Why vidal capote feud

And it took me many years to understand that Vidal had never really left his alcoholic mother, Nina. He yearned for female attention in the same drawing rooms he had grown up in, which made his politics—despite his oratorical brilliance—rather suspect to me: he spent too many years in the arm chair, and not enough in the field. Again, I think his continual battle with writers like Norman Mailer, Capote, and probably James Baldwin, had to do with the fact that they did the legwork Vidal never really did do.

As a memoirist Vidal could, of course, use the form to settle scores, but he used it best when he made something else out of it: a combined critical essay, memoir, philosophical treatise, and movie treatment. And, as the heroine of his own story, Vidal rarely seemed to hold back. Unlike his innumerable television appearances, he could, in his essays for the Review , be a wit without being on display.

One of my favorite Vidal stories revolves around one of his Wilde-like declarations of taste. He entered that stream and swam vigorously, often against the current. And his wide knowledge of the world informed his work — the brilliant historical novels, especially Burr about Aaron Burr, a founding father and Julian , about the fourth-century Roman emperor.

His seven novels about American history form an elegant and entertaining interlocking series that runs from the Jeffersonian years through the midth century, and which puts his vast erudition on display in palatable ways.

His essays, as gathered in United States: Essays , make up more than 1, pages of vivid writing about books and ideas — perhaps his main contribution to the republic of letters. His perspective is always that of the lofty intellectual. A brilliant writer and public intellectual who could take on the world when he felt it necessary, Vidal was a brave figure on the political scene who would stand up for things that meant a lot to him, and he made his case eloquently before a wide audience.

He was that nearly extinct variety of human being: a famous writer whose fame extended far beyond the realms of literature: a wit, a political pundit, a sought-after TV guest, a scold and much more.

From the start of his career in the late s, he looked around to see who else was getting attention, and it irked him when others seemed to outflank him.

Truman Capote certainly annoyed him, and he honed his talent for feuding with this feline young novelist from the American south whose first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms , swept the bestseller lists in Vidal lived in New York after the war, as did Capote, and they moved in the same social circle, over which Tennessee Williams presided. When I sat down on it, it squealed. It was Truman. It annoyed Vidal horribly that when Life magazine ran an article on the new generation of writers it featured a large picture of Capote and a small one of Vidal.

You are making your mother ill. Gide was at the peak of his fame, a public intellectual who represented, for Vidal, an ideal of sorts. Like Vidal, he considered homosexuality utterly natural, noting that it could be found in most of the advanced cultural moments in history.

That Gide was also gay intrigued Vidal, and he gratefully accepted from the year-old writer an inscribed copy of Corydon , a volume of four dialogues on homosexuality. Gide smoked, talking in mandarin French about Oscar Wilde and Henry James as if he were giving a lecture. When Vidal heard that Capote had been there only a couple of days previously, he nervously asked the old master how he found him. Then he remembered that there was a young American author by that name and found on his desk the article from Life that featured Capote.

Unsurprisingly, the young Vidal winced. The novelist and composer Paul Bowles was a friend of both Capote and Vidal, who decided to join him in Morocco in the summer of When Bowles explained that Capote planned to come as well, Vidal cooked up a practical joke. He thought it would be amusing for Capote to step off the boat and see Bowles with Vidal at his side. And the scenario played out nicely. When Bowles met Capote at the dock, Capote looked behind him to see Vidal with his hands in his jacket pockets, as if in permanent residence.

Theirs was a minor squabble, with neither side missing a chance to make a joke about the other. Vidal sued Capote over the remark, and Capote countersued. The legal case dragged on with Vidal winning in the end, though Capote had no money by then, so it was a Pyrrhic victory.

Their wrangling continued until Capote, ill from his abuse of alcohol and prescription drugs, died in the late summer of Mailer had made a huge splash with The Naked and the Dead , his bestselling novel of the Pacific war, frustrating Vidal, whose own war novel, Williwaw , had barely registered. The two young writers circled each other warily, and a complicated friendship began that would play out over the next five decades. The two had little in common. But he put on this aggressive mask.

Vidal had another kind of mask: cool, suave, worldly-wise. It was a good contrast with Norman. They played well together, but it was always a kind of act. They both understood the publicity value of this contest, and they let it play out in different ways. Never, by his own admission, one to pass up the opportunity to be on television, Vidal accepted an offer from Dick Cavett to appear on his talk show with Mailer. In the green room, according to Mailer, Vidal put a warm hand on the back of his neck, a gesture that he interpreted as veiled aggression.

Mailer answered with a not-so playful swipe on the cheek. Then Mailer leaned forward like a boxer and, in a move that suggested to Vidal he had been drinking, winked before headbutting his cheek. On the show, Mailer expressed his disapproval of Vidal, saying he was intellectually shameless. Vidal ignored him, offering an innocent smile. Instead, he remained eerily calm when Mailer asked him to apologise for comparing him to Manson. On the other hand, Mailer came off as a bully.

The two avoided each other for some years, but their rivalry came to a head in , when Vidal and his partner, Howard Austen, were passing through New York. It has all of the filth and confusion of Calcutta without the cultural amenities. One night they attended a party for Princess Margaret , before going on to an expansive apartment owned by Lally Weymouth, a journalist and daughter of Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post.

More than guests crammed together. Gore was in a good mood as Mailer moved right up to him, got in his face, and everybody around them fell pretty silent. It looked like trouble. Norman told Gore that he looked like an old Jew, and Gore shook his head. Gore was stunned, and he stepped back. He wiped a dribble of blood from his mouth with a handkerchief. It was just enough to prime you or me for a half-hour war, but Vidal must have thought it was the second battle of Stalingrad for he never made a move when I invited him downstairs.

Twenty-four hours later he was telling everybody he had pushed me across the room. In , Mailer decided to call a truce, inviting Vidal to participate with him in a fundraising event in New York.

An element in me, absolutely immune to weather and tides, runs independently fond of you.