The Best Man

Best Man, The (1960), a play by Gore Vidal. [ Morosco Theatre, 520 perf.] The leading contenders in a battle for the presidential nomination are William Russell (Melvyn Douglas), a gentlemanly liberal of the old school, and Joseph Cantwell (Frank Lovejoy), a calculating, unscrupulous senator. Cantwell obtains a damaging psychiatric analysis once made of Russell and releases it to the press. A feisty ex‐president, Arthur Hockstadter (Lee Tracy), tells Cantwell, “It's not that I mind your being a bastard. . . . It's your being such a stupid bastard, I object to.” Hockstadter leaves the Cantwell camp and joins Russell, whom he urges to make public Cantwell's history of homosexuality. Russell refuses, withdraws from the race, and throws his support to a third candidate. A wittily written, shrewdly observed comedy produced by the Playwrights' Company, it was peopled with figures playgoers recognized as thinly disguised modern political celebrities: Russell was not unlike Adlai Stevenson; Cantwell, Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Hockstadter, Harry Truman. A Broadway revival in 2000 was well received.