Gore Vidal (21 page)

Sexy, attractive, resembling the young Katharine Hepburn, madly in love with her husband, Kit had no desire to be a mother of any kind to his almost grown-up son. She knew intuitively that it would be a mistake. She had heard enough about Nina to stay out of the firing line. But young Gene felt the awkwardness, the tenseness, of having a stepmother. “My relationship with her was edgy at the beginning. Trying to get rid of one mother—just the word ‘mother' was enough to start me climbing the wall—and here's a stepmother. Also, she was very sexy and just about my age.” A consultant for the Bendix Corporation and a director of Eastern Airlines, Gene nevertheless had a modest income, and the bills from Los Alamos were huge. At Camden, New Jersey, he soon set up a small factory where he invented and tested variations on molded plywood parts for fuselages and wingtips, still preoccupied with making airplanes for individuals economically feasible. The process was patented as Vidal Weldwood. But there were start-up costs, few contracts, and little profit for his Aeronautics Research Corporation. Despite Kit's father's wealth, there was no family money available for her. When she took on some modeling jobs, Gene's resistance to having a working wife soon put an end to that. The news that young Gene would not be returning to Los Alamos came as a relief.

From the small apartment on East Sixty-fifth Street the couple occupied after marrying, they soon moved into a two-bedroom flat in the Wardman Park in Washington, familiar to Gene Vidal and the obvious place for a short-term residence. Probably he thought he might do better selling his innovative product if he were nearer the source of government contracts. In Washington he took Kit to tea at Rock Creek Park to meet Senator and Mrs. Gore. “Gene was never not friendly with them,” Kit recollected. “He liked them very much. They were his family at that point. They still seemed like family to him. And they weren't all that crazy about Nina all the time either…. I think Gene was more of a son than she was a daughter.”

When young Gene came home briefly to Merrywood during the Easter vacation and the summer of 1940, he stayed a few days with Kit and Gene at their apartment. Gradually the relationship between stepmother and son became calmer, more rational. In conversation he remarked to her that some of his friends had made comments about his father marrying such a young woman. She too, of course, had heard similar remarks. Since it was clear Kit had no intention of being in the least bit motherly, Gene soon felt more at ease with her and the marriage. Blissfully happy, having married “the love of her life,” Kit did not care what people said. At Merrywood the Auchincloss menage had its complications. Yusha, frequently off at boarding school, was disenchanted with Nina as he observed the deterioration of the marriage. At Rock Creek Park the Gores watched their daughter's progress with quiet horror. Both Yusha and Hugh, to whom they were sympathetic, seemed like victims. The Gores “were in a class by themselves,” Yusha recalled. “Both my father and I liked them very much. I think because they were Nina's parents I was always hoping that their daughter would come up to their standards. My father and I never understood how these charming, gentle people could produce a daughter like that.” Still, when she was not drunk or angry, Nina could be enchanting, and Hugh had no desire to divorce her. The stammering husband did his best to keep domestic things going, though they rarely went well. In late spring 1940 he came up with a bright idea. Since Gene would not be returning to Los Alamos, why not send him to Hugh's own alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy? That one of his business partners was a trustee might help. Gene Vidal had no reservations about that suggestion. The cost of a year at Exeter was less than half that of Los Alamos.

An elite school with high standards, Exeter expected even bright boys to get low grades. These were expected, though, to come
at
Exeter, not before. Gene's sponsors were estimable, his grades poor but not terrible. Some claim may have been made that he had special talents, in writing and painting. Certainly Auchincloss's name and his partner-trustee's would have been invoked. His father's and grandfather's also, which would have carried the weight of their careers in public life. It may have been a close call for the admissions office, which allowed Gene admission for September 1940 with a proviso: that he attend the five-week summer school to make up deficiences in his record. Before he knew it, he was grinding away at three onerous courses, two of them subjects he despised. Ironically, English was even more painfully offensive to him than Latin and math. Eager to be creative, to show his skills as a writer, he quickly found that his English teacher, Hamilton Bissell, was having none of it. “I'll allow you to write the way you want to, but first you must show me that you
can
write the way I want you to.” Either Gene would grammatically parse standard English sentences and write dry, formal, correct prose, with the business letter as model, or he was in trouble. He was. Bissell ripped into his compositions. He responded resentfully, defensively. For the four themes he wrote each week he got C's and D's. When a boy sitting next to him strained to look at his paper during an exam, he ironically pushed it toward him. Bissell, who saw only part of what had happened, thought he was cheating, which further soured him on an arrogant student who resisted doing things the Exeter way. Bissell did what the rules required: he reported the offender to the acting principal of the summer school, Darcey Curwen. Expulsion should have been automatic. For some reason Curwen allowed him to stay. The grinding five weeks finally came to an end. Gene had failed Latin. He had gotten a D in math. He had passed English with a C, a very respectable grade at Exeter in the days before grade inflation. But all in all it was a dismal performance. He was happy to have the summer session done with.

Amid the banners, cheers, and hoopla stood the newly famous Mr. Wendell Willkie, the Indiana-born Wall Street lawyer about to receive the 1940 Republican presidential nomination. He would challenge the demon himself, Franklin Roosevelt. Caesar-like, by running for a third term, Roosevelt
was about to turn the republic into an empire, all good Republicans and many conservative Democrats feared. Whomever they were for separately, they hated “that man in the White House” and worried he was about to deliver them up to the conflagration that had begun in Europe the previous September when young Gene and his classmates had sailed home-ward from Liverpool. In the late-July weather, uncomfortable Philadelphia steamed. What better place, though, than the cradle of liberty from which to launch the campaign to save the republic! Crowds, heat, colorful banners, hot rhetoric, Liberty Bells, America First! Not a breeze was to be had except from ceiling and hand fans of the sort right-wing California Senator Vandenberg's supporters handed out by the thousands. “Fan with Van,” they said, a message sufficiently ambiguous to lend itself to anti-Vandenberg jokes. An internationalist lawyer who had long ago left the Midwest, Willkie charmed Middle America with his Hoosier accent, promising little, implying much. He would keep America out of war, a sentiment that Senator Gore had heard from Woodrow Wilson in 1916, not long before Wilson decided that America too must fight. Blind, portly, white-haired, cane extended before him, immediately identifiable, Senator Gore was among ideological soulmates. Always obsessed with his favorite American spectator sport, he had taken his fifteen-year-old grandson to one of America's quadrennial spectaculars, a national political convention.

Earlier, at Willkie's hotel suite, on the reception line with his grandfather, Gene shook the soon-to-be-nominated, soon-to-be-defeated candidate's soft, sweaty hand. Now, from his seat high up in the bleachers, he could see at the press table far below, huge cigar in mouth, big round eyeglasses, stubby, wide-faced, acerbically satirical H. L. Mencken, a hero of American journalism whom Gene did not yet recognize but later identified from a newspaper photo. Politicians, favor seekers, power brokers—American history buzzed all around him at the hotel, at the convention, in the streets. Pink-faced from the heat, the normally gray-looking former President Herbert Hoover addressed the convention competently. Halfway through Hoover's speech, Gene's grandfather muttered, “
He's the only person
in this hall who doesn't know that he will never be President again.” When Hughdie arrived, the three went to lunch at the Philadelphia Raquet Club. Youthful Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, handsome in a naval uniform, the center of attention, joined them. An enthusiastic Willkie supporter and a
major contributor, Hughdie had had visions of the Italian ambassadorship dangled before his eyes. Lodge's father and Gene's grandfather had changed world history: together they had killed the League of Nations. At lunch they talked politics and war, the past, the future. “I remember thinking how extraordinary that this young handsome man is already a senator. Even at that age he seemed more in my age range than I had thought he would be. There was a slight stirring of ambition in me.”

In mid-September 1940 an Auchincloss limousine took Gene from Newport to New Hampshire. The venerable redbrick preparatory school, for the next three years another one of his homeless homes, soon came into sight. For some reason his summer-school grades had not excluded him from matriculation as a Lower Middler (sophomore), though they were to be an accurate indicator of his later marks. That he was a celebrity boy who had flown a plane at ten years of age, grandson of a former senator, son of a former Roosevelt cabinet member, stepson of a wealthy alumnus whose partner was an Exeter trustee undoubtedly helped. That he was just plain smart, whatever his classroom performance, some of the Exeter people recognized. As he may have himself anticipated as he was driven into town in late summer, he was to be, in his own way, a distinctive student. The limousine moved up Main Street to the collegelike campus. He asked the chauffeur to stop. With the chauffeur's help, Gene's luggage was placed on the sidewalk. He did not want to be seen as a rich boy who had been driven to school in a limousine. As the car pulled away, he carried his bags across the street and up the hill to the academy building.

Having already spent the summer session there, Gene was not unfamiliar with the Exeter campus, but the sheer size of the student body and faculty—about seven hundred and fifty boys and more than seventy teachers for the autumn term—struck him as noticeably different from any school he had been to before. It did not seem in the least frightening; in fact, the larger the school, the less school- and prisonlike it felt to him. Still, it was a startling change. He had with some degree of suddenness gone from an experimental ranch school in the New Mexican wilderness to an elite New England preparatory school almost as old as the republic itself. Founded in 1781, its first famous graduate Daniel Webster, Exeter dominated,
with half a dozen or so other such schools, the American Protestant establishment's educational system at the secondary level. A gatekeeping school, it sent huge numbers of its students to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. From there the best went on to Wall Street law firms, high business positions, Ivy League professorships, government service, state and national political office. Some few struck out for the movie industry, for the arts, for wander years and wander lives. Occasionally some dropped out, to be referred to in the reunion classbook directories as “missing” or “unknown.” “
Exeter Fair
, O mother stern yet tender,” as the school song put it, trained national leaders. Just as there was correct “Exeter English,” there was a correct Exeter ideology. A rigorous curriculum was based on the belief that mental is the highest exercise, playing fields are essential as adjuncts to the classroom, privilege demands civic responsibility, intellectual challenge sharpens the mind and character, competition makes men. Those who could not keep up would be eliminated. Those who did not catch on that the Exeter maxim, “There are no rules until you break one,” meant that a first or at best a second infraction resulted in expulsion soon found themselves expelled. The emphasis was on stern rather than tender. Exeter prided itself on building “character.”