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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.