Will DiGravio
Three years after the release of The Best Man (1964), Variety offered an analysis of American moviemaking entitled, “Homo Theme ‘Breakthrough.’” The upshot was that mainstream movies were slowly beginning to wade into a subject often only tackled by underground and independent cinema: homosexuality. Until that point, according to Variety, the sole Hollywood film to utter the word “homosexual” was The Best Man, written by Gore Vidal for the screen and adapted from his own play of the same name.
The Best Man deals with the turbulent currents of American politics. Directed by Franklin Schaffner and set at the 1964 Democratic convention, the film stars Henry Fonda as the JFK-esque William Russell, a former secretary of state and the frontrunner to secure the nomination. Party leaders, though, fear he is too smart to make an electable, effective candidate. Those leaders include the folksy former president Art Hockstader, a character inspired by Harry Truman and played by Lee Tracy, who received an Oscar nomination for his work in the role. Cliff Robertson plays Joe Cantwell, a McCarthy-esque U.S. senator, who, in Russell’s estimation, lacks conviction. Were an international crisis to occur, Russell says, the first thing Cantwell would do as president is consult the Gallup poll.
Revisiting the film brings to mind the Vidal witticism: “Whenever I want to know what the United States is up to, I look into my own black heart.” The grandson of a senator and a cousin by marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy, Vidal often positioned himself as the ultimate insider-critic, a byproduct of the American aristocracy well-equipped to poke holes in the country’s myths and dissect its failings. With the one-liners and robust insight one would expect from Vidal’s political essays, The Best Man showcases his ability to take a symbol of the American elite, in this case the machinations of a political convention, and use it as a means to explore the country writ large, including its irrational hatred and fear of homosexuality.
Concerned by possible reports of Russell’s own failing marriage and infidelities, and after learning that the Cantwell campaign intends to weaponize an illegally obtained copy of the candidate’s psychiatry records, Russell’s chief advisor brings into their orbit a man who served with Cantwell in World War II. When the man, Sheldon Bascomb (Shelley Berman), enters their hotel suite to offer dirt on Cantwell, Russell at first declines. But Hockstader, now an ally of the frontrunner, insists they hear him out. “Was he a member of the Communist Party,” the seasoned Hockstader asks. “Or the Ku Klux Klan? Or did he run the other way when the guns went off?” The answer is something more awful. So awful, in fact, Bascomb struggles to get to the point: there were no women on the base, one thing led to another, etc. etc. Euphemisms help them get to the point, and the scene cuts just after Bascomb is asked to sit down and share every detail.
Language and the absurd fear of it comes to mirror the tension of the political convention itself. Once Cantwell is made aware of Bascomb’s presence, he and Russell meet alone. Bascomb, Cantwell says, is “trying to smear me as a homosexual, which I am not.” For such a groundbreaking moment in Hollywood, Robertson says the word like he would any other. It is Fonda as Russell who seems more uncomfortable. He quickly turns around and denies that he is, in fact, making the charge. The moment makes its usage all the more subversive, as Russell begins to grapple with the depravity of his politicking.
With The Best Man, Vidal seems to anticipate what is to come in the later half of the ’60s. A month before the release of the article in Variety, Vidal appeared on a controversial episode of CBS Reports, “The Homosexuals,” the first network documentary on the subject. In 1968, he sparred with the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. during ABC’s coverage of the convention (as chronicled in Morgan Neville’s 2015 documentary, Best of Enemies). While on TV, a heated argument culminated in Buckley calling Vidal a “queer,” a word that has since been reclaimed but at the time was an insult worthy of news coverage all its own. The moment between Russell and Cantwell plays as a complete inverse of the Buckley-Vidal exchange, yet equally revealing of the hate and political power wielded by such words and their implications.
Any discussion of this phenomena in The Best Man runs the risk of forgetting one thing: the absurdity with which Vidal treats the political process and the convention itself. In The Best Man, Vidal shows just how easily the democratic process can become infected and upended. It is not merely a media and political spectacle, but a site of moral degradation. Perhaps our greatest mistake is that we take it and the people who run it too seriously. Early in the film, when asked why she returned to the convention to be at her estranged husband’s side, Russell’s wife Alice (Margaret Leighton) says, “It looked amusing.”
