RSVP : They Were Hungry For More Gore

Everyone, it seems, knows Gore Vidal.

They’ve known him for eons, long before the dinner Wednesday at L’Orangerie hosted by New Yorker Editor Tina Brown and her husband, Random House President Harold Evans, to celebrate the publication of Vidal’s memoir “Palimpsest.”

People such as Oliver Stone, who said he met the author “years ago. But I can’t tell you lewd stories.” Or Roseanne, who said, “He told me, ‘Never give in to good taste.’ I told him, ‘How could I with you as my idol?’ ” Or Billy Wilder who called the author “one of the rare literate people around.” Or Nancy Olson Livingston who knew Vidal even before Wilder directed her in “Sunset Boulevard.”

Of course, some know him better than others. Dominick Dunne said he’s known Vidal since the summer of 1948. “He had a house in Guatemala. That’s where I met Anais Nin. I’m told it’s in the book.” (Page 121: Nin dumps Dunne for a Mexican beach boy in Acapulco.)

Suzanne de Passe said she’s known Vidal for “like 100 years” and described him as “a relatable kind of genius.” Which is remarkably like what Leonard Goldberg said: “He’s the perfect person to be seated next to on a long flight. He knows a lot about everything.”

Though Jeffrey Katzenberg made no claim to knowing Vidal well, he did “look forward to having a moment of self-improvement and guilty pleasure” when he reads the book. Another recent acquaintance is District Attorney Gil Garcetti, who suspected the Simpson trial might have played a part in his invitation. “There’s been some notoriety with the case, obviously.”

But, no matter how deep the relationship with the author might be, if knowing him brought you to L’Orangerie, it was a good thing. For this was a warm and friendly evening. Beneath the paintings of French chateaus in the restaurant’s Louis XV setting, there was a main course of salmon en croute, then brief speeches before the sorbet was served.

Standing next to one of the restaurant’s indoor orange trees, Brown mentioned, “It’s been one of the New Yorker’s strange and dirty secrets that it’s never published Gore Vidal.” She thinks the book excerpt in this week’s issue “will leave you very hungry for more Gore.”

Evans praised Vidal’s work as “novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, aesthete, actor and raconteur.” He too, brought up the name Anais Nin, mentioning that in her famous diaries Vidal is described as “luminous and manly.”

After being toasted by Creative Artists Agency co-founder Bill Haber, Vidal spoke, getting his biggest laugh when he compared his modest book promotion with the media frenzy surrounding fellow Random House author Gen. Colin Powell. He accepted this because, “in the immortal phrase of Kato Kaelin: We’re not up for the same parts.”

Among the 115 guests listening were Howard Austen, Barbara and Marvin Davis, Barry Diller, Donna Dixon Aykroyd, Carrie Fisher, Courteney Cox, Christian Slater, Bob Bookman, Sandy Gallin, Sidney and Joanna Poitier, Amanda de Cadenet, Wendy Goldberg, Susan Faludi, Ruby Wax, Digby Diehl, Chuck Close, Arne Glimcher and Billy Zane, who wore pants one guest described as “being made either of dolphin skin or stainless steel leather.”

It was a fitting evening for a writer the New Yorker’s political correspondent Sidney Blumenthal called “one of the great mythographers of Washington.”

“If he was blind,” said Blumenthal, “he would be the Homer of Washington.”