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) (18 page)

Earhart was dubbed “Lady Lindy.”

[Eugene was portrayed by the actor Ewan McGregor in the 2009 film
Amelia
.]

“Although Eugene told me he didn’t want to actually marry a boy
[a reference to Amelia]
, I learned years later he was not averse to having sex with one. Much later in life, an occasional man as well.”

As a teenager growing up in Madison, South Dakota, Eugene might have followed a different sexual path. “I might never have existed if he’d continued his early pattern,” Gore said.

He was referring to the love affair between his father, Eugene, and Robert McAlmon, the author, poet, and publisher, who became a stellar member of the literati.

“Eugene, who was fifteen, and Bob, who was fourteen, were inseparable,” said Margaret Vidal, Gore’s aunt. “They even took turns sleeping over at each other’s houses. We didn’t understand different types of love in those days, and were pleased that the boys were so close. Even so, it was rather clear that Bob liked Gene
too much!
Occasionally, they got into a fight. One time, Bob accused Eugene of paying too much attention to the strikingly handsome president of his fraternity.”

After South Dakota, both men went their separate ways. In New York, McAlmon became a publisher, printing poetry by Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Kay Boyle. He collaborated with William Carlos Williams on
Contact Review
. McAlmon also typed and edited the handwritten manuscript of
Ulysses
by James Joyce before its eventual publication in 1922.

Later, McAlmon moved to Paris, where he married the wealthy lesbian English writer, Annie Winifred Ellerman, who wrote under the pen name of “Bryher.”

Her father was the shipowner and financier John Ellerman, who at the time of his death in 1933 was the richest Englishman who had ever lived.

Gore got to meet Bryher in Paris, and learned fascinating things about her life there in the 1920s. In Paris, she had been an unconventional figure, lending money to struggling writers like James Joyce and Edith Sitwell. She also financed Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop on the Left Bank. Bryher’s writings brought Sergei Eisenstein to the attention of the British public.

Gore learned that she’d written a series of historical novels, most of which were set in Britain. The one he chose to read was
The Coin of Carthage
(1963), which he later said in spired him to write his own historical novels, especially
Julian
, published in 1964.

In Paris, McAlmon also became a close friend of Ernest Hemingway until one night in a café he drunkenly referred to him as “my fellow fag.”

Along with Kay Boyle, McAlmon wrote
Being Geniuses Together (1920-1930)
, which previewed their relationships not only with Hemingway, but with Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Djuana Barnes, Ford Maddox Ford, Katherine Mansfield, and Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude’s lover).

Gore met Boyle later in her life when her literary reputation had faded. She confirmed that “Bob never got over his love for your father. His picture in a football uniform is always at his bedside.”

“She was very bitter at getting blacklisted, along with her husband, by Senator Joseph McCarthy and that snake, Roy Cohn,” Gore said.

“Other than that,” she told Gore, “I have few regrets. People with full sex lives don’t have regrets.”

She presented Gore with a copy of McAlmon’s novel:
Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period
(1924). “The character of Eugene Collins written about in the novel is your father.”

That night, Gore read the novel in one sitting. He later said, “It was clear that McAlmon was in love with Eugene. It was most curious to encounter one’s father as a boy of fifteen as seen through the eyes of a boy of fourteen who is in love with him.”

At the time he wrote his own novel of homosexual love,
The City and the Pillar
, Gore had not read McAlmon’s novel. “My tale of Bob Ford and Jim Willard in
The City and the Pillar
paralleled the real story of Eugene and McAlmon. If nothing else, the very ordinariness of the story makes it a good deal more universal than I realized. McAlmon must have been intrigued that the son of ‘Eugene Collins’ had written a variation on his
Village
novel without having ever heard of the book or its author.”

Gore learned of his father’s affair with yet another man through a coincidence. In the mid-1940s, he was introduced to the designer, Stanley Mills Haggart, who for the rest of the decade, became his best friend.

Gore learned that for a brief period in the late 1920s, when both Eugene and Stanley were working as extras in films, they roomed together and became lovers. When Eugene returned to the East Coast, Stanley went on to become intimately involved with Randolph Scott during that actor’s pre-Cary Grant days.

Back East, Eugene entered politics long before his son ran for Congress, representing a district in New York State. After his election in November of 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt summoned Eugene to Warm Springs, Georgia, where he met the left-leaning Vice President, Henry A. Wallace. The President-elect asked Eugene if he would assume the position of Director of Air Commerce.
[In a country such as France or England, that would represent the equivalent of Minister of Aviation.]
Eugene accepted the post, serving in that capacity throughout FDR’s turbulent first term in office.

Eugene paid several visits to the home of Orville Wright, the last surviving brother of the team that invented the airplane. Orville died in 1948.

At one point Eugene told his son that the Wright Brothers, both lifelong bachelors, had been lovers during the 19
^th
century. Or, as Gore obscurely wrote in his memoirs, they were involved in “uranism.”

Only the hippest of gay people knew that he intended that as a descriptive term for male homosexuality.
[Uranism derived from the word “Uranian,” a 19
^th
century term that referred to people “of the third sex—that is, someone with a female psyche in a male body.]

One gay newspaper claimed that “Vidal could have written with more clarity, saying that Wilbur and Orville liked to suck each other’s cocks.”

***

It seemed inevitable that Eugene would try to interest his son in becoming a pilot.

Near the end of his term working in aviation commerce for the government, Eugene became interested in developing a low-cost “flivver plane” that most middle class households could afford as a mode of transportation equivalent to the family car. He told the press that, “It will be so simple to operate that even a ten-year-old can do it.”

To prove that, he brought his ten-year-old son to pilot a prototype Hammond Y-1. Pathé newsreel cameras recorded the event for presentation in theaters across America.

“I was the cutest looking boy in the history of the world,” Gore later said. “For a while, at least, I became the most famous kid in America. I expected a movie contract to arrive at any minute. Move your ass, Freddie Bartholomew. Alas, the film contract never arrived on my doorstep. So much for that dream. Eugene’s dream of the flivver plane in every household didn’t come true either.”

Three years after the birth of her son, Nina had grown tired of motherhood.

By 1928, she was pursuing her dream of becoming a Broadway actress, a goal inspired by Tallulah Bankhead, who had become a close friend. “I’m sure my mother and Tallulah bumped pussies on occasion,” Gore later claimed.

Nina did manage a one-week engagement in a minor role in a road show production of
Sign of the Leopard
at Washington’s National Theater. But her dreams of stardom didn’t lead her into acting. As her father, Senator Gore, said, “She wanted the fame and glory, but wasn’t prepared to do the hard work to get there.”

“I found the best way to get along with Nina was never to see her,” Gore recalled.

With each passing year, Gore’s hatred of Nina seemed to grow. He admitted in a memoir that at the age of eleven, he started mysteriously to vomit in her presence.

“My mother, Nina Gore Vidal, was just atrocious,” he wrote. “Everybody who knew her hated her. It was the race Anglo-Irish. They are more vicious than most. She was a shit. A drunken shit.”

He later was relieved that for some eight years, beginning at age ten and ending at age 18, he was sent away to boys’ schools “far away from the repulsive presence of my drunkard whore of a mother. Reunions were rare.”

When she did see her son, she denounced him, claiming that she’d devoted her life to “undeserving husbands, lovers, and children. I could have become a celebrated actress, perhaps a challenge to Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck. I could have played the same roles they starred in.”

“I noticed you left out Garbo,” he said sarcastically. She threw her glass of Scotch at him, narrowly missing his head.

“I despised Nina, but loved my grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore (1870-1949),” Gore said. “I once posed for a photo standing by his side. I was ten years old, the same age he was when he had been blinded by two separate accidents. His left eye was made of glass, and I used to play with it as he shaved.”

He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1907 from Oklahoma. He served until he was defeated in the summer of 1936, when FDR was running for a second term. He used to tell Gore, “If there was any race other than the human race, I’d join it.”

Through his grandfather’s blood line, Gore was distantly related to Al Gore, the former U.S. Vice President under Bill Clinton.

Outside their home, or inside it on some occasions when a spouse was away, both Eugene and Nina pursued other affairs. Gore referred to Nina’s string of male lovers as “a scandalous field of operations.”

Since Eugene was away with Earhart, flying around the country, Nina felt free to bring her casual lovers back to the Vidal home. Gore soon learned that these pickups weren’t decorous social visits, when Nina took their hands to lead them upstairs to her bedroom. The Vidals had a black nurse to look after Gore, since his parents were gone most of the day and night. “Mrs. Goodman—that was her name—caught Nina smuggling a black taxi driver up to her bedroom. The poor woman, a Bible-thumping Baptist from Alabama, was shocked by what she called ‘the Devil’s Lust.’”

Most of Nina’s affairs were with anonymous men she randomly encountered. But on a few occasions, her affairs were with famous men.