Gore Vidal: ‘The Most Interesting Man in the World’

[Linda Minor]

[quote=Paul Rigby]
I even mentioned that very fact a while back in this thread: http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...ore+vidal: "Gore is Jackie's cousin and consequently the subject of the Kennedys is the only one that I take with a grain of salt with Gore, because he hates Bobby so much for an altercation they had. I think it keeps him from being as open minded as he normally is on the subject of President Kennedy--his worth and his legacy."

I don't think Gore and Jackie were cousins, but Gore's mother was married to, and divorced from, Hugh D. Auchincloss before Jackie's mother married him.

http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/aubert-austen.html
Auchincloss, Hugh Dudley (1897-1976) — also known as Hugh D. Auchincloss — of Fairfax, Va. Born in Newport, Newport County, R.I., August 28, 1897. Son of Hugh Dudley Auchincloss and Emma Brewster (Jennings) Auchincloss; married 1935 to Nina Gore Vidal (daughter of Thomas Pryor Gore); married 1942 to Janet Norton (Lee) Bouvier (1907-1989) (mother-in-law of John Fitzgerald Kennedy); father of Hugh Dudley Auchincloss III. Republican. Lawyer; alternate delegate to Republican National Convention from Virginia, 1940. Died in Washington, D.C., November 20, 1976. Interment at Island Cemetery, Newport, R.I.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people...23769.html

A LITTLE HELP FOR JACK KENNEDY

I read somewhere how odd it was that although I ran for public office twice I have never really written about either race or, indeed, why I ran. Well, part of the why of 1960 was Jack Kennedy who had married Jackie whose mother had taken the place of my mother as Mrs Hugh Dudley Auchincloss. After my mother and I had moved out of Auchincloss' Virginia house Jackie's mother and sister moved in while my half brother and half sister became Jackie's stepbrother and stepsister. So many divorces and remarriages in our interconnected family have made for numerous weird connections as well as non-connections: I have four stepbrothers, sons of my mother's last husband, General Olds: I have not only never met them but I don't even know their names. Oh, what a tangled web is woven when divorcées conceive.

In 1956 Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for president, decided to throw the convention open in order to choose a vice-presidential candidate. Jack, the junior senator from Massachusetts, placed himself at centre stage, battling with Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator with a record for fighting crime. When Jack lost, I wrote him a note congratulating him on not being Stevenson's running mate since that eloquent figure was clearly not going to beat Eisenhower; and did not.

As Jack began his long campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, I decided to help out with a play called The Best Man whose successful run on Broadway did him no harm. Some years later, I wrote another political play, An Evening with Richard Nixon: in this case my Nixon character, wonderfully played by George Irving, spoke only Nixon's actual recorded words; this decision to use his actual words as recorded over the years cost me more money in research than I was ever to make out of the play. But with Irving as Nixon the result was wildly comic because Nixon seemed to have no conscious mind. He said whatever was milling about in his overwrought subconscious. In speeches he often turned to Pat, his wife, loyally seated nearby, and, shaking his finger at her, he would intone, "We here in America can no longer stand pat." The producer, an old friend, suddenly succumbed to a fit of megalomania: instead of opening at a small theatre like the Booth where my Visit to a Small Planet had done so well, he opened Nixon at the Shubert, a vast theatre that only something the size of Oklahoma!, the musical - or indeed the state - could ever have filled. Needless to say, as always, in Nixon land, there were death threats for many of us, while The New York Times outdid itself by headlining the review "A play for radical liberals", certain death for a Broadway play. Actually the play was a sharp preview of Watergate, already unfolding in the wings. A dance critic, Clive Barnes, reviewed the play which had done well with tryout audiences. Clive conceded that it was very funny but, by the third paragraph, he knew that he was supposed to attack and did. I think his exact line was: "Gore Vidal has said mean and nasty things about our President." I ran into him not long after and told him, kindly, that in Clive's native England one might refer to "Our" Queen but in the US we never say Our President. The best aspect of the play was a sort of limbo to which George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower and JFK have been assigned, quarrelling with each other as they watch with wonder Nixon's inexorable rise to the presidency. As it turned out, aside from revivals, that was to be my last new play on Broadway, made memorable by a young actress who played several different parts. In due course, I became godfather to one of Susan Sarandon's sons by Tim Robbins. Yes: I did say: Always a godfather, never a god....

On October 3 1975 I turned 50, an event that I wanted to keep secret. I cannot imagine anyone willingly celebrating time's ruthless one-way passage. But that year friends decided to do something and Kathleen Tynan, second wife of the critic Kenneth Tynan, and my old friend Diana Phipps decided to give a party in London where over the years I had come to know more people than anywhere else. A club with a good cook was the site. Howard and I flew to London and stayed not as always before at the Connaught but at the Ritz. I remember I had letters to answer and so the morning of the 3rd I was up early answering them in longhand. Then Howard and I took the lift down to the lobby. It was a small lift lined with mirrors. Halfway down it stopped to admit another passenger, a woman in a white trench coat. Our eyes met in mute shock: it was Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Relations between us had broken off after my row with Bobby in 1961 and time certainly had not improved my mood. First, the IRS went after my father with a long pointless audit. Then I heard from Mississippi that someone from Bobby's Justice Department had been snooping around trying to dig up scandal about Senator Gore while several court journalists were always available to think up items about me. I never blamed Jackie for taking his side in a complicated unbecoming row but her contribution was that we had not known each other until a chance encounter at a horse show, the last place I would ever be found unless it was after dinner at the White House when Jackie dragged Jack and me there. With that in mind, to Howard's horror, I turned my back on her to discover in the mirror a smudge of ink on my brow. As I used a handkerchief to remove the ink the lift door opened and she sighed in her best Marilyn Monroe voice, "Bye-bye" and vanished into Piccadilly....