Vidal Gore - In bed with Gore Vidal: hustlers, Hollywood, and the private world of an American master

Advance Praise

"Tim Teeman's biography of Gore Vidal is the perfect combination of racy gossipfrom steamy celebrity liaisons to hustlers in Romeand penetrating analysis. It shows how a complicated attitude to sex and sexuality shaped an author's life and work. An original, intriguing, and necessary portrait of an American icon. Edmund White, author of City Boy

"Sex with hustlers and Hollywood starsfor all his insistence that sexuality did not define him, Gore Vidal sure got around. And while he didnt hit the streets with placards, he was still, in many ways, a gay rights revolutionary. Tim Teeman's biography, full of new material and interviews, reveals how Vidals sexuality and sex life influenced his life and his work and tells, for the first time, the moving story of his painful last years. With deftness, wit, intelligence, and a journalist's nose for a good story, Teeman pulls back the curtain on an American icon. It seems Gore Vidal can still surprise us. What a page-turner!" William J. Mann, author of Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn and Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

"Gore Vidal was a good friend for over sixty years. If you want to know who Gore really was, read In Bed with Gore Vidal, which uncovers, and evokes, his complicated private life and how that influenced and shaped his wider life, politics, and work. Lost loves, sex with hustlers, a life with Howard Austen, his relationships with women and the truth about his sexuality: this is a juicy, intelligent and honest portrait of a dear friend and exceptional writer and man."Scotty Bowers, author of Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars

In Bed with Gore Vidal

Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master

Tim Teeman

Copyright 2013 by Tim Teeman

Smashwords Edition

Magnus Books

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

Cover by: Nick Vogelson, Townhouse Creative

Cover photo used by permission of the Granger Collection, New York

Print ISBN: 978-1936833-041-3

Digital ISBN: 978-1936833-040-6

www.magnusbooks.com

For David, Neil, Anna, Leonie and John

Thanks to Burr Steers and Nina Straight for talking about their uncle and brother so openly and for all their help. Thanks to Matt Tyrnauer for his invaluable advice, generosity and guidance, and to Juan Bastos for his many introductions in Los Angeles, his driving which was beyond the call of duty and for the wonderful pictures. Thanks to Claire Bloom, Susan Sarandon and Scotty Bowers for not only talking about Gore, but so candidly; the same to Jean Stein, Boaty Boatwright, Fred Kaplan, Jason Epstein and Jay Parini; also to Steven Abbott, Sean Strub, Jack Larson, Fabian Bouthillette, Grace Millar, Patrick Merla, Richard Harrison, Felice Picano, Edmund White, Michael Childers, David Schweizer, Nicholas Wrathall, Judith Harris, Tom Powers, Barbara Howar, Elinor Pruder and her son Hubert, Norberto Nierras and Christopher Murray and to the many others who spoke on and off the record. Thanks to Bernie Woolf for guiding me to Walter Clemonss unseen manuscript.

My dear friend, the journalist Liza Foreman, carried out essential research and interviews in Italy, adding immeasurably to the book. Christopher Bram and William J. Mann kindly read the manuscript and their wise suggestions and guidance greatly enhanced and improved it. Nick Vogelson designed a beautiful book-jacket.

Thanks to the staff at the Houghton Library at Harvard University, where Vidals archive is held, for their patience and professionalism. Emilie L. Hardman was particularly sterling, sourcing and holding material and was understanding when various complications impeded my journeys there. Thanks for similar accommodation, efficiency and expertise to John C. Johnson, Manager of Digital Archival Resources in the Gotlieb Center of the Mugar Library at Boston University, and to Janet Lorenz at the National Film Information Service/Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

Thanks also to friends and colleagues: to Bruce Shenitz and Richard Canning for setting me off on my journey, Michael Zam, Bob Smith, Richard Schneider, Eric Price, Philip Sherwell, Paul Schindler, Erica Wagner, Paul Clements, Debra Craine, Brian Sills, Jeffrey Trachtenberg, Mark Lasswell, Robbie Millen, Nancy Durrant, Michael Carroll, Nicola Jeal, Alex Frean, Eric Gutierrez, Alex OConnell, James Harding, Neil Fisher, Catherine Nixey, Neil McKenna, Will Pavia, David Robertson, Tom Gatti, Tom Farina, Paul Burston, Matthew Todd, Celia Duncan, Abigail Radnor, Richard Chapman, Stephen Foley and William Candia. And to Don Weise, my editor and publisher, thank you for your expertise, guidance and for such an unexpected adventure.

Outpost Drive: Los Angeles, December 2012

Nearly five months after Gore Vidals death, colorful Christmas baubles hung on the wall outside the authors Spanish Revival home on Outpost Drive in the Hollywood hills. Inside, the Master no longer home, there was still a fierce, irascible presence to contend with: Baby Rat, his seven-year-old King Charles spaniel now under the care of Vidals major domo Norberto Nierras, was primed to snarl and yap at any strangers feet and pisses all over the house, Burr Steers, Vidals nephew, said.

Vidal died, aged eighty-six, of complications from pneumonia on July 31, 2012 in the early evening in a bed set up in his downstairs living room so he could look out to his garden, including the tall fir trees that so reminded him of his years living in Rome in the 1960s: his very own Dolce Vita featuring a lot of sex with beautiful young men. He enjoyed looking at a fountain pool filled with koi, erected by Muzius Gordon Dietzmann, his unofficial godson and for many years a devoted caregiver. But Vidals death had been anything but peaceful, marked by heavy drinking, dementia, painful feuding with family and friends, and a miserable, drawn-out decline, according to Burr Steers. I really loved him, he says, sitting in the living room. I stuck with him in those last few days. He was like a pretzel, all twisted up. You could hear him dying from the inside out, it really fucking affected me. It was really sad how it all ended up.

Other rooms showed the Vidal legacy in transition: a collection of family pictures in random groupings and books being boxed up. The eighty-six-year-old author left everything, all his possessions and fortune (an estimated 37 million dollars, according to Nina Straight, his half-sister; a not inconsiderable chunk of change Steers said with a smile), to Harvard University with a few paintings going to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, Steers told me. Vidal left nothing to his family, even though Steers had been promised, verbally, the Outpost Drive house. His mother, Nina Straight, revealed this to me rather than Steers; he seemed relaxed or resigned at his uncles will provisions, having already endured, very painfully and upsettingly, the reverberations of his mental and physical decline.

In death as in life, Vidal continues to unsettle, cause trouble, ruffle feathers, confound. Nina and three other half-siblings were, at the time of this writing in June 2013, challenging the will on the grounds of Vidals mental competence in the spring of 2011 when the late codicil, awarding Harvard everything, was drafted. They would like Vidals verbal wish, that Steers get the Outpost Drive property, to be respected and a sum of money to be made available to the devoted Nierras. According to Nina, there is an unpaid debt "of close to a million dollars" Vidal owed to her, arising from the sequence of legal tussles he had with his conservative adversary William F. Buckley, who famously called Vidal a "queer" in a television confrontation in 1968. A Harvard University spokesman told me the university was not involved with the legal challenge and awaits resolution of all issues before it would comment on the bequest and how its proceeds would be spent. Those overseeing Vidals estate would not co-operate with this book, or give me access to whatever papers and documents of Vidals the Estate holds.