June 24, 2007 -- GORE Vidal is up in arms over a new play that imagines him being sexually attracted to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Edmund White's "Terre Haute," which recently finished a successful run in Britain, involves the relationship between a thinly veiled, Vidal-like writer named James and a McVeigh-like killer, Harrison. In one sexually charged scene, James comes on to Harrison during a prison visit, gushing: "If I thought you'd never know, I'd unzip that orange jumpsuit just a bit so I could see your chest. Touch it." The McVeigh character opens his shirt to show off his torso as a "gift" to the Vidal character.
Vidal, 81, told the London Observer: "Edmund White will yet be feeling the wrath of my lawyers. It's unethical and vicious to make it very clear that this old faggot writer is based on me, and that I'm madly in love with Timothy McVeigh, who I never met."
But White told Page Six that when "Terre Haute" was first presented as a BBC radio play with Ian McKellen a few years back, "the BBC insisted I get Mr. Vidal to sign off on it, which I did. I still have the fax saying it was OK by him. Maybe he forgot it, since he went into surgery the very next day.
"I changed the names of the characters . . . I invented all the dialogue and actions, [and] the character of James ended up being closer to my experience and politics than to Mr. Vidal's."
White also insists that nobody who has reviewed the show "made the mistake of confounding the character James with Gore Vidal. I hope upon reflection Mr. Vidal will withdraw his intention to sue me for libel."
McVeigh was convicted in the bombing that claimed 168 lives on April 19, 1995, and was executed in 2001. While Vidal never met McVeigh, he's acknowledged corresponding with him, and told the Telegraph that he found the mass murderer "a very bright, self-taught constitutional lawyer . . . I was impressed. To my delight, he was very funny about a lot of things [and was] a very history-minded kid."
Vidal also says he felt compassion for McVeigh in the final hours before he was put to death by lethal injection.
Tootsie Terror
KRISTANNA Loken is quite sensitive about her big tootsies. When asked about them by YRB magazine, the towering "L Word" beauty roared, "I do not have size 12 feet! They're size 11, thank you very much, and don't make them any bigger." The luscious blonde, who shot to stardom in "Terminator 3," then laments, "At that size, I can't wear Manolo Blahniks. Drag-queen stores often have what I'm looking for."
We Hear
THAT country superband Lonestar and its fans hit the CMA Music Festival in Nashville, where they raised $39,000 for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital . . . THAT Bob Guccione Jr. went on a zero-gravity ride on G-Force One, a commercial jet that has hosted physicist Stephen Hawking, Buzz Aldrin and A.J. Feely on recent weightless flights . . . THAT Barry Bonds and Jay-Z are hosting a bash at Roe in San Francisco for the Major League Baseball All-Star Game on July 9, and they are shelling out more than $30,000 for silver Tiffany pin invites.
Mystery Man
JAMES Blunt received some rather blunt news the other night - Gisele Bundchen, the stunning Brazilian model he's said to be dying to meet, isn't attracted to British men. "I don't like them. I just don't - and I wouldn't even be able to tell you why not," she told the London Telegraph at the Mappin & Webb flagship store launch. To make things worse, Bundchen didn't seem to have any idea who the singer was. "Who is that?" she asked. "No, I'm sorry, I have no idea who you're talking about."
Like Old Times
IT was like the good old sex-ed-up days in Motley Crue for Tommy Lee last week at the Download Festival in England. Lee was hanging out in his dressing room with a famous rock star's daughter and another woman when the two ladies started "going at it," our spy reports. Lee enjoyed the private show while deejaying in the corner and tried to get some friends to join in on the action, but they passed and walked out. Lee just kept playing music and egging the girls on.
Lessons For Young Stars
LINDSAY Lohan's and Britney Spears' bad behavior has badly damaged their careers, and some teen stars are taking note. "Hannah Montana" star Miley Cyrus, 14, worked over-12-hour days when she came to town last week, doing meet-and-greets every day and a concert for "Good Morning America." Her rep said, "She would see people being turned away and get her bodyguards to go get them. One family was staying in a car because they had nowhere to stay, and she brought them all up to her hotel room." But not everyone has learned the lesson. "Heroes" starlet Hayden Panettiere, 17, hasn't been able to go home for weeks now. She showed up for almost every event in L.A. and New York, including the Electronic Arts "Harry Potter" video-game launch party where she narrowly avoided a Tara Reid moment on the red carpet when the back of her dress popped open. "Oh, well, this is the life of Hayden," the actress, referring to herself in the third person, sighed as three of her handlers put her dress back together.
Look It Up, Oz
ROCK legend Ozzy Osbourne doesn't quite get mild-mannered guitarist John Mayer. In the July issue of Stuff magazine, the former Black Sabbath frontman had this to say about Mayer's new album: " 'Continuum: Music by John Mayer,' whoever that is. 'Continuum.' I couldn't understand what that word meant. 'Continuum'? What does that mean?"
Paulie Cracks
DON'T interrupt "Sopranos" star Tony (Paulie Walnuts) Sirico. He was trying to have a peaceful time at the Fort Lauderdale airport before boarding a Continental flight to New York when all of a sudden, "people recognized him and started snapping photos of him with their cellphones," our spy told us over dinner at Da Tommaso. Sirico put up with it for a while, but finally "stood up, put his hands on his hips and said, 'I hate all of you,' and walked away."
Endquote . . . Endquote
"BY the time I was legal to drink, I had had so many wild nights, it was like, 'Really, now I'm legal?' " - Christina Ricci to the London Telegraph . . . "I AM lucky, in that I'm the guy who can masquerade behind a very hairy, spirit-gummed face, with rubber latex on to make me look much older than I am" - "Pirates of the Caribbean" star Geoffrey Rush to Fade In magazine on being recognized . . . "The currency of my family was what you looked like. My beautiful mommy with her enormous breasts and tiny waist. And my father with his beautiful physique and blue eyes. For me it was trickier because I obviously was not classically pretty the way my parents were" - Jamie Lee Curtis to Ladies' Home Journal on her parents, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh . . . "I'M too old to be a big star right now . . . God, I shouldn't have said that" - Kyra Sedgwick to Town & Country.
Hot In Her 90s
TEDDY Roosevelt's eldest daughter was a sexually charged dynamo right up to her death in 1980 at age 96. In "Alice," Stacy Cordery's upcoming biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, out in October, she quotes the wild child as saying, "Old people have feelings . . . they even have sexual passion." She says Longworth, who had a secret affair during her marriage to her congressman husband Nicholas Longworth, loved the sexual revolution of the 1960s, boasting that she lived by the adage: "Fill what's empty, empty what's full, and scratch where it itches."
Sightings
DAMON Dash offering Carole Radziwill $20 for a kiss at the Christiania Vodka-sponsored bash for Radziwill's new book, "What Remains," at Socialista . . . ED Koch at the City Bar Association, fulfilling his Continuing Legal Education requirement and waiting on line "just like everyone else" to get his attendance certification signed at the end of the three-hour course.
X-rated Rat
IT'S hard to believe that Patton Oswalt, who voices the lead rodent, Remy, in Disney/Pixar's new G-rated animated flick, "Ratatouille," has a very X-rated comedy past. Oswalt tells aintitcoolnews.com that director Brad Bird was driving his car when he heard one of the curmudgeonly comic's raunchy routines on the radio. "[He] said 'This is the rat,' and played it for the Disney people, and they were like 'He's talking about [bleeps] and vaginas! ' [Bird] said, "Don't worry about that, just listen to the voice. And, you know, it was that geeky passion I have for things . . . That's kind of how it happened."
