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never met them but I don’t even know their names. Oh, what a tangled web is woven when divorcées conceive.
    In 1956 Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for president, decided to throw the convention open in order to choose a vice presidential candidate. Jack, the junior senator from Massachusetts, placed himself at center stage, battling with Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator with a record for fighting crime. When Jack lost, I wrote him a note congratulating him on
not
being Stevenson’s running mate since that eloquent figure was clearly not going to beat Eisenhower; and did not.
    As Jack began his long campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, I decided to help out with a play called
The Best Man
whose successful run on Broadway did him no harm. Some years later, I wrote another political play,
An Evening with Richard Nixon
: in this case my Nixon character, wonderfully played by George Irving, spoke only Nixon’s actual recorded words; this decision to use his actual words as recorded over the years cost me more money in research than I was ever to make out of the play. But with Irving as Nixon the result was wildly comic because Nixon seemed to have no conscious mind. He said whatever was milling about in his overwrought subconscious. In speeches he often turned to Pat, his wife, loyally seated nearby, and, shaking his finger at her, he would intone, “We here in America can no longer stand pat.” The producer, an old friend, suddenly succumbed to a fit of megalomania: instead of opening at a small theater like the Booth where my
Visit to a Small Planet
had done so well, he opened
Nixon
at the Shubert, a vast theater that only something the size of
Oklahoma!
, the musical—or indeed the state—could ever have filled. Needless to say, as always, in Nixon land, there were death threats for many of us, while
The New York Times
outdid itself by headlining the review: “A play for radical liberals,” certain death for a Broadway play. Actually the play was a sharp preview of Watergate, already unfolding in the wings. A dance critic, Clive Barnes reviewed the play which had done well with tryout audiences. Clive conceded that it was very funny but, by the third paragraph, he knew that he was supposed to attack and did. I think his exact line was: “Gore Vidal has said mean and nasty things about our president.” I ran into him not long after and told him, kindly, that in Clive’s native England one might refer to “Our” Queen but in the U.S. we never say Our President. The best aspect of the play was a sort of limbo to which George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, and JFK have been assigned, quarreling with each other as they watch with wonder Nixon’s inexorable rise to the presidency. As it turned out, aside from revivals, that was to be my last new play on Broadway, made memorable by a young actress who played several different parts. In due course, I became godfather to one of Susan Sarandon’s sons by Tim Robbins. Yes: I did say, Always a godfather, never a god.

    George Irving (the star), Claire Bloom, and I at the New York opening of
An Evening with Richard Nixon
.

TWELVE

    As early as 1959 Judge Joe Hawkins from Poughkeepsie wanted me to run for Congress. Joe was a blue-eyed Irishman with a lively Greek wife. Joe liked show business; he also knew that, thanks to television, I was known to the five counties of the district: Dutchess, Ulster, Greene, Columbia, and Scoharie. Joe was Democratic chairman of Dutchess, the largest county which perversely prided itself on how it had always voted resolutely against its most famous resident Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now his widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, held sway at Valkill Cottage while the Roosevelt main house was being turned into a museum and the president himself lay buried nearby in the
roosevelt
, Dutch for rose garden.
    In 1960 Eleanor wanted Adlai Stevenson to be our candidate again. She disliked Jack because she detested his father nor