[VR-21]

"Vidal also performed his repertoire of impressions, favoring the audience with his surefire imitations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, Federico Fellini, “Old Joe” Kennedy, JFK (with a special demonstration of how the 35th president tapped his teeth with a fingernail “when he was deeply bored”), Saul Bellow, Bette Davis, Ronald Reagan, and Tennessee Williams.

I'm sure he could do Monica Lewinski pretty well too.

[Sans-Culotte]

"Trouble was on the agenda when the aging provocateur irrelevant queen, infamous for his tough remarks on Israel, visited a Jewish cultural hub last night".

There, fixed it.

[DManA]

Someone should tell the poor old guy that Heston died years ago.

[a fool in paradise]

Most of Vidal’s friends are dead and gone.

He must've become real unpopular over his more recent diatribes.

[a fool in paradise]

When an audience member wondered why Christopher Hitchens, the formerly left-leaning columnist for The Nation, had become a neoconservative,

and a noted antitheist who proudly proclaims that there is more evidence of the existence of King Arthur than Jesus Christ and that the world would be much better off (as an atheist supremacist model) with NO religions.

Some "neocon".

The Left needs to find a new talking point.

[DemforBush]

“At various times and in various venues, he has...claimed that President Harry Truman decided to recognize Israel after “an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train.”

Interestingly (or not), another leftist writer of roughly the same era had an equally unflattering but radically different view of Truman and Israel. Howard Fast (probably best known for writing the novel Spartacus, along with Citizen Tom Paine and April Morning), claimed that Truman was deeply antisemitic, and that (among other things) he used his power as President to get Julius and Ethel Rosenberg falsely convicted.

Good writer, nutty guy, that Howard.

***

“In another Hollywood anecdote, Vidal recounted how one of his film projects fell apart when the prospective director, Hal Ashby, “decided to snort all the cocaine in Malibu.””

Just wanted to mention Ashby directed two of my favorite films - Harold and Maude and Being There.

[Lx]

I had a chance to check out his villa in Ravello but I missed out. Now it’s a luxury hotel.

He must of made a lot of money as Ravello is an incredibly expensive place to live.

[Chi-townChief]

I thought Vidal was dead.

[SunkenCiv]

"Those who invited him are, as Jews, either most forgiving, or schmucks,” former mayor Ed Koch had opined in the New York Post’s Page Six column. Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, echoed that view: "It is appalling that a Jewish institution would make a reckless decision to give a podium to Gore Vidal. He has continually displayed enormous antipathy towards Israel and Jews."

[fieldmarshaldj]

As William F. Buckley put so well, (Gore Vidal) ‘The Author of Myra Breckinridge.’ ‘nuff said.

[cookcounty]

Perhaps the current “incivility” in politics cad be traced to Vidal, who back in 1968 called William F Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” to his face on national TV.