The lion in winter – Gore Vidal

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Gore Vidal says that when he meets strangers, ‘I invent a new character for myself.’ At 81, his potential repertoire of new roles has become limited by age and infirmity, but he still contrives an impressive entrance, descending from the upper floor of his villa in the Hollywood Hills like a deus ex machina.
The experience of visiting him at home on the leafy, exclusive slopes of LA’s Mulholland Drive is theatrical, even gothic. Norberto, the major-domo, shows you into a cavernously gloomy living room cluttered with Roman busts, Regency mirrors and massive old oils. Upstairs, across creaking floorboards, there is the sound of an old man getting up. It is mid-morning, and the house is just stirring. A gangly teenage boy in trainers, wearing an iPod, flits down the staircase and disappears backstage. More anticipation. Noises off: scraps of conversation from the servants’ quarters followed by the sinister drone of a lift descending to the ground floor with a ker-chunk.

Another pause. Then the teenage boy reappears, supporting his master, who shuffles forward with excruciating slowness to make his greeting. The extended hand with the quasi-papal ring is thin and old. He turns his head awkwardly, not meeting your gaze. Still, Gore Vidal is recognisably himself, though dramatically aged, with the waxy pallor and wispy white hair of the slippered pantaloon.
Vidal’s entrance is matched by his first line. When I murmur something about Terre Haute, a new play by Edmund White which dramatises a fictional encounter between the writer and the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Gore Vidal merely growls, ‘Edmund White will yet be feeling the wrath of my lawyers.’ Where once he might have revelled in going the distance with another writer, now he seems surprisingly hurt by the treacherous ways of the creative community. ‘It’s unethical and vicious to make it very clear that this old faggot writer is based on me, and that I’m madly in love with Timothy McVeigh, who I never met.’ He adds, tetchily, that he doesn’t want to be ‘lumped together with Mailer and Capote. They both went for murderers, and I don’t go for murderers.’ more…

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