The Hot Seat: Gore Vidal  Still belligerent after all these
years ... Gore Vidal says he "never gave a goddamn about my
reputation".  Still belligerent after all these years ... Gore
Vidal says he "never gave a goddamn about my reputation". Photo:
Eamonn McCabe  I'm not paranoid ... I have enemies. Very real
ones. John Preston December 16, 2006  Midway through my
conversation with Gore Vidal I ask him if he has ever in his
life felt socially inferior to anyone. Down the phone line from
Los Angeles comes an incredulous popping sound followed by a
familiar honeyed drawl. "That really would be the trick of the
week, wouldn't it? Inferior? No, why should I?"  At 81, Vidal is
confined to a wheelchair these days. But while his voice may be
more frail and his famous quiff less magisterial, he can still
do queenly hauteur like no one else. As the critic John Lahr
once wrote, "No one pisses from the height that Vidal does." In
Vidal's latest book, a memoir entitled Point to Point
Navigation, he adroitly skewers old ad