Literary Feuds

If Mailer—the violently sexist homophobe—and “exquisite” Vidal have anything in common, it is their love of a good feud. Mailer—whose past opponents include his second wife, whom he stabbed, Tom Wolfe, critic Michiko Kakutani, Truman Capote, and Germaine Greer—was enraged when Gore Vidal compared Mailer’s “The Prisoner of Sex” to “three days of menstrual flow” and Mailer to Charles Manson. In response, Mailer head-butted him in the green room of the Dick Cavett Show in 1971, and then told him on-air, that he “ruined” Kerouac by sleeping with him. Six years later at a Lally Weymouth soirée, he threw a drink at Vidal, and punched him. Even lying on the floor, Vidal somehow won the match: “As usual, words fail him,” he sniffed.