by Gore Vidal
THIRTY-SIX
While still living in Largo Argentina we lived a fairly ordered social life. Our usual fairly disordered life simply meant we’d have dinner with each other at a trattoria or with one or another of friends in the city or sometimes with passersby who’d ring up like Saul Bellow or F. W. Dupee, friends and acquaintances from our Hudson life now drawing to a close. Actually, an ordered social life was nearly impossible for me: it meant writing down in a book invitations accepted and then, in due course, honoring them. This obliged us to see the same people over and over again. One evening as I was dressing to go out to dinner at Mimi Pecci-Blunt’s palace opposite the Campidoglio I got the inevitable telephone call: “Gene is worse. Only the shots are keeping him alive. He’s also been hallucinating. Just now he said, ‘If I don’t get out of this motel soon I’ll become extinct.’ ” Hardly his usual language. My stepmother was herself somewhat formal in manner; she had been brought up by her mother in Beijing in the thirties and she recalled that period as the most magical of her life. An early boyfriend had been a son of the historian Arnold Toynbee; the young man’s romantic suicide seemed always to be, somehow, at the edge of her memory unlike her long-absent wealthy father, Owen Roberts, who had separated from her mother. Gene had brought father and daughter together. When the old man died, his daughter inherited an eighteenth-century house on a crater lake overlooking Hartford, Connecticut, a tall mountain almost entirely surrounded by the Alsop family, one of whom was Joe—the political columnist and devotee of empire as well as some sort of relative to “Uncle T” as Theodore Roosevelt was known to him: Uncle T had characteristically presented his infant relative with the tooth of a saber-tooth tiger, always on conspicuous display in Joe’s Georgetown house.
I quizzed my stepmother about the various doctors and their reports. How far had the cancer spread? Apparently, to the brain. She was waiting for me to say something and I was waiting, in my turn, for her to say the inevitable which turned out to be, “Shall we stop the Swiss injections.” A curtain was suddenly coming down on Gene. As I talked into the telephone all I could see was a man taking a step on the dusty moon. And so it was, without words, we agreed to stop the medicine. Ordinarily, I would have talked this over with Howard but he’d already gone to dinner with friends. Then I walked the short distance to the Pecci palace; went to the wrong door; waited and waited. Finally I was let in. Dinner had begun without me. Mimi was polite, even droll. I made a mumbled excuse, thinking of Proust, of Swann, of Madame Verdurin who was, somehow—the original one, that is—related to Mimi who was herself a niece to Pope Leo XIII. The next day while I was struggling with a letter of apology to Mimi a footman arrived with a letter from her which combined Proustian tact with the Thomist wisdom of her uncle Pecci. And that is how it was I entered man’s usual state, as an orphan. But I am ahead of my story since my mother did not die until 1978, but as I had not seen her in the twenty years previous to her death, at the end it was as if we had never known each other. She had attacked Howard who had genuinely liked her, which was more than I had ever done, and so I had told her that I never wanted to see her again and never did. I was startled at how many ladies of my acquaintance were horrified when they read this account in the first volume of these memoirs. Obviously, a new epoch of mother worship had been ushered in by…Freud? Fannie Farmer? I’ve yet to read any criticism of George Washington for his bad relations with his mother or even Ernest Hemingway. But a sea change occurred in the twentieth century and mothers are automatically exempted from all blame if my lady friends are to be believed.
Meanwhile, a happy voluntary mother-daughter relationship was being acted out each winter and sometimes summer, too, at Klosters in Switzerland. Salka Viertel was the widow of a well-known German film director and mother of the writer Peter Viertel. A sometime actress and screenwriter, Salka had been chosen by Greta Garbo to be her mother. Salka lived down the street from Howard and me and next to the small flat where Garbo stayed; she did her yoga exercises on the balcony to the amazement of the villagers who had no idea just who Frau Garbo was.
Thanks to my Aleutianized left knee I could never ski well but cross-country skiing was possible as well as long walks beside the Silvretta River. Or even the longer walk to Davos where the characters in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain died of tuberculosis while immersed in philosophical tautologies.
Garbo had become very fond of our Australian terrier, Rat. “But it is such a brutal name for him so I shall call him Ratski.” And so each morning at about eight she would come by our flat and Ratski would rush out into the street to greet her. Then I would join them for our morning walk beside the nearby Silvretta River. On the walk Rat took charge, as always. We went only where he wanted to go.
A last summer at Klosters. Garbo is sixty-five. I could never get her to come back to Ravello where she had spent her “honeymoon” with the conductor Leopold Stokowski only to be driven away by a newsreel cameraman in the bushes who boasted ever after of his great coup. One did not grieve when he was later shot by the Mafia.
Irwin Shaw and his wife were longtime friends of Garbo and warned us never to discuss her film career. As it turned out, that was what she most wanted to talk about. She recalled every detail of every movie, including the names of the grips. “I learn my bad English from them,” she said, reminding us that she had been a star of silent movies and the whole world had wondered whether or not the glamorous voiceless Swede could make the transition to talking pictures, something her co-star John Gilbert had failed to do. Not only did she like to talk about the old days but she wanted to know what MGM was like so many years later. She also had a number of ribald stories that she enjoyed telling and retelling. Although she had been queen of MGM she was not above keeping an eye on the minor stars at court. For some reason the thought of the singer Jeanette MacDonald caused all the stars at Metro to start laughing while Judy Garland would burst into a flat-filled version of Jeanette’s signature song “San Francisco.” Doubtless, it had something to do with the old-fashioned operettas that Jeanette appeared in, along with her co-star Nelson Eddy fondly known as “the singing capon.” One story that Garbo liked to tell: Jeanette was married to an actor called Gene Raymond, an amiable sort who appeared in my film The Best Man. One morning Raymond was playing tennis with a coach while Jeanette arrives, in a picture hat (one starts decorating the scene when these magical figures appear in a narrative), a basket of freshly cut roses on one arm while trilling an aria from Naughty Marietta. As she enters the house, she reminds her husband that lunch will soon be ready. Raymond invites the pro to lunch but he says, “I’m all sweaty and I didn’t bring any other clothes.” Gene Raymond says, “Go up to my bathroom. There’s a shower and plenty of clothes your size.” So the tennis pro goes into the house. Meanwhile, Jeanette, weary from her decorative labors, is putting roses into vases. Then, as she passes her husband’s bathroom, she hears the shower running. She slips into the bathroom, pokes her hand into the shower stall, firmly grips the pro’s genitals and sings, fortissimo, “Ding, dong, Daddy, Don’t be late for lunch!” then she resumes her journey along the corridor only to come face-to-face with her husband. By this time Garbo would be roaring with laughter, her right hand twitching convulsively.
Much has been written about her androgynous appeal. While she was worshipped as a goddess by L. B. Mayer the longtime master of the studio, they both were alert to the basis of her popularity. Women loved her movies—she suffered; she was beautiful in a way few people are. Yet she was not popular with American men who preferred the Betty Grable type. The important money earned from a Garbo picture came largely from Europe. When World War Two put an end to the European market, Garbo nicely let MGM off the contractual hook. She would take a vacation until the war was over. It is said L.B. wept with gratitude. Contrary to legend she did not intend to retire. When the war was over Walter Wanger prepared a script for her based on Balzac’s La Duchesse de Langeais, to be released by RKO. Garbo got as far as the wa
rdrobe test, a subtle way for the studio to see if she still looked like Garbo. She did. I’ve seen the test. But then she was only in her thirties. Unfortunately, the studio was bought by an aviation colleague of my father who promptly canceled the Garbo movie. It is a pity that Scorsese in his film about Howard Hughes left out the only thing that Hughes would ever be famous for. So shocked was Garbo by this abrupt rejection that she never came close to making another film. She was also very rich and somewhat lazy.
In Klosters she had a simple routine. She would collect the morning paper then get back into bed for a fat-free breakfast while reading the newspaper and the various Silver Screen movie magazines she had collected during the week. She kept up with all the new stars though I can’t imagine she saw many of their pictures, but when it came to Fabian’s romantic life she was au courant.
When someone sent me a large tin of Beluga caviar Howard decided to give a small party just for us, the Irwin Shaws, and Garbo. At the last moment Irwin rang to ask if he could bring the journalist Martha Gellhorn. I’d always liked her writing and felt sympathetic to anyone who’d been married to Hemingway. The small party went off well. Garbo arrived early and promptly put on Howard’s blazer. She liked dressing up in men’s clothes. She also liked to refer to herself in masculine terms. “Where is the little boys’ room” was a favorite expression. It was Ina Claire, the urbane comedienne from Broadway, who went to the little boys’ room right after Garbo had vacated it and, yes, the toilet seat had been left up.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Never rent, buy—if you can. This bit of antebellum lore I learned from my grandparents. Around 1946 while traveling through Guatemala I found a sixteenth-century monastery in the earthquake-ruined city of Antigua. For something like $3,000 I bought it with my meager earnings from a first novel. An American architect who lived in the town agreed to restore the building if I allowed him to live in it. This proved to be a successful arrangement. But after two or three years I was ready to move on; and did. Europe had, as they say, opened up again and I started traveling seriously. But I knew that sooner or later I’d be obliged to buy another house. Why? The books I kept accumulating—in which I resembled Senator Gore whose houses in Washington kept getting bigger as he acquired more and more books. I was the same. In due course, I sold the Guatemala house. Later, back in New York, I was invited to lunch by a transatlantic lady Alice Pleydell-Bouverie. She had spent the war years in London and then came back to New York with her children. She was to the end more English than American and lived in a sort of English manor house near the village of Rhinebeck on the Hudson River not far from her endlessly irritable and irritating brother Vincent Astor who owned much of New York City. Meanwhile, Howard and I settled in a small apartment over the Dover food shop in Lexington Avenue where I started to write plays for television. Alice lent us the odd chair or two. We also visited her at Rhinebeck where she was assembling a life for herself much like the one she had known in England, centered on the ballet, where she had been a considerable patron thanks to her friendship with Frederick Ashton. She resumed much the same role in New York but never ceased to long for prewar England. She had stored away a vast amount of furniture to be used when it came time to furnish her English house but, like a Chekhovian heroine, she never went back to live in England. Happily, a stream of British friends came to visit her at Rhinebeck or stayed in Manhattan at her brother Vincent’s hotel the Saint Regis.
On one visit to Alice’s house she took us for a drive through the countryside to see a beautiful Greek Revival house built in 1820 with columns and an octagonal library, the work of A. J. Davis. A lawn extended from portico down to the Hudson River. There were also three acres of willow and locust trees as well as a small island in the river. My television work paid, barely, for the house—some $16,000. On the other hand, I had no money to furnish the place. Alice allowed me to use some of the furniture intended for the London house that she was never to live in. She died far too soon in 1956. Howard and I continued to live on at Edgewater until the 1960s when the books seemed to have moved, all on their own, to Italy and so we moved with them until now; as I write, they are headed for California where I shall finally live in our fourth and final house, whose endless library seems to have been assembled by the sorcerer’s apprentice.
My obsession with houses is the result of my mother’s habit of marrying and divorcing. No sooner had she restored a house than she’d either leave a husband or he her. Since I was away in school or the army, I never, as they say, settled in. So, eventually, I had to buy my own houses.
Howard and I lived at Edgewater for twenty years then sold it to a rich businessman who collected Greek Revival houses which he usually made museums out of and then gave to the public, enjoying no doubt a considerable tax deduction from a grateful nation. I’ve only set foot in the house once since the sale. It is now a sort of museum of nineteenth-century furniture.
Edgewater, the house I intended to live in to the end, with the spaniels Billy and Blanche. This is the autumn day when, after nearly twenty years, I sold the place and moved to Rome with the dogs. Howard had got there before me. Edgewater was built in 1820. The octagonal library is the work of A. J. Davis.
I do dream about the house. In the dream I have somehow bought it back and I am about to move in. As I cross the tracks of the adjacent New York Central Railroad, I run into John Navins the postmaster of Barrytown who also kept a small general store in what had been the old Barrytown station house. Whenever we meet in this particular dream, he always says, “I knew you’d come back.” But back to what? In the dream the lawn has vanished. The river is almost even with the columns. The island is large and stony. Inside the rooms are unfamiliar. And, of course, there is no one there. Plainly I, too, am a ghost as I wander through the empty rooms. Only old John Navins seems to be among the living. Yet in all his years beside the tracks he only took the train down to New York City once. Dutifully, he got off at Grand Central Terminal and walked out into the crowded street. He was so horrified by what he saw that he hurried back into the station and sat down in a waiting room where he remained until the next train took him back to Barrytown and his pre-ghostly existence. I’ve not seen him for several years now. Perhaps he’s retired from haunting. To my distress Howard does not make many appearances in dreams other than the frustration ones where one cannot find the door to a flat. My father makes the odd appearance, as serene as ever. But I think of those as death dreams: he comes only at times when my own death is on my mind. Several times he has led me up a mountain to some wild landscape into which he disappears. Mercifully, I am spared visits from my mother. Sadly I never see the Gores anymore. My grandmother Dot had told me what horrendous dreams she was having in her last days. The Senator did not tell me about his dreams but he’d answer questions that interested him. He was totally blind by his tenth year. So one of my first questions to him on the subject was: “Are you able to see again in your dreams?” He found that an interesting subject. The answer was, yes, he sometimes could. But as he pondered this “restored” vision he came to the conclusion that he could only see things which he had seen before the second accident blinded him. He could see green grass. Blue sky. But, no, he could not even imagine his wife or children or political colleagues. He sensed that they were present in certain dream-dramas but he had no faces to put to them. Voices? He thought that he must have heard voices in a lightless void. Could he visualize the color red? I was relentless but he was patient, even a bit curious. I learned that his father had taken him to a famous eye specialist in New Orleans when he was about twelve and the optic nerve in one eye (the other was missing) still registered light and dark and vague shadows but then all that faded away. Had he lived in our time he could have recovered a good deal of sight in at least the one eye. I recall a woman journalist telling him that, of course, there must be compensations. “There are none,” was the hard response and he later referred to her as that Christian Scientist, not a compliment from someone atheistic
ally inclined who had survived a youth in religion-mad Mississippi. He liked to confront his more devout cousinage with contradictions in their Christian faith. Early in life his own family had split on religion. The Gores belonged to a long line of Methodist preachers but by the time of his father many of them were splitting off into Baptist groupings. His father, Thomas Madison Gore, the county clerk, became a Cambellite, an interesting sect of fundamentalists that wanted to prove every word of Gospel to be scientifically true. When my grandfather was asked to which church he planned to go, he said, briskly, “I’m going to the Senate.” He got through Lebanon Law School with the help of a cousin whose tuition his father had paid. Still an adolescent, he helped several adult members of his family to organize the Party of the People in Mississippi. He developed early as an orator and was known to contemporaries as Guv. In due course, he moved west to the Indian territories and helped organize Oklahoma as a state where he was elected their first senator in 1907 and served until 1937. His last years were spent working as an attorney for several Indian tribes that had been cheated of their land by the U.S. government. Not long after his death the tribes got a considerable settlement. There is a city named Gore in the state; he always threatened to go live there when its population was under a hundred but thought better of it when it became a city. I have never seen his house in Lawton if it still exists. It is somewhere near those ubiquitous railroad tracks on whose other side the future Joan Crawford was growing up at the same time as my mother, Nina, who was forbidden to play with her young contemporary because her mother was deemed a scarlet woman by the pious folk of the town.
