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The novelist, playwright, pundit, essayist, actor and scourge of conservative politics, the Kennedy clan and Truman Capote couldn’t get the phone to work.

“It’s been happening to me all over the country,” Gore Vidal said, poking at buttons on the phone that had just rung in his suite at the Four Seasons Hotel. No one was on the line, despite the flashing red light, despite the now-random button pushing.

Vidal finally shrugged in defeat, a role he plays neither well nor often. At 72, he remains as tall and elegantly dressed as one’s recollection of him, though he has gotten a good deal chunkier than when at his ideal fighting weight.

While always provocative, he is remembered especially for two classic bouts. There was the time on the Dick Cavett Show in the early 1970s when he compared Norman Mailer’s homelife to Charles Manson’s, and Mailer responded by questioning Vidal’s sexual preferences. There was also the time, during his 1968 political debates with conservative patrician William F. Buckley, that liberal patrician Vidal hit the master of the flared nostrils with “crypto-fascist” and Buckley counterpunched the king of the ironic half-smile with “You queen!”

Vidal was in Chicago to promote his newest novel, “The Smithsonian Institution” (Random House), and to do a reading from it to kick off the ninth annual Chicago Humanities Festival.

“I’ve never done a reading before,” he said, then with mock irritation, added, “Isn’t it enough that I write them?”

“Them” is some 40 books–novels, plays, collections of essays and short stories, plus a memoir. The latest novel, Vidal said, combines his “reflective” tradition (“Lincoln,” “Burr”) with the “inventive” tradition of “Myra Breckinridge.” The title and setting of the novel are a place that loomed in Vidal’s youth.

As a boy, he lived in Washington, D.C., with his grandfather, the legendary blind senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma.

“Every kid who grows up in Washington inevitably tours two places,” he said, “the FBI headquarters and the Smithsonian. I didn’t have a fetish about the Smithsonian, though looking like a castle as it does, it is a romantic presence. Also a bit of my personal history is there.”

Vidal’s father, Eugene, was director of the Bureau of Air Commerce under Franklin D. Roosevelt and wanted to promote the idea that flying was suitable for everyday family transportation. He gathered a Pathe news film crew at a local airfield and, while the film rolled, had a 10-year-old boy–his boy, Gore–slip behind the controls of a tiny Hammond aircraft, take off, circle and land.

“That plane now hangs in the Smithsonian,” Vidal said, “but there’s no way I could fit into it anymore.”

As the repository of the nation’s past, the Smithsonian is a natural site for the novel’s time travel and the jumps between parallel universes that drive much of the book’s plot. That, of course, brought up Monica Lewinsky.

Vidal was asked if– as in the novel, where people and events scattered through history are brought together, as if concurrent– allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of the current president give him a case of the deja views going back to the Kennedy White House.

“Jack was a sui generis,” said Vidal, who shares family ties with Jacqueline Kennedy in that they both had Hugh Auchincloss for a stepfather. “Jack was totally reckless. I think he knew he was going to have a short life, and he wanted to get everything in. He said that the constant escapades eased the terrible headaches he had. He thought that as long as he was alive, no paper would go into print with this–if you’re William Randolph Hearst, you’re not going to blow the whistle on Jack–and after he was dead, he didn’t care.

“Jack and Jackie were an 18th Century amoral couple with a marriage of convenience. I don’t know that much about Bill and Hillary. I assume she knows, but power in Washington is much more important than marriage.

“Having been brought up in a company town in a family that worked for the company, I’m not surprised by the current scandals. You have to be an energetic extrovert to get to Congress or the White House, what animal behavior experts call an `alpha male.’ What has not really come out is that women are always hitting on the president, and some of them can be strange. Remember Clint Eastwood’s movie `Play Misty for Me’? This Monica, she’s Misty.

“When Clinton gave that six-hour deposition, he should have said, `Don’t ask; don’t tell.’ I would have said that this is none of your business, and if you don’t like it, take it to the Supreme Court. As creepy as the Court is, I think they’d be nervous about taking on this mess.

“One of the governors of Louisiana once said, `No man can defeat me unless I get caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.’ My grandfather once said, `No problem with a woman ever cost a vote,’ and he was charged with rape, twice, and he was blind.”

“My Italian friends are mystified by the press coverage here,” noted Vidal, who has homes in Los Angeles and on the Amalfi Coast in Italy, the latter residence a 1925 villa, Villa Rondinaia (Swallow’s Nest), overlooking the Bay of Salerno. “I’ve never read a story on the private life of any Italian politician. No one there cares. It’s like when the Italians hear of antisodomy laws here, and they ask me, `Who would pass such a law?’ “

Vidal said his third novel, “The City and the Pillar,” an overt treatment of homosexuality in the 1940s, thrilled other young novelists of his generation because “they knew they now had one less competitor to worry about. The effects of publishing that novel lasted a long time. I’m included in syllabuses now, but for most of my career, I’ve been anathema to school boards.”

His view of sexuality, expressed in his 1979 essay “Sex is Politics,” is that “there is no such thing as a homosexual person, just as there is no such thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people.”

He has said, too, that Truman Capote did more damage to the nation’s dealings with homosexuality “than any other figure including Anita Bryant (an orange juice spokeswoman and outspoken opponent of gays).”

He suspects that “a Gore will become president, but it will be the wrong one.” Vidal, Al Gore’s cousin, ran for Congress twice. He says he won’t run again.

“I was brought up to be a politician,” he said, “but I was born to be a writer. You can’t do both. The essence of writing is the truth. The essence of politics is never to give the game away. I happened to be standing next to (then-Idaho Sen.) Frank Church when Jimmy Carter–he’s a fifth cousin twice removed, not so surprising in that the South is about half Carters and half Gores–gave the speech in which he said he’d never lie to the American people. Church said, `He (Carter) would deny the very nature of politics.’ Later Carter’s mother, Miz Lillian, was asked about the speech. `Now I have to lie for two,’ she said.”

Vidal has been talking with Seymour Hersh, author of “The Dark Side of Camelot,” about dramatizing the book, but doesn’t think it will work out. In the meantime, it’s back to touring for his Smithsonian book, city after city, treacherous phone upon treacherous phone, and the growing realization that “everyone I know is dead or in Boston.”