Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  From Union Station in Washington Gore departed, once more by train, for the Army Special Training Program (ASTP) in Lexington, Virginia, set up for educationally advantaged enlistees under the age of eighteen who were too young for regular Army programs. He had enlisted in New York City on July 29, 1943, his home address his father’s 1107 Fifth Avenue apartment. There was one stepsibling there, Vance, another well on its way. The large fifth-floor apartment, with views of Central Park, had a room for Gore, converted from a maid’s to a family bedroom. His father’s East Hampton summer hospitality was in easy reach.

  Most of July, though, he stayed, for the last time, with his grandparents at the large stone house overlooking Rock Creek Park, the happiest home of his childhood. Dot and the Senator were delighted to have him there. With heating oil rationed, it had become difficult to heat the house for the winter. Having thought they had sold it, when the deal fell through they reoccupied the house that summer. Soon it was to be out of their hands forever. Some part of the long summer days Gore spent reading and writing. Late afternoons he went to his grandfather’s downtown office to escort him home.

  Nina, who with Tommy and Nini, her two children by Auchincloss, had gone from Tucson to Los Angeles, was living now in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. With $1,000 a month from Auchincloss, some additional money for child support, her pension as the widow of a major-general, and complete Army medical care, she could afford a comfortable life in wartime California. She had Hollywood friends, some through Olds, who had consulted on numbers of films, including Clark Gable’s Test Pilot. She had also met Doris Stein, now her closest friend, the beautiful wife of one of the reigning Hollywood talent entrepreneurs, Jules Stein, later a major player in the making of movies. Having slept with Gable, Nina hoped he might propose to her. They had become intimate drinking buddies. When she played bridge and gin rummy with Michael Arlen, she told him Gore was “working on a jealous inspiration inspired by him,” actually his Somerset Maugham novel. Arlen won $400. “I’m the unluckiest gambler in the world,” Nina complained. “I don’t know why I do it.” Warmed by the Los Angeles sunshine, she settled in for the duration.

  In the company of a hundred other seventeen-year-old Washington boys, Gore marched into Union Station early in August “and onto an ancient train that let us off in or near Lexington, Virginia.” Having escaped Exeter, he found himself on August 7 a student of sorts at, of all places, the venerable Virginia Military Institute. The campus was redbrick, traditional, lovely, the air and landscape late-summer green. Everywhere strapping cadets marched, shoulders square, to the beat of a military and scientific drum. The ASTP students wore Army uniforms without a corps designation. His blond hair now brown, his eyes hazel, his complexion ruddy, his height 5 feet 11¼ inches, a private in the “Enlisted Reserve Corps,” Gore immediately discovered to his shock that this three-month intensive program trained not general officers but engineers. Someone who had sworn an oath never to take another math course, who had little to no background in the sciences, was suddenly plunged into a hastily devised college-level preengineering program intended to teach bright high-school graduates enough physics and math to qualify for the Army engineering corp. They would be expected to assist senior Army engineers in building and/or blowing up bridges around the world. “I am now a goddamned engineer,” he told his father. “First of all we are in regular army uniform all the time. Second we are in the regular army. Third this place trains only engineers. I can’t get in the Amgots [American Military Government in Occupied Territories] or foreign language group because they require a BA. Nor in psychology or personnel because they require an MA. Nor in pre—med because they require two years of college.” Could his father help him get a commission or at least a transfer to a situation more appropriate to his abilities?

  Classes each day until 3 P.M., then exercise and drill till dinner: physics, trigonometry, military science, engineering, chemistry. At least history and geography had some connection with his interests. The staff came from the regular Virginia Military Institute faculty. One day an elderly colonel accosted him on campus. Why didn’t he play football like his father? Two of the faculty were congenial, especially a young English Department teacher, Carrington Tutwiler, a Philadelphian with a doctorate from Princeton, who encouraged his writing. A nephew of the novelist Ellen Glasgow, he was himself literary enough to be interested in a young man who wanted to be a writer. Though Gore worked some evenings on the Maugham novel, a bit of which Tutwiler read, he showed him mainly poetry, which he continued to turn out, much of it increasingly dark in abstractly unfocused ways. Still, it was competent, and impressed Tutwiler. The schedule, however, permitted little time for writing. “I compose sonnets in the latrine,” he told his father. In his English class the group of twenty-five students studied Supreme Court decisions for structure and style as well as content, Tutwiler recalled. Actually Gore enjoyed the toughness of the regimen, particularly the physical training. On the first day he took satisfaction in being able to do twenty-five push-ups. By the end of August he had been made a platoon leader, promoted to corporal. “I’m having a fine time yelling ‘Thirsqawthirplutuneawpresencountedfor,’” he wrote to his father. The food was surprisingly good, with meat plentiful. On weekends he and two roommates spent hours in noisy roadside bars where men in uniform and local ladies flirted, nostalgic wartime popular songs mixing with thick cigarette smoke. “There was a wonderful roadhouse near by which we would get to, with a jukebox and the hot—eyed girls from the neighborhood. It was very erotic, and they were always playing ‘Paper Moon’ and ‘Don’t Get Around Much Any More.’ There was a pleasant air of doom about it.” Weekend passes were easy to get. He caught a mild case of flu. “I always seem to catch something when things get a little rigorous…. I am getting high marks in everything but physics. Maybe I’ll pass maybe I won’t but I’m too damned tired most of the time to care. I really enjoy this business altho I’d like to sit still sometime and think.” Later he had some nostalgic good feeling for the crazily dislocating combination of activities. After Exeter, VMI seemed grown-up, purposeful, even if bizarre.

  A sharp pain in his stomach soon proved to be appendicitis. Operated on by an Army doctor, Gore found the aftermath “very unpleasant. I was flat on my back for a week then the Dr. bade me rise and walk, which I did.” When he returned to classes, his physics marks plummeted. The ten days or so he had missed contributed to the decline. Most likely it would have happened anyway. “I dread the outcome. There’s a story here that an AST student dropped a pencil in class, and while he was leaning over to pick it up he missed a term.” Not that he was uninterested in physics, an interest that would express itself almost a lifetime later in his manipulation of modern theories as part of the plot of The Smithsonian Institution. The physics instructor, Colonel Willard, whose name he was to make use of in The City and the Pillar, let them in on a military secret: the atom had been smashed. That it had occurred at the site of what had once been the Los Alamos Ranch School was still top secret. Gore’s other grades were still good. He was even elected class president, 85 votes to 22. Despite the appendectomy, he felt physically fine, partly because during the recovery period he was relieved of physical training and marching. “Maybe I should have tried for West Point earlier in life—or played football—there is a certain parallel,” he joked to his father. He had a two-week furlough coming up at the end of August. If he could hang on scholastically, he might make it through. “Privates have happy if short lives.” But, as he feared from the beginning, he could not sustain adequate grades in subjects he had no aptitude for or interest in. The second half of the intensive physics course was a disaster. So too math. Suddenly, by mid—October, it was all over. As it became evident he would fail these courses, he was quite understandably expelled. This was hardly a blow to his ego, and, as he often did in such situations, he had anticipated the inevitable and made alternative plans. He had been regularly in touch with his father and Uncle Pick. The p
ractical problem was immediate. Assigned to Fort Meade, near Washington, as an expendable infantry private he might spend the rest of the war there or he might suddenly find himself on a troopship to the European front.

  At Fort Meade the Army found appropriate jobs for him. At first he was assigned twenty-four-hour KP duty. The only advantage was an endless supply of delicious pork chops with which he stoked his lanky frame. Working through the day and night, he slept most of the morning in a noisy barracks. After six hours’ sleep, back to work. Then he was assigned to the night shift in a small, dark furnace room in a barracks building. Soot made the darkness heavy. Wooden bins contained endless mounds of coal. There was no time to read, little to sleep, between firing and stoking. He slept on the concrete floor. When the floor got cold, he awakened and knew it was time to feed the furnace. In the red-glowing darkness, muscles tired, sweating heavily, shoveling coal into a fiery furnace, he found little consolation in observing that they too serve who only stand and shovel. It would be a hell of a place to spend the war.

  Chapter Six

  A Border Lord

  1943-1946

  Thanksgiving 1943. Peterson Field, Colorado Springs. A cold, invigorating wind blew constantly. Liberated from the coal furnaces of Fort Meade, Private Gore Vidal went directly to the command headquarters of the 268th Army Air Force Unit to thank Uncle Pick. “Don’t announce me. Just let me go in,” he said to the startled corporal guarding the entrance to the base commander’s office. “I don’t know why the enlisted man went along with that, but he did,” Sally Vidal remembered. “Gore threw his hat into the office, and then he popped in and said, ‘Daddy,’ or some crazy thing like that. We just had a ball with him. He was so funny and so weird.” Uncle Pick “almost fell thru the floor,” Gore wrote to his father. “He’s still not quite sure whether I’m supposed to be here or not.”

  When furnace duty in Maryland had begun to feel endless, Gore had made his urgent request to the informal West Point Protective Association. West Point people looked after their own. His father and uncle were both high-ranking members, former football greats, Pick now commander of the newly formed Fighter Wing—the largest in the country—designated to provide support for the Second Air Force. Gore’s request was simple: “Get me out of here!” In Beverly Hills, Nina was disappointed that he had left the relative safety of the Army Special Training Program. “I couldn’t be more upset over your plans not to go through with the schooling. I’m in hopes your Dad’s plans will turn out a pipe dream—for I think it a great mistake not to go through with this course even though you don’t like it. This other way there is no telling what may happen to you…. I don’t like at all the Pick set up…. There is no point in your going to a combat zone.” Events had already overtaken Nina’s reservations. Gene Vidal talked to a classmate in charge of personnel in the War Department. Pick requested his nephew be transferred to the Army Air Corps for service at Peterson Field, his operational headquarters, one of more than a dozen bases under his command. The Air Force still part of the Army, the transfer was easily effected. Suddenly relieved of duty at Fort Meade, Gore was ordered to report, after a brief furlough, for abbreviated basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, a transfer point for reassignment and travel. Relieved, exhausted, waiting, he spent a few weeks with his grandparents at their new Washington residence, an apartment on Crescent Place. Having just turned eighteen, he happily enjoyed the attractions of the bustling wartime city. Downtown Washington adventures appealed to him; the streets, the movie theaters, the parks were filled with men on the loose, particularly energetic soldiers and sailors. It was a cool, erotic change from the fiery furnace at Fort Meade. With his grandfather he had his first adult conversations. Dot was as loving as ever, happy to have him home, pleased to have Nina on the other side of the continent. With new orders in hand, Gore once more left from Union Station, the train crowded with servicemen, wartime security tight. At Fort Dix the transfer and new orders caught up with him. From Fort Dix to Denver, then Colorado Springs.

  Soon he began to feel “human again.” Assigned to Quonset-hut barracks, he had no complaint about his quarters. Autumn weather was bracing, the late-November sky clear, snow-covered mountains to the west. At night soldiers took turns feeding the black iron coal-burning stove in the middle of the barracks room. During the day, assigned to A-2 as a clerk-typist, Gore was put to the comparatively light work of writing for the base newspaper. Since his uncle, Sally Vidal recalled, had no doubt that “‘That’s the smartest enlisted man I’ve ever had,’ he gave Gore the job of base historian. Somebody’s got to write this all up.” There were no physics tests, no furnaces to stoke around the clock. He had time to read and write. From the small base library he borrowed books, mostly novels, soon aware that one useful thing the Army did was provide books for those few soldiers who wanted to read, including a series of special armed-forces paperback editions. With the unfinished Somerset Maugham novel on hold, he began working on a new idea he had for a novel, to be called The Deserter. As happy as he was to be at Peterson Field rather than Fort Meade, clearly he still would have preferred to be someplace other than the Army. The new novel did not get very far. Both his imagination and confidence in the venture deserted him when he found he could not effectively describe Mexico, to which he had never been but to which the main character flees. Early in the new year he returned to the Maugham novel, soon to break off again, finally, and wrote more poems, ambitiously enlisting his father to forward a book-length poetry manuscript to a New York literary agent, Gertrude Algase, who had taken some interest in his work. She hoped to sell some of his fiction, including the opening chapter of The Deserter. The poems must have seemed to her dauntingly nonsalable. Literary in a nonliterary world, Gore impressed one of the professors at the college in Colorado Springs. Amanda Ellis “encouraged my poetry…. She was an English professor, a fat, enthusiastic spinster who knew Ted [Edward] Weeks of the Atlantic Monthly. So I was soon sending stuff off to Weeks and so on, to no avail. But I saw a good bit of Amanda while I was there.” She felt “confident that he will like it,” he told his father, “and if he likes it will publish it with Little, Brown, without strings. So all progresses well, perhaps.” In Colorado Springs she introduced him to local celebrities, particularly the elderly painter, illustrator, and cartoonist, Boardman Robinson, a far-left political satirist who directed the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. On a self-description, probably to accompany a manuscript Algase circulated to publishers, Gore indulged in the career-building, cute-toned exaggerations from which young writers get pleasure: “Has been published in numerous magazines and first book RECREATION PERIOD (collected poetry) scheduled to be published in late spring. Spent much of life travelling Europe, U.S., etc…. Now writing a novel that is unique: a) it is not autobiographical b) it is not the great American novel.”

  However comfortable his life had become at Peterson Field, the notion of going to Officer Candidate School, preferably in Miami, appealed to him. He filed an application. “I’m really going,” he partly joked to his father, “because I discovered that if I get thru it I’ll be the youngest officer in the history of the army! We have to keep that exceptional Vidal theory alive.” When Pick would get his promotion to general was a subject of enthusiastic amusement. In response to his father’s comment that Pick did not seem ambitious enough, Gore expressed his daydream that his uncle, who had an interest in political office, return, after the war, to South Dakota to run for the Senate and himself for the House. “That would be colorful and unique. Castle in the air.” Regardless of poor eyesight, Gore was optimistic that he would be leaving soon for OCS. In the meantime, life at Colorado Springs had its attractions. Ellis invited him to talk to her senior class and lecture to a group of high-school English teachers. Probably he read his poems. The USO had a poetry prize contest, which he soon won with his elegy to General Olds. Unlike other enlisted men, he was often Pick and Sally’s guest, especially on weekends, at the luxurious Broadmoor Hotel
five miles from Colorado Springs, which the Army had taken over for officers’ quarters. It had a well-trained international staff and “displaced Japanese from California, who worked as gardeners.” The eighteen-year-old private frequently had his dinner at a table filled with the commander’s guests, mostly visiting brass. Christmas he celebrated with his aunt and uncle, their small daughter, Victoria, and Nina, who flew in from Los Angeles to spend the holiday with her son. Wrapped in her luxurious fur coat, with matching fur hat, her bright rubies gleaming, attractively suntanned, she swept into the Broadmoor, the ex-sister-in-law of the commander of the base and the widow of the former head of the Second Air Force. When Victoria lost her toy battleship on the lake, she came in crying. Gore consoled her, slightly. “‘My,’ he said, ‘she takes adversity hard. But wait till she’s lost her first, second, and third husbands.’” He had been looking forward to his mother’s visit. Fortunately, it went well, neither of them in a fighting mood. Nina’s heavy drinking apparently did not erupt into dramatics or disablement until New Year’s eve, when she got drunk. Most officers and their wives were in no condition to notice. With everyone expecting to be imminently off to Europe or the Pacific, alcohol and cigarettes were the drugs of choice. Mostly, though, Nina’s visit was a success. She departed with the expectation that Gore would visit her soon in Los Angeles. Air Corps flights were readily available on military planes. As long as there was room, enlisted men could fly home on furloughs.

  To Gore’s discomfort and perplexity, he had been getting phone calls from Rosalind, now a student at Vassar. He discouraged her. There was a handsome, red-haired Southern boy in the barracks who could neither read nor write. “When I was CQ, he’d often stay in the hut rather than go to Colorado Springs, and I’d tell him stories, like a child. I even tried Shakespeare on him. Romeo and Juliet. He loved the plot…. The verse, what I could recall, moved him, and he would play idly with what he called his ‘fuck-pole,’ but in no provocative way…. There was a great deal of [same-sex] sex going on. In the States it was dangerous on post. But in nearby Colorado Springs there were many men eager to know us, and once, as I was blown by an old man of, perhaps, thirty—my absolute cutoff age—he offered me ten dollars, which I took.” With raging hormones, after the comparative asceticism of Exeter and the exhausting regimen at VMI, he now had the energy and opportunity for sexual encounters. “Having discreet sex with strangers didn’t begin until I was in the Army…. But the great promiscuity began in Colorado Springs.” The excitement was in anonymity, transgression, the almost infinite opportunity for pleasure without the tedium of establishing a relationship or the danger of entanglements. There were few or no queens in sight. Most of those in uniform sexually active with other men looked and spoke like men who were sexually active with women only. Gore, eighteen, lanky, almost six feet tall, with a deep baritone voice, actually had only two sexual escapades in Colorado Springs, one at the Broadmoor, one in town. They seemed to him just as natural as his relationship with Rosalind had been. If the world chose to see it differently, it was the world that was at fault.