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18 Sep ' 18:23
In September 1992, Variety reporter Joseph McBride was surprised to learn that his editors had spiked an article he had written about the upcoming political docu-drama, “Bob Roberts.” The film starred Tim Robbins — who also wrote and directed — as a charismatic, guitar-playing millionaire who was running for the U.S. Senate against an incumbent, Sen. Brickley Paiste, an entrenched, old school liberal, portrayed by Gore Vidal.
For his article on the film, McBride interviewed Vidal — and it was his focus on Vidal, he says now, that created a problem for his editors:
- Published: Sep. 18, 2012
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17 Sep ' 21:24
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29 Aug ' 22:13
- Gore Vidal’s ‘Burr’ Versus the Tea Party
- Friends Gather in New York to Pay Homage to Gore Vidal
- James Wolcott on ‘The Gore Supremacy’
- How Gore Vidal Wrote a Perennially Best Selling Play
- Gore Vidal Remembered by Fans Gathered at Musso & Frank, His Favorite Hollywood’s Nightspot
- Remembrance of Gore Vidal Scheduled for Aug. 23 at Schoenfeld Theatre on Broadway
- Gore Vidal’s Papers to Be Housed at Harvard’s Houghton Library
Where did tea partyists get their fantastical ideas about our Founding Fathers? In an article published at Bloomberg.com earlier this month, Adam Kirsch, a senior editor at The New Republic, suggests that the source of the mythologizing of the Founders originated with those august gentlemen themselves — a fact that Kirsch says Gore Vidal illuminated in Burr, his 1973 novel about the United States’ third vice president: Burr delights in subverting everything we think we know about how the country was built. With his characteristic patrician sarcasm, Vidal casually scraps the enduring notion of American exceptionalism, the idea that our politics, unlike those of the corrupt Old World, are founded on ideals of democratic equality and public virtue. If the Tea Party today looks back to the founders with reverence, Burr suggests, that is only because they did such a good job mythologizing themselves and mesmerizing posterity…
- Published: Aug. 29, 2012
Friends, colleagues and fans of Gore Vidal gathered at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater — home of the revival of Vidal’s play, “The Best Man” — in New York on Thursday to celebrate his life. Joining host Dick Cavet were Oscar winners Susan Sarandon, Anjelica Huston and Michael Moore; novelist Salman Rushdie; playwrights John Guare and Doug Wright; screenwriter Elaine May; the columnist Liz Smith; actors Richard Belzer, Alan Cumming, Griffin Dunne, Christine Ebersole and Phyllis Newman.
Dick Cavet hosting the Gore Vidal tribute
Past and present members of the cast of “The Best Man” also participated, including Elizabeth Ashley, Candice Bergen, Kristin Davis, James Earl Jones, John Larroquette and Cybill Shepherd.
Carol Blue, the widow of Christopher Hitchens, also attended, as did Vidal’s friend, Rep. Dennis Kucinich.
Here is a sampling of excerpts from coverage of the event:
- Published: Aug. 24, 2012
“Vanity Fair” columnist James Wolcott has written a Kindle Single for Amazon about Gore Vidal, which he calls a “fast-moving meditation on the life and times and major battles of Gore Vidal, who met his stoic fate on July 31st.”Here’s an excerpt from the opening:
[The] death that most ceremoniously lowered the curtain on an era, an ideal, and an avocation, was that of Gore Vidal, who nodded his last on July 31st, age 86. Tottering on walking sticks in his later years before being resigned to a wheelchair, where he still looked in charge, enthroned, dispensing papal benediction on those who came to pay homage, Vidal had been edging to the Exit Door, as he put it, for some time. It didn’t make it any easier to see him go. We shall never see his like again. But then we had never seen his like before. He was a stately, head-sculptured presence for so long that we took for granted how improbable that presence was. Practically an emanation.
Kindle Singles are available only at Amazon.com.
- Published: Aug. 22, 2012
Mark Lawson in The Guardian
James Earl Jones
Most dramatists would kill to have a play revived every few years. One solution is to write an imperishable masterpiece; even better if it becomes a set text on the school or university syllabus. But a more reliable method is to choose a subject that excites cyclical interest — a tactic demonstrated by the late Gore Vidal.
Vidal, who died last month, was always better known for novels, essays, screenplays, quips and controversies. But he also created a few pieces for the stage, and a new production of his 1960 drama The Best Man has been playing at the Schoenfeld Theatre in New York throughout the summer. Impressively, this is the second Broadway staging in just over a decade.
- Published: Aug. 22, 2012
Los Angeles Times columnist Gale Holland attended the wake held for Gore Vidal by LAVA, the Los Angeles Visionaries Association, at Musso & Frank in Hollywood last Thursday night. Here is a sample of her reporting on the event:It was a spectacle Vidal most likely would have loved. For all his high-WASP breeding, his mandarin hauteur, Gore Vidal was a populist. He ran for office several times and never stopped trying to convince the American people to reverse what he saw as a disastrous course of empire-building, engineered by politicians from his own patrician class.
- Published: Aug. 16, 2012
Liz Smith:
Schoenfeld Theatre (Photo: Playbill)
On Aug. 23, the producer Jeff Richards whom I’ve known since he was a little boy in short pants and who is now the producer of Gore’s “The Best Man” on Broadway, will host a remembrance of Gore at 12 p.m. in the Schoenfeld Theatre. Should be quite a treat; full of the people Gore disdained, abused and did not quite approve of. But in the kindness of his heart, Gore was always a gentleman, and he wouldn’t deny access to his “betters” because he didn’t feel he had any. His play is, again (I think) the best drama on Broadway, full of portent for our times.
- Published: Aug. 9, 2012
Gore Vidal with Houghton archivist Jennifer Lyons, looking through the Vidal papers in the Houghton Reading Room (June 2007)
In 2002, Gore Vidal selected the Houghton Library, Harvard University’s primary repository for rare books and manuscripts, to be the permanent home of his papers, including his books, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs and other documents. Yesterday, Houghton made note of Vidal’s passing and expressed gratitude for his “magnificent gift”:
- Published: Aug. 8, 2012
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07 Aug ' 07:34
In 2003, Gore Vidal and Howard Austen moved from La Rondinaia, their long-time home in Ravello, Italy, to a house Vidal had owned in the Hollywood Hills since the 1970s. They returned to Los Angeles, Vidal said later, to live out “the Cedars-Sinai years.” In fact, Austen was seriously ill when they returned to California. He died not long after they returned. Vidal passed away in the house last week.
Los Angeles Magazine revisits its story on the house, Casa Vidal, from December 2011, on its website:
- Published: Aug. 7, 2012
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06 Aug ' 10:32
“Gore Vidal seemed able not only to do anything but to do it all at the same time,” Hillel Italie wrote in an remembrance of Vidal for the Associated Press yesterday. “In the early 1960s, you might catch him on a television talk show, read an essay of his in The Nation about Norman Mailer, see “The Best Man” on Broadway or watch him campaign for Congress with Eleanor Roosevelt at his side.”
“Nothing is easier nowadays than to get a feeling of being entirely surrounded by Gore Vidal.”
- Richard Rover in the New Yorker, 1960Italie quotes Richard Rovers in the New Yorker from 1960: “Nothing is easier nowadays than to get a feeling of being entirely surrounded by Gore Vidal.”
It has felt that way again over the past few days, naturally, as news of Vidal’s death has been reported around the world and reacted to by his friends and admirers, as well as his detractors and other opinisists. Italie suggests that Vidal “feared irrelevance” to which Vidal might have responded, “Don’t we all?”
When asked in 2007 how he wanted to remembered, Vidal answered, “Not at all … Anyone who wants to be remembered is doomed not to be.”
Early indicators suggest that the prospects for Vidal’s continued relevance are great. Hillel Italie notes that, upon his death, Gore Vidal was not only seemingly everywhere again — and as relevant as ever:
- Published: Aug. 6, 2012
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04 Aug ' 12:23
Tweets from current and former cast members:
“Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television”- advice taken Gore – and thank you for the BEST MAN. rip Gore Vidal.
Rest in peace our brilliant writer – so sad to lose him.We will relish his words today in @TheBestManBway.
Gore Vidal is now silent – 1st time in 87 years. It was an honor to speak his words from the stage & spend a little time in his company.
- Published: Aug. 4, 2012
From “Remembering Gore Vidal,” by Jon Wiener, in The Nation:
Victor Navasky tells one of the most revealing stories about Gore Vidal, who died July 31 in Los Angeles at age 86. In 1986, Gore wrote an essay for the magazine’s 120th anniversary issue. Shortly after it was published, Victor was invited to lunch by the publisher of Penthouse magazine, Bob Guccione, at his East Side townhouse, famous for its $200 million art collection. “We had barely consumed the amuse gueules when Bob asked me how much it cost to get Gore Vidal to write his essay,” Victor recalled. “When I told him we had paid each contributor to that issue $25 and Gore got the same $25 that everyone else got, he almost choked on his Chateau Margaux and told me he had offered Vidal $50,000 to write an article for Penthouse and Vidal declined.”Gore, who had accepted Victor’s invitation to join the magazine in 1981 as a contributing editor, published forty-one articles in The Nation at those rates. Some of his most memorable quotes appeared in The Nation: “We are the United States of Amnesia,” he wrote in 2004. “We learn nothing because we remember nothing.” In that same essay he called the US a place where “the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.”
Below are links to more than 25 of the essays Gore Vidal wrote for The Nation, including one from 1958 and another from 1960:
- Published: Aug. 4, 2012
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03 Aug ' 15:24
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- Published: Aug. 3, 2012
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03 Aug ' 11:21
- Susan Sarandon on Gore Vidal: ‘We’ve Lost an Important Voice and I will Miss His Big Heart’
- LAVA to Hold Homage to Gore Vidal at Musso & Franks in Hollywood on August 9
- Playboy Republishes Its Coversations with Gore Vidal for Tablet Subscribers
- Scotty Bowers, Author of ‘Full Service’ and Longtime Friend, on Gore Vidal: ‘One Kind of Sweetheart’
- Larry Flynt on Gore Vidal: ‘I’m Happy to Have Been Able to Call Him a Good Friend’
- Gore Vidal in 2007 Interview: ‘Anyone Who Wants to Be Remembered Is Doomed Not to Be’
Susan Sarandon was a longtime friend of Gore Vidal. Here is her statement on his passing:Gore Vidal was a lover of truth, the Constitution & the Republic. With courage and wit he inspired, challenged and entertained. We’ve lost an important voice and I will miss his big heart.
- Published: Aug. 3, 2012
LAVA, the Los Angeles Visionaries Association, will hold an homage to Gore Vidal on August 9. Here is the event description from the LAVA website- Published: Aug. 3, 2012
Playboy Magazine has published its conversations with Gore Vidal from the June 1969 Playboy Interview, the December 1987 Playboy Interview and the December 1998 20 Questions in their entirety for tablet subscribers to i.playboy.com. You’ll find a few excerpts here, including these:
- Published: Aug. 3, 2012
Scotty Bowers, Author of ‘Full Service’ and Longtime Friend, on Gore Vidal: ‘One Kind of Sweetheart’
Scotty Bowers and Gore Vidal met shortly after World War II and remained friends for the next 64 years. Recently, Vidal helped Bowers find an agent for his book, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Life of the Stars, which was published earlier this year — and Vidal’s final public appearance was as a guest of honor at a book party for Bowers at the Chateau Marmont Hotel on the Sunset Strip.Here in part is Scotty Bowers’ reaction to the passing of his friend Gore Vidal:
I will miss everything about Gore. He was a good fox-hole buddy. Believe me, there was only one Gore. He’s never going to be replaced or duplicated, in the way he thought and what he said and how he said it. It wasn’t like he practiced it. He was a one kind of a sweetheart.
Full Service has been on the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list for 18 weeks.
- Published: Aug. 3, 2012
- Published: Aug. 3, 2012
This interview was given in conjunction with the publication of Point to Point Navigation. The video is posted below…
- Published: Aug. 3, 2012
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03 Aug ' 07:11
From Gore Vidal appreciation: Writer served as canary in a coal mine, by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic:
For Vidal, contemporary America could be best interpreted as a reflection of ancient Rome: a republic that had become an empire and, in so doing, had fallen prey to empire’s corruptions, empire’s woes. This is the story to which he returned, in both his writing and his public appearances, and it illustrates a fundamental tension that he never quite resolved. Vidal, after all, was both insider and outsider: an aristocrat who saw the failings of the aristocracy, a true believer whose belief had been betrayed.
- Published: Aug. 3, 2012
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02 Aug ' 10:33
Joanne Woodward on the passing of Gore Vidal:“We had a great times together – we always did. I loved listening to him. My favorite quote: ‘Always a godfather, never a god.’ I will miss him terribly.”
The photo at left shows Vidal holding Elinor “Nell” Teresa, the firstborn child of Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. It was about Nell, who was born in 1959, that Vidal said, “Always a godfather, but never a god.”
- Published: Aug. 2, 2012
Bill Maher, in a posting to Facebook:Gore Vidal: loved him. As a guest, as a writer, as a friend. Balls like beachballs. Google him on monotheism. A giant who stands alone.
- Published: Aug. 2, 2012
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, in a news release:America has lost a man of singular brilliance, a towering intellectual figure of immense heart and wit whose mere passing will revive the power and integrity of the adjective in the English language.
Gore Vidal was a dear friend as well. This is a deep personal loss, an unfathomable loss to the world of literature and politics, whose consolation shall be the counsel and affliction by Gore’s writing for generations to come. We shall miss him, but he will not be gone. He will just be away.
- Published: Aug. 2, 2012
This comes to us from the AtlanticWire
He did have sex with him; he called him a crypto-Nazi, not crypto-fascist; and he wasn’t related to Al Gore. The corrections on the New York Times’ Gore Vidal obituary are so perfectly Vidal. The Times’ posted their four page Vidal obituary late last night after the news of his death was announced on his website (and caused it to crash). Apparently they made a few mistakes, but they might be the funniest mistakes attached to an obituary, ever, and they fit so well with the stories we’ve heard about Vidal. They were first brought to our attention by the Times’ Michael Roston, who called them “epic,” and after reading we were inclined to agree.
Here are the Times’ corrections:
- Published: Aug. 2, 2012
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