Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  At graduation Vidal had just come from a year of athletic triumphs in football that equaled his achievements of 1916 and were his best ever in track and field. And he had led his class in mathematics. Now he was a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers in what soon, in November 1918, became a peacetime Army again. Athletics, though, was still a ticket to prominence. The Army always delighted in showcasing itself. Soon Gene was playing basketball and football for the Army command centers to which he was assigned, first at Fort Humphreys in Virginia, near Washington, whose basketball team he captained, and then at Fort Howard, where he led the Army team through its football schedule. In June 1920, having won the decathlon at the Army championship games, he was chosen by the Army as its track-and-field representative to the Seventh Olympic Games to be held in Antwerp, Belgium. That summer, in Pershing Stadium in France, he won second place in the pentathlon. There were banner headlines in America. In late summer he returned home, first to New York, then to Fort Humphreys. Margaret Vidal came by herself to New York to see her triumphant son. At a football game to which he took her, the public-address system announced to the huge audience the presence of the newly returned Olympic star. The crowd applauded enthusiastically. When the basketball season began, he and his Army teammates went to play a game at Langley Field, Virginia. For fun, the Army pilots took them all up for a spin. Immediately sold on flying, he and his roommate asked for transfers to the Army Air Service and were sent to Carlston Field, Arcadia, Florida, for training. He had found his second passion. There he trained in World War I “Jennys” and, as always, starred in interservice games. The next year he had his wings. On a visit to New York, the handsome twenty-six-year old Army pilot and athlete met the attractive, flirtatious eighteen-year-old Nina Gore, the daughter of the senator from Oklahoma. In December 1921 the Washington newspapers announced the engagement. They were to be married early in the new year.

  The Gore and the Vidal family names were united on a cold day in January 1922, at Washington’s St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, perfumed by pink roses and illuminated with soft candles. Nina, “attended by four bridesmaids, wore a gown of soft duchess satin trimmed with rose point lace.” The groom and five of his ushers were in uniform. Newspaper accounts, which celebrated this Washington occasion, did not fail to mention that the ceremony took place “before a distinguished company representative of diplomatic, senatorial, congressional and residential society.” At the last moment the bride’s mother arrived, accompanied by the family doctor, apparently also a family friend. The senator was not there. Newspaper accounts stated that “Mr. Gore and Thomas Gore, Jr. were prevented from attending the ceremony by their attending physician.”

  What they were ill of or whether they were ill at all is not clear. Perhaps the senator was kept away by the “severe bruises” he had received in an automobile accident the week before in, of all places, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he had gone to give a speech. Perhaps flu, a life-threatening illness then, prevented the senator from attending. Perhaps he simply did not want to be at the wedding, since he did not think his daughter ready for marriage. A miscarriage kept away the only Vidal invited, Gene’s sister Lurene. The groom apparently made sure his provincial father and obese mother did not come. Certainly the Democratic Gores and the Republican Vidals would not have been readily compatible. At the Congressional Club, friends of Mrs. Gore, who went home immediately after the ceremony, received the guests. That evening the bride and groom left for Fort Sill, Oklahoma, “where Lieut. Vidal is stationed.” The handsome young officer had the pleasure of bringing “home” with him his young and beautiful bride. At last liberated from parental oversight and thrilled by the adventure of it all, the virginal Nina probably felt she was now starting her real life. Later, her son recalled, she told the story that “on her wedding night … when she lost her virginity she wet the bed which she always felt cast a pall over the marriage…. She was virginal, so she always maintained, and my father never said a word to the contrary.”

  Born in Lawton, Oklahoma, in July 1903, Nina (pronounced NÉYEna) was a beautiful, lively child, the first of the two Gore children. That the Gores had any children at all was a surprise to the Senator and an annoyance to Nina Belle, who already had her hands full looking after a blind husband. She later told her grandson that rats had gnawed at her douche bag. To start her on the road to a useful life, her parents sent Nina to the Georgetown Convent School, in Washington, then to Holton Arms School. Nina had more interest in playing than studying. From childhood on, she was unconventionally beautiful, a slim, attractive figure, slightly bulging dark eyes, sharply defined full lips, and a decisive nose. Her hair was dark, usually cut short, flapper style. Less than medium height, she was appealingly petite. Her beauty was, nevertheless, aggressive. She let you know she was there. A member of the Junior League, she appeared regularly at all the places glamorous young Washingtonians should. A good athlete, with excellent hand-eye coordination, at school she had a heavy crush on an older girl, a star athlete with whom she exchanged vows of eternal friendship. Later she resented that her parents had not educated her for high society. She had not been “exposed,” she complained. After Holton Arms, which she left without graduating, she refused even to consider going to college. Books were not her thing. She loved partying. Two centuries of Gore-family pioneers, farmers, lawyers, doctors—hardworking avatars of the republic’s obsession with being serious—had unexpectedly produced a Jazz Age playgirl. The sober Senator, who had come to Washington “direct,” so to speak, from the hardworking frontier territories, had a daughter whose highest devotion was to having a good time.

  As to a profession, marriage would take care of that. For a moment, after her marriage, she fantasized about an acting career, like Tallulah Bankhead’s, whose friend she was to become, or Joan Crawford’s, almost her exact contemporary. She had one week on the stage in a road-show production of The Sign of the Leopard, at Washington’s National Theater, chosen from among attractive young Washingtonians by a well-known actor-producer of the day who always cast a local girl in a bit part to increase attendance on tour. For Nina, it led neither to further roles nor to a screen test. Her bemused father remarked, “She wants to be a movie star without going to acting school. She doesn’t feel she needs preparation for anything.” Apparently the beautiful daughter of a powerful senator need not worry about taking care of herself. She would be taken care of. And she could handle herself. She constantly fought with her mother, in rebellion against limitations and rules. She idolized her father, his strength, his determination, his influence. That she was the daughter of such a man was one of the strongest elements in her self-definition. She loved him with an intensity that partly determined her relationships with men in her adult life. The Senator, in her eyes, could do no wrong. Her mother was mostly a bothersome rival and a nagging enforcer of rules for ordinary people.

  At Fort Sill, Nina discovered that being an Army bride was not as glamorous as she had expected. Of course, Gene’s Army buddies were fun. So too the drinking parties, though she was no doubt unhappily surprised to learn that in the Army’s gender-segregated society the men had rituals from which Army wives were excluded. To her delight, she had a sleek black convertible roadster that, with her excellent coordination and love of speed, she drove with brilliant abandon. When she posed for photographs, her dark, explosive beauty and the car’s sleek darkness seemed a perfect fit. How ironic, though, to be back in the dust bowl of her birth, from which her family had escaped. Gene’s interest was less in parties than in flying. More than anything, his work absorbed him. By temperament he was elegantly serious. If he was glamorous, he was rarely self-conscious or purposeful about it. Late hours did not appeal to him. The ascent to high rank would undoubtedly be slow, even for the talented and well connected. From Fort Sill they happily went to West Point, where Gene had been appointed the first instructor of aeronautics, an assistant football coach, and coach of track and field. West Point was delighted to hav
e him back. No one minded that his teaching assignment mostly provided cover for his contribution to the athletic program. His fame had made him a West Point legend: heads turned at the mention of his name. With his flying wings, his engineering degree, and his amiable camaraderie, he seemed a natural choice for the position. He even looked the role. As much as he enjoyed flying itself, he had no special desire to set records. Perhaps he felt he had already set, as an athlete, his fair share. His focus was on the engineering challenges of flight, on how aviation might change the world. But for the time being he thought mostly about athletics. Soon track and field at the academy were revivified. By spring 1923 he had convinced the West Point authorities that his athletes deserved the opportunity to compete in the tryouts for the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. For the first time, at Yankee Stadium in September, Army track and field athletes competed away from home. In March 1924 the Olympic Committee asked him to coach the American decathlon and pentathlon teams.

  Nina also was delighted to be at West Point. It was much nearer Washington and New York than Fort Sill. Still, life even at the Point was not as fast or as glamorous as she would have liked. She had married, she believed, a man on the rise, a famous athlete whom she would accompany in his ascension into higher spheres. But that would not happen at West Point, and an Army paycheck did not go far, especially toward the cost of a New York or Washington social life. Whether or not marital trouble was already brewing in paradise is unclear. She had married a quiet man of Midwestern equanimity. Excessive temperament and explosive temper seemed to him anathema. It would drain the life out of home, work, and play. Nina, on the contrary, thrived on attitude, on emotional and verbal vividness, on exaggerated gestures of temperament and language. Argument was her mode. Fighting gave her a charge. It was often the necessary prelude to sex. Gene could not have found this readily assimilable to his temperament and to his view of what a satisfactory marriage should be. He certainly did not want to play his mother to Nina’s version of his father. West Point Army society would have found Nina a handful, not that its hard-drinking crowd of officers and their wives did not often enjoy her company. Prohibition made liquor even more pleasurably racy and exciting. She soon discovered she had a taste for it. Though a little went a long way, she gradually increased her tolerance. Gene hardly drank, partly by temperament; also, it was not compatible with his devotion to athletics and coaching. To him, late nights and hard drinking seemed mostly a bore. As the daughter of a famous senator, Nina treated West Point as an extension of Washington. Influence counted. She regularly parked her roadster in the superintendent’s restricted parking space. At first with noblesse oblige and then with exasperation, Douglas MacArthur explained to her that the parking space was his. Army regulations required that the superintendent had to park in his own parking spot. Apparently Nina paid no attention.

  When she became pregnant in early 1925, the decision to leave the fortress on the Hudson was an easy one. They had been there almost three years. Bored as an Army wife, Nina must have anticipated she would be even more bored (and burdened) as the mother of an Army brat. And they needed more than Army pay. Also, Gene’s enthusiasm was turning to commercial aviation, a new industry that would require its dreamers, planners, administrators, heroes, some of whom would become rich and famous. That Gene actually wanted to be a father is doubtful. For his career and his pocketbook, the timing was inconvenient. Probably the news came as a surprise. Nina, who may have seen her pregnancy as a ticket back to civilization, gave birth to an eight-pound boy at the Cadet Hospital at 11 A.M., Saturday, October 3, 1925. Major Howard Snyder, later to become the White House physician to President Eisenhower, was the first to hold the healthy child. A month later, with their one-month-old infant, Nina and Gene moved from West Point to the nation’s capital. They were to stay temporarily with her parents at the Gores’ newly built house in Rock Creek Park. The baby’s cradle there was a chest of drawers. Gene had resigned from the Army. Nina was thrilled to be back in town.

  Chapter Two

  A Washington Childhood

  1925-1939

  “If recurrent dreams can be relied on,” Gore Vidal recalled, “I … have a memory of being born. I am in a narrow tunnel. I cannot move forward or backward. I wake up in a sweat. Nina’s pelvis was narrow and I was delivered clumsily, with forceps, by a doctor not used to deliveries: he was officer of the day in the Cadet Hospital.” In The Season of Comfort, an autobiographical novel of his early adulthood, he dramatized his mother’s pain and the child’s birth struggle. “The child was partly born; it seemed reluctant to leave the darkness of the womb. But she would scream now. She would scream until she had thrown this thing out of her, until she had dragged her child into the light the living saw.” His earliest vivid memory is of having his head stuck between the slats of a playpen in his bedroom at his grandparents’ house, the beginning of his lifelong claustrophobia. His grandmother, who came in response to his screams, immediately freed him. He later remembered it as if the playpen were a prison and his much-loved grandmother his liberator. His mother was, as usual, someplace else, an emotional as well as a physical location. Though she later boasted she had breast-fed him to the age of one, she also thought it great fun to tell people that she never stopped smoking while the baby nursed. “She could draw a funny picture of her dutifully breast-feeding me while talking to people with ash like Vesuvius on my head,” Gore Vidal recalled. She did not mind people seeing her body. She would hold court even on the toilet seat, with the bathroom door open. Hers was never a household in which the body was private. Partly it was because she had imbibed child-raising theories that advocated naturalness, parents and children seeing one another naked. She was, though, proud of her body and challenged her parents and the general puritan world with her amused indifference to their inhibitions. She was never indifferent to herself, to her claims to attention, admiration, and privilege.

  For Gore, childhood was imprisonment, victimization. Later he was to see its drama as his attempt to leave it behind as quickly as possible. At best, parents and children spoke a different language, had different assumptions. Their interests usually diverged. At worst, they were enemies. Dependency, he was to conclude later, inevitably meant abuse. Parents, families, schools were like the slats of the playpen, the prison-house of the world, the incarcerating narrow pelvis twisting and forcing the child to take on the contours imposed by circumstances. The most unavoidable victimization was mortality itself. Not unexpectedly, his baby pictures show a seemingly happy, well-fed boy, with an inquisitive look and the possibility if not the fact of a smile. This was a resilient child. The bureau drawer at his grandfather’s house was probably a cozy place to be. His mother breast-fed him successfully, though one year seemed enough. Easily bored, keenly concerned about keeping her figure, she quickly resumed her social life, turning him over to the bottle and nannies. Gene, who soon took the family westward to the University of Oregon, where he briefly served as head football coach, had on his mind the challenge of life and career after the Army. Still in demand as an athlete, he played professional football that year. But one football season at Eugene, Oregon, was enough. He was soon looking at other possibilities, particularly commercial aviation. It too would keep him on the move. Father and son were Big Gene and Little Gene. Big Gene had no hesitation leaving wife and child at the home of his in-laws, who, despite wondering how all this was going to turn out, found their son-in-law charming and likable. He was easy to have around. So too was Little Gene, whom his grandmother immediately adored. Nina Belle Gore, though, could have readily done without her daughter. When she was at home, there was never peace in the house. The boy himself was a pleasure, and his grandfather, when it became clear that Little Gene might be parked with them for long periods, began to make plans for him.

  The Senator was in that worst of all places for a professional politician, out of office. Stubbornly independent, he had come to Washington in 1907 at the age of thirty-seven. Over the years he had n
ever stopped learning things that interested him, especially monetary policy, trade, agriculture, and oil. He had become wise and sometimes cynical about the ways of Washington. About the damned human race he had begun to say that if there were any other, he would join it. In his heart and in some of his politics, he was still a grassroots populist and a fiercely aggressive individualist. At the Democratic convention of 1908, in Denver, he had made a brief but brilliant speech, though he had not been on the program and had been called on to speak extemporaneously during a lull. His speech had turned the convention to William Jennings Bryan. The Senator knew whom he favored and what he himself stood for. He believed in basic truths about money, work, nature, and human nature. Any nation or politician who denied them would, in the end, be decisively corrected. When root issues were at stake, he never varied, a combination of principle and stubbornness that verged on but never quite became arrogance. “‘After I nominated [Bryan] at Denver,’” he later remarked to his grandson, “‘we rode back to the hotel in the same carriage and he turned to me and said, “You know, I base my political success on just three things.”’ The old man paused for dramatic effect. ‘What were they?’” his grandson asked. “‘I’ve completely forgotten,’ he said. ‘But I do remember wondering why he thought he was a success.’” After a truncated initial term, having drawn the short straw when Oklahoma entered the Union, he was reelected for a full term and, in 1914, elected again. Even in the faction-ridden, backstabbing politics of Oklahoma, he had proved a success. Like his state, he held conservative views on economics and civil rights. He supported both small farmers and the emerging oil industry, and became the key figure in the creation of soil-conservation legislation and the oil-depletion allowance. Known for his integrity, he was both a flinty campaigner and an unbribable politician who lived exclusively on his salary. To some his blindness seemed an affliction that had raised him above ordinary limitations, a sign of integrity.