Hunting the Famous - Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal in 1948, two years after he published his first novel City and the Pillar at the age of 21.

Gore Vidal with one of his many literary enemies Norman Mailer during a speech in 1985 against the American political landscape of the day. Pictures courtesy of The UK Guardian.

By the time he got to Gore Vidal he was a little blase about interviewing famous people.

He had long ago worked out that offering interviews of the famous to Australian newspapers was a sure route to publication - and therefore money.

Would you like an interview with Joseph Heller, author of Catch 22, went down a treat with the now defunct then historic news magazine The Bulletin, which back in the early part of the 20th century had published famous Australian authors, including that most lyrical of poet-alcoholics, Henry Lawson.

Once they hit the stratosphere of multi-million dollar sales, world wide fame and armies of public relations hacks, living legends tend to become unavailable to all but the most prestigious newspapers and magazines.

Except when they're flogging product. 

Well we were crippled by the side of the mountain, away from the beach, as if we had been walking towards the desert but failed. For across the mountain lay another mountain, and no one from our village had ventured further. In stories, that was all, there were men on horseback and privileged fights, carousing in sophisticated taverns, away from the quiet, incestuous village life. We released the dog and gazed after it lovingly, our substitute child we had loved so much. Everything to us in the cold London winters. A long way from the outpost from whence we came. 

The speed they scored down Chelsea Road kept them all awake, the toxicity of their pleasures raising no doubts, for there was no tomorrow, only the dawn, the embrace, the inappropriate randiness, the knives drawn if you threatened to leave. It was so vivid and yet so shameful. So many had promised to cure him; and failed. He could see the whack whack whack of the crystal light in the turgid dark of the London suburbs; densely populated, aching with history. He was always the emissary, the one sent out to score. Out in the streets when no one else wanted to be out; haunting Vauxhall when the snow piled in the corners of the streets and the pubs, which they rarely had money to venture into, churned out a foreign world of which he would never be a part.

Richard was always there, at two am, when everybody else was asleep, downing shots of Drambuie or Tia Maria or some exotic cocktail he had lifted from his place of work, speeding of his head, always happy to see you, his old mate from Australia, his dark mentor, the one that had introduced him to William Burroughs and the merry dance; the plain sacrifice, the glass raised; his handsome face, his dark limpid eyes, always part of our fantasy and our lives. He was beautiful, simply beautiful, in his unadorned way, and we all adored him. He would embrace us, not knowing what he did to our hearts, and that would be the end of it, as they shuffled into the crippled dawn.

Richard is dead now because they're all dead now. If it wasn't AIDS it was overdoses, and in his fragmented self, in the shadows where he had once lived, that face resonated as the spirit of adventure, as a beloved man, as everything we held dear. Him and Stephen drinking in the bar at the London School of Economics, drinking the afternoon away and laughing in delight at their shared jokes. And he flitted past, even then not able to drink in the same quantity. They laughed and share their jokes, and greeted him as the writer, sure that one day he would write their story too, the silent observer, the court poet. 

They could see from the bar windows into their backyards, the Hollyhocks in astonishing bloom, here in the centre of London, ten minutes from Trafalgar Square. He was shadowed in his own guilt and felt as if he was being followed, always, about to be exposed for the criminal he was, a fraud more interested in being plastered than in producing the lines of lyricism they all expected. Every now and then something was published, as he interviewed famous author after famous author, lunching with Joseph Heller, wrinkling their foreheads at the antics of Norman Mailer, being welcomed into Gore Vidal's room at Claridges. Please don't be overwhelmed, he said in his sweeping way, welcoming them in.

And yet they sat on the balcony of that bar and pissed the afternoons away. And everything they thought they were going to achieve never happened. The book he had laboured so hard over fell flat on a spike of rejection slips. Stephen worked as a nurse and all his various enterprises, playing the harp, becoming an osteopath, creating a home for wealthy queens, none of them were happening yet; the days when he was to become a doctor far off. And as for Richard himself, the centre of our entrancement, he drank and he drank in those days when he could still be fabulous, in those days before the alcohol ate his body and the pills left him a mumbling wreck, and those affectionate embraces he reserved for his loyal circle of friends; they became the embraces of a dying man, a tragedy within themselves. He excused himself and wenwt back to the typewriter; something had to work sometime.



  He had interviewed Salman Rushdie in the room the same room where he had written Midnight's Children. It was before the Fatwah and his fame had spiralled out of all control. Serious breaches were breaking through the fabric of things. He had walked with Al Alvarez on Hampstead Heath, he had used his new found status as a freelance journalist to pursue all his literary idols, and had been successful to quite some degree. He met Anthony Burgess, Dirk Bogarde, Joseph Heller, all gone now, he interviewed Gore Vidal and hunted down Paul Bowles in Tangiers, he had dinner in Madrid with Ian Gibson, who had just written a biography of the Spanish poet Lorca, and he climbed and he twisted here about, the lonely voice from far off Australia.

The British, of course, treat Australians with something between amusement and contempt, or at least they did in those days, and it was relatively easy to inveigle his way into all sorts of situations. Salman was a special case. In those days, before time and age and numerous life pressures crowded out the days, he would always read the books before interviewing the author. He had particularly loved Midnight's Children, as had millions of other readers, and had read it in Bombay, or Mumbai as it is now known, even chasing down some of the locations in the book, the sprawling, chaotic, wealthy areas of Bombay with its fading glamour and crumbling old temples.

The book had resonated with the chaos of India, and with his friend Martin they had embraced these days of chaos and charm. The house where Rushdie lived at that time, in Kent Town he remembered, was a large hushed house which would have required substantial wealth to have bought, even back then. He was living in squats at the time, and the wealth struck him as much as anything. Rushdie had come from a well off merchant Indian family, and this surprising wealth, here in London, at the centre of things, was impressive to an antipodean. Oh how he had valued that walk with Al Alvarez on Hampstead Heath, as they talked of Sylvia Plath and The Savage God. Oh how it all seemed to point to a glorious literary career, if only he kept writing, if only he kept on moving.

The house was hushed. A maid had opened the door. It soon became apparent that all four floors of the house were the Rushdie family; an astonishing thing to him. A wife appeared briefly, very briefly, before disappearing into the bowels of the house. He was taken up to Rushdie's study. In those days, before his short hand and personal hieroglyphics were anything to write home about, he used a tape recorder, which he set up duly. His own life had been riddled with failure and dereliction, excessive drinking and bohemian friends, and he was quietly overawed, although he tried not to show it, at all that was being shown him, the windows that were opening up, this different world of wealth and influence and success.

Rushdie told him of his first science fiction novel - Grimus - which he utterly related to because his own first novels had been science fiction. And then Rushdie showed him a black and white photograph of the house that features in Midnight's Children, a big, rambling, Indian house where he had grown up. Outside, before he knocked on the door, he had frantically read the last pages of Shame, the book he was ostensibly interviewing him about, a sprawling, black work set in Pakistan, where few of the characters are admirable, the plot confusing and the politics dark. Rushdie seemed impressed that he had actually read the novel.

The interview went well. He spoke disarmingly of the fame that had been thrust upon him with the phenomenal success of Midnight's Children. He showed him the desk where he had written it; and asked, if you had written a book like that, just sitting here, not really talking to anybody, without any orthodox plot, with multiple voices inside it, the voices of India, sitting here, could you have possible imagined it would be a success? No, he answered, as if they were equals, as if he, too, would ultimately go on to have a famed career, for the beauty of the young is there is always hope, the disasters, the failures, the bites of reality, none of it has set in yet.

Afterwards, Rushdie had seen him graciously to the door, all the charm and magnificent courtesy of the wealthy Indian, all the vast diversity of their wealth and the complex, accepted wisdoms of their culture, and he walked back down the road into his own contrasting life in that overwhelming city. And he always followed, after that intimate hour with one of the world's greatest authors, his career with interest, the extravagances of Satanic Verses, the fatwah, the security, the changed wives, his increasing status into the literary stratosphere. While he went back to Australia and all his own books failed, and ultimately he became a journalist. The public relations person for Jonathan Cape told him Rushdie had told her it was the best interview he had ever done. That was a source of pride in a disintegrating life, as chaos after chaos proceeded to mount upon him.