Frank offers an account of the film Visit to a Small Planet, originally a play for television, then a play for Broadway and, finally, terminally, a movie with the dread Jerry Lewis who Frank tells us: “According to Lewis, it was Vidal’s idea to cast him.” It was Vidal’s idea to cast David Niven and Paramount agreed; then Lewis, somehow, got the part which he played as a nine-year-old from outer space. Frank is a truly audacious explorer in the rain forest of my career. She finds shadowy monsters unknown to me and similarities where I find none. Jacqueline Susann was a popular novelist who exploited TV in her successful efforts to sell her exciting and excited novels, largely about feminine ailments and addictions. Although I have never read her I enjoyed meeting her several times with her large dark eyes whose thick false lashes resembled a pair of tarantulas in a postcoital state. Frank writes:
But, like Susann, Jerry Lewis has much in common with Vidal’s Myra. I put Vidal in the company of Susann (just as I put him in the company of Jerry Lewis earlier) in order to suggest an alternative genealogy for the intellectual, one excluded from those accounts that have been dominated by the print-based model of the intellectual. If Vidal maintains the status of exemplary American writer-intellectual in the age of TV, it is because he has both exploited the print-screen circuit in the genre of romance and found ways to transmit his sexual politics on-screen.
Frank is very good on Live from Golgotha though its alleged subtitle is not “The Gospel According to Gore Vidal,” an addition made by a creative dust-jacket designer. My Gospel would have been very different. “James Tatum has given a persuasive exposition of Vidal’s adherence to the world of Roman which he calls Vidal’s Romanitas. Underwriting Vidal’s Romanitas is a universalism evident in his treatments of sexuality but also there in his mode of political address. The example of Vidal should thus prompt an alternative account of the intellectual and the media that would consider the prospects of universalism in our day.” Now Ms. Frank is getting to the engine room of her subject. The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of Tales from Livy that I’d found in my grandfather’s library. Although in school I was like so many others persecuted with Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars of which Montaigne observed that although every reader is eager to know why he was so brilliant a general, not to mention a transformer of the old republic into a principate suitable for himself, he tells us nothing interesting on those subjects so busy is he trying to convince us what a greater engineer he was. (I, though not a general, generalize like the emperor and god-to-be.) Frank handles this most originally:
Perversely, perhaps, when I call Vidal’s intellectual career an exercise in televisual classicism I take my cue from the man whom Vidal obliterated from his alternative political history of the United States: Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who recognized and confirmed Vidal’s classic status. When asked to what purposes he would put the auditorium of his presidential library, Nixon said that it should be used to reenact “great debates like—oh, Vidal and Buckley’s 1968 battle” had brought sexuality into the political arena, something the noncharismatic, conservative Nixon would seem the least likely to have recognized, but here Nixon confers on Vidal and Buckley the status of national treasures.
FIFTY-THREE
“Bemoaning the demise of the serious novel, or the disintegration of literary fame, as the consequence of the loss of history makes Vidal’s satirical stance reminiscent of Alexander Pope. He thus might seem to support those who believe in the decline of the intellectual or of literary seriousness. But Vidal simultaneously overrides Pope’s famous definition of wit—‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’—by expressing it so well, so often, verbatim. Such reproduction, enabled by the central position of television in Vidal’s writing, points to the future possibilities suggested by Myra’s utopian mission, to ‘re-create the sexes and thus save the human race from certain extinction.’ Exploiting the television commercial as ‘the last demonstration of necessary love in the West,’ Vidal successfully negotiates a public role for the author as intellectual on the basis of the circuit that he establishes between the page and the movie screen, a circuit that relies on the mediation of that amnesia-inducing and immortality-producing medium: the television. Vidal uses TV to ward off the blurring of the boundaries between culture and politics in identity-based politics. He exploits the congruencies among critiques of genetic, genital, and technological determinism. By these means, he has refused to be ghettoized…in TV he has found both a vehicle through which to convey his politics and a mode of address for a new televisual public, that is, a public conditioned by television even when it reads. Vidal’s career teaches us that it is possible to remain a universal intellectual in the age of TV. He has done so by negotiating the print-screen circuit.”
FIFTY-FOUR
Irony has never had an easy time of it in our American version of English. We tend to bald bold literal statements whether it be during a sales pitch to someone who may be persuaded to buy a used car that once belonged to a blind octogenarian widow whose car had never accrued so much as a fraction of vulgar mileage. Lately I’ve noted that the notion of irony, if not irony itself, is suddenly abroad. Particularly on television. All sorts of young and not-so-young people when they say something that has a slightly tinny sound will, simultaneously, hold up both hands with forefingers extended on either side of the head to mean, I think, that the statement is in quotation marks because…well, what? That the statement for some reason is suspect? Untrue? Moot? Whatever the gesture means, I suspect that, at times, irony may be intended but the very concept of irony is unusual in our language featuring as it does enthusiastic declarative sentences sometimes true but if, in quotes, perhaps, false: so caveat auditor.
Since much of what I say and write tends to the ironic (without, however, the cute bracketing fingers) I should like to end this memoir with, first, a definition of irony and, second, a demonstration of irony in action that ended in catastrophic murder.
The best of dictionaries of English words and their usage is the Oxford English Dictionary. Here is their listing for “irony”:
1) A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used; usually taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to imply condemnation or contempt.
2) A condition of affairs or events of a character opposite to what was, or might naturally be, expected; a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things.
Let’s keep this last definition in mind as I now tell a tale for midnight.
In 1961 a new president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was inaugurated at the age of forty-three. With him a new generation had taken the crown from the older generation as represented by General Eisenhower. There was triumphant talk of a new frontier presumably to be crossed by all of us into a new bright land where the only shadow that marred the prospect was that of the hideous, murderous specter of international Communism centered upon the Soviet Union against whom JFK had sworn to bear any burden to ensure the ultimate victory of freedom, liberty, and so on. But early on, starting in 1959, under the general direction of the then vice president Richard M. Nixon, who had many interesting Cuban Mob connections (yes, Bebe Rebozo his mysterious friend was also linked not only to mobsters but to the Cuban dictator Batista who had been overthrown by Fidel Castro to the annoyance of the Mob, an annoyance that turned to fury when Castro shut down, if only briefly, the Mafia-run Havana casinos). Elements of the CIA were soon attempting to murder Castro who, like all Nixon enemies, was if not yet a Communist, worse, a Communist dupe. The presidential election of 1960 was a close one fought by Nixon and John F. Kennedy, an attractive Massachusetts senator whose father had, ironically, dealings with many mobsters during the pre–World War Two period, as well as at the time of the prohibition of alcohol. The late film producer Ray Stark told me how, during the short presidency of JFK, Joe Kennedy and Frank Costello (the retired N.Y. Mob overlord) would often have dinner at Kennedy’s Central Park South apartment and rehash old crimes, often in the company of a retired Teamster who gave great massages. Joe’s Mob connections were useful to Jack in the 1960 election and could easily have saved JFK’s life in 1963 had Bobby Kennedy, in the interest of building himself up in the public’s eyes, not started arresting important mobsters particularly in the so-called Apalachin Mob Conference bust where they had all come together to confer about the succession to the leadership of the New York Mob. I’ve long since forgotten how I first heard of the plot to kill JFK, while I had no idea at all of the Kennedy brothers’ plot to kill Castro on December 1, 1963, until I read a recent book by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann called Ultimate Sacrifice. It was assumed that the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had sufficiently alarmed JFK and Castro’s mentor, Khrushchev, so that they jointly backed down, putting an end, so everyone thought, to such dangerous adventures. JFK had pledged not to invade Cuba if Castro would allow inspections of any remaining missiles on the island. Since Castro did not cooperate, JFK then regarded his pledge as inoperative. “In the spring of 1963,” according to Ultimate Sacrifice (more a literal than an ironic title), “John and Robert Kennedy started laying the groundwork for a coup against Fidel Castro that would eventually be set for what they called C-Day: December, 1 1963.” Bobby, like Nixon before him, was in charge of what would be the most secretive operation of its sort in our history. Since the CIA had, in the eyes of the Kennedys, botched the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the Department of Defense was to be in charge of this adventure which would first engage Mob hit men to assassinate Castro and then replace him with a provisional government that would implore the United States to come to its aid and restore order. Ours is a society riddled with plots of every kind from, let’s say, one to bribe certain members of Congress to cheat the Indians of their casino money to the financing, often secretly, of numerous presidential elections while, simultaneously, great companies like Enron cheat customers, stockholders, employees; yet anyone who draws attention to all of this corruption is quickly denounced as a conspiracy theorist who means to undo the great fiction that anything truly wicked, at least in the murder line, must be the work of a sole solitary “nut” who is simply Evil; hence, the setting up of Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone crazed killer of JFK despite his own brief but presumably accurate statement after his Dallas arrest: “I’m the patsy”; then, as planned, his being gunned down by Jack Ruby, a fellow CIA “asset” (I use dumb quotes denoting that neither, strictly speaking, was a real asset in the literal sense but each had a role to play); Oswald as lone killer for no reason at all and addled Ruby, a onetime Chicago mobster, who claimed to be deeply worried about the stress that all this must be causing the widow Kennedy.