Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  In Nina’s hard-drinking world not to consume punishingly heavy amounts of alcohol would have been unusual. The son of one of Nina’s friends, Patrick Hurley, Hoover’s Secretary of War, remembered her drinking and her beauty. “In my society—northern Virginia, 1930s—a gentleman would consume in a day eight ounces of neat whiskey. You’d have highballs before supper, then drinking with dinner, and then drinks after dinner. These guys weren’t lushes, and the whole society accepted this. To see someone take two or four drinks was not exceptionable, and what was frowned upon was he who took so many drinks that he lost control of himself and got into contentious arguments or fights, or women who got emotional and stormed out of the house … that we would look upon as so-and-so drinks too much.” Even the more temperate Gores drank. The Senator enjoyed his two glasses of whiskey each evening. Mrs. Gore, more often than the Senator liked, drank too much at dinner and slurred her speech. The Senator’s two brothers, successful lawyers, were heavy drinkers. Nina had already mastered the trick of keeping her disposition sweet in public, though she had consumed prodigious amounts of alcohol, then showing the pernicious effects afterward, privately, with her family. Probably her adjustment to her sexually unsatisfying marriage included increasing her drinking. It soon became talked of as excessive. Mostly family and servants, though, were in the line of fire. Years later one of her close friends remarked to Nina’s son, “the thing I never could understand is that we would go to a party together and we would drink along with everybody else. I never saw her drunk at a party. Then I talked to her the next morning and she would say, ‘I’ve got a terrible hangover—call me later.’ … It was then I figured out that she got through the party without behaving disgracefully, then went home and drank a bottle. And started telephoning and denouncing everybody that she had a grudge against, a great trait of alcoholics.”

  As the liquor flowed downstairs, Gene usually stayed in his attic bedroom with his toy soldiers. Over time Hugh added large numbers of them to a collection that eventually reached more than three thousand. To the usual Christmas presents of tennis rackets, baseball gloves, and guns he was indifferent. He mostly wanted books. The toy soldiers, which became a pleasurable, imaginative preoccupation, he would deploy “by the hour” in reenactments of historical and literary battles of the sort he read about in Sir Walter Scott or saw in movies, “inventing stories for them, mostly nonmartial.” In his mind now he could be an author himself, a writer like Scott, a creator of movie scripts like The Crusaders, imaginative extensions of what he read and saw, “an endless series of dramas.” The family dramas he desired to escape. Those of the imagination, endlessly triggered by the toy soldiers, he embraced. There were, occasionally, contiguous public dramas. In December 1936 the family gathered around the radio in Nina’s art deco bedroom to listen to the soon-to-be—Duke of Windsor’s abdication speech. Tears flowed. Soon they were happily listening to the radio account of George VI’s coronation. In the movie theaters, Pathé News provided memorable images of both occasions, grand spectacles of the sort Gene experienced in his attic theater with his own cast of thousands. Later he was to remark that though the Duke of Windsor, whom he knew in the exmonarch’s old age, “was of a stupidity more suitable to the pen of Wodehouse than of Shakespeare, he was to me forever glamorous because he had been artfully screened for me all my life, as had his family.” Leaving the Translux Theater with his father, he was riveted by a display in the lobby of a miniature version of the coronation coach and horses. He desperately wanted it. By necessity and temperament always careful with money, his father “made an insufficient offer to the manager of the theater. Later I acquired the coach through my stepfather.” It was a brilliant addition to his stage sets. Real and imaginative history merged.

  The Pathé News of the Week movie camera turns. A blond ten-year-old and his father are standing beside a small, odd-looking airplane at Bolling Field, Washington. The boy wears short pants and a white polo shirt. The man is handsomely dressed, comfortable with the camera, a movie-star face. The boy’s nervousness shows, his full face and turned-up nose, his youthful complexion glowing in the camera’s black-and-white tones. The voice-over announces that the director of aeronautics has high hopes this prototype Hammond flivver will be the airplane of the future that everyone will own. Even a child can fly it. The dialogue begins. “We want to find out whether a ten-year-old youngster can handle it. What do you think?” Eagerly: “Sure, I’ll try it!” His back to the camera, the bare-legged boy climbs, crawls in, takes the pilot’s seat. His father follows. The camera closes on young Gene’s hands demonstrating the controls, his father beside him. Gene Vidal gets out. If he stays, everyone will think he has piloted the plane. It slowly glides down the runway. The camera moves in. The boy is at the wheel. As the plane lifts off the ground, the boy-pilot is visible, behind him the larger silhouette of another figure. The plane makes a turn, disappears from the camera’s eye, reappears, then descends, hitting the ground with a bump, then another, until it comes to a stop. The camera and his father greet the boy as he steps out. More dialogue. “What was it like?” “Easy.” Boy grins for a second at camera, more like an aborted smile. Cut. Camera stops. The next week in the movie houses of the nation audiences watched the Pathé News brief feature in the usual snippet of news-as-entertainment. “Ten Year Old Boy Flies Airplane.” Will Gene Vidal’s dream of everyman in the air come true? If everyone can afford a car, won’t everyone be able to afford a plane? Is a new era in flying about to dawn? The child watches himself on the screen at the Belasco Theatre.

  On a warm Saturday afternoon in early May 1936 his father had picked him up at Friends School. As they drove off in Gene’s signature nondescript Plymouth, the streets smelled of melting asphalt, the landscape was bright with the lush greens of late spring. He was hardly surprised when they pulled up at Bolling Field; he had been there many times for flights in Gene’s small Commerce Department Stinson monoplane. On weekend days they would take pleasure trips around the Washington area, over the Maryland and Virginia countryside, regularly exhanging roles, one as navigator, the other pilot. They flew only in good weather, navigating done partly with gasoline-station road maps, mostly by sighting landmarks, following roads and railroad tracks. To the young boy it was now old hat, flying no longer a thrill. But this was to be different, not for them but for the camera. Suddenly he was excited, thrilled. The obsessive movie-watcher now realized he was about to have the chance to be in the movies. Imagining himself another Mickey Rooney, recently circumnavigating the globe as Puck in Max Reinhardt’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he too was about to fly into fame, so he allowed himself to fantasize. “‘Well, you want to be a movie actor,’” Gene said, “‘so here’s your chance. All you have to do is remember to take off into the wind.’” As they parked, his father explained what he wanted him to do: take off, circle once, land, then answer a few questions. When asked what it was like to fly the Hammond flivver, he must stick to the script: “It was just like riding a bicycle.” At the field, the plane waited. So too the camera and movie crew directed by Pathé News’ premier cameraman, who had already filmed Gene Vidal many times. Gene’s assistant hovered solicitously. Soon the camera rolled, father and son speaking their semirehearsed lines. Young Gene could not keep his eyes off the lens.

  As they stepped up to the airplane, he felt the excitement of his acting premiere. He was not, though, to have the distinction of flying solo. Though more newsworthy, the news would not have been all favorable. It would have set a record for youngest person ever to fly alone. It would also have broken the law. That had been and would be done by others for the sake of the record. As director of aeronautics Gene Vidal was in no position to allow the law to be broken on camera. To be legal, the boy needed to be accompanied. They decide that Gene’s assistant, who himself could not fly, would crouch in the small back seat, the size of a suitcase, as much out of sight as possible. Young Gene’s father does the on-camera talking, joking deadpan about
his age and whether he’s sure he can fly the thing. With Gene beside him in the cockpit, young Gene demonstrates the landing gear. Then he is sitting alone, except for the man partly hidden behind him. Calmly, he starts the engine. He begins to feel anxious, not about the flight but about the camera. Will he perform well enough to be the new Mickey Rooney? He is experiencing the beginning of stage fright. Fastening his seat belt, he taxies downfield, starts the run. Soon the plane rises, the field falls below. Frightened, Gene’s assistant keeps repeating superfluous advice about not flying into the wind. As he takes the plane on its circle above the field, he has no trouble keeping it stable. Then he circles again, which is not in the script, and brings the plane down. It hits the field hard, bounces, bumps, slows to its landing. Everyone is relieved. Young Gene’s mind is now entirely, self-consciously, on the camera. How will he look? Will he be a success? When he steps out, the cameraman asks, for the world’s ears, what it was like to fly the plane. Terrified, young Gene begins to lose his voice. He forgets his lines. “I said, ‘Oh, it wasn’t much’ … and I stammered incoherently.” Gene fills in. He turns to his son and gives him the cue again. “I remember the answer that he wants me to make: it was as easy as riding a bicycle. But, I had argued, it was a lot more complicated than riding a bicycle. Anyway, I am trapped in the wrong script. I say the line. Then I make a face to show my disapproval…. Finally I gave what I thought was a puckish, Rooneyesque grin.” As he watched it in the Belasco Theatre, he “shuddered in horror at that demented leer which had cost me stardom.” He had wanted to be a movie star, not a “newsreel personage.”

  The next month, in June 1936, also recorded by newsreels, the sixty-six-year-old Senator Gore crashed politically. After a primary campaign in which he emphasized his populist themes, he was decisively rejected by the Oklahoma Democratic Party. State politics and the temper of the times had turned against him. He seemed old-fashioned, inflexible. Also, having done legitimate legal work for one of the convicted principals in the Harding administration Teapot Dome scandal, in which valuable oil reserves set aside for the Navy had been sold without competitive bidding, his opponents accused him of having been involved in criminality. “This is the last relief check you’ll ever get if Gore is reelected,” they had told the voters. Most important, so did the incumbent President, who despised the retrograde, anti—New Deal, harshly outspoken Senator, who had deeply offended him by telling him to his face that he would be stealing money from the people if he took the country off the gold standard. Like those on the far right, Senator Gore was “convinced that FDR … was our republic’s Caesar while his wife … was a revolutionary.” Two retainers, one from the American Petroleum Institute, the other from the Chase National Bank, provided most of his income thereafter, about the same amount as his Senate salary had been. “He didn’t take any money that wasn’t rightfully his. And he did think up the oil-depletion allowance, which he thought was good for the state. And never got a penny,” other than the income he earned, out of office, “as my grandmother bitterly would say, since all the senators and congressmen from Oklahoma were on the take and they all died rich…. Oil fields do get depleted,” his grandson later remarked. “But so does the brain. I said I’d like a depletion allowance for writers, for our brains.” The former Senator soon became active and successful as a pro bono lawyer for the land claims of Oklahoma Indian tribes. His pioneer ancestors would have been amused at the irony. For his grandson, who worshipped him, there was much to admire, nothing to criticize. In the attic at Rock Creek Park, young Gene put together a scrapbook of campaign newspaper clippings, partly an act of homage to his grandfather, mostly an expression of anger at those who had rejected him.

  The Senator’s bitter summer of 1936 was Gene’s first in his new Auchincloss world. To his surprise, he was once more sent off to William Lawrence Camp, though for August only. The rest of the summer was spent at Newport with his mother and stepfather, whose aged mother ruled over Hammersmith Farm, one of the grand nouveau-riche mansions built by the post—Civil War Newport robber barons, the gilded-age vulgarians whom Henry James so much despised when he visited the Newport of his youth. At Hammersmith Farm “the old lady still presided over two liveried footmen as well as a conservatory that produced out-of-season grapes, more beautiful than a Vermeer painting, and about as tasteless.” While Hughdie patiently waited for her to die, they stayed at a nearby house, at Hazard’s Bay, with its own pond, the beach and sea in front. The next three summers Gene spent part of his time at Newport, building sand castles at Bailey’s Beach, where he won a first-prize silver cup for a larger-than-life bust of Lincoln, and sailing, swimming, seeing movies, reading a great deal. Next door were Jim Tuck, from the Bancroft playground days, and his sister, whose mother had married Snowden Fahnstock, who owned the “cottage” next to Hammersmith Farm. They played “the usual kid games.” Yusha was often around, though they still did not get along. Each Sunday they had lunch with old Mrs. Auchincloss. The first summer Nina was pregnant with the first of two children born during her marriage to Hughdie. One summer they took Gene to Watch Hill, Rhode Island. At Newport, he remembers, he was “a royal pain in the ass,” boastful of his fame as a “newsreel personage,” filled with a sense of his intellectual superiority and of his talents as a sculptor and painter (he always took his watercolor set with him), “the repository of a myriad of mediocre talents.” Quick-witted, he was now himself sometimes sharp-tongued, ironic, even sarcastic. Preoccupied with Lincoln, he wrote in his notebook, under the preparatory drawings that he made for his sand sculpture, “Now he belongs to the ages.” One hot summer afternoon, reclining on the lawn, watching the sailboats, he half overheard his stepfather talking about a family portrait of a lady named Theodosia, who had been Aaron Burr’s daughter. Hugh was distantly related on his mother’s side to the nation’s third Vice President, who had killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Thomas Jefferson’s name came up. Just as the mention of Lincoln always brought to mind the memorial in Washington, Jefferson meant to young Gene, partly, the memorial now in the process of being created. During that summer of 1936 he also tried, unsuccessfully, to read a biography of George Washington. It seemed to him unbearably dull. He never finished it. But the whispers of American history that blew around him on the summer breeze were already part of his consciousness. He would remember Burr.

  The boring biography of “The Father of Our Country” had been assigned as preparatory reading for his entry, in September 1936, to a new school. When Gene and Nina decided in spring 1934 to send him to William Lawrence Camp, they had politely turned down Reverend Henderson’s request that he attend Henderson’s camp. They had responded, though, with interest to his eagerness to have Little Gene at St. Albans. Henderson had tried again in April 1935, urging them to “drop out here and look us over.” Since they had been discussing sending him to a boarding school, “as soon as he returns from camp,” Gene responded, “we will drop over some afternoon and visit with you as to enrolling him in your school.” Both parents favored the change. Gene liked the low cost of tuition and board. Since St. Albans was both a day and a boarding school, Nina could deposit him there whenever it suited her. Life at Merrywood would be more comfortable with him around only on weekends. She would be happy to be rid of the daily presence of her book-obsessed, sharp-tongued son, who increasingly fought back, who more and more seemed an inhibiting depressant on her freedom to do as she pleased. Situated on the high rise from which the unfinished National Cathedral looked toward Washington, within an easy half-hour run from Merrywood, the school would be far enough for separation, close enough for supervision.

  Originally the National Cathedral School for Boys, St. Albans, opened in 1909, had its conception in a bequest from President James Buchanan’s niece to the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation of the District of Columbia. As the unfinished cathedral conducted what it considered God’s business, the school presided over the mostly secular education of what was still, by 1936, only about a
hundred boys divided between the lower and upper schools, grades five through twelve. The main school buildings were vaguely neo-Gothic, in imitation of the cathedral. Chapel was compulsory. Reverend Henderson, senior master of the Upper School, taught Sacred Studies and mathematics. In the Lower School the assistant headmaster, Alfred True, soft-spoken, responsive, thoughtful, was a secular angel of attentiveness who greeted his boys each morning in the entranceway. Headmaster Reverend Albert Hawley Lucas presided, an ex-marine who combined decisiveness, authority, and benevolence in the amounts that produced the successful headmaster of that era. He was both master and cheerleader. Lucas and True, working together with a dedicated, well-qualified faculty, gradually overcame the main problems: to make the Lower School attractive enough so that it would be a happy place for young boys and to make the Upper School sufficiently prominent and respected so that enough elite Washington families would send their high-school-age sons there rather than to the traditional New England academies. Lucas stressed discipline, athletics, and college-entrance preparation; True emphasized community, sensitivity, individual attention. To his faculty he was the best administrator they had ever seen, someone “who let people down very gently.” Most of the students, like young Gene, who were in awe of Mr. Lucas, loved Mr. True. And Gene did not at all mind being a boarder, though he could not have known that True had strongly recommended that no Lower School boys board. They were too young, he believed, to be separated from their families. For Gene that was the attraction. Life at Merrywood was hardly domestic bliss. He was eager to get away.