Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare [Hardcover]

. . . this picture book sans pareil from Abrams' exceptional creative team, who knew that Gore Vidal demanded, and deserved, nothing but the best.

Vidal says in the preface: "During the fifty-four years that Howard Russell Auster and I shared a life, he took a great many photographs...to eventually mak(e) his own book. Upon his death...he left me his photographs and papers...(A)s a memorial to him, I am now publishing them, with more notes describing the various occasions that we took part in, as well as a number of pictures from my life and times, now becoming, with time's passage, literally historic."

All the text is written by Vidal in his polished style, and kept succinct so we can see all 360 pictures, black & white and full color, before closing time. He begins with the maternal family album headed by his grandfather, blind Senator Gore, and spiced by Gore's mother-to-be, Nina. Pass on to his handsome aviator dad, who served under FDR. There are no baby pictures, and we first see Gore at 3 or 4. Apparently he was blondish in his youth, went to name schools, and at 18 with WWII upon us, went into the army. While in the hospital for a knee injury, he began Williwaw, his first published novel (1946).

Free to roam at last, he has snapshots with dancers John Kriza and Harold Lang, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Truan Capote, Tanaquil Le Clerq. He meets Howard Auster of Jewish lineage, who respells it Austen as he seeks work. Howard and Gore click for the next half century.

The pair go to Hollywood: Ben Hur and so on. Gore quickly sours on the movie industry, but meets the Paul Newmans, who are often subjects in the photos thereafter. Veering into politics, Gore joins in photos with John Kennedy. He then turns to Broadway: Cyril Ritchard in Visit to a Small Planet, Melvin Douglas in The Best Man.

He always dresses well, and has the same high standard for his houses, photographed inside and out in beautiful color.

His TV confrontations with Buckley and Mailer are captured, as well as his war of words with Capote.

Transferring to the beautiful landscapes of the Amalfi Coast, Gore and Howard could relax, and enjoy the company of Princess Margaret, Leonard Bernstein, Michael York, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol (who made some blurry Polaroids and signed them W for Gore), Johnny Carson, Tim and Susan Robbins and kids.

When Howard's health was fading fast, the pair had to return to the States, to Gore's Hollywood Hills home, bringing the cat of course.

The last page of photos shows the gateway to Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington DC, the cloaked head of Grief, and the polished stone over the grave of Howard Auster already incised "GORE VIDAL 1925-".

My favorite photos, both by Annie Leibovitz: On page 233, full color, Vidal turns thoughtfully aside from the dictionary, opened to the "vodka" entry where there is a small pic of a bottle of Absolut. It's an ad. On pages 248-249, black & white, Vidal in black attire lies on the wide bed, his legs crossed. Annie is half off the bed, her face covered by her camera pointed at the mirror on the ceiling. Hair fanned out on the pillow, Vidal looks seriously right at you, not at all "plainly dead" as the text says.

All this and more are in this bright ingratiating book, sweepingly entertaining and priced right.

FOOTNOTES (regrettably not in 6-point type)

1 Inasmuch as Vidal personally selected the 360 photos etc. from his voluminous archive, he never appears in deshabille except tasteful swim trunks. Nor is anyone else embarrassed by his choices.
2 On pages 74-75, writer Donald Windham in the photo is not idenified in the text. Is this a snub?
3 On page 204, Claire Bloom's companion is identified as husband Rod Steiger, but I doubt it. Somebody help.
4 Many letters and clippings are shown, quite legible. But NO manuscript pages are exhibited.
5 Six spreads are devoted to Vidal's book covers.
6 Two pages of Image Credits appear at the end of the book (not in any kind of order); seemingly this spares the publisher from adding a credit tail to every photo in the body of the book. Two-page Index. The Staff and Copyright are on the very last book page. Boy, that Vidal really has clout!

Gore Vidal is so close to the end he can see the white light. And his legendary intellect has failed him; his opinions now are violent broadsides, his voice the impotent rage of a seer whose vision is darkening. But just look at the cover picture of 'Snapshots in History's Glare' --- my Lord, in his youth, he was stunning.

In the 54 years of their domestic partnership, Howard Auster took thousands of photos of Gore Vidal and their friends. After his death, Vidal chose 360 pictures and graced them with a running commentary on those people and their times. Finished before his acuity failed him, "Snapshots" is his last real book.

It's fun to look at Tennessee Williams in Key West; Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol in Italy; Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman over six decades; campaign shots of John F. Kennedy stumping for Vidal when the writer ran for Congress in 1960, and more more more.
The prose that surrounds those pictures provides just as much fun; it's a riveting account of Vidal's love/hate relationship with America, our politics and our public figures. He names names, nurses grudges and doles out great dish --- this is vintage Gore. And that can be as strong as a double shot of single malt.

In these pages, he starts at the beginning, with childhood villains. Forget his distinguished lineage. Consider his "incorrigible" mother, a sometime actress who "failed a Paramount screen test because of the prominence of her manly moustache." Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt had a mad Sapphic crush on Amelia Earhart and was "constantly proposing" that they fly around the country, "with Amelia at the controls"? The president of the Guatemalan National Assembly tipped an innocent young Vidal to a CIA-backed overthrow of his government; when that prediction came true, Vidal "discovered American imperialism in action."

Interspersed are photos of brilliant, hunky young men in bathing suits and Army uniforms, book jackets of paperback novels that Vidal knocked out in eight days, photos of houses he bought with book money. Success brought Hollywood work; Vidal wrote "Ben-Hur," but got no credit. ("The higher the profile of the movie, the less chance for the actual creator to be given credit," he notes.) Lots of theater stories. A funny tale of being excised from a photograph with John F. Kennedy.

You'd be disappointed if there were no zingers. Good news: There are plenty. Asked to define commercialism, Vidal remarks, "It's the ability to do well what ought not to be done at all." Bobby Kennedy had "aggressive non-charm." The `60s: "a decade stolen from those of us who were living in it." And he doesn't turn away from the wit of others. Like Tennessee Williams, who stares at Jack Kennedy and mutters, "That boy has a nice ass."

And then we get to William F. Buckley, Jr --- "like Hitler, but without the charm." Vidal tees off on him in every possible way, from his lie about never using makeup on TV --- look, here's a photo of him in the make-up chair --- to dueling hatchet jobs in Esquire Magazine to the inevitable lawsuit that had both sides claiming victory. (Decades later, Buckley wrote to Tina Brown at Vanity Fair that I ought to have my mouth washed out with soap. That was vintage Buckley: fake-patrician and weak on the facts.)

The last third of the book is set at La Rondinaia, the retreat above Ravello that was Auster and Vidal's Italian retreat. More famous guests. More goofy stories ("Fellini always called me Gorino, a diminutive I did not like, and I called him Fred, which I hope he did not like either.") A lawsuit with Capote: "I was persuaded not to ask for the million dollars I knew he had." And, because no one is less sentimental than Gore Vidal, the book ends with photos of Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC, where Auster is buried and Vidal will be. Nice touch.

Put this book on your coffee table, and it will soon fight with the other books there.

When you mention Gore Vidal, what comes to mind? A novelist? Essayist? Playwright? A Politician? Commentator? Screenwriter? A Raconteur? A Socialite...?

Of course, the right answer is `all of the above.' In fact, it might be argued that Gore Vidal is America's ultimate renaissance man. Certainly, his latest book, `Snapshots in History's Glare' does nothing to dispel this notion.

From his early days growing up in a political family in Virginia, his days at boys school, his associations with writers like Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, the political years with Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, as a confidante of the Kennedys as well as his own political ambitions, to the intoxicating highlife of the movie and showbiz worlds, Vidal has enjoyed a life like few others.

This book, which could alternately be described as a scrapbook, an annotated photo album or perhaps even a visual memoir, is an amazing collection of every phase of Vidal's life from Virginia to New York, to Hollywood (twice) to his many years along the Amalfi coast. Anchored by photographs and mementos saved by his long time companion, Howard Russell Auster (whose death was the inspiration for this book), Vidal has assembled a completist's collection of everything from early handwritten notes from political figures, to Hollywood letters, to an impressive collection of photographs of the rich and famous and even pictures of most of his movie posters and his many, many book covers. (Including when as the bete noire of the New York Times book editor, he was forced to adopt the nome-de-plume, Edgar Box!)

Vidal was certainly a bon-vivant of his generation, entertaining at times various celebrities from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer to David Hockney, to decades long relationships with Johnny Carson, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and others. Vidal's commentary offers his clever and sometimes acerbic remembrances of events past, such as how he was denied credit for the film epic `Ben-Hur' though later was successful in suing MGM to obtain personal vindication. (One must observe, as well, the caustic words he saved for his famed debate partner, the late William F. Buckley.)

In the book, Vidal periodically whines that the glory days are now behind us. Given the depth of the rarified lifestyle he enjoyed over the last 60 years, he may very well be right.

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