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11/13/13 For Gore Vidal, a Final Plot Twist - NYTimes.com Nina Straight, Mr. Steers’s mother and Mr. Vidal’s half sister, is challenging her half brother’s will on the grounds that Mr. Vidal was not mentally competent when he changed the terms of his will the year before he died. On Nov. 22 in Los Angeles County Court, there will be a second hearing of case No. BP138192. On one side is Ms. Straight and on the other Andrew S. Auchincloss, son of Mr. Vidal’s distant cousin Louis Auchincloss and the trustee of the Gore Vidal Revocable Trust, which oversees Mr. Vidal’s estate. The Harvard bequest mystifies Ms. Straight and Mr. Steers and many of the author’s closest friends, but it is also vintage Vidal: an appropriately ornery final salvo from a master contrarian. A close friend, who asked not to be identified because of the family’s sensitivity, said: “Anger was Gore’s default mode. He wanted to go out like Ebenezer Scrooge, with a huge finger to everyone around him.” Mr. Steers said he was not angry about his uncle’s Harvard bequest, but instead bruised and resigned. When I spoke to him last December for a book I was researching about Mr. Vidal, Mr. Steers told me his uncle’s was a “miserable, drawn-out decline,” especially when one recalled his barnstorming public persona, the growling intellectual maverick scattering his withering bon mots in prime time. “It was unsettling, dealing with Gore with dementia,” Mr. Steers said. “It was like having him replaced, and someone very different take his place. He let go of everything. He ceased to be Gore.” Mr. Steers said Mr. Vidal, in his original will, left everything to Howard Austen, his partner of 53 years who died in 2003, then amended it in 2011, awarding it to Harvard. A few paintings were bequeathed to the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. At about that time Mr. Vidal also bought a house in the south of France. “Part of the idea was to relocate there and live in exile,” said the film director Matt Tyrnauer, a close friend and former literary executor. Ultimately Mr. Vidal gave the house to his onetime assistant, Muzius Gordon Dietzmann, who lives there with his family. Mr. Vidal told Mr. Tyrnauer, “I have made him a rich boy.” Mr. Vidal’s fortune, according to Ms. Straight, is estimated at $37 million; representatives for the estate would not confirm this or any other details about the will. Mr. Auchincloss declined to comment. His lawyer, Adam Streisand, a partner at the Los Angeles firm Loeb & Loeb, declined to answer questions, though in a statement said: “The claims asserted by Ms. Straight have no merit and we will have no further comment while this matter is in litigation. We will answer these claims in court, not in the press.” www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/fashion/In-a-final-plot-twist-Gore-Vidal-leaves-his-estate-to-Harvard-Universtity.html?_r=1&&pagewanted=print 2/8
11/13/13 For Gore Vidal, a Final Plot Twist - NYTimes.com Harvard has not yet been drawn into the case. “The University has been provided with notice of an interest under Mr. Vidal’s testamentary plan and is aware of ongoing proceedings related to it, but is not involved in those proceedings and awaits resolution of all issues,” a spokesman said in a statement. There is an irony, as well as mystery, to Mr. Vidal’s bequest. “He had an incredible insecurity about not having gone to university,” said Jay Parini, Mr. Vidal’s longtime friend, onetime literary executor and author of a forthcoming biography. “He was terrified of professors and academics. When he got an honorary degree from Brown, he was thrilled. But he was such a good actor he could intimidate a group of academics.” In 1974 Mr. Vidal told Fag Rag magazine that he was supposed to have gone to Harvard, but went into the Army instead. “What was the point of going into another institution when I had already written my first novel?” he said. He lectured at Harvard when his classmates from high school were undergraduates there. “The greatest moment of my life,” he told the magazine. “I mean, I really rubbed it in. It’s all been downhill since.” In Nicholas Wrathall’s documentary “Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia,” Mr. Vidal said he had been accepted at Harvard but had opted to write instead. As the will stands, Ms. Straight told me during an interview in Washington earlier this year, Harvard not only receives Mr. Vidal’s fortune, but also profits from the continued sales of his books. She intends to ask the school if an arrangement could be reached in which her son’s two daughters receive some money. Ms. Straight, who had a turbulent though close relationship with Mr. Vidal, said she was also owed around a million dollars by her half brother in legal fees she paid for him in his protracted battle with the conservative columnist William F. Buckley. Mr. Buckley called Mr. Vidal “a queer” after Mr. Vidal had called him a “crypto-Nazi” during a 1968 television debate. Subsequently, Esquire magazine commissioned Mr. Buckley to write an article about Mr. Vidal and then Mr. Vidal to respond in another article. Mr. Vidal then sued Mr. Buckley; Mr. Buckley countersued, and the case went on for three years before being abruptly terminated. Mr. Steers said Mr. Vidal was terrified that Mr. Buckley had evidence that Mr. Vidal had sex www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/fashion/In-a-final-plot-twist-Gore-Vidal-leaves-his-estate-to-Harvard-Universtity.html?_r=1&&pagewanted=print 3/8
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