Andre’s Posture

Classiq stuff!

John Forsythe passed away just before Easter after a long battle with cancer and pneumonia, aged 92.

His enduring career in television started in the 1950s and took off once he began his association with Aaron Spelling as the voice of “Charlie” in Charlie’s Angels (including the later big screen adaptations).

Forsythe also had an Alfred Hitchcock connection, starring in The Trouble With Harry (1955) and Topaz (1969) as well as appearing in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and it’s 1960s spin-off The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Also, he was a founding member of the Lee Strasberg acting school and had a long and distinguished presence on the Broadway stage.

But it was Forsythe’s role as Blake Carrington in Spelling’s mega-deluxe supersoap Dynasty that brought Forsythe his greatest fame. In Dynasty, Blake was the patriarch of the filthy rich but intractably dysfunctional Carrington clan, made up of Blake, his second wife Krystle (played by Linda Evans and her windscreen-wiper hairdo) and the adult children he shared with his first wife Alexis, who appeared at the thrilling courtroom finale that closed season one (see below for more on this). As the series went on a next-to-endless list of previously unmentioned sons and daughters, cousins and the entire clan of the Colbys, who Alexis married into, joined the cast.

The show was devised to compete with smash hit Dallas (the pilot episode of Dynasty is called Oil) and in the underwhelming first season, Blake was continually battling various business rivals and men who wanted a peek at Krystle’s boobs. The show was not a huge success at first, but the moment Alexis (re)appeared on the scene, the show found its style and focus.

Alexis became Blake’s main nemesis, and their never-ending hostilities became the main plot base of the rest of the life of the series. Alexis’ enmity for Blake was driven by their bitter divorce, part of which included a clause where she was never again allowed to see their children (a clause which evaporated somewhere between the divorce and the beginning of season two) and her enduring but well-concealed love for him, which she admitted in season seven when Blake recovered from the amnesia he had been struck with when an oil rig he was inspecting in the South China Seas exploded, and Alexis had to hand back all the contracts and documents she’d gleefully taken ownership of by fooling hospital staff that she was still Blake’s wife - something he had concurred with as while under the influence of his amnesia he could not remember anything before 1964. Under attack from an angry Blake Alexis confessed that part of her strategy was that she had a chance to once again be his loving wife.

But, their egomaniacal competitiveness was beyond debate as their two business empires (his: Denver Carrington, hers: ColbyCo, which she inherited when she married Cecil Colby at his hospital bed seconds before he died) were the two largest corporations in the state of Colorado and were continuously in competition for every major contract and business deal that took place anywhere in the world. Their rivalry went even further such as in season eight when Blake and Alexis ran against each other for election as Governor of Colorado just to spite each other, while at all other times anything from boardroom confrontations, accusations of various murders and mutual strangulation attempts (true) ensued.

Over-the-top Reagan-era glamour was the order of the day, starting with the opening titles (replete with its trilling, dynastic music and images of popping bottles of Champagne and spewing oil derricks, polo ponies and limousines, diamond necklaces, fur coats and so on), continuing with Nolan Miller’s legendary gowns (by season three the budget for each episode of Dynasty exceeded one million dollars) and the completely excessive list of guest stars that included Charlton Heston, Barbara Stanwyck, George Hamilton ex-president Gerald Ford and most famously, Rock Hudson, whose kiss with Linda Evans as part of a minor romantic subplot between their characters in the 1984 season became a sensation when it was announced soon after the episode aired that Hudson was suffering from AIDS.

Dynasty was the number one rating program in the United States for 1984 and 1985 and won the Golden Globe for Best Drama Series in 1984 (it was nominated every year in that category 1981-1986). Forsythe won five Golden Globe nominations for Best Actor in a Television Drama and won twice (1083-84) and Linda Evans and Joan Collins each won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Drama (in 1982 and 1983, respectively) but by the late 1980s, times started to change and television viewing habits changed with them. Dynasty’s prime time quickly came to an end, and the show was axed in 1989, the year working-class sitcom Roseanne took the number one spot in the ratings.

Anyway, back to John Forsythe and an interesting tidbit: each episode of Dynasty ended in a cliffhanger scene, announced via dramatic freeze-frame. From his decades in the game, Forsythe understood the critical importance of appearing in these scenes, and it written into his contract that Blake would appear in every episode’s final scene, for the run of the entire series. This proved to be a most prescient move come season two when Joan Collins as Alexis quickly and permanently shoulder padded barged her way past Forsythe to become far and away the show’s biggest star to the point that she/Alexis became the embodiment of all that was Dynasty.

Blake and Alexis’ endless sparring was fundamentally archetypal and not a little cartoonish, so it was, I think, the ever-evolving plotline involving his relationship with his gay son and only male heir Steven who was originally played by the handsome Al Corley (pictured below) which was the most compelling dramatic thread of Blake’s character arc, and the one that gave Forsythe his best opportunities in the series to show off his acting.

(Al Corley as Steven Carrington)

As Dynasty ran pretty much in tandem with the calamitous early years of the AIDS Crisis, the series’ creators made decisions regarding the presentation of Steven Carrington that were, variously, daring and cautious and as a result Steven’s sexuality and relationship with his father proved to be as predictable and consistent as everything else in the show, which at one point ran a plotline that had Carrington daughter Fallon abducted briefly by a UFO, and another that had Krystle locked in an attic for several episodes while an identical impersonator of her (known as Rita) operated maliciously in her place. Steven Carrington was one of the first gay characters with a major role in the ensemble and narrative of a prime time television show, and his relationship with “companion” Ted Dinard (played by Mark Withers) was one of the major subplots of season one.

That first year, Blake refused to accept his son’s homosexuality and would not have a bar of Ted Dinard and banned Steven from seeing Dinard or letting him anywhere near anyone or anything to do with the family. In an episode late in the first season, Blake arrives home to the news (delivered by a waiting maid and butler) that Ted Dinard is on the premises - inside the Carrington family home! Already fuming that Steven had introduced Ted to various infant members of the Carrington clan, a livid Blake barks that he will “kill him” and pounces up several grand staircases to find Steven and Ted talking in a room together. All three men wrestle, with Blake shoving Ted so hard that he falls and hits his head on the brass fender of a fireplace, dying instantly, as you can see here:

Corley left the series early in the second season, unhappy with the whiplash shifts in his character: from gay to bi to straight, to straight out of most of the episodes. He was replaced by dashing but not quite as sexy Jack Coleman, who had previously appeared in Days Of Our Lives (before Dynasty, Corley had been a doorman at Studio 54). The difference in Steven’s appearance was explained by plastic surgery required after yet another oil rig explosion. This rather contrived plot point brought the all-over-the-place first season of Dynasty into instant focus with Blake’s arrest and subsequent trial for Ted Dinard’s murder cinching the season’s final few episodes around the season-ending courtroom climax that feauted Alexis arriving unannounced, at the very last minute, to deliver incriminating evidence against Blake.

(Incidentally, it is quite clear from the scene that the Alexis that strides into the courtroom in then-fashionable black and white panels and veiled hat is not played by Joan Collins, just as the Alexis in most of the fight scenes was not played by Joan Collins either, but actually a male stuntman. In the clips below, the one on the left is the arrival of Alexis at the very end of season one, and on the right, if you freeze-frame at 3:53, you’ll see a drag queen standing in for Joan Collins that is slightly less of a drag queen than Joan Collins ever was.)

Season two was a very busy one for Steven, who kicked off the year by getting drunk and falling into a pool, hitting his head and nearly dying and rekindling his father’s affections as he convalesced in hospital, where he meets Krystle’s niece Sammy-Jo (Heather Locklear) but also feels drawn back to Claudia (Pamela Bellwood) his fag-hag/girlfriend from season one. On Alexis’ advice, Steven proposes to Claudia but she has since fallen in love with transient character Matthew Blaisdel, and old flame of Krystle’s (who returned six seasons later with a team of mercenaries from Central America to take the entire Carrington family hostage inside the Carrington mansion in order to win Krystle back in the season seven cliffhanger.) Steven returns to the arms of Sammy-Jo and they elope, much to the fury of Alexis and Blake.

Quick aside: An earlier scene where Sammy-Jo, having downed one too many flutes of champagne at her own wedding reception before hitting the dance floor with no embarrassment before being dragged off the scene by Alexis, is compulsory viewing:

The marriage between Steven and Sammy Jo was short-lived, and towards the end of season two Steven gathers the entire family together at the Carrington mansion to announce that he has had it with the Carrington ethos, is gay and intends to live life in his own terms:

“I’m a homosexual, Dad,” Steven said. “I’m gay, and I want you to face it, and say it. Say it: Steven is gay.”

Jack Coleman took over the role in season three, where Steven initially refused to return to Denver (he was convalescing in an Indonesian hospital after the oil rig explosion) but does so when he learns that Sammy Jo has had their baby, Danny, which she has promptly abandoned so she can pursue her modelling career in New York. Way ahead of the times, Steven became a gay parent by moving back to Denver and setting up home with Danny, which was fine with everybody until Blake suspects that Steven’s relationship with his live-in attorney was more than a room mate arrangement. Blake sues for custody of Danny. A court battle in season four sees Blake arguing that a gay cannot be a good parent with Steven countering that Blake is in no position to judge as he was only just on trial himself for murder. Steven wins out by marrying Claudia after she promises to adopt Danny.

Season five: Claudia and Steven divorce after he tells her that while he loves her, he also loves and is involved with a male colleague, Luke Fuller, putting him and Blake at odds yet again, especially when Steven announces that he will be taking Luke as his date to new-found Carrington daughter Amanda’s wedding to Prince Michael of Moldavia, a small European principality. In the first episode of season six, we learn that Luke was killed in the famous Moldavian massacre cliffhanger that ended the previous season (Ali MacGraw was the only other victim despite the entire cast taking bullets). Steven and Blake reconcile as Steven helps Blake through serious personal and business problems, and in season seven Steven and Sammy-Jo reconcile for Danny’s sake, initially on a platonic basis but enjoy a sex scene in an episode late in that season.

In season eight, after Steven has rescued the entire family from Matthew Blaisdel and his henchmen and acted in various other honourable ways, Blake appoints him acting head of Denver Carrington, but as season eight progresses Steven’s conflicts over his sexuality continue, and he tells his father that he is going to leave Denver and the family business to move to New York to regroup and reconsider. This episode featured a tentative resolution of Blake and Steven’s many ups and downs with their final conversation ending with a tender hug between father and son, and Blake telling Steven that he loves him. It also featured the extraordinary exchange about AIDS (another prime time television first) that can be seen from 6:45 in this clip:

Though I guess Forsythe refused to say “AIDS”, he obviously didn’t mind the writers transferring that word to Steven’s dialogue, but with considerable powers of veto on set, Forsythe evidently had no problem delivering what at the time was the well-intentioned (if not entirely exact) anti-gay-hysteria statement: “I’m talking about a disease that kills. It’s no longer just a gay disease. it doesn’t matter whether somebody’s gay or straight - it’ll catch up with you if you’re not careful. Son, I love you.” This beautiful scene - hampered only slightly by the heavy hands of the writers - brings the relationship of father and gay son full circle, with Blake concerned for Steven, and not entirely happy about his son’s homosexuality, but certainly more empathetic than he had been in this classic scene from season one:

It’s a journey that many fathers are forced to make, and John Forsythe’s Blake seemed to travel along it as well as he could.

Rest In Peace, John Forsythe.

Gore Vidal has never been one to keep his mouth shut. Even on the homosexual activist agenda! That includes the subject of gay marriage, which he's never been a fan of. But not in the Elton John sort of way. But in a "even straight marriages are F'd" sort of way. In 2006, he told Time, "Since heterosexual marriage is such a disaster, why on earth would anybody want to imitate it?" His position hasn't changed, but the recipient of his ire may have. He's now going after Americans!

Like pal Dennis Altman, Vidal thinks the idea of gay marriage is bogus. But then why are we all fighting mad about securing the right to, one day, get a divorce? Because we are ignorant patriots, that's why.

“I’m not into partnerships,” Vidal, a single man, says. "I don’t even know what it means. [I couldn't] couldn’t care less [about same-sex marriage. Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.”

(Vidal, a former Hillary Clinton supporter who switched to Barack Obama, has his own criticism of the current president. Obama is doing "[d]readfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism. … He f***ed [health care] up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen")

Now, it's easy to dismiss the ramblings of an octogenarian who, it could be argued, is out of touch with the priorities of gay Americans today. But this is a man who appeared on Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G show as himself. He must get us, right?

By Pareene, 5:33 PM on Wed Aug 26 2009, 6,402 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

Dominick Dunne, chronicler of crime, celebrity, and the intersection of the two, has died at 83. Dunne had been suffering from bladder cancer.

He was diagnosed last year, and his decline was sudden and largely unexpected, though Liz Smith reported on his condition just yesterday.

It was a long and fascinating life. Dunne was a World War II vet. He was a TV director and film producer. He was one of the druggiest of the '70s Hollywood druggies until he cleaned up at age 50. He was a television star. When his daughter Dominique was murdered in 1982, he became a journalist.

His professional home of many years lists his credits:

Dunne—who joined Vanity Fair in 1984 as a contributing editor, and was named special correspondent in 1993—famously covered the trials of O. J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, Michael Skakel, William Kennedy Smith, and Phil Spector, as well as the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. He wrote memorable profiles on numerous personalities, among them Imelda Marcos, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elizabeth Taylor, Claus von Bülow, Adnan Khashoggi, and Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. His monthly column provided a glimpse inside high society, and captivated readers.

"He became our first star writer," Tina Brown says in After the Party, a documentary on Dunne. She hired him to write a story on the trial of his daughter's killer for Vanity Fair, and she calls him "the defining voice of the magazine."

Dunne covered the trials of "the rich, the powerful, and the famous," he said in the same documentary. And "the reason I can write assholes so well is that I used to be an asshole."

He's survived by sons Griffin and Alex and granddaughter Hannah. There is an obituary and a nice remembrance from Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair.

Gore Vidal Turns Off The Lights On The American Dream

via MARK SIMPSON .com by Mark S on 5/19/09

Gore Vidal speaks to Mark Simpson (Arena Hommes Plus, Summer 2009)

I’m having trouble hearing the last living Great American Man of Letters. He says something else I don’t hear and I ask him to repeat it. Suddenly this 83 year old legend is very loud and very scary indeed: ‘IS “QUIET” A EUPHEMISM FOR DEAD?!’ he thunders in a voice much more Biblical than his old foe the late Charlton Heston was ever able to muster. But then, Mr Vidal is amongst other things, an Old Testament prophet - albeit a Godless, ‘pinko’ one with a very mischievous sense of humour.

***

‘I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess.’ So announces the opening sentence of the 1968 sensational bestseller ‘Myra Breckinridge’ about a hilarious, devastating, but always elegant transsexual, by the hilarious, devastating, but always elegant Gore Vidal. Myra, a (slightly psychotic) devotee of High Hollywood, hell-bent on revenging herself on American machismo, continues her manifesto:

‘Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for ‘why’ or ‘because. Wielding a stone axe, I broke the arms, the limbs, the balls of their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them, as it does all men, unmanning them in the way that King Kong was reduced to a mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray whom I resemble left three-quarter profile if the key light is no more than five feet high during the close shot.’

From the right angle, and in the right light of hindsight, Gore Vidal resembles his most famous offspring. Clad only in his wit - and an armour-plated ego - Mr Vidal has, during his long and prolific career as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, (failed) politician, commentator, movie special guest-star, (gleeful) gadfly, and America’s (highly unauthorised) biographer, taken on The Land of the Free’s finest literary warriors, who had no word for ‘why’ or ‘because’, but plenty for ‘faggot’ and ‘pinko’. Vidal broke the balls - and outlasted - tiresomely macho brawlers like Norman Mailer: he compared ‘The Prisoner of Sex’ to ‘three days of menstrual flow”; later, when he was knocked to the ground by Mailer, he retorted, still on the floor: ‘Words fail Norman Mailer yet again’.

And also right wing bruisers like William F. Buckley Jnr., whom he famously provoked into threatening him and shouting ‘you queer!’ on live national TV in 1968: ‘RIP WFB - In Hell’ was Gore’s very Christian obituary notice last year. (Like that other thorn in the side of America, Castro, Vidal has survived almost all his foes.)

In his spare time, piercing, pointed Gore has taken on the Cold War, the American Empire, what he calls the ‘Republican-Democrat’ Party, monotheism, and, even more sacred to America (and, for that matter, the UK), monosexuality. He himself has had relationships with both men and women (and what women! He was briefly engaged to Joanne Woodward) and maintains, like the incurable blasphemer he is, that ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ are adjectives not nouns, acts not identities. Most recently, his impressively unnecessary punking of the venerable, extravagantly charming BBC presenter David Dimbleby - ‘I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE!’ he barked in his best Lady Bracknell - on live TV on Election Night has become an unlikely YouTube hit.

As he once said: ‘Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.’ Or was that Myra? Either way, Mr Vidal is more of a man than many of his adversaries sadly mistook themselves for - and, perhaps, more woman than any of them could ever hope to possess.

Maybe that’s why, twenty years ago when I was a callow youth, I sent Mr Vidal a fan letter - the only one I’ve ever penned. I also included, as you do, a topless shot: back then, I had Hollywood tits. And who better to appreciate them than Gore Vidal, MGM’s last contract writer? Fortunately for both of us, I didn’t hear anything back.

I put my tits away, and took to writing. But I was probably still writing fan notes to Vidal, even when I scribbled, as I did from time to time, nasty, Oedipal things about him. Re-reading Myra Breckinridge I can see that far too much of my own work is just footnotes to this forty-year-old novel which more or less invented metrosexuality decades before the word was coined, strapped it on and rammed it where the sun don’t shine. (Described at the time on the dust-jacket as a ‘novel of far-out sexuality’ it now seems, well, all the way in).

But now I’m actually speaking to Mr Vidal. I feel like Michael J Fox in ‘Back to the Future’ where he meets his teen mother at High School (save my ‘mother’ is generally agreed to be no pussycat). Am I going to disappear into an embarrassing time-paradox? ‘Please forgive my nervousness,’ I stutter. ‘I’m a Big Fan - though I suppose those words probably strike terror into your heart….’

Without missing a beat comes the laconic reply, in that measured, unmistakable voice: ‘They clearly strike terror into yours.’

Later, I hand him another line when I gush, not entirely baselessly: ‘To someone like me, you almost seem like the embodiment of the Twentieth Century!’

‘On arthritic days I know I’m the Twentieth Century’.

Mr Vidal is speaking today from his American home of the last forty years in the Hollywood Hills. Vidal in the Hollywood Hills makes sense - it is an LA Eyrie; a place where his back is covered and from which he can spy people coming a long way off. His fortress-like house in Ravello, Italy, which he recently sold, was perched atop rocky cliffs, reached only by a steep, dizzying pathway. But Vidal says he chose the Hills because they weren’t vulgar. ‘Unlike other parts of LA, like Beverly Hills or Bel Air, when I bought this house forty years ago, it did not attract the super rich, wherever they live they build these huge houses. You don’t have many of those up here in the hills.’

‘Do you survey Los Angeles from your window?’

‘Heavens, no! There’s no sight uglier than Los Angeles!’

‘But at night it can be very beautiful.’

‘Well, almost anywhere can be beautiful at night.’

‘True. Even a refinery town like Middlesbrough, which just happens to be down the road from my own somewhat less glamorous home. The opening aerial shot of a future, infernal Los Angeles in ‘Blade Runner‘ were supposedly inspired by Middlesbrough at night - the director Ridley Scott grew up round there.’

‘Yes, Ridley Scott used to hire my house. I think also during the making of that film. I used to hire it out a lot - mostly to Brits.’

‘You’re regarded very fondly on these shores.’

‘It’s reciprocated,’ he says, almost warmly. ‘The books were read in the UK at the same time as they were in America. Although more easily for the English since, unlike the New York Times, the London Times was not dedicated to attacking me.’

The New York Times, taking ladylike fright at the matter-of-fact way Vidal’s second novel ‘The City and the Pillar’ dealt with same-sex love in the US Army during the Second World War (Vidal enlisted at the age 17), had an attack of the vapours and banned Gore’s next five novels. No minor snub this, since the NYT even more so then than today could make or break you as a writer.

Perhaps the NYT was so shocked because this distasteful dissident was a product of the very heart of the East Coast Elite. A cuckoo in a feathered nest. Born in October 3, 1924 at the US Military Academy in Westpoint, his father an aeronautics pioneer and airline tycoon (founding what would become TWA and Eastern Airlines), his grandfather was Thomas P. Gore, the most powerful Senator of the age - and also blind - his mother was an actress and socialite (and a mean drunk). He was christened Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. by the headmaster of St. Albans preparatory school, a school for the DC elite which he was to attend. He later took the name ‘Gore’ in honour of his grandfather (a leading Isolationist - whose outlook Vidal has remained faithful to), whom he spent much of his childhood reading to, and mixing with the most powerful figures in the most powerful country in the world - just before it was about to become the world.

I’d like to think that Vidal was almost a kind of internal émigré from the East Coast when he arrived in LA in the early 50s as a scriptwriter for MGM. ‘Not really,’ he demurs, ‘I was back and forth between the East and West Coast. I was one of the founders of live drama on television. I must have done a hundred plays during ‘54 to ‘57. After the New York Times banned me I had to make a living, and there it was: I never wanted to be a playwright but I found out I was one. Theatre work kept me going for many years.’

A number of his plays were made into movies, including ‘The Best Man’ (1960), starring Henry Fonda as an idealistic Presidential Candidate faced with one who will do anything to win. It includes a prophetic speech: ‘One day there will be a Jewish President and then a black President. And when all the minorities are heard from we’ll do something for the downtrodden majority of this country: the ladies.’ I mention to Vidal it’s being re-released on DVD.

‘Oh, they never tell me,’ he sighs, ‘and I never receive any money from it - it just happens. I mean now I think the rights probably belong to a group of Martian businessmen.’ (Possibly a bitter reference to another play of his, ‘Visit to a Small Planet’, made into a movie starring Jerry Lewis in 1960, in which a delinquent Martian visits Earth - the play’s sharp satire of the Washington elite and 1950s American values disappeared in the film version.)

It’s a busy Oscar Weekend in LA, but will Mr Vidal be attending any of the events? ‘I’ve been invited to the Vanity Fair Oscar Party but I don’t think I’ll be going along. I haven’t been to the Oscars for years. I really don’t have much interest any more.’

‘Whatever happened’, I ask, ‘to the uplifting propaganda for the American Way of Life that Hollywood used to produce?

‘Well, there are no longer studios to generate that kind of euphoria,’ he replies glumly. ‘Money is all powerful these days, and calls all the shots-in Hollywood and pretty much everything else in American life. We watched ‘That Hamilton Woman’ last night, as it was called in America, the 1941 Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton biopic. It really was a spectacular movie, they certainly don’t make them like that anymore. It was the first time that Vivien Leigh and Olivier had appeared together, which caused enormous excitement. London was being bombed and they were making this movie in Hollywood! With Alexander Korda directing and producing. A superb romantic film and great acting. God…!’ He trails off in an unguarded reverie.

High Hollywood, the period that Vidal grew up with, visiting the movie theatre almost daily, almost religiously, is one of the few things that Vidal could be accused of being sentimental about. In ‘Screening History’ (1992) he wrote: ‘It occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.’ In ‘Myra Breckinridge’, the heroine declares: ‘…in the decade between 1935 and 1945, no irrelevant film was made in the United States. During those years, the entire range of human (which is to say, American) legend was put on film, and any profound study of those extraordinary works is bound to make crystal-clear the human condition.’

No one could accuse most Hollywood contemporary output of being amenable to ‘profound study’. High Hollywood was about money too of course, but movies back then often seemed to be the most aesthetic medium imaginable: fashion, art, glamour. How was that?

‘The early moguls liked art,’ explains Vidal. ‘Like Adolph Zuckor who founded Paramount. He cast Sarah Bernhardt, the famous French actress, in Queen Elizabeth, his first feature film. Zuckor aspired to the highest standards of theatre. Then of course Hollywood became very successful and money became all anyone was really interested in.’

‘Remember, movies are movies. It’s better to do them out here where there’s plenty of light without going broke over the electricity. Mind you, the reason that Warner Brothers films were often the best movies made in the 1930s was because they looked so dark - the chiaroscuro quality of WB films was priceless. Bette Davies in The Letter was a great one- from the opening gloomy, brooding shot. How did Warner do it? Well it was because the Brothers Warner were very, very cheap! They’d go around from soundstage to soundstage turning the lights down, so halfway through the day every scene was in darkness!’

‘It was said that a British actor, a little on the pompous side came over here for some loot. Addressing some of the old timer American actors he asked: “Isn’t it difficult living in a society so unrooted and uprooted, without tradition of any kind?” One of them answered: “Why the Warner Brothers Christmas layoffs are one of our greatest traditions!”‘ Vidal laughs scornfully.

Vidal is himself a frequent visitor to the UK, ‘When I was younger I always made a point to visit Saville Row Whenever in London - though the last time was 30 years ago.’

‘How long does a Saville suit last?’

‘Forever! I don’t believe in fashion. I have no time for it. Versace once told me I looked a state and sent some of his staff to visit me in Ravello and make a suit. And very nice suits they were too. But it isn’t something I take an interest in.’

Vidal may claim not to believe in fashion, but in ‘Myra Breckinridge’ he proved a profound observer of male fashion trends, predicting in effect the Twenty First Century: ‘…young men [today compensate by playing at being men, wearing cowboy clothes, boots, black leather, attempting through clothes (what an age for the fetishist!) to impersonate the kind of man our society claims to admire but swiftly puts down should he attempt to be anything more than an illusionist, playing a part.’

But when I suggest this to him, bringing up his most famous, most prophetic book, he just says quickly, ‘I should read it again.’ Making it quite clear that he doesn’t wish to discuss it. Perhaps the eccentric 1970 film version starring Raquel Welch left a bad taste in his mouth - it certainly left a bad taste in the critics’ mouths.

I ask him when he was last in the UK. ‘Just the other week. I had the great joy of addressing the House of Commons in Westminster’s Great Hall courtesy of Third World Solidarity to talk about the matter of Cuba and the United States. It was the venom of the Kennedy brothers who were out to destroy Castro because he didn’t want to be killed by them. Or invaded. Or taken over. And his revolution erased. The vanity of that family!’

Vidal’s vigorous attacks on liberal icons the Kennedys - whom he knew personally - for their warmongering are always value for money, exploding as they do the soft-focus mythology of Camelot. Vidal was one of the few people in American public life to dare to denounce the Cold War as an American invention to keep the politically and economically profitable US war machine turning over after the Second World War ceased trading. ‘The thing about Jack was that he actually believed all that anti-communist propaganda - the previous Presidents didn’t.’ (To which could be added: George W. Bush had much in common with Kennedy’s messianic zeal and frothy talk of ‘freedom’ - he just didn’t have the good fortune to be assassinated in his first term.)

Vidal was vehemently attacked for his outspokenness about the Cold War and particularly for talking and writing about something that was as clear as day: the American Empire. ‘”How dare you!” people shouted,’ recalls Vidal. ‘”We’re not an Empire! We stand for freedom!”‘

‘Recently pretty much everyone has started talking about the “American Empire”,’ I observe.

‘Well, when we started down the Roman Imperial, dynastic way with the Bush family,’ says Vidal wearily, ‘it became quite clear it was all wrong whatever it was. Remember, we didn’t break away from England, we broke away from the King. That’s what the Declaration of Independence is all about. Thomas Jefferson’s brilliant propaganda united the colonists against George III.’

‘We’re the original Evil Empire.’

‘Well, you certainly were then.’

‘Alas, our empire fell . . .’

‘Well, you ran out of money.’

‘Yes. As the US seems to be doing now. Are you surprised by the speeded-up schedule of Imperial implosion?’

‘I was surprised by the speed at which we lost the Republic, and lost Magna Carta during the Bush Dictatorship.’

‘But you see liberal icon Roosevelt as the first American Emperor - decreeing there should be no Empires, save his.’

‘I’ll tell you a story. Roosevelt was having lunch with Churchill. The Second World War was drawing to a close. They toasted the end of the war. Then Roosevelt gave Churchill a radiant smile, and said [here Vidal imitates Roosevelt's high Patrician voice: he is a great, savage mimic, ‘You realize you’re going to have to give up your precious India, don’t you?’ [imitating Churchill's jowly tones “Never!” And they had a quarrel over the lunch table. Many people who happened to be there spread it around. Roosevelt not only won the argument, it was force majeure. Roosevelt said, ‘The days of Empire are over, and I trust you realize this.”‘

‘Churchill said: “What do you want me to do? Get on my hind legs like your little dog Fala, and beg?” Roosevelt said simply: “Yes.” Don’t tempt an Emperor!’

‘Most people in the UK seem not to have realised the real nature of the ‘special relationship’ we have had with the US since 1940.’

‘Why should they? their lives go on anyway…’.

Vidal is a keen historian, but that most dangerous kind: an autodidact. ‘I didn’t go to Harvard,’ he once boasted. ‘I just sent my work there.’ Unlike most historians, Vidal has actually had met most of the key players. Or perhaps the other way around - as he has put it himself elsewhere: ‘People always say: “You got to meet everyone.” They always put that sentence the wrong way around. I mean, why not put it the right way, that these people got to meet me, and wanted to? Otherwise it sounds like I spent my life hustling around trying to meet people: “Oh, look, there’s the governor.”‘ Wouldn’t you want to meet Gore Vidal if you were Jack Kennedy or William Burroughs? Although he is an incorrigible name-dropper, it’s probably because his world has been so filled with names that not to drop them would be the pretentious thing to do.

‘I used to know Nancy Astor,’ he says, launching into a five star anecdote sparked by our discussion of Britain’s rather unlikely Imperial past. ‘And I asked her about her famous trip to the Soviet with Bernard Shaw. “Well, I was just lookin’ out that train window” - she had a Virginia accent - “I was watchin’ the whole world go by. And it was pathetic - he kept readin’ one of his own books!”

In Moscow Stalin was in charming mode, embracing them, one in each arm. He listened to Shaw go on for a while, then pointed to a map of the world on the wall of his Kremlin office and he asked, “How is it that this little island in the North Sea has ended up with all this??” And he pointed to all the pink on the map. ‘”Can you explain that to me Mr. Shaw?” Shaw declined to respond. And so he turned to Lady Astor. “Well, ahh think it is becaauuse it was we first who gave the world the King James Version of the Bible.” I asked her, “What did Stalin say to that?” “He didn’t say anythin’.” On the way out, Lady Astor asked, “Mr Stalin, when you gonna stop killin’ people?”

“Oh, Lady Astor,’ replied Stalin, looking directly at her. “The undesirable classes do not kill themselves.”‘

‘Now,’ says Vidal only slightly ironically, ‘that’s a nice story where everybody’s in character!’

My audience with the Twentieth Century is winding down. ‘Do you think,’ I ask, looking for silver linings and sunny endings, ‘the latest Emperor, Barack Obama, can rescue the American Imperium?’

‘The US is a very racist country,’ responds Vidal sorrowfully. ‘He will probably be assassinated. Then Martial Law will be declared. The contingency plans are already in place, I’m sure.’ Like the Brother’s Warner, he’s switching off the lights.

‘Do you think the American Dream can be revived?’

‘No. There was never anything to it. It was always fraudulent.’ Off goes another light.

‘LA was once the city of the future - does it still have one?’

‘No. It’s run out of gas.’ And another bulb dies. We’re now in darkness. Bette Davies had more light in that opening shot in ‘The Letter.’

‘Do you think America can survive without the kind of brilliant dreams and illusions Hollywood used to manufacture - or without an Empire on which the sun never sets?’

‘Of course we can,’ he retorts. ‘We’ll just get on with our lives like everyone else.’ And a little no-frills night-light comes on.

All things considered, it was probably for the best that I didn’t mention the topless fan letter I’d sent all those years ago to Gore, glorious Grinch of the Hollywood Hills.

 

Special thanks to D.A. Krolak

 

 

Revolutionary, Dictator...gay?