Gore Vidal (110 page)

Having given up Edgewater, Gore needed a replacement. The apartments
in New York were for visits or rentals. The Via Di Torre Argentina apartment had become home for the time being. But having been brought up, even if peripatetically, in houses, his mental model of architectural domesticity had the separateness, the privacy, and the size of a freestanding house. As much as he felt at home in Rome, the attractive apartment seemed ancillary, or at least partial, to be completed by another residence, preferably not in a large city, not necessarily in Italy. He had already begun to pressure Howard to keep his eyes and ears open about the possibility of a country place, the European replacement for Edgewater.

The home-lust was further complicated by Vidal's political alienation because of America's Vietnam madness and his dissatisfaction with his high taxes, much of which went to support a war he detested. During their August 1968 appearances on television, Buckley had contemptuously referred to him as an expatriate. He did not feel like one, at least in the traditional sense embodied in Henry James's long English residence and assumption of British citizenship. He felt more like Mark Twain, who over a ten-year period had taken multi-year-long vacations from America, returning only for business visits. Distance clarified perspective, kept emotions under control. To the extent that he might obtain tax advantages if he resided abroad, Gore would be happy to have them, but his overriding motivation was to keep a healthy distance. European life appealed to him emotionally and culturally. Whatever price he would pay to live abroad, especially in regard to his career as an American writer, he was willing to pay, though probably he did not fully appreciate how alienating to many Americans his long-term foreign residence would seem and what consequences would result from forgoing on-site opportunities for career promotion. It would be seen as expatriation, which went against the national ethos. It was something an American writer would have to explain, and no explanation could ever completely suffice. Spurred by his disgust with the war, he considered making the ultimate statement beyond expatriation. In 1969, while establishing residence in Switzerland, he explored the possibility of becoming a Swiss national. It would have meant giving up his American citizenship. Residence was feasible. Nationality, though, was too technically complicated, Swiss regulations too restrictive to make it sensible to pursue. Even the tax advantages of Swiss residency soon proved illusory. He next tried Ireland, with whose prime minister his Hollywood friend John Huston put him in communication. “
I confess that
when I wrote threatening to
change my nationality [because of the Vietnam War], I never dreamed my rhetoric would ever be translated into action,” he explained to the prime minister. “Like most writers, I am prone to spur others to positions I myself never quite get around to taking. But this is the exception: last April I became a resident of Switzerland simply because one has to have an official residence somewhere and the United States was mine no longer. This month I sold my house in New York State and am now poised for permanent departure…. I'm aware that the honorable course for me would be to stay and fight. But I am now 44 with work to do and so think it time to leave the marching and fine speeches to those who are not only younger but more optimistic than I.” Ireland offered a tax haven for artistic people who could demonstrate Irish descent. Gore could easily do that on both sides of the family. “I would indeed live in Ireland with pleasure and, come to think of it, symbolically it is perhaps the best gesture I could make at this time: to return after more than two centuries to the family's point of origin. Certainly this is a nice symmetry. The American experiment has gone wrong while the troubled country that could sustain us is now coming alive, and proves the better place to be.”

From the Irish point of view he would not have to give up his American citizenship. In January 1970 and through the spring, after “a fascinating trip to Dublin,” where “they may take me in,” he wrote to Tom Driberg, his agent looked into available houses in Fitzwilliam Square, then on the Elgin Road, then in Merrion Square, none of which proved satisfactory, partly because of his ambivalence about living in the heart of Dublin. When he mentioned his interest in a country residence, his agent quickly found an attractive property in Knock, Lowertown, Schull, County Cork, at a price he was willing to pay, as well as the projected cost of extensive renovations over the next two years to make it attractively livable. To Howard, the thought of living in Ireland at all, let alone rural Ireland, seemed absolutely mad. “I refused to set foot in the house in Ireland. I thought it was madness. Klosters, Ireland, three apartments in New York, an apartment in Rome, and then La Rondinaia came along. It was just driving me insane. Probably Gore was looking for a home.” Ireland, Gore explained, “was because I'd said, when I spoke out about the Vietnam War, that if the war went on I'd change nationalities. Besides that virtuous motive, the unvirtuous one was that you pay no tax. So I could have made a fortune had I shifted over to Irish nationality, protesting the war and saving
my money from the government at the same time. But my man, Charley Haughey, who was the minister of finance, fell from power as soon as I bought the house, and I couldn't get the nationality.” There was some vagueness in the criterion that permitted the interpretation that one grandparent had to be Irish. “I had a great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, except it also says ‘significant Irish connections' in the constitution. I met the guy who wrote the constitution, and he said the fact that you are a cousin of Constance Gore-Booth Countess Markovich, one of the swans of Lissadel, makes you highly significant and that makes you a citizen under our laws. Highly significant is that there's a statue of her on St. Stephen's Green. She looks just like my mother.” Haughey “later became for many years prime minister, by which time I sold the house and it was all moot. Everything went wrong. It was a pretty place. But I never saw it finished and I sold it one afternoon.”

Just before Thanksgiving 1968 Kit and Gene drove from the home in Avon, Connecticut that Kit had inherited to Washington, D.C., to see Sally and Pick, the first stop on a cross-country drive and then a trip, westward, around the world. On a mild autumn day they lunched at a restaurant near the National Cathedral and went by St. Albans School. Gore, of whom Gene was immensely proud, was one of the subjects of conversation, especially since the convention fireworks were still in people's minds, partly because the war in Vietnam, where Gene had gone as part of a military evaluation committee, still mercilessly continued. The newly elected Nixon administration waited to take power. Public antiwar protests intensified. Gore had been active in the creation of the New Party, soon to be renamed the People's Party, formed by pro-Gene McCarthy dissidents and led by Benjamin Spock and Marcus Raskin, who refused to return to the Democratic fold and support Hubert Humphrey. Pick Vidal, a conservative Republican whose West Point class had been retired in 1963, had voted for Nixon. Probably Gene had also. After lunch the two patriarchs, with their wives, sat outside in the autumnal air, the Washington Monument visible in the distance. “Gene had just had a physical,” Sally recalled, “and the doctor said he was just great. They were going to make a trip around the world. So they came down to Washington to say good-bye. Gene had a lot of classmates there.”

At seventy-three, retired, white-haired, handsome, bemused by old age and relative uselessness, Gene Vidal had begun to settle into a life of recreational travel and general superfluity. He was occasionally consulted by airlines and government commissions. The heroic world of early aviation he had helped create had long passed, and whether or not he was introspective or retrospective enough to focus on his early displacement from fame and power, his son certainly had a sense of how abruptly his father's career had been diminished by his 1942 heart attack. Fortunately, his heart had repaired itself sufficiently so that he had never had another cardiac episode. For almost ten years he had been taking an anti-aging enzyme-enrichment formula, made from placentas that had nurtured fetal calves, obtained from a doctor in Florida. He believed it did him a world of good. The doctors at the Hartford Hospital were “puzzled,” he wrote to Gore, “
over the fact
that my blood pressure has dropped from 190 to 140, my pulse has increased from 45/min to 72/min (normal), my cholesterol down from 470 to 215, etc. I must send Wolf a thank you note.” From Washington, Kit and Gene drove to Jackson, Michigan, to visit Gene's favorite sister, Lurene, then to California to see his sister Margaret, who had settled with her family in Inglewood. They did not get beyond California. On New Year's Eve, Gene became ill with what appeared to be pneumonia. On New Year's Day 1969 the tests he underwent in Centinela Valley Hospital revealed lung cancer. Gore flew to Los Angeles to be with his father and stepmother. Unexpectedly, after a few weeks of treatment, the cancerous cells entirely disappeared from Gene's lungs. Delighted, he joked proudly with Kit and Gore about his recuperative powers. Still, the condition needed to be watched. For the time being, the round-the-world trip was put on hold. They soon found a small furnished apartment, and for a few weeks it looked as if he would be fine. Soon, though, his feeling of energy and general good health began to decline. By late January he was back in the hospital. Tests revealed that his left kidney had become riddled with cancerous cells. The malignancy that had not been able to sustain itself in the lungs had been a secondary colony. Suddenly, at the age of seventy-three, Gene faced the news. Kidney cancer was almost always fatal; he had at most two or three years of life.

Surgery was the best of the medical alternatives. If successful, the prognosis was still poor. Most likely the cancer had spread to other places in addition to the lungs. Gene and Kit decided to try the risky operation. Gore joined them at the hospital the night before. It seemed more than possible
that Gene would not survive the surgery. When the surgeon came with release papers to be signed, Gore recalled, Gene “looked at the doctor and said, ‘But I thought it was the left kidney?' The doctor got hysterical. ‘Well, of course it's the left kidney!' ‘But why does it say the right kidney here? You don't want to take out the only good kidney I've got!' He tortured the doctor. That was his humor.” Late that night Gore returned to the Beverly Hills Hotel, bleary-eyed, exhausted. Like Kit, he feared that his father would not survive. Early the next morning, having been up most of the night, he took a walk on Beverly Drive. As he passed between Santa Monica Boulevard and Wilshire, a car pulled over. Marty Manulis, on his way to get a Sunday newspaper, astonished to see anybody walking in Beverly Hills, thought he had recognized a familiar figure. “I cruised up right past him. He was walking and I was driving. I stopped and said, ‘What the hell are you doing walking in Beverly Hills and at this hour?' He mumbled something, but I noticed he was very red-eyed. I thought that he'd had a hard night or something like that. I think I made some bad joke about that, and he really kind of dismissed it in an offhand way. But he didn't have his usual ebullience. We said something about having dinner together soon, and I went on.” When Gore got to the hospital, the operation had just been concluded. The kidney had been removed. Gene had survived. Later, Kit and Gore sat by Gene's bedside. “He was out of his head. But he could hear Kit and me talking. And I said, whispering, ‘How is he?' And she said, ‘Don't worry, he doesn't understand anything.' ‘Of course I do,' he said. She said, ‘He thinks he does, but this is his unconscious mind. He won't remember anything we say.' Then he said, ‘Well, I do know I've got cancer!' This is a man supposedly out of his skull. I said, ‘Well, maybe we should lower our voices. We're giving his limbic memories all kinds of unpleasant things to recall.'” As Gene came to his senses, he was suddenly distracted by the latest NASA space launching. “He was so fascinated, he said, ‘Imagine, I've lived so long. I've lived all the way through the history of aviation. I knew the Wright brothers and I have made my contribution, and now I see men walking on the moon. I never thought I'd see that in my lifetime.'” When Gore privately asked the doctor what the prognosis was, the doctor matter-of-factly said that Gene would be dead in a few months. Angry, resentful, appalled by the doctor's tone, Gore insisted that the doctor review for him what might be done. He could not believe there was no antidote.

Always a good caretaker, Kit looked after Gene with a stoic but
sinking heart. Gore visited each day at the hospital and then at the Inglewood apartment during the first week in February. The doctors had decided they could do nothing more. Since he began to recover quickly from the surgery itself, Gene was optimistic. “What should I be taking to get over this?” he asked a doctor-cousin who came by to visit. “‘What about a double martini?' ‘Well,' my father said, ‘I don't like martinis.' ‘Well, I do,'” the doctor said, “and the doctor started drinking, and so did I. What he was saying is that it's all over and you might as well get drunk.” There seemed to be a remission, or at least a pause. Surprisingly, Gene soon looked much better. His spirits rose with his coloring and his energy. He began to catch up with his correspondence. Gore hoped that the doctor's prognosis was wrong. But since even if it was right Gene would have at least a few months, perhaps as many as six, Gore said, simply, “I think I'll return to Rome.” He had been away most of the summer and part of the fall and winter. From Rome he talked daily on the phone with Kit, grateful for her tireless attention to Gene. The news, though, was bad. The latest tests showed that the cancer had spread. Gene's energy disappeared. He could hardly eat. He had begun to hover somewhere between irrational and comatose, partly out of his senses when awake, often unresponsive. He sat bolt upright in bed one day and said, “If I do not get out of this motel, I shall become extinct.” He got up and walked around, and then Kit put him back to bed. There appeared to be reason to believe that the enzyme supplement was keeping him alive, though it seemed not a life but a living death. The doctors saw not the remotest possibility that he would recover. On February 10 Kit rang Gore. She thought it sensible to stop the enzyme injections. Would he agree? Yes, he said. “It was going to keep him alive God knows how long, but unconscious. What was the alternative? It was a horror. He was like a vegetable. She stopped the enzyme.”