Departure Lounge
As Gore settled back into the Hollywood Hills for his “Cedars-Sinai years” in “life’s departure lounge,” he managed to keep writing. Snapshots in History’s Glare is a collection of photographs, letters, movie stills, and other memorabilia from his personal archives, strung together with his reflections (and photo-edited by AIR MAIL’s Ann Schneider). Many of the photographs had been taken by Howard, who’d intended to publish his own collection before he died. “I have now gone through them,” Gore wrote in his introduction to the book, “and as a memorial to him, I am now publishing them.” It would be his final work.
I’d kept in regular touch with him and offered to help promote the book by interviewing him for Vanity Fair. (He’d written for the magazine in the late 90s and early aughts.) He agreed, and we set a date and time to do the interview. When I rang him at the appointed hour, he was miles into the Macallan. We exchanged our usual greetings, then he abruptly announced that the Secret Service had just left. I assumed it was the scotch talking.
