the audience laughed, the moment passed, and cavett went down to other arenas. the lawyer complimented her afterwards on a nice show and she was stashed away. january 24, 1980. two months later, alone in her bedroom, lillian watched the show on a cold saturday night. listen to mary mccarty mccarthy accused her of being a liar. when i buy the accusations of stalinism and unwarranted sympathy for the soviet union which followed the publication. tired of the never-ending negativity by her personalized self-aggrandizing nature, she was unprepared for this new assault. the following morning she called her own friend and lawyer from london. one of the two people to whom she had dedicated the memoir. she wanted to know if there were grounds for a lawsuit. and they agreed that there might be. during this time, she demanded to know why he hadn't descended. she would be suing the whole darn bunch of you, cavett recall her telling him. very mccarthy heard rumors of a pending lawsuit. on february 18, a servicemen knocked on her door and was handed the formal notice. it had

. >> brown: provocateur-- here going at it with norman mailer on the dick cavett show-- wit, polemicistlebrity: gore vidal was all those things and more. but first and foremost, he was a writer. author of numberous essays, two memoirs, and some 25 novels-- from historical fiction on the likes of "burr" and "lincoln" to "myra breckenridge", his black comedy about a transexual. an early work, "the city and the pillar", about a young man discovering his homosexuality, caused a scandal when it came out in 1948. in a 2006 interview, vidal had this to say. >> it was a book about the absolute normality of same- sexuality, as it was sometimes called. remember, i spent all my life not only in boys' schools, but here i am stuck in three years of the army. i knew exactly what went on in the real world. it was walt whitman who said, "no one will ever know what goes on in armies." everybody thought it was the bloodshed and so on. whitman was after different game. i knew what went on in the real world, and i thought, well, nobody would write about it. >> brown: he also wrote for films-- helping scrip