GLR May June

12 / 52

his blazer hung open, exposing a swagged belly. His shoulders
were dotted with dandruff, and his parchment-dry skin had a per-
manent crease on the right cheek.” Later, when Mewshaw and
his wife had been invited for dinner: “Howard and Gore were
drunk when Linda and I joined them in their suite at the Con-
naught. Room service had sent up a magnum of Veuve Clicquot
and a pot of caviar, much of which dribbled down Gore’s shirt-
front, along with hard-boiled egg yolk and toast crumbs.”
“Whom the gods would destroy, they first put hair on their
backs,” Vidal once joked when speaking of Israelis, but dan-
druff seems below the belt. I suppose one could say that it’s a
measure of Mewshaw’s love for Vidal, his reverence for Vidal’s
accomplishment and brilliance, that makes the details of his
physical decline all the more horrific to him. Or it’s just a good
writer’s eye for physical detail. Or the fact that decline is more
dramatic than success. There is something Lear-like in Vidal’s
long suicide by alcohol, his wish to die, his turning to senti-
mental reveries about the prep school student Jimmy Trimble,
who he claimed was the love of his life (a myth, both Teeman
and Mewshaw conclude), his increasingly tacky behavior and
offensive remarks. But that dandruff makes one wonder whether
Mewshaw’s stated goal of showing the kind, conflicted, vul-
nerable man behind the mask Vidal presented to the world has
not been overtaken by the same inevitable Grand Guignol in
which Teeman’s book is steeped, though Mewshaw’s is much
better written, with a skilled writer’s eye for anecdote, punch
line, and description of scene.
At the Key West Literary Seminar, to which Mewshaw had
12 The Gay & Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE
been given the assignment of attracting Vidal, there’s more
when his old friend arrives: “A sad, shrunken doll in a rumpled
blue blazer with an antimacassar of dandruff around his shoul-
ders, he wore stained sweatpants and bright white tennis sneak-
ers and sat slumped to one side in his wheelchair, as if the bones
had been siphoned out of his body.”
Vidal’s behavior at the Key West Literary Seminar is so bad,
it’s hilarious—he’s the nightmare guest whose presence induces
chiefly dread in his hosts: Can he get through it? At an inaugu-
ral party at an art gallery, when the owner says, “Here’s some-
one I’m sure you’d like to meet, Mr. Vidal. Joy Williams,” Vidal
replies, “Why would I want to meet Joy Williams?” When one
of the town’s leading lights, a man who has told Mewshaw he’s
looking forward to meeting the writer Tennessee Williams in-
troduced him to years ago, says to Vidal: “Gore, what a pleas-
ure to see you after all these years,” Vidal replies, “I’ve never
seen you before in my life.” And when a generous donor to the
Seminar comes over to talk to him, Vidal barks “for somebody
to ‘get this drunken cross-eyed cunt out of my face.’” Not your
dream panelist, though Vidal went on to be filmed by C-SPAN
in conversation with his literary executor Jay Parini and later in
the year addressed the British Parliament and the legislature in
Turkey, and conferred on a revival of his play The Best Man be-
fore dying of pneumonia in Los Angeles not long after that.
In other words, though much better written, more interest-
ing, and more readable, Mewshaw does not come out in a place
very far from Teeman’s gothic amalgam of interviews with
Vidal’s caretakers conducted not long after his demise. So how
does Mewshaw end up with something very close to a pathog-
raphy after all? Is it just Vidal himself that makes it inevitable?
Or is it the strange tax we levy on people who achieve great
things? Or the difference between being straight and gay? In the
end, the Mewshaws still seem like the young couple in The
Rocky Horror Picture Show, or for that matter Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? They, and many of Vidal’s friends, have had to
put up with an awful lot. But when it’s over, the Mewshaws di-
vide their time among London, Rome, and Key West, the par-
ents of two grown sons and a grandchild, while Vidal has died
a crazy drunk in a wheelchair.
So he drank himself to death; so what? (Or rather, would it
not be interesting to wonder why at sixty he began wishing to
die?) Is there an explanation for it? Does it have anything to do
with his genius, or was it just alcoholism? In this case, it’s nei-
ther irrelevant nor explained. But surely we don’t read about
Vidal because he died with wet brain. As with John Lahr’s re-
cent biography of Tennessee Williams, Sympathy for the Devil
portrays the tortured personality, the conflicts, the turmoil be-
hind the public mask; but we never get what made both of these
men the writers they were. Like Williams, Vidal was so witty,
so quick, so sharp, he deserved a Boswell; instead we get these
secondary figures who intersected with them as interviewers
and survived to chart their terrible decline. Mewshaw’s memoir
succeeds in its goal of showing us the variegated moods and as-
pects of Vidal’s character; but what do he and Lahr want of their
subjects, perfect mental health? It’s a bit like Orson Welles’
speech in the movie The Third Man (to condense): Renaissance
Italy produced murder, the Borgias, Michelangelo, and
Leonardo. Switzerland had five hundred years of democracy
and peace and produced the cuckoo clock.
A CALOOSA CLUB MYSTERY
Purchase your copy at
When drowned men’s bodies begin turning up in Lee County,
Florida, Detective Bud Wright and sidekick Dan Ewing must
set to work solving a series of brutal murders.
“Elliott Mackle is a gay Pat Conroy.”
—Dudley Clendinen, co-author, Out for Good