Celebrated author, playwright and commentator Gore Vidal has died at the age of 86, his nephew said today.
Burr Steers said Vidal died at his home in Los Angeles’ Hollywood Hills at about 6.45pm local time yesterday of complications from pneumonia.
Mr Steers said Vidal had been living alone in the home and had been sick for ‘quite a while’.
The acerbic Vidal was known for such best-selling novels as Burr and Myra Breckenridge, the play The Best Man, and for essays on everything from politics and literature to sex and religion.
In the 1960s and 70s he was a fixture on talk shows and other television programmes and feuded openly with Norman Mailer, William Buckley and others.
He also worked on screenplays and appeared in several films, including Bob Roberts and With Honors.
Along with such contemporaries as Mailer and Truman Capote, Vidal was among the last generation of literary writers who were also genuine celebrities, personalities of such size and appeal that even those who had not read their books knew who they were.
His works included hundreds of essays; best-selling novel Lincoln; the groundbreaking The City and The Pillar, among the first novels about openly gay characters; and the Tony-nominated political drama The Best Man, revived on Broadway in 2012.
Tall and distinguished looking, with a haughty baritone not unlike that of his conservative arch-enemy Buckley, Vidal appeared cold and cynical on the surface.
But he bore a melancholy regard for lost worlds, for the primacy of the written word, for ‘the ancient American sense that whatever is wrong with human society can be put right by human action’.
Vidal was uncomfortable with the literary and political establishment, and the feeling was mutual.
Beyond an honorary National Book Award in 2009, he won few major writing prizes, lost both times he ran for office and initially declined membership into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, joking that he already belonged to the Diners Club. He was eventually admitted in 1999.
But he was widely admired as an independent thinker – in the tradition of Mark Twain and HL Mencken – about literature, culture, politics and, as he liked to call it, ‘the birds and the bees’.
He picked apart politicians, living and dead, mocked religion and prudery, opposed wars from Vietnam to Iraq and insulted his peers like no other, once observing that the three saddest words in the English language were ‘Joyce Carol Oates’ (The happiest words: ‘I told you so’).
The author ‘meant everything to me when I was learning how to write and learning how to read’, Dave Eggers said at the 2009 National Book Awards ceremony, when he and Vidal received honorary citations.
‘His words, his intellect, his activism, his ability and willingness to always speak up and hold his government accountable, especially, has been so inspiring to me I can’t articulate it.’
Ralph Ellison labelled him a ‘campy patrician’.
Vidal had an old-fashioned belief in honour, but a modern will to live as he pleased. He wrote in the memoir Palimpsest that he had more than 1,000 ‘sexual encounters’, nothing special, he added, compared with the pursuits of such peers as John F Kennedy and Tennessee Williams.
Vidal was fond of drink and claimed that he had sampled every major drug, once. He never married and for decades shared a scenic villa in Ravello, Italy, with companion Howard Austen.
Vidal would say that his decision to live abroad damaged his literary reputation in the U.S. In print and in person, he was a shameless name dropper, but what names! John and Jacqueline Kennedy; Hillary Clinton; Tennessee Williams; Mick Jagger; Orson Welles; Frank Sinatra; Marlon Brando; Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon.
He dined with Welles in Los Angeles, lunched with the Kennedys in Florida, clowned with the Newmans in Connecticut, drove wildly around Rome with a near-sighted Williams and escorted Jagger on a sightseeing tour along the Italian coast.
He campaigned with Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman. He butted heads, literally, with Mailer. He helped director William Wyler with the script for Ben-Hur. He made guest appearances on everything from The Simpsons to Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
Vidal formed his most unusual bond with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. The two exchanged letters after Vidal’s 1998 article in Vanity Fair on ‘the shredding’ of the Bill of Rights and their friendship inspired Edmund White’s play Terre Haute.
‘He’s very intelligent. He’s not insane,’ Vidal said of McVeigh in a 2001 interview.
Vidal also bewildered his fans by saying the Bush administration probably had advance knowledge of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; that McVeigh was no more a killer than Dwight Eisenhower; and that the U.S. would eventually be subservient to China, ‘The Yellow Man’s Burden’.
Christopher Hitchens, who once regarded Vidal as a modern Oscar Wilde, lamented in a 2010 Vanity Fair essay that Vidal’s recent comments suffered from an ‘utter want of any grace or generosity, as well as the entire absence of any wit or profundity’. Years earlier, Saul Bellow stated that ‘a dune of salt has grown up to season the preposterous things Gore says’.
A long-time critic of American militarism, Vidal was, ironically, born at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, his father’s alma mater.
