One Of The Nastiest Bastards On The Planet Dies - Gore Vidal - 86ed at 86

[Selene]

Gore Vidal, 1925-2012

Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: August 1, 2012

Gore Vidal, the elegant, acerbic all-around man of letters who presided with a certain relish over what he declared to be the end of American civilization, died on Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, where he moved in 2003, after years of living in Ravello, Italy. He was 86.

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Gore Vidal in 1947. More Photos »

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Gore Vidal, 1925-2012

The cause was complications of pneumonia, his nephew Burr Steers said by telephone.

Mr. Vidal was, at the end of his life, an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent. He published some 25 novels, two memoirs and several volumes of stylish essays. He also wrote plays, television dramas and screenplays. For a while he was even a contract writer at MGM. And he could always be counted on for a spur-of-the-moment aphorism, put down or sharply worded critique of American foreign policy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/books/gore-vidal-elegant-writer-dies-at-86.html?_r=1&hp

[basimpson22]

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm a conspiracy analyst. Everything the Bushites touch is screwed up. They could never have pulled off 9/11, even if they wanted to. Even if they longed to. They could step aside, though, or just go out to lunch while these terrible things were happening to the nation. I believe that of them. - Gore Vidal

made me laugh

[9thdoctor]

One Of The Nastiest Bastards On The Planet...

Sounds like someone's exulting in the death of one of his fellow creatures! Why,

It's...

Colder than the nipple on a witch’s tit!

Colder than a bucket of penguin shit!

Colder than the hairs of a polar bear’s ass!

Colder than the frost on a champagne glass!

"Comparing Pynchon's prose with that of, say, Joyce, is like comparing a kindergartener with a graduate student."

Gore Vidal, American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction 1976

Never mind.

[Selene]

One Of The Nastiest Bastards On The Planet...

Sounds like someone's exulting in the death of one of his fellow creatures! Why,

It's...

Colder than the nipple on a witch's tit!

Colder than a bucket of penguin shit!

Colder than the hairs of a polar bear's ass!

Colder than the frost on a champagne glass!

"Comparing Pynchon's prose with that of, say, Joyce, is like comparing a kindergartener with a graduate student."

Gore Vidal, American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction 1976

Never mind.

ND:

While I am not exulting, I am certainly not weeping.

Smart, accomplished individual, however, as I stated, a nasty, vicious person.

Adam

[9thdoctor]

While I am not exulting, I am certainly not weeping.

Smart, accomplished individual, however, as I stated, a nasty, vicious person.

Yeah yeah, just messing with you. Looks like I forgot to notate that the couplets were by Pynchon, the sarcasm maybe wasn't so obvious.

[Selene]

While I am not exulting, I am certainly not weeping.

Smart, accomplished individual, however, as I stated, a nasty, vicious person.

Yeah yeah, just messing with you. Looks like I forgot to notate that the couplets were by Pynchon, the sarcasm maybe wasn't so obvious.

I figured that part out.

I thought the title of the thread might have sounded like I was happy, or, gloating about his death, so you were well withing the strike zone...lol.

[Reidy]

One of Peikoff's best moments was a letter to the editor of Esquire after Vidal reviewed For the New Intellectual. One phrase that has stuck with me is "an ignorance of the history of philosophy that would be shocking in a college sophomore."

[George H. Smith]

I liked Gore Vidal.

A good article on Gore Vidal by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

http://lareviewofboo...ulltext=1=

Vidal discusses the gay subtext in Ben-Hur in this interview:

For some earlier comments by Jeff Riggenbach about Vidal's historical novels, see:

http://www.lewrockwe...genbach3-4.html

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

I read a couple of his novels a long time ago, including "Julian." I felt so compulsion to keep reading him, unlike, say, Ayn Rand. (I did enjoy his various repartees with Buckley.) Might be one of the things that galled him about Rand--the basic nature of their respective successes: her with two big apparently never out of print influential novels and he . . . : read and forget.

--Brant

[Reidy]

The Ben-Hur story is amusing, but it isn't true. The best evidence is the utter lack of supporting evidence. This is one of the most famous movies ever made, and Wyler is one of the big names in movie history. A movie set is not a good place to keep secrets. Wouldn't somebody - another writer, a cast member, an assistant director... - have talked and thus have been in a position, twenty years later, to come forth and confirm Vidal's story? Even a piece of gossip, Wyler-told-me-years-later..., would be better than nohing, which is what Vidal provides.

Very well. He's ready for that, telling us conveniently that it was a big secret among him, Wyler, Boyd and nobody else. Even more conveniently, Wyler had died the year before this interview, and Boyd five years earlier.

Second best evidence is that nothing in Boyd's performance, in the clips supplied, bears the claim out. Hot-to-trot is in any actor's repertoire of skills. If he'd played it well, it would show on the screen, especially after Vidal had clued us in. If he'd played it badly, it would be even more conspicuous.

[George H. Smith]

The Ben-Hur story is amusing, but it isn't true. The best evidence is the utter lack of supporting evidence. This is one of the most famous movies ever made, and Wyler is one of the big names in movie history. A movie set is not a good place to keep secrets. Wouldn't somebody - another writer, a cast member, an assistant director... - have talked and thus have been in a position, twenty years later, to come forth and confirm Vidal's story? Even a piece of gossip, Wyler-told-me-years-later..., would be better than nohing, which is what Vidal provides.

Very well. He's ready for that, telling us conveniently that it was a big secret among him, Wyler, Boyd and nobody else. Even more conveniently, Wyler had died the year before this interview, and Boyd five years earlier.

Second best evidence is that nothing in Boyd's performance, in the clips supplied, bears the claim out. Hot-to-trot is in any actor's repertoire of skills. If he'd played it well, it would show on the screen, especially after Vidal had clued us in. If he'd played it badly, it would be even more conspicuous.

I think Boyd's performance supports Vidal's story quite well. So does some of the dialogue, such as the exchange, "Still close...in every way."

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

The Ben-Hur story is amusing, but it isn't true. The best evidence is the utter lack of supporting evidence. This is one of the most famous movies ever made, and Wyler is one of the big names in movie history. A movie set is not a good place to keep secrets. Wouldn't somebody - another writer, a cast member, an assistant director... - have talked and thus have been in a position, twenty years later, to come forth and confirm Vidal's story? Even a piece of gossip, Wyler-told-me-years-later..., would be better than nohing, which is what Vidal provides.

Very well. He's ready for that, telling us conveniently that it was a big secret among him, Wyler, Boyd and nobody else. Even more conveniently, Wyler had died the year before this interview, and Boyd five years earlier.

Second best evidence is that nothing in Boyd's performance, in the clips supplied, bears the claim out. Hot-to-trot is in any actor's repertoire of skills. If he'd played it well, it would show on the screen, especially after Vidal had clued us in. If he'd played it badly, it would be even more conspicuous.

I think Boyd's performance supports Vidal's story quite well. So does some of the dialogue, such as the exchange, "Still close...in every way."

Ghs

It does do that. At least in that scene the Boyd character is going ape-shit with that. I'd have to re-see the movie to know if he kept in up that way. I suspect he did or what we see in this clip is gratuitous and reflects professional incompetence. I think the director was homosexual. In those days homosexuality was a Hollywood sub-rosa. The studios went to great lengths to protect their gay stars and major actors from publicity to that effect, notably, Rock Hudson. As for directors, it seems even John Ford was a gay so well concealed it only came out to a few as in one case an actress caught him kissing a man, an actor, in his office. She caught him in such a way that they didn't notice so she made a second, noisy entrance.

--Brant

[Selene]

Let's not forget The Rifleman, and first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers [not a very good baseball player]...Chuck Connors was purported to be homosexual...

Chuck Connors (on right) meeting USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev at the Western White House in California, June 1973.

Connors as a Dodger.

[Reidy]

Whatever Boyd is doing, Heston is doing, too, contrary to Vidal's account. They are both happy to see each other, but neither has a sword in his toga.

Vidal's claim that he "was writing" the movie is exaggerated. He came in for some uncredited on-the-set doctoring. imdb.com credits Karl Tunberg as the writer. Heston said Vidal wrote one scene that was not used, a claim that is exactly as well-founded as any of Vidal's.

What's the evidence that Wyler was gay? You have at least some gossip about Ford, but nothing at all about Wyler. He's been dead for over thirty years, plenty of time for the stories to come out. I looked up "William Wyler gay" on Bing and found nothing but the fact that he directed Gay Deception in 1935, long before it came to mean that. His previous project was The Good Fairy. I'm not making this up.

Connors made a gay porno movie before he became famous. Playboy once published a still. They didn't mention his name, but it was unmistakably Connors. This means that he's gay or that he needed the money. Depends on how hardcore it was.

[Brant Gaede]

I see Wyler was married twice and had five children by his second wife. I was wrong, I guess. It was something I thought I had read years ago.

--Brant

[Reidy]

But he had a thing going with Bette Davis at one time. That makes him an honorary queer.

[Selene]

But he had a thing going with Bette Davis at one time. That makes him an honorary queer.

Now that is funny!!

[9thdoctor]

I think Boyd's performance supports Vidal's story quite well.

I perceive a certain glow in the way he looks at Heston, but I can't say I'd see it that way if Vidal hadn't said what he did. It makes you look for it.

So does some of the dialogue, such as the exchange, "Still close...in every way."

That's just crap dialogue, I mean come on. And people say Rand's dialogue was wooden...

[George H. Smith]

Whatever Boyd is doing, Heston is doing, too, contrary to Vidal's account. They are both happy to see each other, but neither has a sword in his toga.

Vidal's claim that he "was writing" the movie is exaggerated. He came in for some uncredited on-the-set doctoring. imdb.com credits Karl Tunberg as the writer. Heston said Vidal wrote one scene that was not used, a claim that is exactly as well-founded as any of Vidal's....

I am not in a position to defend Vidal's claim, but if you read the lengthy article I linked earlier, you will see that Feeney casts doubt on Heston's account and gives some credibility to Vidal's. Here is the link again:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=815&fulltext=1&media

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

But he had a thing going with Bette Davis at one time. That makes him an honorary queer.

Now that is funny!!

I wonder what it would have meant to have had a thing going with Joan "No wire hangers!" Crawford--at one time?

Bette once said that while women were prettier, she liked the male mind.

--Brant

Well, I like mine

[George H. Smith]

I think Boyd's performance supports Vidal's story quite well.

I perceive a certain glow in the way he looks at Heston, but I can't say I'd see it that way if Vidal hadn't said what he did. It makes you look for it.

So does some of the dialogue, such as the exchange, "Still close...in every way."

That's just crap dialogue, I mean come on. And people say Rand's dialogue was wooden...

Here is the relevant part of F.X. Feeney's article at: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=815&fulltext=1&media.

I think he makes a credible case for Vidal's story.

Vidal flew to Rome with producer Sam Zimbalist and director William Wyler in the spring of 1958. His assignment was to develop a psychological motivation for the quarrel that erupts between two former friends, Massala and Ben-Hur — a feud that must fuel a whole four-hour epic, “until” as Vidal describes it, “Jesus Christ suddenly and pointlessly drifts onto the scene, automatically untying some of the cruder knots in the plot.” Wyler and he “agreed that a single political quarrel would not turn into a lifelong vendetta,” so Vidal proposed something primal: “As boys they were lovers. Now Messala wants to continue the affair. Ben-Hur rejects him. Messala is furious. Chagrin d’amour, the classic motivation for murder.”

This being the 1950s, the story being an adjunct to the Bible, and the star being Charlton Heston, Wyler understandably balked, but Vidal reassured him: “We won’t really do it. We’ll just suggest it. I’ll write the scenes so that they will make sense to those who are tuned in. Those who aren’t will still feel that Messala’s rage is somehow emotionally logical.” Wyler, his back to the wall with an otherwise unworkable script, agreed to the scheme, but issued a now legendary warning: “Don’t ever tell Chuck what it’s all about, or he’ll fall apart.”

Heston, waking up at the butt-end of this punchline decades after the fact, understandably — if grimly — disputed this yarn for the rest of his life, carrying his campaign from the pages of Time magazine to the midnight airwaves courtesy of Bill Maher. “What are we to make of Gore Vidal?” he asked, in a letter circulated to a number of Op-Ed pages. “He’s determined to pass himself off as a screenwriter, particularly of Ben-Hur... He was in fact imported for a trial run on a script that needed work. Over three days (recorded in my work journal), he produced a scene of several pages which Wyler rejected after a read-through with Steve Boyd [the actor playing Messala] and me. Vidal left the next day.” In cold fact, Heston’s “work journal” — published as The Actor’s Life in 1978 — shows Vidal was on the Ben-Hur set not just for three days, but well over a month.

But to harp on this tussle misses the key point of Vidal’s essay, which was “to show the near-impossibility of determining how a movie is actually created.” Memories are fickle; only producer Sam Zimbalist (who preceded Wyler onto the project and brought Vidal aboard) knew which of the five writers involved was responsible for which contribution, and he died of a heart attack before credit could be arbitrated. Karl Tunberg (an MGM contract writer involved years before, as well as a former President of the Writer’s Guild) received the sole screenplay credit; in treating the episode, Vidal’s purpose was not to torment Heston but to belatedly establish himself and playwright Christopher Fry as the actual authors of the Ben-Hur script. He was also aiming a heat-seeking missile at the heart of the auteur theory.

¤

To test its accuracy I spent the better part of a month studying as many Vidal teleplays and movies as I could lay my hands on — twelve, in all — as well as both texts of Visit to a Small Planet (stage and teleplay; the kinescope has been lost, alas); Heston’s journals; the Christopher Fry screenplay for The Bible; and – most tellingly – the multicolored shooting script for Ben Hur archived at the Academy library, in which each page is dated. What emerges fast – especially watching the films and kinescopes chronologically – is that Vidal’s verbal signature is not just identifiable, but his screen work vivid and continuous from film to film. One could well imagine Turner Classics bringing out a boxed set, “The Films of Gore Vidal.”

An unbroken line of development comes right at the beginning, when he was at MGM working with Zimbalist. Richard Brooks may have directed The Catered Affair, but the film bears no visible relation to The Professionals or Bite the Bullet, films Brooks later wrote himself and which very much bear his stamp. What The Catered Affair most resembles is the film Vidal wrote directly after — again for Zimbalist, directed by its star, Jose Ferrer: I Accuse. The complexities of the Dreyfuss case, which rocked the French government to its roots in the 1890s, are laid out in thirty leanly crafted, straightforward scenes. The abundance of treachery and corruption give Vidal’s best wits and insights room to joust and maneuver.

“All our men dislike change on principle,” a kindly officer warns our hero in an early scene, “but it is something of an innovation — having a Jewish officer.”

Dreyfuss, who will nearly be crushed by such institutional Anti Semitism, is someone we need get to know and love in the space of a very few scenes. The traps the fates are laying for him are so intricate they will require the greater part of our attention. Thus, early on, Captain Dreyfuss finds his young son kneeling at play before a little army of toy soldiers.

— How is General Dreyfuss tonight?

— I stopped Kaiser.

— Did, eh? Supply lines intact?

— Yes, captain.

— Communications established?

— Yes, captain.

— Reserves in readiness?

— Yes, captain.

— Good. Carry on, General.

A man’s tenderness toward his boy and his devotion to professional duty, simultaneously established in one compact encounter.

After drafting Ben-Hur, Vidal was invited to England by Michael Balcon to do The Scapegoat (1959) based on a Daphne du Maurier story. Director Robert Hamer is credited with “screenplay,” Vidal with “adaptation,” but the tensile strength of the story’s arc and the sharp, incantatory metrics in the dialogue put it on the same shelf as The Catered Affair and I Accuse.

In The Scapegoat, Alec Guinness plays a quiet, unaccomplished Englishman on holiday in France. He and a local nobleman chance across one another in a pub and discover they are physically identical – virtual twins. This is amusing to the traveler, but to the aristocrat (facing deadly financial pressures) it inspires, in the manner of Strangers on a Train, a murder scheme. The innocent Englishman wakes up with a hangover and discovers he’s been forced to take over his seedy lookalike’s whole complicated identity, complete with a nagging wife, a racy Italian mistress, a French chateau and a half-blind grand Duchess for a mother, played wonderfully by Bette Davis.

Nobody seems to catch on to the imposture. The resemblance is that total. If anything, the dowager is merely irritated at the uncharacteristic generosity her “son” is suddenly showing to the local poor. She demands to know:

— What’s happened to you while you were away? It’s almost as if you were a different person.

— I am, as I’ve been trying very hard to explain.

— You can’t go and get mixed up in politics.

— You can’t go and let people starve.

For all that he’s been cornered into a game that may kill him, this stranger finds he likes wielding power and quickly cultivates the wit to defend it.

Because Vidal entered the field as an established novelist, he had a practiced grasp of narrative. He also had humility about the requirements of writing for actors, and took to heart a piece of advice from Henry James: “Theater is not an art but a secret.” His people don’t speak prose; they address each other straightforwardly, without embellishment. However sharp the rejoinders, we never “hear the dialogue;” we hear the characters. “People do not listen to words,” he discovered when writing for television. “This is due perhaps to habits acquired in everyday life, where conversations are dependent not so much upon the use and arrangement of words and ideas as on certain familiar tones of voice, gestures, hesitations.”

Finding the right structure became key: not in any formulaic, storytelling-by-the-numbers sense, but of finding the right fulcrum – for example, slowing down the story of Billy the Kid, concentrating on key moments in contrast to the severely limited running time of the piece, or in The Best Man of moving back and forth from one rival camp to another with a soon-to-be-former President acting as a humble foil-figure and go-between. Brought aboard to script The Sicilian (1987), Vidal told director Michael Cimino, “I don’t ‘see’ anything, so don’t bother me with action. I’ll do the characters and introduce the themes.”

¤

In Dark Possession, the handsome young Doctor played by Leslie Nielsen stamps his feet as he comes into the foyer and greets his fiancee.

— They’re outside! The new horses.

— They must be freezing! They’re not used to our winters.

— Oh! They’re all right.

A completely innocuous exchange (one Vidal later deleted from the published text), but that by its rhythmic brevity catches the frosty breath and nervous mood of a snowy day, vital to moving forward a house-bound who-done-it. Notice, also, the light-footed way the words “they’re” and “they” repeat from speaker to speaker. Repetition is a trait one can mark in any number of excellent playwrights, but how words repeat and why bears the imprint of an individual mind and ear. David Mamet’s people repeat forcefully, like boxers, proving points with verbal punches. In the work of Christopher Fry, repetition hits the lyric organ-note of a responsorial psalm.

In Vidal’s case, repeat-words are a subtle, organic constant, and advance his notion (a key theme in all his work) that even the most casual conversation is a form of duel. “This can’t be happening to me,” says the domineering mother in Summer Pavilion. Her daughter shoots back: “This isn’t happening to you, Mother. It’s happening to me!”

Wit fights fire with fire; the snap of provocation and response that are Vidal’s trademarks give even routine bits of exposition a clever intensity. Notice the melodic repetitions in The Catered Affair, in which a New Jersey mother played by Bette Davis has this exchange with her son:

— Eddie, your sister’s marrying Ralph.

— That’s good [he grunts].

— That all you got to say?

— Congratulations.

— Eddie, your sister’s marrying Ralph.

— I heard you, that’s what you said, she’s got him, so good.

— I never seen less family spirit.

— Who’s got spirit? I got nothin.’ Next month in Fort Dix, the army’s got nothin.’

Blue collar reality isn’t exactly Vidal’s native beat — he was radically adapting The Big Deal, a teleplay by Paddy Chayevsky — but the above conversation, the very existence of Eddie (new to the script), indeed all of The Catered Affair as it now stands, is original Vidal dialogue. To make a seamless film-script out of this chamber drama required throwing everything away but the original intention. Theme, anguish, basic premise — these are Chayevsky’s, and Vidal honors them with bold improvisation. Ironically, in 2007, when Harvey Fierstein and John Bucchino commemorated their love for this movie by turning it into a Broadway musical, it wasn’t until last minute that somebody actually compared scripts and realized they were adapting Vidal while tickets were being sold on the Chayevsky name. Vidal took the apologetic phone call that followed in stride: “I did not wish them ill and made no fuss.”

¤

The narrative voice of his novels is a droll, mischievous, Orson Wellesian presence — but Vidal escapes this entirely when writing dialogue for actors. He can mimic old men, peasants, Southern belles, visitors from outer space with equal freedom and absence of strain. His excitement is contagious in the early scripts. Certain familiar obsessions crop up. Historical references abound — in Dark Possession, the elderly father recalls that he heard Lincoln at Gettysburg, “but preferred the speech made by the other fellow.” Aphorisms about power crop up everywhere — the Vidal songbook in this line is The Best Man, with its hit singles, “Power is not a toy we give to good children,” “The self-made man often makes himself out of pieces of his victims,” and “That man has all the qualities of a dog, except loyalty.”

A defining Vidalian trait might be termed the “silent turnabout.” In I Accuse, when her husband has been arrested for treason and the whole world is against her, Mrs. Dreyfuss notices with dread that the lawyer she engaged has gone ominously grave. “When you came to me,” he tells her, “I said I would defend your husband if I believed him innocent...” (She turns to face him, and we brace ourselves, but are surprised:) “Well — I do. …I’m more than ever convinced.”

Such peripeteia form the basic grammar of a dramatist. Vidal is especially adroit at planting such skipped heartbeats, though — time and again, characters catch one another off guard. Even in friendship, the winning duelist keeps his listener guessing.

The dialogue in The Sicilian has all his earmarks:

— Your son is a scholar, Don Masino...

— My son does not exist.

This much-maligned movie deserves a look, if you’ve never seen it – indeed, it deserves a second or third look if you haven’t seen it in a while. (The director’s cut is available on DVD.) What matters in this context is that, once again, Vidal was denied his due acknowledgment. The screenplay is credited to Steve Shagan, who adapted Mario Puzo’s novel before Cimino signed on and brought Vidal aboard – but when I interviewed him in depth on this topic for LA Weekly, Vidal was emphatic that he alone wrote what got filmed.

“I have a simple question I’d like to submit to every member of the Writer’s Guild,” he smiled: “True or False: Would Gore Vidal ever want credit for anything written by Steve Shagan?” More seriously he sued the guild, as much in repayment for Ben Hur as for the Sicilian matter. “They have institutionalized plagiarism, and I don’t like that.” He and the WGA fought all the way to the Supreme Court of California, “which found in my favor,” he writes, in Snapshots in History’s Glare. “This lawsuit was my quarter-of-a-million-dollar gift to the membership of the Guild. No longer need they accept as ‘final’ the judgments of three anonymous hacks [assigned to arbitrate screen-credits].”

He had originally embraced the assignment of The Sicilian as a chance to freshly address the tragic theme of The Death of Billy the Kid, particularly the reluctance of the lawman Pat Garrett, whom he once described as “driven by pride to measure himself against a hero, to become the hero by destroying him.” In The Sicilian the same outline applies. Don Masino’s courtship of a substitute son in the renegade outlaw, Salvatore Giuiliano, is the emotional mainspring that drives the film. We know from the beginning that the tale will, somehow, some way, end at Giuliano’s grave. When it does Don Masino, who had him killed, stands with his confidante Professor Adonis and sheds tears like a bereft father. Their conversation, which powerfully concludes this film, is pure Vidal:

DON MASINO

(weeping)

Why couldn’t he — why wouldn’t he — come to me?

ADONIS

Why should he? He was his own father. He invented himself, and we killed him ... You and I ... Now he’s gone.

DON MASINO

What next? What next??

ADONIS

(indicates the grave)

There is no next. There never is ... Here.

Pure Vidal? Is that possible in a collaborative medium? Yes. His ear for dialogue is natural, precise, and so idiosyncratic – note the rhythms and repetitions – that with little study you can pick his contribution out of a crowd of collaborators.

Which brings us to Ben-Hur.

¤

“I’d forgotten the heat,” Massalas remarks, when he arrives in Judea to take charge. “If it were only the heat,” shrugs his weary predecessor. (Two lines in, and Judea is already Vidal country.)

The shooting script on file at the Motion Picture Academy Library — a thick parfait of green and pink pages — lists no writers for Ben-Hur on title page, only: “Producer: Sam Zimbalist,” and below him, ’Director: William Wyler.” Fortunately for our purposes, every page of the text is individually dated, ranging in no particular order from late April to late September. The infamous Messala / Ben-Hur confrontations, both at the beginning of the script and at the climax, are — like the whole of the chariot race — dated May 17, 1958. According to Heston’s diaries (hardback edition), Vidal was still very actively involved on this day, though the actor suggests Christopher Fry was heavily rewriting him.

All we have to go on are the dates — but there is no disputing that all of the Messala / Ben-Hur scenes were locked in place while Vidal was still on board. Note the Vidalian rhythms of the repeat-words in the innocuous chitchat as they meet again, and embrace for the first time in years. (And listen for the intention. Is our hero a wee bit nervous about something?)

MESSALA

I said I’d come back.

BEN-HUR

And I never thought you would — I’m glad. I’m so glad.

They stare at one another, a long moment.

MESSALA

Look at you!

BEN-HUR

And you!

MESSALA

But you’re taller. I don’t like that.

BEN-HUR

Of course, Tribune, you could take my head off.

They both laugh.

MESSALA

Strange, but when we were boys, I was taller. Remember?

BEN-HUR

Yes, I remember. Everything.

MESSALA

I do, too.

Hmm. Everything, my prince?

Now — just because it’s the 1950s doesn’t mean we can’t have a little physical business to go with the unspoken. At this point, Vidal — again, going by the dates in Heston’s account — has Messala pick up a javelin. “Where the beams cross,” he says. A stage direction from the script: “The spear sails the length of the corridor and stabs into an oak beam, sticking there — quivering.” Messala grins to Ben-Hur, who picks up a javelin of his own and competes. Again, the stage direction: “Ben-Hur’s spear pierces the beam so close to the other spear that the two weapons seem like one.” (Mr. Heston? Dr. Freud wonders if you’d prefer a cigar.)

BEN-HUR

Down Eros! Up Mars! Remember?

MESSALA

Down Eros! Up Mars!

(indicates target)

After all these years, still close.

BEN-HUR

Yes ... In every way.

Perhaps in Vidal’s draft the dialogue read, “Down Venus, Up Uranus,” and this is Fry’s more elegant alternative — but even so. The problem of how to define Messala and Ben-Hur’s relationship so that their quarrel will have enough logic and emotional weight to last us four hours is anchored — however discreetly — in this sexually charged little duet with the spears. As the quarrel begins, Messala (“lightly,” according to the stage direction) remarks, “Is anything so sad as unreciprocated love?” Here the dramatist’s intent practically has a neon sign over it.

Vidal delved into these matters at length, years later, to establish his authority over the topic of how movies are made. I’ve delved into them afresh because in the context of Vidal’s other work, what is hidden under Ben-Hur is of central importance.

“Vidal’s most useful insistence as a moralist,” writes Harold Bloom, “is that we ought to cease speaking of homosexuals and heterosexuals. There are only women and men, some of whom prefer their own sex, some the other, some both."

Heston, at his radiant best an icon of unself-conscious virility, was kept out of the loop precisely so that he could stay unself-conscious. A depressing distortion that adheres to all this controversy is the idea that Judah Ben-Hur is a tortured closet-case — when Vidal (and Fry, and Wyler) plainly intend the opposite: that his sexual complexities, such as they are, never burden him — they are never the point.

[9thdoctor]

Perhaps in Vidal’s draft the dialogue read, “Down Venus, Up Uranus,”

Maybe, but Uranus hadn't been discovered yet. This calls to mind the end of Julian, where just before getting that history changing javelin in the side, Julian "stands up in his stirrups". Yeah, in the 4th century AD a horseman might just stand in his stirrups to get a better view of the battlefield. What an ignorant klutz, I'm sorry. I know that book is spoken of well by some people, but IMO the man was like a vampire (or embalmer) of dramatic events from history, it's like he had the Midas touch in reverse, he could turn gold into lead. I didn't think Lincoln was very good either.

Anyway, there's a positive write up on the Reason site:

http://reason.com/bl...apher-and-champ

When I saw him speak in Los Angeles sometime I believe in the late 1990s, he was asked a question about party politics, and said merely, with no elaboration, "I'm partial to the Libertarians."

And a harshly negative one on Slate:

http://www.slate.com...n_elitist_.html

Go figure.

[George H. Smith]

Perhaps in Vidal’s draft the dialogue read, “Down Venus, Up Uranus,”

Maybe, but Uranus hadn't been discovered yet. This calls to mind the end of Julian, where just before getting that history changing javelin in the side, Julian "stands up in his stirrups". Yeah, in the 4th century AD a horseman might just stand in his stirrups to get a better view of the battlefield. What an ignorant klutz, I'm sorry. I know that book is spoken of well by some people, but IMO the man was like a vampire (or embalmer) of dramatic events from history, it's like he had the Midas touch in reverse, he could turn gold into lead. I didn't think Lincoln was very good either.

Anyway, there's a positive write up on the Reason site:

http://reason.com/bl...apher-and-champ

When I saw him speak in Los Angeles sometime I believe in the late 1990s, he was asked a question about party politics, and said merely, with no elaboration, "I'm partial to the Libertarians."

And a harshly negative one on Slate:

http://www.slate.com...n_elitist_.html

Go figure.

The Slate article is a sleazy smear.

Gore says some favorable things about Ron Paul at 1:50 into this 2007 interview.

Ghs