Salon.com > Gore Vidal

Rex Reed: A career of offensiveness

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 23:02:00 +0000

Long-time film critic Rex Reed -- who incidentally acted in one of the worst films ever made, the 1970 adaptation of Gore Vidal's novel "Myra Breckinridge" -- is making headlines today for his particularly offensive review of "Identity Thief," in which he called comedian Melissa McCarthy "humongous," "tractor-sized," and a "female hippo." He continued to focus on nothing but her weight, trivializing her fame to the point of calling the "Bridesmaids" star "a gimmick comedian who has devoted her short career to being obese and obnoxious with equal success."

As support for McCarthy poured in via Twitter and comments, Gawker's Rich Juzwiak called Reed's description "uncivil and the product of an intolerant mindset"; critic Christopher Campbell tweeted: "Seriously, there are too many writers losing their jobs (and those of us who can't get good ones) for Rex Reed to get away with that junk"; Chad Lowe called the comments "vile and unnacceptable," asking for the Observer to fire Reed.

Out of a newspaper strike dawned a new age in American letters

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:07:00 +0000

Last week, my colleague at Doubleday came by my office with an austere-looking 11-by-15-inch broadsheet. Good God! It was a facsimile edition of the first issue of the New York Review of Books, Feb. 1, 1963. The advertising director and I sat there kvelling over this wondrously manifested printed object from another universe, with its Murderers Row of reviewers weighing in on many books that all these years later still matter, its old-school book ads with their quaint frontal appeals to the reader’s higher cultural aspirations (“Pantheon: Outstanding Books From Abroad”; “The power of Thought is the magic of the Mind.” — the Lord Byron headline for Columbia University Press’s ad), its wittily punning heads (“Albee Damned” for Nicola Chiarmonte’s review of "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf"; “To the Whitehouse” for Dwight Macdonald’s review of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s "The Politics of Hope"). Byron had it right: There was a whole lost world of magical allure contained in those 48 pages of newsprint. So I closed my door, and let’s just say not a whole lot of work got done the rest of the afternoon.

Gore Vidal told you so

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

This past summer, we lost Gore Vidal, one of our greatest intellectual treasures at a time when we needed him most: during the 2012 presidential election. In a forthcoming book of interviews — which date from 1988 to 2007 — that Nation contributing editor Jon Wiener conducted with the witty and acerbic writer, activist and fiercely loyal Democrat, Vidal holds forth on oil, the unholy matrimony of corporations and politicians, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and war and Wall Street. Even though he's speaking of the past, Vidal's insights and anecdotes are equally, if not more so, applicable today.

Vidal on gas and oil:

The only optimists are the gas and oil people, and they have every reason to be. It has always been the trick of our republic to get people to vote wholeheartedly against their interests. That’s very exciting when you can do it. [Laughter.] I remember when I was running for Congress in upstate New York, in Dutchess County, and there would be these farmers going around in old, old Model-T Fords and so on, with stickers — Vote for Rockefeller. Sometimes I would stop them, and we’d chat. I’d say, “Why do you like him?” because he was pretty poisonous even then. They said, “He’s so rich, he wouldn’t steal our money.”

Mitt Romney, man of mystery

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 23:16:00 +0000

When Gore Vidal died a few weeks ago, eulogies quoted his famous observation that “the more money an American accumulates the less interesting he himself becomes.” Vidal originally wrote these words in a 1972 essay on Howard Hughes, but who could read them today and not think of Willard Mitt Romney?

Blessed with parodically presidential good looks, yet cursed with the unconvincing mannerisms of an early-generation android without its update patch, Romney is that most discombobulating of political phenomena—a boring enigma. Trying to figure out his true nature is akin to facing a block of polystyrene. You can’t see inside, and you can’t get a toehold. You’re left with analogies. Romney has been dubbed the next Herbert Hoover, awarded the honorary George H.W. Bush “Wimp” prize from Newsweek, and compared to a porn-movie queen because he changes his positions so often (this last from Arlen Specter, who only changes parties). Those of a more artistic bent have dubbed Romney a latter-day Zelig or, more arcanely, the Man without Qualities, although this is an insult to Robert Musil’s fictional hero, who may have shared Romney’s unwillingness to take a firm position on anything but at least had the courtesy not to seek political power.

The paradox of Romney is that even as he wants to run the world, he’s busy running away from its gaze. Although neither a dope like Dan Quayle nor an ignoramus like Sarah Palin—he has read Guns, Germs, and Steel even if he didn’t quite understand it—he has waged a campaign most memorable for its absence of specific ideas. While implying that President Barack Obama is somehow not a real American—for a phantasm to win he must turn his opponent into one, too—Romney basically asks voters to trust in his economic acumen and his leadership. But how can you lead when nobody can find you? He hides from his religion, his political achievements, his big scores at Bain Capital, his tax records, his old public utterances, his new public utterances—hides from everything that might not appeal to whatever voters he happens to be wooing at that particular moment. “Forget about yesterday,” he seems to be saying, “What matters is who I say I am right now.”

A great many empty suits have run for president, but seldom has one been so willing to flaunt his own lack of vision. Indeed, he’s the only nominee I can remember who, in choosing his running mate, was hoping to gain substance. There is, of course, nothing strange about a candidate pretending to be somebody else, but when Richard Nixon unveiled the “New Nixon” in 1968, you knew who he was pretending not to be. With Mitt, you suspect even Romney himself doesn’t know. He’s something new in American politics, if not American culture: a potential president so weightless that he makes Charles Foster Kane look as grounded as Dwight Eisenhower. At least you could tell what that mogul yearned for deep down inside, even if it was only that stupid sled.

While it would be invidious to suggest that Romney has no inner life (a quality that, to be fair, worked wonders for Ronald Reagan), even veteran Mittologists aren’t quite sure what goes on behind the synthetic smile. But they start with the Oedipal. As the worshipful son of a successful businessman whose “brainwashing” gaffe put the kibosh on his presidential hopes, Romney couldn’t fail to learn lessons from his father’s political failures, although he picked up the wrong ones. Tossing overboard what was admirable in George Romney’s legacy—his principled stands within the GOP on issues like civil rights—Mitt became so cautious that even his sister says that he uses vagueness as camouflage. But as the great Sigmund would remind us, an obsession with bottling up what you think will always produce its own elaborate symptomology. Romney rarely speaks off the cuff without landing in trouble. Even more than Joe Biden, who’s Metternich by comparison, he’s a walking gaffe-o-matic, which may be the most likably authentic thing about him.

Gore Vidal’s reading list for America

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 20:25:00 +0000

I briefly interviewed Gore Vidal once. It was a little more than thirty years ago, at the end of a long day of filming in Los Angeles. I was working as writer and segment producer on an arts magazine pilot for public television.

Vidal was staying at a friend’s house near the Hollywood Bowl. At 5 pm, the prearranged time, I knocked on the door and after a minute or so heard footsteps coming down stairs. The door opened and there he was, swathed in a long, elegant, silk paisley robe (of course!) and still half-asleep.

I told him who I was and reminded him why I was there. Ronald Reagan had been in the White House for less than a year and already was threatening major cuts to funding for the arts, so as part of the pilot, I was interviewing authors about books they thought might help the rest of us through his presidency. The answers would be spotted throughout the show, like currants in a bun. Vidal nodded and returned upstairs to change while the crew set up in the living room.

A few minutes later, now in jacket and tie, he joined us and sat down as lights, camera and sound were adjusted. I told him again what I wanted but now he stared at me blankly. Books for the Reagan years? He sighed, “I haven’t a clue.”

Gore Vidal: The Virgil of American populism

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 16:30:00 +0000

I remember exactly where I was when I understood Gore Vidal. The late writer was giving a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., during the impeachment proceedings against then-President Bill Clinton. Earlier that evening I had met Vidal in person for the first time. We had corresponded since the early 1990s, even when I had still been a member in good standing of the neoconservative movement as executive editor of the National Interest, published by Irving Kristol, and an occasional contributor to Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary. We exchanged letters about the “culture war,” neoconservatism, sex, religion, Thomas Mann and God knows what else (I don’t have copies of our correspondence, which is in the Vidal papers at Harvard). When I broke publicly with my conservative friends and colleagues and published “Up From Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America” in 1996, Vidal supplied me with a slyly equivocal blurb: “Part Candide, part de Tocqueville, Lind is a brilliant guide to the radicals who call themselves conservative, to the ossified who call themselves liberal.” To the dinner that preceded the speech that evening I had brought, as a gift, a facsimile reproduction of a Civil War-era guide to brothels in Washington,D.C., which I thought would amuse the controversial author of "Lincoln."

Dumbest tweets of the day

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 20:06:00 +0000

@Lujy261:

Gore Vidal live

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 16:47:00 +0000

For more than 50 years, Gore Vidal was a constant guest in several of America's most popular talk shows. From the Dick Cavett Show, where he verbally sparred with an increasingly drunk Norman Mailer, to his multiple appearances on Charlie Rose, Vidal craved for the attention that television and show business guaranteed. Salon presents a small selection of some notable onscreen appearances.

The memorable Dick Cavett Show featuring Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Janet Flanner:

During the 1968 Democratic Convention, Gore Vidal discussed the Vietnam War with William F. Buckley. After calling the conservative a "crypto-Nazi," Buckley, now truly angry, retorted, "Now listen you queer, quit calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered":