The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  Peter put down the draft of his piece; looked across the desk at Aeneas, who was looking at him. “Problems?” Aeneas wheezed; always a signal for him to light another cigarette, which he did, careful to blow the smoke in Peter’s direction.

  “Yes. I’ve written a mystery story—a murder mystery, really—but I don’t know who did the murder or why.”

  “Obviously, we can’t accept the New York Times view of Potsdam, where the conquerors met in perfect harmony, the future of Poland and reparations only mild amusements.”

  “Something happened on—” Peter checked the date—“July 16. Up until then Stalin had twice reassured Truman that by mid-August the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan. He also said he’d do nothing to help the Chinese communists. Yet later that day—no, the next day—I was with Leahy and my lieutenant commander at the lunch break. They were looking grim. They kept referring to ‘the message.’ Leahy said, ‘I pray the damned thing won’t work.’ The aide said, ‘But, sir, the message sounds like it does.’ Then Leahy said, ‘For what it’s worth, Eisenhower’s against using it.’ That was all I heard. I couldn’t ask either of them what they were talking about. I’d already heard too much. But the whole mood of the conference suddenly changed. Oh, everyone was still friendly and Truman kept boasting about how well he was getting on with ‘Uncle Joe.’ He seemed to think he was back in Kansas City with Boss Prendergast.”

  “It’s obvious they were talking about that project I’ve been researching for years now. But all I really know is top-secret hearsay.” Aeneas was strict in matters of ethics. If one could not absolutely verify a story, it was not to be used. Hence, his low-key but quite genuine loathing of Billy Thorne.

  “Maybe.” Peter looked at his typescript for inspiration. There was none. “Actually, I had stopped believing that there was such a weapon. Seemed too much like the sort of thing we were hired to peddle at the Pentagon. But after I eavesdropped on Leahy’s comments, I could tell there was a definite change in mood at Potsdam. Nothing more was said about Russia entering the Pacific war, which means …” Peter shut the folder. “Truman’s decided to use it, whatever it is, and so he feels that we don’t need Russia’s help in defeating Japan. All our show now.”

  “Guesswork.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you can’t use it, can you?”

  Peter sighed. “No.” He put the Potsdam story in the top drawer of his desk.

  Two weeks later, he opened the drawer. On August 6, 1945, the United States Twentieth Army Air Force had dropped an “atomic bomb” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing an estimated 130,000 people. The world was duly stunned. Peter began to type, vigorously, with two fingers. He finished his piece on August 9, just after the news came that another atomic—now called nuclear—bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, killing some 70,000 people. Five days later, Japan, which had been trying for some months to surrender, surrendered. Peter had now solved the mystery—literally a mass-murder mystery set in secret motion at Potsdam to intimidate the Russians and keep them out of the war in the Pacific. Meanwhile, Peter was now the first of many to ask, in print, why a dramatic demonstration would not have been as effective as the incineration of so many innocent citizens. Why not transform the snowy top of holy Mount Fujiyama into a deep crater-lake whose radioactive waters would be guaranteed to heal a myriad of skin diseases? Why not …? With this one issue The American Idea was well and truly launched; and the day it was on the streets, Peter, in a complex move worthy of Stalin in his glory days, fired Billy Thorne.

  3

  Caroline and Marie-Louise had now moved into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel not far from Marie-Louise’s old employer, Mrs. Auchincloss.

  Timothy X. Farrell had his own raffish bungalow at the Garden of Allah, where the serious actor-playboys tested their systems in competitive drinking and drug contests. Here the girls were, to Caroline’s bleak eye, perilously young as they made their way along palm-tree- or hibiscus-lined paths that led to crumbling bungalows which smelled of gin and mold.

  The day after Elsie Mendl’s V-E Cole Porter celebration, Tim had picked up Caroline at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a vast clammy barn of a building that Caroline could have bought for two hundred thousand dollars from the discouraged woman who owned it. But the last thing that she wanted, even at a bargain price, was property in a country she was planning soon to abandon.

  “By the first of next year,” she said to Tim, “the State Department says, I’ll be able to go back to France. But that’s only because I have property there. Tourists are being kept away now. No fuel. No food. Pretty grim.” She looked about Tim’s living room, dark from the thick leaves of unpruned trees that grew so close to the bungalow that they threatened to break through flimsy walls. “What a dreadful place. And what is that funny smell? The lobby of the Beverly Hills smells the same way.”

  “Damp. It’s the smell of Hollywood. Don’t you remember?”

  “It’s been twenty years.” She put her feet on the coffee table; since Caroline was wearing slacks, it seemed the correct thing to do. But then even “old” Hollywood had tended to bring out the boy in girls.

  “Why did you come out?”

  “Why not? With the Roosevelts gone and poor Harry busy dying in New York, Washington is pretty empty.” She changed the subject. On a wall there was the movie poster: “Timothy X. Farrell’s Winter War.” This was his last documentary; and Caroline thought it his best. He had assembled captured German footage of the original invasion of Russia; then he followed the ragtag Russian army as it swept across Eastern Europe and into Berlin, where a forlorn Hitler was last seen handing out autographed photographs of himself to child soldiers in the ruins of the capital of what was to have been a thousand-year empire and had lasted not too many more days. The film had been released in May, too late for the Academy Awards, which something called Fighting Lady had won.

  Tim was philosophic. “You can’t time these things for awards. Anyway, we’re doing fair business. But I expect peace will be something of a downer for me.”

  “There’s always Hometown—to go home to.”

  “Would I recognize it?” He picked up a pile of glossy stills from Winter War. He gave several to Caroline. Russian troops in silhouette crossing a white frozen river.

  “Alexander Nevsky,” she said, impressed.

  “Right the first time. I stole and stole. Did you like Stalin’s joke?”

  “Did he make one?”

  “Not in the film.” He gave her a picture of Stalin standing at the center of a long table, smiling and holding up a glass to propose a toast. “This is the Kremlin. Everyone’s celebrating the fall of Berlin. Stalin’s laid on a party for the Kremlin’s staff. One of them is a clerk called Ivan Ivanov who works down the hall from Stalin’s office. One day when the Germans were only a few miles from Moscow, Stalin starts down the hall just as Ivan comes out of his office. ‘What?’ Stalin roars. ‘You still alive!’ Ivan nearly faints. Stalin moves on. Ivan goes home. Tells his wife that this is the end. He’ll be dead by morning. Sits up all night. No arrest. Finally, goes back to work. A year later Stalin sees him in the hall. This time Stalin is beside himself. ‘I still can’t believe it! I’d hoped never to see you again,’ and so on. Ivan knows that this is really the end. Goes home. Waits. Nothing happens. Now it’s the victory dinner in the Kremlin. Stalin makes a patriotic speech. ‘We have been through terrible times together. We have known terrible defeats. We have known hunger, pain. But never once did we lose heart. Never once did we falter and, best of all, never once did we lose our sense of humor.’ He turns to Ivan Ivanov, and roars, ‘Did we, Ivan Ivanov?’ ”

  Caroline laughed. “You make Stalin seem almost inhuman.”

  “Inhuman is a step towards the human, I guess. I wonder if he was as cruel as Roosevelt.”

  Caroline was startled. “Roosevelt, cruel?”

  “In a different way. Obviously, our Siberia is a lot nicer than theirs. But Siberia is
still Siberia for those you send there.”

  “I suppose,” said Caroline, “the temperament of one man of power may be very like that of another. Churchill’s a great bully, you know, constantly clawing at those who don’t dare claw back.”

  “And Roosevelt held endless grudges. Deliberately ruined careers.”

  “Perhaps that’s how you have to govern. Frighten everyone, particularly your rivals.” Caroline came to the point. “I’ve talked to your John Balderston.”

  “My John Balderston?”

  “The world’s John Balderston.”

  “I haven’t seen him since England and the Blitz. Isn’t he trying to do a remake of Berkeley Square?”

  “He has other notions, too. He came to me in Washington about one of them. I told him I was long since retired, as a producer. But when he told me what he had in mind, I thought of you. What happens to the veteran when he comes back to his hometown after the war? Has the town changed? Has he changed? What does he want?”

  Tim shook into place a broken venetian blind, not quite hiding a candy-bright hibiscus intent on occupying the bungalow.

  “Everybody’s doing that one. I’m sure Capra will get there first and ruin it for the rest of us.”

  “What about your doing it? With Balderston.”

  “What about you doing it? With me?”

  Caroline realized that for two or three beats she had neglected to inhale or exhale. She gave a great cough to restart her lungs. “Dust,” she said.

  “That’s because every maid slinks about in terror of being raped by the likes of Errol Flynn, not now in residence. You’ve got a director. Get a script. Maybe from Balderston. Interest a studio.”

  “A Sanford-Farrell production? Or Farrell-Sanford?”

  “It makes no difference. Anyway, for postwar Hollywood, we’re probably out of date …”

  “I doubt it. At worst, historic.”

  “Like D. W. Griffith? He’s only two or three years older than you and no one will hire him. His last job was with Hal Roach ten years ago. Then look at Orson.”

  “I’d rather not. But you’re at your peak …”

  “No offers except for documentaries, and now with no war …”

  Caroline picked up the shot of Stalin making his toast. “Ivan Ivanov the Terrible. The story of a clerk in the Kremlin. We could make it in Paris. For very little.”

  “I didn’t pitch you the story as a picture.”

  “But that’s how I … caught it.”

  Neither spoke for a moment. Caroline stared at the smiling Stalin as Tim stared at her. Then he said, “You haven’t asked me about Emma.”

  “No.” She put down the photograph.

  “You don’t want to hear about her and me?”

  “No. You have my sympathy, of course. You always will.”

  “You’ll never like her.” This was more statement than question.

  “If I never see her again, I might come to appreciate her … her … her energy, more than I do.”

  Tim walked over to a pinewood sideboard. A framed photograph lay facedown. He set it upright. Emma had been photographed by a studio photographer. Blond hair, with which she had not been born, made a heavenly nimbus about a heart-shaped face from which all lines had been removed by exquisite lighting rather than by the retoucher’s art.

  Caroline took a long look at her daughter’s face. “She photographs well, doesn’t she? She is—with the dyed hair—very like her father.”

  “Who was not your husband, Mr. Sanford?”

  “No. No. I was pregnant by someone else. I married Sanford for respectability. He married me to settle his debts. He was a good man, though I never really got to know him. I was too busy with work.”

  “Who was the father?”

  “Do you care?”

  “I’m just curious. She cares, of course.”

  “James Burden Day.”

  “The senator?”

  Caroline nodded. “He knows that Emma’s his. He also keeps an eye on her. I used to when she was young. But now she’s grown up. Middle-aged, in fact. How I hate that phrase! Middle of what age? The stone age or the age of reason? She must be—what?—forty-five now.”

  “Forty-two.”

  “Did she really tell you?”

  “She had no choice. She had to produce a birth certificate when we married.” He laughed. “She knew I liked older women, obviously.”

  “Obviously.” Caroline remembered to keep her voice light, offhand. “Did you marry her in the church?”

  Tim nodded. “The war brought me back to my awful roots in South Boston. I’ve lapsed back, partway, to the church. Emma’s an eager convert.”

  Caroline rose. “I must congratulate you on having found God again.” She kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I had hoped we might meet again—in films, that is—but you have made me a mother-in-law instead, and Mother-in-law Productions doesn’t sound right.”

  “Emma’s here. In town.”

  “Congratulate her for me. Tell her how much I admire—what was it I said? Oh yes. Her energy. I’m going back East. Then France. Goodbye.”

  As Caroline stepped out into the too bright sun she had a sense of having lived through this scene before. In a film? But she had never had a daughter in a film, only doomed sons. Then she remembered Emma’s long-ago denunciation of her because she was living in sin with a communist. But then that was to be expected, because Caroline was a fellow traveler. Emma could tell. After all, had she not worked with a tenured professor who was doing a study of communism in the universities? When Caroline saw fit to criticize Professor Becker … Decker? … Emma said that she had, the previous day, married him, thus sparing Caroline her daughter’s company for a decade or two. Now, thanks to another surprise marriage, Caroline would never again see Emma; never see her grandson, perhaps a pity. In any case, to be rid of Emma nearly compensated for the permanent loss of Tim, not that, to be fair, he was hers to lose except in memory, a faculty that time could be relied on to dim—cool—erase.

  Caroline was now at the entrance to the Garden of Allah. An out-of-work actor was playing the part of doorman to the shady Garden of Allah. He was convincingly seedy. Caroline asked him to order a taxi. He blew a whistle. She murmured to herself, “If I had a heart, it would be marble by now.” She had said that line in one of her first talkies. The actor-doorman opened the door for what he plainly took to be a great star of yesteryear.

  “You’re an actor,” said Caroline with the shards of a broken smile.

  “How did you …?”

  Caroline was now into the taxi. “What do you think of the title ‘Ivan Ivanov the Terrible’?”

  “What does it mean? Who’s Yvonne?” Caroline had imitated Tim’s Russian pronunciation of Ivan.

  “A woman with a past. The Beverly Hills Hotel,” Caroline told the driver, who then made the perilous turn on Sunset Boulevard up to the Chateau Marmont driveway; then an abrupt right to the hotel, the sunset, the sea. “And no discernible present,” she added to herself, not quite able to feel much sympathy, as yet, for the terrible Yvonne.

  TEN

  1

  The first thing that Caroline saw as she entered the hospital room was a small bright Renoir propped up on a table beside the iron hospital bed where Harry Hopkins had been cranked almost to sitting position. He was as bright-eyed as ever but his eyes were now set in a face that had fallen back into its skull. Awkwardly, she embraced him. The room smelled of disinfectant and chrysanthemums, a flower no European would allow in a sickroom since it was thought to be the flower of the dead and not to be displayed until the funeral.

  “Renoir.” She indicated the picture as if she were passing an examination. “You have become an art collector.”

  “It’s only on loan. I’ve been looking at pictures for the first time in my life.”

  “When you’re out of here, and the weather’s better, come to France. My pictures are safe, or so I’m told.” She sat in a chair, the painting
between them.

  “If I get out. I’m back at death’s door, they tell me.”

  “It must be a quite comforting place by now to be.… How long has it been? Ten years’ attendance at the familiar door?”

  “The last trip to Moscow finally did the trick. Have you seen Eleanor?”

  “Only once since the President died. She’s busy with the United Nations. Something to do with human affairs. It was good of Truman to put her back to work.”

  Hopkins shut his eyes; and sighed; then he stopped breathing. For an instant Caroline thought she had witnessed the end. But, eyes shut, he started to speak—from beyond death’s door? “Things went wrong between us, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. I don’t know.” Caroline could not imagine so great a partnership ever foundering.

  “It started when I married. Or just before I married Louise. Eleanor accused me of spending all my time with the President—and the war—and forgetting about what truly matters, the New Deal.”

  “First things first.”

  “That was my answer. She was—she became—hard to believe, hysterical. She said I’d only pretended to be her best friend in order to get closer to the President and once there I had dropped her and all our work together and saw only him, which is true up to a point, but he had no one else and, finally, neither did I.”

  “She should have understood that.” Caroline was quite aware that no one in—whatever love should be called in this case—was ever entirely sane much less reasonable.

  “I had thought she liked Louise. ‘So pleased you’re getting married at last. Someone to look after you.’ ” He opened his eyes to look not at Caroline but at the Renoir. He smiled with, she hoped, pleasure. “Then we made the mistake of staying on, in the White House. Eleanor was away almost all the time and the Boss’s jokes about her constant gallivanting suddenly stopped. A bad sign. He was also seeing Lucy Mercer again. You know who I mean?”