Gore Vidal, 1925-2012

Second from right, with William Wyler, Christopher Fry, and Charlton Heston, on the set of Ben Hur, 1959.

For almost an hour I watched a tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial being made on the same stage where Bette Davis acted in The Catered Affair—that pre­dict­ably unhappy res­ult of the movies attempt­ing to take over the tele­vi­sion drama when what they should have taken over was the spir­it of the com­mer­cials. Then I was giv­en lunch in the com­mis­sary which is much changed since the great days when people in extraordin­ary cos­tumes wandered about, cre­at­ing the impres­sion that one was inside a time machine gone ber­serk. Now tele­vi­sion exec­ut­ives and tech­ni­cians occupy all the tables and order what used to be Louis B. Mayer Chicken Soup only the name of Mayer has been, my guide told me, stricken from the menu. So much for great­ness! Even more poignant as remind­ers of human tran­si­ency are the empty offices on the second floor of the Thalberg Building. I was par­tic­u­larly upset to see that the adjoin­ing suites of Pandro S. Berman and the late Sam Zimbalist were both vacant. Zimbalist (immor­tal because of Boom Town) died in Rome while pro­du­cing Ben Hur which saved the stu­di­o’s bacon, and Pandro S. Berman (Dragon Seed, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Seventh Cross) has gone into what the loc­al trade papers refer to as “indie pro­duc­tion.” How tra­gic! MGM without Pandro S. ber­man is like the American flag without its stars.

No doubt about it, an era has indeed ended and I am its chron­icler. Farewell the clas­sic films, hail the tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial! Yet noth­ing human that is great can entirely end. It is merely transmuted—in the way that the wharf where Jeanette MacDonald arrived in New Orleans (Naughty Marietta, 1935) has been used over and over for a hun­dred oth­er films even though it will always remain, to those who have a sense of his­tory, Jeanette’s wharf. Speaking of his­tory, there was some­thing curi­ously god­like about Nelson Eddy’s recent death before a nightclub audi­ence in Miami. In the middle of a song, he sud­denly for­got the words. And so, in that plan­gent bari­tone which long ago earned him a per­man­ent place in the pan­theon of super­stars, he turned to his accompnaist and said, “Play ‘Dardenella’ and maybe I’ll remem­ber the words.” Then he col­lapsed and died.

Play “Dardenella”! Play on! In any case, one must be thank­ful for those strips of cel­lu­loid which still endure to remind us that once there were gods and god­desses in out midst and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (where I now sit) pre­served their shad­ows for all time! Could the actu­al Christ been pos­sessed of a fra­tion of the radi­ance and the mys­tery of H.B. Warner in the first King of Kings or revealed, even on the cross, so much of a shad­ow of the moon­struck Nemi-agony of Jeffrey Hunter in the second King of Kings, that aston­ish­ing cre­ation of Nicholas Ray? No. 

—Myra Breckinridge, 1968