Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  He also resented the news that Kit and Gene had made him a half-brother again, this time to a girl they named Valerie. Discreetly, good-humoredly, he registered his concern that a man who had almost died two years ago and whose income had been severely curtailed partly because of health was not being self–protective enough. “It’s good to hear your last traces of thrombosis are going.” But he saw indeed that his now prematurely white-haired father would never be the same again. The heart attack had taken from him his edge of energy and ambition. Now Gene Vidal, never an enthusiastic parent, had become a father again at the age of almost fifty. Gore blamed Kit. But he realized that this was the likely result of Gene having married a woman half his age who may have thought of this second child as reasonable compensation for having to look after an ailing husband. And it may have been possible that Gene, as a life-affirming statement of his own, had participated fully in the decision, if decision it were. Since Gore, of course, could do nothing about any of this, he congratulated the parents and wished only happy things for the child. Also he expressed some of his resentment. “Give [Kit] my best and I hope she’ll be up and around soon. I understand the 2nd is a snap. Now [all] she has to do is get small pox and you have a thrombosis … and it will be just like old times.” Not that his own interests were threatened in any material way. He counted on his father for help only to the extent of the bonds that had been put aside for his college costs. Each month since he had enlisted, he had saved most of his $150 salary. Now the additional overseas pay allowed him to bank his entire base pay. It was adding up. So too was his manuscript. “In another 2 months” he expected something to send to a publisher or a new agent. “Read and eat a lot, though I’ve lost weight. This tricky weather is apt to keep you nervous on a run.”

  On deck one day a sudden squall in below-freezing weather drenched him with numbing coldness. He immediately began to shiver. Wrapped in blankets, he thawed out in his cabin. One day it was calm, placid, another rough and stormy. When the wind blew from the south, a ghostly white mist enveloped their arctic world. Stepping lively at the bow of the ship as it pulled into Dutch Harbor a few days later, the first mate shifted his weight to initiate his jump to the dock. Suddenly he could not propel himself forward, his right knee locked in place. He could not unbend his leg. As Freight Supply Ship 135 came close to the wharf, Gore realized that he could not make the jump. “As first mate it was my job to jump off the bow onto the wharf and to see that the spring line was secure, and I couldn’t make the jump because I didn’t think I was going to make it, and my leg had locked on me, and I thought Jesus I’m going to fall between the wharf and the ship.” Quickly he had a deckhand take over his duties. Driven first to a doctor, who took X rays, then to the base hospital, he remembered the arctic drenching of a few days before. Since then his joints had ached, but he had assumed it was superficial, temporary. Everyone stationed on the frigid Bering Sea more often than not ached from the arctic cold. Now for two days he could not walk at all. A week later, at the end of March 1945, still hospitalized, he was relieved of all duties. The diagnosis was acute rheumatoid arthritis. He immediately knew that he would never go to Officer Candidate School. Soon on his way to Anchorage for medical observation, he realized also that he probably would never see the Aleutian Islands again. “In fact, I’m apt to be washed up in the army…. I’m feeling rather desolate about the whole thing,” he wrote to his father. “It, the arthritis, is not really painful, but one feels weak and aching and every now and then my left shoulder aches like all hell. Finger joints are swollen so I can’t write much. Am waiting now for a plane.” At Anchorage he was taken directly to the hospital at Fort Richardson. “They’ve been testing several gallons of my blood and I have a feeling I may be here a long time. Have no idea what they’ve found wrong or what they’ll do. If the climate is to blame (and I think that’s what they’ll find) I shall go back to the States. That’s about the best news I’ve heard.” Medical observation reconfirmed the earlier diagnosis. The prescription was rest and rehabilitation, preferably in a warm, dry climate.

  Listening to the radio at the Fort Richardson hospital, he was startled by astounding news: FDR had died. The next day, April 13, the newspapers confirmed the story. For Gore and his grandfather the news had personal resonance. The President who had occupied the White House all Gore’s conscious life, whom he had imitated to the amusement of friends and enemies, whose policies he had opposed as a debater at Exeter, who had become his and his grandfather’s nemesis, had passed from the stage of what even his enemies admitted were his brilliant performances. He had been an act impossible to compete with or ignore. “I was relieved. We were done with him. He had been around so long. I was so tired of him. And my imitation of him was by now so good I was eager to imitate somebody else.” But he was stunned that someone who had seemed eternal was gone. “It seemed impossible that this larger than life King Kong of a newsreel politician was dead. I was delighted, of course. He had got us into the war; he had established a dictatorship; he had defeated my grandfather in the election of 1936.” Both his grandson and the Senator took satisfaction that the latter had outlived his enemy, that the man who had thought himself “indispensable” had been dispensed with. “I thought your comment on the tragedy was classic,” the Senator wrote to his grandson. “If it had got to the lips of the newspapermen it would have gone the rounds … I mean your epigram, ‘The king is dead—long live the president.’”

  He was glad to be on the move, flying southward to Los Angeles, this time to stay for a much longer period than his previous brief visits from Colorado. The Army doctors had recommended a few months of hospitalization for further observation, therapy, and reassignment. With the Army’s preference for placing patients near their families, Gore had in mind the perfect place. “Although I did not want to be near my mother, I wanted to be near Hollywood. I was hooked on movies.” The Army soon assigned him to Birmingham General Hospital in Van Nuys, just a short distance from Beverly Hills. With him he had about thirty thousand words of his novel-in-progress, his depiction of life on a boat like his own FS-135, focused on two competitive crewmen whose antagonism leads to the death of one in the freezing arctic waters as the other (who has thrown a hammer with the intent to hurt but not kill) decides, in a split second, as the seas are still high from a brutal williwaw that almost destroys the ship, not to call for help. The tone is bleak, the Army tedious, the men ranging from competent to self-serving, the mission of the freight ship to carry a party of officers to their destination. Despite the likelihood of severe weather, the ranking officer in transit has insisted on departure because he vaingloriously wants to demonstrate to his superiors that he will get where he believes his report is required, even against obstacles. The captain of the freight ship, though he has the right to say no, gives in. They find shelter during a lull in the storm. The captain then makes his second error of judgment: he decides to resume the open-sea voyage in the hope the worst of the williwaw is over. It is not. When they finally make it to their destination, he has two unhappy situations to deal with: one of the crew has fallen overboard in unexplained circumstances, and he himself is blamed for bad judgment in having agreed to undertake the trip by the very self-serving officer who had urged him to sail. With about one quarter of the book in hand, unsure how to develop his initial conception, Gore brought the gray “Accounts” ledger with him on the flight to Burbank. His other manuscripts he had shipped. He feared, though, that just as he had not been able to finish the Maugham novel, so too he would not be able to finish this one. With his right hand swollen from rheumatoid arthritis, writing was physically difficult. But he was also emotionally blocked. For a while he “abandoned the book. I could never finish anything, I decided. I was full of self-contempt.”

  Still, there would be time to work on it, at least for as long as the Army supported him during his convalescence and thereafter, if his duties were light. For the moment, having completed one more chapter, he put the manuscr
ipt aside. With the war coming to an end, what he would do next and how he would earn his living were much on his mind. Whether it were to be literature or politics (or both), for the time being he found Hollywood riveting. From the hospital he could easily hitch to Beverly Hills and stay with Nina whenever he could be away more than the day. The Steins found him clever, witty, adorable. “Jules went on and on for years that he was the first to see my talent. Doris had a job at the Stage Door Canteen,” Gore recalled. “Jules drove—can you imagine in those days tycoons actually drove themselves—he drove Doris and my mother and me to the canteen. I sat up front with Jules, the girls sat in the back. We had a long talk about politics and so on. From then on, for the next half century, Doris said, ‘Well, it was Jules who said that the young man is going places. He is so intelligent.’ And probably meaning so unlike his drunken mother, whom Jules couldn’t stand. Jules was the biggest agent in the business. He didn’t become a power mogul until he got Universal. He’d handled everybody. It was through him that I met Bette Davis, who was in the first movie I wrote a dozen years later. He was wildly in love with her. Jules got me passes for all the studios.” After years of watching movies on theater screens, Gore now could watch them being made on the famous sound stages and back lots of Hollywood. “We were watching … Marriage Is a Private Affair by Tennessee Williams…. Lana Turner was in that…. I’d sleep at the hospital. Sometimes on weekends I’d be allowed to stay at my mother’s bungalow in town. By then my mother was generally pretty drunk every night, so I’d be on my own at night. I’d cruise around, get picked up, and then slip out the side door before any action occurred.” On one occasion Hollywood came to the hospital. “Charles Laughton, unannounced, arrived at the library to read to a dozen of us who were interested—he started with Whitman then proceeded on to Brecht’s Galileo, which B was writing for him in the Hollywood Hills.”

  Gore tried, with little success, to work on his novel. And something else was amiss, actually astray. The footlocker containing the manuscripts he had written in Colorado and Alaska, which he had had shipped to Van Nuys, was missing. It contained short stories, poems, fragments of novels. As the days went by, as comforting as was the California sunshine, as fascinating as his insider’s view of the film industry, he felt a void, an absence, a potential loss that soon developed into realized disaster. There was no sign of the footlocker. It never turned up. Characteristically, he took the disaster with a mixture of stoicism and anger, and soon maximized the attractions of the present. Since he was not making much progress with the novel, he began to go almost daily to the sound stages. Jules Stein’s passes opened every door. At the Beverly Hills Hotel the composer Vincent Youmans, ill and lonely, asked the young writer to create some lyrics for him to set to music. He did. But nothing came of it. On weekends life with Nina had a flashy impersonality. She took her handsome son, resplendently patriotic in his military uniform, to the parties Doris and others constantly hosted, at which he more readily recognized Hollywood stars than she did. Drinks. Cigarettes. Handsome men. Beautiful women. Nina stunningly dresssed. There was no mirror in which she did not see her attractive self. Guiltless, she slept with whomever she wanted. The Steins’ eleven-year-old daughter, Jean, noticed, as did Gore, how unnoticed they both were by Nina and Doris. “We didn’t really have mothers. They were so busy. They were very narcissistic women … who didn’t really have interest in their children. They were mainly interested in themselves.” Nina was “incredibly beautiful, very striking, very strong, very willful.”

  One afternoon, as he sat by the hotel pool, about to start on a visit to some of the studios, he began to overhear a conversation about a film. A few feet away two fat men in bathing suits were discussing a script they were writing for a movie called Siren of Atlantis, starring Maria Montez. If they had been dressed, they would have been wearing berets, he imagined. If they had been smoking, they would have been smoking cigars. They were working out the plot. “It was so hilarious I couldn’t tear myself away. I think the title must have come up and stuck in my head, and of course Maria Montez was a great favorite of people who loved bad movies, as I did.” Maria Montez and the title of the film remained in his mind. Decades later they contributed to the creation of Myra Breckinridge.

  At the hospital he began to emerge into reasonable health and some restlessness. His swollen right knee and finger joints returned to normal, though he still had some immobility and dull aches. Eager to visit his father, whom he had last seen the previous fall, he solicited a leave from Van Nuys long enough to allow him to hitch a ride to New York in early June 1945. Sally had joined Pick, recently returned from Italy, at Mitchell Field. At Kit and Gene’s Fifth Avenue apartment Gore was also reunited with his poetry manuscript. His father, for whom publishing, let alone poetry, was mostly an unknown, had given it to Gertrude Algase, who had been unable to find a publisher for it. But unexpectedly the beneficent long reach of Amelia Earhart blessed him once again. While Gore was in New York, a struggling Earhart biographer, Janet Mabie, came to 1107 Fifth Avenue to interview Gene, who was eager to help a project that valorized his dead friend and the pioneering days of the airline industry. Gene said to her, in Gore’s presence, as they were chatting away, “‘Oh, Gore’s written a book!’ ‘Oh!’ she said.” Mabie proposed a meeting between Gore and her editor at Dutton. The Dutton editorial director, Nicholas Wreden, hoped that Gene Vidal could be persuaded to write a memoir. Accounts of the glamour and celebrities of the early aviation industry appealed to a wide reading public. With no intention of writing anything, Gene put Wreden on tantalizing hold. Meanwhile he pushed Gore, whom Wreden met and immediately liked. Wreden passed along Gore’s book of poems to Dutton’s poetry editor, an accomplished poet, Louise Townsend Nicholl, who liked it. She told him she would make the recommendation to publish the poems at the next editorial meeting, in a month or so.

  Wreden had his own proposal for the Dutton proprietors and for Gore. Since Dutton was eager to have new young voices, why not bring onto the staff an energetic young writer who could alert the house to people and projects that would give Dutton a leg up on the postwar world of returning soldiers and the eager anticipation of a new postwar literature? Though it had never occurred to him that he might earn his living as an editor, Gore immediately accepted. The totally unexpected had happened: his book of poems had been accepted for publication, and he had been offered a job. He could join Dutton when he was discharged from the service. In early July, after two months’ rehabilitation at Van Nuys, he was called to appear before an examination board of three senior medical officers. He still had occasional aches, pain, and stiffness from swollen joints. The mysteries of rheumatoid arthritis left doctors perplexed, in disagreement about diagnosis and treatment. Fortunately, the Army doctors did him no harm. The board reviewed the records, questioned him. Clearly he would not be sent overseas again, regardless of how long the war lasted. Since there was no cure, he would be entitled, at discharge, to a small disability pension if he would agree to stay in the Army for approximately another two years. If he would forgo the pension, he would be discharged in approximately one year. In any case he would be assigned for six months to “temporary limited service” in a warm, dry climate, “duty not involving excessive physical exertion.” He did not hesitate a moment. “I said, ‘Let me out! I don’t want the pension.’ I wanted to get out, I wanted to get into the world. Going into the Army at seventeen was a relief. I’d gone into another prison, but it was a much bigger prison than any school.” The assignment was, inexplicably, to a training center, Camp Gordon Johnston, at Carabelle on the west coast of Florida. With orders to report in mid-August via Fort Dix to the redistribution center in Asheville, North Carolina, for transport to Florida by August 19, Gore said good-bye to Nina, to the Steins, to Hollywood glamour. He had another cross-country train trip ahead of him. Since the eastward route required connections through Chicago, he decided to stop in Jackson, Michigan, to visit his favorite aunt, the sharp-talking Lur
ene and her husband, Merle. A welcome visitor, he enjoyed the assertion of Vidal family identity, the voluble pride of Lurene in his father and now in him also. Handsome, young, happy to be alive, slim in his brown Army uniform, the world all before him, his war was coming to an end.

  As he stood in his aunt’s garden, bright with flowers on a sunny July day, someone he vaguely knew from one of the many Washington schools he had been to, though he could not remember which, now a neighbor or visiting a neighbor of Lurene’s, joined him. “Oh,” Carter Sparks said, as the conversation went on, “did you know that Jimmie Trimble’s dead?” Shock. Silence. Resistance. Numbness. What did that mean? He held the “stark announcement” at a distance, temporarily. The immediate facts were blunt, brief, though it would take much of a lifetime to assemble them more fully. He vaguely knew that Jimmie, whom he had last seen during Christmas 1942 in Washington, had gone from St. Albans to Duke University. Since Jimmie was underage, his mother would not give him permission to enlist. Six months later, at eighteen, he had joined the Marines. With numbers of opportunities to use his baseball skills to stay out of combat, he had insisted that he take the same chances as most others. In August 1944 he became a scout-observer in the South Pacific. From October 1944 to February 1945 he was stationed on Guam, from where he soon wrote to his mother that “I’ll never forgive myself for refusing to follow your advice to stay in college. After the war we won’t receive any credit for having been out here.” At the end of February, while Gore was in the Aleutians, Jimmie landed on Iwo Jima. On March 1 he was killed in heavy action with the enemy. What Gore knew now was the bare fact of his death in action, casually mentioned in an idle conversation by someone who had no idea what their relationship had been, even that they had been friends. How to absorb this? How to deal with it?