Asking Gore Vidal, America’s last great literary lion, why he is selling his Los Angeles home is akin to quizzing Oscar Wilde about his council-tax bill. You know such concerns will be witheringly dismissed as servant talk, though I don’t think the Irish wit, on hearing that The Sunday Times was on the blower, would have groaned quite so theatrically and exclaimed “Oh shit” before picking up the receiver.
“Now why should I want to talk about my house?” Vidal asks. “I am not in the business of real estate. I don’t care about it. Why don’t you talk to me about my books and plays?”
Well, a home is all about stories, and you are a storyteller, I say shamelessly. You are a historian, and people will be interested in the background of the mansion built on stolen ground that you are selling for $3.495m (£2.16m). “Don’t you try that one,” he harrumphs. “Whoever told you I would talk about my house was being optimistic. Just be honest and say you are doing it as a job.”
He is open to chitchat. He loved The King’s Speech (“great cast”), but avoided Colin Firth’s previous film, A Single Man, because it was based on a sad episode in Christopher Isherwood’s life: “I refuse to see films about people I knew.”
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Being patronised by Vidal is like falling into Willy Wonka’s river of chocolate Asked if he will revise anything in his 1960 political play The Best Man, which is returning to Broadway this spring, he harrumphs again and questions whether I would have put the same question to William Shakespeare. Probably.
And, yes, I really should check my pronunciation of the title of his biography, Palimpsest.
Being patronised by Vidal is like falling into Willy Wonka’s river of chocolate: you know you are drowning, but it feels curiously comforting. It’s cheering to know that, at 85, he is as rigorous, voluble and cantankerous as ever, albeit in smaller bursts.
A while ago, he spoke at an antiwar street rally and was ‘“deliberately” drowned out by a hovering Los Angeles Police Department helicopter — a chopper that, associates tease, is still lingering over his house at night to fuel his political paranoia.
Why is he moving? Put simply, he does not like Los Angeles. It’s clear that he puts the City of Angels in the same category as his toxic old rivals Norman Mailer and the “crypto-Nazi” commentator William F Buckley, with whom there were famously violent altercations. And doctors (“They took out my gall bladder, I still do not know why”), many of today’s politicians and talking about houses.
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Vidal craves urban stimulation, but also wants to live in his usual patrician and gated style — and, while both worlds exist in LA, they do not talk, let alone abut.
“The city does not suit him,” a friend said recently. “The property is like a stage set, he does not need all the rooms. To him, it’s a house not a home.” But that does not mean Casa Vidal could not be a family home again.
Born into the American political aristocracy, Vidal started out as a trouble-making essayist and author. He said he became more “civilised” after meeting his lifelong companion, Howard Austen, in 1950 — but Vidal, who had earlier been briefly engaged to the actress Joanne Woodward before she married Paul Newman, said the secret of his relationship with Austen was, at least in the later years, no sex.
During the 1950s, he took the Hollywood coin as a scriptwriter, repaying it by inserting a gay subtext into Ben-Hur and the more overt omnisexuality of Myra Breckinridge, with Raquel Welch as a glam transvestite.
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The 1970 film flopped badly, but Vidal was left with spare change to lavish on his own slice of the Hollywood dream. It was an investment, an alternative to putting his money in the stock exchange, perilously close to “trade” for an aristocrat — but well-situated land never gets old. In 1977, the writer paid $149,000 for a half-acre site with a mansion on Outpost Estates, which had a shady and distinctly un-PC past.
It was formerly the site of a country club built by Harrison Otis, a Union army officer who came west to take over the newspaper now known as the Los Angeles Times. Otis had acquired the land from a Spanish-speaking farmer during the murky transition of California from Mexican backwater to gringo-owned Golden State. He went on to make a second fortune in the water scandal lightly fictionalised in the film Chinatown.
In the 1920s, a developer peppered the hillside with large villas, but they were in elegant decline when Vidal found his dream house: a 4,800 sq ft 1929 mansion with five bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a near-Olympic-size pool built into the hillside behind the house.
I am not like most Americans, who deny the possibility that they may not live for ever. I know where I am in my life He brought in a fashionable interior designer, Diana Phipps, whose upholstered benches — featured in her 1983 book Affordable Splendor — are still in place. She stripped the wide-plank floorboards and added the rugs, but left the original chandelier in place. She also cleaned up the nooks and the huge carved stone fireplace in the living room, and oversaw the revival of the fruit gardens surrounding the house.
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Vidal added his own art and books — about 20,000 at the last count —but probably did not dip into the pool more than half a dozen times before following his romantic dream and moving to Italy at the end of the 1970s. He and Austen owned a six-acre estate called La Rondinaia (The Swallow’s Nest), perched high above Ravello, on the Amalfi coast.
They were social, gregarious — Vidal challenges the word, but does not offer a replacement — and entertained a steady stream of stars, from Greta Garbo to Brad Pitt.
In the meantime, the Los Angeles property was let out to actors and visiting directors such as Ken Russell. The green area near Runyon Canyon became fashionable again. Today, his neighbours include Charlize Theron, Will Ferrell, Laurence Fishburne and the expatriate punk-turned-rocker Billy Idol. Not that Vidal knows or cares about such passers-by.
Vidal moved back to LA with Austen in 2003 because, as he told me at the time: “I need to be closer than a hour’s drive from a good hospital.” Austen died in November that year.
Now Vidal is ready to quit the city for the last time. He remains unsure where he will live next; he may even move back to Italy. “I don’t know, why do you ask me?” he says wearily.
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He is preparing to donate many of his books and papers to university libraries and move into a smaller abode, perhaps a gentleman bachelor’s flat in New York, on the Upper West Side.
He says he has been playing a recording of Austen performing On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. “It’s about death, you know,” he says. “I am not like most Americans, who deny the possibility that they may not live for ever. I know where I am in my life.”
Vidal then suddenly puts down the phone. He does not have the time to waste on domestic trivia. Sometimes a house, even a mansion, is just a place to pass time before the next chapter is written.
The house is for sale through Coldwell Banker Previews International; coldwellbankerpreviews.com