Wednesday, August 07, 2013

'In Bed With Gore Vidal'


Here's your first look at the cover of Tim Teeman's explosive new biography, "In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private World of an American Master," to be published in November by Magnus Books.

Some highlights:
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. 
Pre-order now HERE.

3 comments:

Muscle Obsessive said...

The man was sociopathically arrogant and incredibly bitter (unable to drop a grudge or forget a slight) but he was great fun and had a huge brain and damn he was a sexy lad. But he is famous for once having claimed that, not only was he a pathological top, he 'never knowingly gave pleasure to anyone'.

robertE said...

Vidal was a nasty piece of works.

mortem non sit tristitia.

RobertE.

Apelcart said...

I will not read the book because Vidal is not around to attest to the truth, or lack thereof, of its contents. As one of my generations' great authors and interesting persons, I prefer to remember him as I knew him, and read him in his own time.