For Gore Vidal, a Final Plot Twist - iSites - Harvard University
For Gore Vidal, a Final Plot Twist - iSites - Harvard University
For Gore Vidal, a Final Plot Twist - iSites - Harvard University
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11/13/13 <strong>For</strong> <strong>Gore</strong> <strong>Vidal</strong>, a <strong>Final</strong> <strong>Plot</strong> <strong>Twist</strong> - NYTimes.com<br />
<strong>Harvard</strong> has not yet been drawn into the case. “The <strong>University</strong> has been provided with notice<br />
of an interest under Mr. <strong>Vidal</strong>’s testamentary plan and is aware of ongoing proceedings related<br />
to it, but is not involved in those proceedings and awaits resolution of all issues,” a spokesman<br />
said in a statement.<br />
There is an irony, as well as mystery, to Mr. <strong>Vidal</strong>’s bequest.<br />
“He had an incredible insecurity about not having gone to university,” said Jay Parini, Mr.<br />
<strong>Vidal</strong>’s longtime friend, onetime literary executor and author of a forthcoming biography. “He<br />
was terrified of professors and academics. When he got an honorary degree from Brown, he was<br />
thrilled. But he was such a good actor he could intimidate a group of academics.”<br />
In 1974 Mr. <strong>Vidal</strong> told Fag Rag magazine that he was supposed to have gone to <strong>Harvard</strong>, but<br />
went into the Army instead.<br />
“What was the point of going into another institution when I had already written my first<br />
novel?” he said.<br />
He lectured at <strong>Harvard</strong> when his classmates from high school were undergraduates there. “The<br />
greatest moment of my life,” he told the magazine. “I mean, I really rubbed it in. It’s all been<br />
downhill since.”<br />
In Nicholas Wrathall’s documentary “<strong>Gore</strong> <strong>Vidal</strong>: The United States of Amnesia,” Mr. <strong>Vidal</strong> said<br />
he had been accepted at <strong>Harvard</strong> but had opted to write instead.<br />
As the will stands, Ms. Straight told me during an interview in Washington earlier this year,<br />
<strong>Harvard</strong> not only receives Mr. <strong>Vidal</strong>’s fortune, but also profits from the continued sales of his<br />
books. She intends to ask the school if an arrangement could be reached in which her son’s two<br />
daughters receive some money.<br />
Ms. Straight, who had a turbulent though close relationship with Mr. <strong>Vidal</strong>, said she was also<br />
owed around a million dollars by her half brother in legal fees she paid for him in his protracted<br />
battle with the conservative columnist William F. Buckley.<br />
Mr. Buckley called Mr. <strong>Vidal</strong> “a queer” after Mr. <strong>Vidal</strong> had called him a “crypto-Nazi” during a<br />
1968 television debate. Subsequently, Esquire magazine commissioned Mr. Buckley to write an<br />
article about Mr. <strong>Vidal</strong> and then Mr. <strong>Vidal</strong> to respond in another article. Mr. <strong>Vidal</strong> then sued<br />
Mr. Buckley; Mr. Buckley countersued, and the case went on for three years before being<br />
abruptly terminated.<br />
Mr. Steers said Mr. <strong>Vidal</strong> was terrified that Mr. Buckley had evidence that Mr. <strong>Vidal</strong> had sex<br />
www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/fashion/In-a-final-plot-twist-<strong>Gore</strong>-<strong>Vidal</strong>-leaves-his-estate-to-<strong>Harvard</strong>-Universtity.html?_r=1&&pagewanted=print 3/8