Vidal Kicks Up Dust Again

Getty Images Trouble was on the agenda when the aging provocateur, infamous for his tough remarks on Israel, visited a Jewish cultural hub last night. But as Lloyd Grove reports, Vidal charmed the critics.

There were moments at the 92nd Street Y Tuesday night when Gore Vidal was just a sweet old man, reminiscing.

“What do you miss most about Ravello?” asked his literary executor, Middlebury College English professor Jay Parini, reading an audience question about the Amalfi Coast palazzo where Vidal had lived with Howard Austen, his companion of 53 years.

“Hmmm, Howard, I suppose,” Vidal mused sadly—and the answer just hung there, a cloud of muted grief.

Austen died six years ago. At 84, Vidal himself is nearing the end. He is white-haired and wheelchair-bound. The skin on his face is like rice paper. When he tries to smile he manages a grimace. Could he really be the same imperially slim, beautiful young man projected on the big screen behind him, whose photograph was taken 65 years ago, on the occasion of his first novel, Williwaw?

There had been a spot of bother concerning Vidal’s visit to the Jewish cultural center to promote his autobiographical coffee-table book, given his history of remarks about Jews and Israel. The lion, so to speak, was in Daniel’s den.

“It’s a brilliant book—I loved that book,” Parini cooed.

“I loved hearing you say that,” Vidal retorted, in a moment of comic relief.

“I’ll say it again,” Parini offered.

“Oh no, I’ll repeat it for you,” Vidal said, to rising laughter. “I want to spare you the monotony.”

Most of Vidal’s friends are dead and gone. His pop-cultural references seem to stop at Johnny Carson. When he was rolled onstage at the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association, he wasn’t the razor-tongued fencer, poised to cut and thrust; instead, he seemed vulnerable, in need of protection.

There had been a spot of bother concerning Vidal’s visit to the Jewish cultural center to promote his autobiographical coffee-table book, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare, a handsome collection of private photos, personal letters and commentary. "Those who invited him are, as Jews, either most forgiving, or schmucks,” former mayor Ed Koch had opined in the New York Post’s Page Six column. Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, echoed that view: "It is appalling that a Jewish institution would make a reckless decision to give a podium to Gore Vidal. He has continually displayed enormous antipathy towards Israel and Jews."

The waspish Vidal, who has always made much of his noble bloodlines and aristocratic connections (grandson of a senator, confidant of Eleanor Roosevelt, friend of JFK, step-something-or-other to Jackie, and so on and so forth), has a history of being rather tough on the Jewish people and especially the state of Israel. At various times and in various venues, he has called Judaism “an unusually ugly religion,” claimed that President Harry Truman decided to recognize Israel after “an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train,” suggested that some American Jews, notably pro-Israel neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz, have divided loyalties, and decried "the hatred and fear of women that runs through the Old Testament (not to mention in the pages of our justly admired Jewish novelists)."

Now the lion, so to speak, was in Daniel’s den.

Actor/comedian Richard Belzer, for one, had come to the Y to offer his support. “I’m here as a Jew who knows he’s not an anti-Semite,” Belzer told me about his friend.

And if anyone says different?

“I’m going to kick their ass,” he vowed.

Happily, ass-kicking was unnecessary and good manners prevailed. Just how good? The name William F. Buckley Jr. didn’t even come up. And Vidal, perhaps wisely, punted on a request to discuss his views on religion. “Well, as a forgotten president used to say, ‘Hard work never hurt anybody,’ but I say, ‘Why take the chance?’” he parried.

The old man got off to a slow start, telling a long and hoary anecdote about Franklin Delano Roosevelt—“as far as I’m concerned we’ve never had more than one president in my lifetime,” Vidal declared majestically—and a mishap involving the presidential wheelchair and a young Navy enlisted man. “Anyway, he got out of it and the boy is probably an admiral by now,” was Vidal’s punch line, which might have been plausible decades ago when he first told the story; now it’s more likely that the boy is a late admiral.