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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."