Gore Vidal: a life in pictures

From The Telegraph:

Vidal-at-21-small_1521245c Writing in his new book, Snapshots in History’s Glare, Gore Vidal begins one paragraph with the words: ‘Despite never having been very social…’. He then proceeds to talk of asking Andy Warhol, Mick and Bianca Jagger and ‘baby Jade’ to visit him and his long time companion, Howard Austen, at their ravishing villa outside Ravello. Our old friends the Newmans [Paul and Joanne, that is]’ used to drop by, the next sentence tells us. So did Lauren Hutton, Susan Sarandon, Rudolf Nureyev, Hillary Clinton, Sting, James Taylor, Leonard Bernstein, Johnny Carson, Bruce Springsteen and many others, as this pictorial memoir bears witness. How exhausting it would all have been if Vidal had actually liked company.

But then Vidal likes to tease, just as he enjoys tearing Truman Capote’s reputation to shreds. One of Capote’s crimes was claiming to have flown, and landed, a plane at the age of 10, which was what Vidal actually had done (Vidal’s father was director of Aeronautics at the Department of Commerce). There are, to prove it, pictures of a golden-haired, white-shorted Gore at the controls. And there are photographs, too, of the young Vidal setting off to war and later frolicking with Tennessee Williams; and of a middle-aged Vidal running for Congress and shooting the breeze with JFK – Vidal shared a stepfather with Jackie Kennedy. Williams told Vidal that JFK had ‘a nice ass’; Vidal told Kennedy who said: ‘Why, that’s very exciting.’

More here.