Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  The galleys were ready in September, publication scheduled for February 1950, one month after A Search for the King. No one other than the author and a few people at Dutton were to know that both had been written by him. Critics had already found his productivity suspect. If he associated his name with A Star’s Progress, his credentials as a serious literary writer would be weakened. His critics would complain that not only did he write too much too quickly but that he also had written a steamy potboiler. The Orville Prescotts of the world would feel vindicated, probably maliciously vindictive. Dutton’s production manager, who sent Katherine Everard the galley proofs at a Ridgewood, New Jersey, address, had no idea that “Dear Miss Everard” was anyone other than she appeared to be. Enjoying the conspiracy, John Macrae, soon after publication, happily told Gore, “I have to sneak around and write to you about Miss Kitty’s book. Here is the review in the Times. Not too bad. When you mention her in your letters just use the work K. I mean the letter K. I keep worrying for fear someone will find out.” No one did. The complacent Times reviewer, who thought the book okay of its kind, was readily taken in. The governing board of The Pen and Brush, a Manhattan club of female “professional writers and artists,” wanted, “in recognition of [her] work,” to have Miss Everard “as a regular member.”

  Despite Vidal’s efforts to write down, A Star’s Progress is a classy piece of pulp fiction. The author’s hand is evident throughout. Set mainly in Monterrey, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, it is a partly original, partly formulaic female bildungsroman in which a beautiful, graceful, gifted Mexican-born dancer, perhaps modeled on Rita Hayworth, eager to escape her family’s poverty, rises, with the help of numbers of men, to Hollywood stardom, though not to happiness. Despite her talent, she is a victim of forces she can at best accommodate to, at worst be damaged by. Her talent and willpower can take her only so far, though they do take her to fame and notoriety. At the age of thirteen she dances in a raunchy New Orleans nightclub. One year later she becomes the mistress of a wealthy man more than four times her age, who takes her to Los Angeles. With the help of powerful Hollywood supporters, she soon becomes a film star. When she falls in love with her handsome bisexual co-star, she is stunned to learn he prefers his own sex to hers, that he is in love with a man. Escaping her misery, she has a sensationalized affair with a European prince. In the end she returns to New Orleans, where she carefully, deliberately, kills herself. Like that of The City and the Pillar, the narrative is framed by an opening and closing set in a bar in the novel’s present. The narrative pace is artfully varied, mostly brisk and focused. Drawing on his 1945 stay in Hollywood and his frequent visits to New Orleans, Vidal sharply evokes the two cities with a casual but concrete indirectness that makes them more than scenery and less than performers. When Graziella Serrano (as the movie star Grace Carter) goes to Nevada for a divorce, she stays at a dude ranch very much like the one Nina stayed at in 1935. Grace’s bisexual lover, Eric, a name that Vidal was to use again in Two Sisters, “sooner or later … always managed to prove that every man in the world was like himself” sexually, a Vidalian position of some later prominence. “The name Duluth,” where her mother was born, “had always intrigued” Grace, as it did her creator, who was to use it as the title for one of his most compelling fictions. As in Williwaw, elegant directness of style is everything. The prose is spare, precise, sometimes luminous in its exactness, interesting in its rhythms, sophisticated in its elaborations. Throughout, alas, convention and public morality press hard on the narrative. Grace Carter cannot escape the punishing hand that demands she pay for her transgressions with death, though her bisexual co-star remains happily unscathed. But for Grace punishment is inescapable, such did the genre, the publisher, and the public demand. A strong character, she is not strong enough; she is a weak link between, looking backward, Moll Flanders and, looking forward, Myra Breckinridge.

  Financially the experiment was a limited success. Sales were modest. For one week’s work Gore earned $1,000 and an additional small amount for the paperback, which Pyramid Books published under the title Cry Shame! Though he had nothing to be ashamed of, anonymity made sense. The money helped, but he had hoped for much more. He and Dutton kept the secret. Apparently he did not tell even his closest friends, like Williams, who had gone to Hollywood for some script work, or the restless Bowles, who had begun to plan a trip to Ceylon hoping Gore would join him there, or his new friend, Alice Astor, whom he had now begun to see frequently. In the country Alice stayed at a fine, square, gray-fieldstone Queen Anne-style house on the Hudson in Dutchess County, simply called Rhinebeck, for the local town. The land had been a wedding present to her and her first husband from her usually stingy older brother, Vincent. He had inherited much of the family fortune, including a huge tract of Rhinebeck land called Ferncliff, a small portion of which, about one hundred acres, he gave to Alice and Serge Obolensky. In New York she stayed in great comfort with her teenage daughters at the Gladstone Hotel, which she made a center for visitors from England, artistic and otherwise, and where she occupied one half of the eighth floor, naïvely thinking how economical she was by forgoing the expense of running a town house with servants. To go to Rhinebeck she got her doorman to hail a taxi, Gore recalled. “‘Do you mind taking me to Rhinebeck?’ ‘Where the hell is that?’ ‘I’ll show you the way.’ Mr. DiNapoli drove her back and forth for the next three or four years. ‘He’s so wonderful, and it’s so simple. You just ring him and he takes you there.’ Of course he was charging her on the meter, and she could have bought the cab by the time she finished with him.”

  Alice and Vincent had inherited great wealth, in Alice’s case a $5-million trust fund, when their father, John Jacob Astor IV, divorced from Alice’s difficult mother, had gone down with the Titanic. Originally German-Jewish merchants, the primal Astors had made a fortune in the early-nineteenth-century fur trade in America and in New York City real estate. The family divided into American and British branches. Alice’s early years were spent in both places. When her beautiful, imperious mother, whom Alice always feared, married an English aristocrat, Lord Ribblesdale, she settled permanently in London. Credible rumor and her non-Astor-like dark hair and features had persuaded Alice and others that John Jacob had probably not been her father. At twenty-one she married, in defiance of her mother, a divorced, impoverished Russian prince, Serge Obolensky, a handsome cavalry officer with whom she had fallen in love. After six years of marriage and a son, she fell in love again, divorced, and remarried the attractive Raimund von Hofmannsthal, the son of the world-renowned Austrian playwright, with whom she had two daughters. As she was prone, Alice fell in love again, as did Raimund. Soon they were each very much off on their separate affairs, Alice’s life divided between London, Austrian holidays, and Americans winters. In the mid-1930s she fell in love with the celebrated dancer and choreographer of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Theatre, Frederick Ashton, whose main interest was in men. “Freddie was quite able to leap into bed with her, which he wasn’t with many, whatever he says,” one of Alice’s daughters recalled. Always interested in the arts, Alice immersed herself in Ashton’s ballet world. Ashton found Alice attractive and useful. To the extent that her attentions were comfortable, he enjoyed the advantages of her wealth and social entrée. She hoped they would marry. By the early 1940s she had for some time known that nothing more would come of her love for Ashton. When the war started, she married Philip Harding, a writer for The Financial Times, a close friend of the poet John Betjeman, and a homosexual. One war and one daughter later, she divorced him and moved back to America. With her characteristic passion for unsuitable men, she married a British architect, David Playdell-Bouverie, also homosexual, who was happy to be made wealthy. Each new marital start seemed to her a hopeful beginning, a love that could not fail. Within three years Alice was in the process of divorcing him. By the late 1940s, with the divorce from Bouverie imminent, she allowed herself to hope for a short while that Freddie Ashton and she might take up
again. In 1949 she persuaded the skeptical impresario Sol Hurok to bring to New York Ashton’s Sadler’s Wells Ballet, which in October opened a triumphant season that combined the best in British and American post—World War II ballet.

  Having resumed her conversation with the young writer she had met in the spring, Alice invited him to Rhinebeck for a midautumn weekend with her friends from the ballet world. During the last days of October, Gore went up to Rhinebeck by train. To his left the wide Hudson flowed downstream. Westward, across the river, his birthplace held its stone prominence high on the palisade. The train stopped briefly at Hyde Park, then Poughkeepsie, then Rhinecliff, the Rhinebeck-area station. It was a route associated with his father, with Amelia Earhart, with “that man in the White House,” with some of the origins of his life. From the window, eastward up sloping lawns, across spacious autumn vistas, he could occasionally glimpse the mansions of the Dutchess County gentry, families like the Roosevelts and the Astors, who beginning in the late eighteenth century had settled into huge riverside estates. At Rhinebeck, Gore immediately saw that Alice was “wildly in love” with Ashton, “his talent, his charm, and the difficult time that he gave her. She loved having a difficult time. It was always the case that Alice was more in love with someone than he was with her.” In New York, where he sat next to Ashton at the Sadler’s Wells performance of one of Ashton’s ballets, and at Rhinebeck that weekend, Ashton flirted with Gore. A compulsive parlor entertainer, Ashton amused them all with impersonations and mimicry. “I spent a weekend with Freddie A. at Alice Bouverie’s in the country,” Gore wrote to John Lehmann early in November. “The rest is silence.” Lehmann of course knew what the “silence” meant, though it did not mean anything between Gore and Ashton other than that Ashton was, as usual, pursuing young men and, as often, being turned down. It was Alice whom Gore did not turn down.

  From the beginning they had a mutually acknowledged platonic rapport, a friendship that he valued immensely, that had something to do, at least at first, with who Alice was, but also and always was essentially a personal spark between two people who warmly liked one another in a deeply intuitive way. “I was sort of aware of Gore’s homosexuality,” Alice’s daughter Romana recalled, “but I was also aware of my mother’s penchant for having love affairs with homosexuals. She was the sort of woman that if Gore was going to have an affair, she would have one with him.” If Alice was in love with Gore, as Romana came to believe, her attentions had something of the familial to them, a sororal or even motherly engagement that immediately attracted to Gore the hostility of her son, Ivan, Speed Lamkin’s friend, who fancied himself a novelist also and who had gone into publishing. More than anything, “she was trying to make everyone aware what a young genius Gore was. She was very admiring of his work. How talented he was,” Romana recalled. “She thought he was underappreciated and badly reviewed. Though she was right about him, I think my mother would get involved with a man’s career and with a particular interest only when she was in love with him.” Whether in love or not, Alice desired to have him closer. Later that month Gore spent another weekend at Rhinebeck, enjoying his hostess and her guests, the comfortable, spacious house, the late-night entertainments, the notables from the ballet world, the luxury of servants, including a marvelous Russian chef whom Alice had kept as her divorce settlement from Obolensky. His specialty was a superb mushroom soup and an irresistible chocolate cake. These culinary delectations must have reminded Gore of some of the better aspects of Merrywood. On a weekend night, after a heavy Slavonic meal, he dreamed a scenario that the next morning he turned into a short story, “The Ladies in the Library,” which he dedicated to Alice. Most of the guests that weekend were English, including Judy Montagu.

  One damp late-November afternoon Alice took her guests for a drive northward along the River Road. Gore drove with Alice in her small car; the others were chauffeured separately. The Hudson glimmered to the left. Fog rose along the river, the woods white with mist. Their destination was a deserted early nineteenth-century Federal Greek Revival house, called Edgewater, in Barrytown, little more than a railroad station and a post office not far from the town of Red Hook, about ten miles above Rhinebeck. Alice told him, as they drove, that the house, on three acres, built in 1820 for a branch of the wealthy Livingston family, had been acquired a century before by her Chanler relatives, one of whom, the eccentric Chapman Chanler, lived nearby. In the late nineteenth century the essaysist John Jay Chapman, who had married a Chanler, had lived there while building his own house. It was one of Alice’s favorites. As they pulled into the driveway, immediately to the west, very close to the road, Gore saw the brick profile of the house, especially an octagonal addition on the north side. The New York Central tracks ran a few yards to the east, parallel to the driveway, which ran along the house’s north-south length. With Alice in the lead, “we walked along between the railroad track and the back of the house, which is how I think of it, but it was actually the old front door, and Alice knew it as that. Then she wanted, as usual, to see if it was open. She was a magician with keys and locks. But it wasn’t open, so we then walked around the south end, and I saw this big block of a house.” In front of them, to the west, as they came around the back, across a sloping field of grass that rose to their waists, was the wide river. Weeping willows marked the boundary between land and water. Beyond: a railroad bridge, a small island, the western shore, the low rise of “the delicately irregular line of the pale-blue Catskills … like the flourish beneath Washington Irving’s signature.” As they walked through the high grass toward the river, he turned and saw behind him, facing the river, the Greek Revival colonnade: six white-painted columns rising three stories high. They all looked back, somewhat dazzled, at the true front of Edgewater. He had never seen anything so beautiful. Classically proportioned, it seemed magical. As he saw the colonnade, he knew that he wanted this house.

  Actually, to his surprise and delight, the obstacles to acquisition were not as formidable as he had feared. The house had gone from the Chanler to the Chapman family, and in 1946 it had been purchased by Laura Taylor, who had had it on the market for some time. When, with Alice’s help, he learned that the asking price was $16,000, he was heartened. In fact, he immediately became a believer. He had no doubt he could somehow raise that amount. He would need the down payment and a mortgage. Perhaps Pat Crocker would succeed in selling the Antigua house and that money would be forthcoming. He soon found out why the asking price was noticeably low: the interior was in disrepair and the New York Central Railroad ran on the track that came within ten yards of the house. Most of the grand Hudson River houses were high up on a bluff, a distance from the track, which ran mostly along the river. At Edgewater the railroad ran on the landward side. For most, the proximity of the train made the house undesirable, though by 1950 changes in transportation that soon made the railroad comparatively unimportant had reduced the number of trains on the route and made their passage less frequent. Years later, in one of his novels, Vidal evoked what the experience must have been like in the nineteenth century. “We looked and saw just back of the house one of Commodore Vanderbilt’s monsters: some thirty freight cars jerked and rattled past as smoke and burning cinders erupted from the locomotive, making a huge cloud that obscured half the sky. During this visitation even the natives did not speak. We stood mute, motionless, as ashes fell about us like a dark rain…. ‘It’s all the fault of my husband’s father. He said, ‘Oh, how marvellous!’ when they wanted to put the railroad through. ‘It’ll stop and pick us up whenever we want!’ Well!” Surprisingly, the idea of the railroad hardly bothered Gore. As guests over the years were to remark, it seemed, though the house shook whenever the train passed, that he hardly noticed. Whereas most people saw heavy expenses for repairs, he immediately saw an opportunity to get a house he passionately wanted at a cost he could manage. The repairs could be done later, slowly, over time. As much as he had wanted anything, he wanted this house. He did not want to live in N
ew York or any city. Edgewater had proximity without subservience. It was close enough but separate. He felt the same impulse that, four years before, had got him to buy the Antigua house. Except for his grandparents’ Rock Creek Park home, he had been a transient in his formative years. He did not belong at any one of the houses his mother had him at or sent him away from. At boarding school he had been a traveler with no home to come back to. No one but he himself had or ever would provide him with one. He wanted a home of his own, and he had an instinct and an eye, despite obstacles, for houses and locations that fulfilled that sense of himself, that embraced beauty, distinctiveness, grandeur.