Hollywood / Emperor of America
Vidal, Gore & Condon, Richard
HOLLYWOOD: A NOVEL OF AMERICA IN THE 1920s Gore Vidal/Random House/437 pp. $19.95 EMPEROR OF AMERICA Richard Condon/Simon and Schuster/300 pp. $19.95 Victor Gold Where are they now, that pride...
...What's more, a rolling consensus of reviewers, coast-to-coast, finds this Emperor, written after all by one of the most esteemed liberal satirists of our time, to be well-attired indeed...
...Herb Mitgang of the New York Times thought this book a laugha-minute...
...A few swatches from the Emperor's text should be enough to make a judgment: Excerpt, page 23: The traffic was horrendous because the streets all over the country were choked with the homeless...
...In this incisive and uproarious sat- .1...
...The mouth was cretinously ajar...
...But this was the Capitol...
...ire on American politics," if we're to believe the dust jacket on Richard Condon's Emperor of America, "the author of Prizzi's Honor and The Manchurian Candidate turns his wicked eye on the 'Imperial Presidency'—with a real emperor ruling America in the not too distant future (which may already be upon us...
...Hearst travels west to extend his personal empire into the new field of movie-making...
...The Democratic ticket of 1920, waiting for an audience with Wilson...
...with: "I pledge allegiance to the balance of trade and to the Export-Import Bank for which it stands...
...For tax loopholes indivisible with a kiss-off and a promise for all...
...The operative caution in that bit of flackery—a consumer's warning label for those familiar with the ham-handed irony of the disempowered left—is the telltale phrase, "which may already be upon us...
...Indeed, indeed...
...Why then do I find it a literary embarrassment to a writer whose previous books I've enjoyed, a hyperventilating exercise in broad-assed wit of the sort that passed for political satire in college underground journals of the 1960s...
...Hollywood picks up the thread of Vidal's historical narrative a dozen years after this fictional Oval Room face-off between Teddy Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst...
...All right, so the man is the consummate liberal gadfly, a supercilious misanthrope whose appearances on the Johnny Carson show give arrogance a bad name...
...What Vidal is likely to be remembered for, however, isn't his essays but his docu-fictions covering nineteenth-and twentieth-century American politics and power...
...Hmmm, I see...
...Fair is fair...
...The eyes were round and staring while the muscles were slack...
...Finally, out west, there is the docufictionalist Vidal's sketch of the fabled Mabel Norman, portrayed as "considerably sharper than the usual bovine American star...
...though incapable of awe for anyone except, perhaps, a fellow Roosevelt, he was very nervous...
...Just tell me, have I missed something...
...Mailer took to writing with and about his penis...
...She becomes a film star in a World War I thriller titled The Huns From Hell, playing the role of a Red Cross nurse who saves her honor by immobilizing a thick-necked Prussian with a crucifix...
...If anything, not what Condon offers up in Emperor of America...
...Excerpt, page 65: Keifetz . . . was ardently committed to the Flag to which he referred affectionately as "Old Tootsie," and he led the sixty-seven person staff...
...Hearst inquired, as if bestowing a huge favor on a junior editor...
...We have so much to talk about...
...Miller became Harry Truman's stenographer...
...Only Vidal proved to be more than a one- or two-book Wunderkind, a diligent craftsman who has produced, to date, some twenty-two novels, five plays, and seven volumes of essays...
...If he'd written nothing in the past four decades but his essays, his place as one of the most provocative literary minds of our time would be secure...
...Yet even on an off-day Vidal doesn't entirely disappoint...
...From the novel Empire: Slowly, majestically, Hearst got to his feet...
...But the sonofabitch can write...
...No need to go into the plot of this "incisive" political fable about an ongoing war between a post-Reagan U.S...
...Nixon, Watergate, assorted other straw men...
...Call the roll: Bourjaily went into screenwriting...
...and Nicaragua...
...With him goes Carolyn Sanford, one of Vidal's fictional characters carried over from Empire...
...and the President was a puritan...
...Narrative aside, he offers readers a keyhole view of many of the personalities who helped Hearst shape U.S...
...Everybody knows conservatives have no sense of humor...
...Shaw ran to literary flab, e.g., Rich Man, Poor Man...
...Ditto the Washington Post's critic...
...The vice presidential nominee was the thirtyeight-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...With Hollywood, Vidal expands this cynical (but arguably valid) thesis to take in "picture plays" on large screens that in the decades that followed would manipulate as well as define reality...
...Jones flamed out...
...In Empire, the author's subtext was that the coming of a mass circulation press made media moguls like Hearst not simply the shapers but the "inventors" of history...
...Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...19.95 Victor Gold Where are they now, that pride of young literary lions that came out of World War II . . . Vance Bourjaily, James Jones, Norman Mailer, Merle Miller, Irwin Shaw, Gore Vidal...
...but regrettably, Hollywood has all too few such moments, and this reviewer, for one, found the going tedious when the story line whipsawed between Warren Harding's Georgetown and Douglas Fairbanks's Tinseltown...
...Although Hearst stood between the President and the presidential chair, the tubby but sturdy Roosevelt simply charged the chair, knocking Hearst to one side in the process...
...Oh well, I guess Mitgang had it right after all...
...But wait...
...She was known to play jazz on the set, while her addiction to cocaine had given . . . new meaning to the phrase 'powder room.' " Born, as it were, sixty years too soonfor the Betty Ford Clinic and final redemption on the Oprah Winfrey show...
...Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, you see...
...Enough already...
...Had this been Paris and the President a French boulevardier, Blaise could have named the drug he had been taking—opium...
...The delegates had passed laws which were necessary, but through a national misunderstanding, because there did not seem to be a Federal government as they had known it, the American people, severely conditioned by the Republican party in the past, had happily assumed that they did not have to pay Federal taxes...
...Whether or not Hearst had literally sunk the Maine was irrelevant, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 45 because he, far more than Roosevelt, had made war not only inevitable but desirable...
...What more need be said...
...He wore bright red galluses and a stiff detachable collar, snowy white in contrast to his olive-tinted face, whose regular features were ever so slightly blurred, giving satisfaction to those who enjoyed believing the never entirely discredited legend that the Hardings were a Negro family that had only recently . . . passed over to white...
...Excerpt, page 141: By the end of the tenth month of the establishment of the National Conference for Democracy in Dallas, political terror was at its height...
...Warren Harding, en route to the presidency...
...history in the early years of the century, including: Woodrow Wilson, in failing health...
...Could it be that my own narrow ideological perspective has blindered me to the beauty part of Richard Condon's spoof of Reaganism...
...not just indigent men, not just the mentally ill, but whole families who had been unable to afford housing since the real estate lobby had come into its own when the Republicans had come into office in '68...
...each morning . . . in a massed Pledge of Allegiance in Latin . . . as it had been taken daily by the Roman legionnaires under Julius Caesar in 40 B.C...
...You wanted to see me...
...then reelected in 1984...
...For unlike other modern writers who have worked this genre—Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Herman Wouk—Gore Vidal's historical novels are distinguished not so much for their broad sweep as their author's eye for detail...
...Here Vidal is at his satiric best...
...As the two men shook hands, Hearst deliberately pulled Roosevelt toward him so that the President was obliged to stare straight up into the air at the taller man...
...The presidential nominee, Governor James Cox of Ohio, was a small, thin-haired, apple-faced man . . . he seemed both self-important and awed...
...Better a month spent on Mario Cuomo's diary entries, if it's "uproarious satire" you're looking for, than even a quarter-hour on this herniated attempt at political burlesque, the worst by a major author since Philip Roth delivered himself of Our Gang (Remember...
Vol. 23 • May 1990 • No. 5
