A quote from The Observer, an interview with Vidal in 2007 – I am using it as a potted review of this book.
““The catalogue raisonné of Vidal's remarkable meetings is a mini-history of Anglo-American literature and politics, from EM Forster and Eleanor Roosevelt to Rupert Everett and Hillary Clinton. 'The best thing about being Anglophone,' he observes, elegiacally, 'is that you have two countries.' As a young man, he encountered Harold Acton, Samuel Barber, Cecil Beaton, Albert Camus, Chips Channon, James Dean, William Faulkner, Federico Fellini, Greta Garbo, Evelyn Waugh (whom he describes as 'a drunken social climber') and George Santayana. The enfant terrible of the transatlantic literary scene, he partied with Isherwood, slept with Kerouac, dined with Auden, travelled with Tennessee Williams ('the Bird') and enjoyed a strange, platonic friendship with Anais Nin.
The Man Who Knew Everyone was especially successful in postwar London. Vidal's English connection, a source of pride and gratification, and well-represented by the signed photographs surrounding him in Hollywood, included Princess Margaret, Kenneth Tynan, Alec Guinness and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the Bois de Boulogne. It is a mark of his ease at this altitude, possibly as the perfect guest and also as a formidably entertaining wit, that he is emphatically neither a name dropper nor a snob. What people liked about Vidal, I suspect, was his exquisite manners, his contrarian mind and the exhilarating range of his gifts. The attraction was mutual: they were as much drawn to him as he to them.””
As someone who reads one biography which leads to another biography and so on, many of the names above are familiar to me as I have read biographies of Hillary Clinton, Harold Acton, Cecil Beaton, Chips Channon, James Dean, Kenneth Tynan, Alec Guinness, Duke and Duchess of Windsor and, of course, the diaries of Anais Nin. He also knew Amelia Earhart and so very many others I have read. It was a pleasure to meet them all again gathered together passing through Gore Vidal’s life like a cat’s cradle. The book was 850 pages of tiny print and slow going. Not boring but also not exciting, just interesting enough to keep going but dull enough to keep putting it down time after time to go off and do things like dishes. This is a major, very very detailed, not at all salacious look at Gore Vidal’s life and a must read for any true fan. ( )