Gore Vidal (5 page)

Fame came partly from the innumerable South Dakota newspaper headlines that proclaimed the accomplishments of the Vermillion teams and their stars, especially Gene Vidal. His good looks and amiable intelligence made him eminently salable, a Midwestern, soon an all-American, role model. America loved its games and its playing-field heroes. In those distant times, before the triumph of commercialism, athletes were idealized for their manliness and their American virtues. Madison swelled with pride: “
Local boy
great star at state university.” When Gene came home for holidays, he now had about him an aura. His siblings and their friends were in awe. In June 1916 he completed his engineering course. At home in Madison he deliberated whether to apply to the naval academy at Annapolis or to West Point, where he could continue his engineering studies and his athletic career. Someone of influence, eager to have him play football there, made “a vigorous plea that Vidal be sent to West Point.” Congressman Royal S. Johnson used South Dakota's one appointment. At Minneapolis he passed the entrance examination with high grades. By late summer 1916 this “demon on the gridiron” was marching and practicing on the fields above the Hudson, at first kept under wraps by the Army coach the better to surprise opponents. For the next three years he set West Point records in football and track, and was soon to be known to a generation of Army enthusiasts as the best all-around athlete West Point had ever produced. As the starting half-back for a nationally famous Army team that beat all its major rivals, the South Dakota boy was now a national hero. He played before huge audiences around the country. At the Polo Gounds the “largest crowd that ever attended a sporting event” in New York City watched Army beat Navy. Film of the Army victory in the 1916 game, starring “Gene Vidal,” shown along with
The Law Decides
, “A Powerful Gripping Drama in Seven Parts,” could be seen for ten cents on the movie screens springing up across America. When he visited home, resplendent in his cadet uniform, “the whole town was watching him.” Not everything, though, went smoothly in his cadet years at the academy. A debilitating war was devastating Europe. When the military and political brass cheered at the Army-Navy game, they also had other, more brutal games on their minds. So too did some of the cadets. As always, there was a glut of officers in the promotions pipeline.
Advancement came excruciatingly slowly in the peacetime Army. Cadets were more concerned about the lack of opportunity for promotion than about physical danger. After the 1916 academic year, Gene considered leaving for “some technical school…. At the present rate of promotion,” Vidal and other cadets “see themselves second lieutenants on small pay,” reported a worried sports reporter, “until they are old men with little chance of retiring at a higher rank than captain.” Gene stayed. Soon, in response to America's entry into the war, graduation was accelerated. The class of 1920 graduated two years early.

At graduation Vidal had just come from a year of athletic triumphs in football that equaled his achievements of 1916 and were his best ever in track and field. And he had led his class in mathematics. Now he was a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers in what soon, in November 1918, became a peacetime Army again. Athletics, though, was still a ticket to prominence. The Army always delighted in showcasing itself. Soon Gene was playing basketball and football for the Army command centers to which he was assigned, first at Fort Humphreys in Virginia, near Washington, whose basketball team he captained, and then at Fort Howard, where he led the Army team through its football schedule. In June 1920, having won the decathlon at the Army championship games, he was chosen by the Army as its track-and-field representative to the Seventh Olympic Games to be held in Antwerp, Belgium. That summer, in Pershing Stadium in France, he won second place in the pentathlon. There were banner headlines in America. In late summer he returned home, first to New York, then to Fort Humphreys. Margaret Vidal came by herself to New York to see her triumphant son. At a football game to which he took her, the public-address system announced to the huge audience the presence of the newly returned Olympic star. The crowd applauded enthusiastically. When the basketball season began, he and his Army teammates went to play a game at Langley Field, Virginia. For fun, the Army pilots took them all up for a spin. Immediately sold on flying, he and his roommate asked for transfers to the Army Air Service and were sent to Carlston Field, Arcadia, Florida, for training. He had found his second passion. There he trained in World War I “Jennys” and, as always, starred in interservice games. The next year he had his wings. On a visit to New York, the handsome twenty-six-year old Army pilot and athlete met the attractive, flirtatious eighteen-year-old Nina Gore, the daughter of the
senator from Oklahoma. In December 1921 the Washington newspapers announced the engagement. They were to be married early in the new year.

The Gore and the Vidal family names were united on a cold day in January 1922, at Washington's St. Margaret's Episcopal Church, perfumed by pink roses and illuminated with soft candles. Nina, “
attended by four
bridesmaids, wore a gown of soft duchess satin trimmed with rose point lace.” The groom and five of his ushers were in uniform. Newspaper accounts, which celebrated this Washington occasion, did not fail to mention that the ceremony took place “before a distinguished company representative of diplomatic, senatorial, congressional and residential society.” At the last moment the bride's mother arrived, accompanied by the family doctor, apparently also a family friend. The senator was not there. Newspaper accounts stated that “Mr. Gore and Thomas Gore, Jr. were prevented from attending the ceremony by their attending physician.”

What they were ill of or whether they were ill at all is not clear. Perhaps the senator was kept away by the “severe bruises” he had received in an automobile accident the week before in, of all places, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he had gone to give a speech. Perhaps flu, a life-threatening illness then, prevented the senator from attending. Perhaps he simply did not want to be at the wedding, since he did not think his daughter ready for marriage. A miscarriage kept away the only Vidal invited, Gene's sister Lurene. The groom apparently made sure his provincial father and obese mother did not come. Certainly the Democratic Gores and the Republican Vidals would not have been readily compatible. At the Congressional Club, friends of Mrs. Gore, who went home immediately after the ceremony, received the guests. That evening the bride and groom left for Fort Sill, Oklahoma, “where Lieut. Vidal is stationed.” The handsome young officer had the pleasure of bringing “home” with him his young and beautiful bride. At last liberated from parental oversight and thrilled by the adventure of it all, the virginal Nina probably felt she was now starting her real life. Later, her son recalled, she told the story that “on her wedding night … when she lost her virginity she wet the bed which she always felt cast a pall over the marriage…. She was virginal, so she always maintained, and my father never said a word to the contrary.”

Born in Lawton, Oklahoma, in July 1903, Nina (pronounced NÉYEna) was a beautiful, lively child, the first of the two Gore children. That the Gores had any children at all was a surprise to the Senator and an annoyance to Nina Belle, who already had her hands full looking after a blind husband. She later told her grandson that rats had gnawed at her douche bag. To start her on the road to a useful life, her parents sent Nina to the Georgetown Convent School, in Washington, then to Holton Arms School. Nina had more interest in playing than studying. From childhood on, she was unconventionally beautiful, a slim, attractive figure, slightly bulging dark eyes, sharply defined full lips, and a decisive nose. Her hair was dark, usually cut short, flapper style. Less than medium height, she was appealingly petite. Her beauty was, nevertheless, aggressive. She let you know she was there. A member of the Junior League, she appeared regularly at all the places glamorous young Washingtonians should. A good athlete, with excellent hand-eye coordination, at school she had a heavy crush on an older girl, a star athlete with whom she exchanged vows of eternal friendship. Later she resented that her parents had not educated her for high society. She had not been “exposed,” she complained. After Holton Arms, which she left without graduating, she refused even to consider going to college. Books were not her thing. She loved partying. Two centuries of Gore-family pioneers, farmers, lawyers, doctors—hardworking avatars of the republic's obsession with being serious—had unexpectedly produced a Jazz Age playgirl. The sober Senator, who had come to Washington “direct,” so to speak, from the hardworking frontier territories, had a daughter whose highest devotion was to having a good time.

As to a profession, marriage would take care of that. For a moment, after her marriage, she fantasized about an acting career, like Tallulah Bankhead's, whose friend she was to become, or Joan Crawford's, almost her exact contemporary. She had one week on the stage in a road-show production of
The Sign of the Leopard
, at Washington's National Theater, chosen from among attractive young Washingtonians by a well-known actor-producer of the day who always cast a local girl in a bit part to increase attendance on tour. For Nina, it led neither to further roles nor to a screen test. Her bemused father remarked, “
She wants to be
a movie star without going to acting school. She doesn't feel she needs preparation for anything.” Apparently the beautiful daughter of a powerful senator need not worry about taking care of herself. She would be taken care of. And she could
handle herself. She constantly fought with her mother, in rebellion against limitations and rules. She idolized her father, his strength, his determination, his influence. That she was the daughter of such a man was one of the strongest elements in her self-definition. She loved him with an intensity that partly determined her relationships with men in her adult life. The Senator, in her eyes, could do no wrong. Her mother was mostly a bothersome rival and a nagging enforcer of rules for ordinary people.

At Fort Sill, Nina discovered that being an Army bride was not as glamorous as she had expected. Of course, Gene's Army buddies were fun. So too the drinking parties, though she was no doubt unhappily surprised to learn that in the Army's gender-segregated society the men had rituals from which Army wives were excluded. To her delight, she had a sleek black convertible roadster that, with her excellent coordination and love of speed, she drove with brilliant abandon. When she posed for photographs, her dark, explosive beauty and the car's sleek darkness seemed a perfect fit. How ironic, though, to be back in the dust bowl of her birth, from which her family had escaped. Gene's interest was less in parties than in flying. More than anything, his work absorbed him. By temperament he was elegantly serious. If he was glamorous, he was rarely self-conscious or purposeful about it. Late hours did not appeal to him. The ascent to high rank would undoubtedly be slow, even for the talented and well connected. From Fort Sill they happily went to West Point, where Gene had been appointed the first instructor of aeronautics, an assistant football coach, and coach of track and field. West Point was delighted to have him back. No one minded that his teaching assignment mostly provided cover for his contribution to the athletic program. His fame had made him a West Point legend: heads turned at the mention of his name. With his flying wings, his engineering degree, and his amiable camaraderie, he seemed a natural choice for the position. He even looked the role. As much as he enjoyed flying itself, he had no special desire to set records. Perhaps he felt he had already set, as an athlete, his fair share. His focus was on the engineering challenges of flight, on how aviation might change the world. But for the time being he thought mostly about athletics. Soon track and field at the academy were revivified. By spring 1923 he had convinced the West Point authorities that his athletes deserved the opportunity to compete in the tryouts for the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. For the first time, at Yankee Stadium in September, Army track and field athletes competed away from home. In March 1924 the
Olympic Committee asked him to coach the American decathlon and pentathlon teams.

Nina also was delighted to be at West Point. It was much nearer Washington and New York than Fort Sill. Still, life even at the Point was not as fast or as glamorous as she would have liked. She had married, she believed, a man on the rise, a famous athlete whom she would accompany in his ascension into higher spheres. But that would not happen at West Point, and an Army paycheck did not go far, especially toward the cost of a New York or Washington social life. Whether or not marital trouble was already brewing in paradise is unclear. She had married a quiet man of Midwestern equanimity. Excessive temperament and explosive temper seemed to him anathema. It would drain the life out of home, work, and play. Nina, on the contrary, thrived on attitude, on emotional and verbal vividness, on exaggerated gestures of temperament and language. Argument was her mode. Fighting gave her a charge. It was often the necessary prelude to sex. Gene could not have found this readily assimilable to his temperament and to his view of what a satisfactory marriage should be. He certainly did not want to play his mother to Nina's version of his father. West Point Army society would have found Nina a handful, not that its hard-drinking crowd of officers and their wives did not often enjoy her company. Prohibition made liquor even more pleasurably racy and exciting. She soon discovered she had a taste for it. Though a little went a long way, she gradually increased her tolerance. Gene hardly drank, partly by temperament; also, it was not compatible with his devotion to athletics and coaching. To him, late nights and hard drinking seemed mostly a bore. As the daughter of a famous senator, Nina treated West Point as an extension of Washington. Influence counted. She regularly parked her roadster in the superintendent's restricted parking space. At first with noblesse oblige and then with exasperation, Douglas MacArthur explained to her that the parking space was his. Army regulations required that the superintendent
had
to park in his own parking spot. Apparently Nina paid no attention.