50 Facts About Gore Vidal

1.

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit.

2.

Gore Vidal unsuccessfully sought office twice as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the US House of Representatives, and later in 1982 to the US Senate.

3.

Gore Vidal was born there because his father, a US Army officer, was then serving as the first aeronautics instructor at the military academy.

4.

Gore Vidal was baptized in January 1939, when he was 13 years old, by the headmaster of St Albans School, where Gore Vidal attended preparatory school.

5.

Gore's great-grandfather Eugen Fidel Vidal was born in Feldkirch, Austria, of Romansh background, and had come to the US with Gore's Swiss great-grandmother, Emma Hartmann.

6.

Nina Gore Vidal then was married two more times; to Hugh D Auchincloss and to Robert Olds.

7.

Gore Vidal had "a long off-and-on affair" with the actor Clark Gable.

8.

The nephews of Gore Vidal include Burr Steers, a writer and film director, and Hugh Auchincloss Steers, a figurative painter.

9.

In 1939, during his summer holiday, Gore Vidal went with some colleagues and professor from St Albans School on his first European trip, to visit Italy and France.

10.

Gore Vidal visited for the first time Rome, the city which came to be "at the center of Gore's literary imagination", and Paris.

11.

Rather than attend university, Gore Vidal enlisted in the US Army at age 17 and was assigned to work as an office clerk in the USAAF.

12.

Gore Vidal claimed that New York Times critic Orville Prescott was so offended by the book that he refused to review or to permit other critics to review any book by Gore Vidal.

13.

Gore Vidal took the pseudonym "Edgar Box" and wrote the mystery novels Death in the Fifth Position, Death before Bedtime and Death Likes it Hot featuring Peter Cutler Sargeant II, a publicist-turned-private-eye.

14.

That mystery-novel success led Gore Vidal to write in other genres, where he produced the stage play The Best Man: A Play about Politics and the television play Visit to a Small Planet.

15.

Gore Vidal wrote the pulp novel Thieves Fall Out under the pseudonym Cameron Kay but refused to have it reprinted under his real name during his life.

16.

Besides US history, Gore Vidal explored and analyzed the history of the ancient world, specifically the Axial Age, with the novel Creation.

17.

The novel was published without four chapters that were part of the manuscript he submitted to the publisher; years later, Gore Vidal restored the chapters to the text and re-published the novel Creation in 2002.

18.

Gore Vidal wrote a historical essay about the Founding Fathers, Inventing a Nation.

19.

In 2009, Gore Vidal won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, which called him a "prominent social critic on politics, history, literature and culture".

20.

In exchange for rewriting the Ben-Hur screenplay, on location in Italy, Gore Vidal negotiated the early termination of his four-year contract with MGM.

21.

Gore Vidal said that Boyd was aware of the homosexual subtext to the scene and that the director, the producer and the screenwriter agreed to keep Heston ignorant of the subtext, lest he refuse to play the scene.

22.

In turn, on learning of that explanation, Heston said that Gore Vidal had contributed little to the script of Ben-Hur.

23.

Gore Vidal occasionally returned to the movie business, and wrote historically accurate teleplays and screenplays about subjects important to him.

24.

Gore Vidal appeared in the American television series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and in the films Bob Roberts, a serio-comedy about a reactionary populist politician who manipulates youth culture to win votes; With Honors, an Ivy league comedy-drama; Gattaca, a science-fiction drama about genetic engineering; and Igby Goes Down, a coming-of-age serio-comedy directed by his nephew, Burr Steers.

25.

Gore Vidal began to drift towards the political left after he received his first paycheck, and realized how much money the government took in tax.

26.

Gore Vidal reasoned that if the government was taking so much money, then it should at least provide first-rate healthcare and education.

27.

In 1960, Vidal was the Democratic candidate for Congress for the 29th Congressional District of New York, a usually Republican district that including most of the Catskills and the western bank of the Hudson River, including Newburgh, but lost to the Republican candidate J Ernest Wharton, by a margin of 57 percent to 43 percent.

28.

Gore Vidal concluded that McVeigh had destroyed the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building as an act of revenge for the FBI's Waco massacre at the Branch Davidian Compound in Texas, believing that the US government had mistreated Americans in the same manner that he believed that the US Army had mistreated the Iraqis.

29.

Gore Vidal was very much against any kind of military intervention in the world.

30.

Gore Vidal contended that Roosevelt had advance knowledge of the dawn-raid attack on Pearl Harbor.

31.

Gore Vidal described Bush as "the stupidest man in the United States" and said that Bush's foreign policy was explicitly expansionist.

32.

Gore Vidal contended that the Bush Administration and their oil-business sponsors, aimed to control the petroleum of Central Asia, after having gained hegemony over the petroleum of the Persian Gulf in 1991.

33.

Gore Vidal became a member of the board of advisors of The World Can't Wait, a political organization which sought to publicly repudiate the foreign-policy program of the Bush Administration and advocated Bush's impeachment for war crimes, such as the Second Iraq War and torturing prisoners of war in violation of international law.

34.

Gore Vidal had earlier described what he saw as the political and cultural rot in the United States in his essay "The State of the Union",.

35.

In 1975, Gore Vidal sued Truman Capote for slander, over the accusation that he had once been thrown out of the White House for being drunk, putting his arm around First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and then insulting her mother.

36.

Later, Buckley said he regretted having called Gore Vidal a "queer", but still expressed some distaste for Gore Vidal when he said that he was an "evangelist for bisexuality".

37.

The feud continued in Esquire, where Gore Vidal implied that in 1944, Buckley and unnamed siblings had vandalized a Protestant church in Sharon, Connecticut after the wife of a pastor had sold a house to a Jewish family.

38.

Gore Vidal did not subscribe to American values, in the least.

39.

In 1997, Gore Vidal was one of thirty-four public intellectuals and celebrities who joined a publicity campaign waged by Scientologists against the German government, signing an open letter addressed to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, published in the International Herald Tribune, alleging that Scientologists in Germany were treated "in the same way that the Nazi regime persecuted the Jews".

40.

In 1967, Gore Vidal appeared in the CBS documentary CBS Reports: The Homosexuals, in which he expressed his views on homosexuality in the arts.

41.

Gore Vidal did not express a public stance on the HIV-AIDS crisis.

42.

Gore Vidal said that he had an intermittent romance with the actress Diana Lynn, and alluded to possibly having fathered a daughter.

43.

Gore Vidal was briefly engaged to the actress Joanne Woodward before she married the actor Paul Newman; after marrying, they briefly shared a house with Vidal in Los Angeles.

44.

Gore Vidal claimed to have slept with Fred Astaire when he first moved to Hollywood and with a young Dennis Hopper.

45.

In 1950, Gore Vidal met Howard Austen, who became his partner for the next 53 years, until Austen's death.

46.

Howard Austen died in November 2003 and in February 2005 his remains were re-buried at Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, DC, in a joint grave plot that Gore Vidal had purchased for himself and Austen.

47.

On July 31,2012, Gore Vidal died of pneumonia at his home in the Hollywood Hills at the age of 86.

48.

Gore Vidal was buried next to Howard Austen in Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, DC Vidal said he chose his grave site because it is between the graves of two people who were important in his life: Henry Adams, the historian and writer, whose work Vidal admired; and his boyhood friend Jimmie Trimble who was killed in World War II, a tragedy that haunted Vidal for the rest of his life.

49.

Gore Vidal saw himself as the last of the breed of literary figures who became celebrities in their own right.

50.

Gore Vidal provided his own voice for the animated-cartoon version of himself in The Simpsons episode "Moe'N'a Lisa".