Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  More interested in their past than their present, he suddenly realized that just as he could seach for marble shards in the Roman Forum, here he could dig for Indian artifacts. There were Indian ruins all around, including immediately in front of Fuller Lodge, where in an area of packed mud the ridge of an old wall extruded four or five inches above the ground. Soon he got permission to dig. Playing archaeologist was more exciting than most of the other Los Alamos Ranch activities. The desire to dig, to uncover, to find out all he could about the past, to connect the past to the present had now a living tactile immediacy. Some years later he was to write a poem, “Walking,” about the experience of finding an arrowhead in a dry arroyo as the sun turned red with evening, thinking of “the dead Indians,” of the water flowing through the canyon as an image of historical time. Digging by himself, four or five hours a day, he began to discover pots and other shards. As he cleared away earth down to three feet, the outlines of long-hidden rooms became evident. Finally, after days, two rooms were excavated, to the annoyance of those who found it an unsightly inconvenience or a folly. But Hitchcock and others were impressed. At the school’s request an expert came from Santa Fe. “It was an eight-hundred-year-old Pueblo Indian ruin.” Though Gene was able to secrete away some small pieces of pottery for himself, most of it he was forced to give up to the experts. When the school authorities decided that the excavation would have to be filled in, he had a tantrum that produced a compromise. “They half filled it in, up to the adobe brick wall, the top two rooms.” “Oh, my days,” he later happily recalled, “as an archaeologist at Los Alamos!”

  Soon he had the bright idea that Connell himself might be his ticket out. Whatever sex was going on between boys or between Connell and boys at Los Alamos, Gene had not participated in. He had steered away from “The Boss” as much as possible. “I was very pure then. It all seemed like a great mess to me, and my lust was not aroused by anybody there.” But he disliked Connell, partly for taking advantage of the health examinations and some of the boys privately, mostly because he was the daily authoritarian embodiment of the power that had sent him into exile. Perhaps if he blew the whistle on Connell back in Washington, Nina would allow him to return to St. Albans or at least go to what he thought would be a more appropriate school. Since there was no way of avoiding the director, he might as well put him to use. At Christmas 1939 the two Washington boys, Wilson Hurley and Gene Vidal, traveled home together, the same train route they had taken westward in September. At Merrywood, Nina now had two children under her erratic guidance, Nini, two years old, and Tommy, recently born. Christmas festivities were gathering their usual momentum, the huge tree handsomely decorated, stacks of presents waiting to be opened. Visitors came and went, including Wilson’s parents, who lived nearby at Leesburg and were part of the same extended circle of prominent Washingtonians who enjoyed the company of their peers. Gene quickly found the opportunity to tell Nina that Connell was “a sexual degenerate.” Shocked, Nina thought that, if true, this was a danger to Gene. From her perspective he was already odd enough. She remembered Sherry Davis’s analysis of Gene’s fascination with costumes and role-playing and immediately took the bait. Gene must have felt secure enough or desperate enough to use an issue that might cut back at him. But at Los Alamos itself there had been no hint that he was implicated in Connell’s activities. Nina immediately rolled up her sleeves and went to work, which suited Gene’s purposes. At the first opportunity, drink in hand at a late-night party, she cornered Patrick Hurley. Inimitably direct, the “let’s tell it as it is” Nina wanted to know whether or not what her son had told her was true. Was the director of the school a pansy? Horrified, in the small hours of the night, as soon as he got home, Hurley awakened his son. “‘I hear your headmaster’s a queer,’” he said, and demanded that Wilson either confirm or deny what Gene had told his mother. Wilson had already been at Los Alamos for almost two years. His father, a supporter and advocate of Connell’s regime, had visited the school. What the hell was going on? “Wilson played dumb or was dumb.” The grilling was precise, harsh, military. “‘Well, he may be, but he’s never mentioned or demonstrated it to me. I have never seen it in action, and so I can’t depose on that subject.’ So then he said, ‘Well, has anybody ever laid a hand on you that way?’ And I said, ‘No.’” That satisfied “The General,” who would have been eager to be satisfied. “Pat Hurley reported to my mother who said—a line I’ve always loved—‘Why, it just shows that that boy of yours is a greenhorn!’” But the greenhorn had pulled off a clever maneuver.

  Wilson and Gene took the train back early in the new year. When, traveling westward, they discussed the subject, Wilson still maintained that nothing of that sort had gone on as far as he knew except ordinary adolescent things, the same line that had gotten him off the hook with his father. As they ascended to the wintry high mesa, Gene had good reason to hope that this would be his last and only winter there. He had begun raising his voice on the matter, to his mother, his father, his grandparents. Usually tractable, he had insisted he would not return for another year. Soon Hurley telephoned Connell and asked him if he knew about the rumor that was going far enough around to have reached him in Washington. The director provided denials and assurances. Apparently Connell either knew or guessed the source of Hurley’s information. Soon Connell let Nina and Big Gene know that their son would not be invited to return the next year. The reasons were of the most general kind, including that it would be in the young man’s best interest to go to a school with a larger program. Since Gene had already made it clear he did not want to return, his quiet expulsion seemed easy enough for all to go along with. To Nina the only annoyance was that she would now have to find a new school for him. Gene Vidal was pleased to be relieved of the high tuition. The boy himself was delighted.

  The school also would soon be moving on, out of material existence and into the pages of history. Those who had been students there were shortly to have Los Alamos seared into their memories beyond the ordinary memorable images of schoolboy life. On a spring morning in 1942, two years after Gene’s departure, the students and staff at the Ranch School gazed up at the strange sight of a small airplane circling and circling. Connell guessed something significant was up. Such an expenditure of airplane fuel in wartime was likely to be consequential. Soon two authoritative strangers came to visit, General Leslie Groves and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, plans and vision in hand. In a short time guards were posted around the perimeter of Los Alamos. In December an abrupt, bureaucratic notice from the Secretary of War arrived: land and buildings were to be expropriated for military use. Some compensation. Period. Connell, crushed, did his patriotic duty uncomplainingly. The Los Alamos Ranch School disappeared forever. So did the director, who died two years later, a man whose boys and whose mission had been taken from him late in life when a new beginning was impossible. The literal place name of the school on the mesa soon became awesomely famous, associated not with living boys but with devastated cities, not with the romantic American optimism and naïveté of Pond’s vision but with the nuclear age and the Cold War.

  While home from Los Alamos for the Christmas 1939 holidays, Gene had the mixed blessing of seeing his recently remarried father. His own juniorship seemed vexatiously ironic: his father had just married a woman only six years older than his son. Young Gene already had one mother. What would be the point in having another, especially one almost his contemporary? Slim, dark-haired, bright-eyed, with classical features, twenty-year-old Katherine Roberts had come into his father’s life like a breath of spring. “She was just so fresh,” he told his sister-in-law. “She was fresh and new.” He had fallen in love with youth, perhaps partly a statement of how much he disliked his own aging, how frightening the prospect of losing his athlete’s fine body. Owen Roberts, Kit’s multimillionaire father, with a seat on the stock exchange and a valuable art collection, provided his wife, from whom he had separated, and daughter with only a small courtmandated allowance. Ki
t had been working for the last five years as a Powers model, and she and her mother, from a well-established Southern family, had spent a great deal of time living in palatial splendor in Peking. “With what they would have paid for living on Central Park West, they lived in a palace with twenty servants.” She had also attended finishing school in Connecticut and studied in Paris. The impending marriage came as a surprise to many. Skeptical, Kit’s mother, who liked Gene, soon came around. Gene’s sister Lurene inquired disbelievingly about the rumor. No, she had misheard, Gene teased. This was actually a poor young girl he was going to adopt, not marry. Liz Whitney was furious. She had not expected Gene to slip away. Apparently “she tried everything from threats of murder to suicide to blackmail, everything. My father said that to his last day he never figured out how she found out where Kit and he were spending their honeymoon…. But on their wedding night Liz started ringing about ten o’clock in the evening. Then he said, ‘If Miss Whitney calls, don’t take the call.’ So then ‘Miss Smith’ would call, and it would be Liz again, denouncing my father for what he had done, for the terrible mistake he made throwing away his life and her life … Finally, he said, he had to take the phone off the hook because Liz wouldn’t stop. Then the next day she wrote a slightly apologetic letter and sent him a wedding present, the most beautiful beige silk pajamas I’ve ever seen in my life. I know because he gave them to me…. He never wore them. It was the one color he couldn’t wear, and she knew it. It made him look green…. I wore those pajamas for years.”

  The marriage took place mid-December 1939, in the bride’s mother’s Manhattan apartment. The New York and Washington papers noticed it prominently, the New York Herald Tribune previewing it on the morning of the wedding day: “Aeronautic Consultant and New York Girl, Recently of China, Plan Bridal.” There had been no public engagement announcement. Gene’s divorce prevented their marrying at the Episcopalian Church of the Heavenly Rest. Of Gene’s family, only Sally and Pick attended, Pick the best man. Stationed in nearby Mitchell Field, he had seen a good deal of Gene since his move to New York. Why the wedding date had not been arranged so that young Gene could be there is unclear. On that same day he departed from Los Alamos for Christmas at Merrywood, where he was to bring Connell’s predilections to his mother’s attention. Perhaps preoccupied and, as usual, absentminded about arrangements, Gene may not have thought to align his schedule with his son’s. Although always happy to have his father’s company, the boy never expected to have it. It was not exclusion but misalignment, of a sort he had grown used to. Not that it did not sometimes disappoint him, as it did when, coming up from Washington by train, he regularly arrived at the entrance to the upper-Park Avenue building where Gene had a small apartment only to find that he had to wait endlessly, though they had made precise arrangements in advance. “I can remember waiting for him six and seven hours outside his apartment building because he had forgotten I’d come up. And it wasn’t any feeling against me: he forgot everything. He was naturally vague. I can remember waiting, waiting, waiting for him in the vestibule…. I took it for granted that that was the way it was. I didn’t like it. But I didn’t dislike it. He always charmed me. He was very apologetic. He didn’t remember anything…. His best friend of ten years earlier could be talking to him and he still couldn’t figure out who he was. Not good with names or faces. One of his jokes: ‘There are three things I can’t remember: one is names, another faces, and the third I can’t remember.’ He couldn’t remember that he had an appointment with me. Who knows what the hell he was doing! He wasn’t that rabid about business…. He refused to keep appointments and refused to have an office if he could help it. He liked puttering. He liked inventing things. He was more apt to be working in a shed inventing molded plywood or something. That was what interested him. Or fucking. Many ladies.”

  Gene’s failings were of a sort that never produced the level of pain that Nina’s did. Neither patriarchal nor nurturing, he had a talent for companionable good times. Lurene, puzzled, remarked that father and son behaved more like brothers than father and son, “‘off in corners giggling at the rest of us.’ She didn’t approve. Each had his role, and we weren’t playing them.” Gene never gave advice. But he also never took credit for his son’s achievements. “Friends of his would ask … what had he done that made me so successful? ‘Well,’ he’d say, ‘I think it’s the fact that I never gave him any advice and if I had he would not have taken it. And,’ he said, ‘we had a perfect relationship.’” In warm weather they would take drives into the country, particularly from his Manhattan apartment to Amagansett, Long Island, to stay with his friend McClellan Barkeley. A successful portrait and fashion painter, Barkeley had a way with beautiful young models, both in paint and in the flesh. With Pick, Sally, and Gene, “Mac” attended a football game at West Point. Broad-shouldered, mustached, with thinning hair, about forty years old, he “wore sort of a gangster snap-brim hat and a tan polo coat and a yellow wool scarf. He just looked so beautiful walking around the stands trying to find our seats,” Sally recalled. With an attractive beach house, Barkeley was an amorous bachelor who had a love life perhaps even more active than Vidal’s. In summer 1939 he had introduced Gene to Kit Roberts, who was posing for one of his Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations and whom he wanted for himself. She responded to Gene’s advances, not Mac’s. Still, he had attractive alternatives, whom he regularly hosted at his beachfront cottage. Each of the two rooms had four beds, one room for the young models, the other for the men on hand. In the summers of 1937 and 1938 Gene and young Gene visited numbers of times. “It was a house … filled with beautiful girls. I loved it. That would be great fun, sort of living on the beach.” Young Gene enjoyed flirting with some of the girls, all of whom were indeed closer to his age than to their host’s. Like his father, though in a different way, he was now noticeably charming. By 1939 “he was getting taller,” his then twenty-five-year-old Aunt Sally noticed, “and he was always so skinny. He had on some sort of cute Western pants, with a Western cut.” At the beach, in swim trunks, blond, pale-complexioned, hazel-eyed, with an inquisitive bright smile, usually in high spirits, he was a delight to have around. He soon had a ferocious crush on one of the young ladies, who was not at all unhappy about his being smitten. Nothing came of it, but it was fun and memorable.

  Sexy, attractive, resembling the young Katharine Hepburn, madly in love with her husband, Kit had no desire to be a mother of any kind to his almost grown-up son. She knew intuitively that it would be a mistake. She had heard enough about Nina to stay out of the firing line. But young Gene felt the awkwardness, the tenseness, of having a stepmother. “My relationship with her was edgy at the beginning. Trying to get rid of one mother—just the word ‘mother’ was enough to start me climbing the wall—and here’s a stepmother. Also, she was very sexy and just about my age.” A consultant for the Bendix Corporation and a director of Eastern Airlines, Gene nevertheless had a modest income, and the bills from Los Alamos were huge. At Camden, New Jersey, he soon set up a small factory where he invented and tested variations on molded plywood parts for fuselages and wingtips, still preoccupied with making airplanes for individuals economically feasible. The process was patented as Vidal Weldwood. But there were start-up costs, few contracts, and little profit for his Aeronautics Research Corporation. Despite Kit’s father’s wealth, there was no family money available for her. When she took on some modeling jobs, Gene’s resistance to having a working wife soon put an end to that. The news that young Gene would not be returning to Los Alamos came as a relief.

  From the small apartment on East Sixty-fifth Street the couple occupied after marrying, they soon moved into a two-bedroom flat in the Wardman Park in Washington, familiar to Gene Vidal and the obvious place for a short-term residence. Probably he thought he might do better selling his innovative product if he were nearer the source of government contracts. In Washington he took Kit to tea at Rock Creek Park to meet Senator and Mrs. Gore. “Gene was never not fri
endly with them,” Kit recollected. “He liked them very much. They were his family at that point. They still seemed like family to him. And they weren’t all that crazy about Nina all the time either…. I think Gene was more of a son than she was a daughter.”

  When young Gene came home briefly to Merrywood during the Easter vacation and the summer of 1940, he stayed a few days with Kit and Gene at their apartment. Gradually the relationship between stepmother and son became calmer, more rational. In conversation he remarked to her that some of his friends had made comments about his father marrying such a young woman. She too, of course, had heard similar remarks. Since it was clear Kit had no intention of being in the least bit motherly, Gene soon felt more at ease with her and the marriage. Blissfully happy, having married “the love of her life,” Kit did not care what people said. At Merrywood the Auchincloss menage had its complications. Yusha, frequently off at boarding school, was disenchanted with Nina as he observed the deterioration of the marriage. At Rock Creek Park the Gores watched their daughter’s progress with quiet horror. Both Yusha and Hugh, to whom they were sympathetic, seemed like victims. The Gores “were in a class by themselves,” Yusha recalled. “Both my father and I liked them very much. I think because they were Nina’s parents I was always hoping that their daughter would come up to their standards. My father and I never understood how these charming, gentle people could produce a daughter like that.” Still, when she was not drunk or angry, Nina could be enchanting, and Hugh had no desire to divorce her. The stammering husband did his best to keep domestic things going, though they rarely went well. In late spring 1940 he came up with a bright idea. Since Gene would not be returning to Los Alamos, why not send him to Hugh’s own alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy? That one of his business partners was a trustee might help. Gene Vidal had no reservations about that suggestion. The cost of a year at Exeter was less than half that of Los Alamos.