"You are quite necessary to me as you know."

-- Gore Vidal

For years I'd wondered about the relationship between Gore Vidal and Anais Nin. She romanticized him in "The Diary of Anais Nin," while he famously trashed her. I wanted to know why, so with my motivation spurred after his death on July 31, 2012 I sought access to Nin's archive. The original materials of her famous, sprawling diary and her "unexpurgated" diaries, including "Henry and June" (and the up-coming installment, "Mirages"), are stored at UCLA's beautiful Westwood campus.

I entered the cool, wood-paneled room that is the Special Collections Library and there, under the watchful eye of librarians, I examined the contents of Nin's files. The portions of her diary that have been published are voluminous, but the raw diary is gargantuan, containing many thousands of pages describing the period between 1914, when she began writing as an eleven year old Spanish girl en route to America by boat, to 1977 when she died in Los Angeles. Deeply immersed in Nin's handwritten pages, searching for clues, I found actual letters from Vidal to Nin and therein uncovered the truth.

Both Nin's diary and Vidal's memoir describe their initial meeting at a lecture in New York City at the end of 1945. She was an exotic creature with a lilting European accent, 42 years old, and still 20 years away from international fame. Vidal was the patrician grandson of a senator, about to become a published novelist, and only twenty years old. His memoir admits he might have "flirted" with Nin and states he went on to become "ensorcelled" by her. Her diary reports he asked for permission to visit that first night when he impressed her with his "manliness," "poise," and "greater worldliness."

Nin's diary entries suggest that six weeks after meeting, the two were behaving like jealous lovers. Vidal, Nin wrote, told her he was happiest with her and asked her to send away her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, so Vidal could have her all to himself. Their intense bond, according to Nin's raw diary, seems to have been colored by mutual attraction that was "undeniable, inescapable," but she wrote that because Vidal was homosexual, the pull between them could never be fulfilled. She encouraged him to undergo psychoanalysis. His response? According to her diary, he said, "Then I would become normal and take you away from Hugo."

Perhaps predictably, Nin's feelings of attraction for the young Vidal eventually cooled. She referred to their constant flirting as "the most painful of all relationships" and began pulling away. But the relationship was not cooling for Vidal who sent Nin increasingly anxious letters -- letters that are included in her raw diary files.

Stunningly, Nin's diary reports Vidal began begging her to marry him, saying, "I built a house for us." But her emotional bond to Vidal had been irretrievably broken after she read her "portrait" in the manuscript of his third novel, "The City and the Pillar." The novel tells the story of a young man named Jim who was obsessed by a homosexual encounter he had in high school. Jim develops a friendship with an older, exotic woman named Maria, but when they fail to fall into bed together Jim is convinced he is most definitely homosexual. Maria goes on to start an affair with another man and this makes Jim profoundly jealous.

Nin felt Vidal's portrait of her was a distorted caricature and this hurt her deeply. She wrote to him, saying:

I want to protect you the human being from the consequences of this incapacity to love, heighten, or transform, this sort of nausea about people, your poor opinion of them, for it will hurt you.

Nin then agonized about the relationship in the pages of her diary, marveling that she'd made friends with Vidal, but blaming the misunderstanding between them on her "romanticism," "sentimentalism," "great sadness," and "loneliness." She remembered Vidal had described his abandonment by his mother and she worried he'd been "crippled" because of it.

At this juncture the relationship was dead for Nin, but it was still burning for Vidal who scrambled to make extensive changes to his novel and assured her in a letter, "It is a very much better book now."

Then Nin met the actor Rupert Pole at a party in New York and they began a serious romance. According to her diary, Vidal's response was this:

He puts on his glasses and acts like a senator, watching my love life [...] with sad resignation, asking me to marry him, to bear his child by "artificial insemination." He says when no one else wants me he will still love me. [...] And the other night during the party he repeated, "Marry me, marry me, marry me. I will lock you up in Guatemala ...."