by Fred Kaplan
In late August 1936 a counselor from William Lawrence Camp, on his way south, brought Gene home to Merrywood, empty except for the servants. The Auchinclosses were still on holiday. In mid-September, with twenty-one other boys divided into two sections, Gene began Form A, the equivalent of sixth grade. Initially he was a day student, though soon Nina arranged to have him stay at the dormitory for short spells and then to board entirely, which had been her original intention. As usual, his grades were mediocre, ranging from the usual high in spelling, for which he had a natural feel, to the low in penmanship, a lifelong nearly indecipherable scribble. For his entire three years at St. Albans his English grades remained poor. The system demanded memorization, with little to no emphasis on intellectual content. With a sonorous voice, he loved reading poetry aloud. When, as often required, he did so in class, his nuanced, actorly readings attracted attention and praise. But he refused to memorize poems. Demerits followed. Student essays were mainly parsed for formal grammatical correctness; beyond that, there was little analysis. Grades in English depended on memorization of grammatical categories, with examples. More than indifferent, he was hostile to rote learning. St. Albans gave him the gift of an inability to learn the language of grammar. Neither the system nor the student would adapt. On the athletic field he expressed his usual indifference, though he did his best with tennis, which he liked, and soon fencing. He now wore glasses, as little as possible to avoid both the stigma and the disfigurement. Subtle depth perception seemed the problem, an astigmatism that glasses did not completely correct. As the ball came close, it went slightly out of focus. Fortunately, none of his classmates ragged him about his incessant reading, his disinterest in athletics. It was a benign environment of what he remembered as very decent young people, among them George Goodrich, Barrett Prettyman, and Hamilton Fish. Two of the boys, Jim Birney and Dick McConnell, became friends, Birney a soft-spoken, outgoing, rather innocent son of a well-known Episcopalian abolitionist family, McConnell a more aggressive boy who was both rival and friend. “The only boys I ever really liked were at St. Albans,” he recalled. “I can’t say I was wild about any of them, but I mean I liked them as people.”
Gene was not unhappy at St. Albans. Merrywood stood at most thirty minutes distant, unequivocal demonstration of his mother’s desire for separateness. But Gene had begun to see the advantages of separation: it suited mother and son. One day, Nina, tired of complaining to Gene about his grades, came to see Mr. True. Gene’s “grades must improve ‘because,’ she said, ‘he is living in the lap of luxury now, but he’s never going to inherit anything! And he doesn’t understand the value of money.’” “Well, if you could just get him to do his homework,” True said. “She confessed defeat: ‘He locks himself in his room,’ she said sadly, ‘and writes.’” Gene declined to explain or reform. Frustrated, Nina kept demanding proof he was not slothful, a spendthrift, a disgrace to her social status and ambition, an improvidential ward of the family whom they would have to support forever. Sensibly, True realized that Gene cared little about grades, though even at that low level of motivation he performed adequately. Best to let him alone, since he spent most of his time reading, a constructive alternative to what boys were expected to do and, mostly, did. True understood boys; Nina did not. Quick to pursue her view of dysfunction, she became suspicious of Gene’s imaginative games, one of which was role-playing and performance. She hated his constant reading. That he already knew a great deal of history and literature seemed to her irksome. What good could it possibly be? If pernicious, she was nevertheless sincere, eager to fix what she perceived as wrong, though her eagerness rarely produced sustained attention to the problem. When she decided his teeth needed straightening, she had her dentist install braces. “I had absolutely straight teeth, except for one incisor which was slightly off. So I had to have braces put on my teeth by a lousy dentist” because the children of everyone she knew had them. Then she forgot about them. “They stayed on much too long. They were never looked after again, and five years later my teeth were rotting away under these things.” Eventually he was to lose all his upper molars.
When given, probably for his tenth birthday, a theatrical makeup kit designed to allow a child to dress up as historical and literary characters, he delighted in combining his fascination with history and role-playing, his second chance to be Mickey Rooney. The kit contained the basic materials and instructions for a wide group of characters, from Cardinal Richelieu to Mephistopheles to the prince of The Prince and the Pauper. The latter he had seen enacted in a recent film in which twins had played the lead roles. The notion of an alternative self, of being himself a twin, fascinated him. With the help of a white towel, which he had become adept at twisting into a turban, he used the makeup kit to play an Egyptian pharaoh, based on his favorite move, The Mummy. A black wig, a gift from Liz Whitney, enabled him to play Cleopatra, though mostly he impersonated male figures. Popular Hollywood movies were dressing up the world, especially its glamorous past, its famous historical figures and events. Downtown, at the Keith, the Palace, the Belasco, the Translux, the Metropolitan, and the Capitol; at the Blue Hen in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he was taken sometimes for brief summer visits; in the movie house in Newport—each with its own particular aroma and atmosphere—he saw every new movie, accompanied, at the main Washington theaters, by an elaborate stage show. At the Capitol Theater “there were the Living Statues. Well-known historic tableaux were enacted by actors and actresses in white leotards.” Gene’s reading and moviegoing were part of a vast costume drama that he personalized. At first Nina took all this as another example of his self-involvement, like reading. At Newport a family friend, Sherwood Davis, set off alarm bells when he told Nina that Gene’s love of theatricality was a danger sign that might indicate homosexual tendencies. “So Sherry Davis says he likes putting on makeup, he likes dressing up—watch out: that’s what fags do. Sherry Davis was himself a fag and a bisexual. And she took that to heart, my mother…. I seem to remember that I was sent to a doctor. I don’t know if it was a psychiatrist or a psychologist, probably the latter, who asked me sex questions and so on. I gave perfectly polite answers. And that was the end of it. She then loses interest. Never again does the subject come up.”
As the leaves changed colors in autumn 1936, young Gene and his father, while Gene Vidal was still director of aeronautics, traveled northward by railroad through the Hudson River Valley to West Point, the military city high on the Palisades where Vidal had had many of his greatest triumphs. In 1925, when he left, he had been an assistant football coach, the track and field coach, and the instructor of aeronautics. He returned as a man of Washington and of the world, bringing along his eleven-year-old son, who had just started at a new school. Gene also brought with him one of his closest friends, Amelia Earhart, whose fame had risen to a dimension beyond Gene’s athletic or professional achievement. She had become a national icon. Together the three of them sat in the stadium watching Army play Navy. As much as Gene was a familiar figure to the cadet corps, Earhart would have created the stir, her willowy figure, her blond-white eyebrows, her elegant clothes, the mystique of her courage, her fame for being famous. On their way back to New York, as Earhart’s fans peered into the train compartment to get a look at their idol, she told the fascinated young Gene about her plans to fly around the world from east to west, to circumnavigate the earth, like Puck circling the globe. In her own way an actress of sorts, Amelia glittered in his eyes. Playing the grown-up, he asked what part of the flight she most worried about. Africa, she responded. She did not want to be forced down in the jungle. What about the Pacific? he asked. “Oh, there are always islands,” she said. As they approached Grand Central Station, he asked if she would give him a souvenir. “Shortly before she left on the flight around the world, she sent me the blue-and-white checked leather belt that she often wore. She gave my father her old watch.”
They had also given one another much of their company, both personal and prof
essional, during the last six years. Gene rarely made an important decision without consulting her. Together, with Paul Collins, they had become in 1936 the founding organizers and major stockholders of an airline in New England, at first in conjunction with the Boston-Maine Railroad, later to be reorganized as Northeast Airlines. City-hopping together in a small plane, at least once with young Gene along, they laid out the routes along the railroad tracks. If it seemed an odd thing for a government official to be doing, apparently no one thought it remarkable. She regularly confided in him, and especially about her aeronautical plans. He was to be one of her closest consultants in her preparation for her ill-fated round-the-world flight the next year. Her marriage to George Palmer Putnam remained the open one she had insisted on from the beginning. Whether she had other lovers, male or female, she certainly had Gene Vidal in her heart. With young Gene she was playful, warm, glamorous, another one of his father’s women whom he would have preferred to the mother he had. It was a daydream he allowed himself. Amelia Earhart and Liz Whitney were the prototypes of the older women with whom as an adult he was to have strong friendships, mother and grandmother figures not necessarily themselves very motherly but reminders of the mother he would have wanted or of the much-loved Nina Kay Gore. An occasional visitor at the Earhart-Putnam home in Rye, young Gene loved Amelia’s company, her house, her aura, the maps spread out on the living-room floor, the jungle-animal-decorated wallpaper in the guest room. Walking with her on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, he noticed how many people stared at his famous companion. Another time, when he had been ill in Washington and she had visited him, he sculpted her head out of clay, a creation they both admired. Her beautiful voice, like his grandmother’s, stayed in his memory. And now that he was writing a great deal of poetry, she read his and he hers, sometimes out loud to one another. As poets they were both expressive, though Earhart more personal, and equally untalented. For young Gene there was a glow to the relationship.
Apparently Nina did not feel especially threatened by Gene’s friendship with Amelia, at least not to an extent that prevented her having lunch with Earhart at a Washington hotel the year before the divorce. Gene had hovered nervously in the background, afraid there might be a scene, especially if Nina had too many drinks. Perhaps Amelia’s boyish looks disarmed or even attracted her. Shrewd and intuitive, she may have sized up the relationship as unthreatening. The Whitneys were then the targets anyway. But by autumn 1936 Nina had been married to Hugh Auchincloss for a full year. Since she had lost Jock, she was no longer in a mood to be happy if Gene married Liz. Whatever her many dissatisfactions, money was not among them, except insofar as she occasionally worried about her son’s economic future, especially since he did not excel in school or mix with people. He was happy to mix at Langollen, Liz Whitney’s horse farm in Upperville, Virginia, fifty miles from Washington, where Gene took him for visits and where Liz taught him to ride. With his father and his father’s friends he felt comfortable. The glamorous ones, like Liz and Amelia, were very attractive. From a bachelor apartment at the Wardman Park, where he played tennis with Henry Wallace, Gene Vidal had moved to another apartment, on Connecticut Avenue. His son visited regularly. Liz was often there during 1936–37. Liz and Gene traveled together, at least once to Los Angeles, where Liz presented herself as a candidate in the international competition for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, the movie based on the bestselling novel of the Civil War. Its male star was soon to appear in a film called Test Pilot, on whose set Nina was to meet Clark Gable and have an affair with him and also with her third-husband-to-be, an Air Force officer who served as technical consultant. Unfortunately for Liz, her estranged husband, the primary financial backer of Gone With the Wind, made it clear to the producer she was not even to be considered for the role. While Liz tried Hollywood, Gene busily attended the National Air Show in Inglewood. What is now the Los Angeles Airport was still a cornfield. They drove together cross-country, back to Washington, with a detour to visit Gene’s brother Pick, now a young Air Force pilot, at Barkesdale Field, in Shreveport, Louisiana. Pick and his wife, Sally, insisted Liz sleep in the guest bedroom and Gene in the den. “We were very old-fashioned,” Sally explained. A month later Liz was still not divorced. The endless legal-financial wrangling went on and on.
From the window seat of his St. Albans dormitory cubicle he could see the Washington Monument in the distance. The biography of “The Father of Our Country” which he had never finished epitomized the boredom of historical studies (and most of his classes). Now, deeply absorbed, he was reading Gone With the Wind. Through the Gores, he thought of himself as Southern, living in what was, prior to World War II, essentially a Southern city whose only industry was government. Southerners like his grandfather dominated the Congress, which despite Roosevelt’s power still insisted it was the premier branch. Issues of honor, justice, seniority, home rule, and graft preoccupied the political rulers, whether they were of the Ashley Wilkes or the Snopes kind. Having been brought up in the home of a practical politician, Gene knew that the romanticism of Ashley Wilkes was nonsense. His grandmother’s dismissal of gambling, whoring Southern boys getting their comeuppance was another antidote to idealization. Still, while he had no doubt that Gone With the Wind distorted history and human nature, he found the book deeply absorbing, a dramatization of the sort that made history come alive. The novel and film brought together his own growing interest in the American past and numbers of vivid self-reflexive moments, one of which was his self-awareness as he sat in that window embrasure, gazing out into the Washington distance, often looking down at the pages that were alive in his hands. It produced in his mind an unforgettable image of himself, there and then, becoming himself. Such visual images increasingly filled the storehouse of his mind, always there, readily available, instantly alive.
Life in the antiseptic Lower School dormitory was best lived imaginatively, “a long room with a linoleum floor, freshly waxed and lined on both sides with doorless cubicles,” small, bare spaces with bed, chair, desk. Each day began with services in the Little Sanctuary, presided over by the headmaster, who had a sermon or homily for the school. An imposing figure, he was authority itself, speaking familiarly about honor, duty, country, about God, morality, and “character.” He also had a sense of humor and a sharp eye for the personalities of his teachers and pupils. An avid athletic partisan, “The Chief” cheered as loud as the loudest at school football games. Though some parents found it unseemly, the Reverend Albert Hawley Lucas knew what he stood for and was not to be repressed. Among other things, he stood for winning football games and building character. He presided, for the boarders, over breakfast and dinner, each of the resident masters at the head of a table, where the food was competent, the atmosphere mostly pleasant. For the sixth- and seventh-grade boys, the homeroom teacher dominated the long teaching day. For Gene, Herve Gordon (“Papa”) Chasseaud’s much-loved “boudoir,” the school library under the stairs in the Activities Building, was a primal location. Chasseaud himself had gathered most of the growing collection. A bibliophilic French teacher with attractively eccentric habits, he had a literary aura. In the Lower Form office, the school secretary and mother-confessor to many, Virginia Martin, sold cookies and milk during recess. One day a student ran in, exclaiming, “Miss Martin, there’s a fire in the boys’ room!” “First,” she replied, “put on your tie.”
The one master he did love was Stanley Sofield, his seventh-grade homeroom teacher, an eccentrically brilliant pedagogue whose personal charisma made him a powerful presence in the daily lives of his students and a St. Albans legend. The only teacher Gene later came back to see and had a friendship with, Sofield had “magic with boys,” partly based on an intuitive understanding of and a genuine affection for the species. “He had that magic quality of treating them as equals,” Alfred True recollected. “They felt he was the man in charge, but he never condescended to them. No boy was ever a mystery to him.” A Columbia University grad
uate, in his thirties when Gene was at St. Albans, Sofield was physically unprepossessing, a rather gawky pixie, “a plump young man with thick brown hair, glasses, a tapir’s nose and small chin.” Unmarried, his sexual interests unclear, he was strongly attached to a sister in New Jersey whom he helped economically and spoke with on the telephone every evening. Rumored among the masters to be homosexual, Sofield never made that a part of his St. Albans life. The boys knew him only as a brilliant teacher and a memorable character. With a sharp wit and a loud, demanding voice, he made the classroom his theater. The students he good-humoredly addressed as “gentlemen.” Totally unathletic himself, he apparently enjoyed coaching baseball and cheering boisterously at school games. Flamboyant, “he knew how to control the boys and teach them also,” to make the class interesting by investing it with personality and ideas. Passionate about the musical theater, each year Sofield directed the school Christmas musical, which he composed, frequently banging away at the piano. Afraid of performing in public, Gene would have nothing to do with the musicals, though Sofield, who had nicknames for most of the boys, would regularly sing to him, “Gene-y with the light brown hair.” It made him writhe with embarrassment. Actually he was still blond, as his classmate John Hanes recalled, with straight hair darkening to brown, “good-looking although not pretty. Just a good-looking boy. Tall for his age.” With another St. Albans master, Sofield directed a summer camp in the Adirondacks, where musicals were featured. He hoped Gene would attend. A regular if not heavy drinker who loved martinis, some mornings Sofield, bleary-eyed, would with a soft voice, a “gentle, grave manner, and a slightly pained squint,” alert the students to his mood, which often produced histrionic demands for silence. Other times books or erasers would fly, unerringly, across the room toward offendingly loud or silly or unresponsive boys. Sofield’s famous scream echoed throughout the Lower Form, part of its special character. His storms were unpredictable, though everyone expected them, and most enjoyed them. Usually he taught in a tone of “gentle expository reason.” To Gene he seemed like “a benign Nina”—the vitality, the histrionics, even the drinking, but without the destructive irresponsibility, the self-glorification, the cruelty. With everyone else Gene was reserved, mostly unresponsive. But he responded to Sofield’s magic, part pedagogic calculation, part spontaneous expressiveness, a feel for boys and for schoolroom life that made him predictably unpredictable in the classroom.