and with it came a voracious demand for new material. Vidal rapidly mastered the demands of the teleplay form and ultimately commanded fees as high as $5,000 for a one-hour script.

He tried screenwriting and proved adept at that as well. A suave addition to Hollywood society, he was briefly engaged to Actress Joanne Woodward; she and Husband Paul Newman are now among his closest friends. His backstage knowledge was only exceeded by his familiarity with backstairs politics. The Best Man, his well-made melodrama about infighting at a political nominating convention, opened on Broadway in 1960 and ran for 520 performances.

By that time Vidal was running too. Writing The Best Man had inspired him to become the Democratic candidate for Congress in New York State's bedrock Republican 29th District. It was a kamikaze assignment. Vidal advocated such positions as federal aid to education and diplomatic recognition of Communist China. With the help of Eleanor Roosevelt, a Hudson Valley neighbor and friend, and such show-business celebrities as Woodward and Newman, Vidal staged a surprisingly effective campaign. He lost by 25,000 votes (out of a total 183,000 cast) but outpolled every Democratic House candidate in the district since 1910. He also ran ahead of Presidential Candidate John F. Kennedy.

With Stepsister Jacqueline in the White House, Vidal regained entree to the center of power. He enjoyed an easy, bantering relationship with J.F.K. Once, sitting next to Kennedy at a horse show, the author remarked on how easy it would be for a marksman to assassinate the President. Vidal then added that he would probably be hit instead. "No great loss," Kennedy joked. But Vidal's snappish wit and lofty mien were not the virtues of a loyal flatterer. Robert Kennedy distrusted and disliked him. During a White House party, Bobby flared when Vidal laid a brotherly hand on Jackie. Insults were exchanged, and Gore was banished from the court. He later struck back in print with fulminations like "The Holy Family," a notorious Esquire essay that warned of the day when "a vain and greedy intellectual establishment will most certainly restore to power the illusion-making Kennedys." The breach with Jackie has not been healed.

A gradual withdrawal from the U.S. was under way. In 1963 he began spending much of his time in Rome, soaking up local color for his first novel in ten years. Julian (1964), a vivid study of the 4th century Roman Emperor who vainly tried to stem the spread of Christianity, was a surprise bestseller. A string of successful novels followed, including the memoirs of Myra Breckinridge (1968), Vidal's funniest word on fuddled sexual identity.

In fact, Julian and Myra Breckinridge suggest Vidal's startling range as a literary mime. He can pull off convincing impersonations of both an ascetic, driven emperor and a movie-mad transsexual--and impress history buffs with his faithful reproduction of Aaron Burr. He exhibits this talent in private as well. The distinctive, stentorian voice can shift eerily into that of J.F.K. or Richard Nixon. When telling an anecdote, Vidal regularly falls into the tones and mannerisms of its subject. He can do a wry impression of Tennessee Williams, explaining what happened to Blanche DuBois at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire: "Well, ah assyume she spent the next three ye-ahs seducin' th' young doctuhs at the insane asylum, then was let out and opened a smawul shop in the French Quahtuh."

Vidal's favorite public act is playing the gentleman bitch.

His political essays are less written than engraved with acid. He has railed constantly--and rather inconsistently--at an American electorate too stupid to choose proper leaders and at a capitalistic oligarchy that systematically cheats the common yeomanry. A litany developed: all people are innately bisexual (though not all choose to act it); the police persecute people for private preference and turn a blind eye to fat-cat criminality; the end is near.

Vidal's perigee as a public debater came during the turbulent 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Appearing on ABC-TV, while demonstrators and police rioted in the streets, Vidal called Fellow Commentator William F. Buckley Jr. a "crypto Nazi." Buckley riposted: "Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddam face and you'll stay plastered." Mutual lawsuits finally came to a well-earned nothing.

Intimates who know him off-tube insist that Vidal's public image as a Cassandra in drag is a mask protecting a sensitive, even self-sacrificial ally. Actress Claire Bloom recalls the time last year when he interrupted the writing of 1876 to accompany her on a twelve-day trip to Greece. Depressed by a broken marriage and a role in a play that folded out of New York, she found Vidal a consoling companion, showing her local sights she had not seen before. Later, he dedicated 1876 to her. "I know he likes to give the impression that he is incapable of love." Says Bloom, "He is capable of it, but he doesn't want others to know, I don't know why."

Vidal's half sister, Mrs. Nina Straight, a Washington socialite, agrees that he has held something back from the world: "I don't think Gore wants people to know what a sterling character he is and how hard he works. He has not had a happy life, but he's never dwelt on it. He just put certain things aside and concentrated on the writing. I know it sounds Horatio Algeresque --he will vomit to think I'm putting him in that category. But it's true."

In fact, by most outward measure, Vidal's present life is close to the last chapter in an Alger novel--updated by Gore Vidal. He spends eight or nine months each year at La Rondinaia

(The Swallow's Nest), his spectacular Italian villa at Ravello, perched on a 200-ft. cliff overlooking the Amalfi coast. The sundrenched three-story house is impeccably furnished and filled with mementos and family photographs; Senator Gore's old rocking chair sits in the second-floor study where his grandson writes.

Everyday details are handled by Bronx-born Howard Austen, 47, Vidal's companion for 26 years. Vidal rises most mornings between 9:30 and 11, has a small breakfast and then writes until 3 p.m., pausing only to consume a boiled egg for lunch. Next comes 30 to 45 minutes of weight lifting, a daily regimen to keep his 6-ft. frame tolerably within range of 180 Ibs. When this fails, he adopts a last resort: holing up in a hotel where he hates the food. Vidal manifests an unembarrassed narcissism about his appearance. "When I was a little boy," he says, "I looked just like the Gores --blond and pig-nosed. But growing older, I've grown more Vidal." He cannot resist a final Roman vanity: "I have the face now of one of the later, briefer Emperors."

Night life at Ravello is generally subdued. Visitors to La Rondinaia have included Princess Margaret, the Newmans, Andy Warhol and Mick and Bianca Jagger, but Vidal spends most evenings alone, reading until 3 a.m.--usually research for what he will write the next day.

Vidal also maintains a spacious apartment in Rome but spends less and less time there. He is friendly with journalists and occasionally sees such fellow novelists as Anthony Burgess and Muriel Spark. Curiously for the author of Julian and a man who considers Christianity "the single greatest disaster that has ever happened to the West," Vidal seems to delight in the company of clerics. One of the people he dines with in Rome is American Jesuit John Navone, a theologian at the Pontifical Gregorian University. When Navone once brought a group of visiting Jesuits to Vidal's apartment, Vidal greeted them with the question "Out for a night in Transylvania?"

On another occasion, at dinner, Vidal teased Navone: "Now, John, tell us what your idea of heaven is ... all about those angels." Navone gently replied: "There are no harps. We are already there. Heaven is communicating with friends." Moved, Vidal had nothing to say.

That rarely happens, as TIME Correspondent Erik Amfitheatrof discovered during a recent interview with the author. He found the celebrated Vidal tongue as sharp and active as ever. A sampling of Vidal's current opinions and animadversions:

-- Truman Capote: "He's made lying an art form--a minor art form."

-- Norman Mailer: "I think his whole life was destroyed by his name. He should have been called Male-est."

-- The "cleansing effect" of

Watergate: "Everybody's so anesthetized by scandal that if it turned out Richard Nixon were the illegitimate son of Golda Meir, it wouldn't even make the front pages."

-- Senator Edward M. Kennedy: "He will probably be our next President. Every country should have at least one King Farouk."

-- Ronald Reagan: "Reagan can't talk for more than about 28 minutes. That's all he's programmed for, then he has nothing to say."

-- The presidential campaign:

"It doesn't make much difference who's elected. The system doesn't work. Our elections are an expensive public charade to celebrate the owners of the country."

Vidal has much else to think about these days. The next item on his agenda is Gore Vidal's Caligula, a film project financed by Penthouse Publisher Bob Guccione and starring Malcolm McDowell. The title, naturally, is Vidal's idea. "I decided to strike a blow for the writer," he says, "and against the idea that the director is the sole auteur of a film Some are--Fellini, Bergman. But most directors are parasites, peculiarly dependent on the talents of writers whose names they very rarely reveal to the press." More immediate is a March visit to the U.S. promoting 1876. Vidal seems unenthusiastic: "When I think about it, I just see 10,000 Ramada Inns from one end of the country to the other."

In such a mood, he muses about retirement: "After all, I've been at it for 30 years. At my age Scott Fitzgerald had been dead for six years, Hemingway had nearly stopped, Faulkner wasn't much good. It might be a good idea to stop while you have all your marbles."

Then, with typical reverse English he announces that he will be back in the country next summer, covering the Democratic Convention for Rolling Stone. There may be more than

sheer perversity behind that assignment: Vidal is surely aware that 50 is barely puberty in the life of a politician. Could he be subjecting himself to the chaos of political conventions because of an old obsession, the one prize life has denied him? How could a writer resist the fantasy: a hopelessly deadlocked convention; a sudden mammoth coming-to-trie-senses by the delegates; a whisper cascading into a roar that will not be gaveled into silence. And out into the glare of klieg lights and a forest of microphones there steps, at last, the Best Man.

Such a scenario, Vidal admits, is impossible. "You can't write --how to put it discreetly?--adventurous books like Julian and Myra Breckinridge and then make the trip to Pennsylvania Avenue."

True enough. But if you can create Charlie Schuyler and his engrossing history, why bother with Conventional thinking? As every author--and every reader --knows, writing well is the best trip of them all.

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