Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  With Gene’s appointment in September 1933 as director of aeronautics, the Vidals moved back to Rock Creek Park. Contentedly casual about it, Vidal wrote to friends that “the Gores, Nina, and myself have joined in opening up our former home in Rock Creek Park…. Come out…. It’s just like a visit to the country.” Given the businesslike frugality of both the Senator and Director, Gene probably paid a share of the costs. At a salary of $8,500, when one could rent handsome quarters in fashionable areas for less than $200 a month, the Vidals could have afforded their own apartment. Nina probably was unhappy to be living again with her parents. Her relations with her mother were no better than ever. But Gene’s busy schedule from airport to airport around the country made Rock Creek Park seem sensible. It also had the attraction to Nina of Mrs. Gore being available to look after Little Gene. Nina sustained a formidable social schedule, with all the advantages she believed were the sacred entitlement of someone whom the newspapers had taken to calling, usually with an illustrative photograph, “one of Washington’s most attractive young matrons.” That autumn a Washington Post article, “Capital’s Beauty Experts Give Advice on Best Coiffures, Gowns, Jewels and Cosmetics for Each Type,” headlined Nina as “The Dynamic Type. The constant play of emotions across the expressive and beautiful face of Nina Vidal, her enormous brown eyes and flexible, generous mouth, place her first on the list of Washington’s dynamic beauties.”

  In spring 1934 young Gene was sent to camp, though Mrs. Gore would have been happy to have him summers also. A friend of Gene’s recommended William Lawrence Camp in Tuftonboro, New Hampshire, named after the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts and run through the Boston Episcopal diocese. A camp for poor and middle-class boys, it had no social or economic cachet: it was not where the children of the famous and/or the wealthy went. Impressed by his friend’s enthusiasm, perhaps also by the low fees (fifteen dollars a week), Gene deputized her to pass along to the Director some of his questions, particularly about the quality of the counselors. Frank Lincoln responded, “We have not had a moral problem in the eight years of the camp and Mr. Vidal can rest assured that as the father of two young boys, eight and four years of age, I am on the look-out at all times for just such situations…. I hope we will have the pleasure of having Mr. Vidal’s son in camp.” Gene soon wrote that they had decided to send “our boy, age 8, for the full camp period.” Quite used to being relocated by fiat, and now to an unlikely place, Little Gene accepted that he was, so to speak, on the move again, another turn in the merry-go-round of semihomelessness.

  From its high points distant Mount Washington shimmered. With New Hampshire’s immense Lake Winnepesaukee nearby and the White Mountains just beyond, William Lawrence Camp provided deep vistas, dark woods, and cold water. It was a lovely summer world of blues and greens, on its fine days brilliant, on rainy days damp and moldy, smelling of the water that seeped into everything. The seventy-five boys, from seven to fifteen years old, and the counselors, all college students, slept in wooden cabins. Each held eight boys and two counselors, though some increased their capacity with double-decker bunks. Each morning, dressed in navyblue pants and blue sleeveless underwearlike shirts emblazoned with the camp monogram, the boys aired their blankets over juniper bushes. Meals were at a large nineteenth-century structure with sloping floors called The Farm House, everything bent with the dampness of decades. A covered porch, where boys could eat whatever the weather, extended from one side. Counselors’ assistants served meals. The boys peeled potatoes. “The Army was nothing but déjà vu,” Vidal recalled. “When I went in as a private, I felt, Jesus, I’ve already done this once.” There was a huge barn for theatricals. The usual sports: woodcraft, woodlore, hikes, camp trips, campfires, camp songs, ghost stories, silly practical jokes, and, in those more innocent days, a totemic Indian mystique that organized the older boys into an exclusive group called the Braves.

  In a highly regularized routine of daily camp activities, each punctuated by bugle calls, he went through the paces indifferently, sometimes evasively. There were no bullies to deal with. The counselors were serious, responsible, or at least not harmful, all from the Episcopalian world, some from as far away as North Carolina. One of them, who looked like Billy Graham and was going to be a minister, escorted Little Gene home by train at the end of summer. With another, in his fictionalized version of the experience, he had discussions about the soul, unable to understand why the counselor thought “spiritual things cause an inner peace which is more important than worldly affairs.” Another was “a very nice-looking boy…. From Princeton. I see him very clearly now. Ginger-haired with freckles…. He was a Communist, perfectly open about it. It was fashionable in the thirties. We had discussions. I was fascinated by it.” Sex was not part of the atmosphere, though bed-wetting was. “About four in the morning everybody would be waked up to catch the bed-wetters. As I was not one of them, I resented being got out of bed just because they were trying to catch them. They had some psychological theory that if you could catch the boy before he was wetting the bed he wouldn’t wet the bed. He’d go and do it outside.”

  Everything seemed routinized, boring. The elite Braves, dressed up like Indians at secret campfire meetings, were a club he did not wish to join. Every moment he could manage not to be missed he went back to the cabin or found some quiet outdoor place in which to read. Wisely, the camp authorities left him alone. One day Bob Bingham, later to be a friend at Exeter, who “especially remembered the required cold plunges into the lake in the early morning,” and with whom he had been teamed at the swimming pond in the safety-conscious buddy system, could not find him in or near the water. The alarm was sounded. Was he perhaps at the bottom of the lake? The rumor spread that he had drowned. Desperately searching the camp, they found him back at his cabin, reading. It was a lapse in thoughtfulness he regretted. But the books he got from the camp library sustained him, some P. G. Wodehouse and, particularly, the complete set (about a hundred) of the Horatio Alger series, with whose hero he strongly identified. Part of their appeal for his fictional surrogate in The Season of Comfort is “that all these marvelous boys became successful…. He made up his mind to make something of himself … to be like Horatio Alger,” in the face of his mother’s constant prediction that he would amount to nothing because he was lazy, spoiled, spendthrift. “Then, his mind made up … he made an effort, usually a futile one, to be a good mixer.” Already interested in politics, part of the childhood air he breathed in his Washington family, he preferred to talk with the counselors. The Sunday Episcopal service seemed to him to consist of boring irrelevancies. Myths were to be analyzed, not believed in. The most pleasurable ritual was Sunday dinner, when the cooks were off, “the best meal of the week. We had these pitchers of milk made out of dented pewter set on large trestle tables; then we each had a bowl and a big spoon and there was box after box of square crackers and a big thing of peanut butter and a big thing of grape jelly. And you would break up the crackers, pour the milk over them, and add the peanut butter and jelly until you had this purple slime. It was the most delicious thing I’ve ever had in my life. We lived for Sunday-night mush.”

  The blue lake, the hilly vistas, the long hikes and camp trips to the mountains he also enjoyed. “We’d go over to Chocorua,” to the area of John Hay’s summer home in the last years of his life, Henry James’s friend and Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State whom years later Vidal was to transform from history into fiction. “I remember that as a very beautiful spot. And the White Mountains. The hiking and the woods were wonderful.” Somewhere close by, he later realized, William James had had his summer home. One of the long trips in the camp truck took the boys to northern New Hampshire, on the Vermont border, where the Lost River, cutting a narrow gorge, had carried two huge rocks so close together that they and the slight opening between them were called the “Lemon Squeezer.” “You thought that once your head was through you could never get your body through, and then it was very hard to get your head th
rough.” Suddenly he felt trapped, imprisoned, gripped by a claustrophobic anxiety attack. His legs going out from under him, he pulled himself through the dark, tight space. The walls gripped him on both sides. They seemed to go on forever. At last he was out, only to learn that camp tradition required that each boy go through three times. “Many years later I was discussing this with a friendly psychiatrist … and I was curious about prenatal memories, as I still am…. And I had totally forgotten the Lemon Squeezer, but I certainly remembered always having been claustrophobic. This was exactly like being born: you put your head through this thing and you see a glint of light and can you get the hell through or not? And he said, ‘Well, that could qualify as a prenatal memory, if indeed there are such things,’ and he said, ‘Ask your mother.’ So I asked her, and she said yes, she had a very narrow pelvis and that it was a near thing whether there’d be a cesarean and it was a very difficult birth and the back of my head was indented by her narrow pelvis.”

  At the end of summer 1934 he returned to Washington, to the second of the three years at Sidwell Friends School, now not only the grandson of a well-known senator but the son of a glamorous, newsmaking public official. In October 1934 the grandmother who had seen him only once, Margaret Vidal, died at the age of sixty-four in Madison, North Dakota. When he was still two, in 1928, his Vidal grandparents had seen their grandson briefly in a Chicago hotel when Gene and Nina were passing through by train. In early 1935 Felix Vidal died, at the age of seventy-three. “He had been exceedingly low since the death of my mother,” Gene wrote to a relative. “Father was quite lonely and completely through with life.” Gene had managed to keep both his parents away. There is no indication that Nina had met them other than the one occasion in Chicago. Margaret and Felix were not averse to travel: they had numbers of times visited their eldest daughter, Lurene, Gene’s favorite sister. She had married Lloyd Jones, a successful stockbroker, and moved to Jackson, Michigan, not far from Detroit. On his own frequent travels, Gene occasionally visited his family in Madison and more often Lurene in Jackson, but he chose to provide Little Gene with no memories of Margaret and Felix. For the young boy, the Vidal grandparents were other people’s images. Lurene soon came into focus as his formidable aunt. Gene’s youngest sibling, named after his father but nicknamed Pick, had come into sight during the 1931 and 1932 football seasons, when the young cadet became the second Vidal to set records for West Point. Just twenty years old, Pick, working as a lifeguard, spent one summer with the Vidals in Washington, where he found Nina attractive.

  Young Gene found his mother both attractive and difficult. Senator Gore’s new secretary, the young Oklahoman Roy Thompson, who often came to the house to read to the Senator and each Sunday brought the newspaper, was shocked to walk by an open door through which he saw Nina naked from the waist up. Ten-year-old Deenie was in the room. Suddenly catching Thompson’s eye, she looked at him unflinchingly. “That was ordinary and normal for Nina,” her son recollected. So too was her drinking, which had become frequent, sometimes heavy. After parties she hosted, when the guests had left, she finished the liquor that had been left in glasses. So too were her sexual adventures, often extensions of partying or titillation to relieve boredom. A servant reported some years later that Nina had spent an hour in her bedroom, one hot Washington afternoon, with her black taxi driver. The enchantment had long gone out of the marriage. Nina “was frivolous and always wanted to party, and Gene was worn out from working all day,” Gene’s sister-in-law remembered. She complained that she would be a better wife if Gene were a more available husband. When Deenie returned from camp in the late summer of 1934, he could not help but know his family life would soon change radically. There was occasional discussion of his future, including sending him to boarding school. That might speak effectively to Gene’s travel schedule, to Nina’s social whirl, to the unstable home life other than the stability the Gores provided. In April 1934 James Henderson, former coach of the University of South Dakota football team, now chaplain and math teacher at St. Albans School in Washington, had urged Gene “to consider St. Albans as a future school for your young son. We’ve got a fine school here and if you are at all interested come out and let us show you the works.” Henderson also ran a summer camp to which he asked his old friend to consider sending his son. Gene was interested in St. Albans. “I believe it would be a good idea if we brought him out … one of these days, probably on Sunday, and talk with you about sending him to your school. We have been discussing the possibilities of sending him to a boys’ school next year.” But nothing came of it for the time being.

  Sometime early in the 1930s Nina began an affair with the wealthy John Hay Whitney. It was slightly complicated (perhaps enriched) by Gene having an affair with Whitney’s wife, Elizabeth. Which pair had started first did not seem to be an issue. By the fall of 1934 Nina was dreaming about marrying “Jock,” whose influential family had made a fortune in newspaper publishing. Liz, in love with Gene, apparently would have been delighted to marry him or at least have him entirely to herself. Full-figured, athletic, she was stunningly attractive. “She wore her dark hair parted in the center, pulled back very tightly into a bun. She was funny, amusing, very beautiful. Her features were chiseled, a gorgeous nose, very wealthy and uneducated.” Ten years younger than Gene, she came from an old-line Philadelphia family. Her passion was horse breeding, horse racing, and beautiful dogs. To Little Gene, the exotic, animal-loving, regal-looking Liz seemed a desirable alternative to his mother. “She always had certain little dirt marks in the wrinkles around her neck. She was out there in the stables all day, and sometimes she didn’t get around to bathing very carefully. But she was so beautiful, with her worn-down Indian moccasins; looked like an Indian princess. Black flashing eyes…. She was breathtaking. She looked like she should be on a stamp.”

  Jock Whitney’s looks were not an issue. Accomplished, wealthy, powerful in the world of finance, media, and government, Whitney was someone Nina was eager to have. When Liz met Gene, “she liked him right away, and Nina said to Liz, ‘You try and do something with him.’ So Liz did,” Gene’s sister-in-law recalled. “She took him over. While Nina and Gene were still married.” One evening Nina ran into Liz and Gene at a cocktail party at which she did not expect her husband. Caught off guard, “she went over and slapped Gene in the face.” That may have had mostly to do with her mood that day. Nina was sleeping with Jock, among others. The “among others” finally led to the inevitable end of a tired marriage between incompatible people. “There was a guy called Doggy Waggerman, ugly but suave. He sold yachts to the rich. And when my father would not go out to parties and she wanted to go to bed,” Gore was later told, “Doggy Waggerman would escort my mother. One night [in late winter or early spring 1935] my father was asleep and my mother came home. He found her in the bathroom douching herself. And he said, ‘Well, Doggy Waggerman, of all people.’ And she said, ‘So what?’ And that was the end of that.” In that same year Eugene Luther Vidal, Jr., going on ten years of age, sat reading in an alcove in his grandfather’s attic, deeply absorbed in a novel that seemed then and later to be almost preternaturally about himself. The Spartan, published originally under the title Coward of Thermopylae, by the now forgotten Caroline Dale Snedeker, is an example of a Victorian literary genre that retold classical legend, myth, and history as exemplary moral tales for Anglo-American adolescents. It is the story of Aristodemos, son of Lykos of Athens, whose Spartan mother, Makaria, takes Aristodemos back to her native Sparta after her husband’s death. An Athenian of birth, valor, and high character, whose closest friend is the poet Pindar, Lykos has been killed in an athletic accident. Aristodemos is ten years old at the time, the same age at which, with total identification, Little Gene read The Spartan, whose title he unconsciously changed in his memory and always remembered as The Athenian. It is a tale of the triumph of individual courage and self-fashioning in the face of a mother’s unloving rejection and a society’s hostile narrow-mindedness.<
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