Gore Vidal (18 page)

Life settled down to the usual shipboard routine except that, to Gene's annoyance, the canteen ran out of chocolate, a major disappointment. To him it seemed mostly an adventure, not true history since he was not reading about it in a book, where real history exists. After a few days the adventure seemed ordinary, even boring, certainly not as scary as the countless scary movies he had seen. At night they sailed without lights. He and
Lee Barlow walked the deck in the darkness. She tried, again, to teach him versification. When she insisted on absolute metrical regularity, he cited a Keats sonnet as evidence that great poets sometimes write irregular lines. And why did he need to know the name of a metrical pattern in order to write poetry in that pattern? They were at a standstill. As they kept walking the deck in the darkness, the
Antonia
zigzagged westward. Soon the passengers discovered they were heading for Montreal, not New York. The eight-day trip took two weeks. From Montreal they took the train to Washington, where one of the first things Nina required was that Gene get his hair washed and cut at the Mayflower Hotel. As he looked down into the washbasin at the dirty water, his dark hair turning blond again, he realized, happily, that he had not washed his hair in three months. It had been a blissfully successful first European visit. His only problem was that he had been booked, involuntarily, for a further westward voyage. It was to, of all places, Los Alamos, New Mexico.

On a high mesa in the wilderness of New Mexico, thirty-five miles from Santa Fe, the eight-hundred-acre Los Alamos Ranch School was a quintessential American institution. Founded in 1917 by Ashley Pond, an educated Midwesterner from Detroit, it was now in the hands of an ex-Marine, ex-forest ranger named Albert James Connell, who, like Pond, proclaimed to the effete Eastern world that a rough outdoor life would turn sickly boys into healthy men. Muscle tone was everything. Deep breathing expanded the soul. Boys needed a rigorous schedule, tough conditions, exposure to the elements, survival skills, the transforming beauty and isolation of the Western wilderness. The smiling ghost of Teddy Roosevelt provided guidance and gave his blessing. What they needed also was distance from the effeminizing influence of women. Having served in Roosevelt's “Rough Riders,” Pond believed that “
boys became men
more easily when separated from oversolicitous mothers.” If America was being feminized, the Los Alamos Ranch School would save some of its sons. At night, with lights out, there would be only darkness and bright stars, swirling snows in winter, high pastures in spring, muddy dirt roads and clouds of dust as the seasons
changed, a happy community of no more than forty-four boys whose parents would gladly pay the highest fee of any preparatory school in the United States to allow their children to breathe freely, their wayward sons to become straight arrows. The magic mesa, jutting out from the main range of the Jemez Mountains, surrounded by the Santa Fe National Forest, was partly a magic mountain, in some cases a sanatorium for the body, but in most, as the school grew, a place where “character” would be developed. Indeed, most of the boys were healthy enough when they arrived. By the 1930s “a lot of the people sent there were kids who were having trouble elsewhere, almost like remittance men from privileged families,” one of the students recalled. What they needed to learn was discipline, toughness, manliness.

For Pond, books were an abomination. Nature and hard work provided lessons enough. An avid enthusiast of the Boy Scout movement, Connell had the brilliant idea to organize the school as an active troop, the only mounted troop in the country. Everyone would dress, including the teachers, in the same khaki uniform: short pants and shirt, with wide-brimmed Stetson hat, bandanna on the weekends, black tie on school days. The only concession to winter was woolen underwear. In warm weather the Scouts would be encouraged to go shirtless. Each boy would have a horse. Saddles needed to be polished. Salubrious packing trips into the valleys and mountains demanded perfection, outdoor spit and polish. The ranch, with its own water, electric, and sanitation systems, with “complete machinery for harvesting crops, hauling fuel and supplies, and building, maintaining, and clearing roads,” needed to be worked. The boys would play their part. Schooling was at first barely relevant, then secondary. This was not to be a dude ranch but an authentic experience. When Connell took over the school from Pond, the ex-Marine realized that to be successful a ranch needed experienced hands and that to attract boys from well-to-do families who could afford the necessarily high tuition he also had to provide college preparation. These boys, who were not going to grow up to be ranch hands, needed to qualify for the prestigious universities of the country, to take their place in the national hierarchy as befitted their backgrounds. Eager to make a success of the school, he transformed Pond's vision of a ranch in which the boys did all the work into a school in which employees ran the ranch, occasionally helped by the boys. By the mid-1920s Connell had assembled a capable staff, under the headmastership of a smart Latin teacher from Yale,
Lawrence Hitchcock. Connell took care of recruitment, business, discipline, outdoor chores, and expeditions; Hitchcock guided the academic program. Soon the schedule was in place: half a day devoted to studies, half to becoming a self-reliant American male.

As an isolated school run by idealistic male romantics, the ranch on the high mesa had the feel of a muscular monastery, the kind of semiclosed male society in which Connell flourished. Married teachers were not encouraged, though one traditional family, Pond's daughter Peggy and her husband, the science teacher Fermor Church, raised three children there. Connell's compelling interest was in boys, their growth and maturation, their moral and physical well-being. A strict disciplinarian, imperious and mercurial, he enjoyed dominating them, teaching them what he thought of as manly things, particularly the skills of outdoor life and the high principles of Scouting, in both of which he had a mystical belief. When the boys cooked over an outdoor fire on their Saturday full-day trips or their overnight excursions to the high valleys, they did it, as they did everything else, A. J. Connell's way. Any boy who dared cook over an open fire rather than smoldering coals or whose skillet was the least bit dirtied by fire would know Connell's wrath. Verbally sharp, he made sure that everyone knew he did not believe in accidents. If something went wrong, it was always someone's fault, usually yours. He regularly proclaimed that “I know what's best for boys.” Having named them “gibbons,” he made regular efforts to catch them at what he assumed all gibbons do, bursting into a suspected boy's room to surprise the masturbating offender. “I've caught 'em at it,” he would say. He also had his soft side, his gentle aspect, expressed in his fondness for colorful fabrics for his apartment, for hypnotic music like Ravel's “Bolero,” for campfire songs and stories. He admired muscles, his own and the boys'. He had an eye for masculine attractions. The boys were subject to weekly physical inspections in the nurse's office by two of the masters. Connell, though, was usually there—to make certain proper procedures were used, to check out the boys' muscle tone, to ascertain just how much each had grown since the last examination. Some of his colleagues found it bothersome. Oscar Steege, the history master, thought “there was an erotic element in Connell's touching the boys,” though he restricted his touch to arms, chests, and backsides, “and perhaps some of the boys felt this. … It didn't seem right. It didn't seem necessary…. That he had a sexual interest in the boys was generally recognized by us at the school.
And there was some unhappiness about this. Not that there were any overt incidents at all. That never happened. But he loved to touch them. I saw that.”

When, in mid-September 1939, Gene Vidal, almost fourteen years old, was driven, in a station wagon full of boys, across the arroyo, up the razor turns of the spectacular road cut out of the sold tufa wall of the canyon, onto the high Los Alamos mesa, he could have had little idea what to expect. He had been sent into exile, expelled from his Washington world and whatever semblance of a home he had, by a mother who applied the Los Alamos doctrine of separating boys from mothers with a vengeance. It was not that Nina did not want him to cling to her apron strings. She did not want him around at all. His Western destination had been determined the previous spring when Connell, on his annual recruiting swing through the Midwest and Northeast, had visited Merrywood, probably introduced to Nina by her good friend Patrick Hurley. Hurley's son was already a student at the Ranch School. The tall, gangly Wilson Hurley wanted to be an artist. His exacting, militaristic father, a powerful Washington political reactionary from Oklahoma who greatly admired Senator Gore, had been Secretary of War in the Hoover administration. “The General,” as he was known even to his family, was not about to allow his son to become an effete aesthete. Wilson, who needed to be straightened out, had been sent west the year before Gene. At Merrywood, Connell, a handsome man of middle height, a strong, compact build, and close-cropped, thin gray hair, exerted his twinkling blue-eyed Irish charm. With the help of photos of the school and landscape, he soon had Nina convinced that New Mexico was just what Gene needed. The $2,400-a-year tuition at a time when the Depression-deflated Eastern schools were half that did not shock her: Gene's father was legally obliged to pay. The bills were to be sent directly to him. “I hated going to Los Alamos. I didn't have any choice. I was shipped off. If there had been sufficient coordination between my father and me, I could have headed it off, because he didn't want to pay that tuition. He didn't give a damn whether I liked the school, but it was the most expensive school in America. Nina was such a liar. She would have gone to him and said, ‘Oh, he's dying to go out there! It means everything to him!' I can just hear her voice. She was never more rapturous than when she was lying.”

By mid-September Gene was on the train to Chicago, with hardly a chance to say good-bye to Jimmie or anyone else. In Chicago he joined other Los Alamos boys for the descent to New Mexico. On the train they wore jackets, ties, some of them even hats, all from privileged families that subscribed to the sartorial decorum that bespoke their world. At Lamy, New Mexico, they were met by the school station wagon which provided a bumpy, slow passage on dirt roads through a starkly beautiful landscape the likes of which he had seen before only in Western movies. A month before, he had been among the glories of Rome, Paris, London. Suddenly he was on a high, immense Southwestern mesa called the Pajarito, the “little bird,” whose occasional cottonwood trees gave Los Alamos its name. “
The desert suddenly gave
birth to a large wooden building with a high roof and a verandah, supported by round smooth wooden columns,” he wrote in
The Smithsonian Institution
, evoking his first sight of Los Alamos Ranch School. Sunset on the distant Sangre de Cristo Mountains seemed brilliantly red with the blood the Spanish padres had imagined there centuries before. The thin, sharp air made its breathtaking demands. “As they approached the top of the mesa, the road became narrow and rocky. Tall juniper bushes on every side and the air sage-scented.”

New Mexico had its glories too, and Gene was not immune to them, though it hardly attracted him to be at what seemed a glorified summer camp, a combination of a macho Boy Scout troop and an Outward Bound challenge to resourcefulness. With his usual good grace about matters he could not control, he made no fuss. “Going to Los Alamos was my fate. I had no control over anywhere that I went. I didn't like the idea of it, and I didn't like it when I got there.” He began scheming immediately about how to get away. As always, he determined to be impersonally congenial. He knew how to be good company for those who liked that kind of company: conversational, verbally playful, amiably careful about boundaries, arrogant but generous. It was clear to him, though, from the moment he boarded the Pullman car in Chicago, that the school encouraged, even demanded, total immersion, constant daily engagement, full exposure to the communal experience. There would be little privacy here. The life of the body demanded shared sweat rather than solitary reading. Horseback was hardly a high cultural position. Since he was stuck, he would make the best of what he was stuck with, away from St. Albans, from Jimmie, from his father in New York, from movie theaters, museums, even farther from the Europe he had
just visited. As he walked into Fuller Lodge for his first meal, he could see both the best and worst of what he would have to deal with.
There
were the forty-odd other boys, now, like himself, dressed in their Boy Scout khaki shorts and shirts.
There
were the masters—Hitchcock, Church, Whelen, Steege, Wirth, and a few others—a blur of unfamiliar adults in similar uniforms, and
there
was the only recognizable face, the center of authority, A. J. Connell, whom everyone knew was “The Boss,” a kind of Twainian figure, like Hank Morgan in
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,
a man of great arbitrary energy who knew how to make the things of his world work and who believed with deep certainty that the practices and values of his school made boys into men.