Schooling with Oscar Peterson.
“I’m exactly as I appear,” Vidal once said of himself. “There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”
Here’s an excerpt from his memoir about the Fifties.
Now this is unfair of me, because the clip is really about Mailer, but this is what I always think of when I think of Vidal: