October 29, 2009
Ever the contrarian, Gore Vidal calls Polanski victim "a hooker"
Robert Nesti READ TIME: 2 MIN.
slug>Gore Vidal has lived a long life being contrary to mainstream opinion. In the late 1940s he wrote a seminal work of gay fiction - The City and the Pillar, which pretty much blackballed him from mainstream media for years. In 1968 he came to blows (literally) with William F. Buckley Jr. on national television as rioters filled the streets outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He has long maintained that America is a plutocracy (or as a Citibank report called it a "plutonomy"), has railed against Presidents from Johnson to Bush; and more recently, called Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh a patriot.
At 83 Vidal is turning up in interviews in major publications and media outlets in conjunction with the release of his photo memoir, Snapshots in History's Glare. Recently he gave an extended interview with .
This week he weighed in on the Roman Polanski case in an extensive interview in the Atlantic. Not unexpectedly, he offered a different perspective:
Q: In September, director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for leaving the U.S. in 1978 before being sentenced to prison for raping a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson's house in Hollywood. During the time of the original incident, you were working in the industry, and you and Polanski had a common friend in theater critic and producer Kenneth Tynan. So what's your take on Polanski, this many years later?
A: I really don't give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she's been taken advantage of?
Q: I've certainly never heard that take on the story before.
A: First, I was in the middle of all that. Back then, we all were. Everybody knew everybody else. There was a totally different story at the time that doesn't resemble anything that we're now being told.
Q: What do you mean?
The media can't get anything straight. Plus, there's usually an anti-Semitic and anti-fag thing going on with the press - lots of crazy things. The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew, Polacko - that's what people were calling him - well, the story is totally different now from what it was then.
(The interviewer moved onto to discuss other movie personalities at this point, only to return the conversation to Polanski.)
Q: ... Polanski was condemned even before he pled guilty to raping a girl.
A: Well, believe it or not, anti-Semitism is very strong out here, even though this is a Jewish business. L.B. Mayer was the worst anti-Semite of all.
Q: But he was Jewish.
A: Well, Mayer's view was, "The public will turn on all of us if they know that one of us has done anything."
Q' target='_blank'> You think anti-Semitism is motivating the prosecution of Polanski?
A: Anti-Semitism got poor Polanski. He was also a foreigner. He did not subscribe to American values in the least. To [his persecutors], that seemed vicious and unnatural.
Robert Nesti can be reached at [email protected].
