by Fred Kaplan
As the express train left Union Station for Chicago in May 1935, Deenie played in the aisle with a toy silver train much like the Super Chief, which he had been given as a present. “I can remember playing with it, running up and down, wondering why I was doing that. Ordinarily I would be reading.” Nina and he were on their way to Reno. Change and dislocation were becoming familiar to him. Later he was to develop a talent for self-consciously creating attractive places in which to live. Used to traveling from an early age, he was in the future to make certain that he had a home from which to leave and one to which to return. As the train pulled out of the station, Nina broke down and cried. Though she had long fallen out of love with Gene Vidal, she was off into the unknown, leaving one marriage behind, not certain what was next. She could, as always, fall back on her parents. But she (as well as they) would prefer that she manage on her own. She had in mind marrying someone rich. As he saw her tears falling, her son tried to be comforting. He got a nasty look. “That was the last time I made that error.” As the train gathered speed, her spirits quickly improved. They were booked for a six-week stay at a Nevada dude ranch that accommodated ladies who desired to stay the time required to establish Nevada residency. Nina looked forward to having a splendid time in the divorce capital of the world.
The Washington agreement provided her with 40 percent of Gene’s income for “her own use and benefit and the support, maintenance and education of Eugene L. Vidal, Junior, minor son of the parties.” But 40 percent of $8,500 was a small sum on which to maintain her standard of living. Aware of this, she knew that without remarriage her current life was unsustainable. She had no career. She was not about to become a salesgirl to eke out a few dollars to provide a slightly better life for her son. John Hay Whitney was her target, though another eligible man had just appeared on the scene: Hugh D. Auchincloss, a wealthy Washington stockbroker. Of Scots origin, the large, disparate Auchincloss family’s American originator had established himself at the beginning of the nineteenth century in New York City as a dry-goods merchant. An excellent businessman, he soon became rich. Over the next century and a half his descendants prospered in business and/or in economically advantageous marriages. Hugh Auchincloss’s branch had become wealthy through his father’s marriage to Emma Burr Jennings, the daughter of one of John D. Rockefeller’s partners in Standard Oil. An unassuming man, attracted to aggressively high-spirited women, Auchincloss was taken with Nina, with her liveliness, her assertiveness, her sense of entitlement, her wide web of Washington political and social connections. To “Hughdie,” as he was known to his friends, she was an exciting lady. With a son by his first wife, he was now eager to remarry the right woman. Nina at first did not reciprocate. He seemed to her a gray, blank man, hardly there when there. Though rich, he was neither handsome nor glamorous. Her eye, of course, was on Whitney, who had Auchincloss’s main attraction and many others as well. Vidal, of course, needed Nina to remarry someone, the richer the better: 60 percent of $8,500 would not go very far even for an economical bachelor. Her remarriage would reduce his obligation to 20 percent, exclusively for his son’s support. If he himself were to marry Liz, she would make her new husband and son comfortable with the piles of money she would get from Jock. If Nina were to marry Whitney, his money would make life easier for Gene and luxurious for her.
At the TH Ranch near Pyramid Lake north of Reno, they lived in comfortable cabins and dined in the Big House. Nina complained about the food. Gene saw nothing wrong with it except that there was a definite connection between the calves regularly slaughtered, skinned, and dissected in full sight of the paying guests and the tough steak on the table. In this small, fertile valley, surrounded by desert, trees and flowers flourished, horses were cosseted, cattle grazed. At Nina’s insistence Gene had riding lessons. She required that he ride bareback. “She had been told by someone that that was the only way to become a good rider.” His fictional counterpart in The Season of Comfort often goes riding with the niece of the ranch owner, to whom he tells stories about his Washington life. In return she guides him through the desert and shows him where to find gray river clay, which he uses to sculpt. The paint set his mother had given him for his eighth birthday had been put to good use. He had also discovered that he had a talent for making clay heads and figures, an activity that gave him much pleasure throughout his adolescence. The Oz books were on his mind, particularly the magical incantations whose spells and powers he used to imagine himself invisible or others frozen in place. With another divorcée-to-be, whom he remembered simply as Rosemary, he had long conversations. Lonely, good-natured, perhaps missing children of her own, she apparently found the young boy companionable. “My mother hated her, so there were scenes over my talking to Rosemary.” Meanwhile, Nina was busy, enjoying the cowboys, some of whom considered the ladies-in-residence a fringe benefit.
As usual, “Nina was popular at the ranch,” or such is the way Gore Vidal later depicted her in his fictional version. She loved playing cowgirl. “Every evening she went into Reno or to another ranch for parties. He didn’t see her very much. When he did, she criticized his riding. If he complained about anything, the food, for instance, in imitation of her, she would tell him to stop his ‘beefing’; she used many Western phrases now and she swore a great deal.” One of her favorite phrases, “Let’s face it,” usually followed by some amazing realization about herself or others, such as “Let’s face it, I’m just too self-sacrificing,” began to ring in his ears. Suddenly Hugh Auchincloss appeared. In pursuit of Nina he had made the long train trip from Washington. Nina met him at the station in Reno. “Looking out of place in his banker’s suit,” pale against the deep tan of Nina and son, he probably had already proposed marriage. “Would he like him for a stepfather?” Nina privately asked Little Gene. “I said no, largely on aesthetic grounds.” There was nothing dislikable about Auchincloss. But in comparison to his graceful father, Hugh, with his business suit, his owlish glasses, and his stammer seemed dull and cumbersome. Gene much preferred Jock Whitney. So too did Nina.
After the divorce was granted in Reno on July 3, they immediately returned to Washington, from which young Gene was shipped up to William Lawrence Camp again, for his second summer, much like the first. He would have preferred to stay with his grandparents at Rock Creek Park. Gene and Nina had each taken apartments, Nina at the well-known Wardman Park Hotel. Gene was busy at the Commerce Department and around the country, Liz Whitney much on his arm at social events. They were also in one another’s arms. Many expected the couple switch to take place, the marriage partners to be exchanged. Soon Liz was to start divorce proceedings. But the negotiations were to be difficult, the lawyers’ bills immense. Whitney’s attorneys took a hard line. “So Liz, thinking of the best way of fighting back, just went over to the White House one day to see Franklin Roosevelt,” Gore Vidal later remarked. “Just like that. No appointment. In fact, she used to go over about once a month and ask for all the news so that she didn’t have to read the newspapers. And the President would gladly give her a general rundown on what was going on in the country. And this time she went in and said, ‘Look, Jock and I have come to the end,’ and here is Roosevelt sitting with the whole world falling to pieces about him: ‘I’ve got to get a good divorce lawyer.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was never a divorce lawyer, but my partner, Miles Hern, is very good at trusts.’ ‘I took Franklin’s word for it,’ she later said, ‘and I got cheated. By Jock’s people anyway.’” Fortunately, neither Liz nor Gene was under extreme financial pressure. Liz was wealthy. Gene had enough on which to manage. Nina, though, was in trouble. In response to Hugh’s proposal, Nina had said, “Oh, nonsense!” But in early July the Associated Press story on the divorce had reported that “Mrs. Vidal was recently reported to be planning a second marriage to Hugh D. Auchincloss, Washington broker, but her attorney … said he was ‘personally satisfied’ she had no such intention, at least for the present.”
Back from summer camp, now in fift
h grade at Friends, on the evening of his tenth birthday Gene was delighted to welcome his father’s visit to his mother’s apartment. His parents appeared more relaxed with one another than ever before, which he attributed to the divorce. On the subject of Deenie, Nina was expansively self-congratulatory. What an excellent job she had done as a single parent! Actually, she had been a single parent for only two months, and he had been at home with her only since the beginning of September. “Gene politely agreed with her. Then they discussed money, an urgent subject, always, with her, and one of no interest to him or me. I fell asleep,” Gore Vidal wrote in his memoir. “I gather now what they had really discussed was the necessity of her marriage to Hugh D.” Whitney had disappointed her. That marriage was not going to happen; it was time for the fallback position. While Auchincloss was on vacation in Europe, Nina had reached the glum conclusion that, with limited means and no Whitney, she was going to marry “the last person on earth she wanted to marry.” Hughdie had apparently given Nina a marital blank check. He awaited her signature. Excited by Nina’s attractions, he was eager for marriage to one of Washington’s most glamorous ladies. In anticipation, he purchased a fifty-acre estate on the south bank of the Potomac in McLean, Virginia, where he was building a huge neo-Georgian brick house called Merrywood, reminiscent of Mount Vernon in design but not scale. Nina made a condition of her consent that Hughdie not insist on their having sexual relations, “an informal prenuptial agreement” that “theirs would be a mariage blanc,” partly because she found him unattractive. She also believed, so she told her son, Hughdie was partly or mostly impotent. Though enchanted by his bride-to-be, he was still lucid enough to require a prenuptial agreement that granted Nina in the event of divorce only a fixed income of $1,000 a month for life. It was a substantial sum at a time when a United States senator’s salary was $15,000 a year. But there was no provision for inflation. Why Nina allowed herself to be excluded from all claim against Hughdie’s wealth beyond this amount is not clear. Apparently, though flexible on much else, he (or his lawyers and friends) were unalterable on this point. Hughdie assumed that Nina would be alterable on her condition about their sexual life. At least that was an “informal agreement.”
Soon after his tenth birthday, sitting in class, young Gene was called out by his teacher. There had been a telephone call. Would he please come to the office? His mother was about to be married, and he was wanted at the wedding. “The announcement comes as a surprise,” Washington was to learn in the next day’s newspaper, “to members of Capital society, as no previous announcement had been made, although rumors had predicted the event since Mrs. Vidal returned from Reno several months ago.” In a ceremony performed by a Presbyterian minister as the mid-October twilight darkened, Nina changed her name from Vidal to Auchincloss. She was now married to one of the wealthiest men in Washington. Little seemed to faze her, including that she did not in the least love him. For the second time her father was not at her wedding. Both her parents were in distant Oklahoma, the Senator preparing for his primary campaign the next spring. Relations between Nina and her parents were no better than they had ever been. This time “the bride wore a frock of dark gray velveteen fashioned with long sleeves and an ankle-length skirt.” She looked beautiful, though noticeably less youthfully innocent than in her first wedding pictures thirteen years before. When the wedding story appeared the next day in the Washington Post under the heading “An Attractive Autumn Bride,” Nina and young Gene were already in their new home.
Chapter Three
First Flight
1935-1939
The descent down the hazardous rocky decline from the lawn at Merrywood to the banks of the Potomac he found both exhilarating and frightening. The river ran swiftly, especially in bad weather, white water breaking around small snags and islands. Warned never to swim in it, he was attracted to the river then and later in lifelong dreams that had a touch of nightmare to them, the descent “to the swift mud-brown, swirling river—going faster and faster, ecstatically unable to stop until the dream’s end.” The river was excitement, escape. Standing grandly on the high bluff, Merrywood was dull, problematic, philistine. The morning of his first night there, in mid-October 1935, he found his mother, wrapped in a dark-gray silk dressing gown, sitting on a step of the main staircase below the bedrooms. Probably, as always, she was smoking. This time she was flicking the ashes of dissatisfaction. During her nuptial night she had seen the abyss. Her complacency and self-confidence had been shaken. Sex with Hugh Auchincloss was a disaster. Could she face a lifetime of that? “Would you like us both to leave here and go back to live with your father?” she asked. Stunned, he mumbled that they had just arrived. Nina, according to her son, soon raised with Gene Vidal the possibility of a reconciliation. He politely declined. She later widely reported that he had asked her to return to him, an offer she had declined because young Gene had stated that he preferred the advantages of life at Merrywood. She may have meant that she herself preferred them. Soon she learned to cope with Hugh’s inadequacies as a lover. Eager for satisfaction, she found it in other places. Yusha, Hugh’s son by his first marriage, tactfully remarked that Nina “did some things which hurt my father a great deal, and I was very close to my father and I resented that.” Even young Gene came to sympathize with Hugh. Merrywood’s only practical disadvantage was that it kept him away from what he thought his true home, at Rock Creek Park. Like Aristodemos, he felt in exile from Athens.
At Merrywood, Nina had no need of her mother to take care of Gene. “We were brought up by servants. It was the servants you played games with,” servants such as Marguerite, Yusha’s French governess. “I had a black nurse called Annie, and there were the servants of the house like Maria, my mother’s maid. They kept us company.” It was far from all bad. Maria “was a wonderful Bavarian woman, a great deal of fun. She spoke with a heavy accent…. We used to have seltzer fights in the pantry, the two of us. She seemed a hundred to me. But she was about fifty.” Yusha’s governess, whom Gene adored, also found him grown-up enough to play games with, his sexual initiation, though Gore Vidal declines to say exactly what they did. Jealous, protective, sensing something erotic between Marguerite and Gene, Nina fired her. She also gradually cleaned out the servants inherited from Hugh’s first wife, including the Russian cook whose aromatic dishes Gene had found one of the most attractive aspects of Merrywood when he had first arrived. Also, she immediately began to have much of the house redecorated, her particular obsession a stunningly distinctive black-and-white art-deco recasting of her bathroom and bedroom. With Yusha, Gene battled for space and dominance. As at school, Gene wanted to be in charge. Yusha fought back. He had been there first. Gene was “a bully and invading my territory…. One day I got annoyed at him and punched him in the nose. Since that moment he became more respectful and we got along much better.”
With Nina, Gene began to assert himself. Tall, thin, strong for his age, “he couldn’t really be pushed around physically anymore.” Nina stopped slapping him. But she was still mercilessly critical. Why was she always making sacrifices, she wanted to know, for him and for others, all of whom were ungrateful? Why was he so selfish and inconsiderate? Why didn’t he mix more? Of what use was his reading, especially when he should be doing homework? Her complaints about everyone who did not measure up to her high standard of self-sacrifice were a regular part of life at Merrywood, including her good-humored comment every evening that Hugh’s huge stuffed-marlin trophy above the dining-room fireplace took away her appetite. Why couldn’t they get rid of that? When Liz Whitney gave Gene a toy Scottie, Nina claimed that the dog was a present for her. At Rock Creek Park there had been dogs, particularly a dalmatian given to Gene as a gift, but they could not get comfortable with one another: the dog scratched him badly. Also, any dog had to be kept out of the way of his blind grandfather. He immediately adored the toy Scottie, whom he named Wiggles. Nina, though, insisted that Wiggles was hers. To make the point, she brought him into her ro
om at night. When he whined and scratched at the door, eager to be out, she became angry at the dog and at Gene. Soon she insisted that Wiggles be kept in a small pen behind the house. He was never allowed inside again. To Gene it seemed that Wiggles was being imprisoned, a victim of some of the same forces by which he himself was threatened.
By nature generous, amiable, fair, Hugh was a quiet man. He treated Gene well, especially with expensive presents. The first Christmas at Merrywood had a luxurious plenitude. The magnificent tree everyone helped decorate, the parties, the dinners, the mountain of gifts—all sharply contrasted with the modest Christmases at Rock Creek Park. The Great Depression’s widespread economic misery hardly touched even the consciousness, let alone the actuality, of Merrywood. It was a world in which capital was king, in which Roosevelt was the devil who would destroy their civilization, in which Jews were evil socialists, the Irish ignorant papists fit only to be servants, and blacks essentially unchangeable primitives one step above the jungle. It was a network of powerful people whose wealth and social prestige defined itself partly by its high sense of entitlement. What was most important was to protect wealth and property. Nina gladly shared Hugh’s high-Wasp life, and she brought to it, to her husband’s delight, her own family and connections. Merrywood became a social center, briefly. Though Hugh was “a quiet but sincere anti-Semite,” a few well-known Jews were invited, such as Walter Lippmann. Unmarried couples, like the journalist Arthur Krock and his lady, could come as long as they slept in separate rooms, though they were well known to be lovers. Appearances mattered. Senator Gore and his wife visited. Hugh was eager to have them: the Senator’s anti–Roosevelt, anti-New Deal populist conservatism had much in common with the right-wing politics of Merrywood.