Alternately praised as America's foremost living literary figure and attacked as a deviant subversive, Gore Vidal remains at 73 a protean figure - by turns an intellectual and entertainer, an experimental novelist and experienced polemicist, a sober historian and wicked humorist, a playwright and screenwriter, and in recent years, a movie actor.
In times of international upheaval and political turbulence, particularly sexual scandal, the press beats a path to his door, desperate for his lapidary quotes that elucidate the foggiest controversies. Since Vidal retreats to Italy when he's not on promotional or speaking tours, journalists must make their way to the cliffside town of Ravello, on the Amalfi coast, where his villa, La Rondinaia (The Swallow's Nest) is unreachable by car.
At the end of a long footpath, behind a series of locked gates, down staircases hewn out of stone, one comes to the kind of baronial mansion that seems more appropriate to a millionaire industrialist or a Middle Eastern potentate. Set amid eight acres of terraced gardens and olive groves, the house has heart-stopping views of mountains spilling into the Mediterranean, of pastel villages strewn along the sea coast a thousand feet below, and of a sky whose scudding clouds cast deep blue shadows over the turquoise Gulf of Salerno.
"As you can see," Vidal wisecracks about the place, "my wants are simple." An interviewer once asked whether the setting inspired his writing. Vidal replied that he'd been "inspired to take on a movie project to get the pool finished. That's a powerful inspiration. I always date things by which book, which money, built them."
In short, he comes to Ravello to work, and although he's sometimes criticised as a patrician socialite who goes to too many parties and knows too many non-literary celebrities, he has just published his 25th novel, The Smithsonian Institution. He has also produced 10 collections of essays, a volume of short stories, five plays, a quartet of mysteries written under the pseudonym, Edgar Box, countless scripts for television and film, and a best-selling memoir, Palimpsest, hailed as we are likely to get."
His office resembles a 19th-century gentleman's study - bookshelves, overstuffed velour furniture, an enormous fireplace - crossed with a state-of-the-art communications centre. Phones ring, faxes arrive, and a satellite dish brings in TV stations in different languages from distant continents. A rogue's gallery of photographs gazes down from the walls, and Vidal admits to changing the cast of famous and infamous characters according to his mood. These days there's a snapshot of him with Ethan Hawke - the two acted in the sci-fi film Gattaca - and of Vidal on a visit to the White House where he's shown in conversation with a smiling, meticulously coifed Hillary Clinton. This provides an easy transition to a discussion of Vidal's antic, iconoclastic views on the rapidly unfolding events in Washington.
During Watergate he was quoted as saying he couldn't wait to get out of bed each morning to get his daily fill of the scandal's developments. He doesn't feel the same about President Bill Clinton and Zippergate.
"There is a certain dull monotony to the attacks on Clinton," he says. "For one thing, he himself is well-liked and no one save the mad (all right: half the American people should probably serve some time in a cloistered bin) finds him at all like Nixon who, at every full moon, became a werewolf - to the applause, no doubt, of the binnable half. [Ken] Starr, of course, I consider seriously unhinged in the Elmer Gantry snake-oil selling Jesus-quoting Southern way and I suppose when he finally cracks up on television and bites deep into Tom Brokaw's pretty jugular my jaded attention will finally be caught."
Does he view Clinton's allege d peccadilloes with the same seriousness as Nixon's? And what does he think of the persistent pursuit of the Clintons by special prosecutor, Ken Starr?
"Watergate was the subversion of the constitution by an incumbent president. Clinton's sole crime is not confessing to a grand jury that he likes the odd blow-job, a taste he shares with most of the male population. In respectable societies, gentlemen - and ladies - never discuss their sex lives and if confronted with the subject they are expected - nay, suborned - to lie. In a recent book, The Day America Told The Truth, more than 90 per cent of us confessed to being habitual liars. "Bad lawyers have made a fetish out of perjury, something no other country bothers much with unless some real crime - such as murder - is being investigated. Clinton should have refused to respond to Starr's literally impertinent questions about his private life. If Congress or the Supreme Court were then to order him to respond, he should, under executive powers and through the Justice Department, put the whole lot under oath to discuss their sex lives - the traditions and filing systems of J. Edgar still live at the FBI and Langley. This should have a restraining effect.
"Finally, I would seriously entertain a charge of treason against Starr for trying to overthrow We The People, the source of all legitimacy, by preventing Clinton from the execution of that office we elected him to."
So, to what extent is the sex life of the president a legitimate political concern? Vidal has no doubt. "If he was a sex criminal - rapist, blackmailer - of course it would be relevant. But what consenting adults do. . ."
In his memoir, Palimpsest, Vidal pointed out that the variety and intensity of John Kennedy's sex life bore some resemblance to his own. They both seemed to have subscribed to the theory that one should never turn down an opportunity to be on TV or to have sex. Does he believe that part of Clinton's alleged promiscuity is simply a matter of a famous man having more opportunities?
"Obviously," he responds. "Also, the drive that gets one to the peculiar state of `famous' in a very peculiar country such as the US - superstitious, bigoted and, worst of all, garrulous - is apt to be accompanied by a strong sex drive. The press acts as if Clinton uses his high office to get girls. It is the other way round - it is the high profile that is like catnip to women. Watch them crowd about DiCaprio. Those pubescent girls are going to eat him raw one day - the Bacchae was a realistic play.
But if famous men do have more opportunities, was Marx (Karl, not Groucho) correct when he said that a change in quantity is a change in quality? Again, Vidal doesn't hesitate. "That's one way of looking at it - though most of us prefer quantity to start with. Boys are meant to squirt as often as possible with as many different partners as possible. Girls are designed to take nine months to lay an egg. Different wave-lengths. Groucho Marx at the end of his life was asked if he had it to do all over again what would he do differently? `Try another position.' "
In his recent book about John F. Kennedy, Seymour Hersh suggests that JFK's complicated sex life left him open to blackmail, brought him into contact with lowlife hookers and mobsters, and definitely affected his conduct in office. Does Vidal agree?
"Yes. Though the Giancana connection was forged long before they shared Ms Exner." To what extent might Clinton be accused of similar offences?
"Clinton, as far as we know, is not into crime. The Kennedys, thanks first to Honeyfitz, mayor of Boston, and then to his son-in-law Joe Kennedy, were deeply involved with the Mafia. That was the heart of the Hersh book, but Marilyn Monroe got the headlines as the media cannot bear anything actually true because, sooner or later, they are going to be fingered, too."
Vidal claimed in his autobiography that his relationship with Howard Austen has endured for decades because it is non-sexual. Does he view sex as antithetical to an ongoing relationship? "I've made it a rule never to have sex with friends," he says. "One can always find sex, as Bill will tell you, but one doesn't find friends that easily, as Bill will also tell you."
Vidal's latest novel The Smithsonian Institution, has been described as one of his "inventions" - like Myra Beckinridge. But in view of the zany, self-satirising events currently going on in Washington, does he regard it as social realism?
"Reality seems challenged by my inventions but I still have an edge - until Starr appears in court got up as Myra Breckinridge, in one dress shield, driving me from the field."
He has expressed dissatisfaction with journalists and their tendency to turn interviews into diatribes against him. Is it possible President Clinton is partly a victim of the same sort of misrepresentation?
"When Hillary Clinton came to call a few summers ago we did nothing but trade stories on what people had invented about us. It is not the `diatribes' one minds. It is the quotation of something you never said. This need not be the result of malice. Incompetence is also a journalistic failing."
What does he see as Bill Clinton's lasting legacy? If nothing else, has he changed the nature of political discourse?
"The post-Truman presidents are all fading away, as our empire is doing - too slowly for my taste," he says. "Since we have elections but no politics, Clinton has been the opening wedge for a truly great diversion; the candidates' sex life. This really keeps us away from politics, a subject the owners of the country fear. What is real politics? Who collects what money from whom to spend on whom for what? That's all there is to it, but no politician dares address that subject for fear we'll discover who bought him and for how much, not to mention how the military got us $5 trillion in debt."
What is he writing about now?
"The past, long ago. A `golden' age."
The Smithsonian Institution, by Gore Vidal, will be published later this year by Littlebrown, price, £15.99 in UK