Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  For Christmas, Gore and Howard took the train down to Washington, where Howard had never been, to visit Nina and Dot. Gore’s temporary truce with Nina now provided a painful example of its fragility and Howard his first experience with Nina drunk. They arrived in good Christmas cheer at her large four-story row house, 3226 N Street, one floor of which she occupied, the others of which she rented, except for a guest apartment Dot sometimes stayed in. Probably she was there now, though not Gore’s thirteen-year-old half-sister Nini, who, with a temper of her own and after a fight with her mother, had gone to live with her father. She preferred an Auchincloss Christmas. Eleven-year-old Tommy, home from boarding school for the holiday, showed Howard the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan and Mars books that had once been Gore’s and that Tommy had saved when they had left the Woodland Avenue house. Few of Gore’s other childhood books remained, and all his papers had been discarded. Fascinated by the Tarzan books, Howard sat with Tommy, leafing through one of them. Tommy then went to bed, early. He was suddenly shocked into awakeness by Nina. “God, it was an awful thing. She came in, and she was naked, and she hit me a couple of times,” Tommy recalled. He had never seen his mother that way before. “She woke me up. I must have said something that set her off into a drunken rage. Something like kids do. She may have spent too much money on me, and I wasn’t appreciative enough or something. Then she got sick and vomited on me. Gore was there, but he was in another apartment.” The next day Gore explained to Tommy “that ‘your mother’s not well.’ I guess she felt badly about it. Afterwards she never remembered what she had done. I didn’t go near her for two years after that…. I was in boarding school anyway.” Frightened, he also moved to his father’s. Janet Auchincloss’s rages were slightly less intolerable, and at least she was not his mother. When he left, Nina got rid of “all the toys and all the clothes and all the books” Tommy had, including those of Gore’s that Tommy had salvaged. For Gore the scene was familiar, one of many he had experienced, some of them when he was as vulnerable as Tommy. Nina’s friend Joe Ryle remembered what for him was the sadness of Nina’s self-destructive behavior, particularly how, when Nini and Tommy were coming home from school for holidays, Nina would be “so marvelous and be on the wagon for two or three weeks before they came home, totally. Not a drink. The minute those children would arrive, she’d go falling-down drunk. She just couldn’t cope with—I don’t know what it was she couldn’t cope with. It was just so sad.” Sometimes she could stay on the wagon for months. AA helped. At times in the mid-1950s “she was quite self-analytical, but she was also always excusing herself,” Gore recalled, “and trying to find excuses for what she knew was incredibly bad behavior, even as drunks go. She blamed her bad behavior on having been neglected as a child and so on and so forth. But she knew that didn’t play with me, because I knew too much about her parents, so she then said that she had agonizing menstrual periods. ‘I had the longest menopause in history. It went on for years. It was agony. All the night sweats and nerves.’ I said, ‘I guess a lot of it was DTs too.’”

  Though he felt sorry for Tommy, the Christmas nightmare did not ruffle Gore’s good spirits. Except for his concern about money, things were going well, and he had hopes that either television or pulp fiction would provide him with additional funds. There was the possibility of reprints of his novels, a backlist that he hoped the new paperback industry would make available. Victor Weybright, who had originated New American Library with Signet and Mentor paperbacks, was successfully pushing mass-market fiction. Gore had just met Weybright, a stolid, dark-haired man, elegantly dressed in hand-tailored British suits, his ever-present pipe accenting his jowls. “Weybright looked like Evelyn Waugh,” Jason Epstein recalled, “and tried to act like him, to look elegant. He was a very good businessman.” From an agricultural family long settled in rural Maryland. Weybright had gone from the Wharton School to editing an important Washington social-science research magazine to four enjoyable wartime years in London as the American liaison with British scientific and cultural organizations. Before leaving England he had made an arrangement with Alan Lane, the pioneering creator of Penguin Books, to buy out Penguin’s fledgling American operation. Weybright hoped to do for paperbacks in America what Lane was doing in Britain. There was some possibility that Weybright would arrange with Dutton a new paperback edition of The City and the Pillar. Also, he had in mind a paperback anthology of quality literature, to be published a few times a year. By spring 1951 both projects were in the air. Weybright, who had been having great success publishing mass-market originals of Mickey Spillane’s subliterary detective fiction, may have suggested to Gore he might earn much-needed money by writing an upscale version of Spillane, sophisticated murder-mystery thrillers to appeal to the high end of the paperback market. Vidal remembers that the suggestion came from Weybright, partly compensation for his resistance to publishing Gore’s out-of-print novels with the excuse that literary novels did not sell in paperback, though he boasted he had been the first to sell Faulkner widely when he put a steamy cover on his edition of Sanctuary. More likely he feared the taint of a novel and a novelist associated with homosexuality. The chronology and the record suggest that in the spring of 1951 Gore himself thought of what were soon to become the pseudonymous Edgar Box mystery novels. As a reader of Agathie Christie and S. S. Van Dine, he felt he knew the genre. That summer at Edgewater, experimenting for the first time with a Dictaphone, he dictated in about a week Death in the Fifth Position, the first in the Edgar Box trio.

  At ease in the octagonal study, the house still somewhat haggard and underfurnished, he had worked through the winter and spring completing Judgment and trying to get various moneymaking projects off the ground. Through Harvey Breit he had done a review in February for the New York Times Book Review, another for The Saturday Review. It soon seemed evident that he would make very little from Judgment. In late June 1951 he had finished the novel. At best, he anticipated, it would sell his usual 10,000 copies. In October 1950 he had arranged to be paid by Dutton $450 a month from November 1, 1950, to October 1, 1951, mostly advances against royalties for Judgment and for the next novel he had in mind, tentatively titled The King James Book. That money would stop soon. At the same time as he finished Judgment, Gene Vidal, consulting with his son, leased a small factory in Poughkeepsie with a contract to make a thousand plastic bread trays a week for the General Baking Company. He previously owned a similar factory in New Rochelle, which had recently burned. Probably the plastics were dangerously flammable. Gore, from nearby Barrytown, was to be director of personnel. Perhaps there would be profits for both father and son. “He was actually running his father’s factory,” Tommy Auchincloss recalled, “or at least that was the impression he gave me. His father would come down and visit. Gore was basically the one who was going over there and checking things.” A disastrous fire two years later was also to close the Poughkeepsie factory, with little or no benefit to either. But beginning in the summer of 1951, it was something that Gore kept one eye on. Gene, who regularly inspected the factory, stopped at Edgewater for brief visits.

  That same summer Gore had long-term visitors, though they did not distract him from work. Dot, who came to see the house, did not stay long. Nina, who had Tommy for the summer, initially intended to stay much of July and August, the 1950 Christmas fiasco long out of her mind. She would help decorate Edgewater. The octagonal room, like much of the house, needed painting. As always, to pass time during the evenings, they played gin rummy. “Nina wouldn’t take my beating her at gin rummy terribly well, and she never paid me what she owed me. Oh, we played just for pennies. And even that was more than she would pay.” Soon Nina was happily aflutter at an invitation to be a celebrity bridge-playing guest on the maiden voyage of the transatlantic liner the United States. Why could she not leave twelve-year-old Tommy with Gore at Edgewater and she herself sail off on this glamorous adventure? Amiably, Gore agreed. While he worked on Death in the Fifth Position and answered, as Tommy
noticed, stacks of letters, Howard entertained Gore’s half-brother. In addition to the press of work, Gore felt he was “not very good with children. I can manage babies. They’re like cats. But much older children, I don’t know what to do with them. Tommy was the wrong age. If he were an adolescent, I’d have been able to talk to him.” Gore would talk to him, Tommy recalled, about his work, his friends—one of them a famous ballet dancer who could jump four feet in the air. He would not play with him, though. The highlight of Tommy’s summer was when Howard, his ubiquitous Lucky Strike cigarette in his mouth, took him to Coney Island. “We went to a burlesque show,” Tommy recalled. “I probably talked Howard into it. I had a prurient interest in that kind of thing, and I never had any sense that he didn’t.” After a few weeks Gore and Dot arranged for Tommy to spend the rest of the summer in Newport with the Auchinclosses. When, after a month, Nina returned, clearly something had gone wrong on her trip, perhaps some aborted romance or imagined insult. She did not seem, though, “in such bad spirits. But she was raging at Hughdie for having taken the son that she had left there, and then she decided to kill herself. She took a lot of pills, and my grandmother knew she wasn’t up and heard this terrible snoring from her room where she had passed out.” The local doctor saved her.

  At Alice’s grand hostelry and at Ferncliff, Vincent’s larger estate nearby, Gore had the advantage of both friendship and entertainment on a high scale. Alice, who split her time between the Gladstone Hotel and Rhinebeck, was delighted to have her artistic-intellectual young friend nearby, especially during the fall and winter weekends when most of her Dutchess County society was away. Though Gore, who disliked Edgewater’s winter cold, soon began regular Key West visits for at least one winter month, he stayed during part of the off-season. Oblivious to seasons or class distinctions, Alice had little interest in warm-weather winters. Howard was regularly, kindly welcomed at Rhinebeck. Alice “looked like a Byzantine princess. Very dark, with brooding eyes, Byzantine-Etruscan. She never wore much makeup, but of course she didn’t have to. I see her constantly playing with her earring. Not with great speed, but as if her hands were always busy with worry beads. She smoked constantly.” Her young teenage daughters, Emily and Romana, were around. So too her eldest, Ivan, who detested Gore, probably suspecting, as he did of many of his mother’s friends, that he was getting money from her and perhaps had designs on Ivan’s inheritance. He was right to the extent that Alice invested $2,500 in June 1950 in a Latouche-Vidal “literary idea” called “The Devil May Care,” one of a number of ideas and outlines they created together, the most substantial a screenplay called Love Is a Horse Named Gladys. Actually, Latouche got the entire $2,500. It was a device to funnel money to him. Always broke, he lived from hand to mouth, sometimes desperately morose, often charmingly inventive. One day when Gore was visiting him at his lower—Park Avenue apartment, some men came to seize his furniture for indebtedness. “They asked him if he were John Latouche. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m Louis Latouche, his brother!’ In a short while he had charmed the men not only into believing this but into going away without the furniture.” Except for the loan of some sofas and beds, most of it returned by the mid-1950s, Gore himself took nothing from Alice.

  A fountain of humorous anecdotes and witty comebacks, Latouche often lived up to his reputation of being the best talker around. Gore, who had begun to hear some of Latouche’s favorite stories too many times, especially about his adventures in Africa, set him up amusingly one night at Edgewater. With his eye on his watch, making sure to get the timing right, Gore interrupted the flow of conversation, suddenly saying to Latouche in an amiably insistent voice, “Why don’t you tell everyone your African story?” Latouche launched into it. Just as he came to the climax, the New York Central Railroad roared by, shaking the house, drowning him out. Like Latouche, Alice loved the night, whether partying in New York or staying up until the small hours of the morning, playing cards and Chinese checkers, chatting, gossiping, telling stories, always sleeping late. When guests came for lunch, she quickly dressed, dashed out of her bedroom, went out the back door into her car, and had the chauffeur drive her around to the front, as if she had just arrived from a morning out.

  Soon after moving into Edgewater, Gore was delighted to discover he had some interesting neighbors in addition to Alice. In Barrytown and nearby Red Hook lived a number of accomplished people, one of whom, Alan Porter, he became friendly with. Another, Joe O’Donohue, whom he already knew from the New York ballet world, became a good friend. A small, humorous man who always laughed at his own jokes, Porter, the first curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (despite being totally color-blind), came up regularly from New York. His friend Greta Garbo sometimes came to stay with him at the old Lutheran church he had converted into a residence. There he headed what he and his friends, particularly Paul Kent, Billy Baldwin, and Jack Frear, called “the sewing circle” and what the locals called the “Boys from Barrytown.” Jack Frear and Jimmy Whitfield “had a house called Dovecote, and they were known as the Doves of Dovecote. And Whitfield was a cousin of Calder Willingham. I saw him occasionally,” Gore recalled. “The only ones I saw were Alan Porter, who lived next to Don Wilson and Paul Kent.” Old-fashioned, with an odd rustic accent, Porter was an amusing eccentric. “If someone had gone to bed with someone,” O’Donohue recalled, “Alan described it in one sort of little Revolutionary-time dialect, ‘He put the boots to him.’ He was a very strange little guy. A perfectly nice man, who laughed all the time.” Another, more eccentric neighbor was the son of the essayist John Jay Chapman, the heavy-drinking Chanler Chapman who ran a highly personalized local newspaper. For whatever his reasons, including perhaps that John Jay Chapman had once lived in Edgewater, Chapman felt free to come over and make himself at home anytime, which Gore resented and soon put a stop to. O’Donohue, however, was always welcome. A handsome, slim man, elegantly dressed and fastidiously outrageous in manner and conversation, he had lost the inherited fortune that had allowed him to live a cultured, high-society Manhattan life during the 1930s and ’40s, a friend of Carl Van Vechten, Cole Porter, and Clifton Webb, a premier member of café society from Harlem to Park Avenue. “Very handsome in an elegant, aristocratic way,” Sam Lurie recalled. “A snobbish type, I suppose you’d say today. Tall, thin. Very good-looking then. Great charm. Well mannered.” A society columnist named Maury Paul, who wrote under the name Cholly Knickerbocker in the Hearst papers, called him “The last of the Perhapsburgs.” Having recently bought, with the help of Alice, who found it for him, a small house in Red Hook, he stayed much of the winter.

  Many of Alice’s literary guests were treated to the luxuries of her brother Vincent’s estate. Tennessee Williams enjoyed swimming in the indoor pool, wearing a bathing cap, as Romana noticed with some astonishment, and the Sitwells, particularly Edith, came. Alice would bring them over to Ferncliff for the hospitality of Vincent and his wife, the former Minnie Cushing, one of whose sisters had married Jock Whitney—in Nina’s mind still the man who had “got away”—after his divorce from Liz. The aristocratic Sitwells, for whom the Gladstone was not posh enough, stayed free at the St. Regis Hotel, which Vincent owned. “We’re in some little hotel. Osbert, what’s the name of it again?” Edith would say. “Oh, the St. Regis. Yes. Perfectly nice.” Gore, who had met Edith and Osbert in New York in autumn 1949, found the Sitwells’ eccentricities—their odd, elongated, skeletal frames and especially Edith’s witty flamboyance—compelling. When after a lunch together Gore, Paul Bowles, and the very tall Osbert, whom Bowles had been eager to meet, walked on Fifth Avenue toward the St. Regis, the two younger men found that Osbert, who had lost some control of his limbs because of Parkinson’s disease, began to take longer and longer strides. They could barely keep up. “I raced beside him, trying to hold him back—and down to earth like a balloon—while Paul, who is short and slight, had now left the pavement and was flying through the air, clinging to Osbert’s arm for support.” At the height
of her reputation as a poet, over six feet tall, wittily wicked, Edith in her sheer entertaining bizarreness appealed to Gore’s sense of humor as well as to his sense of history, as if some medieval Plantagenet had come alive again. When he complained to her about a foolish British review of The City and the Pillar in the Times Literary Supplement, she said, “But they do books on Icelandic runes very well.” In preparation for her sitting next to the conversationless Vincent at her first lunch at Ferncliff, Edith took counsel with her fellow guests. “‘What am I going to talk to Vincent Astor about? I’ve heard he’s very difficult.’ They said. ‘Look, what he really loves is facts.’ ‘Ah!’ She was put next to Uncle Vincent at lunch,” Romana remembered, “on his right. People were wondering how this was going to go. Uncle Vincent was amazed when she turned to him and said, ‘So glad to meet you. Tell me something—you’re probably the only person who can tell me—how many girders does the Eiffel Tower have?’ She kept my uncle talking about the Eiffel Tower for the whole of lunch.”

  Close to Edgewater, though worlds away from Ferncliff, Bard College provided entertainment of a different sort and, during the first half of the 1950s, a few local friends, particularly the poet Ted Weiss. A small, arty, serious school, with a special emphasis on literature and the humanities, Bard, years before cast off from Columbia University without an endowment, frequently teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, its faculty underpaid and overworked in a demanding tutorial system. Students got much individual attention. Faculty rarely had time for anything else. Still, in the 1940s and ’50s, when academic jobs were especially scarce and widely underpaid, Bard attracted distinguished people who came as visitors or stayed for a few years, writers like Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow. Three years after moving into Edgewater, Gore had not met the peripatetic Bellow, to Ted Weiss’s surprise, and “since I plan to shut the house in a week or so we are not apt to meet: there is a rumor he may not be long up here, that the open road, more grand appointments await him. I have not read his book [The Adventures of Augie March] but it sounds most energetic and respectable.” A young poet of distinction and an enthusiastic teacher of literature, Weiss and his wife Renée, a violinist, had been publishing their influential small magazine, Quarterly Review of Literature, since 1943. They regularly organized poetry readings and conferences at the attractive riverside campus that over the next decade brought to Bard most of the best-known poets of the period. Unenthusiastic about academia, having narrowly escaped Harvard, Gore was enthusiastic about the Weisses and accepted some invitations to readings at the nearby campus, one to hear Jean Garrigue, whom he had met through Anaïs years before in New York and to whom he had introduced the Weisses, another to hear Wallace Stevens. Gore recalled, “Here was this fat solemn businessman in a three-piece suit, a typical insurance salesman from Hartford. ‘Well, it’s a remarkable time in the arts,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to be talking about modern poetry today. I think that’s the subject I was given, and I don’t know what to say in a period that has something no other period has even had, a Museum of Modern Art.’ Well, I fell apart. Nobody else could see the joke. I thought it hysterically funny. I read him then. I used to read a lot of poetry…. I went into the war with Auden’s anthology, which I carried all through the war, two or three volumes…. I got through the war with him.” On another occasion at Bard there were “three British poets,” Gore reported to Lehmann, “very dreary … D. Gascoygne (’nearer my God to thee’), Graham (hearty, solid, regular feller) and a Miss Raine (‘I loathe Jane Austen’) … for a literary jamboree … being strange to these shores they were unaware that anyone took poetry seriously enough to want to discuss it in PUBLIC, so one had the feeling that their most central modesty was hopelessly violated by the tough young New Yorkers who put to them long technical questions. The session broke up with one sharp youth remarking from the floor that, among other things, the supernatural was an abstraction … to which Mr D. G. gulped with pain and said in a strident choked voice, ‘The Supernatural is Not an Abstraction!’ ending the symposium.” Some of the Bard poets came for parties at Edgewater, especially the much-liked Weisses. One afternoon, at the time of the publication of Judgment, as they were chatting about things literary, Gore, defiantly and defensively, told Ted, “Well, my best novel is at least as good as the worst of Henry James.”