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He had bed head — his well-known forelock was sticking straight up. His replacement knee was bothering him. There are stairs everywhere in his house — two up here and three down there — and he has to be led around by his godson, a beautiful French boy with a long, frizzy ponytail. (He also has a Filipino houseboy in a white coat — who looks to be about sixty-five himself.) He misses Howard, with whom he lived for fifty years but never had sex. (The death scene in Point to Point Navigation is one of the best I have ever read, in certain ways.) He seemed depressed. He says he doesn't write anymore, because everybody he used to write to impress is dead, other writers included (to him writing was a competition).

He read David's letter1 and asked if Harold Hayes was still alive. Then, mumbling something about Buckley (I take it he was mentioned in the note), he put the letter on the side table. During the course of our 11:00 A.M. interview, he used the letter as a coaster for his tumbler of Scotch.

He really is quite the guy, pretty much a living embodiment of the last century: star-crossed American royalty, one of the first out fags, famous novelist when there was such a thing, when novelists were like movie stars, friend to everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt to JFK to Updike to Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, and the beats, and then the whole career in Hollywood and in politics... he is really one of our leading intellectuals... and he never went to college!!

Here is some bonus dialogue from our talk... don't know what to do with it, but it was there to be harvested.

Me: You had a calling. You knew what you wanted to do from an early age — you needed to write. So many people today in the world suffer because they have no calling. They don't know where their place is, what they should be doing.

Gore: Who gives a fuck?

1Sager had presented Vidal with a letter from editor-in-chief David Granger regarding a future writing assignment.

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REMEMBRANCES:

• THE INTERVIEW: What I've Learned: Gore Vidal

• Gore Vidal, American Roman, by Tom Junod

THE GORE VIDAL ESQUIRE ARCHIVE:

• A Manifesto for Saving the Human Race

• On Childhood Reading

• On the Wrath of the Radical Right

• On a Fist-Fight by the White House

• On RFK

• On Ralph Nader

• On Life After Eisenhower

• On Ayn Rand's "Philosophy"

• On "Naturalist" Writing

• ...and the Legacy of the Old Frontier

Mike Sager Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter who's been a contributor to Esquire for thirty years.

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