“The Patrician Elite to Which Vidal Himself Belongs”
By I guess Harvard needed the money.
Mr. Steers said Mr. Vidal, in his original will, left everything to Howard Austen, his partner of 53 years who died in 2003, then amended it in 2011, awarding it to Harvard. A few paintings were bequeathed to the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. At about that time Mr. Vidal also bought a house in the south of France.
“Part of the idea was to relocate there and live in exile,” said the film director Matt Tyrnauer, a close friend and former literary executor. Ultimately Mr. Vidal gave the house to his onetime assistant, Muzius Gordon Dietzmann, who lives there with his family. Mr. Vidal told Mr. Tyrnauer, “I have made him a rich boy.”
Mr. Vidal’s fortune, according to Ms. Straight, is estimated at $37 million; representatives for the estate would not confirm this or any other details about the will. Mr. Auchincloss declined to comment. His lawyer, Adam Streisand, a partner at the Los Angeles firm Loeb & Loeb, declined to answer questions, though in a statement said: “The claims asserted by Ms. Straight have no merit and we will have no further comment while this matter is in litigation. We will answer these claims in court, not in the press.”
Gotta say that Niall Ferguson called this one.
Yet criticism of American empire was never the exclusive preserve of the political Left. In the eyes of Gore Vidal, the tragedy of the Roman Republic is repeating itself as farce, with the ‘national-security state’ relentlessly encroaching on the prerogatives of the patrician elite to which Vidal himself belongs.