Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (17 page)

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
(born October 3, 1925; died July 31, 2012) was born in the Cadet Hospital of the United States Military Academy at West Point. He was the only child of Eugene Luther Vidal (1895-1969) and Nina Gore (1903-1978). Gore’s grandfather was the blind Senator from Oklahoma, Thomas Pryor Gore (1870-1949).

Gore’s father, Eugene, a first lieutenant, was an aeronautics instructor at West Point. His mother, Nina, a socialite, married him in 1922, divorcing him in 1935.

[Nina followed this with two more marriages, one to a wealthy stockbroker, Hugh D. Auchincloss, nicknamed “Hughdie.” Nina was married to him from 1935 to 1941. In 1942, Auchincloss became the second husband of Janet Lee Bouvier, the mother of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, through Janet’s previous marriage to Jack Bouvier
.

Nina’s final marriage was to Army Air Forces Major General Robert Olds, who had produced four children from a previous marriage, but who died in 1943 after only ten months of marriage to Nina
.

Gore was the only child produced by his biological parents. The four half-siblings from his parents’ later marriages included Vance Vidal, Valerie Vidal, Thomas (Tommy) Gore Auchincloss, and Nini Gore Auchincloss. He also had four stepbrothers from his mother’s third marriage to Olds.]

The mother-son relationship of Nina and Gore seemed torn from the pages of Philip Wylie’s bestselling indictment of the American way of life,
Generation of Vipers [published in 1942]
, a much-talked about condemnation of “momism.”

After reading it, Gore commented: “I thought Wylie was writing about my own mother, the unrealness, the infantile unreasonableness, the child wife, the psychotic personality of a woman who cannot reason logically, the bridge fiend, the murderess (symbolically speaking), the habitual
divorcée
, the serial adulteress, the sex experimentalist, the quarreler, the castrator, the nagger, the pathological liar, the puerile bitch, the raging hyena—all those endearing identities I know as Mom.”

“After reading
Generation of Vipers
, I was filled with a splenetic outrage against Nina. As I listened to her high-octane twaddle, I never knew if she hated me more than I hated her. The life she led was one of orgiastic claptrap, over-wrought emotion, florid excess, and niggling demands.”

Gore had an entirely different relationship with his father, Eugene.

In an interview in 2008 with
The Independent
, Gore proclaimed that Eugene “was like a film star. He was the most famous college athlete in the history of the United States. A quarterback at West Point, he competed in the decathlon in the Antwerp Olympic Games of 1920, finishing in seventh position. He was also an assistant track coach in charge of the modern pentathlon and decathlon squads at the Summer Olympic Games in Paris in 1924. In the forty-three years that I knew him, we never quarreled once, and we never agreed on anything.”

At the peak of her beauty, Nina met Eugene at a football game in 1921, when he was twenty-six and she was a virginal eighteen. It was love at first sight, at least on his part.

She later characterized her feeling for him as “a mere infatuation.”

In spite of misgivings, she married him in 1923 at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., which was decorated with pink roses and illuminated by soft, scented candles.

On the way to their honeymoon bed, she told him she’d been an unwanted child. “The only reason I was born was that rats chewed up my mother’s douche bag,” Nina told him.

Before he stripped down for her first sight of a fully nude male, he, too, had a revelation. “I have three balls!” he told her.

She was not unduly alarmed, since she wasn’t exactly sure how many testicles a man usually had. She later told her son, Gore, “All three of his balls were of equal size. He was a virtual sperm factory.”

After only a few months into the marriage, Nina realized she’d become an alcoholic. “After a party we’d give, I’d go around the room drinking up what was left in the liquor glasses,” she said.

After the birth of Gore in 1925, Eugene rarely visited his wife’s separate bedroom.

Airlines consumed most of his time, that and his affair with Amelia Earhart, who was the most famous woman aviator of all time. According to biographer Susan Butler, “Vidal became the great love of Amelia Earhart’s life.”

Along with the world’s most fabled male aviator, Charles Lindbergh, Eugene worked with Earhart in the founding of Ludington Line
[which eventually, after mergers, became Eastern Airlines]
and Transcontinental Air Transport
[which eventually seguéd into TWA]
and Northeast Airlines.

Nina soon learned of her husband’s affair with Earhart, but didn’t seem unduly concerned. “Those two can go fly a kite as far as I’m concerned,” she told her friends.

Young Gore was amazed when he was introduced to Earhart, finding her “the most thrilling woman I’d ever met.” Later, he said, “In time, I knew Elizabeth Taylor. But Amelia was a far bigger name than Elizabeth. Once we walked down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. When we turned around, we found 500 people following us. Even at the age of ten, I was impressed.”

He was so impressed that he urged his father to divorce Nina and marry Earhart. “Amelia was delighted with the idea,” Gore said, “but my father only blushed.”

At a party at the Vidal home, Eugene introduced Nina to both Earhart and Lindbergh, whom she found “extremely handsome—devastatingly so.”

Gore noticed that his mother spent the entire night talking just to Lindbergh.

“He was America’s hero, and, like Nina, I, too, developed a crush on this dashing airman,” Gore said.

The next weekend, when Eugene was out of town, Gore came home early and at first thought he was in the house alone until he heard a noise coming from upstairs.

He went to investigate. Nina was supposed to be out shopping, so he opened the door to her bedroom.

“The world’s most famous aviator rose up suddenly from the bed,” Gore recalled. “I got to see an impressive closeup of
The Spirit of St
.
Louis
in all the glory of its raging manhood. His erection was like the rest of his body, long and lean.”

“Nina screamed for me to get out, and I left,” Gore said. “They stayed in the bedroom for another hour, so I guess they finished their business in spite of
coitus interruptus.”

When Gore learned that Lindbergh had seduced Nina, he again pressed his father to divorce his mother and marry Earhart, whom he liked and admired greatly.

“Although I love her, I have no intention of marrying a boy,” Eugene said.

Gore was shocked by his father’s rather bizarre answer. He had once felt that Earhart was rather mannish and was perhaps a lesbian, but the aviator and Eugene seemed to have a torrid sex life together. Gore was later told that Earhart’s marriage to George P. Putnam “was in name only.”

She did have a physical resemblance to Lindbergh, who was known as “Lucky Lindy” in the press.