In the spring of 2011, as we reminisced over dinner one night, I told Gore Vidal that, since his feuds with famous men—William Buckley, Truman Capote, Robert Kennedy—had been so widely documented, I’d like to write about some of his treasured, lifelong friendships with interesting women. “Let’s do it,” Gore replied. And so began several months of visits, all ostensibly interviews, which turned into leisurely meanderings down memory lane. In October 2011 the interviews ended, but the visits continued. On February 15 of last year, when Joan Collins, her husband, Percy Gibson, and I were to meet Gore for dinner at Spago, in Beverly Hills, his caregiver called to say that Gore was en route to a local hospital.

Our visits didn’t end then either, but from then on they were in and out of hospitals and decidedly more one-sided than Gore would ever have tolerated under different circumstances. Finally, just before dusk on July 31, when the light in the hills was changing in the way he so loved, Gore was released from the long, brave struggle that ended his long, brave, extraordinary life.

‘She was,” Gore told me quietly but conclusively one day, without the hint of a pause for possible reconsideration, “the worst person in the world.” America’s pre-eminent man of letters, author of 29 novels, 26 works of nonfiction, 14 screenplays, and 8 stage plays, was speaking about the woman who had given him the gift of life 86 years earlier, Nina Gore Vidal, a glamorous, well-positioned, relentlessly self-absorbed and mean-spirited alcoholic.

Gore and I spent many hours reminiscing about the eclectic group of women he had chosen to recall. Though he and I knew each other for more than 50 years, I never met his mother. Still, it was impossible to talk with Gore about people who had mattered to him without wondering if the worst person in the world was not in some way responsible for the nature of his closest friendships.

We usually met at Gore’s grand Spanish Revival house in the Hollywood Hills. He had owned it for more than four decades but had moved back into it only in 2003, after leaving La Rondinaia, his cliffside villa in Ravello, Italy. There was little joy in his return to Los Angeles, a city he never regarded with affection. But he made the move willingly, because Howard Austen, with whom he had shared 52 years of his life, had developed emphysema and was failing rapidly. They were hoping that the medical care available in this country might buy them some time. But Howard died later that year, leaving a huge hole in the soul of a man who did not customarily speak in spiritual terms and who often appeared to prefer being thought of as emotionally impenetrable.

I asked him about differences in the nature of friendships with men and with women. “Women are more intense about it,” he replied, “because they’re always dealing with other women, and that’s so dicey. There’s always going to be trouble there. Can you imagine the trouble between Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart?” Noting my inquiring expression, he said, “Well, Eleanor was in love with Amelia, and Amelia was in love with my father.” He added, “My father kept taking Amelia and me to college football games, which bored us beyond words. She and I would read, write, and exchange poetry throughout every game. I had hoped that my father would marry her so that she would become my stepmother. But when I asked him why they hadn’t married, he said, ‘She was like a boy. I never wanted to marry another boy.’ ” Since no one has ever been able to explain the mystery of the famous aviatrix’s disappearance in the Pacific, in 1937, I asked Gore what he thought. “She may never have wanted to come back,” he said enigmatically. Did he cry when his father told him of her death? “I did not.”

Eugene Luther Vidal, a handsome former West Point football captain, Olympic athlete, and pioneer U.S. Army Air Corps pilot, was the aeronautics instructor at the U.S. Military Academy when his son, Eugene Luther Vidal Jr., was born there on October 3, 1925. (“Shepherds quaked,” Gore said.) Gore’s father later served as director of airline commerce during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term and founded three airline companies. After he had co-founded one of them—with the Boston and Maine Railroad company and Amelia Earhart, his married lover—it became Northeast Airlines.

Mother Figures

In 1950, Gore was a 25-year-old U.S. Army veteran of World War II who had already become a famous, controversial, and successful novelist. “I didn’t join the Texas Air Force, you know,” he reminded me. “This is what lower-class people do. And I have as powerful a class sense as anyone ever did, although I’m called a Communist or whatever. You name it, I’ve been called it.”

By then, Gore’s mother had divorced his father and married and divorced her second husband, Hugh Auchincloss—a Standard Oil heir who would later re-marry and become the stepfather of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy—and had been widowed by her third husband, General Robert Olds, who died 10 months after their wedding. Had she been at all supportive of Gore in childhood, one could make allowances for this woman, who was actually embarrassed about the controversy surrounding her son’s third book, The City and the Pillar, which dealt frankly with homosexuality. But, as Gore remembered it, there was nothing about him at any age that Nina ever deemed worthy of her support. Between drunken tirades, she would complain to whoever would listen about one of Gore’s most offensive behaviors. “He keeps going off into another room to write!” she’d exclaim, spitting out the last word as though it conveyed some heinous form of aberrant behavior.

If Nina Gore Vidal Auchincloss Olds harbored hostile feelings about writers and homosexuals, that was only a warm-up to the way she felt about Jews. She must have been more convinced than ever that the universe had it in for her when, in the early 1950s, her son struck up a close friendship with a young Jewish singer named Howard Auster (later changed to Austen), who was working in the pre-Mad Men world of New York City advertising.

“All the faggot fan magazines wanted to know how these two famous fags stayed together all those years,” Gore said. “They wanted to know what was the basis of our relationship. So I told them. We never had sex. I had sex and he had sex, but it was never together. Of course, they were furious and hated me for that answer. Howard was living with [the writer] Rona Jaffe when we met, and was with her for almost 10 years, until he moved in with me,” he continued. That was in 1960. “We never had sex, because I’m more intelligent than most people, and that’s the way I wanted it. I was smart enough to know that if you wanted to keep a friendship you made sure there was no sex. It was self-preservation.”

Shortly before he met Howard, Gore had decided to settle down. He bought a rather run-down Greek Revival house called Edgewater, in Barrytown, a Hudson River Valley village two hours north of New York City. His neighbors, who lived on vast wooded estates, included members of such elite American families as the Astors, Aldriches, Ryans, Delanos, and Roosevelts. Almost immediately, Gore became the darling of a small cadre of witty, wealthy, somewhat eccentric women, all the age of his mother or even his beloved grandmother.

In those days, it would appear, the Hudson River Valley was a sort of high-maintenance version of Peyton Place and Melrose Place. I heard Gore reminisce about his “Valley girls” with Katharine Delano Ryan Selznick, who met him with the Astors at Edgewater when she was a child. Many of his older women friends were married but involved in liaisons with tycoons or national leaders, who in turn were married to women who were having out-of-wedlock children with senators and statesmen.

In 1960, during the lead-up to the Kennedy election, Gore, who was turning 35, launched an unsuccessful bid to run for the U.S. Congress. President Harry Truman campaigned for him, as did presidential candidate Jack Kennedy, by then married to Gore’s semi-stepsister Jackie. But the most revered supporter of Gore’s first political campaign was his widowed friend Eleanor Roosevelt, who had become a powerful author, speaker, and activist. Gore adored her. “She was,” he told me, “the mother of the nation. She had to look after the black people, the Jews—all sorts of people. She was noble.”

When I asked Gore about another of his close female friends, Princess Margaret, he said, “She was too bright for her role. It was a tough role—thankless! When she got bad press and deserved to be smacked down, I think she could take it. But when it wasn’t deserved, she’d tell me, ‘Look, you’re the younger sister of the Queen, who is the source of honor, grace, righteousness, and all that is good. You’re not going to be understood, so you just have to take it and accept that there’s nobody who understands a word you’re saying.’

“She was really better at politics than the Queen,” he continued. “Once, the Queen had gone to Australia to open a can of peas or something, and Margaret suggested that she open Parliament while she was there. I mean, she is the Queen of Australia and Canada too.”

Joanne and Paul: “Special Times”

Gore met the actress Joanne Woodward, who was to become his lifelong friend, before she met her future husband, Paul Newman. (Paul starred and Joanne understudied in William Inge’s 1953 Broadway play, Picnic.) Since it was Joanne who introduced me to Gore, nearly six decades ago, I asked him where and how he and Joanne had originally connected.

“We met because of Vidal’s law,” he said. “Everyone who is famous knows everyone else—it goes with the territory. She was just getting parts on television, and I was the leading television dramatist at that time. On my first trip to Hollywood as a scriptwriter, I stayed at the Chateau Marmont, where I’d meet Joanne and Paul at the small, oval pool. And Paul and I used to work out at the Y.M.C.A. on Selma.” Paul was under contract then to Warner Bros., and Joanne to Twentieth Century Fox.

“Men and women all fell in love with Paul for the same reason—he was everyone’s idea of what a real guy should be,” Gore explained. “Paul had three children and wasn’t yet divorced from his first wife when he, Joanne, and I shared a house together in Hollywood.” Later, with Howard, they shared another house, in Malibu. I remember those houses, the era, and a trip I made with Joanne and Paul, on their elopement to Las Vegas in 1958, along with the agent Ina Bernstein, the film producer John Foreman, the screenwriter Stewart Stern, and my then husband, the agent Jay Kanter.

Gore shared trips galore with Joanne and Paul. After he decided to move to Rome and rented Edgewater, Joanne and Paul went to see him off on the liner Leonardo da Vinci. Howard had already gone abroad and was to meet Gore in Palermo, so the first night out Gore wandered into the grand dining room alone. There, at the captain’s table, he found Paul and Joanne, who had only pretended to be seeing him off while their luggage was being taken to their stateroom.

When Gore and Howard’s dog was hit by a speeding train on the track near Edgewater, Joanne gave them two puppies. Later, the Newmans together gave them their dog Rat, described by Gore as “a slightly lopsided Australian terrier of great intelligence.” Rat accompanied Gore and Howard to Klosters, in Switzerland, for the five winters they spent there, and he became a favorite of Gore’s friend Greta Garbo, who called him Ratzski, because, as she told Gore, “Rat is so brutal a name!”

I told Gore that the last time I had seen him with the Newmans he and Joanne seemed almost like brother and sister. “That’d be about right,” he confirmed softly. Looking back over more than half a century’s worth of memories, Joanne told me, “Our relationship is a long and complex one—it’s a whole other novel! My best story about Gore is when he was at my daughter Nell’s christening, and he was the godfather. When we handed him the baby, he hesitated for a minute, then he looked around and said, ‘Always a godfather, never a god!’ ”

I asked both of them about what is often spoken of as their “engagement.” His version: “Joanne and I were nearly married, but that was at her insistence and based entirely upon her passion not for me but Paul. Paul was taking his time divorcing his first wife, and Joanne calculated that the possibility of our marriage would give him the needed push. It did.” Her version: “At one point we decided we were engaged. I can’t remember if Paul and I had broken up or not—it doesn’t matter. Either Gore’s mother or his grandmother was concerned because he hadn’t gotten married. We pretended that we were having an affair or something. We got a kick out of it, because it was in the newspaper. I couldn’t see Gore and me getting married—oh, heavens—but we did have a great time together. Gore, Howard, Paul, and I had one of those rare life experiences where we shared special, special times. I certainly miss those times.”

Travels with Claire

At the end of 1956, the British actress Claire Bloom, who four years earlier had co-starred with Charlie Chaplin in Limelight, returned to New York from an apartment-hunting trip in Los Angeles, where she had stayed with Jay Kanter and me while we awaited the birth of our second daughter, Victoria. Claire, who was still single, was at that time distraught and in love with the very complicated Richard Burton, who was busy being, well, Richard Burton.

On New Year’s Eve, while Jay and I were taking an ambulance to the hospital for an emergency Cesarean delivery, Claire took a taxi to New York’s Plaza hotel with a friend who had invited her to dinner with Joanne, Paul, Howard, and Gore.

Claire told me, “After dinner, Gore and I went off to some club—I can’t remember the name, but it doesn’t exist any longer, because we’ve gone back to look for it. We stayed up all night, and that was it!” “It,” meaning their friendship, lasted 56 years. “She’s determined, talented, strong, witty, and sexy too,” Gore declared. When Gore and Howard lived in Rome, Claire also lived there for a time, with her first husband, the actor Rod Steiger. “We were all so fascinated with history,” she said. “Can you imagine how wonderful it was when we went with Gore on all these historical expeditions, where he knew everything about every place we visited?”

Gore asked me if I knew Claire’s daughter with Steiger, the opera singer Anna Steiger. I said no. He then spoke about Claire’s mother, whom he described as “a tough old Jewish lady in London.” He said, “Claire survived her. She survived all those husbands too!”

Rod Steiger suffered from near-catatonic depression. Claire was next married to the producer Hillard Elkins, who she says is referred to in her family as “the second husband, who shall remain nameless.” She told me, “I was horribly depressed when that marriage ended. I knew I had to do something, so I booked myself for a trip to Greece and intended to travel alone, by bus, throughout the country. When I told Gore about it on the phone, he promptly decided to come with me—canceled the whole bus idea and booked cars for us to visit Athens, Delphi, and everywhere else I wanted to go. And he was so funny about my terrible husband and his infidelity that by the time the trip was over my depression had totally lifted. That’s the thing about Gore: he is always so completely supportive.”

“Gore and Philip,” she said, “really loathed each other.” Claire and the novelist Philip Roth were together for a number of years before she decided to make him her third husband. When she told Gore, he exclaimed, “You already married Portnoy—now don’t marry his complaint!”

In 1957, the year after he met Claire, Gore finally decided to give up the ghost with his mother. As a young adult, he had repeatedly hoped to make peace with her, but Nina had grown increasingly bellicose. She would give up drinking for a few months and move to a new circle of friends or another city, as though her addiction would be unable to find and hit a moving target. By then, though, the only really new thing in her life was her addiction to morphine.

When she assured Gore, yet again, that she had stopped drinking, he invited her to visit him and Howard at an apartment in London he had taken while writing a movie. Her old friends, including U.S. ambassador Jock Whitney, knew about her problems. And though they saw Gore socially, they did not return Nina’s calls once she arrived in town. She drank so heavily that Gore and Howard could not entertain at home. Household staff members quit, one after Nina regaled her for hours about how none of her “dearest friends” in London would see her because of “my pansy son and his Jew boyfriend.” That was more than Gore could take.

He ordered her to leave, burned a savage letter she sent him, and wrote her back, he said, “to tell her I would never see her again, and I never did for the remaining 20 years of her life.” I asked if there had been any contact before her death, in 1978. She wrote once to beg him for money, he said, so he sent her “seven or eight thousand dollars.” Shortly after that, Gore’s picture appeared on the cover of Time. “She sent a long letter to the editors, denouncing my father and me, explaining why I was unworthy of their attention. They only dared print a single paragraph, which appeared under the heading ‘A Mother’s Love.’ ”

Rosemary, Nancy, and Joan

One afternoon I realized that, nearly every time we visited, a custom-cut CD of Rosemary Clooney recordings was playing in the background. Gore sometimes stopped talking to sing along. “I adored her!” he exclaimed, explaining that they had become friends when Rosie’s then husband, actor-director José Ferrer, directed a Los Angeles production of Gore’s play The Best Man in the 1960s. “Did you know her?” he asked.

We were friends in the 1950s, I told him, and Rosie was a bridesmaid at my wedding to Jay Kanter. We talked about how Rosie appeared to be such a straightforward, uncomplicated li’l ole Kentucky girl, but how complex she really was: smart, funny, boisterous, blowing hot and cold with the ill winds of her bipolar disorder and what—as her nephew George Clooney confirmed to Gore—we used to call “a real truckdriver’s mouth.”

Gore knew that I had known the Reagans since the late 1950s, when their children and mine were all in school together. He wanted me to know that he considered Nancy undervalued. “It was not at the same time, but Nancy Reagan and I both attended the Sidwell Friends School, in Washington,” he said. “I understand Nancy, because she’s a power girl. She knows the game. She was born knowing how to play it. I know about power, as I’ve been around it all my life. She was not going to advance herself with the little people, so she did not see many of them.”

Gore recollected one moment that touched him: “We met quite recently, when we joined the ever increasing company of widows and widowers cluttering Los Angeles. ‘Don’t you hate it,’ she said, ‘when they tell you how time is the great healer?’ I agreed that I hated it, because, after all, time is the great constant reminder of things lost and gone for good.

“Gorbachev insists,” Gore continued, “that there would have been no peace except for Nancy. He told me, ‘Nancy and Ronnie had spoken about what they hoped to accomplish with me when we met.’ But then Don Regan and others on the president’s staff prepared materials that inflamed Gorbachev.” Gore said that was one of the things that had prompted Nancy to get Regan fired, so that “from then on, when the president said what he wanted, that’s what got delivered, not something else—or else!” Gore said Gorbachev had told him that by his second term President Reagan “had discovered that peacemakers, above all, earn a place in history … that in this Ronnie was supported by his wife and friend, Nancy, whose role would one day, I hope, be duly appreciated.”

Gore’s gigantic orange cat was on his lap when I read one name on his list of women friends, Joan Collins, but it was Gore who then practically purred. “She’s adorable!” he exclaimed. Joan and I have been close friends since we were in our 20s. I told Gore she recalled being on his terrace with him, Howard, and other friends in Rome on the July 1969 night when televisions all over the world showed a man walking on the moon.

“Joan has such a true sense of humor,” he said. That is fortunate, because when Howard Austen co-wrote the tongue-in-cheek Myra Breckinridge Cookbook, in 1970, Joan told me, she had been surprised to find “a very nasty picture of me on the front cover, eating an enormous banana.”

Gore and I recalled two oft quoted remarks of Joan’s. At a Hollywood party we all attended in the late 1950s, Joan and her then boyfriend, the late Hollywood producer Arthur Loew Jr., were having a heated argument. Arthur finally lost his cool and snapped, “Joan, you are a fucking bore!”

“Arthur,” she barked back, “you are a boring fuck!”

In the 1980s, when a fawning reporter brought up Joan’s TV series, Dynasty, and started to babble about the star’s “grueling schedule,” Joan set her straight, saying, “Factory work is grueling, darling.”

The portrait of Gore hanging in the Smithsonian was painted by Sacha Newley, Joan’s son with her second husband, the British actor Anthony Newley. When Gore first saw it, he told Sacha, “I look like God on the seventh day, having decided it was a terrible mistake.”

“In addition to being smart, funny, warm, and beautiful,” Gore concluded, “Joan is also very talented. It’s annoying that she has never been taken more seriously as an actress.” As we ticked off Joan’s five husbands, Gore noted, “Men are so limited. They’re always thinking about their weenies or their alimony. I make it a rule not to discuss their husbands or lovers with my women friends.” I asked him if he had ever really argued with any of them. “Almost never,” he claimed. “It’s men who start arguments with me—often because they’re jealous of me—not women.”

Kind Hearts

I frequently saw Gore with a close mutual friend, the actress Nancy Olson Livingston. When I mentioned her one day, he said, “She has a kind heart.” In 1947, when Nancy was a student at U.C.L.A. and beginning to act in movies, she was told that someone named Gore Vidal would pick her up and drive her to a small dinner party to which she had been invited. “I waited at the Kappa Kappa Gamma house, on Hilgard, and when the open convertible pulled up, I ran down to it,” she told me. “Gore didn’t get out, just leaned over to open the door for me. He was wearing a blazer and gray pants—one of the most beautiful men I had ever seen in my life! It was obvious, though, that he was completely involved with driving this stick-shift car and not the least bit interested in me.”

By the time they next met, however, Nancy had starred in Broadway plays, TV shows, and movies. (She played William Holden’s young girlfriend in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.) She had also married and divorced Alan Jay Lerner (composer of My Fair Lady and Camelot), had two daughters with him, moved to California to marry Alan Livingston (Capital Records president, who signed the Beatles and helped Frank Sinatra resuscitate his sagging career), and had a son with the second Alan—all without having to re-monogram the towels. By the early 1980s, she had become president of Blue Ribbon, the Los Angeles Music Center’s women’s support organization.

Gore said, “She gives the best cocktail and dinner parties in the city. And do you know why? Because she genuinely likes people and likes to entertain them. She understands the power culture of the city perfectly and operates within it successfully, but she entertains without any hidden agenda.”

“Gore called Alan [Livingston] in 1982,” Nancy recalled, “and asked him to be his finance chairman when he ran for office the second time, against Jerry Brown in the Democratic Senate primary. It was a surprise, because Alan was sort of a Republican then, but he liked Gore, admired his intelligence, and was intrigued by the idea of someone with such a diverse perspective representing the state in Washington. So he said yes.

“But it was after that, visiting with him and Howard in Ravello, that Gore began to reveal more about who he really was with us, what it meant not to be fully accepted by some of his family and others who were slightly uncomfortable with him. Clearly, he was born 50 years too soon to fit in with some of those people, all born with a pedigree and very conscious of their own importance.”

Of great value to Gore were the decades of closeness he had shared with his younger friend the Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon. “We met in 1972,” he said, “when she played several parts in my play An Evening with Richard Nixon. I think it was her first play.”

“It was around the time of Cambodia,” Susan told me. “There were bomb scares. Our birthdays were one day apart. We were having a blast. I was unknown and could get away with anything then!” As for her well-known political activism, she said, “When there are controversies, Gore is very protective of me. He’s always had my back.”

One summer when Susan was doing a movie in Italy, she was shocked to discover that she was pregnant with her daughter, the actress Eva Amurri Martino. “Gore always says Eva was conceived at Ravello. I was staying with them and bought the kit in town, so he and Howard were the first to know when the test was positive. After Eva was born, I was in Ravello with her. I was nursing, and she had these terrible allergies. It was so difficult for me and for her, but Gore and Howard were such a comfort!”

Gore and the late director Robert Altman were the godfathers of Susan’s son Miles, and Gore appeared in the film Bob Roberts, directed by Tim Robbins, Susan’s former partner and Miles’s father. Speaking of Gore’s often provocative political stands shortly before he died, Susan told me, “Well, he knows that somebody’s got to do it! And he does love to flirt with the controversial. I think if Christopher Hitchens hadn’t dealt with Mother Teresa, Gore would have.

“I think Gore’s been disillusioned, even heartbroken, many times,” she added. “I think the greatest disappointment was not being able to serve in Congress. To serve that way was part of his heritage. And then, his standards are so high—too high, really—so he always has to balance the passion with the disappointment. Gore really only started to speak about his feelings when Howard died. The most amazing thing about Gore is that he has the world’s biggest heart!”

When I told Nancy Livingston that the first thing Gore had said about her was “She has a kind heart,” she paused before replying, “Gore has a wounded heart.”

That huge and deeply wounded heart had been warmed, over the years, by a great many women, a number of whom we didn’t get to speak about. I can think of the whip-smart and droll late actress Diana Lynn, whom Gore told me he almost married, but was otherwise reluctant to speak about. And the late Sue Mengers, who started out as Jay Kanter’s secretary at MCA’s New York talent agency and eventually—after becoming Hollywood’s biggest *Über-*agent herself—hosted Gore at dozens of her dishy, intimate evenings at home. There was also New York agent “Boaty” Boatwright, who accompanied Gore to Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, when he buried Howard’s ashes there, next to where his own now rest. Maria St. Just, the Russian friend he shared with Tennessee Williams, stayed close to Gore long after Tennessee was gone; she died in 1994. Gore dedicated his second memoir, Point to Point Navigation, to the late Barbara Epstein, his devoted editor and friend. The late Countess Camilla Pecci-Blunt, wife of the recording executive Earl McGrath, always amazed and delighted Gore as a hostess, filling her living rooms with volatile mixes of rock stars, elected officials, and social lions. In Los Angeles, Gore shared many happy evenings with *Vanity Fair’*s Los Angeles editor, Wendy Stark Morrissey, the late Hollywood hostess Connie Wald, and Frank Sinatra’s youngest daughter, Tina, as well as Jodie Evans, who runs the in-your-face women’s activist group Code Pink. In 2012 he was delighted that his old friend Candice Bergen came out of retirement to co-star in the Broadway revival Gore Vidal’s The Best Man.

That’s quite a list of significant women. How profoundly sad it is—and what a waste—to think that the single most significant woman in Gore’s life, impaired as she was, could never be included on it. Nancy Livingston told me that once, when Gore took her on a tour of La Rondinaia, she noticed a framed photograph of a woman in her early 30s hanging beside his bed. “That’s my mother,” he said reverently. “Isn’t she beautiful?”