Arrivederci, Italia
L'Uomo Vogue, October 2006
“It’s just a place. I am not very sentimental about places,” Gore Vidal told an interviewer about Italy, the country where, with his friend, Howard Austen, he lived for the better part of the last 45 years. Gore Vidal, my friend for a decade now, is a man who always does his best to tell the truth. But, in this case, I am not entirely sure that I believe him.
We are sitting in his living room in the Hollywood Hills. There is a soundman holding a large boom microphone in front of us. We are being recorded for a documentary about Gore that I am making in collaboration with his nephew, the Hollywood writer-director, Burr Steers. One of the scenes we have shot for the documentary, is of Gore moving out of La Rondinaia, his villa in Ravello, on the Amalfi coast, where he lived for 33 years. That was September 2005. Now, a year later, at the age of 81, he is settling in permanently at his Los Angeles house, surrounded by objects and art from his long time in Italy. Gore has owned his Hollywood Hills house since 1978. It was built in 1920, about the same time as La Rondinaia. There are some similarities: the Mediterranean vegetation outside; the white washed walls of the interior. Over the years, the house was usually rented out: for a time to the actor Nicholas Cage. The current next door neighbor is actress Charlize Theron. The director David Lynch lives up the street. In a few weeks, a final container arrives with the last of the furniture from Ravello. Soon after, Muzio Deitzman, one of Gore’s godsons, and caretaker at La Rondinaia, arrives with the tabby cat. The thousands of books are already here, only partially uncrated.
“We sold a lot of stuff,” says Gore. “Because part of what you see here was from La Rondinaia, and part from the apartment in Rome, which we got rid of ten years ago. Two big houses filled with furniture--and I cannot fill this medium-size house with two big houses worth. And I always had fairly large houses, because I always had to have a lot of books around. Therefore, bookcases; therefore, books. More books, bigger and bigger houses, and, therefore, the blank spaces on the walls got blanker. So every time I finished a hack job in the movies there would be enough money left over to go out and buy, quite inexpensively, one of these paintings—usually in Rome. And, certainly, now that I am in the Hollywood Hills, I'm quite glad I have them to look at.”
On the ceiling above us, in what Gore calls “the salone,” using the Italian (“It’s strange, I find myself thinking in Italian here,” he says) are two huge allegorical paintings, circa 1700, by the Neapolitan Paulo di Mattias. They once hung the main hallway of the La Rondinaia, a corridor that is 100-feet-long and has 20-foot-high ceilings. The Hollywood Hills house has much smaller proportions. It was Gore’s idea to hang the paintings overhead—not the usual custom in Los Angeles. “I told the picture hanger, I want this on the ceiling. He said, I'll do it--later confessing he had no idea how that was going to work. But, luckily, it did,” he says.
*****
“According to psychologists every major move is the equivalent of two massive heart attacks,” says Gore, sitting in a red brocade wing chair, a glass of whiskey in his hand. “So, you can say this is the visible evidence of the heart attacks I have, so far, not had. But I'm probably building toward, because the pulling up of roots anywhere and replanting them is, as anybody who's ever had to move will tell you, awful.”
The past couple of years have been very difficult. Moving has not been the worst of it. He and Howard traveled to L.A. in the winter of 2004 so that Howard, who had lung cancer, could check in to Cedars-Sinai Hospital. They had hoped to return to Ravello after Howard was better. In August of 2004, Howard died in his bedroom, upstairs at the Hollywood Hills house, ending an extraordinary 53-year run.
“It wasn’t a marriage with Austen, nor a partnership,” a newspaper writer recently noted about this relationship. “Vidal doesn’t like to name what they were, just as he hates being pigeonholed as a homosexual. No, they were Gore Vidal and Howard Austen, two men who decided to spend their lives together.”
In his second volume of his memoirs, Point to Point Navigation, which is being published in the United States this month (Doubleday), Gore writes about Howard’s death, and about their life together. “Labor Day 1950 was when Howard and I met,” he writes. “But since I have never understood when Labor Day itself is apt to be proclaimed I’d forgot our anniversary until the last one a few weeks before [Howard] died. He was pleasantly surprised. We had been together 53 years. He confessed that he thought he was just passing through my life and was surprised the decades began to stack up and we were still together. But then it is easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part and impossible, I have observed, when it does. Each had a sex life apart from the other; all else including our sovereign, Time, was shared.”
Many people have a hard time absorbing--let alone accepting--this concept. Many people also have a hard time keeping a friend much less a spouse for 53 years. Gore once proclaimed to me: “You live with a friend. You do not live with a lover. I don’t see why people don’t understand this.” It was very clear to him very early. He was 25 when he met Howard. Howard was tk. “In any country but the United States, people would understand this,” he was recently quoted as saying. “For grown people [sex] is something apart from living with somebody; it’s just a disturbance. [Americans] want total fidelity from the other person, and as much sex as they can get on the side. Preferably in a massage parlor. We are not regarded as brilliant by other people.” In the 1950s, he and Howard lived together in a house on the Hudson River, a 19th century Greek Revival mansion, called Edgewater. In the dining room at the Hollywood Hills house, there is an engraving of Edgewater’s handsome columned façade. This picture hung previously where tk in Ravello. In his first memoir, Palimpsest (1995), and in Point to Point Navigation, Gore notes that he dreams about Edgewater, now far in his past. The summers were too hot on Hudson River, and the winters too cold. The climate is Los Angeles is similar to Southern Italy’s. The house here is something like a miniature of La Rondinaia.
“As I now pack up the books and pictures that Howard and I acquired at La Rondinaia since we moved in 33 years ago, I keep thinking of my one conversation with John Steinbeck at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan,” Gore writes in Point to Point Navigation. “We were both talking about houses and the urge to put down roots ‘for good.’ I’d just got Edgewater on the Hudson. I could not imagine wanting to live anyplace else….I suspect that it really was what I’d always wanted and that is why I still dream that I have somehow got it back and am moving back in again and, of course, Howard is still alive. Steinbeck was of the same mind. He said, ‘How many times I’ve settled somewhere for good and never wanted to leave until the inevitable day comes when I move and the place is emptying out and we are suddenly all gone and living in a new place.’ As I write this, I am getting ready to move on and a third of my life is being packed up and I am again transient—neither here nor there. These rehearsals for death take more and more out of one until at the end there is, I suspect, nothing at all except Howard’s old dressing gown hanging on the back of his bathroom door, a refuge for months which [our housekeeper] Rita maintains are fireflies on the grounds that I could not know the difference.”
Howard’s bedroom at the Hollywood house was across the second floor landing from Gore’s. The landing is decorated with an Aubusson tapestry, which Gore says was made by the French for the Dutch trade. “That is why the figures are so ghastly. The French would never have made such poor figures for something they would keep for themselves.” The Aubusson used to fill a wall in the salon in Rome, and part of a wall in the massive salon in Ravello. “It just fits the biggest wall we have here,” says Gore. After Howard died, Gore’s Filipino cook, Norberto Nierras, put a chair in the doorway that goes from Howard’s room to Gore’s studio. On the chair he put a wooden puppet of a man with a moustache, “something superstitious,” Gore says.
*****
Gore writes much more about Rome in Point to Point Navigation than he did in Palimpsest. (The earlier book covers the first 39 years of his life, though it flashes forward periodically.)
I did not know Gore when he lived in Rome. When he started to work on the second memoir, we discussed what it might include. I suggested he put in a lot about Rome. I wanted to know what the city was like as it slid from la dolce vita into in the decades of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, before he and Howard moved south, to escape smog and traffic.
“We fled [in the early 1990s] because Howard was dying,” Gore says. “He had emphysema and wouldn't stop smoking. And I don't know if you've noticed, the air in Rome is nothing but black soot—or was. It’s better now. So we moved full time to La Rondinaia to get fresh air, for both of us, and it was good for a few years. Neither one of us had suspected that he was immortal. And to watch these black clouds every morning from our Rome terrace, we knew that we were doomed living there. It was like living in the vicinity of Vesuvius. So we got out, and it added five, ten years to his life. We were more or less permanent in Ravello. I had no other house. That was the only place I lived, so all the books were there, and the pictures were there.”
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