The Gore You Know

Gore Vidal died a year ago today. If you were on the fence about whether or not you wanted to know more about the legendary writer's private life, here are just a couple of tidbits from Tim Teeman's upcoming biography, "In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private World of an American Master," to be published in November by Magnus Books:

Vidal loved sex, and gossiping about it: he estimated he had had sex with a thousand men before he was 25. He told his nephew Burr Steers he had successfully pursued and had sex with Fred Astaire when he first moved to Hollywood. Steers says, “He also told me Dennis Hopper had a lovely tuft of hair above his ass. He never told me how he knew that.” Another close friend of Vidal's revealed Vidal had asked, when hearing the friend was staying at the legendarily louche Chateau Marmont, "How is the Chateau?", before adding: "Brad Davis [star of Midnight Express and Querelle] was a beautiful boy and I fucked him on the bathroom floor of the Chateau Marmont." Davis, who was HIV-positive, died of a drug overdose in 1991.

For most of their lives together, Vidal referred to [Howard] Austen [his partner from 1950 to 2003, when Austen died] as his friend. His true love, he claimed, was Jimmie Trimble (above), a boy he had known at prep school who died fighting at the Battle of Iwo Jima. Vidal slept with Anaïs Nin and enjoyed close friendships with women including Claire Bloom and Joanne Woodward. He and Austen had sex with hustlers, or “trade” as Vidal called the handsome, “straight-acting” young men he liked. Paying for sex appealed to Vidal because it meant with this, as with so much else in his life, he was in control. He was mostly the “top.” In bed as in life, no one was going to screw Gore Vidal.

Do we really have to wait till November?

Read more HERE.

Pre-order now HERE.