When I was in high school, the young Vidal was a regular on the Jack Paar show, the nearest TV has gotten to a salon. I always thought him among the least charming of the guests, so obviously full of himself. He was best known in those days for his plays Visit to a Small Planet and The Best Man. Neither is terribly good - or terribly bad. He achieved notoriety with his novel Myra Breckenridge, which is not very good at all.
(I just came upon this enotes description of Visit to a Small Planet: "Vidal's play pokes fun at the post-World War II fear of Communism and the "Red-baiting" (Senator Joseph McCarthy's house hearings on Un-American Activities) common in the late 1950s ..." Of course, as a senator, McCarthy would have had no connection to the House of Representatives' Un-American Activities Committee. And by the "late 1950s," McCarthy was dead. He died in 1957, and had been censured by the Senate in 1954.)
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