Parody

...Martial law had just been declared in Poland and I was not getting a lifetime achievement award for my many films, though Whitney Houston, whose ancestors were owned by my ancestors, assured me I deserved one...

...Jack rode into the White House on the coattails of my 1960 congressional bid, and we were sitting in the White House discussing my role as the Biographer of My Nation, when Bobby rushed in and announced that Khrushchev had placed missiles on Cuba...

...I knew the man who deflowered her, although I will not reveal his identity because I am probably making this story up out of whole cloth...

...This was years ago during the great twilight struggle, before I met Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward by the small oval pool at the Ch?teau Marmont in Hollywood and gave Paul my cousin Louis Auchincloss's secret recipe for salad dressing...

...I pulled aside Dean Rusk to repeat to him what North Dakota (as I called Tennessee Williams) had told me that day in 1958 when he, Jack, and I had gone carousing at Palm Beach...

...Truman Capote was flirting with an adolescent Sal Mineo that evening, and Jimmy Baldwin was telling Kentucky (as I called Tennessee Williams) that I was the greatest living essayist...

...Neither, I should add, did Mary McCarthy, who had pretensions to greatness...

...But then, Mary was a woman, which was unacceptable, and she once slept with a Hebrew literary critic named Philip Rahv, which disqualified her in the eyes of all serious men...

...Garbo confided to me that she never wore a bra...

...As I write these memoirs, Susan Sarandon is sitting at my feet, reading Herman Hesse, and it is strange to recall the vital role played in the political events of the century...

...Waugh was not much of a novelist...

...I was backstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion during the Oscars and Chuck Heston was mentioning something about the oppressed Soviet Jews, none of whom my stepfather Hugh Auchincloss had ever known...

...Rusk then asked me to cease touching his lapel...

...He told me I looked better in sunglasses than Jack did...

...Winston Churchill, whose mother was the subject of the disdain of the Auch-incloss side of my family, was on the radio declaring that an Iron Curtain had descended over Europe and that hundreds of millions of people had been thrown into tyranny, and it occurred to me that Alice Astor Bouverie, our hostess, looked sallow under the maroon curtains of her piano room, though in certain lighting conditions she was beautiful...

...Jackie (as I called Jackie Kennedy) often looked radiant, but was not impressed...

...We went to the Vatican, but was not impressed...

...I hadn't been to Cuba since I went with Mailer, but it had rained the whole time, and this was years before Bobby Redford (as I call him) told me that he was thinking of making a movie set there...

...She was disappointed because the Kennedys would not allow her to be an actress, so she did not know Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, as I did...

...My stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss, had gone to school with St...

...Parody PERSONAL HISTORY THE COLD WAR: I WAS NOT IMPRESSED Part II of the memoir he never should have written BY GORE VIDAL I was at the Astor manor on the Hudson, with its 150 rooms and Winslow Homers lining the walls, but I was not impressed...

...Fred said he wanted to show us "the sweet life," but Troy Donahue and Tab Hunter were sulking all day and ruined it for us...

...Later the three of us-Jimmy, Kentucky, and -tried to take Frank O'Hara home, but O'Hara said he was too busy looking for a train to throw himself under...

...Federico Fellini, "Federico Flintstone" as I called him, was at the airport to greet us...

...Later that night she borrowed Evelyn Waugh's blazer and forgot to return it...

...Buckley Jr...

...Peter and once remarked that he looked like a Roosevelt...

...Though it would not have surprised Rock Hudson as we flew first class to Rome the day Soviet troops marched into Prague...

...I read later that he was gay, as am I, but that is difficult to believe, considering the appalling quality of his dental work...

...I have always found the denizens of the National Security Apparatus strangely attractive...

...and his ultra-fascist crew at the National Security State were upset about the Soviet invasion, but it was hard to take Whittaker Chambers seriously, because he had such bad teeth...

...Rusk was taciturn as Arthur Schlesinger said that North Dakota was right, but he made sure he was not in earshot of the president...

...After that conversation with Bobby, I immediately wrote a screenplay, but a few Fifth Columnists for the State of Israel stole my credit and in any case the movie failed, which is why I have yet to win an Academy Award...