A Gadfly in Glorious, Angry Exile

By MARTHA DUFFY RAVELLO

The prayer breakfast during the Republican Convention is revving up its final hallelujahs as Mary Lou Retton burbles her introduction of President Bush. Thousands of miles away, in his aerie on the Mediterranean, an avid CNN watcher is taking in the action and talking back to his TV set. Of the ex- gymnast, he predicts, "She'll be running for office very soon." The President, as usual, quotes a letter, this one from a child named Joy Vaughn. "What if her name were Joy Previn?" asks the viewer sarcastically. One of the pols plugs voluntary prayer in schools. "Well," is the response, "there goes the First Amendment again."

Despite his glee at the campaign antics, Gore Vidal is disgusted. He has loved politics passionately all his life. The grandchild of a U.S. Senator, he himself ran for that office unsuccessfully in 1982. In 1960 he wrote The Best Man, a witty, astute play about a presidential campaign. What he sees around him now is all change and decay. "We have one political party with two right wings," he says. "See why I go so deep into satire? You know, there are only two great issues -- converting from war to peace and managing the economy. Instead we're talking about the fetus and the flag."

Vidal -- perversely brilliant novelist, acerbic gadfly and now movie actor -- lives in self-imposed partial exile in a massive villa in the postcard- picturesque town of Ravello on Italy's Amalfi coast. All his surroundings are serene. Vidal, 67, is a tireless, disciplined author, and his house is in every detail of location and layout designed to enhance concentration.

For the first time in nearly six months, he recently left Ravello. Paramount persuaded him to go to Hollywood for a press jamboree to promote Tim Robbins' shrewd, bumptious political film Bob Roberts. Vidal co-stars as an aging liberal Senator, and he does it with authority and panache. His reviews have been excellent, and the ham in him loves it. "I keep saying, 'John Houseman is dead. Maybe I'll get those nice parts.' "

On the literary front, Random House is publishing LIVE from Golgotha, an outrageous recasting of the Jesus story ("All these excuses and all this fund raising, and still he hasn't come back"). Harvard University Press has just brought out Screening History, a gentle, charming memoir of the movies Vidal saw as a child and how they influenced him. Two books and a movie in two weeks -- not bad.

Not surprising, however. Vidal has written 23 novels, six plays, eight volumes of essays and he isn't sure how many film and television scripts. At the moment he is reading the page proofs of his collected commentary -- 1,200 pages' worth -- representing just two-thirds of his output since 1952. But to him all this is old hat. "I have a new career," he exults. "I'm now a journalist. And all because of the fax!" He keeps the machine nearer to him than his phone. "I'm full of opinions, but with the mails, the pieces were . out of date when they arrived."

Vidal has lived most of his adult life in the public eye. Even for people who have only heard of his mischievous best seller Myra Breckinridge, his image from countless TV talk shows is indelible -- by turns suave, perverse, a man smarter than anyone else on the set. His waspish ripostes can be frightening to confront but endlessly quotable later -- like his line about Ronald Reagan: "A triumph of the embalmer's art." Handsome, saturnine, Vidal projects the threat that he is capable of derailing anything.

Christianity, for one thing. LIVE from Golgotha takes a shocking look at Jesus' claim as the Messiah and at those who, like St. Paul and St. Timothy, spread the word. Though the author has personally never progressed beyond a manual Smith Corona ("I have spent my life changing ribbons"), he has a sophisticated knowledge of computer gadgetry and a puddle jumper's expertise at time tripping.

Golgotha and Myra have several things in common: fantastic sexual gambits and a kind of Lewis Carroll flouting of the laws of time. Plotted like a mystery for late-page plot twists, it casts Paul as a tap-dancing gay, Jesus as a brilliant businessman. Drawing on the work of historian Joel Carmichael, Vidal argues that when Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple, he was destroying a sophisticated Roman financial structure that controlled banking in the Middle East -- and thereby sealing his own fate.

The narrator is Timothy, who is caught on a time trip not of his choosing. All he wants to do is set down his own account of the glory days, but he is thwarted by sci-fi circuitry that allows other people to penetrate his narrative. In particular, two chaps named Cutler intrude ruthlessly. Gradually it becomes clear that Cutler One wants to discard Jesus and await a Messiah who does not end up on a cross. Cutler Two opts for Jesus as the focus of a new religion. In this muddle, centuries turn inside out and the cast at Golgotha can be changed and added to; there is even room for Mary Baker Eddy and Dr. Helen Schucman. It is also possible for Jesus to command a good table at Spago. Or, given Vidal's insatiable need to shock, to find himself pinioned by user-friendly nails at the Crucifixion.

Already, an Irish bishop, a Conservative British M.P. and the Vatican press have denounced Vidal for blasphemy, though none of them had access to the book when they went public. But LIVE from Golgotha will nettle many more. The author shrugs it all off: "Christianity is such a silly religion." As for the book's teasingly naughty humor, he washes his hands of other people's want of wit: "Sometimes the wrong word makes exactly the right joke."

Vidal has always been impossible to pigeonhole. He is ever the restless bull in the china shop of conventional wisdom. He is also a serious student of history. Jason Epstein, his old friend and longtime publisher, correctly calls Vidal "the last in a line of men of letters -- among whom Edmund Wilson is a classic example. Scholars like him are rare in any age, polymaths with a huge range of interests." Vidal can lampoon the New Testament because he knows the Bible and Roman history.

But Wilson's career was a clear trajectory compared with Vidal's. Competing in his psyche are two more obsessions: show biz and sexual identity. He is the grandchild of Oklahoma Senator Thomas P. Gore (making him a distant -- "in every way" -- cousin of Al Gore's), and, since his mother was feckless and his father often away starting up airlines, he spent his first 10 years happily with his grandfather, in privileged Washington circles.

The elder Gore was blind, so his grandchild began reading to him as soon as he could make sense of the letters himself. It was the perfect start for an autodidact. Later, his mother married financier Hugh D. Auchincloss, who was to leave her to marry Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' mother, thus establishing Vidal's long connection with the Kennedys. But at the time, it set young Gore adrift ("If my mother heard about a school at a party, she just sent me there").

He never bothered with college. From the age of 14 he had been trying to write a novel, and at 19 he completed Williwaw, for which he drew on his Army service in the Aleutians in 1943. Vidal was a precocious success, but when he published The City and the Pillar (1948), which had an openly homosexual theme, he found himself blackballed by the mainstream press. He has never forgotten the ostracism and remains suspicious to the point of paranoia about the literary Establishment. Still, it never occurred to him that he could not prosper. He was a natural at script writing and started a second career in Hollywood. (His first credit, The Catered Affair in 1956, starring Bette Davis, was shown recently on Italian TV, and he reveled in his personal time trip.)

At no time has he lacked ideas or opportunities. His agenda at the moment is typical. This winter Martin Scorsese's new film on the Byzantine Empress Theodora, for which Vidal has written the screenplay, goes into production. Then he and Howard Austin, his companion of many years, hop off to Bangkok for their annual cool-out at the Oriental Hotel. While Vidal was promoting Bob Roberts, he and Warren Beatty found time to discuss another political movie. Sting may dramatize his 1978 novel Kalki. Looking back, Vidal regrets that he didn't take movies more seriously. "After The Best Man I think I could have become a director -- not so much of theatrical movies but of TV films, where you have much more control. And the novel just may be dead."

But in the next breath he adds, "What I really have to do is bite the bullet on the final novel of my American story, called The Golden Age. I'll have a fictional plot and myself as a fictional character as well. I won't ever write a memoir. If I tried, it would be like a bad MGM movie -- or worse, a good one." The Golden Age in question is an ironic description of the Kennedy years.

Recently he unearthed 13 pages of notes he took after a visit to Hyannis Port. However, anyone expecting a burnished glow of memory will be disappointed. "In the beginning I was as impressed as anyone," he says. "But it was nonsense really. The invasion of Cuba was the first moment I realized that Kennedy was not going to be much of a President. And Vietnam is really on his head. The truth is that he was something of a war lover, very romantic."

But J.F.K. was fun. Vidal, who had grown up among Washington elders, found an ebullient President, who was only seven years older than he, very refreshing. Kennedy relished the kind of slanging session at which Vidal is a master. He remembers Kennedy "as one of the greatest gossips I've ever known. He knew everything, and still he questioned you constantly. He was wildly interested in all the movie stars I knew. 'Tell me about Hope Lange,' he'd say."

Those freewheeling good times are distant now. His health is good, his career robust, but Vidal seems like a lion in winter. He feels that the populist causes he fought for all his life died with Lyndon Johnson. He is confident that Bush will lose the election, largely because of his stand on abortion, but he despairs of Bill Clinton's shaking up the economy sufficiently or reversing the incursions on civil liberties and women's rights made in the name of family sanctity by what he calls the Party of God, consisting mostly of Republicans, but Democrats as well.

"Bush is a perfectly rational man on abortion," he notes, "but he thinks he can't afford to be. His only hope is for a very small turnout and enough godly folk to push him over. But the Democrats have two conservative Southern boys running, and they'll take back the South." Vidal is depressed, but his irrepressible humor -- never dormant long -- bubbles to the surface. "Ultimately it's a matter of style. What it comes down to is this: Do you spell Jennifer with a J or a G? That's a class division. As a populist, I'm all for G."

Vidal is also confronting the fact that old friends are dying of AIDS. He does not advertise his homosexuality, but a reader of his fiction, notably Myra, Kalki, Duluth and of course Golgotha, knows that he hates the chains of sexual identity. Throughout his literary career he has played endlessly with the notions of bisexuality or transsexuality. If readers find the new novel repellent, it may be that it is no longer easy to laugh at scenes in which Nero rapes Timothy ("Tighten those beautiful little buns") or to laugh off lewd goings-on along the missionary trail.

Vidal will not give ground, as always determined to follow his instincts. There is a scene in Golgotha in which Timothy and Mark, walking in Rome, hear a noisome humming that they cannot place. "I hear it too," says the author. "It's not supernatural or anything silly like that. It's just a sense that things are going on around you." Armed with TV, the fax and endless phone calls from an international army of well-placed pals, this remorseless observer is picking up every buzz.