It Goes By Awfully Fast

From Charles McGrath's elegant obituary of Gore Vidal (he's shown with George McGovern at the Nixon library in 2009), an always-timely warning:

In 2003 Mr. Vidal and his companion, [Howard] Austen, who was ill, left their cliffside Italian villa La Rondinaia (the Swallow’s Nest) on the Gulf of Salerno and moved to the Hollywood Hills to be closer to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Mr. Austen died that year, and in “Point to Point Navigation,” his second volume of memoirs, Mr. Vidal recalled that Mr. Austen asked from his deathbed, “Didn’t it go by awfully fast?”

“Of course it had,” Mr. Vidal wrote. “We had been too happy and the gods cannot bear the happiness of mortals.” Mr. Austen was buried in Washington in a plot Mr. Vidal had purchased in Rock Creek Cemetery. The gravestone was already inscribed with their names side by side.

Franked Male

Charles McGrath, going deeper with "Frost/Nixon" actor Frank Langella that most reporters, reveals the key role played by a fellow Frank at The New Nixon as he prepared to portray 37:

To prepare for the role Mr. Langella visited the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., spent hours watching tape at the Paley Center for Media, the broadcasting museum in Manhattan and interviewed Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Frank Gannon — anyone he could think of who actually knew Nixon.

Read about Langella's visit to the Nixon Library here.