...Vidal gathered steam as the evening progressed, and Parini showed slides of photos from his book—which Vidal, with some difficulty, turned around to glimpse. In one, a skinny, dysentery-suffering Vidal was sitting against a wall in Guatemala, where he lived for a time—in sin, it is said—with the erotic writer Anais Nin.
“What was she like?” Parini asked.
“Come on,” Vidal parried, “gentlemen don’t answer those questions.”
Another photo showed him standing with Charlton Heston on the set of Ben Hur, on which Vidal worked as a script doctor.
Parini asked about Heston’s acting skills. “He was rather wooden, wasn’t he?”
“Well,” Vidal replied, “if you count balsa as one of the woods.”
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.”
By this time the audience was fully on Vidal’s side, rooting for him, even prompting him when he had trouble remembering the names of Kevin Spacey, Dalton Trumbo, and President James K. Polk. “Polk, yes!” Vidal said. “His great granddaughter is married to George Stevens Jr. What does this mean? Nothing!”
By the time of the audience Q&A, he was positively on fire. When an audience member wondered why Christopher Hitchens, the formerly left-leaning columnist for The Nation, had become a neoconservative, Vidal gleefully took aim. “Ask him—leave me out of it,” Vidal said, to laughter. The crowd was in stitches for the rest of his answer. “You know, he identified himself for many years as the heir to me. And unfortunately for him, I didn’t die. I just kept going on and on and on. ‘There he is, Mr. Good Guy Liberal, and he just wouldn’t croak.’ So if you don’t like that, he thought, ‘I’ll be Mr. Bad Guy.’ And boy, he is. He’s made a real place for himself.”
Lloyd Grove attended Gore Vidal’s talk here last night, and 
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