Gore Vidal, Fred Astaire and the cock size question

Will Gore Vidal be remembered 50 years from now? I doubt it. Myra Breckinridge will, by 2063, be a forgotten contribution to a vast library of late 20th century transgressive fiction. Vidal's first gay novel The City & The Pillar - a bold work of juvenilia for 1948 - is already just italics. No one reads it. The historical novels? See the fate of Barbara Cartland's oeuvre. The scintillating essays? See last season's collections with front row Anna in her shades: instant period pieces. In other words, Vidal surfed the earthly moments splendidly but left no timeless time-capsules. 

However, Vidal fans can cling to one hope for his immortality - he could survive in time's freezer as a case study. He fucked thousands, mainly other men. Rampant cockery and cuntery have their own heroes - or case studies. I won't name them; google 'em. Now, this November, a new book is released which examines the extent of Vidal's cockery. Penned by someone called Tim Teeman, it's titled In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private World of an American Master and promises to be 'explosive'. That's a publishing word for 'sex life not shared by publisher'. Readers may say, as they flick over the kindle pages on the bus, 'How did he find the time?' That's what 'explosive' amounts to these days.

More importantly, did Gore Vidal possess a massive cock? The book will answer this question. But why wait for publication day? Here's the answer Tim offers prematurely:

'One of Vidal’s oldest friends was Scotty Bowers who had sex with, and procured sex for, celebrities including Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, and Vidal himself. “Gore had a medium-sized cock, seven inches, he looked circumcised but wasn’t,” Bowers recalls. The few times Bowers had sex with Vidal was “pleasant, not mad love.” Vidal was always “on the ball, not bashful or shy, rather aggressive and pushy,” and was “more or less into a quick trick. He did everything sexually: you sucked his cock, he would suck yours, but he preferred to fuck. He was young and hot and sex was rather quick.”' (From the Daily Beast)

I had no idea Gore had sex with Fred Astaire.

There.

Hemingway & Gellhorn: Two lives, two movies, one cliche

Martha & Arthur Ernest

My last post on the late war correspondent Martha Gellhorn has yielded details of two hideous movie biopics of her life with sometime husband Ernest Hemingway. One is being made; the other never will. Thank God.

The first, comically, stars a tached Clive Owen as Martha and untached Nicole Kidman as Arthur in HBO TV flick Hemingway & Gellhorn. Oh, sorry I got that wrong; you make the casting corrections. Owen was a Great British Hollywood Hope for five minutes before he blew it by running around and shouting too much on camera in fulfilment of testicular expectation.

The prospect of him playing a mega-literary scrote with a euncuhy Midwestern accent via Coventry-cum-Essex to a botoxed Aussie fills me with schadenfreude.

The storyline reads: 'A drama centered on the romance between Ernest Hemingway and WWII correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway's inspiration for For Whom the Bell Tolls and the only woman who ever asked for a divorce from the writer.' In other words, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

The other movie is Love Is A Battlefield which fortunately is stuck at website stage. The only thing to be said for it is that it plainly sells the Who's Afraid... line by comparing 'Gutsy Martha' and 'humorous Hemingway' to other warring pairs of movie legend (see video below) - y'know, Mr & Mrs, Ant 'n' Cleo, et al.

Its storyline kicks off: '“Love is a Battlefield” is a truly original screenplay about the tumultuously-entertaining relationship between the charismatic, witty, ruggedly-handsome 38 year-old Ernest Hemingway at the peak of his literary power and his battles with the tall, blonde, beautiful and brave, 28 year-old Martha Gellhorn who would become the most heralded war correspondent of the 20th Century (man or woman).'

Was Martha Gellhorn a man or a woman? Discuss.

Hemingway Gellhorn Script Pitch - click arrow to play