I Told You So will be available from O/R Books in October. Here is how the publisher describes the contents:

This book is made up from four interviews conducted with his long-time interlocutor, the writer and radio host Jon Wiener, in which Vidal grapples with matters evidently close to his heart: the history of the American Empire, the rise of the National Security State, and his own life in politics, both as a commentator and candidate.

The interviews cover a twenty-year span, from 1988 to 2008, when Vidal was at the height of his powers. His extraordinary facility for developing an argument, tracing connections between past and present, and drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of America’s place in the world, are all on full display. And, of course, it being Gore Vidal, an ample sprinkling of gloriously acerbic one-liners is also provided.

For information on ordering, click here.

Gore Vidal in the Music Room closet in his Hollywood home

Vidal’s accumulation of books took hold in the 1950s when he and his companion, Howard Austen, stocked the library at Edgewater, the 1820 estate north of New York City that they shared, to its capacity and then some. Fifty years later, writing in his and Howard’s home in Ravello, Italy, for his memoir Point to Point Navigation, Vidal recalled that “Howard and I continued to live on at Edgewater until the 1960s when the books seemed to have moved, all on their own, to Italy and so we moved with them until now; as I write, they are headed for California where I shall finally live in our fourth and final house, whose endless library seems to have been assembled by the sorcerer’s apprentice.”

Gore and Howard did follow their books to Hollywood, where Howard passed away, in 2003. Around that same time, Gore Vidal made arrangements to bequeath his papers, including his books, to Harvard University’s Houghton Library. In order to do this efficiently, however, the first order of business was to have the thousands of books in his Hollywood home cataloged and appraised.

Michael Tuttle in the Music Room closet at Gore Vidal's home

Late in 2010, Vidal commissioned Los Angeles-based library consultant Michael Tuttle to catalog and assess his books. Now, nearly two years later — and two months after Gore Vidal passed away — Tuttle is nearing the end of this process. We asked Mike to pull together some of the titles he found that might be of interest to Mr. Vidal’s readers, fans and scholars of his work. Here is an edited version of our conversation about what he found:

Jon Ponder for GORE VIDAL NOW: So how many books did Gore Vidal own?

MICHAEL TUTTLE: Gore told me he had about eight thousand titles. I think that’s right, and we’ll have a final tally soon. But Gore was not a “collector,” per se. I mean, he did not buy books in order to assemble a great collection. He loved books, clearly, and he has some rare editions, but this is a working library. Most of the books were used for research or simply for reading enjoyment. Many were gifts from fellow writers and his celebrity friends.

GVN: So this project has been different from the work you do for other clients.

MT: Right. Much of my work is done with people who have interests in specific areas: photography, art and architecture. Most are concerned with acquiring first editions and books that are signed and inscribed, as well as books that have an association with a famous person. In the Vidal library, every book has an “association” value. It is a fascinating collection, simply because it was assembled by Gore Vidal.

GVN: In Point to Point Navigation, Mr. Vidal described the house having an “endless library [that] seems to have been assembled by the sorcerer’s apprentice.” What did you think he meant that?

MT: I think what he meant was that there were books stored everywhere. Some — hundreds, I guess — were on display on floor-to-ceiling shelves throughout the house, all neat and organized. But there were also boxes of books stored in the guest house, the basement, attic and garage and other places. And nearly every closet in the bedrooms upstairs was stacked full of books — like the closet in the Music Room downstairs, where Gore posed for the photo. [See above.] So, yes, I’m sure to him it seemed like an endless amount.

GVN: So talk about the work itself. Talk about the process.

MT: My first task was to go through all those books, review what’s there and organize it. The next task was to assess each book and separate out those that had intrinsic or scholarly value. Everything was entered into the database. The covers were photographed or scanned, cleaned and covered.

GVN: What do you mean by “scholarly value” in a book?

MT: Scholars are interested in books Gore used for research, particularly books in which he made notations. For example, we found a half-dozen or so volumes on Aaron Burr in which Gore had made notes. There were also notes in books on a wide array of topics — the Civil War, Billy the Kid, World War II, the 2000 presidential election, Huey Long and so on. He’d also made notes in books by Bob Woodward, Oscar Wilde and Anita Bryant.

GVN: Anita Bryant? See, it’s interesting that Gore Vidal read Anita Bryant’s book. Know thy enemy, I guess. Did you find anything by Truman Capote?

MT: No. And nothing by William F. Buckley — although there is a book by [Buckley's son] Christopher Buckley inscribed to Gore. There is a book by Christopher Hitchens, undoubtedly sent before their falling-out. And there was a copy of Harlot’s Ghost that Norman Mailer inscribed, “To Gore, This puts you in my debt since your competitive heart will now produce two more novels than you intended. Cheers, Norman, September 1991.”

GVN: I would assume there are lots of books by his friends?

MT: Right. He had several books by his friend Italo Calvino, one of his favorite writers — and books by Louis Auchincloss, who was a friend but also a relative of his mother’s second husband, Hugh D. Auchincloss. [There were] other friends’ books — Paul Newman, Christopher Isherwood and Dick Cavett; books by other writers like John Knowles, Saul Bellow, Ray Bradbury, Allen Ginsberg and Anthol Fugard; and by politicians, George McGovern, Dennis Kucinich and Bella Abzug. And then books by celebrities, most with inscriptions — Joan Crawford, Steve Allen, Shirley MacLaine, Rudy Vallee, Roddy McDowall. Even Phyllis Diller. But also Noel Coward, Jean Cocteau. And on and on.

GVN: So what would you say is the biggest surprise you found among all these books? Besides the Anita Bryant book.

MT: Just the incredibly wide range of subject matter. High-brow, low-brow, ancient Greek philosophy, American history, scholarly books on sex. He was incredibly curious about everyday life in historical times — how the common person lived in Greece, Rome and medieval Europe. And he read about all the various schools of thought on politics and religion, pop culture … you name. Just an unbelievably wide breadth of interests. It’s a real reflection of who he was.

GVN: So, it’s late September as we speak. How close are you to wrapping up?

MT: Close. On the other hand, we just found more boxes of books in the back of the garage. Maybe that’s what Gore meant when he said it was “endless.”

More info: Michael Tuttle Library Services.

Related: Gore Vidal, Mike Wallace and the 1967 CBS News Report, ‘The Homosexuals’

In September 1992, Variety reporter Joseph McBride was surprised to learn that his editors had spiked an article he had written about the upcoming political docu-drama, “Bob Roberts.” The film starred Tim Robbins — who also wrote and directed — as a charismatic, guitar-playing millionaire who was running for the U.S. Senate against an incumbent, Sen. Brickley Paiste, an entrenched, old school liberal, portrayed by Gore Vidal.

For his article on the film, McBride interviewed Vidal — and it was his focus on Vidal, he says now, that created a problem for his editors:

When I interviewed the supremely witty writer on the occasion of his acting appearance as a liberal U.S. senator in Tim Robbins’s scathing political satire Bob Roberts (1992), the paper seemed outraged by the interview. The editor in charge of my “Straight Shooting” column told me he objected to Vidal’s constant and characteristic harping against the United States as a destructive, imperial regime. Vidal also expounded acerbically and with his customary erudition on American movies in general, and he made what now appear remarkably prescient comments on the country’s rapidly progressing decline. All highly subversive from Daily Variety’s reactionary point of view during the Peter Bart regime.

Tim Robbins, left, and Gore Vidal, in "Bob Roberts"

Gore Vidal has been in town to beat the drums for tomorrow’s opening of Bob Roberts, in which he plays a defeated liberal senator, and he’s bearing some bad news and some good news.

The bad news is that Vidal thinks the American republic is finished: “The game’s up. The system has come to an end. I’m concerned that there might not be another [presidential] election after this one. Who knows who might take over — perhaps the National Security Council.”

The good news is that, as a result, it is becoming easier to make movies about politics: “There is a real chance, because the country’s falling apart very rapidly. Audiences are going to be drawn either toward total Spielbergism — total escape from their fear of losing their jobs, fear of walking down the street — or to things that speak to them and bother them.

“It has to be done ingeniously, because if it’s done like a civics lesson, it will put people to sleep.”

Read the complete article here.

McBride says he bumped into Vidal about a year after Variety canned his article. “I saw him again and apologized, explaining why I thought the interview hadn’t run,” McBride writes now. “He said he had forgotten about the interview and didn’t realize it hadn’t run.”

Burr delights in subverting everything we think we know about how the country was built. With his characteristic patrician sarcasm, Vidal casually scraps the enduring notion of American exceptionalism, the idea that our politics, unlike those of the corrupt Old World, are founded on ideals of democratic equality and public virtue. If the Tea Party today looks back to the founders with reverence, Burr suggests, that is only because they did such a good job mythologizing themselves and mesmerizing posterity…

In the novel … we get an Aaron Burr created in the image of Gore Vidal himself — aristocratic, ironic, skeptical of all patriotic pieties and received truths. If he was unprincipled and ambitious, Vidal suggests, that did not make him any different from George Washington, who appears in the novel as the consummate political general, useless on the battlefield but skilled at dominating Congress, and Thomas Jefferson, who was quite unscrupulous about seizing territory for the young U.S.

Much of the work of cutting the legends down to size is done by simple mockery. In Vidal’s telling, Washington is broad- bottomed and dull-witted, while Jefferson’s famous inventions never work. The novel’s Burr ends up on the wrong side of history because he was too good a man to hold his own against such enemies — or, at least, too grandly unwilling to stoop to political intrigue.

The novel opens in the 1830s, in the last year of the Andrew Jackson administration, with Burr in his late 70s. Before he dies, he allows Charlie Schuyler, the novel’s inexperienced young narrator, to write down his memoirs … Schuyler himself, while naive, is no angel: He agrees to use his intimacy with Burr to try to confirm the rumor that Martin van Buren, the current vice president, is actually Burr’s illegitimate son. (Anyone who was appalled by the “birther” slanders against Obama can take at least this much consolation from Burr: The politics of personal destruction aren’t the invention of our own time.)

And:

What makes Burr unique among major American political novels is not just its debunking of American legend as its sheer insouciance. “I sense nothing more” in the early republic, Vidal’s Burr says to Hamilton, “than the ordinary busy-ness of men wanting to make a place for themselves … it is no different here from what it is in London or what it was in Caesar’s Rome.”

Americans’ usual belief in their country’s uniqueness, and in the unique wisdom of its founders, becomes in Vidal’s hands a fairy tale that no grown-up could possibly credit in the first place. What is left to admire is the sheer audacity and energy of the founders, their 18th-century scale and scope. They may have been scoundrels, Vidal suggests, but the country doesn’t even make scoundrels like that anymore.

Kirsch does not mention it here but at least one tea party leader has said that she was a liberal who was driven to right-wing extremism upon reading Burr in her youth. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican who chairs the tea party caucus in the House, has told her conversion tale many times. It goes like this:

BACHMANN: I had been a Democrat and I’d actually worked on Jimmy Carter’s campaign and I was reading a novel by Gore Vidal and when I was reading it he was mocking the Founding Fathers and all of the sudden it just occurred to me, I set the book down on my lap, I looked out the window of a train I was riding in and I thought to myself, “I don’t think I’m a Democrat. I think I really am a Republican.” The Founding Fathers were not the characters that I saw Gore Vidal portraying in his novel and that snotty, mocking attitude to me didn’t in any way reflect who we are as a nation.

Vidal himself resisted multiple requests — including several from the editor of his own official website — to comment on his role in Bachmann’s conversion. His only public statement on the matter was given to Justin Elliot at Salon.com. When Elliot asked him why he chose not to respond, Vidal said, “She is too stupid to deserve an answer.”

Dick Cavet hosting the Gore Vidal tribute

Past and present members of the cast of “The Best Man” also participated, including Elizabeth Ashley, Candice Bergen, Kristin Davis, James Earl Jones, John Larroquette and Cybill Shepherd.

Carol Blue, the widow of Christopher Hitchens, also attended, as did Vidal’s friend, Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

Here is a sampling of excerpts from coverage of the event:

• New York Times:
  

  [Vidal] was shown in several clips from a PBS documentary being his usual acerbic, witty and elegant self: taking America to task for needless wars, a bloated military-industrial complex and political hypocrisy…

  Richard Belzer, who before turning to his text, a 1958 essay in praise of satire, briefly intoned a Hebrew blessing and pretended to take a cellphone call from Mr. Vidal. Gathered around a pair of lecterns, a chorus of sharp-tongued actresses — Ms. Ashley, Ms. Bergen, Ms. Ebersole and Ms. Huston — traded vintage Vidal one-liners: “Envy is the central fact of American life”; “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little”; and “There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.” Cybill Shepherd read a tribute from Peter Bogdanovich, who recalled working with Mr. Vidal on an adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play. Ms. Smith, who said she and Mr. Vidal shared a love of gossip, read a message from David Mamet. And Mr. Cavett read some remarks sent by Hillary Rodham Clinton, who called Mr. Vidal “one of a kind” and “a true American original.”

  But the oddest speaker at the event, and probably the one Mr. Vidal would have relished most, was an impassioned Dennis J. Kucinich, the congressman from Ohio and two-time presidential candidate, who in tribute to Mr. Vidal’s verbal gifts, read a long and somewhat mystifying passage from Act IV of Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”: “Language is a perpetual Orphic song/ Which rules with daedal harmony a throng/Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.”

  He also recalled that he first met Mr. Vidal in March 2003, when he was contemplating a run for the presidency, and asked for advice. “You’ve got to do something about your hair,” Mr. Vidal told him. “It’s dreadful. I can’t bear to look at it.”

• Wall St. Journal:
  

  Actress Elizabeth Ashley recalled meeting Vidal in 1974, when she and playwright Tennessee Williams sought him out at the bar of the Carlyle Hotel in New York. When they left after hours of conversation, she told Williams that she felt so stupid, but Williams replied, “He’s just an old smartypants.”

  Ashley said conversations with Vidal often sent people in search of a dictionary, and she read the definition of “heretic” aloud, calling Vidal “the great heretic of our time.”

  …Cavett described asking Vidal the source of the term “the silent majority,” which gained popularity after President Nixon used it in a 1969 speech. Vidal quoted the ancient Greek historian Herodotus about a man who “gravely wounded in battle lost much of his blood and joined the silent majority.” He added that it was nice that the Nixon administration knew who its constituency was…

  Film maker Michael Moore described a lunch in March 2003 where Vidal and others offered suggestions for his acceptance speech should his movie “Bowling for Columbine” win the Academy Award the next evening. Vidal said he must quote Thomas Jefferson — because the third U.S. president had never been quoted in an Oscar speech — and when asked what to say, went on for four to five minutes uninterrupted, Moore said.

  Former newspaper gossip columnist Liz Smith said Vidal had not liked her at first but he loved gossip and offered items for her column. “He made all of us better than we were.”

• New York Daily News:
  

  The always wry Cavett began by saying, “This could be fun.” And judging by frequent laughter rising up from the audience that nearly filled the orchestra section, it was…

  Patrick McGregor, 39, visiting from Italy, told The News that Vidal was his “intellectual hero,” while Helen Eisenbach, a copy editor who lives in Manhattan, called “Myra Breckinridge” a “brilliant black-hearted satire.”

  On stage, Shepherd read a note by Peter Bogdanovich, who observed that Vidal’s grasp of the world was “intense” and “all-encompassing.”

  …After reading from the play “Romulus,” Sarandon shared Vidal’s sly advice as she strived to be the perfect mother. “Inevitably you’re going give your child neuroses,” he told her. “Just make sure they’re productive ones.”

  Vidal famously wielded his expansive wit like a weapon, and at times took aim at himself.”I am exactly as I appear,” he noted. “Beneath my cold exterior once you break the ice, you find cold water.”

  …To conclude the event, “Best Man” stars James Earl Jones, who plays a former President, and John Larroquette, who portrays an Oval Office hopeful, acted out a pivotal scene from the show. “If you don’t start to fight,” Jones’ character rails, “you’re finished.”

The Times noted that Vidal “as usual, had the last word. On the back page of the program was a remark he once made about death: ‘The only good thing I find is that the rest of you sons of bitches are going to join me.’”

Here’s an excerpt from the opening:

[The] death that most ceremoniously lowered the curtain on an era, an ideal, and an avocation, was that of Gore Vidal, who nodded his last on July 31st, age 86. Tottering on walking sticks in his later years before being resigned to a wheelchair, where he still looked in charge, enthroned, dispensing papal benediction on those who came to pay homage, Vidal had been edging to the Exit Door, as he put it, for some time. It didn’t make it any easier to see him go. We shall never see his like again. But then we had never seen his like before. He was a stately, head-sculptured presence for so long that we took for granted how improbable that presence was. Practically an emanation.

Kindle Singles are available only at Amazon.com.

James Earl Jones

Most dramatists would kill to have a play revived every few years. One solution is to write an imperishable masterpiece; even better if it becomes a set text on the school or university syllabus. But a more reliable method is to choose a subject that excites cyclical interest — a tactic demonstrated by the late Gore Vidal.

Vidal, who died last month, was always better known for novels, essays, screenplays, quips and controversies. But he also created a few pieces for the stage, and a new production of his 1960 drama The Best Man has been playing at the Schoenfeld Theatre in New York throughout the summer. Impressively, this is the second Broadway staging in just over a decade.

Never short of self-confidence, Vidal would attribute the popularity of The Best Man to the brilliance of the script. But, while it does display the writer’s remarkable facility with one-liners, its durability is down to the fact that it’s set during a presidential nominating convention in an American general election year. As a result, every time Americans are choosing their next president, the play has come to tick the box for New York, Los Angeles or regional theatres. “It gets done somewhere every four years without fail,” Vidal once told me in an interview.

It helps that — because the competitive psychologies and even policies of US politics have changed surprisingly little since the 1960s — The Best Man hasn’t dated, although successive directors have added subtle period tweaks. In the current Broadway staging, for instance, the character of a former president (whom Vidal based on Eisenhower) is played by an African-American actor, James Earl Jones, which adds an Obama, or even post-Obama, spin to the plot…

Lawson concludes: “And it’s perhaps some consolation for the loss of Gore Vidal that — unless his prediction of a future American president suspending democracy proves to be accurate — The Best Man will be a part of every election cycle.

It was a spectacle Vidal most likely would have loved. For all his high-WASP breeding, his mandarin hauteur, Gore Vidal was a populist. He ran for office several times and never stopped trying to convince the American people to reverse what he saw as a disastrous course of empire-building, engineered by politicians from his own patrician class.

Vidal was a public intellectual at a time that such figures, not Snooki or the Kardashians, were celebrities. He spent so much time on Johnny Carson’s couch that he was offered a guest host chair, the New York Times noted in its obituary

At the homage, music publisher Robert Balter dated his admiration for Vidal to the author’s televised debate with his conservative nemesis, William F. Buckley Jr., during the 1968 Democratic convention. Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Buckley flung back “queer.”

It’s on YouTube; watch it. Or better yet, look at the other online clips that show the erudition of Vidal and Buckley, who had been hired by ABC to cover the convention. Then try to picture anything like it when the Republicans roll into Tampa on Aug. 27, or the Democrats come to Charlotte on Sept. 3…

I attended the Vidal memorial with a touch of regret. I had been trying for months to interview the author and see if he would turn his acerbic brain on the Romney-Obama presidential campaign …Now I discovered that I might have found Vidal in his wheelchair at Musso’s Table No. 2, waiting out what he called “the Cedars-Sinai years,” and holding forth to the entire ragtag Hollywood crowd. His populism wasn’t a front. This was a man who graciously entertained any admirer who approached him, humored celebrity hunters, and shared the insights that made him famous with anyone who had the good luck to fall into conversation with him. I could have been one of them …

Perhaps the most poignant tribute came from Sergio Gonzalez, the red-jacketed Musso waiter who served Vidal for many years, bringing him his favorite Crab Louie, creamed spinach and eggplant.

Gonzalez sat down for an interview at an empty table. Vidal told Gonzalez he was a model for the “Aztec terrorist” in the author’s 1983 novel “Duluth,” a wicked parody of Reagan-era America. “He would say, ‘We’ve got to take over Los Angeles pretty soon,’ ” Gonzalez said. “You bring your army and take Echo Park, and I’m going to bring my navy and take Silver Lake.”

“He was such a nice guy to me,” said Gonzalez, striking his heart with his fist several times.

And yes. Vidal was a good tipper.

“Very,” Gonzalez said. “He used to give me $100.”

Schoenfeld Theatre (Photo: Playbill)

On Aug. 23, the producer Jeff Richards whom I’ve known since he was a little boy in short pants and who is now the producer of Gore’s “The Best Man” on Broadway, will host a remembrance of Gore at 12 p.m. in the Schoenfeld Theatre. Should be quite a treat; full of the people Gore disdained, abused and did not quite approve of. But in the kindness of his heart, Gore was always a gentleman, and he wouldn’t deny access to his “betters” because he didn’t feel he had any. His play is, again (I think) the best drama on Broadway, full of portent for our times.