In those days publishers were almost as mystified as they are now when it came to the delicate subject of how to lure people into reading books in the age of movies and that upstart, television. Quite by accident, I presented them with a solution. Since I was still thinking about politics in those days, I had continued to go on television whenever possible to talk about the state of the union, which appealed to Carson and a few—very few—other TV hosts. One of the others was Hugh Downs, the low-key star of the Today show. In that unhurried time, he and I would sit at a table, The New York Times between us, and we’d chat—very low key—about the news of the day with breaks for commercials, weather, solid news. When Little, Brown, the publisher of Julian, asked me if I’d go to Houston to Brown’s bookstore to promote the book I said it seemed pointless to me but I would, if they insisted. They gave me a date. I tried to cancel because it conflicted with an appearance on the Today show with Hugh Downs. “Why not,” asked my editor, “do both? Say something about the book on the show.” I explained that we mostly talked politics. “So make an exception,” I was told. I did. I talked very briefly about the book while Downs held it up like the Grail. Then I left the studio for the airport and flew to Houston where Ted Brown of the eponymous bookstore said, “Not only did that TV show sell out every copy that we had in stock, but it looks like every copy in Houston is gone, too, all in one morning.” Julian promptly became the number-one bestseller on the New York Herald Tribune list (The New York Times—ever consistent—listed it farther down their list but then, some years later, they miraculously kept my Lincoln at number two for a couple of years when it was number one in Publishers Weekly). Anyway, the rest is publishing history as publishers drove their writers onto television programs, more happy than not to get so much airtime illuminated free of charge. In time, of course, Gresham’s not Grisham’s law obtained and people got tired of novelists telling how, although their powers of invention were truly extraordinary, absolutely everything in their fiction was absolutely True and had really happened to them exactly as described. Capote even claimed to have invented a non-fiction (sic) novel about an actual murder case.
So—what made Carson himself laugh? Words, not surprisingly. He used them carefully and listened carefully to the way others used them. The moment we realized that we were, somehow, on each other’s wavelength was when I was doing my deep hollow-voiced radio-announcer Nixonian voice. I quoted from Nixon’s book Six Crises: “President Eisenhower was a far more sly and devious man than people suspected and I mean those words in their very best sense.” On air, I got a look of genuine astonishment from John. Then he nearly slid out of his chair. Over the years, when one or the other of us would characterize someone as “sly” and “devious,” the other would add in an oily voice, “I assume you mean those words in their very best sense.”
Last winter I ran into Janet De Cordova, now a widow. She had tried to get John to come to a memorial service for Freddie and he’d said, “I’ll think about it.” He did. He rang her back and said, “No, I can’t do it.” When reminded of their long friendship and so on, he was to the point: “I can’t do it because everyone thinks I’m still Johnny Carson but I’m not anymore. I wouldn’t even know how to fake it. So, I won’t be there but I know what a lousy businessman Freddie was and I’ll bet his affairs are in a mess so I’m sending you something useful.” He sent her a large check and she was pleased. But how odd it must be not to be the self you have spent a lifetime perfecting. To vanish like Prospero into thin air, leaving behind pale understudies but no replacement.
As I was writing these last thoughts on Carson, a friend sent me an old clipping which John would have enjoyed. I start to imagine we are back on his show. I remark how the administration is praising the recent election in Iraq where, perhaps, 72 percent voted. I sit in the swivel chair to his right, an old bit of newspaper clipping in one hand.
“I hear, Gore, you’ve got the latest news from the election in Iraq. It was certainly a real triumph for freedom and democracy, wouldn’t you say?” To myself I mutter, “In the very best sense of those words.” Aloud I say, “Well, actually, it’s from The New York Times of September 3, 1967.”
“A dicey year for freedom, wasn’t it?”
I read the headline: “U.S. encouraged by Vietnam vote: Officials cite 83 percent turnout despite Vietcong terror…A successful election has long been seen as the keystone to President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.” Suddenly, we are sitting on the balcony in Ravello.
CARSON
What’s that phrase you use all the time for the country?
VIDAL
The United States of Amnesia.
CARSON
I’ll open with that, then you read off the “latest” Iraq election news with the quote from 1967.
VIDAL
But where do we do this?
CARSON
Oh, we’ll find a show.
VIDAL
There isn’t one. Remember? You’re dead.
CARSON (evasively)
No, no. I’m just living down at the beach, I think it’s called in seclusion.
The screen is now crowded with Leno et al. telling jokes until mortar fire drowns them out, and we have faded to black. Anyway, a few of us once heard the chimes at midnight and were the better for it.
ELEVEN
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’s 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 has 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 center 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.