Arrivederci, Italia
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A few months ago, Gore admitted to me that “the Roman years were the best of our lives.” (I say admitted because most of what has said to me about Rome has been negative.) He perhaps came to his conclusion when he was remembering them for the memoir. It was certainly a great period of productivity. The long historical novels (Burr and Lincoln, to name two) were all, in part, written there. His friends included Italo Calvino, Federico Fellini, Alberto Moravia, Mona and Eddie Bismarck, and Consuelo and Rudi Crespi. It was in this period, in 1968, on a trip to back to the U.S., that Gore’s immortal moment on American television took place: The heated debate over Vietnam with William F. Buckley Jr., during the riotous Democratic National Convention. On a live ABC-TV broadcast, Buckley attacked Gore, blurting out, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddam face and you'll stay plastered.” After this, Gore was—enviably--able to return to Rome, a good perch from which to contemplate America’s late 20th century nervous breakdown.
*****
Nineteen-sixty, after an unsuccessful run for the United States congress in New York State, was the year that Gore and Howard moved to Rome. Gore was working on his book about Julian the Apostate. It was his return to the novel, after a ten-year stint of writing for the movies, Broadway, and for live television in that medium’s “golden age.” A classical library was needed in order to research the novel. He chose the library of the American Academy in Rome, where he had first lived for an extended period when the director William Wyler hired him to work on the script of Ben-Hur. That was 1958, the height of la dolce vita. Gore recalls walking to the Via Veneto from Le Grand Hotel, where the Ben-Hur team was put up. Thus began a long patronage of bar of the Grand, where, according to Gore--and many others--Rome’s best Martini was to be had. That season, he got to know an actor who was looking for work in Spaghetti Westerns: Clint Eastwood. King Farouk was on display at the Café de Paris, along with all of the stars who were passing through for films during the heyday of Cinecitta. “We called Via Veneto ‘the beach,’” Gore says. “As in, I’ll see you on the beach.”
After Julian was published, in 1963, he and Howard settled into a penthouse apartment in the Largo Argentina, which would be their Roman base of operations for 30 years. I never saw this apartment, though Gore described it well in a 1985 essay he wrote called “Life in a Roman Street,” about the Via Torre di Argentina, the street in which the apartment was located. “It was [a] small penthouse on top of the moldering 17th Century Orgio Palace in the middle of what bureaucratic Romans call the Historic Center and everyone else calls Old Rome,” Gore wrote. “The palace is at the northwest corner of a busy square that has all the charm of New York City’s Columbus Circle…plus, below street level, three classical temples, home to a colony of cats, a perennial—no, millennial—reminder that this precinct was once scared to the goddess Isis, and the cat, was, and is, her creature….The penthouse is a small, square, rickety 20th century addition to the palace; it is built around a squalid inner court, more than compensated for by two huge terraces at right angles to one another.” From the terraces there were views of San Andrea della Valle, the Vatican and Sant’ Ivo in Sapienza.
It was in this apartment, in his bedroom, that Gore wrote Myra Breckinridge, (1968) one of the great comic novels of the second half of the 20th century. The voice of Myra–a transsexual movie critic on a mission to reverse the decline of the Hollywood studio system and revolutionize the orders of human sexual behavior--first came into his head while walking down the stairs next to the Quirinale. He writes in Point to Point Navigation: “A researcher notes that I began writing Myra Breckinridge in June 1965. I didn’t remember the date, but I recall the day vividly. Howard and I had pretty much finished fixing up our Rome flat. I had a pile of yellow lined legal pads on my writing table which was opposite my bed. Across from the table a French door opened on to a terrace that overlooked the Largo Argentina…. The day I started Myra Breckinridge, there was new silver moon just risen oven the Vatican to the west of the apartment, as sign for me of good luck; the moon, not the Vatican. Curiously, when I finished the fist longhand draft, there was again a new moon. One month had passed.”
*****
I once asked Howard, as we walked from villa to piazza in Ravello, how Gore managed to be so prolific. “What can I say? He’s a genius,” was his reply. When I was a guest at La Rondinaia, I rarely saw Gore working--actually in the process of writing. Yet, somehow, at the end of the day, there would be a pile of new manuscript pages on the writing table in his studio. I found him three Olivetti manual typewriters and had them shipped to Ravello from New York. Those were for his essays. The novels are composed in longhand. It was only when I visited La Rondinaia for the first time that I started to comprehend how such formidable output was possible. The answer, apart from genius, is isolation. This sunk in as I approached the remote villa on a path lined with blue hydrangeas and shaded by chestnut tress. Twenty-four novels; eleven collections of essays; 2 memoirs; 6 plays; numerous number of screenplays as well as short stories.
La Rondiania was built for the daughter of Lord Grimthorpe, a British nobleman who lived in the neighboring Villa Cimbrone. The four-level house, which can only be reached on foot, clings to a rocky cliff overlooking the Amalfi Drive and the Tyrannian Sea. It is one kilometer from Ravello’s piazza. La Republica once headlined a story about Hillary Clinton’s visit to La Rondinaia, while Bill Clinton was president, “Lady Clinton nel paridiso di Vidal.”
Gore, over the past several years, has suffered from a bad knee, which made the walk to and from the piazza an unpleasant affair. When he returned to Ravello, after Howard’s death, I imagine the isolation La Rondinaia, minus the presence of Howard, seemed, for the first time, like a disadvantage. I stayed at the villa for a few days in the period he was there without Howard. The thought of dismantling the house seemed overwhelming even to me. The thought of moving the library and furniture—all of which had to be carried the one kilometer to the piazza for loading on trucks…I didn’t even want to contemplate it.
Gore’s studio at the villa, the first room off the foyer on the main floor, was described by him in Palimpsest: “The room where I work is a white cube with an arched ceiling and a window to my left that looks across the Gulf of Salerno toward Paestum…opposite me there is a large gray tufa-stone fireplace with elaborate green-yellow-blue tiles….By the door, two framed documents: my honorary citizenship of Ravello and my honorary citizenship of Los Angeles, the one and the other of my—home?—towns.” This room was heavily used. It was, by day, a work room for Gore; by night, it was the place where he and Howard played chess, watched movies or entertained visitors. Rudolf Nureyev, Paul Newman, Princess Margaret, Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, Mrs. Clinton, are among the many who passed through.
One of my favorite objects in the studio was a very dark painting, by Viola, which hung over the bar, near the fireplace. It depicts centurions gathered around a table. Howard discovered it in Rome, where it used to hang, where tk in the Largo Argentina arpartment. It now is in the dining room in Hollywood, near the engraving of Edgewater.
“Howard had the best eye for paintings of anyone I've ever known--aside from a professional,” says Gore. “We went to Christie's in Rome, and there was a painting of the Roman soldiers casting dice for JC's garments. A very dark picture. And Howard loved it, and he found it at Christie's, and he bought it for something like 300,000 lira, which in those days, was about $300. And Christie's knew nothing about what it was. They just said it was Neapolitan, and that was it. We had it hanging in Rome. I remember [the American political columnist] Joseph Alsop came by one day. He was a great expert on paintings, and whatever he said was always wrong. He said, ‘Oh, Gore. Can't you tell it's 18th century German—not very good?’ I said, ‘Well, I see aspects--’ ‘Oh, no, it's plainly German. Can't be Neapolitan.’ And, a week or so after I saw Joe, I bought a book called Eighteenth-Century Neapolitan Paintings. I opened it at random, and there was the painting that Howard had bought. So, I realized that this was a great painting -- all due to Howard's eye.”
*****
For the documentary, we are following Gore to some of his public appearances. Last summer there was one in Venice, and I found myself on the Grand Canal, in a water taxi, with Gore and Michael Gorbachev. Gore was speaking at the World Political Forum, of which Gorbachev is the chairman. It was a hot July day, and we were heading over to the island of S. Servorlo. Gore spoke that day, attacking the Bush administration, and what he calls America’s oligarchic “The Property Party,” and the “Cheney-Bush oil and gas junta.”
A few days before, he had been with him in Rome, where he spoke to a crowd of several thousand at the Annual Literature Festival of Rome, in the Basilica di Massenzio, just a mile or so from the old Largo Argentina apartment. He read a passage about Federico Fellini from Point to Point Navigation. Actors read from his novel, The Judgment of Paris, which, last summer, was published for the first time in Italian (Fazi).
“The first sight I had of the Foro Romano was from next door to the Basilica di Massenzio, at the Curia,” Gore recalls. “I went with a school trip in 1939. And there I was, speaking in the Basilica, in 2006--a long time later. It was a lovely audience--there were more than 2,000 people. And there I am on a stage, reading from my memoirs. After, I went over in a corner and signed copies of The Judgment of Paris, a book the daily New York Times had blacked out and it was now an Italian best-seller. So, it was a nice completion of my Roman time. And, as I was signing, a lot of people came rushing over who were friends of Howard. It was a great occasion. His buddies all came out. He had far more than I did -- so I thought that was rather wonderful as my arrivederci.”
In Point to Point Navigation, there is a memory of Howard, in Rome, in their old Roman street. “Last night, I finally saw [Howard] clearly in a dream—a frustration dream,” Gore writes. “We were in a street in Rome where the entrance to our old flat should have been, including a greengrocer whom we knew. Howard had grabbed a handful of fava beans and started to shell them. For what it is worth the fava bean itself resembles a miniature fetus and the Pythagorean cult believed that each bean contains the soul of someone who dead, ready to be reborn. In the dream Howard was eating these forbidden fetuses—preparing for rebirth?”
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