The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  “But perhaps all this fits their mood even though it overthrows two centuries of rhetoric.” Burden Day got to his feet; the trousers of his white linen suit were stuck to the back of his thighs. He switched on a fan and cooled himself in front of it. “I confess that I, too, have sometimes thought that we were meant to govern the earth. Well, if I thought that—and I’m a populist, a mind-your-own-business sort of person who knows from experience whatever is good for the banks is bad for the people if … Where was I? Oh. If I often think that way, what must all the others think? Brought up on manifest destiny and TR’s nonsense about the glories of war. It is no accident that for three hundred years our people willingly, I believe—maybe even joyously—slaughtered their way across this continent, enslaved Negroes, drove out Mexicans, broke more Indian treaties than Hitler ever bothered to make. Then, for the last half century, we’ve made the countries of the Caribbean and Central America our property while occupying most of the islands of the Pacific including, after due incineration, our only Asian rival, Japan. Who are we to say that this was the work of a few war-lovers like TR?”

  “Say that in the Senate.”

  “And return to private life in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary?” The Senator laughed. “Such a speech would not be considered loyal. Even so, three hundred years of bloody expansion cannot be accomplished entirely against the will of the people who do the fighting.”

  “Are you suggesting there’s something demonic in our highly mixed race?”

  Burden Day’s face was now as white as that of the marble Cicero. “I don’t know. How could I? Or anyone. But if at some deep level that’s what they truly want, I must stop short and confess that I am not representative.”

  “They also wanted slavery.”

  “Some did. Some did not.” Burden Day sighed. “But does anyone really want to give up so much freedom and so much money to allow an American general to play Mikado in Tokyo and another one play Kaiser in Berlin? I doubt it.”

  “Probably not if it was explained to them. But the Few dominate the Many …”

  The Senator completed Hume’s incontrovertible law. “… through Opinion. We have our work cut out for us.”

  Peter prepared to go; shook Burden Day’s papery old hand. “Let’s hope it does some good.”

  “It does us good, and that is all that matters. The end will be what it will be.”

  3

  With considerable fanfare, John Latouche got Peter and Aeneas tickets to New York’s most successful new play, which had opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on December 3, 1947: Aeneas was unusually precise about such things when he was serious, and he was very serious, “because it’s time we took a close look at the American theater, to see what’s happening …”

  “And why?” Peter added automatically.

  Their cab had been obliged to park a block away from the theater because of the many cabs and limousines inching past the marquee, where, spelled out in white electric lightbulbs, were the names of director Elia Kazan, and of playwright Tennessee Williams. Of the two names, Kazan’s was the larger in lights. The play’s title had immediately intrigued the world: A Streetcar Named Desire. In the three weeks since the play had opened, radio comedians and newspaper columnists had made a thousand jokes about streetcars and lust.

  The lobby was crowded. The aisles were crowded. Peter had not seen many plays in New York and he had never attended a recently opened “hit.” As a result, he was hardly prepared for the tension in the audience as he and Aeneas slowly moved towards their seats at the center of the third row. “It’s like what an audience must be for a public execution,” he muttered to Aeneas.

  “Latouche is a friend of Irene Selznick, the producer.” Aeneas had not heard Peter. He was too busy with his notebook, pen, miniature flashlight, for which, he now discovered, he had forgotten to buy batteries. “Touche has invited us to a party after the show.…”

  Curtain up. The play irradiated the theater. The color of everything beneath the proscenium arch was brown, either viewed starkly, head on, or dreamlike through a shadowy scrim; there was a murmur of New Orleans voices speaking Spanish (why not French?) in the street beyond the tenement where the characters Stanley and Stella lived. From left to right, a blank space for a sort of foyer, and an iron staircase spiraling up against a begauzed view of sidewalk. Then, in a row, living room, kitchen, bedroom, with a door to the bathroom. Mysteriously placed lights flared and dimmed, came and went. Enter Blanche Du Bois. Pale. Slender. Deliberately out of her place, place. In flight. From Belle Rêve. Her house. Stella’s house, too. Upriver. The home has been lost. Stella’s husband, a sweaty, muscular youth in a T-shirt, played by a young actor, literally famous overnight—Marlon Brando. Peter could see now what the fuss was about. Hear it, too. No male had ever seemed quite so nude on the stage before. Nor quite so entirely at home with his sex not to mention that of the audience, too. A mild speech defect was used artfully. To hold attention—make suspense? Could he ever say an “R” properly? Did it matter? The audience looked only at him when he spoke. Stared even more intensely at him when he was silent. Peter felt sorry for the somewhat manic actress who played Blanche. She was being excluded from what, surely, was supposed to be her play.

  When she was taken away at the end, barbarism—“the apes” as Blanche had called the Stanleys of this world—had triumphed. Was this a warning or a prophecy? What on earth was this most vivid play about?

  “What is Chekhov about?” was Aeneas’s answer as they made their way up the aisle while the rest of the audience stood, shouting bravos, applauding the somewhat bewildered-looking cast. Brando tugged idly at his crotch. A signal? Or merely his way of saying “Until next time.”

  Latouche met them in the lobby. “Don has his taxi across the street.”

  As they drove to the party in East Thirty-sixth Street, Touche described the opening of the play. “Everyone knew that the theater was never going to be the same again. Brando’s changed the whole idea of what an actor is—the way Barrymore did before the war.”

  “An actor?” Aeneas was scribbling fast as the cab rattled down Sixth Avenue. “Surely what he’s changed is the notion of what a man is.”

  “You mean a sexual object?” This was very much Touche’s territory. Amateur anthropology.

  “Object. Subject, too. A man’s not just a suit anymore.” Aeneas was talking as he wrote. “Dim background for the erotic woman. Dim partner to glittering ballerina. Black velvet foil for diamond.”

  “Too much,” warned Peter, the austere editor.

  But Aeneas and Touche were both excited by what each seemed to believe was a total realignment of the sexes as demonstrated onstage at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre one winter’s night two years after the war, two years into a fermenting new world.

  They were met at the door to a modest sublet flat by its current if somewhat, to hear him tell it, fugitive tenant.

  “Oh, Touche. Come on in.” Absently, Tennessee Williams shook hands with Aeneas and Peter. “There seems to be a party going on.”

  There was. Two dozen theatrical people were helping themselves to drink arranged on a long table. “I seem to have had a permanent party going since the opening.” Williams put a cigarette into a long holder; he lit up, producing a smoke screen about his head. His eyes were cloudy-cataract blue. A moustache emphasized full lips.

  “Were you at the play?” he asked his new guests. He squinted at them suspiciously. Enemies?

  Aeneas began what promised to be a panegyric laced with practical suggestions about staging in order to clarify meanings.

  Williams cut him short. “I am finished with the theater. You have seen my last play, the very last. You must understand that my heart has been affected by far too many illnesses, not all of them venereal-related.” His high heh-heh-heh laugh was like someone imitating a barnyard resident, just as his voice, though pleasantly Southern, could suddenly become extremely precise, with all sorts of single and double quotation marks a
s well as italics which he used to put forward, as if for exhibit, certain words that were not usually given such emphasis. “I shall be dead before the end of this year. It is a miracle that I lived long enough to undergo the rehearsals, not to mention the tender mercies of Dame Selznick. On the other hand, Gadge is merciless. But a genius at directing me.” Williams drifted off.

  Touche brought Peter whiskey while Aeneas stalked the dying playwright. When Peter asked if Williams was really in a terminal condition, Touche laughed. “He’s a total hypochondriac. On the other hand, to steady his nerves, he munches Nembutals with vodka as a chaser. This is not healthy. He’s off to Europe at the end of December. What’s become of your uncle or whatever Tim Farrell is to you?”

  “I thought you’d know. Weren’t you doing a film together …”

  “It was often a rich subject of conversation at three in the morning in Harlem. But rich subjects of conversation seldom end up on screen. I’m doing it as a musical for Broadway. Oh, here’s Paul. Virgil says you need a music critic.”

  “I’m a composer, actually.” Bowles was slender, small, blond; he could have been any age that was not young.

  “He’s now becoming a writer.” Touche moved away.

  Bowles seemed mildly annoyed. “How do you become a writer?”

  “I suppose by writing something.”

  “My wife, Jane, is a writer and she never writes something. In fact, she writes practically nothing.” He seemed approving. “Which is what Gertrude Stein told me to do when she read my poems in Paris. ‘You’re not a poet, go on with music.’ So I did. Until now, perhaps.”

  “You did the music for the play tonight.” Peter recalled the playbill.

  “You’ve just come from Streetcar?”

  “Yes.” Peter was not about to use an adjective which would then be examined and assayed for value.

  Bowles seemed disappointed that there was no hyperbole to dissect. “I also did the music for The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee thinks music enhances his plays.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I don’t think I could tell. I only hear the music. He sees and hears the play. Whose American Idea?”

  Peter gave a brief report: news as history, history as news.

  “I’ve never seen any connection between the way the world works and what is written of it.”

  “And I don’t see how there can not be. The writer’s in history, like it or not.”

  “The composer’s part of the play but he listens for the music not the words.”

  “Try,” said Peter, succumbing to his worst didactic instincts, “to do both.”

  “One should, of course, always try.” Bowles’s solemnity plainly disguised a certain watchful glee. “But, of course, I do listen to the words, up to a point.”

  “Which is?”

  “One stopping point is Tennessee’s unerring misuse of foreign languages.”

  “Spanish instead of French in New Orleans?”

  “The wrong Spanish instead of the right. I’ve given up correcting him. He doesn’t hear.”

  Leonard Bernstein made a movie star’s entrance. Darkly handsome, he wore on his shoulders a coat with a mink collar. All eyes were upon him as he embraced Tennessee.

  Bowles sighed. “It must be a terrific burden to be the whole of American music at twenty-nine. To have it all and still want more?”

  “What more could there be?”

  “He says that he would like to be a man of fashion like me.” There was a cheerful glint in Bowles’s eyes; and Peter noted that Bowles was indeed elegantly turned out in a prewar school-of-Paris gray suit, pinched in at the waist. “Not long after his musical comedy, On the Town, he offered me a job as his valet.”

  “Valet?” Peter was astonished.

  “He was serious. I suppose because I’d lived in Europe before the wars. He wants to have a European style like the other great conductors. But, of course, they are European and he’s from Lawrence, Massachusetts. Even so, I might have helped him with French and Spanish and tactfully talked him out of that mink collar. I see astrakhan as being more Lenny’s style.”

  “Why didn’t you take the job?”

  “The salary wasn’t much more than what I’m getting at the Herald Tribune. Besides, Jane and I expect to be living in Morocco …”

  Bowles turned away to greet friends. Peter suspected that either his leg had been pulled or it was actually Bowles’s nature to be flatly literal and precise in all things and what he said he simply said and he always meant exactly what he had said like his mentor in Paris, Gertrude Stein. At the other end of the room, Bernstein was discussing himself with all the passionate zest of a professor enthralled by his subject. “I’ve never seen anything like it! The crowds on the sides of the hill. All the leaders of the country were there to hear me conduct. I felt like weeping. I was home. In Israel. They said my success was the biggest thing in their history! Yes, the old history as well as the new. They said I was a bigger hit than Jesus Christ!”

  “But, Lenny,” said Touche, sweetly, “are you sure that was a compliment? I mean, look at what the Jews did to Jesus.”

  “Oh, Touche. Stop trying to be witty. You know what I mean.”

  “Of course, I do. I was just wondering what they meant.” Latouche’s round.

  Later, walking in the cold to Aeneas’s flat, they compared notes on the evening. “Bernstein’s basing a symphony on Auden’s Age of Anxiety.”

  “The pieces are starting to come together.”

  “One interesting bit of gossip,” said Aeneas, who never gossiped. “Williams is interested in an Italo-American who was in the Navy.”

  “Curious the number of homosexuals there are in the arts now. Or has it always been the same and we just didn’t know?”

  “Probably the same. Anyway, this former sailor lived awhile with Touche. Then, before that, you’ll never guess who he was with.”

  “Aeneas, I don’t care what men and women are doing, much less men and sailors.”

  “Then I won’t tell you that the sailor lived with Joe Alsop.”

  Peter stopped in front of a Sixth Avenue bar. “I don’t believe it. Joe’s too … too …”

  “Too what?”

  “Careful. No. Too snobbish.”

  “It adds depth to his character, doesn’t it? The Baron de Charlus of Georgetown.”

  Peter shuddered as a cold wind came down the street from the north. “This is a new world, isn’t it?”

  “Or the old world, better understood.”

  THIRTEEN

  1

  In June of 1948, Caroline returned to Laurel House. For nearly a year she had been in France restoring Saint-Cloud-le-Duc to what it had been before the comparatively mild German occupation.

  Frederika had insisted that she launch Caroline’s Aaron Burr book with a garden party which, she said, ominously, would doubtless be the last before Irene Bloch took possession.

  “But that,” said Caroline, “is two years from now.”

  “Even so, the way things are going …” Frederika’s voice trailed off. They were seated on the red-brick terrace that overlooked the Potomac, for the most part, at this season, screened by tall trees and thick-growing laurel.

  “I love the roar of the river,” said Caroline.

  “Don’t tell me you can actually hear it?” The one-eyed butler brought them iced tea. The other guests had not yet arrived.

  “I think I hear it, which is almost the same.” Caroline’s hearing had been gradually fading, a condition which she had learned to accept as she had fading vision, various arthritic pains, and a memory no longer reliable. “My bones are turning to sand,” Caroline observed with what she hoped was sufficient cheerfulness. “What about yours?”

  Frederika shook both arms, thoughtfully. “I don’t think I have any left. At least nothing aches. We’re really much too old to be up and around.”

  “Up from what? Around what?”

  “The grave.” Frederika maintained
her cool hostess voice. “Oh, I’ve got some copies of your book.” On a coffee table there were a half-dozen copies of Memories of Aaron Burr by Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, edited by Caroline Sanford. Absently, Frederika picked the price tag off the black-and-gold dust jacket. “Five dollars for a book. Imagine. Weren’t they all two dollars and fifty cents before the war?”

  “Novels. Not works of history.”

  “Curious to think that your mother killed Blaise’s mother. Or was it the other way round?”

  Caroline treated this lightly. “She did not exactly kill her. She let her die.”

  “Surely it’s the same thing.”

  “Not in court. And when all’s said and done, history’s court.”

  Blaise came out of the house. “The authoress. First in the family. They say Cissy Patterson’s dying out at the Dower House.”

  “Such a pretty place,” said Frederika, always more interested in the state of houses than that of their occupants. “I wonder who will inherit?”

  “The grandchild,” said Blaise. “Drew Pearson’s daughter. It’s the Times-Herald that I want to get my hands on.”

  “Doesn’t it still belong to Hearst?” Caroline tended to rise above age and decrepitude at the mention of newspapers.

  Blaise shook his head. “No. Cissy’s got it all now, and the paper’s making money for a change. She wanted it to go to her—what is it?—niece, Alicia Patterson, who’s started a newspaper out on Long Island.”

  “Long Island? That’s not a real place.” Frederika was firm. “What a perverse thing to do, to put a newspaper there.” She went inside to make final arrangements for the buffet.

  “Should we take it on?” Blaise turned to Caroline. It was like the old days when they were working publishers and partners.

  “Aren’t we … Oh, I swore I’d make no reference to time’s wingèd wastebasket, but we’re old, Blaise.”

  “I don’t feel it. You don’t either.”

  “I’m also French again. Even so, it is tempting.”