Gore Vidal and the NY Times' Obsession With Him

In its coverage of the controversy surrounding Gore Vidal's last will and testament, the first indication that the New York Times would live up to Vidal's lifelong insistence that the publication hated him comes early, in the third paragraph. The writer Tim Teeman describes a visit to Vidal's Los Angeles home and Vidal's nephew's warning to not sit in one chair, as Vidal "lost control of his bladder, so that chair's been through a lot of ugly things."

NY Times: In a Final Plot Twist, Gore Vidal Leaves His Estate to Harvard University

Why Burr Steers, the nephew, keeps the apparently repulsive chair in the reach of sitting bottoms is not addressed; the breezy ugliness of his warning description answers that question, however. He keeps the chair where it sits simply for the times (once a week? once per newspaper article?) he can deliver that unpleasant sentence. Steers delivers several more unpleasant sentences in the Times article, including statements alluding to Vidal having sex with "underage men," which is an odd phrase that Teeman and the Times do not explain or counter.

Of late, Teeman has been specializing in revealing details (some unpleasant, many unneeded) about the late author, as he is the author of a book, "In Bed With Gore Vidal," published in September. In an article for Buzzfeed titled, "Gore Vidal, Iconic American Author, Had Way More Sex Than You," Teeman quotes Scotty Bowers, hustler for movie stars from the '40s on, describing the size of Vidal's member and the particulars of his preferences for his partners' sizes.

Buzzfeed: Gore Vidal, Iconic American Author, Had Way More Sex Than You

In most of the articles, Teeman ends with quite a sympathetic note about Vidal as a unique contrarian and bucker of identity trends. From Buzzfeed: "No slave to identity politics or the crowd-pleasing sound-bite, Gore Vidal was and will remain, stubbornly, even heroically, impossible to classify--in or out of bed." Get it? That's the name of his book! Sympathy like Teeman's is impossible to classify, too.

Much of Teeman's writing concerns the last, sad decade of Vidal's life, in which he was quite publicly succumbing to alcoholism and mental illness, particularly paranoia about those closest to him. (His post-9/11 writings and television appearances made both quite plain to see, it always seemed to me.) It is a sad picture, and any complete biography of a major public figure needs to be complete.

In his late-life paranoia, he changed his will several times to include new favorites and dis-include old ones; finally, his will at death included no one, but instead awarded his estimated $37 million estate and rights to his collected works to Harvard University. As he did not attend any college, much less Harvard, this bequest was a mystery, especially to Burr Steers and his mother, Nina Straight, Vidal's half-sister.

The attention-grabbing sound-bite in the Times' article, published on November 10, comes from Steers and Straight. Straight claims that her brother owed her "around a million dollars" for legal fees she paid for him to handle his long-running feud with William F. Buckley. Steers and Straight believe that Buckley, who died in 2008, kept a file on Vidal, a file that Vidal "feared": 

Mr. Steers said Mr. Vidal was terrified that Mr. Buckley had evidence that Mr. Vidal had sex with underage men. "Jerry Sandusky acts," Ms. Straight said, referring to the former Penn State assistant football coach convicted of child molestation. 

Mr. Steers said: "I know Buckley had a file on him that Gore feared. It would make sense if that material was about him having underage sex. Gore spent a lot of time in Bangkok, after all. Gore also had a very weird take on the abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests. He would say that the young guys involved were hustlers who were sending signals."

If statements of verification with representatives of Vidal's estate were pursued by Teeman or the Times about this claim, they are not mentioned. (It is a very easy sentence to write, if they did pursue such statements: "Calls requesting verification of this claim were not returned as of press time.") In the late 1960s and early '70s, did Gore Vidal need a million dollars from anyone, much less his half-sister, to pursue his legal matters? He was a best-selling author, and, further, ran for public office in the time that he would have been "afraid" of this secret file. (He ran for U.S. Senate in 1980.)

There is a breezy loaded coyness to some of the claims: "Gore spent a lot of time in Bangkok." Did he? We all know what is implied here: Bangkok, after all, is where pedophiles travel, right? "He had a weird take on the abuse" scandal. Did he? Vidal certainly was no enemy of the microphone, even in his last years. Both of these statements could be verified or refuted, easily.

Is Teeman or the Times endorsing these claims or reporting them? Reporting them would include the word "claims" and a statement from Vidal's representatives. One attempt at this is made: "Friends of Mr. Vidal told me [Teeman] they doubted he had sex with underage men." The friends are unnamed and their reactions are not included. These things might have made this an interesting article, but the doubts and a pursuit of verification might also have removed the need to include Straight and Steers' claims. 

(Again, there is that odd locution, "underage men." There is no such thing. They would be boys and if Gore Vidal had sex with boys at any age after he himself was a boy, I would be done with him as someone I still read.)

* * * *

Vidal was certain the New York Times was obsessed with him. "Obsessed" may be too strong a word. Gore Vidal was certain the New York Times hated him and he took every occasion (and created a few) to remind his readers of this.

In his memoir, "Palimpsest," there are a total of 13 passages in which he mentions the Times. Several of these recount his version of their history together: In 1948, he published "The City and The Pillar," a novel in which the protagonist's homosexuality was a fact, and not a shameful one, and did not lead to the character's socially satisfying murder or outing or conversion, unlike every other novel in which a homosexual character was featured.

This was more than merely scandalous in 1948. The Times refused to accept ads for the novel and "refused, for more than a decade, to review me in its daily paper (and always badly in the Sunday supplement) ... I published three novels as 'Edgar Box'; each was extravagantly praised by the Times."

Vidal loved the Times/Edgar Box story and writes of it several more times in "Palimpsest." He was in fact delighted to feel certain that the New York Times was obsessed with him.

He also notes in his memoir, with no editorial comment abut the Times' intentions, nor with any irony about him citing this detail with no editorial comment, that "The City and The Pillar" reached number five on the Times' bestseller list, ahead of novels published that year by his contemporaries, Mailer and Capote.

When Vidal died last year, his obituary in the Times was famously error-ridden; a corrections page later that week was almost completely dedicated to remedying the obit. When the Times chose to write about controversies surrounding Vidal's last will, the newspaper hired a writer who only writes about one particular aspect of the novelist's life, his sex life, in a book full of single-sourced claims and no refutations. 

I do not believe that biographies should be hagiographies, nor do I believe that my favorite authors always led pretty lives, so Teeman's book certainly has its place. But when the New York Times hires the author of a biography that makes Vidal's homosexuality its subject and then runs a passage alleging, with no reply or attempt at one, he was a pedophile, it pretty much confirms what Vidal always thought that the Times thought of him: That he was a danger to entrenched authority and needed to be taken down. Even after death.