Gore Vidal (15 page)

As the leaves changed colors in autumn 1936, young Gene and his father, while Gene Vidal was still director of aeronautics, traveled northward by railroad through the Hudson River Valley to West Point, the military city high on the Palisades where Vidal had had many of his greatest triumphs. In 1925, when he left, he had been an assistant football coach, the track and field coach, and the instructor of aeronautics. He returned as a man of Washington and of the world, bringing along his eleven-year-old son, who had just started at a new school. Gene also brought with him one of his closest friends, Amelia Earhart, whose fame had risen to a dimension beyond Gene's athletic or professional achievement. She had become a national icon. Together the three of them sat in the stadium watching Army play Navy. As much as Gene was a familiar figure to the cadet corps, Earhart would have created the stir, her willowy figure, her blond-white eyebrows, her elegant clothes, the mystique of her courage, her fame for being famous. On their way back to New York, as Earhart's fans peered into the train compartment to get a look at their idol, she told the fascinated young Gene about her plans to fly around the world from east to west, to circumnavigate the earth, like Puck circling the globe. In her own way an actress of sorts, Amelia glittered in his eyes. Playing the grown-up, he asked what part of the flight she most worried about. Africa, she responded. She did not want to be forced down in the jungle. What about the Pacific? he asked. “Oh, there are
always islands
,” she said. As they approached Grand Central Station, he asked if she would give him a souvenir. “Shortly before she left on the flight around the world, she sent me the blue-and-white checked leather belt that she often wore. She gave my father her old watch.”

They had also given one another much of their company, both personal and professional, during the last six years. Gene rarely made an important decision without consulting her. Together, with Paul Collins, they had become in 1936 the founding organizers and major stockholders of an airline in New England, at first in conjunction with the Boston-Maine Railroad, later to be reorganized as Northeast Airlines. City-hopping together in a small plane, at least once with young Gene along, they laid out the routes along the railroad tracks. If it seemed an odd thing for a government official to be doing, apparently no one thought it remarkable. She regularly confided in him, and especially about her aeronautical plans. He was to be one
of her closest consultants in her preparation for her ill-fated round-the-world flight the next year. Her marriage to George Palmer Putnam remained the open one she had insisted on from the beginning. Whether she had other lovers, male or female, she certainly had Gene Vidal in her heart. With young Gene she was playful, warm, glamorous, another one of his father's women whom he would have preferred to the mother he had. It was a daydream he allowed himself. Amelia Earhart and Liz Whitney were the prototypes of the older women with whom as an adult he was to have strong friendships, mother and grandmother figures not necessarily themselves very motherly but reminders of the mother he would have wanted or of the much-loved Nina Kay Gore. An occasional visitor at the Earhart-Putnam home in Rye, young Gene loved Amelia's company, her house, her aura, the maps spread out on the living-room floor, the jungle-animal-decorated wallpaper in the guest room. Walking with her on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, he noticed how many people stared at his famous companion. Another time, when he had been ill in Washington and she had visited him, he sculpted her head out of clay, a creation they both admired. Her beautiful voice, like his grandmother's, stayed in his memory. And now that he was writing a great deal of poetry, she read his and he hers, sometimes out loud to one another. As poets they were both expressive, though Earhart more personal, and equally untalented. For young Gene there was a glow to the relationship.

Apparently Nina did not feel especially threatened by Gene's friendship with Amelia, at least not to an extent that prevented her having lunch with Earhart at a Washington hotel the year before the divorce. Gene had hovered nervously in the background, afraid there might be a scene, especially if Nina had too many drinks. Perhaps Amelia's boyish looks disarmed or even attracted her. Shrewd and intuitive, she may have sized up the relationship as unthreatening. The Whitneys were then the targets anyway. But by autumn 1936 Nina had been married to Hugh Auchincloss for a full year. Since she had lost Jock, she was no longer in a mood to be happy if Gene married Liz. Whatever her many dissatisfactions, money was not among them, except insofar as she occasionally worried about her son's economic future, especially since he did not excel in school or mix with people. He was happy to mix at Langollen, Liz Whitney's horse farm in Upperville, Virginia, fifty miles from Washington, where Gene took him for visits and where Liz taught him to ride. With his father and his father's
friends he felt comfortable. The glamorous ones, like Liz and Amelia, were very attractive. From a bachelor apartment at the Wardman Park, where he played tennis with Henry Wallace, Gene Vidal had moved to another apartment, on Connecticut Avenue. His son visited regularly. Liz was often there during 1936–37. Liz and Gene traveled together, at least once to Los Angeles, where Liz presented herself as a candidate in the international competition for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in
Gone With the Wind
, the movie based on the bestselling novel of the Civil War. Its male star was soon to appear in a film called
Test Pilot
, on whose set Nina was to meet Clark Gable and have an affair with him and also with her third-husband-to-be, an Air Force officer who served as technical consultant. Unfortunately for Liz, her estranged husband, the primary financial backer of
Gone With the Wind
, made it clear to the producer she was not even to be considered for the role. While Liz tried Hollywood, Gene busily attended the National Air Show in Inglewood. What is now the Los Angeles Airport was still a cornfield. They drove together cross-country, back to Washington, with a detour to visit Gene's brother Pick, now a young Air Force pilot, at Barkesdale Field, in Shreveport, Louisiana. Pick and his wife, Sally, insisted Liz sleep in the guest bedroom and Gene in the den. “We were very old-fashioned,” Sally explained. A month later Liz was still not divorced. The endless legal-financial wrangling went on and on.

From the window seat of his St. Albans dormitory cubicle he could see the Washington Monument in the distance. The biography of “The Father of Our Country” which he had never finished epitomized the boredom of historical studies (and most of his classes). Now, deeply absorbed, he was reading
Gone With the Wind
. Through the Gores, he thought of himself as Southern, living in what was, prior to World War II, essentially a Southern city whose only industry was government. Southerners like his grandfather dominated the Congress, which despite Roosevelt's power still insisted it was the premier branch. Issues of honor, justice, seniority, home rule, and graft preoccupied the political rulers, whether they were of the Ashley Wilkes or the Snopes kind. Having been brought up in the home of a practical politician, Gene knew that the romanticism of Ashley Wilkes was nonsense. His grandmother's dismissal of gambling, whoring Southern boys getting their comeuppance was another antidote to idealization. Still, while
he had no doubt that
Gone With the Wind
distorted history and human nature, he found the book deeply absorbing, a dramatization of the sort that made history come alive. The novel and film brought together his own growing interest in the American past and numbers of vivid self-reflexive moments, one of which was his self-awareness as he sat in that window embrasure, gazing out into the Washington distance, often looking down at the pages that were alive in his hands. It produced in his mind an unforgettable image of himself, there and then, becoming himself. Such visual images increasingly filled the storehouse of his mind, always there, readily available, instantly alive.

Life in the antiseptic Lower School dormitory was best lived imaginatively, “a long room with a linoleum floor, freshly waxed and lined on both sides with doorless cubicles,” small, bare spaces with bed, chair, desk. Each day began with services in the Little Sanctuary, presided over by the headmaster, who had a sermon or homily for the school. An imposing figure, he was authority itself, speaking familiarly about honor, duty, country, about God, morality, and “character.” He also had a sense of humor and a sharp eye for the personalities of his teachers and pupils. An avid athletic partisan, “The Chief” cheered as loud as the loudest at school football games. Though some parents found it unseemly, the Reverend Albert Hawley Lucas knew what he stood for and was not to be repressed. Among other things, he stood for winning football games and building character. He presided, for the boarders, over breakfast and dinner, each of the resident masters at the head of a table, where the food was competent, the atmosphere mostly pleasant. For the sixth- and seventh-grade boys, the homeroom teacher dominated the long teaching day. For Gene, Herve Gordon (“Papa”) Chasseaud's much-loved “boudoir,” the school library under the stairs in the Activities Building, was a primal location. Chasseaud himself had gathered most of the growing collection. A bibliophilic French teacher with attractively eccentric habits, he had a literary aura. In the Lower Form office, the school secretary and mother-confessor to many, Virginia Martin, sold cookies and milk during recess. One day a student ran in, exclaiming, “
Miss Martin
, there's a fire in the boys' room!” “First,” she replied, “put on your tie.”

The one master he did love was Stanley Sofield, his seventh-grade homeroom teacher, an eccentrically brilliant pedagogue whose personal charisma made him a powerful presence in the daily lives of his students and a
St. Albans legend. The only teacher Gene later came back to see and had a friendship with, Sofield had “magic with boys,” partly based on an intuitive understanding of and a genuine affection for the species. “He had that magic quality of treating them as equals,” Alfred True recollected. “They felt he was the man in charge, but he never condescended to them. No boy was ever a mystery to him.” A Columbia University graduate, in his thirties when Gene was at St. Albans, Sofield was physically unprepossessing, a rather gawky pixie, “a plump young man with thick brown hair, glasses, a tapir's nose and small chin.” Unmarried, his sexual interests unclear, he was strongly attached to a sister in New Jersey whom he helped economically and spoke with on the telephone every evening. Rumored among the masters to be homosexual, Sofield never made that a part of his St. Albans life. The boys knew him only as a brilliant teacher and a memorable character. With a sharp wit and a loud, demanding voice, he made the classroom his theater. The students he good-humoredly addressed as “gentlemen.” Totally unathletic himself, he apparently enjoyed coaching baseball and cheering boisterously at school games. Flamboyant, “he knew how to control the boys and teach them also,” to make the class interesting by investing it with personality and ideas. Passionate about the musical theater, each year Sofield directed the school Christmas musical, which he composed, frequently banging away at the piano. Afraid of performing in public, Gene would have nothing to do with the musicals, though Sofield, who had nicknames for most of the boys, would regularly sing to him, “Gene-y with the light brown hair.” It made him writhe with embarrassment. Actually he was still blond, as his classmate John Hanes recalled, with straight hair darkening to brown, “good-looking although not pretty. Just a good-looking boy. Tall for his age.” With another St. Albans master, Sofield directed a summer camp in the Adirondacks, where musicals were featured. He hoped Gene would attend. A regular if not heavy drinker who loved martinis, some mornings Sofield, bleary-eyed, would with a soft voice, a “
gentle, grave manner
, and a slightly pained squint,” alert the students to his mood, which often produced histrionic demands for silence. Other times books or erasers would fly, unerringly, across the room toward offendingly loud or silly or unresponsive boys. Sofield's famous scream echoed throughout the Lower Form, part of its special character. His storms were unpredictable, though everyone expected them, and most enjoyed them. Usually he taught in a tone of “gentle expository reason.” To Gene he seemed like “a benign
Nina”—the vitality, the histrionics, even the drinking, but without the destructive irresponsibility, the self-glorification, the cruelty. With everyone else Gene was reserved, mostly unresponsive. But he responded to Sofield's magic, part pedagogic calculation, part spontaneous expressiveness, a feel for boys and for schoolroom life that made him predictably unpredictable in the classroom.

At night, in the dormitory and study hall, there was homework, there were smells and noises and games, some very personal, others companionable, all the world-shaking dramas of companionship, ambition, rivalry, affection, health, illness, high spirits, love—the varied activities of a few dozen disparate boys between the ages of ten and fourteen who when the dormitory master, sometimes benign, other times a hated figure, shut off the lights, fell into the sleep of dreams and sometimes nightmares. In the dark one boy sometimes went into another's bed, for comfort, for sexual games. Others, awake, could hear the distinctive noises. Wet dreams, which Gene began to have, were whispered about. In the shower the boys visually measured one another, made note of who had pubic hair and who not: whoever boarded in the Lower School dorm was part of the community's self-scrutiny. One of Gene's school friends, who confided in him, worried about masturbating. He was trying desperately not to. Succumbing to temptation, he thought, was going to destroy his life. It was, Gene told him, his impression “that it probably did no harm at all…. He then said that ‘everywhere you look there's something that sets me off.' ‘Well, like what?' ‘Well,' he said, ‘the funny papers.' I said, ‘I don't see anything sexy about them.' ‘Oh,' he said, ‘I do.'” At home, with his mother's casual nudity, with parents who had affairs, with his own erotic responses and erections, Gene was becoming aware of sexual feeling, though he still had a long way to go in getting right the facts about how babies were made. But he was unselfconscious about most of his personalized responses, which seemed to him perfectly ordinary, natural, acceptable. Unlike some of his friends, he had no religious scruples or anxieties to bring to bear.