Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  From the Irish point of view he would not have to give up his American citizenship. In January 1970 and through the spring, after “a fascinating trip to Dublin,” where “they may take me in,” he wrote to Tom Driberg, his agent looked into available houses in Fitzwilliam Square, then on the Elgin Road, then in Merrion Square, none of which proved satisfactory, partly because of his ambivalence about living in the heart of Dublin. When he mentioned his interest in a country residence, his agent quickly found an attractive property in Knock, Lowertown, Schull, County Cork, at a price he was willing to pay, as well as the projected cost of extensive renovations over the next two years to make it attractively livable. To Howard, the thought of living in Ireland at all, let alone rural Ireland, seemed absolutely mad. “I refused to set foot in the house in Ireland. I thought it was madness. Klosters, Ireland, three apartments in New York, an apartment in Rome, and then La Rondinaia came along. It was just driving me insane. Probably Gore was looking for a home.” Ireland, Gore explained, “was because I’d said, when I spoke out about the Vietnam War, that if the war went on I’d change nationalities. Besides that virtuous motive, the unvirtuous one was that you pay no tax. So I could have made a fortune had I shifted over to Irish nationality, protesting the war and saving my money from the government at the same time. But my man, Charley Haughey, who was the minister of finance, fell from power as soon as I bought the house, and I couldn’t get the nationality.” There was some vagueness in the criterion that permitted the interpretation that one grandparent had to be Irish. “I had a great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, except it also says ‘significant Irish connections’ in the constitution. I met the guy who wrote the constitution, and he said the fact that you are a cousin of Constance Gore-Booth Countess Markovich, one of the swans of Lissadel, makes you highly significant and that makes you a citizen under our laws. Highly significant is that there’s a statue of her on St. Stephen’s Green. She looks just like my mother.” Haughey “later became for many years prime minister, by which time I sold the house and it was all moot. Everything went wrong. It was a pretty place. But I never saw it finished and I sold it one afternoon.”

  Just before Thanksgiving 1968 Kit and Gene drove from the home in Avon, Connecticut that Kit had inherited to Washington, D.C., to see Sally and Pick, the first stop on a cross-country drive and then a trip, westward, around the world. On a mild autumn day they lunched at a restaurant near the National Cathedral and went by St. Albans School. Gore, of whom Gene was immensely proud, was one of the subjects of conversation, especially since the convention fireworks were still in people’s minds, partly because the war in Vietnam, where Gene had gone as part of a military evaluation committee, still mercilessly continued. The newly elected Nixon administration waited to take power. Public antiwar protests intensified. Gore had been active in the creation of the New Party, soon to be renamed the People’s Party, formed by pro-Gene McCarthy dissidents and led by Benjamin Spock and Marcus Raskin, who refused to return to the Democratic fold and support Hubert Humphrey. Pick Vidal, a conservative Republican whose West Point class had been retired in 1963, had voted for Nixon. Probably Gene had also. After lunch the two patriarchs, with their wives, sat outside in the autumnal air, the Washington Monument visible in the distance. “Gene had just had a physical,” Sally recalled, “and the doctor said he was just great. They were going to make a trip around the world. So they came down to Washington to say good-bye. Gene had a lot of classmates there.”

  At seventy-three, retired, white-haired, handsome, bemused by old age and relative uselessness, Gene Vidal had begun to settle into a life of recreational travel and general superfluity. He was occasionally consulted by airlines and government commissions. The heroic world of early aviation he had helped create had long passed, and whether or not he was introspective or retrospective enough to focus on his early displacement from fame and power, his son certainly had a sense of how abruptly his father’s career had been diminished by his 1942 heart attack. Fortunately, his heart had repaired itself sufficiently so that he had never had another cardiac episode. For almost ten years he had been taking an anti-aging enzyme-enrichment formula, made from placentas that had nurtured fetal calves, obtained from a doctor in Florida. He believed it did him a world of good. The doctors at the Hartford Hospital were “puzzled,” he wrote to Gore, “over the fact that my blood pressure has dropped from 190 to 140, my pulse has increased from 45/min to 72/min (normal), my cholesterol down from 470 to 215, etc. I must send Wolf a thank you note.” From Washington, Kit and Gene drove to Jackson, Michigan, to visit Gene’s favorite sister, Lurene, then to California to see his sister Margaret, who had settled with her family in Inglewood. They did not get beyond California. On New Year’s Eve, Gene became ill with what appeared to be pneumonia. On New Year’s Day 1969 the tests he underwent in Centinela Valley Hospital revealed lung cancer. Gore flew to Los Angeles to be with his father and stepmother. Unexpectedly, after a few weeks of treatment, the cancerous cells entirely disappeared from Gene’s lungs. Delighted, he joked proudly with Kit and Gore about his recuperative powers. Still, the condition needed to be watched. For the time being, the round-the-world trip was put on hold. They soon found a small furnished apartment, and for a few weeks it looked as if he would be fine. Soon, though, his feeling of energy and general good health began to decline. By late January he was back in the hospital. Tests revealed that his left kidney had become riddled with cancerous cells. The malignancy that had not been able to sustain itself in the lungs had been a secondary colony. Suddenly, at the age of seventy-three, Gene faced the news. Kidney cancer was almost always fatal; he had at most two or three years of life.

  Surgery was the best of the medical alternatives. If successful, the prognosis was still poor. Most likely the cancer had spread to other places in addition to the lungs. Gene and Kit decided to try the risky operation. Gore joined them at the hospital the night before. It seemed more than possible that Gene would not survive the surgery. When the surgeon came with release papers to be signed, Gore recalled, Gene “looked at the doctor and said, ‘But I thought it was the left kidney?’ The doctor got hysterical. ‘Well, of course it’s the left kidney!’ ‘But why does it say the right kidney here? You don’t want to take out the only good kidney I’ve got!’ He tortured the doctor. That was his humor.” Late that night Gore returned to the Beverly Hills Hotel, bleary-eyed, exhausted. Like Kit, he feared that his father would not survive. Early the next morning, having been up most of the night, he took a walk on Beverly Drive. As he passed between Santa Monica Boulevard and Wilshire, a car pulled over. Marty Manulis, on his way to get a Sunday newspaper, astonished to see anybody walking in Beverly Hills, thought he had recognized a familiar figure. “I cruised up right past him. He was walking and I was driving. I stopped and said, ‘What the hell are you doing walking in Beverly Hills and at this hour?’ He mumbled something, but I noticed he was very red-eyed. I thought that he’d had a hard night or something like that. I think I made some bad joke about that, and he really kind of dismissed it in an offhand way. But he didn’t have his usual ebullience. We said something about having dinner together soon, and I went on.” When Gore got to the hospital, the operation had just been concluded. The kidney had been removed. Gene had survived. Later, Kit and Gore sat by Gene’s bedside. “He was out of his head. But he could hear Kit and me talking. And I said, whispering, ‘How is he?’ And she said, ‘Don’t worry, he doesn’t understand anything.’ ‘Of course I do,’ he said. She said, ‘He thinks he does, but this is his unconscious mind. He won’t remember anything we say.’ Then he said, ‘Well, I do know I’ve got cancer!’ This is a man supposedly out of his skull. I said, ‘Well, maybe we should lower our voices. We’re giving his limbic memories all kinds of unpleasant things to recall.’” As Gene came to his senses, he was suddenly distracted by the latest NASA space launching. “He was so fascinated, he said, ‘Imagine, I’ve lived so long. I’ve lived all the way through the history of aviat
ion. I knew the Wright brothers and I have made my contribution, and now I see men walking on the moon. I never thought I’d see that in my lifetime.’” When Gore privately asked the doctor what the prognosis was, the doctor matter-of-factly said that Gene would be dead in a few months. Angry, resentful, appalled by the doctor’s tone, Gore insisted that the doctor review for him what might be done. He could not believe there was no antidote.

  Always a good caretaker, Kit looked after Gene with a stoic but sinking heart. Gore visited each day at the hospital and then at the Inglewood apartment during the first week in February. The doctors had decided they could do nothing more. Since he began to recover quickly from the surgery itself, Gene was optimistic. “What should I be taking to get over this?” he asked a doctor-cousin who came by to visit. “‘What about a double martini?’ ‘Well,’ my father said, ‘I don’t like martinis.’ ‘Well, I do,’” the doctor said, “and the doctor started drinking, and so did I. What he was saying is that it’s all over and you might as well get drunk.” There seemed to be a remission, or at least a pause. Surprisingly, Gene soon looked much better. His spirits rose with his coloring and his energy. He began to catch up with his correspondence. Gore hoped that the doctor’s prognosis was wrong. But since even if it was right Gene would have at least a few months, perhaps as many as six, Gore said, simply, “I think I’ll return to Rome.” He had been away most of the summer and part of the fall and winter. From Rome he talked daily on the phone with Kit, grateful for her tireless attention to Gene. The news, though, was bad. The latest tests showed that the cancer had spread. Gene’s energy disappeared. He could hardly eat. He had begun to hover somewhere between irrational and comatose, partly out of his senses when awake, often unresponsive. He sat bolt upright in bed one day and said, “If I do not get out of this motel, I shall become extinct.” He got up and walked around, and then Kit put him back to bed. There appeared to be reason to believe that the enzyme supplement was keeping him alive, though it seemed not a life but a living death. The doctors saw not the remotest possibility that he would recover. On February 10 Kit rang Gore. She thought it sensible to stop the enzyme injections. Would he agree? Yes, he said. “It was going to keep him alive God knows how long, but unconscious. What was the alternative? It was a horror. He was like a vegetable. She stopped the enzyme.”

  The call came late in the afternoon ten days later. As soon as Gore put down the phone, he drew a cross in the margin of the manuscript on which he was working to mark the moment. In California it had been heartbreaking for him. Sometimes he had been angry, sometimes numb. Now he was mostly numb; he had not expected the inevitable to happen so quickly. He had assumed there would be time to see his father again. In Rome the news sank in, the irrevocable actuality of termination. The father he had not quarreled with once in forty-three years was gone forever. That night he went through with a dinner engagement at the Pecci-Blunts’. When he arrived with twenty or thirty other guests for dinner at the palace near the Campidoglio, the candles and chandeliers glittering, the waiters and footmen in attendance, he told his hostess, a niece of Pope Pius XII, that his father had died earlier in the day. “I was a bit late, and she had criticized me for being late. ‘My father just died.’ ‘Oh, dear,’ she said, and the grand hostess went right on with the dinner party. And I, as the good guest, went right on too.” The next day, though, she sent him a gentle note thanking him for coming under the circumstances. His own note to Kit a few days later was sincerely and gently appreciative. He had no doubt that his father had been and would continue to be “the love of her life,” which she and her remarriage never gainsaid. “I’m glad it ended as swiftly as it did,” he wrote to her, “and I regret I wasn’t able to do more but my gifts as an actor are limited and much more time with him would have betrayed my distress, and done him no good. Anyway, let me say how fortunate he was to have had you with him all these years, and though you must have known ever since the first illness that your marriage to a man so much older was going to have its dreadful side, you did it all most gracefully, pleasing him and the rest of us.” Kit responded that she considered herself “not only fortunate but privileged to have had nearly thirty years with your wonderful father.” The “dreadful side” went on for both Kit and Gore, though there was no intimacy between them of a sort that would encourage them to do any of their grieving together or even share confidences. Years afterward Gore provided his characteristic analytic overview. “The later it comes, the loss of a father, the more unpleasant it is. If you lose a father when you’re young, it’s sort of, so what? You’ve got your own life ahead of you. You’re too busy. The older you are, the more reflective it makes you. And more unpleasant than it would have been had I been twenty. We had our elective affinities or at least sympathetic affinities. Mutual respect. We never quarreled.” It was his way of admitting and remembering how painful the experience of the loss had been. In late March the person other than Kit and Gore who had loved Gene most, his sister Lurene, old, ill, recently widowed, about to have surgery for cataracts, wrote to Gore about her own heartache and her compassion for him. Lurene had been there when Gene was born. They had grown up together. Probably she had never loved anyone as much as she had loved her brother. “Dearest Gore—You have been in my thoughts so constantly and I feel for you so deeply because tho I am only your father’s sister, I loved him so much and so long, nothing seems worth while—first without Merle and now Gene. But you are his beloved son—and I can only imagine what this loss means to you. Your relationship was so special…. No one ever had a more loving and devoted [father] or a prouder one. He loved you like our mother loved him. He was her very favorite of all people. Nothing ever pleased him more than a ‘call’ from you. He loved and so much appreciated all your thoughtfulness and devotion always—you kept him young because you treated him young. To me, you and he were never like father and son—but rather like two bad kids.” He was “the best friend you’ll ever have! So you are really hurting too and shall miss him too in spite of the fact you are still young and busy—and blessed with so much talent and deserved success.”

  In early May the institution to which Eugene Luther Vidal had sworn loyalty a half century before at West Point honored him at Andrews Air Force base. Pick and Sally had followed the death story with sinking hearts. Kit had called them regularly with news of Gene’s changing circumstances. Soon after Kit had the body cremated in California, General Felix Vidal, retired, began to make arrangements for a gathering of Gene’s classmates to bid him a ritualistic Air Force good-bye at the base outside Washington. Gore flew in from Rome to join Kit, her two children, and Pick and Sally and their daughter, accompanied by a dozen or more ancient warriors from Gene’s West Point class and his long years of work and camaraderie. Among them Gore noticed “the solemn, pompous, haggard Leslie Groves,” who had directed the Los Alamos project, “himself to die a few months later; and that handsome figure of the right wing General Wedemeyer.” It was a doubly complicated moment for Gene Vidal’s son. He had sworn his own version of the oath to “Honor, Duty, Country” that these senior military figures had sworn. On the personal level he shared their pain and bewilderment. “The generals looked dazed,” he recalled, “not so much with grief as with a sense of hurt at what time does to men, and to their particular innocence.” But they were the generals who in earlier incarnations had led battalions into World War II devastation and who had brought Jimmie Trimble to his brutal death on Iwo Jima. They and their surrogates were leading the ongoing carnage in Vietnam, certain there was a light at the end of the tunnel. “I could not help thinking as I walked away from them for the last time that the harm they have done to this republic and to the world elsewhere far outweighs their personal excellence, their duty, their honor.” How ironic for him that through his gentle, much-loved father he had a personal connection to the warrior class. Some of that warrior blood ran within him. It gave him both insight and pause. As they stood on the runway, the airfield was totally silenced f
or the ceremony. No noise. No takeoffs or landings. “Pick carried the box. I wouldn’t touch it,” he recalled. “Thanatophobia was really working strongly.” Sally recalls that both Gore and Pick “carried the ashes out toward the helicopter, and then an officer in charge … walked towards them and saluted and my husband saluted. Gore was holding the ashes and handed them to the officer, who saluted again and took the ashes and carried them back to the helicopter.” The plane gently rose into the bright May sunshine. Everyone on the ground squinted into the sunlight to watch it disappear in the distance. “The icon of their generation, the lovely athlete of a half century before, was now entirely gone.” The pilot, releasing the ashes over Virginia, saw them falling downward to the indifferent earth.