Gore Vidal's Gore Vidal Part One Omnibus

Gore Vidal is America's greatest living man of letters.

For 50 years his writings have delighted and shocked the public,

and his political views have never been less than radical.

He's the wittiest American writer. Most of us aren't witty at all.

He has a rather prickly personality, you know!

How popular do you expect a porcupine to be?

-< We're taking pictures.

-I'm trying to look natural.

He was so beautiful, men AND women flirted -

his sexuality was such that it was there for all!

I follow him in the press and as a politician and as a friend.

He's one of the players in American politics and has been for 30 years.

There is something about this impenetrable wit and intelligence

that doesn't lend itself to images of a man suffering little children,

but in his own way he's very sweet.

I would cast him as a psychopathic killer.

-Do you enjoy writing your memoir?

-I don't know if "enjoy" is quite the verb.

It's significant in the life of anybody, I suppose -

when you get to the memoir you know the life is done with.

It's the sort of thing you put off till last,

the sort of thing I thought I'd put off for good.

You can only tell the truth about people in fiction. That's why we invented it.

There are a lot of problems to writing a memoir.

I think it might be better to call it

"A Tissue Of Lies", and make it all up,

with its central character an invented character like myself.

Many things interest me,

but I don't seem to have caught my own attention over the years.

I feel I'm writing about a stranger when I write about my life.

One thing is interesting - I must ask other memoirists about it -

there's not one moment that I would like to relive.

And it's been quite a contented life. Perhaps too contented.

It's odd, because everybody says,

"Oh, that summer in Lake Odense was the high point of my life."

There's been none of that.

There's no great love affair in your life

which has...er...prompted you...?

There was one very early, and one was enough. I don't think it happens twice.

There are some people partial to the notion of having a twin.

And all that I was not, he was; and all that he was not, I was.

The two of us would've been pretty good had we been rolled into one.

He was killed 50 years ago on March 1st at Iwo Jima,

so doing the memoirs I was somewhat haunted by him,

and I was intrigued by another self that didn't survive.

I was, er...

very interested in sex.

I was not interested in love affairs.

I won't ever be able to write an agony story,

but I might find a few jokes along the way.

Is that because there really wasn't any agony?

Well, if there was, I'm... I'm a stoic,

or so I like to think and so I was brought up.

When you're brought up by a man who was accidentally blinded aged ten,

and made his way in the world, um...

Self-pity is hard to indulge in when you live with someone like that.

I was raised in the house of my grandfather, Senator TP Gore.

FANFARE

'Friends, to obtain votes with false promises

'is worse than to obtain money with false pretences.'

Grandfather was an extraordinary influence on me.

He got me interested in history and literature.

He got me interested in politics, the politics of the people. He was an old populist.

My left-wing positions are those of the party of the people.

'..I will never rob your cradle to feed the dogs of war.'

BLUES MUSIC

I was brought up in Washington.

It was a nice place to grow up in, but it was a small southern town.

It had about 300,000 people.

Everybody knew everybody else,

and the race war was not as intense as now.

Politics was the only subject that anybody talked about.

The only thing attractive to me in the city

is the White House - it's the only game in town.

I'd put up with Washington if one could live there.

Driving around, I am struck over and over again

that this is a city of the dead.

Everywhere you look there's a memorial to someone shot,

and it's creepy - I don't care to go back.

After my birth, my father, my mother and I

moved to Rock Creek Park, the house of Senator Gore, her father.

'It is now the residence of the Malaysian ambassador

'and his wife, a very charming woman.

'Here we lived, off and on, for the first ten years of my life,

'and as living with the in-laws is a sure route to divorce,

'in due course my parents did divorce.

'But I was very happy with my "proper" parents,

'my grandfather and grandmother.'

I was prematurely taught to read by my grandmother so she would be able to do other things than read to him.

He was blind from the age of ten, so he was read to all day long.

-I was reading grown-up books at six.

-Did you like to read to your grandfather?

-Oh, yes!

He was very interesting, a very witty man,

and would explain enough so I knew what was happening.

I read a lot of history to him.

I was bored by the congressional records, but on the other hand

by ten I understood bimetallism, which no ten-year-old understands,

and fiat money, because he was on the banking and finance committee.

In his day the entire top of the house was one long, raw room...

..with plain, deal-wood floors and twenty thousand books.

I was constantly reading, and I sat in windows set in rather funny embrasures,

which would just fit a seated child,

and I would just sit there and read, removed from the house and removed from the world.

I began to suspect that a writer had been born

when I first read a book to myself, not aloud.

As I started to read, I began to think of an alternative work to what I was reading.

I was all of seven, then.

The book was called "The Duck And The Kangaroo, a Tale of Unnatural Affection".

So I began to write my own version of this when I was reading it.

By the time I was 14 I think I'd started about three novels,

and Williwaw, my first published novel, must have been my seventh attempt.

So one was a novelist,

and I had the good - or bad - fortune, I think, of being published very early,

before I was ripe enough.

Tennessee Williams said, "It's a pity, Gore, you became so successful so young.

"You always got to see the world from a successful person's perspective."

He was so hard on people's characters. I felt that about him, too.

But there was something in it, perhaps...

I was recording life before I really understood what I was recording.

And then, rather naturally, thanks to a childhood in this room,

in this house,

um...

history and politics were the air I breathed, the way my brain worked.

It was inevitable I would go in those directions.

-I used to bring my grandfather down here...

-HE brought YOU down.

No, he was blind!

I came on the floor on a hot summer day in a bathing suit.

I was barefoot. Back then you took off your shoes from June to September.

And I remember we went on the floor and I sat down beside him,

-and suddenly the vice president, Mr John Nance Garner...

-Cactus Jack!

Cactus Jack came down, and said, "Senator, that boy's naked!"

And my grandfather was holding my arm like that as we walked along...

I had short sleeves, and his arm went down...!

He sprinted out of there, blind as he was!

'It was always pretty clear to me that I was going to be a writer...

'whether I liked it or not.

'And I'm not so sure I did like it all that much, cos I wanted to be a politician, like my grandfather.'

But I've quickly figured out that the writer has just one job -

to tell the truth as he understands it -

and the politician has only one end, which is not to give the game away.

The two things are in opposition.

Would you, without your grandfather,

have written historical and classical novels?

Can't tell how else I would have been brought up.

Certainly it made them easy for me.

It made them inevitable,

because between us our lives span over half the life of the Republic.

He remembers his grandfather, who was in the Revolution.

So there's a straight line to the beginning.

To me, American history was always a family affair,

so in novels like Burr and Washington DC, I told it through the eyes of one family,

as indeed one family might have experienced it all.

Had it not been for him,

and the fact that I was exposed to politicians and the floor of the Senate, and these books...

who knows?

I might have been a serious and important novelist

who would write about the only important subject -

which is marriage.

'I was very close to my father.

'He had a charming and serene disposition - he was a droll man.

'And he was an inventor. He was a true artist.'

-..If a ten-year-old could handle it?

-Sure! I'll try it!

'My father was eager to find a cheap, popular plane.

'He dreamed of being the Henry Ford of aviation,

'so he always came up with prototypes of aeroplanes

'that were so safe that even I, at the age of ten, could fly them.'

He was rather mean, and so was the senator.

One reason they were so fond of me was that at 17 I enlisted in the army, so the government paid for me.

By the time I got out I was 19 and I'd already written my first book.

From then on I never cost them a penny.

My father and I didn't agree about anything. He was very right-wing.

Yet in the 43 years I knew him, we never quarrelled.

Nor did I with Senator Gore...

though he was far too awesome to quarrel with.

On the other hand, my mother was a virago!

The only way I can handle her in the memoirs, I think,

is as a character of great comedy.

I mean, here she is, an honest-to-God lush, a 1920s flapper.

"Let's face it, I'm the guy who gives the shirt off his back!"

She loves this butch talk, as though she were a man.

She's always done so much for others, and others always let her down(!)

The more I keep doing the dialogue, it starts to come back to me...

I am in stitches! I mean, she is so funny...inadvertently.

But I used to think, "How on earth did I get THIS as a mother?"

That was bad luck - you might say I had a moment of self-pity...

in my early adolescence, but I soon got over it.

Then I solved it by refusing to see her the last 20 years of her life.

It was a great burden off my back.

In 1935 my father and mother were divorced.

I arrived here in November 1935.

My mother had just married Hugh Auchinchloss,

who had just remodelled what was then a fairly new house.

I can remember the smell of the raw paint and wet plaster.

Everybody had a headache.

The dining room is the same size and shape that it was.

I remember my stepfather, Hugh Auchinchloss, was a great fisherman,

and over the fireplace he had an enormous marlin he had caught,

a hideous fish with, you know, a long sword on it.

The quarrels that went on for eight years between them to get that damned thing off the wall!

"It spoils dinner!" But he wouldn't take it down. That fish is history.

In my first memory of the house, we came out at night,

and I got up in the morning as ten-year-olds do, at seven,

and I went exploring the place.

I came back in, and what should I find sitting right here in this spot?

It was my mother after her wedding night.

I never remembers what anyone wears,

but she was wearing a grey silk dressing gown with a red...border.

Looking rather disconsolate, she asked if I liked it here.

I said, "I just arrived. I can't tell."

She said, "Would you like it if I went back to your father?"

Even at ten, I knew that wasn't possible. He was far, far away.

I said, "Well, I don't know."

Apparently the wedding night, the marriage, proved to be a disaster.

However, she stayed married to Auchinchloss for six or seven years,

and had two children, who were born and brought up on the third floor.

But I've often...re-thought in memory

the figure of her on these stairs,

wondering what to do, and already wondering how to get out.

That was my bedroom...

for about six years when I lived here...

I moved out. My mother divorced Mr Auchinchloss, who married a lady.

They had two daughters, called Jackie and Lee.

Jackie moved into my room and found some of my old shirts, which she wore when she went riding.

She married Jack Kennedy and they came back after their honeymoon,

and they stayed in that room.

We'd show you, but it's a closet!

It's odd, what you dream about.

Most people have the same experience I do,

which is that you dream about the places you grew up in.

I dream of this river.

I dream often that I am running at great speed,

through these woods, over these rocks, to the river at the bottom.

We were told it was dangerous to swim, so we always swam there.

The scene between Bob Ford and Jim Willard

in The Pillar And The City took place there.

"Abruptly, Bob pulled away.

"For a moment, their eyes met.

"Then, gravely, Bob shut his eyes and Jim touched him,

"as he had so many times in dreams without words, without thought, without fear.

"When the eyes are shut, the true world begins.

"As faces touched, Bob gave a shuddering sigh,

"and gripped Jim tightly in his arms.

"Now they were complete.

"Each became the other, as their bodies collided with a primal violence.

"Like to like, metal to magnet... half to half,

"and the whole restored."

This is about the only thing left of the ill-named Merrywood

that is still the same.

This was the pool house,

and there used to be a swimming pool here which has gone.

I'm not particularly autobiographical as a writer,

but when I wrote Washington DC,

I used houses I grew up in - I used Merrywood, which we've seen as it now is,

and the house of my grandfather in Rock Creek Park.

The pool house was emblematic to me of the book, and maybe of my life.

It begins with an adulterous affair on the floor -

that's his, that's hers, dressing room -

in the summer of 1937.

They're having a big party up there at Merrywood to celebrate the defeat of Franklyn Roosevelt in the Senate.

They're all very right-wing here.

My own clans, the Vidals and the Gores...

I was raised by the Gores so I know them better.

Once a year, the Gores have a meeting, usually in Mississippi.

They govern practically five southern states.

One of the cousins is currently vice president.

The Kays, my grandmother's family, also reunite yearly, and hundreds come.

We have an ex-president, Jimmy Carter.

These are support systems.

In the absence of a republic, in the absence of governance, all we have is family.

THEY SING A HYMN

I'm Joy Gore, Mary Jane's sister,

and my father is John Gore, also.

I live in Clinton, Mississippi, now.

I'm a computer specialist with the Veterans' Administration.

SHE PLAYS AN INTRODUCTION

# Praise the Lord, I've been invited to a meeting in the air

# Jubilee, jubilee

# All the saints of all the ages in their glory will be there

# Oh, I'm going to that happy jubilee! #

APPLAUSE

I'm always asked what I think,

and I had not expected so much musical talent.

In the family line, my line, that of TP Gore,

-we are all of us tone deaf.

-LAUGHTER

And I'm also kind of thrilled today,

to see so many variations of my nose here.

I thought it was all mine, and now I see that it's only on loan.

You will see to it that it keeps on going in various variations down the ages.

My grandfather came back here, you may remember,

or certainly have heard tell of, in 1910.

I remember some of his sayings and his statesmanship.

Anyway, he once said...

.."If there was any race but the human race, I would go join it."

He had a dark side to him.

I think today he would be properly pleased with the human race,

as of this warm afternoon.

APPLAUSE

I saw TP,

when I was a young girl, the last trip that he made back here.

-He was just as sweet and good as he was then.

-Yeah.

-We all loved TP.

-He was a very funny man.

A good man.

You knew how he became blind, didn't you?

You tell me. I know a story, but the first time is the one I'm vague about.

-A slingshot.

-A slingshot?

He said...

He told me something about throwing nails at a cow when he was eight.

Then he said he went to Jackson as page to a state senator.

He bought a boy a birthday present.

It was a gun with a spike that came out.

Held it to his eye and it went off.

And he said, "I am blind." Like that.

We don't have any Gores, other than young Al.

Young Al - not on the national scene, no.

I liked him.

I liked Albert senior - junior I'm not so keen about.

The populist movement,

which he started and to which the Gore clan belonged,

was rebellion against the...banks, and what they call the "Bourbons".

They were old guard democrats and the great planter families.

Yet when he married my grandmother, he married into a planter family...

proving, as a great English anthropologist once said,

"All great men, early in life, commit hypergamy."

I do not need to translate the Greek, which means "marrying someone above your social station".

TP Gore did that, and my father did it by marrying TP Gore's daughter.

And the long line of hypergamists ends in me.

Eudora, you are a watcher of people. One question passes through my mind.

My grandfather, Senator Gore, was what they call a freethinker.

Suddenly I am surrounded by 200 relatives who really believe in Our Lord,

and round there at every crossroads there is a Baptist or Methodist church.

I asked a couple - these are doctors, lawyers -

these are not what they sometimes condescendingly call simple folk.

They're complicated, well-educated people.

This thing was the centre of their lives,

and I wondered, as you have lived here all your life, is this new?

Did this start with TV evangelicals? Has this been consistent?

I think it's consistent. It's just a part of life in small towns.

It's the centre of life.

I had a visitor from New York one time,

who said, "I've just come from the centre of Jackson,

"and something must be wrong - I saw these people pouring into church."

I said, "It's Sunday, that's all!"

I think it's part of the way of life. I don't think it's new.

Maybe it's the occasion, everybody getting together.

-Yeah...

-Establishing contacts and connections.

-We had eight hymns at the beginning.

-That's a lot!

Luckily only one chorus of each, but...

I have never seen the state of Mississippi before,

and it was green, just as I had expected,

but I did recognise some of the same...

There was the Kentucky Fried Chicken stand, and McDonald's...

Have you noticed that there's more homogenisation?

Yeah, but I was thinking in a deeper sense, maybe,

because back when nobody left where they grew up,

they really had certain aspects of caricature you could identify with.

They said, "Those girls from the Delta are so FAST!"

"You can tell a girl from the coast by her high heels."

We were forced to wear uniforms so you couldn't see differences

-in how they...

-Arranged the collar.

-How they spoke.

Those things have gone, so you can't tell the Delta from anywhere else.

'This production is brought to you by your Pontiac dealer,

'who sells and services Pontiac,

'a General Motors masterpiece.'

I first met Eudora Welty in 1946 when my first book was published.

The New York Times' reviewer hated The City And The Pillar, and blacked out my next five books.

I was desperate because I had to make a living -

I was desperate because something new had started called live TV,

so I plunged in.

Haven't seen you for ages. Welcome home.

In 1954 I went into live television.

And I...I started in '54 and I ended in...'61.

So I spanned most of a career in live TV.

It was very exciting. It was like a club.

It excited me... It's the only thing that's ever excited me artistically.

I mean the adverb without any... ironic gloss.

I was doing something that a country wanted.

..Killed a man he didn't know, out of a sense of justice.

'In A Sense Of Justice,

'I was trying to show at the height of the Jo McCarthy period

'that someone might, out of a sense of justice,

'act how society dared not act when a Hitler comes along,

'or, in this case, Jo McCarthy,

'or, in my play, the boss of a state, who is showing definite totalitarian symptoms.

'It was a very dangerous play to write.'

To stay alive, son, takes a lot more nerve...

'Actors and producers came here after the show.'

It would be broadcast live, I don't know, about nine o'clock...

and we'd come here at 10 or 10.30.

Everybody became an alcoholic... I'm one of the few that managed to live this long.

But I realised - I was the last guest.

I am Rip van With-it... come back from the past!

And it's all half a century ago.

I was a very unsuccessful child - I was no good at being a child.

I was a young man for ever, and I rather thought that was my role.

I skipped middle age, and I think I'm now going into old age.

And as somebody old, who still has...

Ha-ha...! Suddenly a nervous laugh.

Eyes begin to dart about.

..Still has some of his marbles,

er...I may enjoy old age.

# These little town blues

# Are melting away

# I'll make a brand new start of it

# In old New York, o-o-old New York

# If I can

# Make it there, I'll make it

# Anywhere

# It's up to you

# New York

# New Yo-o-o-o-o-o-o-rk! #

You don't get that very often,

I think, on documentary television.

-It's fantastic, Howard.

-A real voice. A magnificent voice.

You want me to get undressed now?

No, it's a great voice and apt, because we're doing New York,

a city I don't like and he likes.

-When you met Gore, Howard, were you living in New York?

-I was living here.

And I was working for Lever Brothers... Dreary!

And he was a college graduate and I was not.

He'd put himself through college, and I never went to college.

I think that's...43 years ago.

When we first met that drew me to him. He was a college graduate.

I was not.

The first question I think I asked Gore was,

"What is your definition of an intellectual?"

He said, "Anybody who understands an abstract."

That kinda cleared things up for me.

For some reason... I don't know.

Anyway, I try to give you colour about my life, and my life doesn't have any colour at all.

In fact, I've forgotten practically everything I ever did. Thank God!

Are we here?

OK.

Don't gamble all your money away!

I suppose Los Angeles is my favourite American city...

This city isn't here - I like that. You can make any life you want.

Nothing imposes itself upon you, except probably the smog,

and the odd earthquake,

but largely you make your own world here.

For somebody in the business of creating worlds, it's a good thing.

I came here for work in the '50s.

I had to make a living, and writing for TV and writing for movies,

was what many novelists of my generation,

and the generation before me, like Faulkner...

Fitzgerald...Isherwood...Huxley...

I was also spoilt, because I came out of TV when the writer was number one.

You watched plays by Paddy Chayefsky or Reginald Rose -

not a play by the director.

At MGM we used to say the power man of the movie was the producer,

the pretty man was the star,

the creative man was the writer,

and the director was a brother-in-law,

usually of some high-ranking official in a studio,

since no-one wanted to spend eight hours a day on stage with actors.

The French, in their confusion in the 1950s,

decided that all these directors were suddenly auteurs, creators,

and the town shook with laughter as word spread we were artists.

Old Western makers actually tried to learn a little French!

The writers were pretty cynical about the directors,

and they outranked directors until the '50s...

They got paid more, generally.

John O'Hara came out.

He wrote a column, saying, "I never thought I'd meet Aldous Huxley,

"Christopher Isherwood and Gore Vidal on the set of a Western."

O'Hara was a great snob. I never thought I'd meet John O'Hara...

..for opposite reasons.

Was Huxley an influence on you at all?

Yes, he was.

The imaginative novel of ideas, which is what he tried to do,

is pretty much what I have tried to do from time to time.

We're in the Malibu colony, where I lived back in the '50s.

It was the age of the young Paul Newman and Jimmy Dean, er...

It was a constant party going on.

This is a colony of... actors, writers, directors...

sealed off from the rest of the world.

Everyone has dogs, up and down.

We lived here with a cocker spaniel.

We had that house, I think the third house from here:

Mr and Mrs Paul Newman and Howard Austin and me and a spaniel.

How did you meet?

Gore wrote a television play called Billy The Kid,

which I did with Arthur Penn.

It was the very early days of television.

Everything was exciting... and electric, and...innovative,

and it was quite wonderful in film.

Er...

The studio changed writers and Gore has not forgiven me for 40 years.

And did you immediately hit it off with him?

Oh, yeah! He was, um...

Um...

He's got a quick... and far-ranging mind,

and of course I knew him mostly by his writing, then.

Paul was the most beautiful man I'd ever seen.

But when I met Gore, I said, "There are two of them!"

He was gorgeous! He was beautiful!

And what I loved about him was that he took me seriously -

seriously, but he made fun of me,

because I was very serious and pretentious as hell.

He didn't allow that.

He also didn't treat me as a dingbat, and he loved the fact I was southern.

At the weekend, I was at Metro, Paul at Warners, Joanne at Fox...

One weekend, they counted... a hundred people...

who had just arrived.

I didn't know... I knew hardly anyone.

I thought they were Paul's friends, or Joanne's.

It was THE place - 100 strangers walking around.

We couldn't say "Get out!" - it might be a friend.

And we had one long party.

Everybody invited everybody, the most extraordinary people.

Christopher Isherwood was there all the time.

Anais Nin would come with her beautiful young men.

Anybody who was anybody came,

because of Gore -

because Gore, even then, knew everybody.

Paul had not then married Joanne, so we had Confidential magazine,

and all sorts of those expose magazines around,

with those...

telescopes, looking at the house, trying to see what was going on.

And it was mostly, you know, who left what in the sink,

and why were those wet towels left in the middle of the bathroom?

It was no more glamorous than that.

-Were they wild times?

-Well, no, although we must have felt as though they were.

It was... I mean, everybody drank too much.

Except me. I didn't drink at all.

I was always running around cleaning, washing and complaining, and picking up people's laundry.

But it was mainly just groups of people talking...all the time!

And I think my education really began...

meeting Gore,

because...through Gore I met people like Christopher and Anais,

people to whom you could listen and learn.

I gave up novel-writing for ten years,

because I set myself a ten-year plan -

I would have enough money never to do anything I didn't want to again.

At the end of ten years, I had accomplished that.

During the ten-year period,

I did five Broadway plays, 20 movies, about 60 plays for TV,

a lot of essay-writing,

and I was involved in politics.

So at end of this period I had the leisure.

I was living up by the Hudson River.

-Did you see much of Gore and Howard when they moved to Edgewater?

-JOANNE WOODWARD: Yes, yes!

That was the hangout. It was wonderful.

That relationship, Howard and Gore's, is monumental

in American literary history.

It must have been strange or difficult at that time -

or maybe it wasn't, I don't know.

Well, I think it was difficult, and there were big problems,

and big problems with Gore's mother, about Howard...

There were cruel things done.

I...always felt... that it's wonderful to have...

Whether this is a romance or not a romance, I don't know.

But it is wonderful to find the person in your life

who fulfils that... that...that which you need!

And for Howard and Gore, that is what happened.

I remember at one point I did a summer stock play at the little theatre there,

and I stayed with Gore at Edgewater for the time I was in rehearsal,

an hilarious time.

It was wonderful, because every morning Gore would go down to write.

That's what he does first thing,

so however drunk he'd been, he'd sit by the window with his coffee,

and I was always next down with my coffee.

And we would sit and talk in the window, looking out at the water.

It was a wonderful place to be.

Joanne and I both campaigned when he ran for Congress and left the colony.

And he didn't win?

No, but I think he got more votes than Roosevelt did.

Would he have been a good senator?

Well, he would have shaken things up...

He's not, um...

You know...

Gore does not tremble or quake in the face of opposition.

Of course, that's just what we need now, more than we needed it then.

I have been a conventional, if radical, candidate for Congress.

In 1960 I was in favour of recognising Red China,

which was a daring thing to do.

I thought Americans

ought to be educated, a very radical thought,

an idea whose time has not yet come.

I doubled the vote in upstate New York, a very conservative district.

I got 20,000 more votes in the district than Jack Kennedy, who was head of the ticket.

So he was riding on MY coat-tails.

But Jack certainly accepted the status quo,

that the American empire was to be obeyed everywhere

particularly in our backyard.

Given your dislike of the empire,

did you try and dissuade him from forays into Southeast Asia?

No, I didn't know a tenth of what I've picked up since.

I didn't question the empire. No-one did.

In the '60s it got on my nerves -

"Oh, you knew Jack Kennedy and Harry Truman, and you actually enlisted in the war!"

I said, "You weren't there, kids. You don't know what country it was."

We thought we were doing our patriotic best. We didn't question the interests of the United States.

We believed the misinformation, the propaganda that was all around us.

Would he have made a good president or senator?

Yes. I don't know about president.

He and I had this dream that he'd run for president and get elected,

and then we'd overthrow the government.

He would become the emperor and I would become sort of the empress!

We would re-do the White House, and he'd rewrite the Constitution,

which he still has a feeling about.

-Do you look back on sort of halcyon days at Edgewater?

-Yes, yes.

It was halcyon days anyway, because we were all at the best and brightest moment in our lives then.

We were glorious, and did other wonderful things,

but that was a special moment in time.

Subtitles by Huw Bell BBC - 1995