by Fred Kaplan
Howard’s father, born in 1905, left fatherless at the age of about five and working for his living by the time he was twelve, embraced his working-class ethos and his gambler’s compulsion. His own father, who had immigrated from Austria, had started a small business in New York. When he went to Europe for a visit, he never returned, leaving his wife and five children to fend for themselves. As if his first family never existed, he remarried. Without education or vocational skills, his deserted wife sent her children to work as soon as possible. A rigidly Orthodox Jew, she pronounced anathema on whoever did not follow the rules, including her eldest daughter, who later became the mainstay of the fragmented family, the only aunt Howard remembered with any fondness. His grandmother “didn’t know what Judaism meant. She just followed the forms. She also never learned English.” Uninterested in religion except insofar as not wanting to offend the neighbors, Ann and Harry Auster struggled financially, fought bitterly, separated, reconciled, loved one another after their fashion, and set themselves up in the shadowland between working-class and lower-middle-class venues, mostly in the Pelham Parkway area of the Bronx. For Harry, life was mostly sporadic work, heavy gambling, the daily sports pages, and the poolroom. For Ann the hair tint of the day, the newspaper gossip columns, her work at nightclubs on the lowest rung of showbiz life were all major preoccupations. Though money was always short, each summer they went to the Jewish Catskills for a holiday, the high point of their year. At Public School 105, Howard, without much assistance from his parents, performed adequately. “I don’t think my father ever read a book in his life. He did, though, help me in my early years in school. I remember I was having trouble learning the alphabet. He took pieces of cardboard and wrote out the letters and taught them to me by rote. That was it. I suppose the main part of it was my fault: He wanted me to be interested in baseball and sports, which he never played. He liked pool and he liked gambling, and I felt that I disappointed him.”
At about five or six Howard “discovered masturbation. But not with my hand. It was rubbing against something. I didn’t know what it was. And I was doing it on my bed one day in this terrible one-room apartment we lived in then on Stratford Avenue, and they came in. I didn’t stop. I was happily humping away. Well, my father didn’t do anything. My mother hit me. I don’t know what consequences this later had on my life. Of course, it made sex all the more interesting.” Initially Ann Auster seemed glamorous to her young son. “My mother getting dressed up and beating up every eyelash to go out at night. She was a bit of a flapper.” And at first his father had appeared strong, exciting, someone to look up to. Soon, however, both parents seemed dull, hostile, rejecting. Like his mother, perhaps in imitation of her, he discovered early on that he had a good voice and loved singing popular and Broadway-musical songs. But “my mother was totally discouraging, except that I do remember, which shows you the extent of their religiosity, that when it came time for my bar mitzvah—‘Well, what’ya wanta do? I’ll give you singing lessons or a bar mitzvah!’ That’s how deeply religious they were. I would have loved singing lessons. But I said, to please her—I’ll have a bar mitzvah. I’ll go to six weeks of Hebrew school.’ Of course she loved giving the party. They showed off. I was aware that I liked singing, and I wasn’t as diffident then. Earlier there was this kid’s hour on radio. I got her to take me for an audition. I was so sure I would pass it. And I guess I didn’t at all. And coming home on the train I remember that my mother would not talk to me. To this day I don’t know why I didn’t pass the audition. I remember being nervous beyond belief.” For some years thereafter “that rejection inhibited me from singing. It was like a little secret of mine. The fear of criticism, and of course when my sexual thing came along, this was another way of just exposing myself.” As he went from grade school to Christopher Columbus High School, he felt that his parents disapproved of him, that their world was small and boring. At about ten he had discovered that he liked sex, especially with boys and men, the secretive, transgressive element a great thrill, partly connected in his mind to his mother’s having hit him when she found him masturbating. “I did it once, I think, with the super’s son—that was enjoyment. I did get blown in the park, I must have been eleven, by a twenty- or twenty-one-year-old guy. But I really did the seducing…. I was really very aggressive about it as a child. Far more then than I would ever dream of being now. And that kind of sex was so exciting. I continued that in high school.”
More than anything, he wanted to get away from his parents, to get away from the dullness of his working-class and lower-middle-class Jewish Bronx world. Always told that money was short and that his parents were making sacrifices for him, he was eager to be independent. Like his father, he started working at twelve, mostly after school, weekends, and summers, as a soda jerk in local candy stores. “One of my reasons for working was so that I could get away from my parents and my neighborhood and I could meet people to have sex with. And then it became a total addiction that I adored.” College was his passage out of that world. He applied to and was admitted in 1946 to New York University at Washington Square. With his own savings and earnings, he could just barely pay the tuition. To his parents, college was a foreign world. They did not want him to know more than they did, to rise above them. When, later, he confided to his father his worry that he might not be able to continue at school, his father responded, “‘Good! You can drive a taxi! You can get a job as a trucker!’” Instead he worked long hours at the soda fountain in a Walgreen’s drugstore near the Paramount movie theater, a job he liked. The customers were interesting, amusing, varied, the neon-lit show-business Times Square atmosphere attractively glamorous. He loved the glitter, and it paid almost all his school bills. Living at home, he had no rent. His parents put pressure on him to live with them (not that he could have afforded to live anywhere else), partly because they benefited from his baby-sitting for his only sibling, a sister twelve years his junior, also because they considered it shameful for a son to live outside the house until he married or moved away. Perhaps because he felt guilty living in the home of people he increasingly disliked, he succumbed one summer to his parents’ wish that he work as a waiter in their beloved Catskills near the resort they stayed at. When business turned bad, the owner fired almost all the waiters. Without any summer earnings, he had to withdraw from college. Soon he had his Walgreen’s job back. Resuming college the next semester, he was back at his old Manhattan haunts—the Village, Times Square, the Everard Baths as soon as he turned eighteen, the Upper West Side. “Anonymous sex, in parks. That sort of thing…. Being on display at the Paramount Theater and at Walgreen’s, I was picked up so many times, and then on Seventy-second Street and Broadway. Just young male flesh. My first really serious encounter was with a woman who must have been a prostitute; she must have been about eighteen or twenty at the most. She really came on strong. She invited me to a place—it wasn’t an apartment. I had never had that kind of experience before in my life. I was willing to try it. But I was so terrified. I couldn’t get a hard-on. First of all, she was older. I was seventeen. She might have been twenty-one or -two. I didn’t find her that attractive. So that was a disaster. What I immediately did to reassure myself was to go to Seventy-second Street and get picked up and get blown by a guy.”
Cute, with red-brown hair and freckles, about medium height with a trim, nicely proportioned build, refreshingly straightforward and innocently unsophisticated, Howard was both street-smart and charmingly young. When they met at the Everard Baths on Labor Day, 1950, Howard, who had graduated from NYU in June, appealed to Gore not because of any particular sexual chemistry between them but because he was refreshingly different, youthful, and roughly charming. That he was a relatively uneducated boy from the Bronx was in his favor. Intellectuals and well-educated Wasps were the proverbial dime a dozen in the world in which Gore had been brought up. Howard’s Jewishness, to the extent that Gore thought about it at all, was transgressive in a minor key, something that might have
appealed to his self-assertiveness, his rejection of the prejudices of the Auchincloss and Gore worlds. So too Howard’s working-class background. Gore had had considerable sexual experience with boys from the working-class world. But now here was one for whom he had an immediate strong feeling of protectiveness, companionability, seniority, whom he could jokingly refer to as his “child.” Both were eager for friendship, for family on their own terms. Both recognized some potential for creating a relationship that might substitute for what they had been denied or had rejected. If they were, from that first encounter, an odd couple, they were an odd couple that made sense. That distinctive familial chemistry was there from the beginning. Howard was immediately in awe, entranced. They were soon having dinner together every night. When Howard could not afford to pay his half of the expensive restaurant bills and asked if they couldn’t go to cheaper places, Gore responded, “‘Why should I suffer because you don’t have any money? I’ll pay for the dinner, and you give me what you can.’ I couldn’t argue with that.”
A week or two after Labor Day, Gore said, “‘Come up to the country this weekend.’” Not “‘would you like to or’—Just: ‘Come to the country this weekend!’ ‘Well, I’m busy, I don’t know if I can make it.’ ‘Well, if you can’t make it, then good-bye!’ I didn’t know if that meant forever. And besides, I really did want to go up. I had nothing else to do. So I said, ‘Okay.’ So I came up for that weekend. There was no sex, no sexual tension. There might have been jealousy early on. He told me—don’t expect sex. I would have gone on doing it. I didn’t care. I would have gone on willingly. But it wasn’t sexual, physical love. I kind of moved—not moved in—I was never sure, that’s why I never took it very seriously. If it ended, it ended. Which took a lot of the tension out of it. I suppose I ended up being a permanent playmate, Greek chorus, and Jewish mother. Who could ask for anything more? I got the company of Gore. Beyond anything I really ever dreamed of…. I know people are puzzled by how it works between me and Gore. I’ve been plagued by that all my life. What do you say? ‘Hi, I’m Howard Austen, I’m associated with Gore Vidal, but we don’t sleep together?’ You assume when two men are living together that…. It was a corner that they put me into that I just had to accept. Even today. There’s no defense. If it were true, I would not be ashamed of it. People have done a lot worse than Gore Vidal, even though he’s fat. The truth is the truth.”
To celebrate Gore’s twenty-fifth birthday and the publication of Dark Green, Bright Red, Nina decided to make a grand birthday party for her son. Though most of their lives they had fought bitterly, at the moment they were in a quiet passage in their ongoing pattern of separation and temporary reconciliation. Nina’s $3,000 loan toward the purchase of Edgewater had given her a proprietary interest in the house. At the Volney, where she took an apartment for her extended New York City visits, she played cards with her alcoholic neighbor, Dorothy Parker. Boiling pot after pot of coffee, Nina tried to stay on the wagon. Regularly she fell off. Most of the time she dressed glamorously, elegantly. In public she was usually vivacious, a dominating presence. In September she came up to Edgewater for her first visit, delighted to have lunch with Alice Astor, whom she soon began to refer to as “my friend Alice Astor.” In fact, Joe O’Donohue recalled, “she would refer to ‘our friend’ and even ‘my friend’ Alice Astor, which would make Gore furious.” When she noticed Howard, she thought him cute and inconsequential and began various small efforts of noblesse oblige, including trying to teach him proper Wasp table manners. “The first time I met Gore’s mother was at the party at the Café Nicholson in October 1950. She seemed wonderful to me. I loved glamorous people, party girls. She was a star. Even Gore would agree on that. I don’t know whether she accepted me reluctantly or whether she was convinced that I was going to be a permanent part of Gore’s life. She had her own gay world. She knew how these affairs began and ended with the speed of light.”
In New York, dragging eleven-year-old Tommy around with her, Nina arranged to have Gore’s birthday party at Café Nicholson on Monday night, October 2, when the restaurant would otherwise be closed. Food from the party would come from a caterer Nina would obtain. Gore, through Johnny, would supply the room and the lovely back garden. He also, of course, would supply most of the guests, from a list of his famous friends whom Nina was eager to meet and have a high time with. For Nina it was somewhat down-class. But it gave her the chance to be managerial, to show the world her interest in and her closeness to her son, to rub shoulders with what to her was a glamorous though less refined world than her own. As usual, she intended to be splendid. Among other things, she had had a large cake made with bright green-and-red lettering in the shape of the book she had not read. Soon after the party began, she swept in, dressed in glittering silver lamé, “a fabulous figure,” Nicholson remembered, “a very handsome woman,” glamorously, superciliously, and probably happily out of place. Since Anaïs was there with Hugh Guiler, they must have met, the only encounter between them, though in the noisy excitement of the party they probably at most eyed one another in passing. Anaïs would have been more interested, though disdainfully, in Nina than Nina in her. Gene Vidal was there, with Kit. When Gene sat next to Anaïs, she startled him with her frank conversational references to Gore having been her lover. Gore introduced his mother, as he did his father, to Tennessee Williams, John Latouche, and Carl Van Vechten. Oliver Smith, the prominent New York set designer, was there, Nick Wreden and Louise Nicholl from Dutton, Harvey Breit from the Times, Alice Astor, Connie Darby, Sarah Moore, the actress Ella Raines—related to Gore and Nina through her marriage to one of Bob Olds’s sons—and about seventy-five of Gore’s old and new New York friends, including editors from Vogue and Mademoiselle. When Miles White entered, he noticed a shy-looking young man standing alone near the entranceway. Shy himself, he kept Howard company. So too, a little later, did Johnny Nicholson, who was frightened of Nina. Toward the end of the party Gore “made a gracious little speech about what an occasion it was etc., etc., ‘particularly when I can,’ I said as I cut the cake, ‘eat my own words.’”
Through the fall of 1950 the domestic rhythms of Edgewater took shape. Before driving to the Rhinecliff station to welcome his new friend to Edgewater for his first visit, Gore had put a pork roast in the oven. When they returned, “the roast was dried out and terrible. And that was it—the whole dinner. Well, perhaps he had some vegetables or something.” Gore seemed to think that he had prepared an excellent meal. “So I said, ‘Maybe I’ll try the cooking.’ I was hungry.” Howard cooked thereafter, making pleasurable use of “fresh ripe Dutchess County tomatoes in July and August from the roadside stands. And the corn,” which Gore always remembered as the best he had ever eaten. At least one weekened meal, usually Saturday night, was at Alice’s, where her Russian chef kept guests happy. On Sunday they often ate at a nearby lobster restaurant. The driving was done by Gore. In the Aleutians he had occasionally driven a jeep over the roadless tundra. He knew how to start and stop. That, though, was the extent of his driving skill. Howard did not drive at all. For local driving (Gore initially took the bus or train into Manhattan) he needed a car. “I went into Rhinebeck and bought a Model A Ford, a couple of hundred dollars,” Gore recalled. “In those days nobody asked you for a driver’s license. I lived there. I said, ‘Will you tell me how this thing starts?’ And they started it and showed me the throttle. I remember that. ‘This is in case it doesn’t start. You do that.’ ‘Where’s the brake?’ I knew about the brake. ‘How do you stop it, etc.?’ ‘The pedal.’ I got into the car,” without a license, “and I drove it from Rhinebeck to Edgewater.” Howard, who stayed from Friday through Sunday, found that social life revolved around guests, at Edgewater and at Alice’s. Gore went regularly into Manhattan once or twice a week, often staying overnight, enjoying New York literary society, particularly, for example, Edith Sitwell who was over for a lecture tour in November and the New York opening of Williams’s The Rose Tattoo in early Febru
ary 1951. Gore paid all the bills, though often he worried about where the money for major expenses would come from. During the week Howard still lived with his parents. Then, late in the year, an ex-cab-driver friend of his father, who had gone to college, showed up with his fifth wife. Howard’s mother had told him about her son’s glamorous new friends. “He was the only person in that milieu to whom those names would mean anything.” Soon Ann Auster was laying down the law. Howard would have “to give up all these friends because Sam … had done some research and found out my new friends were homosexual. I took a bag—I don’t know why we even had a bag—and packed my clothes. I didn’t say a word. ‘You’re moving out?’ That’s when she called me a degenerate.” In late autumn he moved into the Manhattan YMCA, then early the next year into a shared, subleased, $75-a-month furnished apartment on the top floor of an abandoned synagogue on East Seventy-second Street.