Gore Vidal (20 page)

Soon he had the bright idea that Connell himself might be his ticket out. Whatever sex was going on between boys or between Connell and boys at Los Alamos, Gene had not participated in. He had steered away from “The Boss” as much as possible. “I was very pure then. It all seemed like a great mess to me, and my lust was not aroused by anybody there.” But he disliked Connell, partly for taking advantage of the health examinations and some of the boys privately, mostly because he was the daily authoritarian embodiment of the power that had sent him into exile. Perhaps if he blew the whistle on Connell back in Washington, Nina would allow him to return to St. Albans or at least go to what he thought would be a more appropriate school. Since there was no way of avoiding the director, he might as well put him to use. At Christmas 1939 the two Washington boys, Wilson Hurley and Gene Vidal, traveled home together, the same train route they had taken westward in September. At Merrywood, Nina now had two children under her erratic guidance, Nini, two years old, and Tommy, recently born. Christmas festivities were gathering their usual momentum, the huge tree handsomely decorated, stacks of presents waiting to be opened. Visitors came and went, including Wilson's parents, who lived nearby at Leesburg and were part of the same extended circle of prominent Washingtonians who enjoyed the company of their peers. Gene quickly found the opportunity to tell Nina that Connell was “a sexual degenerate.” Shocked, Nina thought that, if true, this was a danger to Gene. From her perspective he was already odd enough. She remembered Sherry Davis's analysis of Gene's fascination with costumes and role-playing and immediately took the bait. Gene must have felt secure enough or desperate enough to use an issue that might cut back at him. But at Los Alamos itself there had been no hint that he was implicated in Connell's activities. Nina immediately rolled up her sleeves and went to work, which suited Gene's purposes. At the first opportunity, drink in hand at a late-night party, she cornered Patrick Hurley. Inimitably direct, the “let's tell it as it is” Nina wanted to know whether or not what her son had told her was true. Was the director of the school a pansy? Horrified, in the small hours of the night, as soon as he got home, Hurley
awakened his son. “‘I hear your headmaster's a queer,'” he said, and demanded that Wilson either confirm or deny what Gene had told his mother. Wilson had already been at Los Alamos for almost two years. His father, a supporter and advocate of Connell's regime, had visited the school. What the hell was going on? “Wilson played dumb or was dumb.” The grilling was precise, harsh, military. “‘Well, he may be, but he's never mentioned or demonstrated it to me. I have never seen it in action, and so I can't depose on that subject.' So then he said, ‘Well, has anybody ever laid a hand on you that way?' And I said, ‘No.'” That satisfied “The General,” who would have been eager to be satisfied. “Pat Hurley reported to my mother who said—a line I've always loved—‘Why, it just shows that that boy of yours is a greenhorn!'” But the greenhorn had pulled off a clever maneuver.

Wilson and Gene took the train back early in the new year. When, traveling westward, they discussed the subject, Wilson still maintained that nothing of that sort had gone on as far as he knew except ordinary adolescent things, the same line that had gotten him off the hook with his father. As they ascended to the wintry high mesa, Gene had good reason to hope that this would be his last and only winter there. He had begun raising his voice on the matter, to his mother, his father, his grandparents. Usually tractable, he had insisted he would not return for another year. Soon Hurley telephoned Connell and asked him if he knew about the rumor that was going far enough around to have reached him in Washington. The director provided denials and assurances. Apparently Connell either knew or guessed the source of Hurley's information. Soon Connell let Nina and Big Gene know that their son would not be invited to return the next year. The reasons were of the most general kind, including that it would be in the young man's best interest to go to a school with a larger program. Since Gene had already made it clear he did not want to return, his quiet expulsion seemed easy enough for all to go along with. To Nina the only annoyance was that she would now have to find a new school for him. Gene Vidal was pleased to be relieved of the high tuition. The boy himself was delighted.

The school also would soon be moving on, out of material existence and into the pages of history. Those who had been students there were shortly to have Los Alamos seared into their memories beyond the ordinary memorable images of schoolboy life. On a spring morning in 1942, two
years after Gene's departure, the students and staff at the Ranch School gazed up at the strange sight of a small airplane circling and circling. Connell guessed something significant was up. Such an expenditure of airplane fuel in wartime was likely to be consequential. Soon two authoritative strangers came to visit, General Leslie Groves and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, plans and vision in hand. In a short time guards were posted around the perimeter of Los Alamos. In December an abrupt, bureaucratic notice from the Secretary of War arrived: land and buildings were to be expropriated for military use. Some compensation. Period. Connell, crushed, did his patriotic duty uncomplainingly. The Los Alamos Ranch School disappeared forever. So did the director, who died two years later, a man whose boys and whose mission had been taken from him late in life when a new beginning was impossible. The literal place name of the school on the mesa soon became awesomely famous, associated not with living boys but with devastated cities, not with the romantic American optimism and naïveté of Pond's vision but with the nuclear age and the Cold War.

While home from Los Alamos for the Christmas 1939 holidays, Gene had the mixed blessing of seeing his recently remarried father. His own juniorship seemed vexatiously ironic: his father had just married a woman only six years older than his son. Young Gene already had one mother. What would be the point in having another, especially one almost his contemporary? Slim, dark-haired, bright-eyed, with classical features, twenty-year-old Katherine Roberts had come into his father's life like a breath of spring. “She was just so fresh,” he told his sister-in-law. “She was fresh and new.” He had fallen in love with youth, perhaps partly a statement of how much he disliked his own aging, how frightening the prospect of losing his athlete's fine body. Owen Roberts, Kit's multimillionaire father, with a seat on the stock exchange and a valuable art collection, provided his wife, from whom he had separated, and daughter with only a small courtmandated allowance. Kit had been working for the last five years as a Powers model, and she and her mother, from a well-established Southern family, had spent a great deal of time living in palatial splendor in Peking. “With what they would have paid for living on Central Park West, they lived in a palace with twenty servants.” She had also attended finishing school in Connecticut and studied in Paris. The impending marriage came
as a surprise to many. Skeptical, Kit's mother, who liked Gene, soon came around. Gene's sister Lurene inquired disbelievingly about the rumor. No, she had misheard, Gene teased. This was actually a poor young girl he was going to adopt, not marry. Liz Whitney was furious. She had not expected Gene to slip away. Apparently “she tried everything from threats of murder to suicide to blackmail, everything. My father said that to his last day he never figured out how she found out where Kit and he were spending their honeymoon…. But on their wedding night Liz started ringing about ten o'clock in the evening. Then he said, ‘If Miss Whitney calls, don't take the call.' So then ‘Miss Smith' would call, and it would be Liz again, denouncing my father for what he had done, for the terrible mistake he made throwing away his life and her life … Finally, he said, he had to take the phone off the hook because Liz wouldn't stop. Then the next day she wrote a slightly apologetic letter and sent him a wedding present, the most beautiful beige silk pajamas I've ever seen in my life. I know because he gave them to me…. He never wore them. It was the one color he couldn't wear, and she knew it. It made him look green…. I wore those pajamas for years.”

The marriage took place mid-December 1939, in the bride's mother's Manhattan apartment. The New York and Washington papers noticed it prominently, the
New York Herald Tribune
previewing it on the morning of the wedding day: “
Aeronautic Consultant and New York Girl
, Recently of China, Plan Bridal.” There had been no public engagement announcement. Gene's divorce prevented their marrying at the Episcopalian Church of the Heavenly Rest. Of Gene's family, only Sally and Pick attended, Pick the best man. Stationed in nearby Mitchell Field, he had seen a good deal of Gene since his move to New York. Why the wedding date had not been arranged so that young Gene could be there is unclear. On that same day he departed from Los Alamos for Christmas at Merrywood, where he was to bring Connell's predilections to his mother's attention. Perhaps preoccupied and, as usual, absentminded about arrangements, Gene may not have thought to align his schedule with his son's. Although always happy to have his father's company, the boy never
expected
to have it. It was not exclusion but misalignment, of a sort he had grown used to. Not that it did not sometimes disappoint him, as it did when, coming up from Washington by train, he regularly arrived at the entrance to the upper-Park Avenue building where Gene had a small apartment only to find that he had to wait endlessly, though they had made precise arrangements in advance. “I can
remember waiting for him six and seven hours outside his apartment building because he had forgotten I'd come up. And it wasn't any feeling against me: he forgot everything. He was naturally vague. I can remember waiting, waiting, waiting for him in the vestibule…. I took it for granted that that was the way it was. I didn't like it. But I didn't dislike it. He always charmed me. He was very apologetic. He didn't remember anything…. His best friend of ten years earlier could be talking to him and he still couldn't figure out who he was. Not good with names or faces. One of his jokes: ‘There are three things I can't remember: one is names, another faces, and the third I can't remember.' He couldn't remember that he had an appointment with me. Who knows what the hell he was doing! He wasn't that rabid about business…. He refused to keep appointments and refused to have an office if he could help it. He liked puttering. He liked inventing things. He was more apt to be working in a shed inventing molded plywood or something. That was what interested him. Or fucking. Many ladies.”

Gene's failings were of a sort that never produced the level of pain that Nina's did. Neither patriarchal nor nurturing, he had a talent for companionable good times. Lurene, puzzled, remarked that father and son behaved more like brothers than father and son, “‘off in corners giggling at the rest of us.' She didn't approve. Each had his role, and we weren't playing them.” Gene never gave advice. But he also never took credit for his son's achievements. “Friends of his would ask … what had he done that made me so successful? ‘Well,' he'd say, ‘I think it's the fact that I never gave him any advice and if I had he would not have taken it. And,' he said, ‘we had a perfect relationship.'” In warm weather they would take drives into the country, particularly from his Manhattan apartment to Amagansett, Long Island, to stay with his friend McClellan Barkeley. A successful portrait and fashion painter, Barkeley had a way with beautiful young models, both in paint and in the flesh. With Pick, Sally, and Gene, “Mac” attended a football game at West Point. Broad-shouldered, mustached, with thinning hair, about forty years old, he “wore sort of a gangster snap-brim hat and a tan polo coat and a yellow wool scarf. He just looked so beautiful walking around the stands trying to find our seats,” Sally recalled. With an attractive beach house, Barkeley was an amorous bachelor who had a love life perhaps even more active than Vidal's. In summer 1939 he had introduced Gene to
Kit Roberts, who was posing for one of his
Saturday Evening Post
cover illustrations and whom he wanted for himself. She responded to Gene's advances, not Mac's. Still, he had attractive alternatives, whom he regularly hosted at his beachfront cottage. Each of the two rooms had four beds, one room for the young models, the other for the men on hand. In the summers of 1937 and 1938 Gene and young Gene visited numbers of times. “It was a house … filled with beautiful girls. I loved it. That would be great fun, sort of living on the beach.” Young Gene enjoyed flirting with some of the girls, all of whom were indeed closer to his age than to their host's. Like his father, though in a different way, he was now noticeably charming. By 1939 “he was getting taller,” his then twenty-five-year-old Aunt Sally noticed, “and he was always so skinny. He had on some sort of cute Western pants, with a Western cut.” At the beach, in swim trunks, blond, pale-complexioned, hazel-eyed, with an inquisitive bright smile, usually in high spirits, he was a delight to have around. He soon had a ferocious crush on one of the young ladies, who was not at all unhappy about his being smitten. Nothing came of it, but it was fun and memorable.