In New York to promote his new book, Snapshots in History's Glare, Gore Vidal talked to Matt Kapp about his greatest achievement, a surprisingly pleasant run-in with the Secret Service, and recollections of Eleanor Roosevelt, Andy Warhol, and other famous friends.

Matt Kapp:__ I heard you sold out all of your New York engagements. You’re still a rock star.__

Gore Vidal: Always. It was huge. It was so big that about five minutes ago the Secret Service left because it was reported that I wanted to kill former president Bush. I said, “No, no, no, a former president doesn’t count, does it?” They looked slightly sick, you know. They knew there was a joke there and they hadn’t picked up on it.

Where did you say that, at the 92nd Street Y?

No, on television. That funny woman ...

Joy Behar?

Yes. The usual question everybody asks now is: *What are you proudest of, Mr. Vital, of all your great achievements?**To which I answer: “Despite intense provocations over the course of what is becoming a rather long life, I have never killed anybody. That is my greatest achievement.” A little negative maybe, but that’s it.

Do you think the Secret Service watches The Joy Behar Show____?

Somebody rang them and told them I was on television telling people to kill the [former] president.

Who rang them?

The Republican National Party. Anytime I appear anywhere, they’re on alert because I knock them on the head whenever I can.

Are you serious? So that’s why the Secret Service came to visit you today?

Well, the doorbell rings. I give my normal witty response, which is “Hello.” They come in. It’s two young detectives, exquisitely clad in the latest Brooks Brothers suits. They pay them a lot better now than they did in my day. I’m lying in bed wearing a T-shirt that says, “Veterans Against the War.” I thought I was going to be renditioned right then and there.

What did they say?

They said, “Well, this is about your going on TV, and we’ve heard from people that you were speaking in favor of killing president Bush.” They knew that I was a potential assassin. I said, “Any president do you think, or just that one?” They said, “Well, you don’t make it clear which one, but we have to watch all these things.” I could see their poor little boyish hands trembling. Here they were up against Lee Harvey Oswald. So we chatted for a bit. They couldn’t have been pleasanter. And I couldn’t have been pleasanter, if I may say so. I said, “Where on earth did you get this from?” They said, “Well, we have a recording of the program.” I should have made them play it, but I didn’t. Because I never said anything unlike what I’ve already told you. In my lifetime I have never killed anybody. And I then added, “I suppose that explains why George W. Bush left office alive.” [“That’s one murder that I missed not committing,” Vidal said of Bush on Behar’s show.]

Amazing.

But where I got my biggest laugh was at the 92nd Street YMHA. A question came from the audience. There was a whole phalanx of yentas in the front row. Just piles of yenta. They were all giggly. One of the really meanest-looking yentas sitting there said, *“If you could change anything in your early life, what would you change, Mr. Vital?”*I said, “My mother.” The whole house exploded. The yentas were rolling on the floor. Their sons were just jumping up and down, you know, long-since-forgotten prehistoric rhapsodies. It was gorgeous.

I thought instead of me asking you questions, we’d play a name game. I give you a name, and you give me the first thing that comes to mind: 1 word, 10 words, 100 words.

I know that old trick, and I stopped doing it many years ago. This is how you can fake anything. It’s called the non-interview, given by lazy interviewers.

Exactly.

Now that we know where we are.

Many of them are the names of people you describe in your new book, Snapshots in History’s Glare.__ How about Eleanor Roosevelt. Is there one word that comes to mind?__

There are a lot of one-words that come to mind. She was a great friend for many, many years, ending only in 1964 with her death. Everybody depicts her as a saccharin old grandmother, but she was a great political warrior. She wasn’t saccharin or even sugary; she was tough as nails. After the victory of the reform movement in Manhattan in 1961, a total victory for Eleanor and her troops, she asked four or five of us over for dinner at Val-Kill Cottage, which is the little place she lived in near the big mansion on the Hudson. She liked to chew and swallow things, but she didn’t care about food. So you always had dinner before you went to her house for dinner, because all you ever got was bread. She would start with fried bread. Then you would get cold bread. Then you’d get poached bread. And you’d get bread pudding at the end. Somebody proposed a toast to her great victory over Tammany Hall and machine politics, despite all of us knowing the irony that the Roosevelts, without machine politics, would never have gotten to the presidency. So we drank a toast to Eleanor, which was some sort of ghastly sweet wine she didn’t drink. Then we called on her for a speech. She always had a speech ready in the back of her head. “Mister De Sapio[the last of the Tammany Hall bosses] *did what he did to my Franklin, and I found that I would bide my time, and one day I would get him, and I have!”*We all applauded for this wonderful old granny with blood practically dripping off of her.

Let’s fast-forward to Andy Warhol.

There was a celebrity in my building on 58th Street, and Andy came over to draw her shoes. He was a beautiful line drawer. It was renaissance talent. Then I got to know him; then when Howard and I moved to Ravello [in Italy], one of the first guests to arrive was Andy. He always saw to it that he’d get invited anywhere. He didn’t care who was there. He had to be invited. He brought Mick Jagger and Mick’s then wife Bianca and baby Jade and a couple of others. We stacked them here, there, everywhere all over the house. And it was a jolly weekend, making conversation with him for hours on end. Very good company. He was a genius, everybody agrees on that. A genius with an I.Q. of about 20.

__You write in Snapshots__that Mick Jagger was the perfect sightseer.

He was a good sightseer. Mick, he could have been anything. He could have been a scientist of some sort, because he had an eye for detail. I found him more intelligent than most show-biz people. He bought the rights to a book of mine called Kalki, but due to the fact that our director, Hal Ashby, decided to snort all the cocaine on earth and cross the shining river, the picture didn’t get made.

How about Federico Fellini, whom you used to call Fred.

I called him Fred, and he called me Gorino. We saw each other around Rome. One day he said, “Gorino, I want you for picture.” I thought he wanted me to do an English version [of a script] for him. He said, “No, no, no, I want you actor.” I said, “Oh well, thank you, I’d be delighted.” It turned out to be a movie called Fellini’s Roma. He put his name on it because the Italians steal everything not nailed down. He thought if he put his name in the title they’d be less apt to steal it.

How about Truman Capote.

Well, I just don’t know about Truman. I always disliked him. And he’s horrified of me. Or was. He’s now in a better world. [A long pause.] I’ve just gone totally blank.

You were saying Truman was horrified of you.

He told horrible stories about everybody, and stories only to make trouble. America is a country of total liars. No one can tell the truth about anything. That’s why I hesitate to give interviews. Anything I say will be assumed to be a self-serving lie, ’cause that’s all people are used to hearing. Every now and then, somebody does try to tell the truth, and I’m one of those. Hence my audience, which is slightly larger than Mr. Capote’s, since even his greatest fans knew that nothing he said could be trusted, unless you wanted to appear in a libel court.

What did he say about you?

He used to say, “I flew a little airplane all by myself in the 1930s, solo.” Well, it was Gore Vidal who had done that, and it was recorded on Pathe News. And sometimes he said I had a billionaire stepfather, Mr. Auchincloss, and other times it was: “Oh, Gore, there’s no money there, that’s why he’s so common.” This from Truman Capote, who came from the last flat rock they could find in Lake Pontchartrain. It was one big lie after another. And boy, he hated it if you caught him in a lie. But you have a public, and a media, that only likes the work of liars. They like being lied to, and they listen hungrily because they like the lies better than the truth.

Leonard Bernstein. You write in the book about how when he used to visit you in Ravello he was a happy night owl but cranky with the sunlight.

The sunlight hurt his eyes. I said, “You’re turning into Dracula, you must be careful.” He couldn’t see. He was complaining about the sun as though I had misplaced it so that he couldn’t use the pool. He treated me like a triangle man. He was great fun.

Sarah Palin.

The curse of Alaska has struck again. I believe oblivion is from whence she came and where she will soon repair to. She doesn’t deserve to be our national liar.

Timothy McVeigh.

I never met him. The most vicious writer I’ve come across in modern times, and that’s saying a lot, made up a play about me being in love with Timothy McVeigh. I was thinly disguised, so that people would think Gore Vidal had an affair with Timothy McVeigh. If you read what I write about McVeigh, you’ll find it’s very sensible, about this kid who was the last patriot. We were only correspondents by letter to each other [while McVeigh was on death row]. He blew up that building in Oklahoma City, which I would not have advised him to do. I thought that was a serious mistake, to which he said he had no idea there were children in it, et cetera, et cetera, and I tend to believe him.

William F. Buckley.

He’s the kind of phony Americans always fall for, who acted like he was *very, very rich.*Those who know about such things should have let him in on the secret that the very rich never let on that they are. The fact that he was constantly suing people was to scare off people who might beat him in court, like me. He attacked me first. In Esquire, the magazine in which he’d attacked me, I responded in kind and he immediately sued me as though I’d started a vicious suit against him. Suddenly, one day I get word that he’s dropped the suit, just as I’m getting ready to go to court to kill him. I must tell the Secret Service: I do not mean that literally.

What exactly did he sue you for? This wasn’t a result of the TV debates you had with him during the ’68 Democratic convention, was it?

Of course it was.

How could he sue you over that?

That’s for you to answer and me to ignore.

Myra Breckinridge.

Many people think it’s the best American novel. But you have to know an awful lot about literature before you can begin to absorb it. And most Americans have never read a book all the way through, so.

Bernie Madoff.

Love him. He’s merciless.

I knew you were gonna say that.

He’s just merciless. He seems to be good, in quotes. And yet, when it came to robbing everybody, I mean, the Jews get it in the teeth, too. And I noted all of those Jewish charities he’d been supporting, and suddenly, he’s robbing them also. And I thought, Well, this is a man of great justice.

President Obama.

I was all for him. I’d vote for him again if he were up for election tomorrow. But his problem is a very complicated one. It would take me a long time to explain it. He lacks imagination. He doesn’t know what a terrible country he’s president of. He doesn’t know who owns it. He doesn’t know how to talk to the military. He’s an outsider. A lot of people far less intelligent than he have managed to get the point across to the country, but he hasn’t done it. And further deponent sayeth naught.

Homer Simpson.

A great American.

How about Bobby or Jackie Kennedy?

I don’t have anything to say about either one.

Norman Mailer? Allen Ginsberg?

Well, they both liked publicity a bit too much, I think. But that’s not my business.

Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

Great man. Wrote me a big fan letter after he read The City and the Pillar. You must tell your readers what that is, as difficult and daunting as the task may be. [It’s Vidal’s third novel, a tragic gay love story whose 1948 publication caused a sensation.]

Why don’t we end on George W. Bush, so we can pull it full circle back to the Secret Service.

As I said, President Obama is one of the most intelligent people we’ve had in the presidential chair, and George W. Bush is certainly the stupidest by any given standard. But Obama doesn’t know what our rulers are like. He’s met them all by now. But he’s no more up on them than he was before he became president. I mean, when he’s having beers with that policeman from Cambridge, Massachusetts. That was the time to take the policeman to the woodshed and do what has got to be done sooner or later. The president of the United States is the only person who can bring the American police to bear before they take over the country, because they are an armed force. They’ll do anything in order to have their way. Do you think that’s extreme talk?

** Italics indicate mimicry*