The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  “Never.”

  “I was an acrobat when I started out at thirteen …”

  “Inspired by the Hungarian Rhapsody in Bristol …”

  “How did you guess?”

  “I’m sure you will have great love scenes, to the melodic drip drip of the clock or whatever it is.”

  The mischievous face became somber. “The script is deeply boring. Nothing happens except a horse falls on him and he breaks his legs. After that, he spends a lot of time in hospitals. Cheery stuff.”

  There was a murmur of excitement at the door as the crippled Cole Porter hobbled in. He was small, elflike, with a sweet cold smile and large spaniel eyes.

  “Is Lynda with him?” asked Caroline. She quite liked the edgy lady that Cole had married in order to present to the world a somewhat sequined façade of everyday marriage.

  “No.” Grant sighed. “I must say hello to my fellow guest of honor.”

  “Who directs?”

  “Mike Curtiz.” Grant’s eyebrows moved, briefly, upwards. Curtiz, Caroline knew from experience, was a bad director who, occasionally, inexplicably, made a good film; he was only slightly handicapped by the fact that English was not a language that he ever intended to master.

  “A Hungarian!” Caroline was cheerful. “Then you’ll think of me while anything goes.”

  A blond pretty woman put down what looked to be a glass of gin and embraced Caroline. “The Chief’s in the sunroom. He’s longing to see you. So am I. Come stay at the beach house before we sell it, which is any second now. He’s finally got most of his money back. But even so, it’s too much to keep up—all those servants.”

  Then Marion Davies led Caroline to a bright room with a view of a rose garden. The gray-haired, gray-faced, gray-suited Hearst greeted her affectionately. “Never guessed you’d be here.” He gave his nervous giggle.

  “Aren’t you glad now I got you to get out of the house?” Marion retied his tie.

  “No,” said Hearst. “I’m going to miss the beach.”

  “I’ve found us a nice place in Beverly Hills. Only I keep forgetting where it is. It’s either on North Beverly Drive or up Coldwater Canyon. Anyway, the driver always knows.” She was gone.

  Caroline sat beside the now truly ancient Hearst. Other guests looked into the room; then quickly withdrew, as if he were somehow otherworldly like history itself come to call on V-E Day.

  “Well, it’s about over. Japan’s trying to surrender, I hear, but Truman’s dragging his feet. Why?”

  “I am no longer at court,” said Caroline.

  Hearst’s smile was wintry. “Changing of the guard. Yes. How is Hopkins?”

  “Not well. He was in bed most of the time during Yalta. Then, when they finally came home, the President died.”

  “How much did he give away at Yalta?” Hearst’s pale eagle eyes blazed out of the dead gray face.

  “Surely,” said Caroline in a voice that she could not prevent from trembling with anger, “you don’t believe what you read in your papers?”

  Hearst shrugged. “I don’t believe the sob sisters, no, but …”

  “They argued over Poland. One of the last letters the President was working on was a complaint about Stalin’s high-handed way with the Polish government in exile …”

  “So what about Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia? FDR left them in Russian hands without a peep.”

  “You sound,” said Caroline, her sudden flash of unexpected partisanship under control, “like Mrs. Roosevelt.”

  “That’s a definite first.” Hearst was good-natured.

  “She told me that after Franklin came back from Yalta, one of the first things she asked him was what about those three countries and he said, ‘The only way they can be freed would be if we were to go to war with Russia. You might want such a war—I might—but the American people are fed up with Europe. We must get used to the fact that wherever the Red Army is is Russian and a thousand Yaltas can’t change that fact.’ Eleanor said she found her husband’s argument unanswerable.”

  “Do the Russians really want Germany to hand over ten billion dollars?”

  “Yes. They suffered the most from Hitler. They also got to Berlin first.”

  “I wonder why we let that happen. I must find out,” he added ominously. Then he said, in the same high urgent voice, preceded by a nervous chuckle, “You should have married Harry Hopkins.”

  “I never suspected that you, of all people, would think so highly of matrimony.” Hearst’s gray face became ever so slightly pink. Caroline found it touching that it still worried him that he was living in sin with Marion Davies, a devout Catholic. “Anyway, Harry found Miss Right, one Louise Macy. She moved into the White House three years ago. I was delighted for Harry. Less so for myself. When I told her that my role in his life had been simply that of caretaker, she looked rather angry and confused, a common condition with her, I should think. Anyway, she’ll be a good stepmother. They think he has cirrhosis of the liver.”

  “Did he drink all that much?”

  “No. ‘To have the consequences without the vice is unfair,’ he says. Mr. Truman is sending him to Moscow soon. I wish he wouldn’t go but I no longer see him. He is too ill to see much of anyone.”

  “Like FDR, in the last years.”

  “Don’t exaggerate. I must fly.”

  At the front door, Caroline stepped straight into a tall Air Force major. In her most convincing American voice, inspired by the nearness of what resembled and probably was Ginger Rogers chewing gum, she said, “Long time no see,” to Timothy X. Farrell.

  2

  Peter’s brother-in-law, Clay Overbury, sat in Blaise’s study at Laurel House. He wore ribbon after ribbon on his chest over the heart where Peter had nothing at all on his uniform except one ribbon for “Good Conduct” and another that confessed to service exclusively in the United States.

  Blaise sat at his desk, piles of clippings in front of him; he was a proud, even ecstatic father of a son who was not the well-conducted Peter but the hero Clay. All in all, Peter was delighted for them. Blaise was always a somewhat implausible father for him but a dream come true for Clay.

  “You signed the commitment papers?”

  Clay nodded. “Wasn’t easy.” He blinked his blue eyes, to denote strong emotion.

  “Best thing, all around. Burden tells me things are going well back home in the district.”

  “So I hear. Should I go see Enid?”

  Blaise shook his head. “The doctors say no. Not now. Not yet.” The eyes of all three men were now on the portrait of Aaron Burr over the fireplace. In the middle of the left eye there was a small round hole where Enid, aiming unsteadily at her father with a pistol, had managed to do what Alexander Hamilton had failed to do so many years ago at Weehawken, New Jersey—shoot Burr, if only in effigy, dead. Peter, who preferred his sister, when sober, to the rest of the family, had not been present. If he had … Anyway, this was, as Blaise had said, “the last straw.” Now he and Clay could put Enid away; lock the door to the sanitarium and throw away the key. Then, unencumbered, Clay would be elected to the House of Representatives in the fall and so continue a rise that now seemed to many to be inevitable. Thanks entirely to Harold Griffiths, he was a national figure, “the Hero of Lingayen Gulf Airfield” in the Philippines, where he had gone into a burning hangar and saved a wounded marine from the flames and then, practically single-handed, captured the airfield, all witnessed by Harold Griffiths, for whom Clay was like a figure out of legend, “like a knight in a tapestry of jungle green.”

  Newsreel cameras, arranged by Blaise, had greeted the knight at Union Station when he stepped off the train to take his place in the Capitoline frieze of gods and heroes. He would be president in a dozen years, thought Peter, staring with open distaste at his admittedly decorative as well as decorated brother-in-law, soon not to be related to him in or out of law. Could Clay and his father actually be lovers? So Enid had charged the night that she shot Aaron Burr instead of
Blaise, or had Clay been her target? Peter could never determine which of the two had been the chosen victim or even if she had made her selection as she denounced them and then, for fatal emphasis, fired her pistol at drunken random.

  Peter stood up, holding in his stomach. Clay’s lean body was visible reproach to a less-disciplined contemporary. “You two seem to have business …”

  “No. No.” Blaise waved him back into his seat. “Clay and I are finished. I want to talk to you, Peter.” In a flash of golden light, white teeth, blue eyes, Clay firmly, sincerely, shook Peter’s hand, allowing—deliberately?—the essence of his own persona like a surge of electricity to flood Peter’s somewhat weaker system. Then Clay was gone, and Blaise was again his usual self. What, Peter wondered, idly, did Enid really know?

  “How is The American Idea doing?”

  “The real thing or the paper?”

  “I doubt if there is a real thing. We’re stuck with too many ideas as it is. No. The paper.”

  Peter told him, more or less accurately, the unglamorous circulation figures. Blaise understood all this better than he did. Then, “How’s your ex-communist working out?”

  “I doubt if he ever had the nerve to be one.” Tension between the two was on the rise. Billy Thorne had interpreted the Yalta meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin as the beginning of a partnership that would stabilize and restore all of Europe, while Peter was certain that everything would fall apart with Roosevelt dead and the American military on so many simultaneous warpaths. There were other quarrels, including the implicit one over Diana. Although Billy could hardly be said to be in love with his wife, he was not about to give up so shining a capitalist trophy, while, simultaneously, Peter was not about to dissolve into thin air. “We’ve also got Aeneas Duncan. He was with me at the Pentagon. In A-2. Intelligence. He’s basically a philosopher.”

  “Heavy stuff. I’ve tried to read him. Do you think you’ll ever break even?”

  “Yes. There’s nothing else really. Nothing that treats Washington today as if it were already history.”

  “Well, I’m sure you know better than I about that sort of thing.” Blaise’s humor, never light, was now oppressively heavy. “I’ve always thought history doesn’t really begin until it’s over.”

  “Well, when it’s over—when you’re absolutely certain it’s over—I hope you’ll let me know.” Peter meant to infuriate; and failed.

  Blaise was bland. “Have you thought about the paper?”

  “Yes. And … no.”

  “I have no heir, except you.”

  “There’s Aunt Caroline.”

  “She’ll vanish into the French countryside any day now.”

  “Her daughter?”

  Blaise shuddered. “Emma has gone back to fighting the menace of communism.”

  “Is she still with Tim Farrell?” Peter had been as amazed as everyone else in the family when Emma Sanford had, with such aplomb, collected her mother’s old lover and gone off to join him during his filming of the war in Europe.

  “I’m not in touch with Emma. Or with your Aunt Caroline, who’s on the West Coast this week. Anyway, you’re perfect, now, for the Tribune once I’m …” Blaise paused.

  “You’ll never let it go, which would make me highly imperfect for your purpose.”

  “I could die.” This was said with some effort—superstition?

  “So can anyone. Even I. But you won’t for a long time. Train Harold Griffiths.”

  “Tiresome pansy.” Blaise seemed to have turned a page in his head. He opened a manila folder. “This mysterious weapon …”

  “It’s almost ready to be tested.”

  “What is it?”

  “It has greater power than anything man-made. It is supposed to be able to disintegrate the planet.”

  “In that case, hardly an ideal weapon. On the other hand, for our country’s greatest secret, what’s known already is too much.”

  “At the Pentagon, we assumed that the Nazis, now defeated, and the Japs, on their way to the exit, knew about it all along because the science—which has something to do with breaking up atoms—is known to everyone in the physics business, but apparently only we had the technology and the money to build it. Aeneas is my expert, at the moment. He has good sources …”

  “You wouldn’t …?”

  “I don’t see how I could.”

  “When do you get out of the Army?”

  “I am out. As of last week. Didn’t I tell you? But since I don’t have any clothes that fit, I still wear my uniform and sleep in the office.”

  “In the Union Trust Building?” Blaise chuckled. “Well, you’re at the center of power.”

  “Why?”

  “The law firm of Covington and Burling is located there. You must see them from time to time.”

  “They dress very well. At least that’s how they look in the elevator where I see them.”

  “Dean Acheson is back with them. But not for long. The President wants him at the State Department. To keep an eye on Jimmy Byrnes.”

  Like most of Washington, Peter had hardly been surprised when Truman selected his old Senate crony South Carolina senator Jimmy Byrnes, to be secretary of state. Peter’s last memory of Byrnes had been during the 1940 Chicago convention, where the sharp conceited little man had, for a moment, thought himself the next vice president only to lose to Wallace, who had then been cast aside in 1944 for Harry S—the S was for nothing—Truman, a senator not only Byrnes’s junior but, in the eyes of Washington as well as of Byrnes, his inferior. The relationship had already begun to go badly or, as Blaise put it: “ ‘A president,’ Acheson said to me, ‘can be his own secretary of state, but a secretary of state cannot be his own president.’ ”

  “Words of wisdom …”

  “Do you want to see them all in action at Potsdam, with Churchill and Stalin?”

  “As a Tribune reporter?”

  “Correspondent.”

  “I’ve too much to do here.”

  The two-room office suite in the Union Trust Building contained not one but two chief editors in almost perpetual conflict. Billy Thorne’s assistants had taken on Billy’s harsh contrarian style, while Peter’s team responded with polite contempt which, in the case of Aeneas Duncan, took the form of cold disapproving silence. Aeneas was again a civilian, with a child-psychologist wife in New York, which obliged him to commute between the two cities twice a week, writing book reviews in the club car of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Capital Express. In order to see as little as possible of her estranged husband, Diana worked at home in Rock Creek Park and only came to the office when Billy was not there, which was a good deal of the time, since he was now in some demand as a lecturer on the evils of communism as observed at first hand in the Spanish Civil War. Precisely how his eyes had been opened to the menace was never entirely clear to Peter, who had yet to attend one of Billy’s excited and exciting lectures.

  Peter shared a partners’ desk with Aeneas. They faced each other at the center of a room lined with bookcases and filing cabinets as well as a woman secretary whose typing was so rapid on an Underwood so old that its staccato sound was like an unceasing firing squad. On the walls there was a mock-up of the next issue of The American Idea. One entire blank sheet was headed “Potsdam.”

  “All I’ve got in the way of news is hearsay.” Peter was having trouble sorting out his impression of the surreal meeting in the Berlin suburb where he had been a part of the world’s press, kept to a most unworldly minimum. In fact, it was only as Blaise’s son that he was able to be billeted in the appropriately named Babelsburg, the seat of what had once been the German film industry. The conference itself was held at the Cecilienhof Palace, located in the relatively unruined suburb of Potsdam. Armed with passes, Peter did his best to look invisible as he drifted from hall to hall.

  Although the Russian military were very much in charge of the palace, they plainly had orders not to disturb the American and English visitors; that
is, the few actually accredited to the conference. Of perhaps two hundred journalists assembled in Potsdam and Berlin, Peter was one of the few allowed inside the palace, thanks to Blaise’s friendship with the President’s military chief of staff. Admiral Leahy had been Roosevelt’s principal adviser; now he performed the same task for Truman.

  One of Leahy’s aides, an amiable lieutenant commander Peter’s age, took charge of him and let him look into the totally off-limits conference hall, whose large round table was covered with a dark red cloth. “The red’s a bit tactless of the Russians,” whispered Peter. Everyone tended to whisper in the vast halls, as if terrified of awakening the slumbering gods of war.

  “Well, it is their city. For now. Actually, they’re pretty easy to get on with. So far.”

  From a distance, Peter duly noted Churchill’s small fat figure as he lumbered into the anteroom with its somber wrought-iron chandeliers. He moved as if he were, physically, a giant; muscle-bound with power. He was usually accompanied by his sad-looking doctor, Lord Moran. Stalin was as small as Churchill but not as plump. He had a genial expression somewhat undone by pale yellow eyes more suitable for the lion house at the Rock Creek Park zoo than a peace conference. Truman wore a gray suit; his breast-pocket handkerchief was arranged in four structured peaks of equal size.

  The lieutenant commander gave Truman high marks. “He’s on the spot and he knows it. Not only does he have to prove he’s up to Roosevelt’s standards, which he isn’t, but he’s got to ride herd on Jimmy Byrnes, who thinks he’s Metternich at the Council of Vienna, except he wouldn’t know who Metternich was.”

  That was one obvious theme, Peter had thought at the time. A wily South Carolina senator with no knowledge of foreign affairs and a president who affected a profound knowledge of history although whenever he made an allusion to the historic past he unerringly got it wrong. Apparently, FDR had had neither the time nor the inclination to educate Truman during the weeks of his vice presidency. This now looked to be a real-life version of a Capra movie: honest little American guy, up against both the sinister smooth English and the bloody barbarian Asiatics. Peter had a lot to write about, only …