by Gore Vidal
In the Bird’s last years I seldom saw him. The barbiturate Nembutal and vodka are a lethal combination and they did his brain no good. But the writing was often still marvelous; also, more adventurous than before. Many critics hoped, even prayed that this was a final falling off from his so unbearable to so many of them greatness. But the talent endured. Medications were only harming, for a time, his memory; he was also having hallucinations: one involved an unpleasant encounter with someone in Spain, only to discover the next day that the offending person had not been in the country. His brother put him away to dry out. “It was not so bad in the bin,” the Bird told me later. “I played a great deal of bridge and discovered that some of our best unsung actors are on the television soap operas.”
Howard and I were in Rome when the papers revealed that Tennessee Williams, a recent convert to Catholicism, had come there to obtain the Pope’s blessing. The story sounded a bit crazy to me but the Bird was always highly dramatic in his effects. We did not see him on that trip but, later, we heard all about the visit from Jesuit friends. Father Navone was an Italo-American professor at Gregorian University. Although Navone had seriously failed to attract me to the Scarlet Woman of Rome (as WASPs still sometimes refer to the original Christian Church) we had remained amiable acquaintances and through him I met many interesting Jesuits—in fact, the most interesting ones were soon to leave the church in the later backlash to the liberalism of Pope John XXIII and the reformations of the Second Vatican Council.
The Glorious Bird and his shifty-eyed dog arrive in Rome to discuss spiritual matters with the Pope.
Navone offered to be of service to the Bird who repeated that he would indeed appreciate an audience with the Pope (could it have been the arid Montini?). Navone played the Bird like some golden pre-evolutionary fish. The Pope was not possible considering the Bird’s tight Roman schedule. But the Black Pope would be happy to receive him. Tennessee was delighted, visualizing a black Pope singing “Ole Man Tiber” and looking like Paul Robeson. Actually the “Black Pope” is the name given the head of the Jesuit order, an order usually at delicate odds with whomever occupies the See of Peter. A time was ordained for this historic meeting. There would be a cocktail party where the Bird could flap about amongst his new co-religionists. Navone, a resourceful well-organized man who had noted the Bird’s tendency to vagueness about time and place and, indeed, people, promised to pick up Tennessee in time to take him to the party. The time came. The Bird was napping. He’d just had his daily swim. Drowsily he begged off. He was too exhausted. Tell the Black Pope some other time. Navone rushed to the telephone and rang the Black Pope’s secretary, a formidable Englishwoman. She got the Bird on the phone and in a voice more commanding than that of even Edwina told him that Father Navone would presently deliver him, ready or not, to the cocktail party and that he was not allowed to be one minute late.
So it was that the grandson of the Episcopal Reverend Dakin was delivered into the lair of the Black Pope where a dozen or two fascinated Jesuits were waiting for him. The Bird, need I say by now, really hammed it up. As Jesuits crowded about him he intoned, “Ever since I became a Catholic, I feel this astonishing presence all about me.” (He’d been led into this by, I think, his brother Dakin.) Now the one thing that professionally religious people most hate is listening to laypeople go on about their religious experiences as Bernadette was to discover back in Old World Lourdes. Somewhat taken aback, a Jesuit politely asked, “Is this ‘presence’ a warm presence?”
The Bird fixed him with a beady gaze: “There is no temperature.”
“How,” asked a helpful Jesuit, “do you write a play?”
“I start,” said the Bird, “with a sentence.” Presumably, during this dialogue, the Holy Father fled to Avignon.
The last time I saw Tennessee we were on the Kupcinet TV interview program in Chicago. A lady author was discussing her book. The Bird leaned back in his chair to the right of Kupcinet and shut his eyes. He remained like this for quite a while. Finally, the host nudged him. No response. “Tennessee, are you asleep?” “No,” said the Bird, “but sometimes I shut my eyes when I am bored.”
We parted in the Chicago street below. I noticed he had a rosy butterfly across the bridge of his nose, known to the bibulous French as a papillon. We never met again.
THIRTY-ONE
Two days ago politics intruded as it has a habit of doing in this bad time. Yes, all times are bad but some times are worse than others. This is one for our country. A Michigan congressman, John Conyers, minority—that is, Democrat—leader of the House Judiciary Committee, went to Ohio with several other members of Congress and a number of staffers to determine whether or not in the late presidential election of 2004 the overexuberant local Republican Party had stolen the election for George W. Bush. The result was a report by Conyers which a Chicago firm published with a preface by me. Yes, Virginia, the election was well and truly stolen and the Conyers team spells it all out in considerable detail. Since the Republican Congress will not allow hearings on what went wrong, Conyers had no recourse other than a book describing in detail how the theft was effected with collusion among high officials and shadowy executives of electronic voting machine companies. Since my name as writer of the preface is on the cover, radio stations with call-in facilities have been ringing me from Arizona to Ohio to Illinois to Texas to—in a few hours from now—New York City. Most of the callers proved to be already suspicious of the election’s validity but as they have been given no information by our monolithic media, the Conyers report is the first hard news from the front. Thus far, the report has not been mentioned in the print media. The New York Times maintains a sibylline silence as it tends to do when proofs of electoral wrongdoing are nailed, as it were, to the church door. The general liberal (what a meaningless word in the American context!) line has been: no one likes sour grapes. So let’s just move on quietly as Gore did in 2000. So what happened next? A blizzard of official lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction. Of collusion between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, two well-known enemies. The wrecking by Rumsfeld of Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries that had not and could not have done us the slightest harm. Simultaneously as their cities were being knocked down at enormous expense to us, the taxpayers, contracts were being given to the vice president’s company, Halliburton, to rebuild those same cities that his colleague at the Defense Department had knocked down. This is a win-win situation for the higher corruption that governs us. Now we are creating air bases in Central Asia to seize Iranian oil reserves? Or, more dangerously, to take on China en route to North Korea or vice versa? Since these so-called neoconservative contingency plans for world conquest will end more soon than late in our destruction one wonders why our media, bought and obedient as they are, cannot see that they are on the wrong side of human history, now more than ever fragile and out of control as we nuclearize space itself and attack nation after nation while silencing those few of our citizens who see what is up ahead for us. Recently one radio caller asked me if it was true that I was the last republican—with a small r. I said I’d better not be since perpetual war for perpetual peace, which is replacing the Republic, will only end in the death of us all. Meanwhile, the glaciers are melting and the seas rise.
Our old original Republic does seem to be well and truly gone. A day or two ago I witnessed the Republican majority of the House Judiciary Committee trash the Democratic minority (which, ironically, actually represents many more millions of Americans than do the “majority” congressional members who represent what Secretary of State William Seward liked to call “the mosquito republics” whose departure in 1860 he quite welcomed, unlike Lincoln, the mystical Unitarian, who chose civil war to keep them attached).
THIRTY-TWO
Those who flew in the early years of the twentieth century were unlike, in many ways, those who did not. Of course most did not live to any great age—they crashed. My youth was filled with family friends wearing neck braces; there were also
many premature funerals. My own father was one of the original Army Air Corps pilots trained in 1917. He married the daughter of Senator Gore of Oklahoma and became the first instructor in aeronautics at West Point where I was born in the Cadet Hospital. Bored with peacetime army life, he helped found two small airlines: TAT which metamorphosed into TWA, and the Ludington Line which became Eastern Airlines.
In the mid-thirties he and his friend Amelia Earhart started Northeast Airlines in conjunction with the Boston and Maine Railroad. When Amelia was lost somewhere in the Pacific my father, who had been director of air commerce under FDR, was put by the president in charge of the search. FDR was almost as fond of her as was his wife, Eleanor. A great cloud of conspiracy theories have since surrounded Amelia’s disappearance. Thirty years after her disappearance I asked Mrs. Roosevelt whether there was any truth to the stories that Amelia—her friend—had been sent to spy on the Japanese preparations for war in the Pacific and that they had either shot her down or she crash-landed and was made captive.
The veins in Mrs. Roosevelt’s left temple often throbbed when she was suddenly moved by emotion recollected. “When the war ended,” she said, “I made my own small investigation. As you might suspect. I harassed everyone connected with the flight and the search. Certainly, there was nothing of a spying nature about her flight. She simply lost her way trying to find—where was it? Howland Island?”
The last time I saw Amelia we were on the way back from West Point where my father had taken us to see a football game. On the way back to New York City we sat in a compartment of the train as passersby peered through the corridor windows. Amelia was perhaps the world’s most famous woman. I asked her what would be the worst part of the trip. The answer was quick. “Africa. If you get forced down in all that jungle with so few cities they could never find you.” When I said that the Pacific Ocean looked pretty big to me, she was offhand: “But there are all those islands where you can land. And all those ships passing by.” Lately, I’ve been reading an account of her flight and of how, for the most part, she had routed her flight over land not sea. She had obviously changed her mind about the relative beneficence of overseas flight.
There have been a number of truly imaginative—not to mention dreadful—books about Amelia. One of them was the work of a woman who had convinced herself that Amelia was a nobody invented by a man of genius, her husband, the publicist and publisher George Palmer Putnam. Amelia’s marriage to G.P. was a wretched one. He kept her constantly on tour, on view. At one point, she wanted to marry Gene. But he was not romantically inclined and saw her only as a friend, a comrade.
My father, Gene Vidal, director of air commerce, being congratulated by Amelia Earhart for his successful parachute jump; she had preceded him in this game of chicken.
My father’s widow, Kit, told me that she had come across a letter Amelia had written Gene after she had had an accident in California. While her Lockheed Electra plane was being repaired, she’d written an anguished letter all about some sort of emotional problem that she was having. I asked if a name had been mentioned. “Oh, it was so long ago, I forget.” I asked Kit if the problem was with a man or a woman. My conventional stepmother frowned at this impropriety. “A man, of course.” “So what did you do with the letter?” “I tore it up, naturally. After all, it was no one’s business but hers.” So there was the final mystery that might have explained what happened. Gene had often speculated that she had deliberately crashed the plane. “She was going through a bad time with G.P.; she was also undergoing some sort of premature menopause.” He also said: “The last time I saw her she said she had put me in her will, leaving me this small house she owned because she could trust me to give it to her mother if anything happened to her. So why not, I asked her, just leave it directly to your mother? ‘Because,’ she said, ‘G.P., as widower, would try to get it.’ ”
I have mentioned how different the early fliers were from other people. There was Lindbergh whose final years were preoccupied with poets like Lao Tse as well as new sorts of procedures to keep hearts alive. I always found the early fliers a bit like a secret society, impatient with us earthbound folk who could never see as much as they saw from their special vertiginous height. Anne Morrow, Lindbergh’s wife, wrote highly poetical prose while her passion for the French pilot-writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, produced quantities of mystical prose on both sides until he crashed at sea in the war. Although Gene himself had no mystical or poetic side he was forever a restless inventor-putterer like Lindbergh. Gene’s not so secret ambition was to be the Henry Ford of aviation. As director of air commerce he supported any number of prototypes for “flivver” planes to do for flight what Ford’s Model T had done for land and at the same affordable price. That’s why I took off and landed the Hammond plane at the age of ten in 1936 and was duly immortalized in a Pathé newsreel. Although Gene enjoyed inventing airlines and crisscrossing the country as director, marking out landing fields, he never lost sight of his true goal: the cheap plane that anyone could own. Since the main expense in airplane manufacture was the aluminum fuselage, Gene began to experiment with molded plywood (Vidal Weldwood it was known as); later he tried laminated fiberglass. He never got to make a cheap plane but his molded fiberglass ended up as a mildly lucrative line of trays for a bread company as well as a few thousand dinghies that made occupants itch from the glass.
Lindbergh’s daughter has written amusingly of her father’s ongoing rage at the poor design of nearly everything, especially flashlights. To be useful, a flashlight must have at least four sides so that it would not, in response to gravity—the flier’s nemesis—roll off whatever surface it was resting on. Much of Lindbergh’s dialogue on such subjects was very like Gene’s, irritation at the compulsive bad design of simple objects and how easy it would be to improve them. A compulsion to improve the utility of everyday objects led to each man’s putterings and inventions. Politically, it did not lead much of anywhere except in Lindbergh’s case. He was the son of a Swedish American congressman from the Midwest. Like his father, Lindbergh was an isolationist. But he was hardly a pacifist. FDR, who had always been jealous of the “Lone Eagle’s” fame, consulted with my father about the uses that could be made of his rival’s fame. This is before the America First isolationist movement made it possible to smear such worthy Americans as Norman Thomas, Burton Wheeler, and, not least, Lindbergh as Nazis. Luckily, Gene was apolitical: his only foray into international politics came when, as director of air commerce, he had been invited to Germany for the Olympic Games (he had been a pentathlon silver medalist in the 1920 Olympics at Antwerp). The German airmen were also curious about American air power. But since Gene was a member of the federal government FDR thought, rightly, that his attendance would look like some sort of endorsement of the Nazi regime. So in the end it was Lindbergh who was sent to report on Nazi air power. He was openly shocked by German air superiority over Britain and France and, privately, over the flawed American effort, such as it was. Much was made of the Iron Cross Göring had slipped him before Lindbergh returned to warn Roosevelt that the Luftwaffe was even more formidable than anyone had suspected and that we would be at a singular disadvantage if we did not begin a buildup in military air power. Lindbergh was busy pushing the B-17 bomber, the so-called Flying Fortress. FDR, despite the malice he bore Lindbergh, knew good advice when he heard it and so, thanks to the Lindbergh reports, in the end it was our air power that won us the war. Meanwhile, politically, FDR could not resist smearing Lindbergh and the other America Firsters as Nazi sympathizers.
THIRTY-THREE
I now realize that I was brought up at the heart of aviation and, simultaneously, through my grandfather, at the then true heart of U.S. politics, the Senate. I lived much of my first seventeen years at Senator and Mrs. Gore’s Rock Creek Park house on Broad Branch Road, where I was more and more put to work as a reader to the Senator which I enjoyed, particularly when we were done with the Congressional Record and he would get me to read
ing Brann the Iconoclast, Robert Ingersoll, and other freethinkers and skeptics, as well as Mark Twain whose complete works were kept not in the attic library with several thousand other books but in the drawing room for a quick fix when “we” read after dinner and Mrs. Gore, relieved of her reading duties, could retreat to her upstairs sitting room and devour serials in Redbook and Ladies Home Companion. Neither the Senator nor I could understand what she saw in those stories but she had earned her free time or, as the Senator used to chuckle when any of us wearied while reading to him, “Both of Milton’s daughters are said to have gone blind reading to him.” We were led to believe that it was upon a very high altar indeed that we were being sacrificed. Between grandfather and father I inhabited two worlds, each fascinating to me. I was not interested in my father’s so-called legendary career as a jock but his life with Lindbergh and Earhart and the Wright brothers was magical. Also, the serenity of his nature was in benign contrast to my mother’s raging nature. I saw her as little as possible; unfortunately, she saw to it that I was not going to spend much time with the Gores or Gene after her marriage to Hugh Dudley Auchincloss, who, through his mother, a Jennings, was a Standard Oil heir. His oleaginous money kept me at schools farther and farther away from Rock Creek and the Gores as well as from Gene, now removed to New York City with a new wife and two new children. Later, when Nina had left Auchincloss, she married her air force general who died early of a blood disease, but by then I was in the army and Gene had been brevetted a major general in the air force to oversee the army’s development of new weapons, while his younger brother was a brigadier general in charge of an air force fighter wing stationed in Italy. Gene was distressed at not being given a more combatant role but a coronary thrombosis a few years earlier nearly kept him entirely out of the war. Through father, stepfather, uncle, I got to know, off duty, as it were, many of the great air commanders from Tooey Spaatz to General Doolittle to Pete Quesada to Nate Twining to Uzal G. Ent who took out the Ploesti oil fields (he was also a descendant of one of the original Siamese twins). Many of these generals were startlingly young even to my youthful eye. Like so many of the early fliers they were a race apart. They also tended to political conservatism—but then so did I, not to mention Jack Kennedy who was very much his father’s son. My enthusiasm for FDR only developed after the war due to exposure to Eleanor. But I was sometimes shocked to hear generals (not the ones noted above) talk about how easy it would be to get rid of Roosevelt through a military coup. Apparently we were fighting the wrong enemy. Stalin not Hitler was the threat. These bull sessions were pretty much just that, fueled by bourbon. After all, none of them was as eloquent as T. P. Gore in denouncing the president. But the Senator never dreamed of a military coup while Gene quite liked the president except for his propensity to lie even when there was no need to. Also, West Point trained its future officers to be accountable for their deeds, unlike presidents who tend cheerfully to outsource blame. When FDR insisted that the army pilots fly the mail despite his director of air commerce’s fierce resistance, the result was the death of many pilots as my father had predicted: “We are not trained for flying in all weather. I know. I’m one of them.” But FDR ordered the air force into action. After a number of disasters he called in Gene: “Well, Brother Vidal, we seem to have a problem.” This was the only time I ever heard Gene express disgust for the president. “I really liked that ‘we.’ ” But Gene was no politician; his fellow West Pointer Eisenhower was. When a similar disaster befell President Eisenhower he sent Jim Hagerty, his press aide, to take the blame for a presidential error. “But,” Hagerty whined, “after what I said yesterday to the press corps they’ll tear me apart.” “Better, my boy,” said the smiling Eisenhower, “you than me.”