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Gore Vidal, Dame Barbara Cartland and a fluffy fantasy

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Gore Vidal and Dame Barbara Cartland: one of them a muck-raking cynic, the other a fluffy fantasist. But which was which?

When Gore Vidal was told of the death of his old rival Truman Capote in 1984, he famously said: ‘Good career move.’ Exactly the same might now be said of Vidal, who has just died. Over the past quarter-century, his pronouncements had been growing ever more silly and off-target. His reputation was in decline. Death may prove his salvation.

In 1987, Vidal insisted that President Reagan was preparing for a world war, ‘a war, to be specific, between the United States and Russia, to take place in Israel’. Later that year Reagan and Gorbachev signed a missile treaty, and two years later, the Berlin wall came down.

Gore Vidal and Dame Barbara Cartland: one of them a muck-raking cynic, the other a fluffy fantasist

In 1998, Vidal claimed that Monica Lewinsky had been pushed into making her sex allegations against President Clinton by the American tobacco industry, and that she was lying. Later that year, Clinton admitted she was telling the truth.

In December 2000, Vidal declared that the threat to the U.S. from terrorism was minimal, and the U.S. government was simply scare-mongering: ‘The Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships,’ he sneered.

Nine months later came the events of 9/11. Vidal then claimed that Osama Bin Laden was not involved, and that there was a media conspiracy to say that he was.

  More... Iconoclastic author, playwright, and politician Gore Vidal dies, aged 86 ROY HATTERSLEY: Gore Vidal: Sharpest tongue in the West

And so to Dame Barbara. As far as I can ascertain, she and Vidal met only once, in Bangkok in 1983.

Staying at the Oriental Hotel, Vidal was invited to lunch by his old friend, Princess Chumbhot. She told him that she had also invited Barbara Cartland.

‘I was overjoyed,’ Vidal recalled 23 years later. ‘I reassured our hostess that I was ready for Mrs Cartland, who was famous for her splendid costumes, intricate wigs, dramatic make-up, Rolls-Royces, and innumerable romantic novels about well-born virgins, male as well as female.’

Celebrated author, playwright and commentator Gore Vidal has died at the age of 86

Dame Barbara was delayed by traffic. Before she arrived, Princess Chumbhot asked Vidal if it was true that Cartland had not been invited to the recent wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Vidal replied that Princess Margaret had told him that Cartland had definitely not been invited. ‘Of course we were going to invite the old thing,’ he said she told him, ‘but the bride’s family said that if she came, they wouldn’t.’

According to Vidal, Dame Barbara arrived to lunch two hours late. ‘She wore neither hat nor wig, only wavy tufts of pale hair adorned her gleaming rosy pate.’

Over soup, Dame Barbara became incensed at the way Charles and Diana were being persecuted by the press: she had never, she said, seen a more loving couple.

Glancing at Princess Chumbhot, Vidal sensed the time was right to put their agreed plan into action. In his version, Chumbhot says: ‘How lovely the Abbey must have been. We saw it only on television, but you were there.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ replies Dame Barbara.

‘Do tell us what the Abbey was like.’

In Vidal’s account, at this point Dame Barbara pretends that something has caught in her throat, but Chumbhot won’t let the matter drop.

‘You WERE there?’

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Dame Barbara is thus forced to back down. ‘Well, it was for young people, really. So I gave away my tickets.’

This is Gore Vidal’s version of their meeting. He published it in 2006, by which time Dame Barbara was safely dead.

It makes a funny story, but was he telling the truth? Two details make me suspect that it was just another one of his little fantasies.

First, the Royal Wedding took place at St Paul’s Cathedral, not Westminster Abbey.

Second, and more important, Barbara Cartland had made a great fuss at the time of NOT attending the wedding. Instead, she held a party for her local branch of the St John Ambulance Brigade. She even appeared on television on the big day, memorably squeezed into her St John uniform. It is hardly likely that, having been witnessed elsewhere by millions of viewers, she would have then pretended she was present at the wedding.So much for Vidal the fluffy fantasist. But what of Cartland, the muck-raking cynic? In March 1996, she told Gyles Brandreth the real reason behind the break-up of the Royal marriage.

‘Of course, you know where it all went wrong? She wouldn’t do oral sex, she just wouldn’t. It’s as simple as that. Of course it all went wrong.’



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